Vote Smarts!

Before we get started, in the interest of full disclosure, let me say that Pluto isn’t a planet.

There are, of course, two distinct camps on this subject, and I wanted to make sure I let you know right off the bat which camp I’m in. I could go on to explain why I hold such an opinion, which involves Pluto’s size, especially relative to the other planets, the eccentricities of its orbit, and its proximity to the Kuiper Belt, but that would be a needless digression.

Because whichever side of that argument you’re on, last week was a great week for space geeks.

Yeah, I’m talking about New Horizons and its close encounter with the object that I grew up calling the ninth planet.

It’s a big deal whenever our space program does something impressive like send a probe to study another planet, but with Pluto…this is different.

Why is the New Horizons mission so amazing?

Because, Pluto was discovered less than a century ago, yet we know it has an orbit that will take 250 years to travel around the Sun once. If you stop and think about that for a second, an obvious question comes to mind: How do we even know that? How do we know its orbit if we haven’t even known of its existence long enough to observe one full orbital trip?

The answer is math, because the answer is always math.

(I’m not going to even begin to describe the math involved, because I know I’m not smart enough to do it justice. Ask your local rocket scientist. If you don’t know any rocket scientists, let me know, I’ll put you in touch with mine.)

How do we know they’re right?

How’s this for an answer: Ten years ago, some more really smart scientists figured out where Pluto would be a decade in the future, using that same math. Then, they figured out how to launch a satellite smaller than my car so it would leave Earth, path close enough to Jupiter that Jupiter’s gravity would actually serve as kind of a sling shot to make it speed up, and would arrive at just the right spot at just the right time so it would be able to take pictures of Pluto for the span of about one Earth day.

To put this in perspective, when New Horizons was launched, Pluto was still a planet. If they had gotten any of these calculations wrong, from the speed and path of Pluto, to the speed of the satellite leaving the Earth, to the speed it would pick up from Jupiter, New Horizons would have missed Pluto entirely. Or if the engineers had forgotten to solder a wire, or shield a sensitive piece of equipment, the onboard systems would have failed at some crucial moment and it would have gone dead and NASA would be seeing nothing but the Blue Screen of Death. Instead:

So, to sum up, a group of American scientists shot a camera at Pluto, knowing it would be in just the right spot a decade later, because that’s what math and science allows us to do. Meanwhile, our lawmakers are still trying to decide if Global Warming is a thing. (Spoiler Alert: It is,) Some of them want Creationism taught in high school science class, because Adam and Eve totally hung out with triceratops. And presidents have won debates (and elections) by pretending to be total idiots.

This is driving me crazy!

We seem to have this idea, in this country, that our politicians need to have qualities like, “relatable,” “in-touch with Main Street America,” “approachable,” and of course, have “family values.” (I’m not sure what that last refers to. Resale value, maybe?)

There are a few pretty famous examples in recent years. President Obama is regularly criticized as being too elitist, or of lecturing to people, or of being condescending. At one point during the last presidential election, he was referred to as “a snob” for suggesting that everyone should be able to go to college.

Here in Massachusetts, the Senate race between Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren was full of the same kind of criticism, with Brown accusing Warren of having “is an elitist attitude there in the way she is communicating to us as citizens and telling us how do things, who should be taxed, who should not be taxed." He never hesitated to remind audiences that she was an academic, referring to her constantly as “Professor Warren,” and accused her of having a “way she is approaching things in terms of knowing better than others, how to do things.”

The nerve of some people! How dare she know things, or have an education!

And then there were the criticisms against John Kerry and Al Gore during their presidential runs, both of whom were criticized for not being relatable enough.

When did coming off as an Average Joe become more important for the people leading our nation than being smart and having good ideas?

There is a streak of anti-intellectualism that runs deep through our political system, which seems to favor those who either pretend to be under-educated, or are actually genuinely stupid. In some cases, both. Take, for instance, this nugget from the 2004 election.

That was in response to Kerry explaining that Bush was partial owner of a timber company for tax benefits. And yes, he did own a timber company, and he totally knew it.

Now, allow me to point out that both those guys went to Yale. One came off as intelligent, one as just a regular guy. Which one got elected?

Meanwhile, NASA’s budget is slashed and science is being openly attacked for making awesome (and occasionally depressing) discoveries, while our nation and indeed whole world is facing crises from climate change, emerging disease, and re-emerging diseases. 

And while some would have you think that this is a division between science-minded atheists and religious believers, we have the Pope speaking out about human-driven climate change, so that’s pretty clearly a false dichotomy.

No, our politicians are fighting science because they personally either don’t believe in it, which is worrisome enough, or they believe it but don’t want you to believe it, which might be worse.

So instead of intelligent, rational debate, we end up with ideologies that dictate positions without taking into account things like facts, or research, or the scientific method. Instead of politician asking us to think critically, we have morons telling how they’re going to “shoot from the hip,” “tell it like it is,” and “shoot straight with y’all.”

They are, of course, doing no such thing. And we all know that they’re lying to us. And when they prove to be totally incompetent, we complain about it, but conveniently ignore the fact that we voted them into office in the first place. But the fact that we allow them to do this, to act like morons and treat us like morons, just demonstrates our own complicity in this dance. Every day, we listen to the jabbering of complete and total idiots reciting their opinion, informed only by strict ideological guidelines (capitalism=always good, or oil drilling= always bad), and act like they are saying something worthwhile. They’re not saying anything!

I'm just gonna leave this here.

Perhaps people just don't want to believe that anyone can be smarter than them, that they have all the answers, that they are right, everyone else is wrong, and suck it! Well, I hate to break this to you, but someone out there is smarter than you. And somebody has better ideas than you, no matter how good your ideas are. And if you take the stance that you're always right, at some point, you will be wrong.
But that's not how the choice is presented to us. Partially, this is the media, playing on our need for clear narratives (Us vs. Them), and partially this is politicians, using clever short-hand to speak opinions that they know their constituents share without saying them aloud ("states rights," for example, doesn't sound racist and bigoted at all, does it?). But mostly, it's our own fault, for allowing this kind of go-nowhere, accomplish-nothing politicizing to go on in the first place! The world doesn't fall neatly into 2 categories; we are not conservative and liberal, or whatever. Rather, we are a nation uniquely built on a framework of argument. We are built on two contradictory principles: Liberty and Equality. In a nation of absolute Liberty, no one would be equal, because some people would be actively prevented from achieving, and ultimately exploited, and would have no recourse against those who basically wanted to do whatever they wanted. But in a fully equal society, liberty is taken away, and no one is allowed to achieve based on their own hard work and perseverance. The Constitution was framed to give us the means to have debates on where within the spectrum of Liberty and Equality we as a people choose to fall at a certain time, recognizing that where we choose to fall will shift over time.

Debates between two sides, as opposed to two immutably ideals; that was the intention of this country. 

Now, we have the opposite: gridlock without compromise, and leaders choosing to be ignorant of the damage they are doing to our country by their own stupidity and stubbornness.

We can do better than this. We have to do better than this! I want political leaders who are smarter than me! There, I said it. If you’re going to run my country, you damn well better be able to think for yourself and make informed decisions!

I want a candidate who (for example) believes human activity is causing massive and dangerous changes to the environment, who believes that life on this planet evolved from single-cell organisms and we share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, who believes in medicine, vaccinations, the heliocentric model of the solar system, quantum mechanics (but who doesn’t misuse quantum jargon to justify pseudoscience), who is willing to try new things, based on rigorous, evidence-based research, and who is willing to try something else if new research comes along.  I don’t care if they think Pluto’s a planet. A little disagreement is a good thing.

We can all do this, we can all vote for someone smarter than us.

(Caveat: Being incredibly smart does not automatically exclude the possibility of being incredibly stupid. People are complex creatures, and we are often capable of being both at the same time.)

But I still believe that if we all do this, if we all stand up and demand better of our politicians, if we insist that they not pander to the lowest common denominator or treat us like we’re stupid, we can turn things around. Those guys that did the math to fire a rocket and pass within a few thousand kilometers of Pluto? Those are the guys I want working on our budget.

Elections are coming up. Local, state, national, presidential. For all of these, I say, vote!

But don’t vote your ideology.

Instead, Vote Smarts!

Really, we’ve got nothing to lose.

What the Hell is Corned Beef, And Why Am I Eating It?

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone! 

‘Tis a day to honor Ireland’s most venerated and holy saint by wearing green and drinking to excess.  ‘Cause that’s just how we roll.

Slainte!

And by “we,” I mean Irish-Americans.  Or, rather, Americans, really of any descent. Strangely, this is a tradition that doesn’t have much traction in other countries, like, say, Ireland, where they insist on honoring this saint’s day by, y’know, going to church.

Yes, St. Patrick’s Day, as we know it, is as American as apple pie.  (Maybe more.  I have no idea how American apple pie really is.)  The holiday as we know it in this country was created as a way to express pride in Irish heritage, particularly at times when Irish immigrant minorities in cities were not feeling the love from Anglo-Americans.  (You may not know this, but the Irish and British have not traditionally demonstrated much mutual respect toward each other.  To say the least.)

Today, St. Patrick’s Day has been embraced by Americans of Irish descent, or dubious Irish descent, and is accepted and even enjoyed by Americans of any ancestry.  Which is why so many people across our country, myself included, will be sitting down to a dinner of corned beef and cabbage.

So what the hell is corned beef, anyway?

Well, the first thing that corned beef is NOT is a traditional Irish food.

Ireland has traditionally produced a good amount of beef, including corned beef, which is something of a staple in British cuisine, but the cows, the land they grazed on, and the meat they produced has, until the last century, been owned largely by English land-owners, the meat being exported to Britain, and too expensive for the majority of Irish to afford.

No, corned beef entered the Irish culinary scene only after huge numbers of poor Irish fled Ireland and landed on the East Coast of the United States.

Corned beef, you see, is made from beef brisket, a fairly tough cut of beef, deemed by most as inferior and therefore cheap.  The trick with brisket is in the preparation. One method involved either brining or salting the beef, often with different spices, similar to pickling spices.  Now, “corn” is not what you think it is.  The word “corn” doesn’t refer to what we call corn (which is actually maize) but rather refers to seeds, and was often used interchangeably with the word “grain.”  Because of the seeds present in the pickling or brining of the beef, it was referred to as “corned.”  Thus, corned beef.  Preparing it in this way, followed by a long cooking time, usually boiled, because what the hell else did poor Irish immigrants have to cook it in besides water, makes the meat much more delicious than it would have been.

Corned beef is, therefore, not Irish food, but rather immigrant food.  This is likewise why it shows up in the cuisine of other immigrants who came in large numbers to American cities in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and why corned beef and its smoked cousin pastrami are staples of any good Jewish deli.  Add in potatoes and cabbage, also both cheap foods that you can make a lot out of, and you have the history of poor immigrants and their struggle for both survival and identity in a foreign land that largely hated them, all right there in one pot.  Because they usually didn’t have more than one pot.

What these early Irish immigrants did was no different than what other immigrant groups, like Italians or Mexicans, have also done, which is to take a fairly minor person or event, and conflate their importance to that of a national figure, and in doing so help create a unified cultural identity.  By making a big deal out of this one guy, they eventually got non-Irish and non-Catholics on board with legitimizing this part of their culture.  It’s kind of what Americans have always done.

It doesn’t matter that St. Patrick wasn't Irish, Columbus might not have been Italian, or Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s Independence Day.  These are moments of culture unity, that help us, as a nation, remember that this nation was founded by immigrants, for immigrants.  And we need to celebrate that immigrant past even as we find a way to embrace the new cultures coming into our country every day.

So here's to the Irish!  Now sit back, relax, have some corned beef, and drink a beer.  (But please, don’t drink the green beer.)

And have a very happy Evacuation Day!