Civil Commotion

Right. Only the howling and bellowing of some red-faced Holy Man — and your tithes — can overcome the demon who whispers in your ear.

A small bomb went off in the restroom of a Target store in Evanston, Illinois yesterday.

A small bomb exploded in the women’s bathroom at a Target store in Evanston on Wednesday, and officials are investigating whether it’s connected to the company’s policy allowing transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice.

Commander Joe Dugan says no one was inside the bathroom when the small explosion happened a little after 4 o’clock. It caused minor damage and no one was injured.

I am telling y’all, the crazies are going to get crazier as American society leaves them behind.

When I was a young soils engineer, and single, I daydreamed about moving to Alaska to study permafrost, a soil state which defies conventional analysis and is susceptible of dramatic elastic and plastic deformation under load. Reason got the upper hand when I realized that if I became an expert on permafrost, which still fascinates me as an engineering material, I’d have to spend the rest of my life where there is permafrost.

This, I should add, was before I knew about the existence of Sarah Palin, so YAY! for thinking ahead.

Here’s something I didn’t foresee: The permafrost is … melting.

Beneath Wetzen’s house, and in great swaths of land across much of Alaska’s vast central and northern interior, the past decade of too-warm winters has unlocked organic material that’s been trapped in icy ground for some 30,000 years. That ground is made of permafrost: many yards of mammoth bones, grasses, soil and other detritus frozen when this land was steppe tundra, ice-cold all year round. Now that permafrost is thawing. The land, losing its ice content, is receding. Spindly black spruce trees, the telltale arboreal species of permafrost area, are pitched at odd, drunken angles in places where the thawing ground beneath them has sunken or heaved. The meltwater from that ice is welling up, forming small lakes that gradually become bigger as they melt the permafrost beneath them. A significant portion of the lake behind Wetzen’s house was a forest 50 years ago. The two-lane highway in front undulates abruptly in places where ice wedges underground have thawed.

[ … ]

None of the permafrost thawing beneath millions of lakes across the Arctic is accounted for in global predictions about climate change — it’s “a gap in our climate modeling,” says Katey Walter Anthony, a University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher who studies permafrost thaw across Alaska and Siberia. She’s become famous in certain circles for finding methane bubbling up beneath the ice in frozen-over permafrost lakes, cutting a hole ice-fishing style and lighting the highly flammable gas on fire, sending up a column of flames 10 feet high.

A very good piece from the Associated Press takes up the marginalization of evangelicals.

For decades, they say, they have been steadily pushed to the sidelines of American life and have come under attack for their most deeply held beliefs, born of their reading of Scripture and their religious mandate to evangelize. The 1960s ban on prayer in public schools is still a fresh wound. Every legal challenge to a public Nativity scene or Ten Commandments display is another marginalization. They’ve been “steamrolled,” they say, and “misunderstood.”

No. Evangelicals have not been steamrolled; they’ve been forced off everybody else’s lawn. Misunderstood? Sorry, but not by a longshot; we understand evangelicals just fine, and have rejected the intellectual dishonesty, the compulsory degradations, the underhanded manipulations, and the whiny self-absorption.

Evangelicals can still be evangelicals; they just can’t demand that everybody else live according to their Bronze Age superstitions.

Perhaps the most telling story in the account is this:

Christians who have been only nominally tied to a conservative church are steadily dropping out altogether. When [Russell] Moore was growing up in Mississippi, any parent whose children weren’t baptized by age 12 or 13 would face widespread disapproval, he said. Those times have passed.

“People don’t have to be culturally identified with evangelical Christianity in order to be seen as good people, good neighbors or good Americans,” Moore said.

The churches cultivated that pressure, of course, the insane idea that people who don’t belong to their club are even more no damn good than everybody else. That is what has passed — and good riddance.

It’s worse than that, really. Since 9/11, the idea that faith is a virtue has been under attack, with growing recognition that unreasoning belief, belief without evidence, or belief in the face of contrary evidence, is a kind of character failure. If you can believe without evidence that Jesus died to save you from eternity as trash in a dumpster fire, then you can believe without evidence that dying in battle against infidels will result in immediate transit to Paradise and the solace of 72 restless virgins, and you can believe without evidence that cows are inhabited by gods even as your children starve to death.

Anything goes when you are guided by faith. Only the methods of science and engineering offer a defense against the lunacies of faith.

I am not preaching now. I’m telling the truth.

Dr. Tom Malone, quoted by Bruce Gerencser