In a very real sense, the ONION is “America’s Finest News Source.” There is more truth to be found in it than in most newspapers. I felt that especially strongly yesterday when I read, Woman a Leading Authority On What Shouldn’t Be in Poor People’s Grocery Carts. The article is about Carol Gaither, a woman who is very critical of how the poor are living their lives. If they would just live as she does, their lives would be as great as her’s. (Yes, I know she isn’t an actual person!)

Broadly speaking, Gaither is all of us. We tend to think we have the answers to the correct way for everyone to live. Of course, that would mean the whole world would be like us and that would be (1) very boring and (2) a total catastrophe, regardless of how wonderful anyone may be. Personally, I try to understand that the focus of my life is not the focus of others’ lives. This is perhaps a bit easier for me than most people because I’m pretty idiocycratic so society has a habit of rapping me on the head about how out of it I actually am.

It reminds me of a segment on The Colbert Report last week, “Watters’ World.” It made fun of the videos that Jesse Watters does for The Factor, where he goes around and interviews people and finds that they are ignorant of this or that political matter. It’s very much like Jay Leno’s thing, but it isn’t done for humor; it’s done for outrage. It is also highly deceptive. Obviously, the vast majority of the people, who are reasonably knowledgeable, don’t get put on the segment.

But I think it’s wrong to feel above the people who are ignorant about politics. I’m ignorant of things that they think everyone should know. The girls in the segment were Miley Cyrus fans. I know the name, but I wouldn’t recognize a picture of her. (When I went to check the spelling of her name, I saw a picture and I was surprised she was a blond.) Now, I think the things I know about are more important—who doesn’t? But that doesn’t mean that in an absolute sense it is more important to know who John Kerry is than who Katy Perry is. As it is, I suspect my impact on what Kerry does is less than the girls’ impact on what Perry does.

It seems that there are two ways that people develop as they get older. They become more certain about their world views or less certain. Carol Gaither in the Onion article is one who has become more certain. But I think such constant prattling about how people ought to live does not come from a conviction that one knows how the world ought to be run. I suspect it is all about trying to grab onto a little power in a society in which very few people have power even over basic aspects of their lives.

None of this is going to stop me from ranting about all the wrongs I see in the world. Along with my constantly lowered belief that I know what’s really going on in the world comes a greater acceptance of who I am. Regardless, this is about communication. My opinions can and do change over time. If only everyone were more like me, the world would be fine!

Three words: it won’t matter.

Chris Hayes did a great sequence on All In about Smart Guns. These are the guns that only allow authorized people to use them. This is done with a little wristwatch that is worn on the same arm as you shoot with. This is necessary because the “watch” much be within ten inches of the gun. This is a big deal because hundreds of kids are accidentally shot and killed each year. It would also make stolen guns much less useful. So it’s a win-win.

But of course, there are those who don’t like it. Some claim that the system is not perfect and it might not shoot when you need it. This is a totally ridiculous complaint. The same can be said for any gun. Things go wrong with guns. They jam, for example. So this complaint is just from people who are against any advancement.

But as Hayes points out, there is actually a substantive reason that the gun rights crowd is against these guns. New Jersey has a law that says that if Smart Guns go on sale anywhere in the United States, the gun dealers in New Jersey must convert their inventories to Smart Guns within three years. Outside of gun rights, that strikes me as an onerous regulation. In three years, it is unlikely that many manufactures will be making Smart Guns—so it would greatly limit consumer choice. Also: the Smart Guns are very expensive and I doubt that will be much changed in three years.

Hayes says that he would be in favor of repealing the law to get Smart Guns on the market. And he had a New Jersey legislator on his show who said the same thing. But there’s a problem and that’s where we get to my three words: it won’t matter.

Even after the law is repealed, the gun rights crowd will do at least two things. First, they will grab onto the “we can’t be sure these guns will always work” argument. Second, they will claim that even though New Jersey repealed its law, it could always pass another. And any number of other states could do the same. So the Smart Guns will be seen as a Trojan horse. And they doubtless will come up with other reasons why the Smart Guns are the Son of Satan.

The truth is that gun owners are not especially crazy. But they see themselves as an oppressed minority. So it takes very little for them to get worked up. One or two opinion leaders decide that Smart Guns are the biggest threat to gun rights since serial numbers and suddenly they all believe it. (Can you imagine the reaction if the government proposed serial numbers as a new thing today?) But this is how bad it’s gotten. Now we don’t even argue over gun laws. Now new gun technologies have to be pre-approved by the gun rights brigade. It’s shameful. They’ve pathetic. And I weep for the steep downward trend of this country.

Afterword

I know I said I stopped watching MSNBC. And mostly I have. But I do check back in occasionally, especially if I hear they are going to do something interesting. And I was really interested in this.

Chris Hedges wrote an update about his case Hedges v Obama, which challenged the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). The law allows the government to detain anyone (including US citizens) for indefinite periods of time as long as the government believes that they are terrorists. Of course, “terrorist” is meant in the Patriot Act sense where the government knows a terrorist when it sees one because a terrorist is someone the government wants to detain indefinitely.

If this sounds like circular reasoning, it shouldn’t be surprising. After a lower court found this part of the law unconstitutional, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturned it. Of course, they didn’t do it on its merits. That would be too much like an actual legal system. It said that Hedges had no standing because he did not know that the government was targeting him. Of course, he can’t know because that information is classified. And so we get into the usual catch-22 where the government can’t be forced to reveal its unconstitutional surveillance because the people can’t prove the the government is in engaged in unconstitutional surveillance.

Last September, Hedges asked the Supreme Court to force the lower court to reevaluate the case, given that the Snowden revelations showed that Hedges did in fact have standing. And a week ago the Supreme Court came back and said no. And interestingly, all it said was no. According to SCOTUSblog, “The Court made no comment as it denied review of Hedges v Obama.” I find it interesting that people like Scalia and Alito who were so concerned about government overreach in the matter of Obamacare leading to forced broccoli consumption don’t seem to be the least bit concerned about the government effectively making US citizens disappear.

For his part, Hedges sounds more desperate than I’ve ever heard him—and that’s saying a lot. He seems to think that nothing short of a popular uprising will save the country and the constitution that supposedly supports it. He explains what the ruling (such as it is) means:

He’s threading a needle here. His point is that the problem is not the government. That’s an important distinction because people like Hedges are not like the supposed “constitutional conservatives” who seem only to want to overthrow the government so they can stop paying taxes and set up a theocracy. The problem is that we really don’t live in a democracy anymore. The government does the bidding of the oligarchs and not much more.

But when I look out on this country of ours, I don’t see people ready to demand their power back. In fact, I don’t even see many people who will bother to vote to keep things from getting much worse.[1] And at this point, voting is of limited power even if we could get politicians who would support the people. The judicial system has been thoroughly corrupted. Just today, Cecily McMillan was found guilty of assaulting a police officer while she was being arrested during an Occupy protest. She faces up to seven years in jail for allegedly elbowing the officer. (I find it amusing how cops claim to be so tough and whine about how hard their jobs are, but when a young woman elbows one, they run to the authorities.) And the judge wouldn’t even let her free for the two weeks until her sentencing.

The power elites own everything and everyone who matters. The rest of us are too busy scraping by to do anything about it. I don’t see much hope.

[1] Let me be clear. The candidates we get are bad. But if all the people showed up at the polls, all the time, we would get much better candidates. But instead, we get a government that is far more conservative on economic issues than the people. And one of the long-term results of this is that we have a ridiculously conservative judicial system where what was once considered conservative is now labeled “liberal.”

As a general rule, I don’t watch the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The truth is that I think it’s dangerous. What the event says is that the media and the political world are just one happy family that puts on a hell of a show for the American people. Well I think that’s bunk. The politicians are supposed to be doing the work of the people. And the media are supposed to be reporting on and probing that work. You want to know why Benghazi is so big in the right wing world? Because it’s entertainment. It is no different than Finding Bigfoot or similar shows based upon nothing but the delusions of kooks.

But I heard all weekend just what a terrible job Joel McHale did at the dinner so I had to check it out. I’ll admit, I went into it as an iconoclast: I wanted to disagree. I wanted to say everyone just didn’t get him. And I think that is largely true. The material was quite strong. But there is no doubt that his performance was weak. He blew a number of otherwise good jokes. But above all, he spent 70% of his time looking down at his cards. I went back and watched Stephen Colbert’s 2006 performance, just to make sure this was not how it was done. And it was not. I’m not sure what was wrong with him.

The best joke of the night was not about politics at all. McHale noted that Robert De Niro was in the audience. He said that he couldn’t do a De Niro impression, but that he did De Niro’s agent. So he reached out and grabbed a pretend telephone and put it to his ear. Then he said very excitedly, “He’ll do it!” That goes along with what seems to have happened to his career. At one time he took great roles. Now he’s just making money.

But the show was filled with some sharp attacks. For example, he said, “Julia Pierson, the new director of the Secret Service, is here tonight. Under her leadership Secret Service agents can no longer consort with prostitutes thanks to their new ‘too drunk to make it to the brothel’ program.” And then there was this, “CNN is desperately searching for something they’ve been missing for months: their dignity.” This elicited boos, to which McHale responded, “Totally!” He continued, “At this point, CNN is like the Radio Shack in a small strip mall: you don’t know how it stayed in business this long, you don’t know anyone that shops there, and they just fired Piers Morgan.”

He made a number of what I thought were cruel jokes about Chris Christie, and that’s saying something because I despise the man. But he did pay it off with what was the high point of his performance, satirizing Christie’s 9 January press conference:

The best part of the evening was not McHale, however. Nor was it Obama, who I thought was rather stilted. It was this fun Veep sort of parody with Joe Biden and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I’ve actually never seen the show, but I loved to see Joe Biden playing a cleaned up version of his super-cool character in The Onion:

But for the record, this is the real Joe Biden:

So it’s all kind of silly and bad for the country. But it has its moments.

Afterword

Here is the whole thing, if you dare:

When the first planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, was discovered, I was amazed. I think most people think of astronomy as being about building bigger and bigger telescopes, just like blowing up a photograph. But just like in the movie, it doesn’t work that way. Just in the most basic sense, imagine looking into a very bright light and how difficult it would be to see a small dark object right next to it. That ought to give you some idea of the problems.

The first confirmed exoplanet discovered was orbiting around Gamma Cephei. It was detected the same way about half of all exoplanets have been detected: Doppler spectroscopy. This is an amazing bit of science. But there are actually too many things to explain it all like centers of mass (stars aren’t stationary in their solar systems) and Doppler shifting of light (the color of light from objects moving towards or away from us gets changed). But the main thing is that the star sends out visible light and the planet sends out infrared light. Based upon the shifts, we can find out a certain amount about the planetary mechanics of the system.

A more obvious technique for locating exoplanets is the transit method. This is very simple, but it doesn’t always apply. If the planet crosses between the star and us, it blocks out some of the light. By seeing the difference, we can determine what the radius of the star must be. For example, the exoplanet that circles the romantically named HD 209458 star was first discovered with Doppler spectroscopy. But then other scientists went back and measured the brightness of the star and found that it decreased by a tad less than 2% every 3.5 days. Thus they could determine its radius to be about 30% greater than Jupiter.

This is all amazing stuff, but I read something today that shocked me, Length of Exoplanet Day Measured for First Time. I couldn’t imagine how they managed that feat. The reason it is possible to measure this value is because the planet, Beta Pictoris b, is one of the few exoplanets that we have managed to take direct pictures of. It’s a huge planet, of course: 65% larger radius than Jupiter’s and a mass between 5 and 10 times. Plus, it orbits about twice the distance from Beta Pictoris than Jupiter does from the sun. All of these things make it easier to see.

And now we know it rotates about twice as fast as Jupiter: about 100,000 km/hr at its equator. It likely spins so fast because it is a very young planet: just 20 million years old. The rotations of planets slow over time because of the gravitational pull on them by the sun, which eventually locks them so that the same side always faces the sun. This has happened to Mercury. And the same mechanism explains why the same side of the moon always faces the earth.

I’m not clear on exactly how they determined the rotation speed. I know the basics: they looked at the star light reflected of the planet. Since the planet has a lot of carbon monoxide in its atmosphere, they looked at the band of light that wasn’t there: the CO absorption line. But that band was broadened, again because of Doppler shifting. Based upon that, they could determine how fast the CO molecules were moving when they were reflecting the light.

This stuff amazes me. We little humans on our little planet are able to determine what is happening 63 light-years away. Of course, it’s still true that when it comes to terrestrial matters, we aren’t any more evolved than chimpanzees. But when we gaze at the stars or doodle our ideas, we are at our best.

Last year I highlighted Bartolomeo Cristofori for the birthday post. He was the inventor of the piano, and so I discussed how it was different from the harpsicode and the clavichord. It’s quite interesting. If you haven’t read it, I recommend checking it out.

On this day in 1825, the great biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was born. He was a comparative anatomist—someone who looks at similarities and differences in species. What has long fascinated me is how people like Huxley were able to classify different species so accurately. When we started doing genetic work, it didn’t much upset what we already knew about species’ relationships.

Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of his public support for evolution. He was a prominent part of the 1860 Oxford evolution debate. So prominent, in fact, that it is often referred to as the Huxley–Wilberforce debate. Wilberforce was Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, arguing for the Bible. In the most famous exchange, Wilberforce asked Huxley if he descended from monkeys on his mother’s side or his father’s. According to Isabella Sidgwick some time afterward, “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous.” Booyah!

What is perhaps most interesting about Huxley is that he was skeptical of natural selection as the mechanism for evolution. Note that natural selection is what is important about Darwin’s work; the idea of species’ evolution was not new to him. But Huxley’s skepticism was scientifically based. He was an empiricist and rather typical in not accepting anything until it was fully proven. And just like now, the religious zealots who would not accept evolution under any circumstances grabbed onto his doubts.

It is clear that Huxley and the others won this debate. And indeed, in the United Kingdom they did where roughly 80% of the people accept evolution through natural selection. But in the United States that number is only 40%. That is so embarrassing. Check out this graph:

And now we have people like Ken Ham who dress up their religious dogma in the clothes of science. But they don’t do science. Their entire effort is meant to stop debate—to stop science. And I’m not at all convinced that they won’t be successful. Certainly we need Huxley today more than ever.

Happy birthday Thomas Henry Huxley!

I am not one to claim that catastrophe is “opportunity!” Bad things happen and they suck. But that shouldn’t stop us from relishing inspiring stories that come out of catastrophe. And so it won’t stop me from related two stories of wonderful pet rescues. Being kind to pets is probably the only thing we all agree on. For example, even Nazis were nice to pets. They put “undesirables” to death but they saved their pets. At least, I assume they did. It doesn’t matter how evil you are, you still take care of pets. Or so I want to believe. Jesus! This is getting depressing. Let’s get onto the stories!

Chuck and Elicia James are a nice young couple who live in New Jersey with their three children. After Hurricane Sandy, their dog Reckless escaped from their backyard. They looked and looked, but they could not find him. Of course, they were somewhat limited. Because of the damage to their home, they’ve been living in a hotel since then—for 18 months! Well, their eldest daughter’s tenth birthday is coming up so they went to the local SPCA looking for a new dog. And the first dog they were shown was… Reckless! You can read all about it at New York, Dog Lost in Hurricane Sandy Miraculously Reunited With Owners 18 Months Later.

Chuck James said, “The dog was licking us to death, he was jumping three feet in the air. He was home. He knew the ordeal was over.” Of course, they are still a family of five living in a hotel room. But clearly New Jersey is stronger than the storm. But that means a whole lot more for Reckless and the whole James family than it does for Chris Christie and his family.

In a story totally unrelated to Hurricane Sandy but related in regards to the fact that it is about a catastrophe and a pet, we move across the border to Crown Heights, Brooklyn where, Two Garages Collapse after Retention Wall Fails. It was a big crash, but no humans were around to be harmed or even trapped. But such was not the luck for the Felis silvestris catus community. An unidentified cat was caught beneath the debris. Fortunately, the Fire Department, City of New York was on the job. They spotted the cat and released it. One of the firemen tried to carry the cat to safety, but clearly, the cat was better able to navigate the rubble than mere humans. Watch the video:

So a little good news to get you through the weekend!

H/T (dog): JoyfulA
H/T (cat): Digby