Petty crimes

It looks like one of the staff at Liberty University has been caught.

A Liberty University chaplain is facing drug and burglary charges. Last week, a homeowner caught Scott Ray on surveillance video breaking into a home to steal painkillers. Ray, who is the chaplain for the men’s basketball team and the Director of Convocation, is also suspected in other Campbell County break-ins. In 2005 he was arrested and charged with the same thing. Ray has been suspended by the school and it’s believed he’s checked into a rehab program. Investigators also say Ray has not yet been arrested but additional indictments are pending.

Now if only the rest of the staff could be charged with the greater crime of sowing ignorance…

Gay conversion works! If you ignore the data and the methods, that is

The fundamentalist community has a strong interest for some bizarre reason in converting homosexuals into heterosexuals. They consider homosexuality nothing but a bad personal choice, and therefore all gay people need is a little Jesus and they’ll switch back to finding the other sex more attractive.

It never seems to occur to them that that implies that their own sexual orientation would then be an arbitrary matter of a trained esthetic, and that that would imply that they should be easily flipped into homosexuality themselves (probably with a little Satan). It’s strange: I’d be rather upset if a group of Baptists tried to brainwash me into thinking Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was a hot dude I ought to fantasize about.

Anyway, the fundies love to cobble up ‘scientific’ studies that back up their claims of successful conversions. These typically defy common sense and the results of work by real psychologists, but that doesn’t stop them. Their latest result claims a program of Christian counseling has a 53% success rate. Unfortunately, even in the press releases that crow about this answer, they have to admit some bothersome details. Like that their sample size was less than a hundred, that over a third of their subjects dropped out and refuse to talk to them, and that even those they managed to retain in the study are very evasive and reluctant to talk to the researchers, all stuff you’d expect of a program that doesn’t work in any way other than instilling guilt in their subjects.

Worst of all, credible scientists don’t accept their results, for an amusing reason.

“They selectively apply rigorous scientific standards,” he said. “So when it comes to examining the evidence that sexual orientation change can occur, they apply extraordinarily rigorous standards, and those standards allow them to disregard significant evidence that sexual orientation change can occur. That’s what happens with our study. They, I think, invalidly applied several methodological concerns to dismiss our study.”

Curse you, Science, for your rigorous standards and methodological discipline that prevent us from getting the answers we wanted ahead of time!

Looking for an article…

So…anybody with an institutional subscription care to send me a copy of this paper? My university’s subscription only lets me see articles in this journal after they’ve aged for a year.

Smith HF, Fisher RE, Everett ML, Thomas AD, Randal Bollinger R, Parker W (2009) Comparative anatomy and phylogenetic distribution of the mammalian cecal appendix. J Evol Biol. 2009 Aug 12. [Epub ahead of print]

Already got it, thanks everyone!

I look forward to the new generation of Texas bible scholars

This year, Texas will require its students to take a Bible course. In the supposedly secular public schools.

This could be a bad thing if all the schools bring in their local Southern Baptist minister to teach fundagelicalism…but it would be a great thing if the teachers brought a properly skeptical attitude towards it. Well, except for all the teacher lynchings that we’d be seeing around October.

A correction from the Texas Freedom Network:

Just a quick note about your post on Bible classes in Texas public schools. Unfortunately, the article you linked to in your post got it wrong – public schools in Texas are NOT required to offer Bible courses. In fact, we were successful in 2007 in changing that bill in committee so that high schools could choose whether or not they want to offer elective courses about the Bible’s influence in history and literature.

The Texas attorney general has ruled that the law, as written, does require that something about the Bible’s influence in history and literature must be in the curriculum somewhere, but it doesn’t have to be a separate course. Of course, many social studies and literature classes have long included samples of sacred writings from Christianity and the other major religions and explain their influence on various cultures. So we don’t think the law will change much unless school districts decide to offer separate Bible courses.

We need a better way to manage public schools

The American education is a hellish mess, run by the ghastly, inefficient school board system that is too often dominated by anti-education hacks (Texas comes to mind as the preeminent example, but really, the problem is everywhere in the country). The system is so bad that Mark Twain was making jokes about it, and nothing has changed since. Could anything be worse?

Maybe. Paddy K has begun a series of articles on the Irish school system. Imagine the chaos of conflicting interests that tug our schools in different directions at every election banished…and replaced with old men in dresses committed to a common, archaic dogma that provides unity of purpose. That purpose, unfortunately, is not necessarily to produce well-educated citizens, but to produce people who will obey the Catholic church.

It could be an interesting series. We have plenty of schadenfreude to go around.

Please stop electing Fool Harkin, Iowa

Tom Harkin is up to his usual tricks: he wants to expand the role of ‘alternative therapies’ by allowing them to be covered by insurance. The quacks are cheering him on, too — every naturopath, homeopath, acupuncturist, crystal healer, shaman, meditator, and iridologist wants their slice of that great big health insurance pie. It’s a disgrace. Strangely, the insurance companies aren’t complaining. This comment explains that, though.

Harvey Kaltsas, president emeritus of the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, said the country could save billions of dollars by shifting care for a number of conditions away from pharmaceutical treatment and toward acupuncture. Kaltsas said the number of licensed practitioners has grown to 20,000 from just 300 in 1971, indicating that many people are sold on the practice’s effectiveness.

I think that last word should be stricken out and replaced with the more appropriate term, “profitability”.

The country could also save billions of dollars if, instead of treating cancer with chemotherapy and surgery and all those expensive Big Medicine remedies, they instead used my personal tickle therapy cure — the only expenses are the cost of feathers and my personal time, at $500 an hour. It is so much cheaper than those overpriced medicines! And instead of putting the patient in a state that requires months or years of sustained expense, and years and years of regular doctor’s visits and diagnostic examinations, my therapy is fast — depending on how far the cancer had progressed, I only need to be employed for weeks or months…and then no more medical expenses at all. Ever. I can guarantee it.

The insurance companies should love me.