Atomic Nerds

…And started a Warcrack blog.

Over the last couple of months blogging and producing what I consider acceptable content has gotten harder and harder, and I’m looking to put some of the fun back into it for me. My HOPE is that doing so will lead to the tap for Atomic Nerds content being a little easier to turn on, but at the very least I’ll be completely enjoying myself more often rather than working for a perceived obligation to my readers. I write about every single other hobby I have, so the only reason not to do so in terms of gaming is that what I’m talking about is a foreign language to anyone who doesn’t play themselves. Crossover interest is also likely to be low between this audience and the one a Warcraft blog would have, so solution: throw together a WordPress blog that lives off by itself. That way that stuff stays strictly where people who actually are interested are.

I don’t intend to let this site suffer if I can possibly, humanly avoid it, so we’ll see how this works out. If I think Atomic Nerds IS suffering, I’ll kill the other blog. More likely it will remain a niche side project in the lines of The Arms Room or Retrotechnologist.

For the Warcrack players and people who for some bizarre reason read anything: Paladin Pants

I like reading good food writing nearly as much as I like eating good food (if not more because I can’t leave a top-notch relleno in my coat pocket to whip out whenever I’m in the mood), and have a thing for regional American cuisines, so Jane and Michael Stern’s books are a natural fit for me. They’re responsible for the Roadfood books and forums, and center around the American eating experience outside of standardized chains and franchises, tuned to national tastes rather than what the locals in a given area have come up with. One of their books, Two For The Road, is mostly essays about the experience of eating for a living and contains several recipes emblematic of the more interesting regions and foodways they’ve travelled through. One, a recipe for baked pork chops from a radio personality in Iowa, made me drool reading the description of eating them, so I determined they’d be next on the list.

Virginia Miller’s Elegant Pork Chops

The marinade:
2 cups soy sauce
1 cup water
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon molasses
3/4 teaspoon salt

The sauce:
1/3 cup water
1 3/4 cup ketchup
1 1/2 cups chili sauce
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 tablespoon dry mustard
2 tablespoons Russian salad dressing

The meat:
6-8 pork chops cut as thick as you can find

Combine the marinade ingredients in a baking pan large enough to hold the pork chops in a single layer, add the meat, and marinate for several hours or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Remove the chops from the marinade and place in a 9 x 13 inch baking pan. Put the pan in the oven, uncovered. Combine all the ingredients for the sauce in a medium saucepan and bring to a boil. After the chops have been in the oven about ten minutes, turn them and cover with the hot baking sauce.

Cover the pan and bake the chops for about 1 hour, until they are tender, turning them several times as they cook. Serve hot, with the sauce spooned over them.

Okay, well, we can throw the light and dark brown sugars out the door and just use whatever’s in the pantry as far as the brown-sugar family goes. Otherwise this looks doable as-is.

1. As soon as you remember that you intended to make these that night, assemble your marinade ingredients. Soy sauce: check. Water: still accessible via sink. Brown sugar: check. Salt: accessible from at least three different sources. Molasses: um.

2. Ask your spouse where the molasses lives. In the pantry, apparently. Open the pantry, which is floor to ceiling crammed with things, with several shelves above eye level, and organized in absolutely no fashion whatsoever. Optional: hum the score from the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the one with the warehouse.

3. We don’t need Top Men to find the damn molasses and for once we’re going to find something for ourselves without having to hassle Spouse into coming in and digging it up for you. Rummage through the flour, sugar, cocoa mix, honey, canned oysters, canned chipotles, unopened jar of clotted cream, elk jerky, dried squid flakes (?!), chocolate chips, leftover Halloween candy, dill pickles, sauerkraut, canned beans, grits, quinoa, tea, Thousand Island dressing, tomato paste, tahini, and sesame oil as time passes and the disturbed dust in the air mounts.

4. Split the difference and ask Spouse for a hint. On one of the middle two shelves, in a container with a yellow cap. Rummage several times through the middle two shelves, cursing vigorously at various jars of Spouse’s local honey collection, which are all dark as molasses and all capped in yellow.

5. Expand your definition of “the middle two shelves” to include the one one slot up from the bottom. Extract the molasses from the very back of the shelf. Success!

6. We’re halving this recipe as 6-8 pork chops is a bit much for two people, so a gallon freezer bag will do as a marinade-and-chop container. Do some quick (by which I mean laborious) kitchen math and dump the requisite proportions of dry ingredients into the bag. Open the molasses jar and enjoy the incredibly appetizing scent of blended sugar and sulfur. Try to keep as much of the molasses possible inside either the jar, the bag, or the tablespoon, although this will be challenging. Pour in the liquid ingredients and add pork chops. Seal the Ziplock.

7. Make the discovery that the chops and marinade bag require two hands to hold flat and handle, as you want to rest the chops on a refrigerator shelf so that they are both covered and in a single layer. Open the refrigerator door. Curse under your breath as the door closes itself when you turn around to fetch the chops. Repeat. Resolve by balancing on one foot while you hold the door open with the other until you can get your elbow up as you transfer the chops. Now bugger off and go read blogs or something until closer to dinnertime, turning the chops once sometime in the midpoint and wandering in to start the oven preheating twenty minutes or so before nomoclock.

8. Extract the chops and a smallish baking dish and drain the marinade from the bag after you put the chops in the dish. Explain to Kitchen Bitch that we’re not using anything that can really be shared with even very patient dogs. Toss the chops in the oven, find a small saucepan, and start pulling stuff out of the fridge and pantry for the sauce.

9. Ketchup: check. Water: check. Sugar: check. Mustard: check. Russian dressing: check. Chili sauce… well, the only thing we have in the fridge labeled “chili sauce” is Sriracha, since Real New Mexicans make their own chile sauces-qua-sauces as the dish that requires them is made, rather than keeping it around bottled or canned. The recipe calls for 3/4 of a cup of the stuff, once halved. Raise an eyebrow at your Sriracha, which exists to add a dash at a time.

10. Dab a bit of Sriracha on your fingertip and lick it off. Notice the way your tongue tingles vigorously for minutes afterward? Compared to what Iowa housewives had in mind, this may be just a mite aggressive. Glop in an amount that looks like enough to add zing without being considered an assault weapon in Massachusetts.

11. Make up for the lowered volume with extra water and ketchup. Add the rest of the ingredients, kick the burner up to high, and stir continuously until it boils. Remove the pork chops from the oven, glop on the sauce, pop the whole thing back in the oven, and wander off for twenty minutes.

12. Return and turn the chops, then set the timer for another twenty. Sit down and start writing the whole thing up. Type in the part about covering the chops once the sauce goes on, which we did not do. Mother goatfucker.

13. Note glumly the rather reduced state of the sauce when you return to turn again, then makeshift cover with a stockpot lid. Leave it for the last twenty minutes of cook time.

14. Pull it out of the oven, add pork chops to plates, spoon on some sauce over each chop, and serve with the corn Spouse grilled in foil packets over the gas burners. Nom.

These tasted really interesting, though they came out a little bit dry; I don’t know if it was because I neglected to cover for the first two-thirds of the cook time or if an hour was simply too much for only two chops, but either way next time I’d use a meat thermometer and go by internal temperature rather than time. The flavor was good and I tuned the proportion of Sriracha well- it turned out to work quite nicely with the rest of the ingredients in the sauce. I’d like to try this again with bigger chops, cooked for less time. The overall sweet, savory, spicy flavor profile turned out really nice.

If the title wasn’t a subtle warning, this post is going to be very heavy on the profanity. Those with a sensitive constitution should not click further.

(more…)

So it seems Oliver Stone, having mutilated history on previous occasions with his own vision, which always has far more to do with his idea of what the narrative should be than what might have actually happened, is going to take on poor, misunderstood Hitler.

Now, there is a tremendous amount in this interview that pisses me off, pretty much all relating to Oliver Stone being a massive fuckhead. He clearly thinks Americans in general are morons and his viewers in particular, he thinks his hilariously tenuous grasp of history in general is massively more informed than most Americans (it’s always sad to see someone so clearly proud of such a deficient skill- like seeing a man chatting about how he’s going to make millions on his amateur watercolors of sunsets), and that the world in general was just waiting for someone like him to come along and tell them how things really were and how they should feel about it. In fact I could fisk just about every damn line for one reason or another.

But there’s one central theme to the whole thing that really pisses me off, that’s morally despicable rather than just offputting, so I’m going to make the post about *that*.

“Stalin has a complete other story,” Stone said. “Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can’t judge people as only ‘bad’ or ‘good.’ Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply.

Actually, Oliver, yes, we CAN judge people only as “bad” if they’re sufficiently bad. If you try to exterminate people deliberately, you aren’t just “bad”, you’re evil and nothing else you do, nor any line of reasoning or influence upon you, can make you not-evil. If you love your wife and kids and take wonderful care of them and then go out and arrange to systematically kill people based on their race, religion, sexuality, or ethnicity, you are fucking evil and your evilness level does not change even if you also arrange on that very same day to save millions more from starvation because they’re the race you like. Stalin fighting Nazis didn’t make him not evil after killing millions of his own citizens made him so; it just made them two evil people who happened to be at odds. People don’t live on a video-game style sliding scale of morality; if you do evil things then you are evil, and while redemption may be possible, sometimes it’s just not, and racking up points on the “other side” affects your status as a monster not a single fucking iota.

Stone either thinks- or thinks that the majority of Americans think, because he believes himself to be smarter than that- that evil is an exotic quantity, like radiation, and evil people are just fundamentally different than normal people in a way that’s impossible for us to understand. Whether or not Stone thinks he holds this view of things, what he says in this interview implies that on some level he must, because he makes the implicit assumption that if these people can be understood and their motivations and influences are similar enough to those of normal people, then they are normal people and therefore not-evil (because normal people are good).

This is not true. Normal people always have the potential for evil, and the choices they make determine whether or not they are evil. Because choices are tempting does not make them not-evil. Because they seem logical doesn’t make them not-evil. If evil were difficult to do or be and its nature were always clear past the temptations of our own gratifications and comfort zones, we wouldn’t have so goddamn much of it in the world.

Evil people that are evil in the same way they’re light or dark skinned, as opposed to evil owing to the choices they’ve made, are a narrative construct rather than a reflection of moral reality. It’s not terribly surprising that Stone tends to think this way; people whose business is the construction of narratives often do, and Stone is infamous for making “historical” movies that reflect his preferred narrative rather than any sort of genuine reflection of historical events.

One last quote that I think shores up my point:

Stone also warned that the same military industrial complex forces that he’s explored in movies such as “JFK” and in “Secret History,” are now corrupting Barack Obama.

“You can understand why Obama is following in Bush’s footsteps in Afghanistan,” Stone said.”Obama is very much trapped, we believe, in that system. And so that’s what we’re going to try and show you — the way it works.”

Stone “knows” Obama is a good person- and to a great many people, electing Barack Obama was about electing a good person because that would be the antidote to the damage electing a bad person did- so therefore the fact that his policies aren’t what Stone thinks they should be is due to bad people and things, and not Obama’s own choices. He’s a good person, so clearly he can’t be making bad choices without bad people somehow screwing everything up.

As for “trapped within the system”, that’s what’s known as life. You can’t eliminate war through accumulating a sufficient number of good people who recognize that war is bad because they’re good. Life will always present you a series of choices, and there’s never any guarantee that you’ll even HAVE a good option rather than a choice between differing degrees of bad ones. We judge people as good or evil depending on what they do with those choices; we usually paint them in some shade of grey if they make bad choices but had no good ones available.

However, there is always a choice not to set up a continental bureaucratic system for the mass extermination of people you consider inferior and a drain on society- and that’s why Adolph Hitler is still the gold standard of evil no matter how much he liked his dog or how many people voted for him.

Holly Pervocracy put up a post recently on the subject of societal beauty standards in general and the concept of certain sub-fetish groups associated with “non-standard” body types that garnered a range of reactions, many of which were pretty far from what she was hoping for, since some took the post for what it was not- a polemic on people needing to get over the beauty standard.

It’s not hard to see why people get defensive about this kind of thing; we tend to get marinated in two conflicting messages: first, that real beauty is all in who you are rather than what you look like and we should really be attracted to people based on how good they are- and second, that good people are beautiful, and making yourself as beautiful as possible by any means necessary is part of being “good”. Mix well with a big healthy dose of sex sells and a media industry driven to not just find the most naturally attractive people to work with, but airbrushing and photoshopping them into something idealized that may not be actually attainable by anybody. As a result, people are surrounded by images of idealized and sexualized people- which they have been trained they should feel bad about being more attracted to than, say, the nice but ugly (either comparatively or really) person at work.

The first refuge of defensive backlash is everyone’s favorite refuge when it comes to desires they’re ashamed of, which is claiming it’s only natural and evolution made them cheat on their spouse/ate six pounds of sugar in a day/be more attracted to Kate Beckinsale than Rosie O’Donnel. It’s natural selection that made us attracted to a certain waist/hip ratio, made us attracted to youth, and that’s why my inner ape wants to fuck Hannah Montana!

The problem with that, as it usually is with just-so rationales, is that the people making these claims usually haven’t bothered to sit down and think through what actually leads to a selective advantage- which, remember folks, is not survival, success, or even how much sex you have, but how many grandchildren you end up with. People who claim that youth is inherently the most attractive have a point up to a point in that menopausal women are unlikely to yield reproductive success, but with any social primate and far moreso for one that undergoes such dangerous and complicated births and lengthy and dangerous child-rearing, the youngest fertile females are nearly as bad a choice from a selection perspective. Primiparous (first-time) young ape and monkey mothers are the most likely to have a pregnancy and delivery that has problems, and the first child she has is by far the most likely of those she will ever have not to survive to the age of fertility itself; the more intelligent and complex the animal gets, the more reproduction becomes a test of skill rather than a test of sheer fertility- and needless to say, humans are right out on the edge of the right tail of the bell curve when it comes to having complicated pregnancies and needing a lot of skill to raise children to be successful enough to reproduce themselves. The youngest women have the least skill, and it takes a few years for their reproductive systems to settle both into regular reliability.

In terms of what kind of female hominid would be the one that actually would have the highest chance of raising a male’s fitness by giving him children likeliest to become reproductively successful themselves, it would be a woman who’d already had at least one child, had lots of high-status female relatives to help her out, and had enough body fat for a comfortable margin before it started to interfere with regular menstrual cycles and overall fertility. And yet, somehow, the height of Angelina Jolie’s status as a sex symbol was when she was pre-pregnancy and had the body fat levels of an underfed whippet- not now.

Likewise, the argument for the weird homogenized “porn-star” or magazine model sexual ideal is that men are wired to be looking for the “best” genes and those are represented by beauty (and women are likewise looking for the “best” and that’s represented by status); this one is a little less easy to blame bad science reporting or education on, because it’s also a weird hangup in sexual selection researcher. The concept of the “best” mate is fundamentally not quite compatible with evolutionary theory, because the entire reason sex exists, so far as can be determined, is that deliberate creation of variation is ultimately more fit than reproducing an ideal. The “best” set of genes for one situation is inherently not the best for another situation; the best body to handle a drought won’t be the best one to handle a blizzard, the best one to hunt with might not be the best one to mate with or the best one to tough out a lack of available prey, and any of those bests might not be the best one to ride out an epidemic. The way to maximize fitness- the amount of your genes that keep on rolling through the epochs- is to hedge your bets against the possibilities by maximizing the combinations your genes wind up in that might turn out to be the best for that generation’s challenges. If attraction were therefore purely a matter of natural selection, no one would have a “type” because their best fitness bet would be to mate with as big a variety of body types and temperaments as possible*.

Americans are obsessed with a strangely homogenized version of youth and beauty not because they evolved to be, but because that’s simply the way our society currently is, and it has a great deal more to do with nurture than nature. I sincerely doubt that we could wish or educate away all conceptions of “beautiful” as a culture or species- there surely do seem to be some basic inborn conceptions of attractiveness that exclude being two hundred pounds overweight and having terrible skin- but the airbrushed teenage minx with six percent body fat is just as surely no monster of our primal id.

The real irony is that I suspect that if this creature did not exist and porn and other sexualized images featuring her were not nearly so common, men in general would be having a lot more sex. Feeling undesirable is a tremendous libido-killer even for men and possibly moreso for women, and women and girls are constantly inundated with idealizations to compare themselves to and helpful articles and products to help them fix their thighs and their boobs and their labia and their eyelashes and whatever else it is about her that deviates from the “standard”. Whether or not any given male is ACTUALLY not attracted or all that less attracted to her doesn’t matter that much when the message is constant enough to internalize, and it takes great self-confidence and self-awareness to shrug it off or purge it entirely.

Men, you know that feeling you had when it seemed like a girl would never be interested in you more than just as a friend, or at all? Or when it seemed or seems like your wife just isn’t interested in touching you except out of a sense of obligation? That’s the way a lot of women feel all the time no matter how many erections actually surround them. (Because, of course, another message we get is that all a man needs is the prospect of a warm hole to be aroused.) Nasty bit of cultural fallout, that, and I wish I knew of a way to fix it outside of fantasyland.

*I realize this statement theoretically conflicts with every argument I’ve ever made about why evolution leaves us wanting to mate with a skillion partners is also flawed thinking about natural selection, but for the moment we’re pretending this variable does not exist.

So yeah, I’m… really epically short of things to say. I have a longer post in my mental queue that’s still going through the tumbler, so to speak, but it ain’t happening tonight. I’ve been thrashing every blog and news service I have and didn’t come up with a damn thing I had anything to say about other than “heh”, “damn!”, “oh snap” or something similarly Twitteresque about. So instead I go into gaming nerd mode and see if the readerbase can serve me instead of the other way round. I am well aware the following paragraph will be incomprehensible to 95% of the audience and I apologize for that.

Warcraft-wise, our guild went through a big breakup last fall, with most of our core raiding team either leaving for other guilds or other servers altogether after it became apparent that some people wanted to be hardcore and some still viewed raiding as an occasion to get together with buddies and beer and down some bosses. (We’re in the bosses-and-beer contingent, as is everyone else who remained.) For awhile we couldn’t raid, then we put more effort into recruiting and at least got enough people to start doing 10-mans again, and I somehow managed to end up as main tank.

It has become apparent to me that I am in need of a gaming mouse. While people with better motor skills than I have seem to be just fine with simultaneously moving using the wasdqe system and using ability keybinds with that same hand, I have tiny hands and I can’t seem to handle moving using a combination of the mouse and keyboard; I do certain things with my left hand, and certain others with my right hand, and trying to make the twain meet is causing me to only survive certain fights due to the raid outgearing the encounter. I want a mouse with enough buttons to keybind strafing and moving backward so the right hand is always the movement hand. My current mouse has two “extra” buttons, but they are currently assigned to autorun, which falls under the “movement” subset, and push-to-talk for Ventrilo, which needs to be on a mouse button because otherwise I can’t talk and tank at the same time*. I am aware there is an official Warcraft gaming mouse, but I’m dubious about it; the thing looks way too huge for my little elf-hands and while I want more buttons, I’m not sure I want another keyboard’s worth of them.

I was looking at the Razer Naga as an option. Thoughts? Suggestions? Flames are pointless; I do indeed have the self-awareness to know just how deep into the nerd category buying a gaming mouse takes me, but if I had shame about it I wouldn’t be announcing it to the world in the first place.

*And it NEEDS to be push-to-talk. Otherwise the whole group gets my constant muttered litany of “where the hell is it is there anything going for the healer oh my god wait for two seconds and let me get aggro fucking threatwhore mages NO DON’T STUN IT fucking kitefight oh god bubble her” etc.

We’re far from the first to pick up on this- as the fact that the best image I could come up with to illustrate is a demotivator poster- but I felt it worth relay. Click for big and then click again for magnify.

Google claims this is a bug they’re working to fix and nothing more.

What we CAN add is that as of 5:57 pm MST on January the 6th of 2010, the bug is still not fixed…

ETA: As Existingthing points out in the comments and at his own place, the phrase “Muslims are” suffers the same curiously specific “bug”. I think we can call this one a feature with no quote marks.

To clarify, I have no great raging beef with Islam or muslims, though I certainly do have one with regards to the states and individuals who’ve elected to take it as an excuse to murder, rape, and oppress. If anything, I believe the mark of equality, and indeed cultural acceptability, is to be an acceptable target; there’s a *reason* white married males take the brunt of the ribbing on TV, and it’s not because our culture truly despises white married males. That part of the reason companies like Comedy Central and possibly Google chicken out of allowing this to happen is because certain of those evil states and individuals are known to make death threats and riot in response to insult rather than to whine the way some Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists will is all the more wrong- and to give into it creates exactly the same positive training witnessed in toddlers who get toys and candy in response to tantrums.

I’ve ranted before on the topic energy issues and that place where the sun don’t shine that the environmental, economic, and political issues meet. If you’ll recall, it was partly on the subject of “alternative fuels” and why most of the proposed alternatives are entirely unworkable, with the rest being suited to a supplementary role at best. Alternative energy sources usually have one of two problems: they are either hopelessly local in nature due to suffering specific problems of storage, transportation, and distribution, or else they do not actually yield more energy than humans have to sink into it* in the process of production, refinement, and distribution.

Amid article number who-can-even-count-anymore on a new source for biofuels that would potentially reduce one feature or another that makes them unsustainable (but leaves all the others firmly in place, rendering the exercise moot), we have one on something that actually looks like it *might* not be pointless straight out the gate: engineered cyanobacteria. Making me adore the journal eternally for it, you can get your “not filtered through journalism-telephone” full published article here: Direct photosynthetic recycling of carbon dioxide to isobutyraldehyde.

The upshot of the article is that the critters in question have been re-tuned to consume CO2 as their primary food (remember, food is what you get your carbon for making more of you from, your fuel is what you to power your chemistry), using photosynthesis as fuel, and producing a chemical product that can be readily and cheaply converted to a close analogue of gasoline and a number of other useful petroleum products as well. This isn’t as weird a trick as it sounds; the species used enjoy renown among the people who study this kind of stuff as being incredible little metabolic Swiss Army Knives with multiple metabolic paths and the ability to switch to the most useful one on short notice, all with extreme energy efficiency and multiple resource-creation abilities. (Plants just don’t evolve fast enough to get this good at energy conversion and resource management.)

It bypasses several traditional problems of biofuels as a general class at once- no need to clear land and sink huge energy resources useful for other things just to grow the organism the way you do for switchgrass or ethanol corn, no massive expensive refinement stage, the end product can be used for other roles oil currently provides the only real base for, and thanks to the efficiency of the organism, energy productivity as compared to that sunk is high. I’m sure it will prove to have several other problems, and it might yet be a disaster in other ways- for example I wonder if it could survive in the wild, and if it would run in this metabolic mode if it escaped- but it doesn’t have truly crippling inherent flaws straight out the gate, which is the usual mode in these kinds of avenues. The fact that it consumes CO2 will give it good political support, too.

A nice start. Be interesting to see where, and if, this goes.

*Stingray points out to me the way I originally had this worded suggests I don’t believe in the laws of thermodynamics. To clarify: everything costs more energy to make than it yields in consumption. It’s a question of what in terms of energy resources WE have to use is economical, not the actual physics equation balance. Oil, for example, is energy created via a process we were not involved in and the energy cost is its extraction, not creation.

I see that today you have decided to pontificate on the “educated class” and how the tea-party movement represents an anti-intellectual backlash against them rather than a more traditional political struggle between certain elements of the left and right. (Which, as anybody wishing to comment remotely intelligently- I’m sorry, in an educated way- knows, are made up of very different internal subgroups, some with directly conflicting goals and values.) You can read the whole piece to get the entirety of Mr. Brooks’s views on the subject, but I take particular issue with this series of statements:

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

Being resident in Los Alamos rather than New York City, we have a perhaps-unique glimpse into the mind of the “educated class”, as Los Alamos can, more than any other city in the world, claim to represent it; it enjoys the status of being the largest concentration of PhD degrees in the world. The local economy is so skewed by the education bias that businesses have serious trouble recruiting and keeping low-skilled and skilled labor, so that, to use the most obvious example, only a few restaurants in town monopolize all waitstaff while successful chains like Pizza Hut are forced to close their doors due to a lack of viable employees. (Everyone else either gets a degree and a job at the labs, or moves out of town.) If there is an “educated class”, as defined by actual level of education, this is its national capital.

Politically speaking, we are thoroughly divided. It appears the educated class just can’t make up its fucking mind on foreign policy, because we have political letters-column and battling editorial wars in the town newspaper as a matter of course. Abortion rights? You’ll find bumper stickers and signs advocating one position or the other, but there doesn’t seem to be any significant bias either way. Global warming I’ll grant more or less- but there is heavy disagreement about what should be done about it. (Actually, the town is mostly united in puzzled contempt for the rest of America for rejecting our clean, efficient nuclear technology.) Gun control? Los Alamos has no city or county laws regarding guns at all, and if the majority of our citizenry aren’t happy with New Mexico’s quite libertarian state laws on the subject, they’re not voicing that opinion nearly as often as they are on other subjects*. When a state or federal election comes around, you can count on Los Alamos county to break extremely narrowly for one side or the other and for our spot on the state map to be thoroughly purple.

As it turns out if you map the data, this result is expected; despite conservative claims that they are supported by the middle class while liberals represent the lowest class and the elites, and liberal claims that they are supported by the educated and conservatives by the uneducated, once you account for the greater sample size of liberals in general the breakdowns between education levels shake out pretty evenly between conservatives, liberals, and independents. As it turns out, having opinions about politics doesn’t depend that much on how educated you are- though it probably does have some effect on what KIND of conservative or liberal you are, as the Pew survey linked later on in the comments demonstrates. (If you’re a very well-educated conservative, odds are that you’re going to be a socially liberal free-marketeer.)

Of course, Los Alamos’s ridiculous population sample of the very well-educated are overwhelmingly educated highly in a certain way- in the hard sciences, technology, and engineering. Their political views and personal values aren’t tied up in their education for the most part- whereas the people David Brooks earlier categorized as the people who “talk like us” usually are. A lot of Los Alamosites don’t; they come with heavy German or Russian or Chinese or Indian or southern-US accents, as often as not. They can only speak in political code if they’ve cultivated a political-junkie side, which tends to be modeled more on their affiliation of choice rather than on their education.

Brooks doesn’t mean educated, although I’m sure he thinks he does, as many people for whom a liberal-arts education (emphasis, these days, on the liberal) is the only world they know and the science students are just those strange trolls that never show up at parties or dorm room bull sessions. He means cultural elite, or those who believe themselves to be. And as for tea-partiers being primarily opposed to that rather than to policy… he’s still wrong, but he would at least be several jumps closer to being right.

*Given that, in a city of 50,000 max if you count White Rock, the only bigger and nicer outdoor range in the northern half of the state is owned by the NRA and ours is staffed and maintained wholly by volunteer, the only generalization I could possibly make based on Los Alamos is that the educated class loves guns.

…I remember bits and pieces of it. All I know is that we actually went for something like five hours, and I was questioned as to why I still only had water in hand when we started. As such, it is the first edited Vicious Circle in quite awhile, as well as the first one I’m kind of afraid to listen to, as I am told I sang at one point.

Vicious Circle 33