It ain't necessarily so

Miraculous logic

Everyone keeps waiting for the Supreme Court to unburden itself of its ruling on California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in 2008. Trembling with trepidation that their labors will have been for naught, the Catholic clergy and laymen who struggled so hard on Proposition 8's behalf have been sharing their fears via print and broadcast media.

On Sunday, June 16, the San Francisco Chronicle published Joe Garofoli's interview with Salvatore Cordileone, the current archbishop of the San Francisco diocese. According to the article, Cordileone struck an alliance with evangelical Protestants and the Mormon Church to promote Proposition 8, with the archbishop digging up $1.5 million to support the effort. That's a lot of collection baskets! (I'm guessing that most of that money came from sources other than the members of his local congregations. San Francisco is not a happy hunting ground for anti-gay contributions, even among its Catholics.)

The Catholic hierarchy appears to be stuck on the campaign theme that worked so well in the 2008 campaign, which I heard directly from my mother's mouth when she explained why she had to vote for Proposition 8: “It's to protect the children!” This was indeed Cordileone's theme as he pitched his position to the Chronicle reporter:

With piercing blue eyes and a propensity for speaking in complete sentences, Cordileone explains that his view of marriage is based on how he believes it affects children.

Legalizing gay marriage, he said, “would result in the law teaching that children do not need an institution that connects them” to their biological parents and their parents to each other.

“Too many children are being hurt by our culture's strange and increasing inability to appreciate how important it is to bring together mothers and fathers for children in one loving home,” he said.

Let that sink in for a minute. His Excellency the archbishop is arguing that permitting same-sex couples to wed would undermine the connection between children and their parents. Even more than that, it would “teach” children that they really don't need those connections.

Is Cordileone an idiot? Or just a liar? (Can't it be both?) The archbishop is laying down a thick layer of illogical crap, and he does it as smoothly as can be. Allowing same-sex couples to wed says nothing to anyone about the parental needs of children. It would do nothing to prevent opposite-sex couples to wed and instantiate the conventional ideal of the nuclear family. Gay marriage would merely (merely!) extend marriage rights to people who are currently denied them. Wouldn't Cordileone's supposedly pro-kid mission be better accomplished with a campaign to require mothers to marry the fathers of their children? That would connect them up, all right! He might even be able to get the Mormons on board with that, since it would necessitate a return to plural marriage. But it's for the children!

As I mentioned, this “think of the children!” blather appears to be the Church's official line on the horrors of same-sex marriage. On Monday, June 17, Immaculate Heart Radio broadcast an installment of “The Bishop's Radio Hour”, during which host Bob Dunning interviewed William B. May, the president of Catholics for the Common Good. Bill May was relentless in the repetition of his mantra, which decried the possible “elimination of the only institution that unites kids with moms and dads.” Yes, he really said this. Elimination!

On the marriage issue, we have to start asking people that question. Okay, you're for redefining marriage. That eliminates the only institution that unites kids with their moms and dads. How can you justify that? If you're proposing to do that you need to address that problem. How are we going to promote men and women marrying before having children if it becomes illegal to do so?

Illegal! This short excerpt cannot do justice to May's mindless repetition of his “elimination” claim. In a short ten-minute block of time, he repeated the absurdity five or six times (I can't be sure because the on-line archive clipped the final minute of the interview). Interviewer Bob Dunning, who is a legitimate newsman and reporter for all that he views the world through Vatican-tinted glasses, embarrassingly mumbled agreement with his guest throughout the entire segment. However, at one point Dunning offered an extremely pertinent observation that May had carefully avoided mentioning:

May: The voters of California have spoken clearly on this twice. There's no doubt where they stand.

Dunning: It tends to be an age demographic; that's what we're fighting.

Bob has it right. Time is not on your side, Bill. In 2000, California voters enacted marriage-defining Proposition 22 with the support of 61.4% of those casting ballots. In 2008, they added the one-man/one-woman definition to the state constitution when 52.5% of the voters supported Proposition 8. A simple straight-line projection shows that the “traditional marriage” gang loses more than one percentage point each year. By this measure, the projection for 2013 is 46.9% in favor of Proposition 8 and similar measures. The reality, however, is even worse for Cordileone and his allies. According to recent a Los Angeles Times poll, same-sex marriage opposition has fallen to 36%. Support has risen to 58%. Suck on that, Your Excellency.

Dunning sees the writing on the wall and is worried that quashing the tide in favor of same-sex marriage is a now-or-never crisis.

Here's a hint: it won't be “now.”

The polite student

A cure worse than the illness

An armed society is a polite society

—Robert A. Heinlein

The weight of events was heavy on our thoughts. The news reports were frightening and the college district had reacted. Department meetings featured safety lectures and the college had conducted an “active shooter” drill, in which the campus cops and local law enforcement rehearsed their emergency response procedures and tested their readiness for a Virginia-Tech-type situation.

It was not unusual for a student to approach me before the start of class for a private word, although it was just a bit strange to have one standing so close. I knew him better than most students. He had been enrolled in one of my classes before. He was unfailingly polite and applied himself diligently to his work. He spoke very quietly, so it helped that his lips were close to my ear.

“I don't want you to worry, Dr. Z, if any of the students give you any trouble,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows.

“Thanks,” I said, “but that hasn't really been a problem so far.”

“That's good,” he replied. His eyes flicked toward his classmates who had nearly filled the classroom. “It's just that I know some students get resentful when you're a strict grader and these days you never know how they might react. I just wanted to say that I've got your back.”

His coat was unzipped. With his left hand he pulled it open slightly so that I could see the holster nestled near his armpit.

“I've got a concealed-carry permit and you can rest easy. I've got your back.”

Hoping that my face did not show my surprise, I calmly replied, “Thanks. Thanks for letting me know.”

Mission accomplished, he returned to his seat.

The class continued without further complications, but every so often I threw an extra glance in the student's direction. Everything seemed the same on the outside, but the entire atmosphere of the room was changed for me. While my rational brain had reasonably reassured me that the active-shooter scenario was merely an extremely remote possibility (how many colleges are there? how many of them got shot up? we're talking good odds here!), my animal hindbrain insisted on stroking the panic button. Now, however, there was some additional solid data to process: A loaded gun was present in my classroom.

While gun-rights advocates like to quote Heinlein's aphorism about gun-mediated courtesy, they appear to care little for simple numerical arguments. Guns are an accelerant. People without guns can scream at each other and live to argue another day. Put guns in their pockets and the odds that someone will get hurt skyrocket. If a gunman strides into a movie theater and starts to shoot innocent bystanders at random, an armed citizen could presumably take him out, save lives, and be a hero. On the other hand, the result might just be more people killed in a crossfire—especially in a darkened theater and especially if more than one armed citizen joins the fight. And when the police arrive, at whom do they shoot?

I didn't feel safer with an armed student in the class, even though he was ostensibly “on my side.” He just made me nervous and acted as a constant reminder of worst-case scenarios. The worshipers of the Second Amendment extol the etiquette-enhancing qualities of firearms, but they ignore the risk-impact of the proliferation of guns while focusing on the deterrence of rare and extreme events. Their grasp of probabilities is shaky.

Still, it's not as though there is no evidence on the side of the gun advocates. History suggests that Tombstone was a very polite town. Quiet, too. At least over at Boothill.

Subatomic subgenius

Ommmmmmmmmmmm

Leon Lederman has a lot to answer for. He famously branded the hypothetical Higgs boson as the “God particle” in the title of his 1993 book on the subject. As a stroke of marketing genius, however, it's undoubtedly had him chuckling all the way to the bank. It follows that recent news from CERN has resurrected the divinely-inspired term, as well as rousing into action the usual crowd of scientific illiterates. A representative of that obscurantist cohort popped up in the letters column of the July 7 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle:

The sages have been telling us for many, many centuries that God or love dwells within our hearts as ourselves. This is found in meditation and costs nothing.

The physicists' instruments have cost millions and are just getting a little glimpse of what is found in totality in meditation.

GVM, Gilroy

Oh, yes. Meditation and occult wisdom long ago revealed the essence of the Higgs boson and its function in the Standard Model of particle physics. We could all save a lot of money if high-energy physics research budgets were devoted instead to the purchase of floor mats and incense sticks. No doubt.

I fired off a response, which the Chronicle did not see fit to publish. Here it is, in full:

I eagerly await GVM's elucidation of the difference between bosons and fermions. Surely he must know.

Stay tuned for the next exciting breakthrough in meditation physics. I predict thrilling new insights into the nature of the bozon, the long-posited fundamental particle of clowning. One hears that the elusive mote might yet be detected with bubble chambers filled with super-cooled seltzer!

Procrustes writes a book

Slow Denialist and the Seven Plots

Christopher Booker is the author of The Seven Basic Plots, a much-lauded book that purports to classify all literature into seven pigeon-holes. It's quite a tour de force. Of course, for every Fay Weldon who gushes “This is the most extraordinary, exhilarating book,” there is an Adam Mars-Jones who cites “distortion” and concludes that it is “a stimulating, ambitious and unsatisfying book.” Still, the estimable Margaret Atwood admires it; that should count for something.

Booker's tome is my current bedside book. I have not fully plumbed its depths, but I dig through a few more pages each evening. I frequently chuckle. As someone who is widely and eccentrically read, I am susceptible to the book's charms. Perhaps I am particularly vulnerable because I especially enjoy catching literary or cultural allusions. “Aha! I see what you did there!” No doubt there are many that sail right over my head, but The Seven Basic Plots is by its very nature a name-dropping, title-dropping work, and my decades of reading have equipped me to occasionally nod my head in a knowing way when certain books are cited. Ooh! I feel so smart!

But my bedtime browsing has not been spared the sudden twinge at odd intervals, as I purse my lips, frown, and regard some authorial pronouncement with suspicion. On page 77, Booker referred to the “Portugese explorer” in H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. Ah, careless proofreading! One demerit! But then I got to page 90, where Booker is immersed in a discussion of Robinson Crusoe and refers to a mutiny aboard a “Portugese ship.” Fie! The man cannot spell “Portuguese”! I naturally take particular offense.

It turned out he also did not know how to spell “Pharaoh.” It's an admittedly tricky word, but there's no good excuse for using “Phaoraoh” multiple times. One begins to despair!

The misspelling were merely disturbing quibbles, but perhaps they alerted me to more significant matters. My antennas were vibrating with a subtle suspicion. While introducing the plot he labeled as “the Quest,” Booker calmly said, “On the face of it, stories based on the plot of the Quest could hardly seem more disparate.” One might indeed think so, since Booker's list of examples included the Odyssey, Pilgrim's Progress, Watership Down, and The Lord of the Ring. Nevertheless, equal to the task he set himself, Booker briskly strips the various stories of most of their elements until he can stuff them into his Quest pigeon-hole. (I can imagine him huffing and puffing and muttering, “Get in there, damn you!”) Only a story's naked armature matters when performing the act of classification.

When he got to the “Voyage and Return” plot, Booker faced the problem of distinguishing it from the Quest. He proved his mettle: “The Quest is altogether a more serious and purposeful affair.” By contrast, of course, the Voyage and Return is rather a lark. Since Frodo and Sam suffer somewhat dramatically on their casual little trip to Mordor and back, Booker points out that The Lord of the Rings is really a dog's breakfast of a work that embodies all seven plots in a glorious mash-up (with due attention to the Thrilling Escape plot device, of course). By the way, the Return component of a Voyage and Return plot needn't be taken too literally. If the protagonist doesn't get to go home again, he might instead return to some condition of normality after the abnormality of his Voyage experiences. It's a Voyage and Return plot as long as the hero has to return to something.

There's no way Booker can lose.

Although I'm still enjoying The Seven Basic Plots, my delight is somewhat tempered after several examples of Booker's trim-to-fit analyses and manipulation of his rather plastic plot definitions. Yes, it's still quite an impressive achievement, but the book seems more thick than profound. At least I'm sure to meet several more old friends and acquaintances as I continue to plow through it.

There is one additional fly struggling in the ointment. After a few too many plot-rackings, I decided to check up on Mr. Booker's credentials. Is he some distinguished litérateur whose name I should have recognized? Wikipedia soon tipped me off to the awful truth. Christopher Booker is one of those self-deluded “thinkers” who imagines that he has pierced the veil of climate change's mysteries and penned a denialist book titled The Real Global Warming Disaster. Of course, when one reads history at Cambridge, one is clearly qualified to evaluate the technical claims of climatologists.

Damn. The man is unsound.

Here be dragons

Not!

The competition for stupidest creationist argument is fierce, as any perusal of WildwoodClaire's “Dim Bulb of the Week” or Potholder54's “Golden Crocoduck” competition will amply demonstrate. Undaunted, they continue to strive to outdo one another.

I just stumbled across a most delightsome example of creationist inanity, laced with a generous dollop of cryptozoology. It's a video titled “The Secret History of Dinosaurs,” and you'll be charmed to learn that it has scraped together all of the spurious evidence for the survival of dinosaurs into the modern era (you know: dragons, Nazca, Ica stones, petroglyphs, la, la, la). In addition, however, it contains one of the loveliest examples of misinterpreted evidence I've ever seen. It's a small thing, but quite entertaining.

Apparently evolutionists have been suppressing the evidence related to dragons and sea monsters, now-endangered species of dinosauria that nevertheless linger in African jungles, Scottish lochs, and other obscure ecological niches. As the narrator explains, the coexistence of man and dinosaur has been disguised by shifts in language. He flashes a page from an old dictionary and points outs that “dragon” is now a disparaged term. At 3:55 into the video, he darkly observes that “dragon” is Now Rare.

The name that you are probably the most familiar with is “dragon.” Even up until 1946 the word “dragon” was found in dictionaries and has in its definition this telling description.

But do you see what the “telling description” really means? It's just a label on definition #1: A huge serpent. Apparently people seldom refer to big snakes as dragons. It doesn't mean that we nasty old evolutionists are suppressing the word.

And, yes, the rest of the video is just about as stupid. Big surprise.

Godforsaken logic

Preachy prelate plotzes

You know it's a new era when a Tory prime minister in the United Kingdom is firmly on record as supporting same-sex marriage. What's more, it seems that David Cameron is not merely paying lip service. One of Cameron's government ministers—Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister (I didn't know that cabinet position even existed)—is pursuing an investigation into the ways and means to extend civil marriage rights to same-sex couples.

Not everyone in the Conservative Party is delighted, which is to be expected. It's also unsurprising to hear objections from the First Estate—that is, the British clergy. A particularly interesting demurer was issued by Cardinal Keith O'Brien. Of course, as a Catholic prelate he is not seated in the House of Lords. That is a privilege reserved to the Anglican bishops of the Church of England and various lords temporal. Nevertheless, O'Brien is a particularly high-ranking member of the clergy in the United Kingdom, serving as head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland. The cardinal shared his views with the Sunday Telegraph:

Redefining marriage will have huge implications for what is taught in our schools, and for wider society. It will redefine society since the institution of marriage is one of the fundamental building blocks of society. The repercussions of enacting same-sex marriage into law will be immense.

Perhaps the padre has a point: the extension of uniform marriage rights to the entire population would be a historical milestone. But is that not a good thing? Let's see what bee is buzzing in O'Brien's bonnet:

If same-sex marriage is enacted into law what will happen to the teacher who wants to tell pupils that marriage can only mean – and has only ever meant – the union of a man and a woman?

The cardinal is serving up an easy one! The school should consider dismissing the teacher on the grounds of ignorance: The Bible itself (an authoritative source where the cardinal is concerned) serves up numerous counterexamples. Solomon's multiple wives serve as a case in point, to say nothing of Jacob's marrying both Leah and her sister Rachel (plus some dalliances with their handmaidens). Even today there are many nations in which polygamy is permitted, although the United States declined to join in the fun when the Mormons advocated plural marriage. O'Brien is rather severely overstating the case when he declares that “marriage” has never meant anything other than “the union of a man and a woman.”

Same-sex marriage would eliminate entirely in law the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child. It would create a society which deliberately chooses to deprive a child of either a mother or a father.

The cardinal's deliberate choice of the word “deprive” makes gay marriage sound like a direct assault on the rights of children—as he explicitly intended—but the Roman Catholic Church cares less about children than it pretends. It is perfectly willing to leave children in orphanages rather than let them be adopted by loving foster parents who happen to be gay. It has also demonstrated a perfect willingness to protect child-molesting clergy in its ranks. In brief, the Church has no standing or credibility when it comes to arguing on behalf of children. None.

Why not allow three men or a woman and two men to constitute a marriage, if they pledge their fidelity to one another? If marriage is simply about adults who love each other, on what basis can three adults who love each other be prevented from marrying?

Heck, I'd let them do it even if they don't pledge fidelity to one another. Consenting adults may create such marriage constellations as they wish, depending on their own decisions and willingness to persevere in the face of likely befuddled reactions from society at large. (It would, I know, puzzle me why people would want to do that, but I wouldn't consider it my call.) But the cardinal is sending up a smoke-screen. Does the desiccated old bachelor really think polyamory is going to become all the rage, wreaking confusion on all of society's functions? Hardly. Let the adventurous minority work out their own preferences and issues. O'Brien need not worry about a clamor for Church-sanctioned gang marriages.

Disingenuously, the Government has suggested that same-sex marriage wouldn’t be compulsory and churches could choose to opt out. This is staggeringly arrogant. No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage. Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that “no one will be forced to keep a slave”.

The cardinal has gone all the way from specious argument to offensive polemic. He makes his point with an analogy that would be vapid for its irrelevance if it were not so noisome. But perhaps we should thank Cardinal O'Brien for offering an argument that compares approval of same-sex marriage with the revival of slavery.

It shows the cardinal to be a fool, and such people are seldom listened to. Decent people may now go about their business and pay him no further mind.

Religion-crippled reason

I guess God hates logic

Noah Hutchings is the superannuated leader of the Southwest Radio Church. His radio broadcasts are replete with numerological arguments (God the Master Mathematician) for various wacky Christian dogmas and earnest warnings about the imminent apocalypse. Hutchings isn't quite crazy enough to set dates in the manner of Harold Camping, but he demonstrates his lack of basic reasoning skills in virtually every radio program.

The July 6 installment of Bible in the News took President Obama to task for having issued a proclamation that designated June as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.” Hutchings quoted a line that was actually from Obama's 2009 declaration: “I am proud to be the first President to appoint openly LGBT candidates to Senate-confirmed positions.... These individuals embody the best qualities we seek in public servants.”

Hutchings draws the obvious conclusion from the president's statement: “In other words, President Obama says that homosexuals are better than heterosexuals.”

Yeah, I can see that. In a world where “equal rights” immediately equate to “special rights” when certain minorities are concerned, it makes complete sense that praising the qualifications of gay individuals is tantamount to proclaiming them better than straight people. If your brain is sufficiently god-rotted, you can follow this line of reasoning, too.

Hutchings went on to say, “ He has indeed appointed, according to reports, over 150 to high government positions—many more than heterosexuals.” Oh, yes. The president has fewer than 300 government positions to fill by appointment, so 150 LGBT appointments constitute a clear majority of Obama's administration.

I think the statements by Mr. Hutchings are as stupid as any I've ever heard. Perhaps he will now declare that I am therefore claiming he is more stupid than anyone else. ... Damn. This time he might be right!

Punctuation for thee and me

Bringing reason to a full stop

The back page of a recent Answers Update (Vol. 18, No. 6) carries a bright little apologetic nugget by Ken Ham himself, the strikingly australopithecine leader of Answers in Genesis. Ham is talking about the earth's effing magnetic field. How does it work?

[G]eophysical and archaeological evidence indicates that 1,000 years ago, the magnetic field of the earth was 40% stronger than today. This field is actually decaying at a rate of 5% per century.

The decay rate may not sound like much, but it's a very important factor in determining the age of the earth. Using the current rate of decay, it's been calculated that just a million years ago, the magnetic field would have been so strong that it would have melted the planet! ...

Creationist physicists declare that the magnetic field is a very strong indicator that our planet cannot be any older than 10,000 years. This, of course, confirms the roughly 6,000-year timeline in the book of Genesis.

Please don't be distracted by Ham's use of amusing little oxymorons like “creationist physicists.” We can easily detect what he is up to. There's a useful word to describe the theoretical foundation for Ham's argument:

Uniformitarianism.

Obvious. Right? Ham is assuming that conditions affecting the earth's magnetic field have remained exactly the same throughout history. What else is that besides uniformitarianism? Of course, Ham might beg to differ. Let's see how he described uniformitarianism in the 1987 edition of his book The Lie: Evolution:

Geologists have the idea that the processes we see operating in the present world have been going on for millions of years at essentially the same rate, and will probably go on for millions of years into the future as well. The technical word used in geology for this belief is “uniformitarianism.” For example, the desert museum in Tucson, Arisona, not only has a display for people to see what supposedly has happened over the past millions of years, but it also has a display of what many scientists believe will happen to Arizona over the millions of years yet to come!

Evolutionists, atheistic and theistic, use the phrase “the present is the key to the past.” In other words, they say that the way to understand the past is to observe what happens in the present.”

Bingo! Ham's magnetic-field argument for a young earth is a page ripped right out of the uniformitarianism playbook. He stands self-accused.

One imagines that Ham might wish to quibble. He could claim that he was using a reductio ad absurdum argument—or proof by contradiction—having demonstrated that the assumption of uniformitarianism leads to an impossibly high level of magnetic flux in the prehistoric past.

Sorry. That won't work. He is not just arguing that an old earth is impossible. Ham explicitly declares that some simple computations provide evidence consistent with a young earth. He is making a “pro” argument for his position every bit as much as he is making a “con” argument against his opponents (which constitute 99% of the scientific community).

Ham may not like uniformitarianism, but he is certainly willing to use it when it suits him. Perhaps he needs to create a new label for it. May I suggest “punctuated uniformitarianism”? He can use it to argue that physical laws and natural processes are uniform between occasional catastrophes—like his magnetic-field argument.

A bag of tricks

Stop making sense!

I remember when “Massha” enrolled in my algebra class. Recognize the name? She's a character created by Robert Lynn Asprin in his Myth Adventures fantasy series. He introduced her in the third volume, Myth Directions, well before the long string of pun-obsessed novels became rather labored.

My student lacked the bright orange hair or heroic girth that characterized Massha, but she reminded me of Asprin's creation because of the way she preferred to do algebra. The fictional Massha was described as a “mechanic”—or even “no-talent mechanic”—by other characters in the novels because she used amulets and other physical trinkets to cast her spells. She possessed no actual magical talents, but relied entirely on magical devices.

The Massha in my class drove the point home time and again whenever I tried to explain a procedure and she would counter with a memorized algorithm, as if that pre-empted any further discussion. It was an occasional irritant, but she was entirely sincere in her approach. She had found success in treating math as a collection of miscellaneous tricks and she resisted any attempt to explore below the surface. As far as our Massha was concerned, that was just a dangerous distraction.

A particularly clear case arose while we were discussing the solution of rational equations. These are nothing more than equations that contain rational expressions. For example,

is a rational equation. One of the glorious principles of algebra is that you can do just about anything to one side of an equation as long as you do the same thing to the other side. In the case of a rational equation, you can use this principle to eliminate all of the denominators. Just multiply both sides of the equation by the least common denominator of all of the rational expressions! For the given example, the least common denominator is x(x − 1). Multiplying both sides results in massive cancellation and simplification:

Since algebra students seem to regard operations involving division with more trepidation than anything else, I can usually engage their enthusiasm for a process that destroys all denominators. It has its moment of messiness, but the results are clean and rational (no math joke intended). I leave it as an exercise to the reader to complete the demonstration that x = −2.

Massha was not content with my demonstration. She wanted to rephrase things in her own way, which I'm normally inclined to encourage, as it indicates the student is assimilating the knowledge. What she said, however, disturbed me:

“Do we have to show our work and cancel things or can I just do it the way I learned it? I was taught that you compare each term to the LCD and give the term the part of the LCD that it's missing. Is that all right?”

I looked back at the problem on the board. Massha knew the LCD was x(x − 1). She would consider 3/x, observe that it lacked the x − 1 and “give” it that factor. At the same time, presumably, she would drop the factor x, which it did have in common with the LCD.

“And you drop whatever it already has in common with the LCD?” I prompted.

She nodded her head. “Just do that to every term,” she said. “It's faster!”

Massha had a magic amulet from her bag of tricks. She had memorized a procedure that saved her from writing the messy cancellation step because it algorithmically led her to the same result without actually justifying it. The juice had been squeezed out of the algebraic process and the dried husk preserved the result if not the rationale.

I pondered.

“Since this is our first encounter with rational equations in this class, I want everyone to show a step-by-step justification for our simplifications. Later on, when we return to rational equations in terms of applications, I'll let people reduce the amount of work they show. For now, though, always write down the LCD and show the step of multiplying through by it and reducing.”

Massha scowled at me.

“But I already know how to do this!” she complained.

“I am confirming that your short-cut is a valid algorithm,” I replied, “but I will be holding everyone to the same standard of completeness in presenting solutions.”

Massha was unhappy much of the semester. She had a keen memory, had had algebra before (so why was she in my class?), and retained quite an array of solution gimmicks. I was happy for her (sort of), but her view of mathematics had been reduced to the rote application of algorithms. It was enough for her to do well in class, but she chafed at every requirement to justify her solutions. She would have found a kindred spirit in the algebra student who had been in one of my previous classes. When I finished demonstrating the derivation of the quadratic formula, that student rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, Mr. Z, are you explaining things again? Why didn't you just give us the formula?”

Hit bottom, kept digging

Conservapedia finds new lows

When P.Z. Myers shared the happy news that Conservapedia honored him with its article of the week, I naturally had to see for myself how he was being celebrated over at Andrew Schlafly's Fortress of Ineptitude. It was a fun-filled visit, punctuated with peals of sudden laughter at the many pages of inadvertent humor.

These guys are funny.

While I was there, I had to revisit the Conservapedia entry on President Obama, which I cruelly mocked in a post last year, just before the presidential inauguration. Naturally, I was curious to see whether it had been improved in any way.

The answer depends on whether your metric involves laughter.

Here is the opening paragraph:

Barack Hussein Obama II (birth name Barry Soetoro,[1][2][3] allegedly born in Honolulu August 4, 1961[4][5][6][7][8]) is the 44th President of the United States, and the first President who is biracial. He previously was associated with several radical causes[9] and served less than four years as a first-term Democratic Senator from Illinois (2005-2008).

Try to remember that this is supposed to be a source of reliable information (“The Trustworthy Encyclopedia,” they claim). Were you able to spot any mistakes? I admit I wondered how the president's birth name could be “Barry Soetoro” given that Lolo Soetoro was his step-father and was nowhere on the scene when Barack was born. Both birth announcements in contemporary Hawaiian newspapers reported that the father was Barack H. Obama. The president's birth certificate (I know, I know; Schlafly and his crew refuse to accept Hawaii's official document) gives his name as “Barack Hussein Obama II.”

No Soetoro.

After a flub like that, I'm surprised that Conservapedia got his presidential number right. Yes, it is 44. They also noticed that he did not serve out his term as U.S. senator. Good catch! (Getting elected president does that to you.)

Upon taking office Obama promised relief for unemployed workers and warned failure to pass his proposed stimulus scheme would turn a “crisis into a catastrophe.”[10][11] The unemployment rate has hovered in the 10% range throughout his presidency, up significantly from the 7.8% rate in January 2009. Since passage of the president's stimulus package, 2.4 million Americans have been added to the unemployment rolls.[12]

Conservapedia loves post hoc, propter hoc insinuations. The stimulus package passed and then unemployment soared. There are two reasons for that which most sane people are able to identify: (1) the stimulus package wasn't big enough (and Paul Krugman warned us, too!) and (2) the collapse of the U.S. economy under the Bush administration still had plenty of momentum in January 2009, right when its chief enablers scrambled out of town. Who knows how much worse off we might be without the cushioning effect of the stimulus package (which, once again, was not large enough).

After the “War on Terror” was abandoned during his first year in office the rate of terrorist attacks on the United States has gone from zero per year during George W. Bush's last year, [13] to at least four.[14][15][16][17][18].

Such careful choosing of time periods! (Cherry-picking, anyone?) Why not compare Obama's first year with Bush's first year. Oh, yes. September 11. Too bad about ignoring terrorist threats until it was too late (and then exaggerating them for political benefit and war justification). I will admit, however, that I like the quotes around the “War on Terror.” Is Conservapedia admitting that the president is merely avoiding some of the cant phrases and reducing the bully-boy rhetoric that characterized the Bush-Cheney years? That's certainly a relief. In the meantime, in terms of reality, Obama is aggressive against terror in ways that may or may not pay off. You know, little things. Little things like tripling the number of drone attacks against targets in Pakistan. I have my doubts about it, but the Conservapedists should be yelling their heads off in support.

The president is not anything close to a pacifist, but his actions are not loud enough or indiscriminate enough to please the troglodytes who live in the dark caverns of Conservapedia.

President Obama authorized offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico[19] and has been widely criticized for mishandling the “worst environmental disaster in US history.”[20][21] Obama declared, “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”[22][23][24]

Well, generally they don't cause spills. There's only one that really causing trouble right now. Of course, it's a doozy. That's the catch. One big spill can do gigabucks of damage. That's why many people reacted negatively to the president's comments about authorizing more oil drilling. However, the drill that spilled was in place long before Obama said anything. The disaster was a legacy of Bush administration neglect and lack of enforcement of safety standards and procedures.

The Gulf spill might, of course, have been mitigated if the Obama administration had promptly ramped up safety inspections and enforcement of maintenance regulations, but I can easily imagine how Schlafly and his minions would have reacted. “Anti-business!” (I think it was Stalin—or was it Hitler?—who was really keen on state enforcement of safety regulations.)

Did you notice the sly post-hoc implication of the paragraph's initial compound sentence? (1) Obama authorized drilling. (2) Worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

Sentences like this don't get constructed by accident. Schlafly really wants readers of Conservapedia to think that BP's Gulf of Mexico disaster was the direct consequence of Obama's statement about offshore oil drilling.

The president's words are powerful.

The initial paragraphs of Conservapedia's entry on Barack Obama is all of a piece. A piece of propaganda. The article deliberately misleads. That's curious, isn't it? The overtly religious perpetrators of such mendacity are evidently so full of good intentions that they regard themselves exempt from the commandment about bearing false witness.

The morality of the people at Conservapedia is very much like the God they purport to follow. There's damned little evidence for the existence of either.

Dad endorses conspiracy theory

Masters of the universe

My politically benighted father has shared with me yet another classic of the forwarded-wisdom genre. Although I have told him (many more times than once) that one is unlikely to find trenchant political wisdom in poorly formatted, multiply forwarded e-mail screeds, he cannot resist sending me some of the iron pyrite nuggets that drop into his AOL mail box. The latest example is fairly typical of the right-wing spam with which he favors me. It's a tribute to the power of politicians. It's really much greater than you might imagine. No, really!

They control everything.

Yeah. Sure.

I'm always conflicted about the proper way to react when these chunks of nonsense show up in my in-box. Initially, I'm insulted that he thinks I could be persuaded by such lame manifestos. Then I'm embarrassed that my father swallows such tripe without blinking. Finally, I simply ash-can the message or—if I just can't resist it—I zing back with a tart response.

This was one of those zinger occasions.

It didn't help that Dad included his endorsement instead of merely forwarding the spam:

“This really got it right. This is what is happening to our country and I do not like it!!!!”

No, Dad. Multiple exclamation points do not add to the weight of the argument. They just don't.

This is part of what followed:

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?. . . .

Charlie Reese, a retired reporter for the Orlando Sentinel has hit the nail directly on the head, defining clearly who it is that in the final analysis must assume responsibility for the judgments made that impact each one of us every day. Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years. It's a short but good read. Worth the time. Worth remembering!

EVERY CITIZEN NEEDS TO READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT WHAT THIS JOURNALIST HAS SCRIPTED IN THIS MESSAGE. READ IT AND THEN REALLY THINK ABOUT OUR CURRENT POLITICAL DEBACLE..

545 vs. 300,000,000 PEOPLE
By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them...Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered: If all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The president does. You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House? Nancy Pelosi. She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people.

When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.
If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.
If the Army & Marines are in IRAQ, it's because they want them in IRAQ.
If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems. Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible. They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees. We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper. What you do with this article now that you have read it.

No one should be surprised to learn that the editorial supposedly written by Mr. Reese of the Orlando Sentinel is not quite as advertised. It has been severely “improved” by clumsy hands as it's been passed from one right-winger to another. I omitted the extensive coda in Dad's version that included a long list of taxes, all of which are horrible crimes against humanity. I especially enjoyed the breathless claim that “Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, and our nation was the most prosperous in the world.” Why was that amusing?

The list included the Telephone Federal Excise Tax, the Gasoline Tax, and the Recreational Vehicle Tax.

I think I have a clue why none of those terrible taxes existed in 1910. I also doubt that their non-existence was a key factor in the nation's prosperity back then. (It didn't even prevent the panic of 1910-11.)

As I previously admitted, I could not resist sending Dad a slightly snarky response.

Dear Dad:

The original version was published by Charley (not “Charlie”) Reese in 1995, when the Republicans ran Congress. He pointed out that the GOP only pretends to want balanced budgets, since they never pass any, even when in power. This version was edited with a right-wing slant to blame Democrats alone and also stuck in some nonsense about the supposed absolute power of the 545 senators and representatives to control the universe. To my knowledge, Reese never wrote anything as silly as

Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Any political reporter who wrote that would apparently believe that Congress could have passed a law abolishing the Depression or mandating peace on earth or banning flash floods and earthquakes. Would that the world were that simple.

The “improved” version of Reese's editorial that you forwarded to me can be rebutted much too easily. Like this, for example:

• Every member of the House of Representatives is elected by the voters in his or her district. If a person is in the House, it's because the people in that district want that person in the House.
• Every member of the Senate is elected by the voters in his or her state (except for temporary interim appointments). If a person is in the Senate, it's because the people in that state want that person in the Senate.
• The Congress is elected by the people of the United States. Therefore the Congress is the representative body that the people want.

Above all, do not let anyone con you into thinking that there exists some disembodied political forces like “radical liberals” or “environmental extremists” or “ACORN” or “George Soros” that prevent voters from electing the people they want in office.

And then, of course, these people control the universe.

The state of the world? It's all the fault of the masters of the universe. Yeah. We can blame it all on He-Man.

The job satisfaction metric

Too much of a good thing?

California community colleges are a mixed lot, lacking the kind of central authority enjoyed(?) by the University of California or the California State University. Instead, the Golden State's 112 two-year colleges are broken up into 72 largely autonomous districts. The colleges have various reporting requirements to the state chancellor's office, but the chancellor has minimal direct authority over any of the individual colleges or districts.

That makes things more exciting. Community college districts don't march in lock-step. We wander in all directions. Sometimes the results aren't pretty, as when Compton College ceased to exist. (It lost its accreditation and was reduced to an educational center under the administration of neighboring El Camino College.) Or you can be like Sierra College and suffer from a fractious board of elected trustees who fire the president and spend as much time on political posturing as setting educational policy. Then there's Solano College, which played a game of brinksmanship with the accrediting authority for community colleges until a state-appointed trustee was imposed on it and an interim president was brought in to kick butt and stabilize the situation.

And I think we've all heard of San Francisco City College's shot-down trial balloon to allow corporate sponsorship of class sessions.

Normally, the less excitement you have, the better.

My friend Steve is mild-mannered and usually doesn't brag about how boring things are at his school, but it's difficult to remain modest when other school districts are cutting programs to the bone and yours is hanging in there. He has enough seniority now to fear no lay-offs, but Steve tells me they're not in the works at American River College and the other Los Rios institutions. (Apparently Los Rios did something weird and socked away a bunch of money in a contingency fund, into which they are now dipping. Unheard of!)

Steve admits that even the Los Rios colleges have to deal with reality in the Governator's dystopia, cutting back on class offerings and reducing (or eliminating!) teaching loads for part-time faculty and limiting overload teaching by full-time instructors. The lengthy budget crisis is taking its toll and now Los Rios faculty and staff are looking at creative remedies: pay cuts!

Faculty salaries are a big-ticket item at any college, of course, which is why cuts have already been imposed on UC and CSU campuses—generally by means of mandatory unpaid furlough days. Sierra College has similarly trimmed work schedules and salary costs. According to Steve, the idea for pay cuts in the Los Rios district actually came from a faculty member, not an administrator.

Hmm.

It appears the idea is that a voluntary pay cut would free up cash to support retention of class sections and adjunct faculty. (I hope the faculty gets a written guarantee that's where the money would go before they cough up part of their salaries.) Some members of the Los Rios community are willing to argue they are overpaid, so it would be easy to give up a little of the “excess.”

Fascinating.

Steve forwarded to me the most compelling argument in support of the claim that he and his colleagues are too richly remunerated. His cover note suggested that Steve was not entirely persuaded by the message writer's logic. Behold:

Subject: RE: Pay cuts are the answer!

I must agree with Professor C. I have been an adjunct instructor at ARC since roughly 1963 and I still love it. I have said that I would be willing to teach for nothing. Actually, I did teach one class for nothing and believe my students felt I was worth every penny of it. It is the only class I ever taught where I had more students at the end of the course than at the beginning.

I believe a 5%-10% pay cut is fully justified. When a colleague died at Sierra College a few years ago, I taught one of his classes for 20% less than ARC pays me and was happy to do it.

One way to tell that "the talent" may be overpaid is by considering the turnover rate. When an instructor quits at ARC, it is talked about for years. One professor at Sierra College told me that in the years from 1996 to 2004, exactly two professors had quit. One joined her husband who had been hired at Chico State and the other was hired by the Air Force Academy. How does this compare with the turnover rate at almost ANY other business?

You follow that line of reasoning? Excessive job satisfaction is evidence that monetary compensation is too high.

It makes a cruel kind of logic. Surely it would be more cost-effective to churn the faculty regularly by setting salaries as low as possible. Instructors would always be leaving and a big fraction of the faculty would always be on the first steps of the entry-level salary scale. Savings galore!

This concept could undoubtedly be extended to the banking industry, where we can tell that salaries are currently too low because the top executives in the financial sector don't stay in their jobs very long.

QED!

By the way, Steve pointed out to me that the above message was written by one of his colleagues in the econ department.

Maybe I'll sign up for a class when he teaches it for free.

The Rite of Confirmation Bias

How golden is your rectangle?

Catholic adolescents in the United States typically go through the rite of confirmation in their early teens. The diocesan bishop comes to your local parish and randomly quizzes some of the confirmation candidates to verify that they have been properly catechized (I say “randomly,” but no bishop goes out of his way to create an incident by calling on the visibly clueless). For many young Catholics, the confirmation quiz, whether they were called upon or not, is a kind of exit interview. Attendance at both catechism and mass drops dramatically after achieving confirmation. All done! (Except maybe for Christmas and Easter. And weddings and funerals.)

In my day (45 years ago), after the quiz and the formal administration of the sacrament, the bishop would also give each candidate a limp little slap on the cheek in token of the pain of human existence. Perhaps it's still done, but I haven't been to a confirmation in decades.

Two years ago, I read Dan Brown's DaVinci Code. It is a very silly book, loaded down with distortions of Catholic history and dogma (which I wouldn't have thought needed any additional twisting or distortion). Brown likes to titillate his readers with revelations of supposedly factual esoterica. It's the old “based on a true story” marketing gimmick. Not content to confine himself to religious fiction, Brown also dabbles in mathematical fiction. After reading The DaVinci Code, I wrote a post about the golden ratio nonsense it contains. In Phi: Good to the last decimal, I explained in some detail that Brown's main character offered many demonstrably untrue statements concerning the golden ratio as if they were recognized scientific facts. The golden ratio, or “phi,” is supposedly deeply embedded in our esthetic sensibilities, but it's all a crock.

Nevertheless, like any popular myth, the golden ratio canard continues to have plenty of believers. An anonymous commenter posted his testimony in a response to my original article. Read it closely. It is a marvelous example of confirmation bias.

I use phi alot. Not because it somohow magically looks good, but because it WORKS ON PEOPLE. Just look at ALL apple products. Open your photoshop, tak some golden ruler made of golden rectangles, blend it and start some measuring. Old ipod is best for this, not iphone. You will see very quickly how they do their GREAT design, which looks easy on the first look, but many people says, there is some hidden beauty in their products. And yes, there is. All their measurements are based on phi. Sometimes not exactly to spice it up, but many times yes. Check spaces around keyboard on the new macbook pro, just check it. And don't tell me now, that phi doesn't work. It works if you know how to use it and where. My opinion is that phi in art is redundant. Nothing more, nothing less. I could live without it in art. But in graphics which is supposed to make me some money? - Here is the right segment for it

Anonymous declares that golden rectangles (those whose sides have the proportion 1 to 1.618) “works on people” in some mystical (though not “magical”) fashion. Presumably this exact proportion elicits involuntary appreciation from viewers and is Apple's secret weapon. Secret weapon, that is, if one considers the iPod, not the iPhone. (Pity, that!) Does Anonymous care that Apple strays from the golden ratio even in its iPod family?


Anonymous is already busily filtering the data. “All their measurements are based on phi,” he says. Unless, of course, they're not: “Sometimes not exactly to spice it up but many times yes.” And therefore many times no.

Martin Gardner famously debunked the same sort of nonsense about the Great Pyramid in Giza by whipping up a similar whole-cloth mythology for the Washington Monument in D.C. It always works the same way: One collects huge amounts of data and then filters out anything that doesn't fit. If the original collection is large enough, the residue is certain to be quite impressive to those who don't know any better.

Anonymous made his task easier by laying claim to golden ratio efficacy even in the absence of the golden ratio. That really opens things up. Consider what happens, if we are allowed to fudge the ratio in a golden rectangle by 5% or 10%. We get an impressive array of rectangles that are “close” to golden. With a loophole that big, it becomes easy to generates lots of compliant examples. The variation comes perilously close to turning even the iPhone golden. Behold!

More Republican logic

It's a mother lode

Thanks to the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, we have another brilliant example of Republican reasoning. It is a wonder to behold. This display of erudition is from the Letters to the Editor (with a bit of added emphasis from me)

It's McCain, folks

Editor - So, according to The Chronicle, the Democratic candidate will win the election. Really? Gee, I hate to disappoint you folks, but the simple fact of the matter is that the Republican candidate will win the election for a very simple reason: He is perceived as a good guy—that's all. And right now, the people want a good guy in the White House.

Considering how the current president is universally hated, and how out of favor the Republicans are in general, one would think that the Democratic candidate would be at least ten to fifteen points ahead in the polls, but the exact opposite is the case. Indeed, as election day looms, the race becomes ever tighter. Why is that? Because increasingly, people see that the Democratic candidate is a completely unknown quantity whereas the Republican candidate is completely known. Why the Democrats ever nominated their man for the presidency is beyond me, when Sen. Hillary Clinton was not only deserving of the nomination but, quite frankly, is the only candidate who could have prevailed to the end and won the race for her party.

A.J. BUTTACAVOLI
Walnut Creek

---

The “exact opposite”? You mean that Obama is ten to fifteen points behind? That's what opposite mean, A.J.

Say, what are they putting in the water in Walnut Creek, anyway?

Republican logic strikes again

Let's do the Time Warp again!

Like George Herbert Walker Bush confronting a supermarket price scanner in the 1992 political legend, cartoonists live in a bubble of retarded time, only they're acutely aware of it. There's not much they can do about it. The panels they draw today, the dialog they letter today—none of it will appear until having been properly aged. The lag-time is built into the process of cartoon publication.

As the Los Angeles Times reports this morning, Garry Trudeau has cast caution to the winds and declared Barack Obama the winner in his Doonesbury strip for Wednesday, November 5, the day after the election. While comic-page editors at newspapers across the country scratch their heads as they decide whether to run the presumptuous strip, Trudeau is not wringing his hands over his reputation if he turns out to be wrong. As he told the press, “I'd be a lot more worried about the country than the strip.”

Naturally, the news media contacted the McCain campaign for a reaction. The Times published a snarky comment from McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, who said, “We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame.”

Are you laughing yet? Please recall that this is the campaign spokesperson for John McCain, the candidate who three weeks ago said in Virginia Beach, “We're six points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes.... My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them!” Apparently Bounds is merely reflecting the kind of logic that is pervasive in the McCain campaign. (But who, of course, could blame them? Much of the national media spun every incident as “good for McCain” during the first months of the election year.)

Let's gently parse the statement of Mr. Bounds. He said that the campaign would like the Doonesbury strip predicting Obama's victory to be as predictive as the strip has been “lame.” We can take it as read—can't we?—that Tucker and his buddies really regard Doonesbury as a lame comic strip. Therefore, by Tucker's own statement, lame = predictive. It predicts Obama. Oops!

Nice thinking there, Tucker!

Men in dresses defend marriage

Do as I say, not as I do

Religion was simpler when I believed in revealed truth. Unfortunately, revealed truth was often manifest stupidity. That makes it more difficult to cling to, so perhaps we should be impressed by those whose faith can overcome the sheer inanity of it. After all, don't we admire people who are willing to sacrifice themselves for a sacred cause?

Yeah. Not so much anymore.

The Catholic Church is trying to throw its weight around in the battle over Proposition 8 on the California general election ballot in November. If it passes, Proposition 8 overturns the state supreme court ruling establishing same-sex marriages by placing a ban in the California constitution. That would trump the state supreme court and end the Golden State's experiment with marital equality. The Catholic Church is an enthusiastic fan of traditional marriage and its celibate priesthood is girding for the fight to pass Proposition 8.

Yes. Unmarried men in dresses are among the Church's shock troops in the war to enshrine the one-man/one-woman definition of marriage. Clever.

Bishop Allen Vigneron of the Oakland diocese is one of the generals trying to lead Catholic voters into the polling stations to cast their ballots for Proposition 8. He issued a pastoral letter in the wake of the supreme court ruling that politically minded Catholics are citing as an inspirational blast of the trumpet of traditionalism. Vigneron warns his readers of the consequences of losing in the attempts to re-establish monogamous heterosexual marriage as the only sanctioned marital union:

If such efforts fail, our way of life will become counter-cultural, always a difficult situation for Christians—one our forebears faced in many ages past, one that the Lord himself predicted for us.

---

“Counter-cultural”? Does His Excellency actually think that old-fashioned man-woman marriage will be abandoned in the wake of Proposition 8's defeat? No doubt society will rise up in opposition to the marriage of straight couples. Heck, the fifty percent failure rate shows that it doesn't work very well anyway. May as well give it up. Counter-cultural.

And what's this “our way of life” business? Vigneron's bachelorhood is part of his career; the wedded way of life is entirely foreign to him. (Of course, he can see married couples from his vantage point in the episcopal see of Oakland, sort of like Gov. Palin can see Russia from her perch in Alaska.) It seems we must construe “way of life” broadly if it is to include bishops.

Finally, Vigneron points out that Christ himself predicted that the Church would fall into the “difficult situation” of opposing the dominant culture. Does His Excellency think he can avert Christ's oracular pronouncement? Maybe Catholics can learn a lesson from the Protestants who cheer every report of famine and disaster and war because they consider catastrophe a prerequisite for the Second Coming. Embrace same-sex marriage (though not too literally), Your Excellency. Otherwise you risk making Jesus a liar.

Vote No on Proposition 8!

A political angle

When math teachers go astray

We math teachers are a relentlessly logical and thoughtful cohort of people. So why don't we agree on everything all the time? Anyone who has witnessed the knock-down and drag-out battles of the math wars knows that we don't. It depends on your initial assumptions. Most math teachers will cheerfully agree on whether a conclusion is the logical consequence of a set of axioms, but then they'll fight to the death over the axioms.

Courtesy of the McClatchy Company's newspapers, we have a stunning example of political logic from an old math professor. Shall we see if we can identify the axioms from which his logic flows?

Palin: A home run for McCain

Wow! Talk about a bombshell? Talk about thinking outside the box? Talk about going off the reservation? Let the game begin.

And all the so-called pundits thought John McCain was too old and over the hill to make important strategic decisions in a timely and impactful fashion. This could be a major-league home run; it puts a shot right over the bow of the Democrats and will haul them up short in their effort to bring disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters and independents into the Obama fold.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has the right politics. She is a reformer who has stared down Sen. Ted Stevens, she is a maverick, she is a hockey mom, she is very comfortable in a man's world, she is a hunter who knows the difference between the business end and the butt end of a weapon, she has been to the Middle East and has a son serving in the military, she is pro-life, she is articulate, she is younger than Barack, she is compelling, and she has a strong, comprehensive energy position. In the words of an old math professor, she is a running mate who complements and supplements John McCain to a “T.” Enough said.

—Walter Andrews, Folsom

---

Passing lightly over the disdain-worthy “impactful,” we must consider whether the choice of Palin “will haul [Democrats] up short in their efforts to bring disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters and independents into the Obama fold.” First of all, we're already there. Former Clinton supporters are not looking for an anti-choice, anti-science alternative to Sen. Obama. By what magic are we supposed to be inveigled into voting for a right-wing conservative? Are we suddenly no longer pro-choice? Second, independents are not necessarily charmed by Sarah. She stoked up the base; she didn't expand it.

Palin “faced down Sen. Ted Stevens”? I guess that came after she headed one of his 527 campaign committees and her support of his “bridge to nowhere” earmark. (She really used to like earmarks, you know, but she's over that now.)

Palin can fire a gun. I did not know that was a requirement for the job, unless the vice president is expected to shoot hunting companions in the face.

She is younger than Barack. That's a positive thing? Goodness! Until recently, the GOP insisted that Sen. Obama was a callow youth. Now Gov. Palin's tender years are a campaign asset. The rules of the game keep changing.

Palin “has a strong, comprehensive energy position”? I guess that “drill, drill, drill” is comprehensive because Sarah wants to drill everywhere. Yes?

Some wicked angles

My favorite part of the math professor's letter is the cutesy bit about how Gov. Palin “complements and supplements John McCain.” As you may know, complementary angles add up to 90°, while supplementary angles add up to 180°. The letter-writer is sending a discreet shout-out to his fellow math teachers. As one of his innumerable mathematical colleagues—albeit a liberal one—I cannot resist going off on my own tangent here. Let's puzzle out the possible significance of Gov. Palin being both a complement and a supplement to John McCain.

I begin by schematically indicating where the nation needs to go. It's just an arrow, pointing to the conventional “east.” (Self-described wits might wish to observe that the arrow points to the right, but don't try to make too much of a simple mathematical convention. That's my job.)

Then we note that McCain is not planning to go in the right direction. He's significantly off.

If Palin is his complement, then McCain-Palin together must go off in the 90° direction, at right angles to the nation's best interests. Oops!

Even better: If Palin is his supplement, then McCain-Palin must be heading in the direction exactly opposite to where we should be going—off by 180°. This may an even more accurate representative of McCain-Palin policies.

To be even-handed, let's consider Sen. Obama's political direction. There he goes, doing the best he can for his country, trending strongly toward all that is good and decent.

Why don't I, the slavishly devoted Democrat, show him heading due east toward the promised land? There's some fine print in the Obama illustration. Let's zoom in to see what it says:


Oh, that's right. Obama ended up supporting a very slightly amended FISA bill (not nearly amended enough!) and he has failed to disavow Bush's motley crew of faith-based initiatives. He may even expand them!

Well, you can't have everything. Any logical person knows that. (I'm not as sure about the letter-writing math professor, though.)