Atomic Nerds

Today I learned that “real” Intelligent Design theory, far from being a political creationist Trojan Horse championed by people who do not understand why methodological naturalism is important, is actually a real science about finding mathematical “markers” to show something is designed. It’s a real science because it’s falsifiable- if you can show something “irreducibly complex”- like a bacterial flagellum- could have evolved just fine without having to invoke a designer, ID is falsified and its honest proponents will presumably pack up and go home rather than calling Goalposts U-Haul and finding some other “irreducibly complex” biological gewgaw to add to the designer’s shrinking curriculum vitae.

Liu and Ochman, “Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system”. Genome sequencing has really made finding these relationships rather than just positing them a lot faster. I have now falsified “real” ID. Cool, that took about five minutes for a jump over to my blogroll and a bit of typing. Don’t believe those haters that tell you science is hard!

I’ve been fortunate. I’ve never, in my entire life, run into a single individual that took a view to astrology any more serious than “Oh, well, horoscope said $prediction, wink wink nudge nudge, better watch out!” I’m told there are people who base major life decisions around these mass-produced vagaries in the local paper, or worse, pay people money to have others come up with specific vagaries on the spot from a cold reading. The only person I know who has paid for such a service was pretty clearly in the spirit of “For entertainment purposes only.” That said, I’m afraid I’m the dumb kid in today’s roundup of major talent, ’cause I really can’t get too worked up about a minor anachronism when I haven’t had to personally sit down and walk someone through the math proving it’s wrong. Personally the part that confuses me the most about the belief in astrology is that our local planets have enough gravitational sway to affect your entire life, while distant galaxies (which tend to compensate for the inverse square in the gravitational force equation with excessive mass despite the insane distances – at least they do well enough for astrology numbers) don’t. I guess you just run out of room on the graph paper at some point and have to draw the line, so to speak. That said, I realized that astrology wasn’t about math or science, but about heavenly bodies. I’m willing to bet that none of my esteemed colleagues picked this up, having written this before the “deadline” (Edit to add: And was foiled by a faulty “publish on schedule” in my wordpress setup), but I for one am going to run with that ball.

First, a quick look at what everyone can expect today:

For those either at home, or with bosses that don’t object to tasteful nekkidness, the rest of my impression of astrology lies below the fold.
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“Personally, I liked working for the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything. I’ve worked in the private sector- they expect RESULTS.”
- Ray Stantz, Ghostbusters

Nowadays, when you put “astrology” and “astronomy” in close proximity, and you are not a dictionary, it’s usually because you’re meaning to compare occult nonsense with sober science. One of them is the study of the nature, movement, and behavior of heavenly bodies, and the other is fundamentally the assertion that the bits of bright light in the sky move in ways that directly translate to what *our* bodies and nature are going to be doing. If nothing else, they make handy root-word cousins for comparing science and pseudoscience. However, as some astrologers point out (thanks Chas), astronomy and astrology were close to being the same discipline for the bulk of human history so far.

Humanity has parlayed a few tricks into astonishing success as animals. One of these- a tactic known by most big-brained and long-lived mammals- is noticing and remembering patterns in the environment around them, and relating those patterns to one another. In its most basic form, this is how a species that doesn’t breed like a mayfly and needs its expensive offspring to survive through lean years stays healthy- in flush years, ripe fruit and dumb young animals (meat) might be everywhere, but remembering where they may STILL be found during lean ones is a useful skill. For a big, bright primate- like an orangutan- life is a layered map of resources cued by changes in the length of the day, the temperature, and all the other things that change with the seasons.

Humans became extremely good at this. Between the even bigger brain and even longer lives, and early advances in telling each other things beyond “we can probably still find palms in fruit over this way”, and some even further symbological advancements that let us write such things down, humanity began to pick up on even bigger patterns- like the specific *way* the sun moved through the sky, the patterns of light against the darkness moved over time, and the predictable way the moon changed. People in the tropics began with noticing the strange days on which they cast no shadow. Folks in more temperate climes were most intensely interested in the longest and shortest days of the year- when the light, the warmth, and the ability to grow things to eat was going to go away and when it was going to come back.

In order to start writing *enough* things down and start relating them to one another in consistent ways, let alone start building everything from the ancient equivalent of UNIVAC right on up to Roadrunner, big civilizations were necessary. Without one, every individual human is mostly occupied with keeping all his own resources organized; you need a surplus, and a way of organizing its distribution, before you can have excess citizens with nothing better to do than sit around watching the lights overhead and mapping them.

However advanced any given group of humans became at making sense of the timing and progression of the seasons, and the tides, and the way they all correlated to the way the stars and the planets (identified by being a lot more inclined to wander around the sky than the more fixed points of lights) moved, they were still thinking about them with exactly the same brain that they used to keep track of the fruit, the herds, and the wife’s monthlies. Specifically, the same brain whose instant followup question to “How do these things relate?” is always “what does this have to do with me?” If anything, the followup only becomes more pressing when your entire existence of painstakingly recording the nature and behavior of the lights in the sky rests on it- or at least on your ability to justify such pure knowledge as valuable to someone who has no knowledge of the processions of the heavens, but DOES have a lot of goats and wheat to spare.

There was certainly little enough reason to suspect that the earth was NOT at the center of the whole thing; earth is a fixed point of reference to anyone standing on it. There was even less reason to suspect that the complex, beautiful system of patterns that the heavens revolved through had no more relevance to humanity than a useful reference system for good times for planting and harvesting; even an illiterate farmer can figure THAT sort of thing out. Stars were the stuff of math, the purest marriage of abstract symbolism and concrete reality, and ultimately the most powerful tool the tool-using apes were ever to stumble across. It all had to mean something- and the same people who wrote everything else down wrote down what they suspected that might be, relating it to everything else they associated with the heavens, with true justification or without it- it can be hard to tell. Ultimately, the body of any contemporary state of knowledge lies in what’s been written down so far.

As it turns out, reality is usually far more preposterous than mere intuition leads us to suspect.

Eventually, the math led us far enough in the right direction that old assumptions based primarily on “makes the most sense of the time” began to crumble and new ones based on “this is the only way we can make the figures work” rose, eventually to the point where we could make such accurate predictions about the sky and the deeper space beyond it that we could stick a probe into a transient celestial object 429 million kilometers away.

Math is wonderful. It gave us astrology and astronomy in a single package born of human nature and solid observation, and then got us out of needing astrology as the most logical set of assumptions about our relationship to the stars. Math can do nearly anything.

It is always useful, however, to remember that math, being a pure tool for pattern-finding, will find the patterns in anything.

Be sure to swing by Matt’s, Marko’s, Tam’s, LawDog’s, and Ambulance Driver’s for everyone else’s take on this weeks’ theme.

As you may already have heard, by week’s end we’ll be taking part in a little experiment in bloggery.

Ambulance Driver, Matt, LawDog, Marko, Tam, and the pair of us will all offer something- anything- on the same theme. Given that we tend to do an inordinate amount of sitting around trying to come up with something to write about, this will probably be good for us, though I probably should sit on my immediate contrarian urge to skip writing something dry and scientific and instead find the perfect interpretive dance on YouTube. Stingray suggested porn. We’ll see.

*You’ll probably get this by Friday. If you get it now, congratulations, and have a nice cold Willer on us.

Another wonderful start to the day rolled around in the form of frantic barking from Kang. Looking out front and not seeing the dogs’ usual nemesis, the UPS guy, I wandered out back in search of something to throw at her. Instead of finding her running along the fence line, letting some recently released-for-summer probable delinquent student know that our yard is no longer a good venue for sneaking out and drinking*, I discovered her apparently engaged in a shouting match with her favorite spot to curl up in the mornings. Taking one barefoot step outside to find out just what the hell was going on in her tiny little mind, I heard a buzzing sound emanate from the spot with which she had contention.

In what is becoming a disturbing trend, I again set a land speed record. In the next five minutes hemisecond, I had cleared the fifty feet from porch to dog and was dragging her back houseward at a rate of speed normally reserved for Barack Jong Il Obama’s foot entering his mouth. Dog safely inside, and myself now equipped with shoes and a few spare neurons to dedicate to identification rather than reaction, I returned, camera and stick in hand**.
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Barack Obama confirmed many of our worst fears today:

“On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.”

It gets worse. The outbreak has begun in Las Cruces, NM. I knew the town didn’t look particularly full of vim and vigor the last time we passed through, but I had no idea that our war dead had risen from the grave to consume the questionable brains of the students at NMSU. We here in Los Alamos may have some hope. Surrounded by the mountains and sheer cliffs, we may be able to draw on the by no means trivial firepower of the local citizens, combine it with the latest technology from LANL, and erect sufficient blockades to keep the shambling masses at bay. Sadly, with Las Cruces a mere 300 miles away we will probably encounter heavy assault much sooner than other places.

The remote mountaintop location of Los Alamos has been vital in our past to maintaining security. Let us only hope that the anti-LANL zombie appeasers have not weakened us beyond hope of surviving the coming conflict. Our thoughts and prayers go to those further south in the state such as Stephen Bodio. Stay strong in the face of the coming undead, and remember: only headshots count!

Once again, I have absolutely no context for this, as the furthest back I was able to trace the link was to a blog post with no other commentary. So I don’t know where this is, or who these people are, I only know that this looks like the most fun you can have at the opera without a paintball gun. It’s the audience participation that really makes it.

Original Numa Numa Guy lives here, for anyone that needs a refresher on YouTube Videos That Became Inexplicable Crazes.

I normally just skim that section of the paper, but my horoscope says that creative energies are approaching a cyclic peak soon. I wonder what this bodes….

You know you live in a small town when you go bopping along a meandering path on the interwebs, find a blog by a local, and realize you’ve probably exchanged pleasantries and currency on multiple occasions with the author.

Maybe next time I won’t immediately scurry off like a startled rodent when approached by a salesperson while in the midst of Book Reverie. Or maybe I’ll just give thanks that I’m not nearly “interesting” enough a customer to be blogfodder.

I finally woke up today feeling more or less human again, although thanks to the ravages of whatever bug I’ve been fighting off, I SOUND as though my voicebox has been removed and replaced with the squeaker from one of the dogs’ favorite toys- “favorite” in that said squeaker has been chewed mostly to death. Given that all my efforts to communicate vocally are being met with a mixture of hilarity and confusion, I considered riding around in a giant metal chair with a blinking light for “yes” and “no”, but I was told that construction would take a bit longer than just waiting for my voice to come back would. Oh well.

I’ve been trying to work up something good to say for Memorial Day, but I find I’m suffering a Critical Eloquence Failure. Go here and here for the words of people who suffer no such difficulties and can make the words stand up and show what we should remember along with “mustard, no ketchup, and could you pass me another beer?”

Seems lots of folks are out messing around in the plant world of late. I’m such a joiner. Gaze upon my works and pity me.

Yeah, yeah. I know, I missed a patch or two. I figure with my luck at growing things, and the enthusiasm with which the dogs go after soft dirt for digging, it’d be better to just start small and expand the lawn in sections until we no longer look like a sagebrush-enhanced version of the Joad farm. The seed in there is something or other called “creeping red fescue,” which according to the local branch of the Master Gardeners club (aka mom) is some sort of supergrass that requires only the slightest water to stay green and lush and will be dog-resistant once established. Frankly, I’d be happy with bindweed as long as it kept the dust down in the summer and the mud more in place in the spring. Visible in the background: Next weekend’s project, the unfinished woodshed, and the chainlink surrounding what will eventually be a food/herb garden. Not visible, even to electron microscopes: My enthusiasm.

In boring blog stuff, I popped the hood on this thing to add a line or two that should hopefully cut down on questions of who posted what when coming in via permalink. Thanks to SayUncle some time back for pointing out that the “irradiated by” attribution vanishes when viewing a post not on the main page. If I borked something and author credits are appearing all willy-nilly in places they shouldn’t, just bop me with a comment and I’ll go tweak more.

Finally, just to round things out, have a recipe. Dinner tonight is teriyaki flank steak. Take one slab o’ flank steak, and score it up good with a paring knife. In a gallon ziploc, mix about three cloves of minced garlic, 2 Tbs brown sugar, 1/2 to 1 tsp of powdered ginger, 1/4 cup dry sherry, and 1/2 cup soy sauce. Drop the meat in and toss it in the fridge for at least two hours, but the longer the better. Come dinner time, set the meat on the counter while you preheat the broiler to as hot as it’ll go. For a cooking vessel, a broiler pan will work, but I’m partial to a cooling rack set in a cookie sheet. Either way, spread the meat out and give it about 3 minutes per side at 5-6″ from the broiler for medium rare. Stir fry some carrots and broccoli if you’re feeling ambitious, or just boil some rice and grab the soy sauce if you’re worn out from playing in the dirt all weekend. Be sure to slice across the grain when serving.

Oh, and just in case anyone had any doubts, I’m offically a redneck now. Got a good batch of pink started back there, ’cause I’m a dumbass that forgot sunscreen. And apparently I need a haircut much more desperately than I thought.

Saturday, 3:23:00AM – Kodos: *whine*
Saturday, 3:23:00.001AM – Kodos: SPLAT
Saturday, 3:23:03AM – Stingray: Oh, you poor fella. Let’s get you outside and cleaned up.*
Saturday, 3:42 AM – Stubbed toe, tearing off roughly 1/3 the nail. Served with obscenity charges for resultant dissertation on the nature of doorframes, dogs, and paper towels. Discovered blood blister on heel from somewhere.
Saturday, 4:15 AM – Return to bed.

*******

Saturday, 6:05:00 AM – Kodos: *Whi —
Saturday, 6:05:00.00000000001 – Set land speed record for recently awoken suburban male moving a 110lb dog out the back door. Quantum tunneling may have occurred through furniture in the living room.
Saturday, 6:05:05 – Escort Kang outside to keep Kodos company and hopefully prevent the Giant Chicken Dog from tearing anything up in an effort to come back inside.
Saturday, 6:06 – Return to bed.

*******

Saturday, 8:57AM – Finally get back to sleep.
Saturday, 9:12AM – Alarm goes off so as to allow the return of the rototiller to my parents, who don’t believe in sleeping in or work levels that wouldn’t shame professional farmers 1/3 their age.
Saturday, 9:15AM – Intercept call from insane parents confirming I’ll have the rototiller there soon, as its absence is holding them up, before it can further disturb the still sick LabRat.

*******

Saturday, 9:30AM – Deliver rototiller (which I need today as well, naturally). Negotiate afternoon use of tiller in exchange for a run to Chili Works for breakfast burritos. Go on, twist my arm.
Saturday, 9:55AM – Commiserate with Jason, the boss at Chili Works, for a while. Consider taking a job as a prep cook and drifting from kitchen to kitchen across New Mexico to master red chile sauce instead of returning for the rototiller.

*******

Saturday, 10:45AM – Begin tilling earth that would make the Joads wince in sympathy, mixing in peat and manure for good measure. Ultimate goal: grass for the dogs and mitigation of the dustbowl/mudbowl sitting right off the back porch.
Saturday, 1:30PM – Consider having children in order to have an excuse to take Saturday mornings off, a la Marko.
Saturday, 2:30PM – Begin construction of wire fencing to keep dogs and rabbits from going nuts in the loose dirt and new grass once seeds go in. Expected operational lifespan of fence on contact with dogs: five seconds.

*******

Saturday, 4:00PM – Discover beer shortage. Formulate plans to annex Germany.
Saturday, 4:05PM – Plans thwarted during equipment check by LabRat’s request for more NyQuil from the grocery store.
Saturday, 4:10 PM – Discover workload for Sunday.
Saturday, 4:10:01 – Set forth for Mexico and adventure.

*Translated from what was at the time a fully coherent and grammatically correct monologue composed entirely of four selections from George Carlin’s Seven Words routine.

Go read it. It’s better than anything you’re gonna see here this weekend.

While LabRat is fully in the grip of NyQuil to deal with the cold I brought home, my own mental faculties are only slightly improved as I shake off the last of it myself – don’t expect anything award winning in this post. Taking this into consideration, it’s probably for the best that I scrap my notion of pointing out how skilled orators are often considered Satanic in some form or other, linking that with how often Republicans are labled some variant of “the Devil” vs. Democrats, and tying it all up with a pretty Obama-shaped bow. I tell you, that cherry-flavored stuff is not to be trifled with.

Rather than leave you all with nothing for a few days, it’s time to once again trot out the “Our Town Is Frickin’ Weird” trolley for another lap around the hill. Last week while trying to find the hours of one of the local eateries, LabRat stumbled upon a travel wiki. With entries concerning local attractions, accomodations, cuisine, and so forth, we were somewhat shocked to find a page dedicated to our sleepy little redneck white bread mountain town.

While broadly speaking the page is technically accurate, it decidedly lacks for flavor. Let’s just take a look at where it falls flat, shall we?

“Get around
The downtown area is compact, and the museums and most restaurants are within easy walking distance of the main hotels and many of the B&Bs. Public transportation by Atomic City Transit includes both fixed routes and an on-demand service.
Many Los Alamos residents bicycle to work and around town. Cycling is feasible for visitors as well, but be aware that the town is at an elevation of about 7320 feet (2231 meters) and quite hilly. Puffing up the hills before you’ve acclimated to the altitude can be a surprisingly exhausting experience. White Rock is nearly a thousand feet lower and about 10 miles (16 km) away by road; riding to it on a bike can be a thrill, but oh, that hill coming back! Atomic City Transit will be adding bike racks to its buses.”

Sweet shivering Shinto priests in Akita, if you come to Los Alamos and plan to ride a bike for transportation anywhere except a mountain trail, be sure to stop by so I can punch your face in. Now I’m going to try not to turn this into a total tangent rant about our local cyclists, but I will say that I have not met a single person in town who actually likes and encourages such activities who was not a cyclist him or herself. Our mountain trails are absolutely gorgeous, and perfectly suited to the athletic type who wish to go wheeling about without an engine, and I wish those folks all the best. Our roads, however, are not as well suited. In Los Alamos proper, there are three main roads: Central, Trinity, and Diamond. I will grant that it is more-or-less possible to ride a bicycle safely on these roads, provided it isn’t rush hour. If it’s rush hour and you try to ride while 20,000 people use three roads, you’re an idiot. Period. As for the highways, two roads in and out of town look like they came straight from a James Bond movie. There is no shoulder and there is a cliff about five feet away. On other roads, there is still no shoulder, plenty of blind curves, and while there isn’t a cliff to plummet from, there is still no place for a car to go should one come upon a two-wheeled hood ornament at an inopportune time.

Look, just don’t ride a bike in Los Alamos on the roads, ok? We’ll all be happier. Right. Moving on.

“See:

* The Art Center at Fuller Lodge [4] maintains an Art Gallery with exhibits that change monthly. The Art Center promotes the development of local and regional artists. The center provides art classes and hosts two Arts & Crafts Fairs, one in August and another in October. Special interest groups meet at the Art Center for photography, Life Drawing, Painting and Collagists gathernings. The Art Center operates a Gallery Shop that specializes in hand made art works including jewerly, picture postcards, paintings, ceramics and more. Regular Hours are 10 AM to 4 PM Monday-Saturday. The Art Center’s website has class and exhibit schedules. (505)662-9331. “

I have no major bones to pick with this section. The art center isn’t my cup of tea, to put it mildly, but Fuller Lodge is a fascinating building, and the museums listed are well worth your time. Personally, I prefer the Historical Society’s museum, as it deals more with life here in town and less on LANL’s role past present and future, but I may be biased as the Bradbury museum is where we usually wind up taking guests first, who then don’t want to see the other one. The most interesting part of the Bradbury museum, personally, is the comment book near the exhibit concerning the pros and cons of nuking Japan. While occasionally there is a comment of actual worth, most are simply a hilarious illustration of people who Just Don’t Get It (examples here from last year’s Hiroshima anniversary). If you do plan to go, spend a few extra bucks and try to find your own -unedited- copy of “The Town that Never Was.” The version they play at the museum has been cut, shamefully, to about sixteen minutes. The original is closer to 45, and is much more informative and illuminating about the town and life here during the war. The edits were made, supposedly, because material presented in it would be of value to (Iran) foreign (Iran) nations (Iran) trying (Iran) to (Iran) go nuclear. How aspects of life at the original Ranch School that was here before the Manhattan Project will further the enrichment of uranium eludes me.

“The Black Hole, [5] a surplus/salvage/junk lot at 4015 Arkansas (and more formally known as “Los Alamos Sales Company,” although absolutely nobody among the locals, even its proprietor, uses the name), is known locally as the best place to see genuine LANL artifacts and get a real feel for the contrary nature of the town. Drop by and buy some oddity, but do it soon; the proprietor, one of the most notable eccentrics in a town well endowed with the breed, is well along in years.”

Fuck the Black Hole, and fuck Ed Grothus. The best thing you could do during a visit to Los Alamos would be to firebomb this miserable hypocrite’s shit-pile and piss on the ashes. “Don Juan De Eduardo De Los Alamos,” as the miserable town pustule calls himself, is a subject for a rant all its own that could span an even greater length than the cyclists. Having worked for the lab for a good chunk of his life, he now makes his living by decrying the lab while selling LANL surplus from the salvage yard at a huge markup. In the midst of telling anyone who will listen, and even more who won’t, why LANL is the worst thing to ever happen to the world and how nuclear fission is the worst abomination in the history of ever (and I am only exaggerating through simplifying his frequent inane blitherings in local public forums), he has spent the last few years extoling the virtues of Chinese labor and government by building a huge granite anti-nuclear monument, which only he wants. He tried to donate this 50-foot-tall obelisk to the town, and was told in polite governmental nomenclature to piss up a rope. At least the county council gets something right now and then.

“Ashley Pond, or is it Ashley Pond Pond?”
Whatever you call it, watch out for the copius amounts of duck crap, insanely agressive geese, and water that wouldn’t qualify as clean in Detroit. It’s pretty if you’re just driving by though.

“Eat

Los Alamos used to have a well-deserved reputation as a culinary wasteland, but things have improved considerably in recent years.”

This is a bald-faced lie. A lie this immense casts doubt on the honor and integrity of even the family of whoever wrote it. There are three good restaraunts in town: Chili Works, Cafe Sushi, and Bob’s Bodacious BBQ. The latter two suffer from never being open. Have you ever heard of a BBQ joint that closes Saturday and Sunday? They’re only open a few hours a day during the week, and trying to figure out when Cafe Sushi will be open is even worse. For Cafe Sushi, it can at least be reasonable since you can only cram so much fresh fish into the hole-in-the-wall they operate out of. For bonus points, both of these rarely open shops have been complaining of late about road work near their establishments preventing customers from coming in. Having braved the minor detour on a weekday afternoon only to find them closed, I am less than sympathetic.

Chili Works, however, is quite possibly the best greasy spoon in the state. It isn’t formal. It isn’t pretty. But the fact that the line can, has, and undoubtedly will again grow to over twice the length of the parking lot should tell you what you need to know. They even have their own Greasy Spoon Language for the just about every breakfast burrito permutation they serve. Me, I like the Cricket – Chorizo, Red chile and Cheese.

“Los Alamos contains more churches than bars, which is a probably sufficient commentary on the night life.”

Enough said. I actually don’t know how many churches there are in town, but I can think of about 20 just off the top of my head. NOTHING is open later than 8:30 except the grocery stores and a bar or two, and most things are closed by 6, some eateries included.

“Stay safe

Violent crime is almost unknown in Los Alamos; it is one of the safest communities you’ll ever visit. The biggest lawbreaking threat to life and limb is drunk drivers. Northern New Mexico has an unfortunate and well-deserved reputation for DUI problems. Until recently Los Alamos was an exception to this, but not any more. Be alert when driving on the arterial roads after 10 p.m. or so, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. Another driving hazard is wildlife. Herds of elk come down from the Jemez Mountains during the winter and often congregate around the roads. If your car hits an elk at highway speed, the elk may lose, but you will most assuredly not win. Again, be careful driving after sundown during the winter months. “

It would be more accurate to say that the police in Los Alamos were more inclined to look the other way until recently. Fortunately, since there’s nothing open after sundown anyway, the roads are almost entirely empty so you have plenty of room to negotiate around the occasional drunk. As for the elk, you better be on the ball. Northern New Mexico apparently is home to the most suicidal herd of elk in the known world. Either that, or the herd considers it sport to see who can take out the biggest vehicle in the most spectacular fashion.

“One final note: bubonic plague is endemic to northern New Mexico, and plague-bearing fleas and rodents have been trapped from within the city limits. As cautioned in the article on Bandelier National Monument, if you see a distressed or dead rodent or other small animal, leave it alone; buzzards are immune to plague, you are not.”

And don’t forget Hanta Virus!

In all fairness, the town is beautiful but basically dead. It’s home to a bunch of folks who live to work and not much else. If any of y’all are going to be in this neck of the woods, we’d be happy to show you around, but don’t expect the tour to take terribly long, and bring a book for when it’s done.

Just what the title says. Garry Kasparov giving a speech in Moscow for which I have no other context, except that it’s the speech where someone piloted in a dildo with helicopter rotors on it to buzz the speaker until a Russian man who clearly regards all of it as Very Serious Business swats it mercilessly down.

Yeah. I’m pretty sure I’m catching Stingray’s cold, so unless my immune system rallies tonight and turns back my scratchy throat and mild cough before it sets up trenches in my lungs, y’all can probably expect light updates.. in both senses of the word.

Yes, I do hope to have another subject, soon… in the meantime, two arguments that did not get addressed (either because I hadn’t yet seen them or because I judged them tangential at the time) in the last post.

1. The ruling was wrong no matter what because it explicitly overturned the will of the people.

Well, if it’d pulled its legal justification out of sheer thin air, then there would be something to be angry about here. (I happen to think that the legal justification was pretty sound, but I’m not a lawyer, so that and five bucks will buy you a cappuccino.) However, if it is ONLY that it overrode the will of the voting public that your argument rests on… er… well, it’s not quite in the original source material, but overall, this is a feature, not a bug. The higher courts are supposed to override the legislature- including when legislation goes to a direct vote- when they find that the law does not jibe with the Operating Manuals of the state and federal constitution. Sometimes this goes badly. Sometimes the reasoning is outrageous. Sometimes if the people are determined enough, they can use that legislative power to rewrite the operating manuals. But the fact that this happens from time to time merely indicates the the system is working as intended, not that it’s been broken by radical judges.

2. We have to legally define marriage as between a man and a woman because if we don’t, the gay activists will start running roughshod over the church/state divide to try and MAKE churches marry them.

So… in order to protect the healthy division between government and religion and preserve vital religious freedom of conscience from government intervention… we have to enshrine a religiously-acceptable definition of marriage at all levels, including the civil.

Men, we’ve got to burn this village to save it!

Much as it pains me to basically say “trust the system”, the freedom of American churches from state-mandated meddling has actually been one of the better-protected ones over the wandering course of our history. Yes, this is going on in Canada, but that particular wall is more of a dainty garden fence in that fair nation.

Either way, if you wanna protect the church’s freedom of principle on the grounds of that argument, churchly principles have to remain out of bounds for inclusion in the civil Operating Manual, too. Pick one. There are always going to be people on both sides who want to move the line over this way or that way in the name of All That Is Right, but they’re going to stay wrong… and the only way to preserve that clarity is to avoid setting precedents for breaching the separation, no matter how good your reason supposedly is.

That didn’t take long. George Takei is getting married.

The original Star Trek, it’s been harped on by every Vulcan-ear wearing, Klingon-gargling nerdoid on the planet, was very revolutionary for its time in having characters of multiple races and ethnicities- including a RUSSIAN and a BLACK CHICK- as part of its primary cast. Okay, sure, so all the female characters were plastic-wrapped into teeny miniskirts, and all the most interesting parts and lines were saved for the three white dudes (even if one of them did have prosthetic ears and an unflattering haircut), but for the times, it was pretty brave.

Star Trek was considered way too valuable a prospective property to take that kind of risks again when they started making new series. Roddenberry promised gay characters or at least references, but they never materalized- reading about it makes for quite the entertaining account of sci-fi and network skullduggery. Instead, about once a series they put out a leadenly heavy-handed episode that always allegorized homosexuality (sometimes rather offensively), but never made an explicit reference to it except in the background.

The social proselytizing was one of the most annoying features of any incarnation of the show, but that very pushiness made that really stand out. So it’s damn funny to me to see that Takei got there first in the real world, when they never had the guts to do it in their future utopia.

When the California Supreme Court same-sex-ruling went down, I had originally intended to ignore it. This has been a hectic busy period with no clearings in sight, and I REALLY wasn’t in the mood to poke the bear, let alone do it with as much verbiage behind the jab as would be necessary. The subject in general can exhaust me before I even open my mouth; I’m ideologically very sympathetic to the cause, but I can get riled up by the tactics employed on both sides, and I really don’t see the point of turning my politics on an issue that even Republicans and Democrats wind up mirroring each other on for pure safety’s sake. In 2004, it broke down like this: John Kerry- against same-sex marriage, pro-civil-unions. John Edwards: against same-sex marriage, pro-civil-unions. George W. Bush- against same sex marriage, pro-civil-unions. Dick Cheney- pro-civil-unions, conspicuously silent on the subject of same-sex marriage. Open hostility to homosexuals has become a political loser now that there are enough of them living openly that a majority has realized they’re pretty much like the rest of us; a majority is also basically opposed to same-sex marriage, so much so that most steps forward for it have been followed by a wave of states adopting laws or constitutional amendments to prevent same-sex marriage or anything that even looks suspiciously like it. (I expect this to be repeated in the wake of the California ruling.) It’s a mess, and one that I had no intention of messing with.

Then our tree-planting plans were canceled by an invading virus that turned Stingray into Wolfman Jack, Marko posted something that cleared up my lingering “judicial activism” squeamishness, and I was suddenly looking at a totally free Sunday in which my spouse was not only not up for unscheduled fun, but was monopolizing my usual distraction devices. Out of excuses.

Besides, y’all have been agreeing with me way too much lately. So, now to burn some pixels on one of my least popular positions- support for same-sex marriage that is grounded mostly in family-values logic. Since I’ve mostly been lurking at other places where the debate is running hot, I’m going to structure this around what I regard as the most common (with varying degrees of credibility) arguments against.

(more…)

(During attempts to repair the latest manifestation of my special talent….)

“Seriously. How did you DO this?”

“I really don’t know. I tried to take off my shoes, and it all went downhill from there.”