Tennessee Senate kills bill to make Bible the Official State book, but passes anti-abortion legislation

April 16, 2015 • 2:55 pm

Well cut off my legs and call me Shorty: the Tennessee Senate has resoundingly defeated, by a vote of 22-9, the Bible-as-State-Book bill that was passed by an substantial majority in the House yesterday (55-38). This time, though, the bill was defeated—or rather, sent back to committee—with the help of Republicans. I think even those dimwits finally realized that a). it would make the state look really dumb, and b). the bill was unconstitutional and would have embroiled Tennessee in an expensive legal battle, which they’d ultimately lose. Even a blind pig can find its swill.

The victory isn’t unalloyed, though, for, according The Tennessean, the committee is going to work on it more. Like the Laearnian Hydra, its head will rise again; as the paper notes, “Referring the bill to committee allows supporters to pick up the campaign against next year. Norris [the Senate majority leader] suspects they will.”

Unfortunately, vindicating my prediction that Tennessee Republicans can get up to mischief on many fronts at once, the state senate also passed a bill on Wednesday mandating a 48-hour waiting period for abortions. This is likely to pass the House, and Governor Bill Haslam appears to approve. The stipulations:

One measure, introduced by Sen. Mae Beavers, a Republican from Mt. Juliet, would require women seeking an abortion to wait 48 hours after receiving in-person counseling by a physician before she could seek an abortion.

The bill specifies the information the physician performing the abortion must provide to a woman, including:

• Confirmation of pregnancy and approximate gestational age of the fetus

• The availability of numerous public and private agencies available to assist her if she chooses not to have an abortion

• The risks of pregnancy and abortion

• If a woman is more than 24 weeks pregnant, the physician must inform a woman that her fetus may be viable and if a viable child is born during the course of an abortion, the physician has a legal obligation to take steps to preserve the health of the child — although there are no abortion clinics in Tennessee that provide abortions past 16 weeks of gestation.

But wait! There’s more! With that bill you get still more restrictions!

A second measure approved with no debate on Wednesday — introduced by Sen. Joey Hensley, a Republican from Hohenwald — would require any facility or doctor’s office performing more than 50 abortions annually to be regulated as an ambulatory surgical treatment center, a designation that comes with specific requirements about the physical building that some abortion providers may not be able to meet.

Four abortion providers meet those standards. They include one clinic in Nashville, two in Memphis and one in Knoxville. A fifth abortion provider that met the standards closed in 2012 after lawmakers passed a requirement that physicians performing abortions have admitting privileges at local hospitals.

Three abortion providers that are not registered as ambulatory surgical treatment centers include The Women’s Center in Nashville and clinics in Bristol and Knoxville.

This, of course, is just another way to limit abortion.  All I can say is that Tennessee gets the legislators it deserves. After all, they won via the democratic process.

 

Brown University student op-ed claims that censorship is “free speech”

April 16, 2015 • 12:34 pm

If you were to ask me which American universities have the most odious instantiations of repressive “political correctness,” I’d say Stanford, Columbia, UCLA, Brandeis, and Brown (this is just an impressionistic view). And it’s sad, because those universities are good ones, and are supposed to provide a liberal education. But the student left often converges with fascism these days—or at least with an unenlightened authoritarianism, and those universities are not ones where I’d want to teach.

And here’s a good example of what passes for “rational thought” among college students. It’s a letter appearing in the Brown University Daily Herald: “Asker ’71: Universities shouldn’t speak freely.” (Nicholas Asker is an op-ed columnist for the paper.) The topic is the University of Michigan’s cancellation of the movie “American Sniper,” an issue I reported a week ago.  The cancellation occurred after Middle Eastern and Muslim students objected to the film’s subject, leading the university group showing the movie to substitute a screening of “Paddington Bear”.  Eventually the University allowed “American Sniper” to be shown.

In a weird inversion of priorities, Asker argues that showing that film is actually a violation of free speech: the speech of the students who were offended. And he equates the screening with having Mein Kampf in a waiting room:

It’s a complete mystery why the university thought it was a good idea to begin with to show the movie at a Friday night event designed to provide alcohol-free fun, entertainment and socializing. Just as it would be disconcerting to find copies of “Mein Kampf” strewn amongst the National Geographic magazines in a dentist’s office, so it is strange to find a controversial war movie playing at a casual party. Though there may be an acceptable time and place to read “Mein Kampf,” it’s quite clear that a waiting room is not. Likewise, a fun social function is not the place to watch “American Sniper.”

Now I’m not sure about the nature of the “fun” event, but I don’t see why a serious movie shouldn’t be shown. What I am sure of is that the students who didn’t like the movie or its theme didn’t have to go.  And someone in a waiting room doesn’t have to read Mein Kampf. (After all, I’ve been in plenty of waiting rooms that contain the Bible, something that offends me.) But that voluntary participation isn’t enough for Asker. Have a look at his Orwellian view of how the movie relates to freedom of speech (my emphasis):

But really, canceling the movie is perfectly consistent with freedom of expression, and showing the movie is what contradicts freedom of expression. As we will see, doing so silences Arab voices, so it conflicts with the purpose of promoting free speech on campuses — to foster students’ intellectual growth through exposing them to many different perspectives.

What the hell? Showing a film doesn’t “silence Arab voices”, except that they shouldn’t talk while the movie is being shown! Offended students, Arab or otherwise, have every right to raise their voices in protest. And they should! (And they did.) Somehow Asker, who is a student at a good university, has a deeply warped view of how free speech should function. If you present one point of view, he argues, you have to present them all—at the same time!

Obviously free speech on a college campus is enormously valuable and something colleges should ardently encourage. They should protect the rights of students and student-run groups to show and view almost any movie they want so that they’re exposed to a wide range of viewpoints. There is a significant difference, however, between the university promoting free speech for its students and the university itself presenting only one particular viewpoint on an issue. If the university, as opposed to a student organization, sponsors an event and presents only one viewpoint, it is effectively weighing in on an issue and endorsing a particular opinion — whether it intends to or not. For it is privileging one view at the expense of other views, which, without a university-authorized platform, get pushed into obscurity. The privileged view gets the limelight and, simply because of its prominence, people buy into it.

This is problematic because it’s not the university’s place to persuade its students or promulgate its own opinions. Its job is to create an environment where students’ voices rule, not its own. Rather than nurturing a diverse symphony of perspectives that free speech policies attempt to achieve, Michigan drowned out alternative views by not giving them a fair shot of being heard.

This is problematic because it’s not the university’s place to persuade its students or promulgate its own opinions. Its job is to create an environment where students’ voices rule, not its own. Rather than nurturing a diverse symphony of perspectives that free speech policies attempt to achieve, Michigan drowned out alternative views by not giving them a fair shot of being heard.

What is he on about? It was one lousy movie! And the movie doesn’t present, as far as I know, the view that Chris Kyle was an unalloyed hero, or that Muslims are universally to be despised. It is the story of a man who suffers greatly from what he’s had to do—was ordered to do. If you’ve seen his other war films, Clint Eastwood is no super-patriot who sees American warfare as a black-and-white issue. He sees it as a horrible thing that dehumanizes people.

Clearly a university should expose students to a variety of viewpoints, but that doesn’t mean that at any single event, everyone with an opinion should participate or weigh in. Asking a speaker or showing a movie isn’t necessarily an endorsement of that movie, just like showing “Triumph of the Will” isn’t an endorsement of Hitler.

What world is Asker living in? He’s going to get a rude shock when he graduates from Brown and sees what happens in the real world. Out there we have plenty of speeches and talks that are not accompanied by countering views. As for the “privileged view getting the limelight”, I don’t think that’s the case here. What got the limelight was the students’ protest about the film.

So Asker sees “freedom of speech” as the presentation of all voices at any event in which one voice is heard. Whoops! There go commencement speakers, showings of any single movies, any talks at all by individuals (especially controversial talks), and so on. But who is to judge which talks are controversial and need balance, and who is to judge what’s required to provide that balance?

Asker finishes with another black-is-white assertion (or, even more Orwellian, “censorship is freedom” (my emphasis):

If Michigan decided to cancel the showing of “American Sniper,” its decision wouldn’t be censorship or antithetical to free speech. Instead, the decision would reflect an understanding that the showing would give an unfair platform to a much-contested viewpoint. The university would realize that it isn’t its place to provide opinions and that it should always be neutral on issues. In general, universities have a special obligation when they put on events to carefully ensure all views are equitably represented, because they can so easily inadvertently privilege certain viewpoints over others. In sum, universities should promote free speech and vigorous exchange of opinions amongst students but avoid opining and speaking freely themselves.

So the American liberal student body goes to perdition, and it’s sad. At first I thought Asker’s letter was a joke, but I don’t really think so.

Pinker on the Kosher Switch

April 16, 2015 • 10:00 am

The Kosher Switch post I put up yesterday, showing how some clever Orthodox Jews can circumvent the regulations not to turn on lights during the Sabbath, got 169 comments—three times more than the much harder-to-write post on the evolution of human altruism. Professor Ceiling Cat wept. Are kosher switches that much more interesting than why humans have behaviors that seem hard to explain by evolution? Well, readers have spoken!

But, like Maru, I do my best.  In the “Kosher Switch” post, I expressed doubt about whether the device was real. After all, is it really eliminating “causation” to turn on a light switch that simply removes an impediment to a randomly-activated beam of light? Wasn’t the whole thing just an enormous and clever joke?

I emailed the link to Steve Pinker, for, as fellow secular Jews, we exchange Jewish jokes as well as bizarre issues of Judaica. Steve responded, and I reproduce what he said, with permission:

It is absolutely not a joke – there is a significant industry in using technology to work around the laws on what you can do on Shabbos (many Israeli hotels have an elevator that stops on every floor on the Sabbath so no one has to press a button and complete an electrical circuit, which is tantamount to lighting a fire, which is work). But Rebecca has told me that most Orthodox Jews would not sign on to such deliberate and complex evasion – there is a sense of obeying the spirit and not just the letter of these laws.

In The Stuff of Thought I go through the philosophy, linguistics, and psychology of causation, and this would have been an excellent case. In common sense and the ordinary language of causation, interpolating a link in a causal chain that is seen as having some degree of autonomy (a human agent, the weather, a device that goes on unpredictably) is seen as severing the causation between the first and last link. So Mike can “break a window” by chucking a rock through it but not by startling a carpenter who’s installing it. You can “open a door” by grabbing the knob but not by opening a window and letting the breeze do it. You can “dim the lights” by sliding a switch but not by turning on the toaster. The law has a similar notion of causation, though as you can guess, this allows for considerable leeway for how many links of what kind are considered to nullify causation and hence mitigate responsibility. Many episodes of Law and Order play these debates out. In one real-life case that I describe in Stuff, a chef at Benihana tried to fling a sizzling shrimp into the mouth of a customer, but it was badly aimed and the customer ducked, sprained his neck, needed an operation, and died of a surgical complication. His survivors sued Benihana but the jury decided there were too many links in the causal chain. In another, President James Garfield was shot by an assassin, but the bullets missed his vital organs and arteries, and he died months later because his doctors applied crackpot 19th-century medical techniques that led him to die of starvation and infection. The assassin argued at his trial, “The doctors killed him. I just shot him.” The jurors were unconvinced and he was hanged.

I’m always impressed that Steve can apparently remember everything he ever wrote (I’m sure he didn’t look this up, because I’ve seen the same kind of performance in person). I can’t even remember some scientific papers I wrote earlier in my career. Further, he has the amazing ability to instantly come up with examples for any point he’s trying to make, as in our latest discussion about whether it would be good for society to pretend that people had libertarian free will, even though we know they don’t. Steve simply rattled off several examples of situations when it’s not necessarily good to know the truth. But I’ll leave that issue for another day.

Why I am not a Bayesian*

April 16, 2015 • 8:45 am

JAC: Today Greg contributes his opinion on the use of Bayesian inference in statistics. I know that many—perhaps most—readers aren’t familiar with this, but it’s of interest to those who are. Further, lots of secular bloggers either write about or use Bayesian inference, as when inferring the probability that Jesus existed given the scanty data. (Theists use it too, sometimes to calculate the probability that God exists given some observations, like the supposed fine-tuning of the Universe’s physical constants.)

When I warned Greg about the difficulty some readers might have, he replied that, “I tried to keep it simple, but it is, as Paul Krugman says about some of his posts, ‘wonkish’.” So wonkish we shall have!

___________

by Greg Mayer

Last month, in a post by Jerry about Tanya Luhrmann’s alleged supernatural experiences, I used a Bayesian argument to critique her claims, remarking parenthetically that I am not a Bayesian. A couple of readers asked me why I wasn’t a Bayesian, and I promised to reply more fully later. So, here goes; it is, as Paul Krugman says, “wonkish“.

Approaches to inference

I studied statistics as an undergraduate and graduate student with some of the luminaries in the field, used statistics, and helped people with statistics; but it wasn’t until I began teaching the subject that I really thought about the logical basis of the subject. Trying to explain to students why we were doing what we were doing forced me to explain it to myself. And, I wasn’t happy with some of those explanations. So, I began looking more deeply into the logic of statistical inference. Influenced strongly by the writings of Ian Hacking, Richard Royall, and especially the geneticist A.W.F. Edwards, I’ve come to adopt a version of the likelihood approach. The likelihood approach takes it that the goal of statistical inference is the same as that of scientific inference, and that the operationalization of this goal is to treat our observations as data bearing upon the adequacy of our theories. Not all approaches to statistical inference share this goal. Some are more modest, and some are more ambitious.

The more modest approach to statistical inference is that of Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson. In the Neyman-Pearson approach, one is concerned to adopt rules of behavior that minimize one’s mistakes. For example, buying a mega-pack of paper towels at Sam’s Club, and then finding that they are of unacceptably low quality, would be a mistake. They define two sorts of errors that might occur in making decisions, and see statistics as a way of reducing one’s decision making error rates. Although they, and especially, Neyman, made some quite grandiose claims for their views, the whole approach seems rather despairing to me: having given up on any attempt to obtain knowledge about the world, they settle for a clean, well-lighted place, or at least one in which the light bulbs usually work. While their approach makes perfect sense in the context of industrial quality control, it is not a suitable basis for scientific inference (which, indeed, Neyman thought was not possible).

The approach of R.A. Fisher, founder of modern statistics and evolutionary theory, shares with the likelihood approach the goal of treating our observations as data bearing upon the adequacy of our theories, and the two approaches also share many statistical procedures, but differ most notably on the issue of significance testing (i.e., those “p” values you often see in scientific papers, or commentaries upon them). What is actually taught and practiced by most scientists today is a hodge-podge of the Neyman-Pearson and Fisherian approaches. Much of the language and theory of Neyman-Pearson is used (e.g., types of errors), but, since few or no scientists actually want to do what Neyman and Pearson wanted to do, current statistical practice is suffused with an evidential interpretation quite congenial to Fisher, but foreign to the Neyman-Pearson approach.

Bayesianism, like the Fisherian and likelihood approaches, also sees our observations as data bearing upon the adequacy of our theories, but is more ambitious in wanting to have a formal, quantitative method for integrating what we learn from observation with everything else we know or believe, in order to come up with a single numerical measure of rational belief in propositions.

So, what is Bayesianism?

The Rev. Thomas Bayes was an 18th century English Nonconformist minister. His “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” was published in 1763, two years after his death. In the Essay, Bayes proved the famous theorem that now bears his name. The theorem is a useful, important, and nonproblematic result in probability theory. In modern notation, it states

P(H∣D) = [P(D∣H)⋅P(H)]/P(D).

In words, the probability P of an hypothesis H in the light of data D is equal to the probability of the data if the hypothesis were true (called the hypothesis’s likelihood) times the probability of the hypothesis prior to obtaining data D, with the product divided by the unconditional probability of the data (for any given problem, this would be a constant). Ignoring the constant in the denominator, P(D), we can say that the posterior probability, P(H∣D), (the probability of the hypothesis after we see the data), is proportional to the likelihood of the hypothesis in light of the data, P(D∣H), (the probability of the data if the hypothesis were true), times the prior probability, P(H), (the probability we gave to the hypothesis before we saw the data).

The theorem has many uncontroversial applications in fields such as genetics and medical diagnosis. These applications may be thought of as two-stage experiments, in which an initial experiment (or background set of observations) establishes probabilities for each of a set of exhaustive and mutually exclusive hypotheses, while the results of a second experiment (or set of observations), providing data D, are used to reevaluate the probabilities of the hypotheses. Thus, knowing something about the grandparents of a set of offspring may influence my evaluation of genetic hypotheses concerning the offspring. Or, in making a diagnosis, I may include in my calculations the known prevalence of a disease in the population, as well as the test results on a particular patient. For example, suppose a 95% accurate test for disease X is positive (+) for a patient, and the disease X is known to occur in 1% of the population. Then, by Bayes’ Theorem

P(X∣+) = P(+∣X)⋅P(X)/P(+)

= (.95)(.01)/[(.95)(.01)+(.05)(.99)]

= .16.

The probability that the patient has the disease is thus 16%. Note that despite the positive result on a pretty accurate test, the odds are more than four to one against the patient actually having condition X. This is because, since the disease is quite rare, most of the positive tests are false positives. [JAC: This is a common and counterintuitive result that could be of practical use to those of you who get a positive test. Such tests almost always mandate re-testing!]

So what could be controversial? Well, what if there is no first stage experiment or background knowledge which gives a probability distribution to the hypotheses? Bayes proposed what is known as Bayes’ Postulate: in the absence of prior information, each of the specifiable hypotheses should be accorded equal probability, or, for a continuum of hypotheses, a uniform distribution of probabilities. Bayes’ Postulate is an attempt to specify a probability distribution for ignorance. Thus, if I am studying the relative frequency of some event (which must range from 0 to 1), Bayes’ Postulate says I should assign a probability of .5 to the hypothesis that the event has a frequency greater than .5, and that the hypothesis that the frequency of the event falls between .25 and .40 should be given a probability of .15, and so on. But is Bayes’ Postulate a good idea?

Problems with Bayes’ Postulate

Let’s look at simple genetic example: a gene with two alleles (forms) at the locus (say alleles A and a). The two alleles have frequencies p + q = 1, and, if there are no evolutionary forces acting on the population and mating is at random, then the three genotypes (AA, Aa, and aa) will have the frequencies p², 2pq and q², respectively. If I am addressing the frequency of allele a, and I am a Bayesian, then I assign equal prior probability to all possible values of q, so

P(q>.5) = .5

But this implies that the frequency of the aa genotype has a non-uniform prior probability distribution

P(q²>.25) = .5.

My ignorance concerning q has become rather definite knowledge concerning q² (which, if there is genetic dominance at the locus, would be the frequency of recessive homozygotes; as in Mendel’s short pea plants, this is a very common way in which we observe the data). This apparent conversion of ‘ignorance’ to ‘knowledge’ will be generally so: prior probabilities are not invariant to parameter transformation (in this case, the transformation is the squaring of q). And even more generally, there will be no unique, objective distribution for ignorance. Lacking a genuine prior distribution (which we do have in the diagnosis example above), reasonable men may disagree on how to represent their ignorance. As Royall (1997) put it, “pure ignorance cannot be represented by a probability distribution”.

Bayesian inference

Bayesians proceed by using Bayes’ Postulate as a starting point, and then update their beliefs by using Bayes’ Theorem:

Posterior probability ∝ Likelihood × Prior probability

which can also be given as

Posterior opinion ∝ Likelihood × Prior opinion.

The appeal of Bayesianism is that it provides an all-encompassing, quantitative method for assessing the rational degree of belief in hypotheses. But there is still the problem of prior probabilities: what should we pick as our prior probabilities if there is no first-stage set of data to give us such a probability? Bayes’ Postulate doesn’t solve the problem, because there is no unique measure of ignorance. We must choose some prior probability distribution in order to carry out the Bayesian calculation, but you may choose a different distribution from the one I do, and neither is ‘correct’: the choice is subjective.

There are three ways round the problem of prior distributions. First, try really hard to find an objective way of portraying ignorance. This hasn’t worked yet, but some people are still trying. Second, note that the prior probabilities make little difference to the posterior probabilty as more and more data accumulate (i.e. as more experiments/observations provide more likelihoods), viz.

P(posterior) ∝ P(prior) × Likelihood  × Likelihood × Likelihood × . . .

In the end, only the likelihoods make a difference; but this is less a defense of Bayesianism than a surrender to likelihood. Third, boldly embrace subjectivity. But then, since everyone has their own prior, the only thing we can agree upon are the likelihoods.  So, why not just use the likelihoods?

The problem with Bayesianism is that it asks the wrong question. It asks, ‘How should I modify my current beliefs in the light of the data?’, rather than ‘Which hypotheses are best supported by the data?’. Bayesianism tells me (and me alone) what to believe, while likelihood tells us (all of us) what the data say.

*Apologies to Clark Glymour and Bertrand Russell.

Further Reading

The best and easiest place to start is with Sober and Royall.

Edwards, A.W.F. 1992. Likelihood. Expanded edition. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. An at times terse, but frequently witty, book that rewards careful study. In many ways, the founding document of likelihood inference; to paraphrase Darwin, it is ‘origin all my views’.

Gigerenzer, G., et al. 1989. The Empire of Chance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. A history of probability and statistics, including how the incompatible approaches of Fisher and Neyman-Pearson became hybridized into textbook orthodoxy.

Hacking, I. 1965. The Logic of Statistical Inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hacking’s argument for likelihood as the fundamental concept for inference; he later changed his mind.

Hacking, I. 2001. An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. A well-written introductory textbook reflecting Hacking’s now more eclectic, and specifically Bayesian, views.

Royall, R. 1997. Statistical Evidence: a Likelihood Paradigm. Chapman & Hall, London. A very clear exposition of the likelihood approach, requiring little mathematical expertise. Along with Edwards, the key work in likelihood inference.

Sober, E. 2002. Bayesianism– Its Scope and Limits. Pp. 21-38 in R. Swinburne, ed., Bayes’ Theorem. Proceedings of the British Academy Press, vol. 113. An examination of the limits of both Bayesian and likelihood approaches. pdf (read this first!)

Readers’ wildlife photographs

April 16, 2015 • 7:45 am

Reader John Pears from the UK sends some nice photos of a species much beloved by our own Matthew Cobb—the Barn Swallow. John’s notes follow:

At this time of year in the UK we eagerly await the return of the Swallows, Swifts and Martins, which signals that spring is here and summer is not far away.  That’s the situation in Northern Europe, but I’ve just returned from Southern Europe (Portugal) where things are different.  I took the attached photos of Barn Swallows (Hirundo rustica) on 31 March and couldn’t reconcile the feeding of fledglings alongside the nearby nest building activities. Perhaps one of your readers can help with what appears to be strange parallel behaviour?

It was one of the nice moments when the birds didn’t mind me being present and I could shoot frames at will. Eventually you pick up the trigger signals from the fledgling so timing improves and so do the images.

  • The first image is a sequence of the shots taken over 1.5 seconds and it shows the remarkable agility of these birds (not to mention the power of modern cameras).

John added in a subsequent email, explaining the sequence to me (it’s a parent feeding an offspring):

1.  The parent is swooping in,
2.  Applying air brakes,
3.  And then thrusting the insect (visible in first 2 frames) into the fledglings mouth.
1
I watched the scene for about 40 minutes while my wife repeatedly checked her watch.
  • The second is the nest building bird with a beak full of estuarine mud.

2

  • 3 and 4 show more feeding activity:

4

3

  • 5 is my favourite, showing the full splendour of the ‘swallow tail’

5

These photos show different methods of delivery:

2015_03_31_Albufeira-0029_Barn Swallow

2015_03_31_Albufeira-0044_Barn Swallow

2015_03_31_Albufeira-0047_Barn Swallow

6

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 16, 2015 • 5:07 am

We’ve almost made it to the end of the week, and tomorrow I leave for two days of lectures, noms, and cockatoo-viewing in SC. Spring is here in all its glory, and the squirrels are ravenous. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, The Furry Princess of Poland is particularly cute today, but craves stimulation:

Hili: Life is full of surprises.
A: What happened?
Hili: That’s it: nothing happened today.

P1020538

In Poliah:
Hili: Życie jest pełne niespodzianek.
Ja: Co się stało?
Hili: Właśnie dzisiaj nic.

Tennessee bill to make the Holy Bible the “state book” passes one branch of the legislature

April 15, 2015 • 4:00 pm

One week ago I noted that the Tennessee legislature was considering a bill to make the Bible the Official State Book. Here’s that bill:

screen-shot-2015-04-08-at-9-29-23-am

It’s sheer lunacy, of course, and unconstitutional to boot. But that’s never stopped Republicans before. And today, according to The Tennesseean site, the bill sailed through one branch of the legislature:

The Holy Bible is the official book of Tennessee in the view of the Tennessee House of Representatives.

Despite questions of constitutionality, lawmakers beat back an attempt to make Andrew Jackson’s Bible the official book and voted 55-38 in favor of Rep. Jerry Sexton’s original bill.

“History’s going to tell us where we stand on this. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to have the side that I’m on,” said Sexton, R-Bean Station, after the vote.

“It may be kind to me in the future and it may not be kind, and that’s OK. I made a decision for today and I feel good about it.”

Although a GOP-led effort, House Speaker Beth Harwell, R-Nashville, was one of 20 Republicans to vote against the measure. House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh, D-Ripley, and four Republicans abstained. Only six Democrats voted in favor of the bill.

Shame on those six Democrats! If you’re a Tennessean, find them and vote them out!

While the bill is also predicted to pass the Senate, bringing it to the Governor to sign into law, The Tennessean reports that Governor Bill Haslam has “concerns.” And well he should, for this is a sure ACLU or FFRF lawsuit for the state if the bill passes, and it will almost surely be declared unconstitutional, saddling the state with enormous court costs.

The bill is opposed by one Republican in the Senate—the majority leader, but look at his grounds for opposition (my emphasis)!:

Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris opposed the bill in committee, and he hopes the bill doesn’t pass when it’s considered by the Senate.

“I sure hope it won’t pass. I think it’ll be a dark day for Tennessee if it does,” Norris said.

“All I know is that I hear Satan snickering. He loves this kind of mischief. You just dumb the good book down far enough to make it whatever it takes to make it a state symbol, and you’re own your way to where he wants you.”

Seriously, are these people adults? In the future, I think, people will look back on this madness with the same feelings we have now when thinking about the torture and burning of witches in the Middle Ages.  How could they do such stuff?

Reader Eliott, who sent me this link, noted:

I guess the one silver lining to this is any time they waste on this obviously unconstitutional bill is time that can’t be spent passing abortion restrictions.

I think he’s underestimating the ability of Republicans to dismantle the Constitution in many ways simultaneously. They make more mischief than Satan!

The Kosher Switch: is it for real?

April 15, 2015 • 1:45 pm

As you may know, it’s forbidden for many Orthodox Jews to turn light switches on and off during the Sabbath, as that constitutes work equivalent to lighting a fire. Some resort to “shabbos goys“: non-Jews whom you can hire to do the dirty work for you.

Now, however, there’s an IndieGoGo project called KosherSwitch that purports to do away with all that, and yet also avoid using pre-set timing devices to turn lights on and off.  After all, you can’t always predict when you want the lights on.

The question is this: is this for real? Well, a lot of people seem to think so, for as of noon today the project has been funded to the tune of $35,421.  I myself found it dubious; but look at this video, which makes it impossible to decide if it’s a joke or for real. First, a bit of jargon that reader “freethinkingjew”, who sent the link, helpfully enclosed:

If you’re watching the video,

Shabbos/Shabbat = the Sabbath (I know you know that, but some of your readers may not)

chilul Shabbos = violation of the rules of the Sabbath

grama = indirectly causing “work” to be done on the Sabbath

Well, how does it work? How can you turn a light on without performing an action on the Sabbath? The details on the IndieGogo page are, well, a bit hazy. . .

Like many inventions, KosherSwitch® technology employs simple concepts to provide indispensable benefits. Our technology is employs complete electro-mechanical isolation, and adds several layers of Halachic uncertainty, randomness, and delays, such that according to Jewish law, a user’s action is not considered to have caused a given reaction.  Many Poskim & Orthodox rabbis have ruled that the KosherSwitch® is not even considered grama (indirect causation), involves nomelakha (forbidden/creative act), and is therefore permitted for consumer use.When “flicking” a  KosherSwitch®, all we’re doing is moving a single, isolated, piece of plastic!  More details are available on our website.

But you check the website, it appears that switching on the light moves a piece of plastic, but that doesn’t turn the light on directly, for there’s some probability that it won’t work. It’s all very deep and philosophical, which is expected when a bunch of wily but crazy Jews are trying to wiggle out of G*d’s strictures:

When you slide the on/off button, you’re moving an isolated piece of plastic.  It is purely mechanical, and is not attached to anything electrical (eletro-mechanically isolated). This is done at a time when you see a green Status Light, which provides 100% assurance that the relevant components within the switch are inactive.  Subsequently, after a random interval, the device will activate and determine the position of the plastic by flashing an internal light pulse. The attached light fixture will be triggered only after the switch overcomes two failure probability processes – one prior to this light pulse and one after it.  Halachically, your action is simply the movement of an isolated piece of plastic with no implications of causation.

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I’m sure there’s at least one reader who will work though the complicated explanation (much longer than the excerpt given above) and let me know if there’s anything to it. I’m particularly curious about how “causation” is avoided when, after all, moving the plastic is what turns the lights on, even if there’s some inherent probability it won’t.

Get on it, dear readers; look at the explanation and post below! If this is a Poe, it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Is it philosophically and theologically sound?