So a cross walks into a federal preserve ...

While living in Pocatello, Idaho, I drove by the county's courthouse on an almost-daily basis. Erected out on the otherwise nondescript lawn was a rather crude monument depicting the Ten Commandments, which is to many courthouses in America what a red light is to a den of iniquity. As a unabashed and often vocal atheist, the memorial was a daily annoyance, though not for the reason many would think. I don't have a problem with signs of faith anymore than I do proclamations of the absence thereof. I am not personally offended or bothered by the concept of spirituality, I just think spirituality itself is silly and dangerous to our world writ large.

The underlying cause of my being annoyed, and the reason I wanted that monument removed, was because I shuddered to think of how totally stupid the lawn in front of the courthouse would look if it featured monuments of faith for the wide variety of religions practiced in the city. I'd just rather we just tell everyone — Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus — that such displays are best left to the front window of one's house. Or, say, churches.

The response to this argument — and it's almost always the Christians who posit such — is that Christian symbols aren't inherently exclusive. Like the champions of the repulsive Confederate Flag that flew over the South Carolina state house, they'll say it's history that's being protected here, not the particular set of beliefs represented by the symbols. That's the tack pursued by Justice Antonin Scalia in defense of the "White Cross World War I Memorial," a five-foot tall white cross erected in 1934 which sits in the federally owned Mojave National Preserve.

"It's erected as a war memorial! I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of … of … of the resting place of the dead."

The article I've linked to covers its bases in terms of the back-and-forth, and I'm certainly not interested in exploring the various legalistic questions at play in this case. What interests me are two things: 1) The fact that Scalia, a brazenly intelligent man who rarely walks into an intellectual gunfight with a knife, actually believes that non-Christians would ever be buried under a cross (this isn't even the case with large plots of anonymous military burial grounds, where any recognized Jew would have a Star of David substituted for a cross); and, 2) That Scalia actually believes that the universal sign of Christianity ever ceases to be so, even if it's being employed in a non-religious context (in this case, a war memorial).

Of course he doesn't actually believe the second premise implicit in his objection; no human being on earth would ever recognize a white cross as anything but a symbol of Christianity, just like no American would recognize the Confederate Flag as anything but a symbol of slave-owning secessionists who once took arms against fellow citizens and America itself. What he's really arguing here is intent, as clearly those vets who put the cross up in the first place did so with no intention of creating an Establishment Clause skirmish, mainly because America was a much more hegemonic place then than it is today.

It's a sticky situation, as almost every fight surrounding the Establishment Clause is. Tearing down the memorial seems a rather crude exercise, since it was and is a war memorial, and memorials are what little solace we have to offer to our military dead and their families. But the alternative is to open up the memorial space to more demonstrations of faith, as was proposed by a Buddhist on this very site. No one will argue that allowing a Buddhist exhibition would be more consistent with the principles of our pluralistic, multi-faith society, but it would also be a logistical and aesthetic nightmare. One can see a situation in which, come the passing of a decade, the site would look more like a "Faiths of the World" exhibition at your local high school than anything resembling a war memorial.

So we have to ask ourselves, what's worse? Nothing, or everything? Because our constitution does not properly allow for the possibility that a majority's religious beliefs somehow affords those followers more rights for public display than the followers of less popular faiths. To argue otherwise would simply be arguing in favor of de facto establishment, which is a short and token step away from just going ahead and ratifying Christianity as our nation's official religion.

Many Christians, particularly those of a rightward bent, find arguments like mine to be repugnant. They express mock or real outrage at the idea of someone being "offended" by Christian displays on public land (and I'll concede that the verb "offense" and its various conjugations have been abused to a tragic degree). They see any challenge to public displays of Christian symbols as being an "attack" on Christianity, just like they see the use of the term "Happy Holidays" as part of a "war" on Christmas. Yet, they don't see their support of passive exclusion as being an attack on Judaism, just the nature of the world when your tribe is the smaller one, and doesn't boast the commonly recognized name of its deity in a passage of the Declaration of Independence (contrary to a rather disturbing commonly held belief, "God" is not mentioned once in The Constitution, a document that actually holds up the concept of "liberty" as that which bestows any and all blessings).

But professed outrage is a poor substitute for logic, and there is ultimately no logical defense available to those who believe Christian symbols can expect special protection in the public sphere. And, since I know men like Scalia would be even more scandalized by opening up the floodgates and turning the front lawns of every small-town courthouse into a smorgasbord of religious symbology, I think we can all agree that it's just better to have nothing at all.

Mr. Scalia, tear down that cross.

Joyce Carol Oates is a monster

From her recent contribution to the torrent of Ted Kennedy remembrances:

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

Is this what it's become? The guilt for Oates and her like over loving Teddy has seemed to overwhelm a rather intelligent woman's last grasp on logic. We're now justifying the kind of callousness and negligence that led to a young woman's unnecessary death — and it's worth noting that she was a wonderful, liberal woman who had dedicated much of her short life to the cause of civil rights — by measuring what that person does with the rest of his undeservedly free life?

And then, this horrifying sentence from someone with much less of a Q rating (and hopefully influence), worse than anything I've heard usual whipping boys O'Reilly, Beck or Limbaugh say recently (though I'm sure they're scrambling now that the stakes have been raised):

Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.

I don't suppose it's worth mentioning that Kennedy's worth as a politician is in the eyes of the beholder; one shouldn't need to point out to Oates and the HuffPoTroll (HPT from here on out) that there's a significant portion of the American population that wished he was locked up precisely to prevent his "second act." No, even if it were accepted by every person in America that Kennedy's contributions as a politician were positive, it would not aid their arguments in the slightest.

There is something so completely revolting about how easily Oates, HPT and many Kennedy defenders, have sloughed off the death of Mary Jo Kopechne as nothing more than a "nadir" of an otherwise great man's life. Perhaps Oates requires reminding that actual human lives aren't slaves to a narrative arc; Kennedy was no vessel for a fiction writer. He was a real man, who could have had the political career he did without Kopechne's death. And Kopechne was a real woman — do we really need to trot out the "somebody's daughter" bullshit to make this point? — who herself aimed to make a real difference in this country. Who knows? Maybe she could have been an even more influential figure in the civil rights movement than Teddy himself?

Maybe I'm expecting too much from the writers who clearly were trying to set themselves apart from the chatter. Maybe I'm overreacting. Maybe I'm allowing my harsh summary judgement of Kennedy's political career — he is one of the leading proponents of the government as omnipresent force in my daily life — to cloud my dim view of Oates and HPT's rather cruel-sounding calculus.

But to accept what they've said is to accept that the ends always justify the means. And many of our worst sins as a country and a human race have been perpetrated using that very justification, including many of the sins we continue to commit today. And it also makes me wonder if Oates, and HPT, believe we should start searching our penitentiaries for more men like Kennedy, who simply needed their own "nadir" before doing great things. Because, surely, these lions of equality and liberalism don't believe such redemption is only available to the rich and privileged.

Boy, I don't know if I can really do this

So, I'm about 99 percent sure that, beginning this September, I will begin a Master's program at the University of Phoenix for secondary education. But, before I finalize anything, I'm doing some research on my possible future career, and stumble across this nugget of pure government beauty in the list of requirements for a full secondary education accreditation:

• A passing score on the performance portion of the Arizona Educator Proficiency Assessment. Currently, the assessment has not been developed.

You just can't make that shit up.

Adventures in online content

Far be it from me to accuse someone else of prejudice, but the absence of "Puerto Rican" on the following list of possible answers shrieks of blatant bias.

For shame, ESPN.

Why the draft is only slightly worse than the Bataan Death March

The draft isn't broken. Proof? Here's how the the key part of the top three teams' draft board looked when the festivities kicked off a couple of months ago:

WASHINGTON NATIONALS:
1) Stephen Strasburg

SEATTLE MARINERS:
1) Stephen Strasburg
2) Dustin Ackley

SAN DIEGO PADRES
1) Stephen Strasburg
2) Dustin Ackley
3) Donovan Tate



While you may quibble with whether Tate should have been the target at No. 3 for the Pads, you cannot argue that he was picked there because they thought he was the third-best player on the board, as evidenced by the fact that they set a bonus record for a prep draftee.

That trend continued down the board. While the Pirates took some heat for taking a "signability" guy in Tony Sanchez at No. 4, they did so in part because they were planning to make a splash later on in the draft and international market, both of which they did. Otherwise, what we saw this year was the best talent flowing to teams in inverse order to their finish in the '08 season.

But that's not what the draft is about, despite what some credulous and cretinous writers and fans will bleat. See, the worst teams not only want the best talent, they also want it for free. They're not happy paying Strasburg 1/5th of what he'd get on the open market (conservatively); they don't think he should cost anything at all. Because, clearly, the Nationals deserve a subsidy — paid for entirely in lost opportunity cost by the unlucky, talented amateur — for running a franchise into the ground, despite already receiving a healthy subsidy from the taxpayers of the greater DC area, not to mention the MLB's general fund.

The Nationals have spent or committed $138.85 million in the last five years in completely voluntary contracts (no service time or arbitration constraints), covering 26 total player seasons, for players on the 40-man roster. That works out to $5.34 million per player season. While not all of those seasons have been cashed in, most of them have been, and you can see the results. If the Nationals are cash-poor, it's only because they decided to re-up Dmitri Young for another 2 years at $5 million per when he would have been lucky to get a minor-league deal elsewhere (and Jim Bowden agreed to keep him on the 25-man roster, regardless of performance, to boot!). Outside of that, virtually every player on the 40-man is making the major-league minimum, give or take a few thousand.

The Nationals had the first pick in the draft because they've been a horrendously run organization, mostly in the sense that they spend what money they have terribly. And who, besides the poor bastards still paying for tickets, gets to foot the bill for the team's ineptitude? Stephen Strasburg, who by deign of the draft and the fact he wasn't born in a foreign country, will receive millions less than he would have in an open market for the first four years of his career (plus two more arb years, which will assuredly pay him closer to what he could earn in a free agent deal, but still not as much).

Yes, the young man will still make $15 million over the first four years of his career, which is not a slave wage, nor should it be compared to one. But no one questions what Strasburg would fetch on the open market — a much less proven/polished pitcher in Aroldis Chapman, a better comp for Stras than Daisuke Matsuzaka, is predicted by some to fetch upwards of $30 million — and that's lost money, period. An athlete's career is a fleeting asset in the best of situations, and the attrition rate is higher for pitchers yet. Everyone talks about what Stras will make down the road, and many of the idiots — Jayson Stark, Ryan Zimmerman, Thomas Boswell — are content to say he should wait for his payday happily. But that payday may never come. It's easy to say, when you've got tenure and are getting paid as much as the market will allow, that the kids should wait for the money.

I've read in some comment boards that the reason MLB must restrict draft bonuses is because the attrition rate for prospects is so great, the teams couldn't possibly afford to pay free-market values. But that argument sounds hollow when you consider that Strasburg, the most expensive drafted player in the history of the sport, will make just a little more than half of what the Nationals paid out to Dmitri Young and Austin Kearns for a combined six years. Both of those players turned in below-replacement performances during their time with the Nats; Strasburg is more valuable to the franchise never throwing a pitch, because at least he won't cost the major league team wins.

But I needn't cherry-pick horrible contracts to make an essential point: The draft is wrong, but not because the draftees are modern-day Tom Joads (as one commenter on ShysterBall mockingly said), or because competitive balance is bad. The draft is wrong because it's punishing the best amateur players by making them the only people who lose money for an organization's ineptitude. You can rationalize all you want, but we only have a draft because we're comfortable with the idea that young people deserve to make less only because they're young.

CERN for dummies

Obviously, I haven't been posting lately. That's mainly because what little time in my life I still dedicate to writing has been absorbed by a project that isn't for public consumption. At least not now. Probably never. Anyway ...

My good friend Colin Laisure-Pool, a professional engineer and rank amateur in every other walk of life, put together an explanation of the whole CERN/Collider thing, which I found extremely edifying. With his permission, I'm reprinting it here, since some of you might be interested as well.

• • •

The what of CERN is pretty much public knowledge at this point: huge European collider ring that smashes particles at ridiculous energies. The how is irrelevant, really, to anyone who isn’t very much involved in particle physics (I could explain maybe about 60% of it, and about half of that would be accurate). But the point is that, a few years back, only physics majors and hardcore trivia nerds knew what CERN even stood for; now everyone who has an MSN account has heard of it, which I consider to be a good thing.

What isn’t such a good thing is the fact that the why has hardly been presented to the public at all, and, really, this is the most important question. Especially as far as the public is concerned, I feel that the physics community has dropped the ball in conveying the rationale and gravitas of this and other experiments of its kind. On the other hand, I can certainly see why and explanation of the why hasn’t been widely disseminated; it is a very difficult thing to explain.

And it’s not even like it is some sort of I-am-so-much-smarter-than-you type of situation; it took me 4 years of schooling and a considerable amount of my current free time to even know the half of it. Many people don’t have a solid physics background, so it is hard to find common ground or make pertinent references. As with anything, it is much easier to explain something to your colleagues than it is to someone with no background in a given field. It’s like trying to explain moment frames, or heat transfer vectors to your doctor. Your doctor is not a stupid person, by any means, but has no idea what you are talking about unless you break it down to the most fundamental of concepts. This means that you basically have to build the analogy or concept from the ground up, and that could take forever.

So, that being said, I’m going to take a swing at this:

The Good: CERN consists of a giant, underground ring on that uses large magnets (and electric fields, too, like a stellerator) to accelerate various subatomic particles (protons being pretty common, but anything with charge will do) in opposite directions within the ring and guides them on a collision path that occurs near the particle detector (the huge device ubiquitously accompanying any article on the matter). By smashing these particles together, we can then see what they are made of. It’s like a caveman trying to see what is inside of a baseball; he would have to throw it at a rock as hard as he could to break it open, and once he knows what is inside, he gains clearer insight into what makes the baseball travel the way that it does. But, what if he only breaks the outermost layer? He would have to throw it harder and harder in order to get down to the most essential elements of what is in that ball.

Like a matryoshka doll, you just have to look deeper and deeper until you find the final, smallest, and most essential component of that object. A hydrogen atom consists of a proton, neutron, and electron. Protons, neutrons and electrons are all made up of different combinations of up and down quarks (there are 6 known varieties of quark). Well, what are quarks made up of? We just have to keep throwing harder and harder to see. DØ (the Tevatron) at FermiLab throws pretty hard, like Roger Clemens. RHIC at Brookhaven (the gold nuclei) is like Nolan Ryan. But CERN would be like the EXPRODING GYROBARR of colliders, which has got people so excited and interested in the first place.

The search to find the essential particle, the last and smallest matryoshka doll, is important for many reasons. If we can find evidence that the Higgs boson exists (one of the sought after particles here), we can begin to unravel some of the mysteries behind why we are observing such very strange (only strange because we don’t understand it) phenomena at the relativistic quantum level. Basically, at very small scales and very high energies, quantum theory is wigging out on us. [Aside: Quantum theory is a theory in the same way that gravity is a theory. Quantum mechanics is a time-tested, verifiable science; the device that I’m using now is a testament to this.] We suspect that this is because we aren’t accounting for all of the elements involved; the stuff within the stuff that we are looking at could be the culprit behind this ‘weird’ behavior. Lots of super-nerds have lots of super-theories, some more popular than others, but to really advance in this field we need to have a look see. A hadron, by the way, is just jargon for any particle that is subject to the strong nuclear force, which is one of the four (or three, depending on who you ask) fundamental forces and the one that is the most important here.

The Bad: As you and everyone else are already aware, this kind of thing is e-x-p-e-n-s-i-v-e. Also, partially for reasons to be mentioned below, politics have become involved, which is never good for anything, ever. Particle colliders are huge, costly, and controversial. Google the SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) for an example of what I mean. Also, there is a possibility that this is not the final step! It is entirely possible that this will only get us through the next layer of the matryoshka, and even bigger colliders are needed, which could generate more questions that answers. When people commit this much money, time, and effort to something, they expect answers. They may not forthcoming, and it is likely that everyone not involved in the scientific community may not be prepared for this outcome. Is it possible that the universe could be infinitely parsed? I don’t think so, but it remains to be seen.

The Ugly: The most widely disseminated story surrounding this collider is that of these nut-jobs claiming that this collider will end the world in some sort of singularity collapse. Frankly, they are either ignorant, fame-seeking, or a combination of the two. While it is always prudent to be concerned about the dangers of such powerful devices, it is never appropriate to try to shut something like this down because of some cockamamie garbage about the end of the flipping world. The black holes that would be created by this experiment would be so miniscule and unstable as to be no more than an object for study. At these energies, the possibility of a black hole being created that is large and stable enough to consume the planet is about the same as an x-ray (or cosmic gamma ray, for that matter) causing a thermonuclear chain reaction after reaching your colon. Unfortunately, though, this is what is bound to happen when you have a largely misinformed public and a litigious culture that actually goes out of its way to find something to sue someone for. People hear “end of the world” and freak out. The world is not going to end because of this experiment; and even if it did, the planet would be crushed to the size of a ping-pong ball so quickly and violently that we wouldn’t even notice. Either way, there is no cause for alarm.


Long version: .........I’m getting cramps in my hands, so I’ll just suffice it to say that this issue is more nuanced and layered than can possibly be illuminated in one e-mail. The broadstroke is that this experiment will advance our understanding of the world and have long term impacts on future technologies unable to be predicted at this time. The laser was developed out of concepts that had been formulated hundreds of years prior to anyone ever envisioning such a device. And even when the laser was invented, nobody could have predicted the uses that we now have for it. Today’s seemingly trite nerdery is the groundwork for tomorrow’s next great technological achievement. The possibilities are endless; if we can only figure out how this damn universe works. We’ve come a long way from rubbing sticks together, but still have a long way to go.

Jean-Claude DeBeaune Brouilly

Country: France
Region: Brouilly (Domaine Des Nazins)
Variety: Gamay Beaujolais
Year: 2006
Price: $15
Where I purchased it: Total Wine & More

This is the first bottle I cracked from my virgin run to the Glendale Total Wine & More. Before I get into the wine, let me make a hearty recommendation for Total Wine; I have trouble believing I'll be buying wine anywhere else for a while. Not only does it have an incredible selection, its prices are probably the best you'll find, anywhere.

As for the wine, it is exactly what I hoped it would be: Delicious.

Beaujolais is the wine I most often recommend to casual wine drinkers because it's the most accessible and versatile red on the market. It goes with just about anything in terms of food, and is light enough that most anyone can drink it without food at all. Plus, it's an excellent value for those looking for an inexpensive quaffing vino that doesn't smell and taste like turpentine.

Despite the fact that Beaujolais will only appear on this label in smaller print, it's still a Beaujolais in spirit. But where your standard Beaujolais or Beaujolais-Village will usually be a sweeter red with little in the way of body or finish, Brouilly comes in with a little more personality. This particular variety is among the lightest Brouillys I've had, but the essence is the same: Crisp, rich flavor that feels fresh on the palate but disappears almost immediately after the swallow. It's a totally enjoyable weekday wine for a small, light meal (I had it with a capicolla sandwich), and works best chilled (it came out of my cooler at 60 degrees, which is right in the middle of its ideal delta).

All in all, an excellent value and a definite recommendation.