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I am reading that a scholar affiliated with an evangelical theological seminary has had to resign his position because of a full-throated (see here) defense of evolutionary theory. In particular, this scholar seems to have asserted that evangelical Christianity is on the way to becoming a marginalized “cult” if it keeps rejecting scientific consensus in regards to evolutionary theory. Cult, from what I know, has a very strong connotation in the evangelical subculture.

Obviously I don’t have relevant opinions about whether evangelicals should, or should not, accept evolution from the perspective of an evangelical Christian. But, we can look at the type of person who accepts and rejections evolution in American society. The General Social Survey has a vocabulary test which it gives to people, and the scores range from 0 out of 10 correct, to 10 out of 10 correct. Over the history of the GSS a little under 25% of the survey respondents scored on the interval 0 to 4. 13% scored on the interval 9 to 10. Let’s label the first “Not Smart” and the second “Smart.” Below are the proportion who accept evolution for the various GSS variables which speak to this issue (I’ve given the GSS labels, you can look up the specific question at the GSS browser under “selected” at the top left).

I don’t know if rejecting scientific consensus will turn evangelical Christianity into a cult, but it will drive a particular self-selection….

For a moment, leave aside the legal questions about the Obama administration’s apparent decision that it possesses the legal authority to order the extra-judicial killing of American citizen and possible al-Qaeda affiliate Anwar al-Awlaki. Karen Greenberg, director of New York University’s Center on Law and Security and the person who convinced me the government can’t just revoke al-Awlaki’s citizenship, views a potential assassination of the Yemen-based cleric as a looming national security blunder.

“Why kill someone who’s crucially important to linking that world and our world?” Greenberg said. “From the point of view of national security, having him in custody is far more important than killing him. He is an enemy that knows an incredible amount. Wouldn’t you like to know who in the U.S. has been in conversation with him?”

There’s an additional irony, as Marcy Wheeler pointed out this morning. (Full disclosure: Marcy and I are both part of the Firedoglake blog-mafia.) Chances are whatever determination that al-Awlaki has crossed the line from inciting terrorist plots to participating in them — as an anonymous administration official cited to Greg Miller – came from the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Which occurred with the full protections of Miranda rights under the U.S. criminal justice system. Abdulmutallab, of course, isn’t a citizen and al-Awlaki is.

On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t even credit the recent determination that al-Awlaki has “recently become an operational figure for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” as the official told Miller. After all, the U.S. tried to kill him with a drone-launched missile strike in December.

For Greenberg, even before the legal and constitutional questions about the permissibility of killing al-Awlaki arise, the strategic wisdom of it escapes her. “This is not a human rights issue, primarily, for me,” she said. “What do we get out of killing him?”

To be on the safe side, this morning, The Washington Independent filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Justice Department and the CIA for any documentation determining the legal basis for an extra-judicial killing of any American citizen on counterterrorism grounds. This is after repeated messages left with DOJ, White House and CIA spokespeople to uncover that assertion. All I got was a quote from CIA spokesman George Little that “this agency conducts its counterterrorism operations in strict accord with the law.” I was unable to persuade George to elaborate on the basis for his confidence that, in this case, it’s doing that.

Posted by John Byrne at 3:07 p.m.

Street parking will get slightly tougher to find around U.S. Cellular Field under a City Council plan to expand special permit parking areas on game days.

The council’s Traffic Committee today approved an ordinance by Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, to extend the "Comiskey Park area parking permit program" several blocks to the south and east of the ballpark.

Under Dowell’s plan, which will next head to the full City Council for approval, the special parking zone will be enlarged by two areas of about four square blocks each.

One area would be bordered by Pershing Road, Wentworth Avenue, Princeton Avenue and 37th Street.

 

The other would be bounded by 37th Street, Wentworth, Dearborn Street and 35th Street.

Street parking would remain open on both Pershing and 35th, according to the ordinance.

 

Dowell said residents of new housing developments near the ballpark want to be able to park in front of their homes on game days.

 

The parking restrictions around the Cell begin three hours before first pitch and end three hours after last pitch. They also are in effect for concerts and other events at the ballpark.

CP:  So it’s friggin’ hot in DC and much of the country.

Audience:  How hot is it?

CP:  It’s so hot that:

• I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walkin’.
• The robins are laying their eggs sunny side up.
• I saw squirrels fanning their nuts.
• Even meteorologists are doing stories about human-caused global warming.

Settle down, disinformers, they’re only jokes.  We all know that you can’t use a single weather event as evidence for or against climate change — unless of course that weather event is a big snowstorm [see “Massive moisture-driven extreme precipitation during warmest winter in the satellite record — and the disinformers say it disproves (!) climate science].

What people should be talking about are record highs versus record lows across the country.  The figure above comes from a Weather Channel post by Jonathan Erdman, “July or April? Spring skipped?“:

To the south of this front, temperatures had soared into the 80s and, yes, 90s in many locations, shattering daily record highs.  In fact, according to the National Climatic Data Center, in the seven-day period from March 29 through April 4, over 1100 daily record highs were either tied or broken in the nation!

Now that is a heat wave!

The data in the top graphic might remind you of this figure from a must-read 2009 study led by National Center for Atmospheric Research (see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.“):

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole.  (©UCAR, graphic by Mike Shibao.)

NCAR begins its release on this study:

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows. The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.”

It’d be nice if the Weather Channel would say something close to that or at least mention the NCAR study if not the overall warming trend.  Instead the piece opens with this:

To get a feel for what’s going on in the world’s weather, meteorologists look at weather patterns, namely, the juxtaposition of dips and rises in the jet stream that dictate the weather we feel here on the surface.

Yes, as we know, for many if not most weather reporters, it’s all just one of the greatest coincidences in human history (see “In yet another front-page journalistic lapse, the NY Times once again equates non-scientists — Bastardi, Coleman, and Watts (!) — with climate scientists” and “Is that airlifted snow on your Olympic ski mountain, or is your enormous helicopter just happy to see me?“)

Sadly, for the rest of us, assuming we keep doing what we’re doing, which is to say, nothing, NCAR predicts (and yes, they use the word “predictions” not “projections”):

The modeling results indicate that if nations continue to increase their emissions of greenhouse gases in a “business as usual” scenario, the U.S. ratio of daily record high to record low temperatures would increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100.

In short, if you like the current heat wave, you ain’t seen nothing yet (see Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!”)

h/t WAG.

Related Post:

• Skeptical Science explains how we know global warming is happening: It’s the oceans.
• Watts not to love: New study finds the poor weather stations tend to have a slight COOL bias, not a warm one.
• Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”

by Eric de Place

California’s nascent cap-and-trade program appears to be threatened by a ballot measure that is both substantively idiotic and yet diabolically clever. Basically, the measure would suspend implementation until California’s unemployment rate declines to below 5.5 percent. Financial backing comes from oil companies and other big polluters. Shocking, I know.

Anyway, it’s a stupid idea on the merits because, apart from one industry-funded study, detailed analysis has shown that the bill would actually be beneficial to California’s economy, lowering energy bills and creating jobs. (Plus, the measure would, of course, reduce the state’s sizeable contribution to the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions; and California’s carbon footprint is roughly equivalent to that of France.)

So why is it clever? Because linking the outcome to unemployment cements the (incorrect) impression that carbon reduction is bad for the economy. In fact, simply describing the measure requires one to link climate protection and unemployment. It’s a masterstroke of framing, and it’s a technique that progressives could stand to learn.

Fortunately, this is a game that anyone can play! It shouldn’t be too hard to start adopting this kind of thing in ballot measure-saturated states in the West. So to get the conversation started, here’s a formula I just invented:

[State] will levy an X percent tax on [bad-guy industry product] until [desired social or economic outcome] occurs.

Here’s how it might work:

Oregon will levy a 25 percent tax on cigarettes until teen smoking declines below 10 percent;
Montana will levy a 50 percent tax on the in-state profits of payday lending firms until the state’s child poverty rate declines below 10 percent.
Washington will levy a 10 percent tax on petroleum products until U.S. oil industry profits decline below $50 billion per year.

You could tweak the dials here: change the numbers, change the targets, whatever. But I think you get the idea. In a best case scenario, progressives could win big fat Pigovian tax victories, and net a bunch of revenue to direct to their objectives.

But even if the ballot measures failed, they would amount to a campaign season’s worth of PR for their pet issue. Tobacco sales are bad for kids; payday lending hurts poor children; the oil industry is screwing consumers. It’s fun, right? 

I mean, if your state’s politics are locked in the death spiral of cynical bought-and-paid-for faux-populist ballot initiatives, the least you can do is leverage the dysfunction to do a little good for the world. 

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

Related Links:

Lowering income taxes while raising pollution taxes reaps great returns

Filling our short-term fossil-fuel needs

Can we get some attention for our issues now?

Herbert Richter is well known for their modular car mounts, allowing one to simply change the holder when you change your smartphone.

The German company has now release a dedicated holder for the HTC HD2 that fit their suction mounts, and for buyers it includes a nice extra – a kick stand that can be used to hold the device in the upright position on a desk for example.

The holder can be purchased in various online stores, including at Expansys for a slightly more expensive £13.99.

Via PDA.pl.

Here’s what you need to know as you leave work today:

• Weak February consumer credit numbers sent the markets into a tailspin as Fed data showed a 5.5% month-over-month decline.
  

• Short term Greek credit rates are getting hammered as private investors have begun to pull out of the economy. 6-month Greek debt bills now yield 6.60, and have a 313 bps spread against the German bund.

• Today’s treasury auction resulted in lower than 4% yields, a positive for markets. We believe this is a sign of a flight to safety away from what is now perceived as risky European debt.

• Alan Greenspan humiliated himself testifying before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, refusing to apologize or acknowledge his mistakes. Jim Grant complained that Greenspan was never willing to acknowledge those who were right and, “just wanted to be liked.”

• Ben Bernanke has outlined the aging population as the biggest threat to U.S. economic growth. This points out the fact that the civilian employment ratio is likely to continue to decline.

• The DJIA (.60%), S&P 500 (.49%), and NASDAQ (.20%) are all down at close.

• Crude oil, natural gas, and heating oil have all fallen off over 1% as a result of the negative consumer credit data, which implies lower demand.

• Gold has shown a sharp gain of 1.3%. The U.S. dollar is slightly up against the euro and pound, and slightly down against the yen.

• AIG is up 10.53% today.

Join the conversation about this story »

The 2009 angel investor market exhibited a modest decrease in investment dollars but little change in the number of investments, while significant changes occurred in the critical seed and start-up stages, according to the 2009 Angel Market Analysis by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). Total investments in 2009 were $17.6 billion, a decrease of 8.3% over 2008, when investments totaled $19.2 billion. However, 57,225 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in 2009, a 3.1% increase from 2008, when 55,480 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding. Active investors in 2009 totaled 259,480 individuals, compared to 260,500 individuals in 2008. The small decline in total dollars, coupled with the increase in investments, resulted in an 11.1% decline in deal size from 2008, according to Jeffrey Sohl, PhD, MBA, professor and director of the Center for Venture Research in UNH’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics.

At 19%, software accounted for the largest share of angel investments in 2009, followed by health care services/medical devices and equipment (17%), industrial/energy (17%), retail (9%), and biotech (8%). “Industrial and energy investing saw a significant increase from 2008, reflecting a growing appetite for green technologies,” Sohl says. Mergers and acquisitions represented 54% of angel exits in 2009, while bankruptcies accounted for 40% of exits. Annual returns for angel exits (mergers and acquisitions and IPOs) varied from 23% to 38%.

Overall, angels decreased their investments of seed and start-up capital. Thirty-five percent of 2009 angel investments occurred during the seed and start-up stage, a 10% decrease percent from 2008. First sequence investments in 2009 also represented a significant decline from the previous two years, at 47% of angel activity. However, angels exhibited increased interest in post-seed/start-up investing, with 62% of investments in the early and expansion stage — an increase over 2008 commitments. “This decrease in seed/start-up stage and first sequence investing is the unfortunate reality of a difficult economy and little or no support for angels — or the companies they invest in — from the various legislative initiatives enacted to stimulate the economy,” Sohl says. To read the report, “The Angel Investor Market in 2009: Holding Steady but Changes in Seed and Startup Investments,” click here.

Source: News Blaze