so I came down to crash and burn your beggars banquet

The Family: A secret conspiracy of religious fundamentalists, who use their unequaled access to American politicians to meet in secret with overseas dictators, sounds like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel. If true, or if masquerading as truth, then one would expect to find it in a photocopied zine left in a punk rock cafe or an Allston laundromat. Not in a well-researched book, excerpts of which have appeared in Harper’s and Rolling Stone. Not by a man who’s met this conspiracy in the flesh.

But such a book is Jeff Sharlet’s The Family. And such a conspiracy is … well, the Fellowship is such a loose grouping of interconnected “prayer cells” that it’s tough to give them a single name. Founded in 1935 by Norwegian missionary Abraham Vereide, it started as a means to create a solid anti-union, anti-communist front – in the name of Jesus – on America’s west coast. It has grown since then: a faith that does not target congregations but “key men” in places of high power. Since Vereide’s directive that his brothers “submerge the institutional image” of the Family in 1966, they have had no formal status. It’s hard to call a faith that builds no megachurches, sponsors no protests, and does nothing public except run the National Prayer Breakfast a “fundamentalist conspiracy.”

And yet many of the Watergate co-conspirators, including Chuck Colson and James McCord, were members of the Fellowship. Gerald Ford prayed in a secret prayer cell with them. William Rehnquist led the Family’s bible study for federal judges. Figures attacked by controversy, such as James Watt and Clarence Thomas, have absconded to the Family’s private retreat – the Cedars – to avoid the public eye. Reagan and Bush Sr praised the Family for its secrecy and diplomatic efforts. Paul Temple, former Exxon executive, helps support the Family through generous donations. The Fellowship was instrumental in arranging the Camp David accords in 1978 and the Congo/Rwanda talks in 2002. Senators Hillary Clinton, Sam Brownback and John Ensign, as well as Congressman Chip Pickering and Gov. Mark Sanford have all relied on the Family for moral guidance, if not diplomatic cachet. And this is a short list.

What makes the Family so successful, if not so sinister, is that they’re not obvious in their fundamentalism. They don’t have much use for the Bible beyond the New Testament, and even that they don’t memorize. They don’t build a lot of churches. They don’t write op-eds opposing gay marriage. What they have done, rather, is quietly command the ear of every President since Eisenhower, the most powerful men in both houses of Congress, the occasional Supreme Court Justice, and many American diplomats abroad.

Their explicit goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian nation, and thereby the world into a Christian planet. Or not Christian, rather, but Christ-loving. As Sharlet makes clear, the Fellowship does not believe in the idea of Christianity so much as they worship Christ the man: God made flesh, the ultimate source of power in human form. And in spreading God’s power around the world, they have funneled money and U.S. aid to some of the 20th Century’s worst dictators, including Mohammed Siad Barre, Suharto and Gustavo Alvarez Martinez.

Sharlet doesn’t spend the entire book on the Family (though he could). He spends a lot of time digging into America’s religious history: its Pilgrim founding, its revivals and hysterias, its itinerant preachers and urban megachurches. Secular observers, Sharlet claims, look at events like the Great Awakening or the Scopes Monkey Trial as outliers – bursts of fundamentalism that flare up and die down in time. Sharlet asserts, to the contrary, that the periods of secular culture are the outliers. America is and always has been a fundamentalist nation. Americans want to feel their religion, not be guided by it. And by tapping into that need for a strong, emotional faith, and delivering it to key men in Washington, the Family has succeeded where generations of grass roots efforts have failed. Their hand is on the wheel.

april, come she will

I forgot my camera battery when going to Mia and Bob’s wedding in Dublin, NH this Saturday. So now I have to weblog about it to remember it at all. It’s not my fault.

• Rachel V. and Steve were kind enough to give me a ride up. We listened to Steve’s XM radio and Rachel’s extra-danceable iPod playlist.

  “Was nu-metal a reaction to the … flamboyance of hair bands?” Rachel asked at one point.
  “I thought nu-metal was a reaction to grunge,” I chimed in from the back seat.
  “And grunge to hair bands,” Steve finished.
  “Only one way to settle this,” I concluded, digging out my cell phone to call Fred Durst. Still hasn’t got back to me.

• “Who are you texting?” Rachel asked Kevin Q. We stood in the shade around the rustic firepit in Mia’s mother’s backyard.
  “I’m not texting anyone,” he said, not looking up.
  “Then what are–”
  “I’m live-tweeting the wedding.”

• Later, someone waved a copy of the program at Kevin, with its admonition to silence cell phones during the ceremony. To drive the point home, Serpico texted “turn off your phone” just before the ceremony started. Kevin got it and fumed.

• The ceremony, though outdoors, was shaded by the towering trees and aerated by ambient wind. Mia’s uncle, a pastor, conducted the ceremony, giving plenty of advice and insight to the young couple. We sat patiently until told to stand again. I suppose it says something of the secularity of the audience that nobody knew what to do when prompted to “share a sign of peace.” It fell to the lapsed Catholics (like me) to turn and start shaking hands.

• No communion wafers, though. Hell, that’s another, what, fifteen minutes? Twenty?

• Chatting with my favorite EMT, Lynne W., I learned that tall, skinny people are more prone to suffer collapsed lungs. “I wonder if that has any connection to the stabbing pains I feel once every ten months or so when I draw a deep breath,” I speculated.

  “Could be.”

  “Eh, my cross to bear.”

  “Oh, life’s so hard for you tall and slender people.”

  “Exactly; I – hey!”
  

• I got to chat at length with the significant others of my friends: Rachel’s Steve; Michelle McN’s Ben; Kevin’s Shawn. They have an identity outside of their predicate attachment to an existing friend, I discovered. For instance, Ben took up snowboarding after skiing screwed up his knees. He, Haley and I chatted about it in the smoker’s circle near the parked cars. I wasn’t smoking; I just wanted to hang with the cool kids. Like Ben.

  Also, Steve quit smoking, drinking and caffeine a year ago, all on the same day. Neither Vickie nor I could believe it. “I don’t even drink or use caffeine that much, and I don’t smoke,” I told him. “But if a doctor told me those two were killing me, I’d ask, ‘How long do I have?’ ”

• Rode back with a full car – the Serpico/Keoughs and the Smithneys, me snug in the backseat with Claire and Kim^*. We reminisced about childhood indulgences: our favorite books that we devoured a stack at a time, our favorite cartoons, our favorite food. Everyone conceded that everyone at the wedding was cool and that we all need to hang out with them more. Which I plan on.

______________________________
^* All ri-ight.

rule britannia is out of bounds

WALL-E: Another touching and awesome Pixar spectacle. Pixar has mastered animation to the extent that a one-foot robot with only two words in its vocabulary can emote more effectively than most of the stars expected to carry a summer picture today. They’ve mastered comic timing on a level that puts 99% of comedies released today (Mike Myers films, the [Genre] Movie series) to shame. And I’m not the best barometer for tearjerkers, sensitive twit that I am, but very few human actors can move me like Pixar’s wooden toys, fuzzy monsters, colorful fish or rusting robots.

(No, I haven’t seen Up yet; planning on it)

Red Mars: I started this book when I was 14, maybe, got about 100 pages into it, and couldn’t sustain interest. Don’t know why I stuck to my initial judgment for so long – putting too high a premium on my adolescent judgments – but man, was I wrong. Red Mars works on all levels. As a compelling story of social orders in development, Red Mars tells the story of the first permanent colony on Mars – dedicated scientists at constant odds, each with their own vision of utopia that they seek to impose upon a lifeless planet. I also found myself able to follow the hard science aspects to a greater extent than in other sci-fi novels – I got the importance of aerobraking, and moholes, and the Phobos oscillation on the space elevator. So few engineers-turned-authors can make that work for an English major like me.

But above all else, Red Mars tells my favorite story: of how the war between institutions grinds humans in its wake. Red Mars lacks any overt villains. Though the United Nations and the megacorporations that run it draw no real sympathy, they do have a compelling case: they made a significant investment in Mars by getting the colony there, and they want to see that investment recouped. The environmentalists and the terraformers both make solid arguments for their points of view. Even the saboteurs draw the reader in, with their hokey Rousseauvian mysticism.

What else was I wrong about at age 14, I wonder?

Your Religion is False: Asked and answered, I suppose.

Atheists will never gain much traction in the public forum with the cranky attitude that people like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers adopt in talking about faith. The ancient churches of the world have dealt with better (and better armed) vitriol for centuries. But gone are the years when joking about a holy man would get you exiled from your village, or burned at the stake, or eaten by bears. Laughter is a hard weapon to deflect.

Joel Grus puts humor to good use in Your Religion is False, by taking a John Hodgmann-esque look at all of the major world’s religions. He alternates between straight-faced looks at the absurdity of religious doctrine and exaggerations for comic effect:

Conservative Protestants strictly follow three universal principles, all of which revolve around the idea of “I’m sick of the Pope telling me what to do”:

1. “If the Bible says it, I believe it. If the Bible doesn’t say it, I don’t believe it. If the Pope says it, for sure I don’t believe it, unless the Bible says it too, in which case I have to ask my pastor what I think.”
2. “It doesn’t matter how good or evil you are – if you accept Jesus as your savior, you’re going to heaven, and if you don’t you’re going to hell.”
3. “I’m sick of the Pope telling me what to do.”

The first causes all sorts of problems, as it forces Conservative Protestants to believe that the world is only 6000 years old, to disbelieve in all sorts of useful science, to insist that one man both built a boat capable of carrying and subsequently discovered two members of every species on Earth (including, apparently, all five million-plus species of beetles), and to assert that pi equals 3. The second causes all sorts of problems, as it has allowed a number of Nixon-era criminals to establish lucrative post-incarceration prison ministries. The third is actually an exceptionally sensible position.

And he devotes attention to just about every religion I’ve heard of, from the obscure (transcendental meditation, Jainism, giant stone head worship) to the institutional (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc). I think this is the book’s greatest strength and the key to its outreach. Every believer thinks that religions other than his own are silly, or false, or harmful, and wouldn’t mind a chance to poke fun at them. Maybe by seeing them juxtaposed with his own beliefs – equally silly in Grus’s eyes – he’ll have cause to rethink them.

Highly recommended. Buy a copy today.

(Disclosure: I advised Joel on certain portions of the book and provided some feedback on an early draft. However, I think you all know me well enough to know that, if I didn’t think this was a genuinely worthwhile book, I’d put off Joel’s persistent requests for a glowing review with a polite passive-aggression until he lost interest or took the hint. I’m that sort of asshole. But I haven’t; it’s legitimately funny)

breathe in, breathe out

As an atheist, rationalist and all-around humorless asshole, I don’t go in for a lot of Eastern mysticism. I don’t think much of reiki. I don’t believe in the healing power of crystals, or cranio-sacral touch, or reflexology. I think ear candling’s a dangerous fraud. I don’t trust acupuncturists or chiropractors.

So you wouldn’t think I’d be big on ki.

Watching Vlad promote to black belt at jiu-jitsu this past Saturday, I took a moment to revisit my thoughts on ki. Vlad’s built like a linebacker – big but fit, in full control of his mass. But he moves with a fluidity that speaks to incredible control over his own body. When Vlad throws you, you don’t feel the tension of exertion behind it. You feel a smooth, continuous projection, like a roller coaster cresting a hill. That’s the kind of energy it takes to toss someone to the ground using only your hands, or to break through a stack of boards with a single chop while kneeling in front of them.

The human body is a pretty efficient machine for directing force into one fine point. Think about it: your body has enough fine control to turn a deadbolt, enough raw power to lift a box of books, enough coordination to ride a bicycle and enough balance to descend a staircase. That’s a remarkable variety of tasks. But too often, if we’re using our body without training, we dissipate that force. We lift heavy boxes by bending at the back instead of the knees, or we try to turn a deadbolt while holding four bags of groceries. Instead of directing our muscles to their most precise use, we let them run wild.

It gets even worse in a fight, when adrenaline ramps up our reflexes. Our arms flail in crazy windmills. We hold our breath, filling our body with tension, and lean forward on our toes as if to spring. We swarm and crush, but we don’t fight effectively. How much better to dispel that tension – forcing your body to relax, directing energy from where it’s wasted (keeping the entire body rigid) to where it’s needed (the hand, the leg, the arm, etc).

Think of the incredible coordination required for Dwight Howard to dunk a ball from nearly the free throw line. Every muscle must be working in unison to that goal alone – legs, torso, arms, hands. He couldn’t pull that off if he just had a powerful jump, or merely had good ball control. It takes athleticism, coordination and practice.

That’s ki. Strip it of the mysticism, and ki is shorthand for the control and awareness of one’s own body that comes with years of practice at a given task. It’s what lets me push away an opponent half again my weight when I couldn’t bench that much, even on steroids. It’s what lets the world’s greatest athletes perform in the clutch. And it’s what carried my friend and fellow instructor Vlad through his black belt test this past Saturday.

Call it what you’ve like, but I’ve seen it. It’s real.

it’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor

I haven’t been religious for more than a decade now. From the day I decided to walk away from religion I’ve never missed it. It fills no essential role in my life, either ethically or logically. I almost forget what it was like to be religious.

But I have noticed one thing missing: the sense of community.

Church, or temple, or the mosque: these are all great places to meet a broad cross-section of neighbors. Consider that the people you see at your place of worship, you might never run into otherwise. They don’t work at your office; they don’t belong to your community pool; they don’t date your friends. But once a weekend, you show up at the same place. You bake stale brownies for the same picnics, assemble the same houses on church retreats to the Appalachians and chaperone the same pool parties. You’re forced to meet people whose paths would never cross yours normally.

Networking like that improves the quality of your life. The broader and stronger your network, the better the type of jobs, perks and friends you’ll find. Oh, you’re in the market for a car? My cousin’s a dealer out in Springfield – he’s been trying to offload some inventory. Or: sixth grade, you said? My daughter just entered sixth grade at that private school up in Clinton; she loves it. And my wife sits on the school board. Let me give you our number.

Religious services work like that, in a way few other groups do, because of the disparate interests they draw in. Other groups – professional organizations, amateur sports teams, bar-hopping circles of friends – can approach that level of networking success, but they can never duplicate it. You need the random-but-not-quite sampling that a faith draws in – people who believe enough in common to talk to each other, but not so much that they have nothing to say.

I’ve been part of like-minded atheist experiments – the Boston Objectivist Network being the most successful – but it’s never quite the same. And I think this is why religious people will enjoy a statistical, and thus political, advantage over the non-religious for decades to come. They have instant networks. They have a voter base – or, more importantly, a movement base – that can easily be tapped into. Atheists do not.

I’m not saying you should join a church you don’t believe in for the free brownies and car washes. But I’m always looking for ways to expand my network.

hit the shore ’cause I’m faded; honeys in the street saying money, yo we made it

Pascal’s Wager is an argument for belief in the Christian God – not proof of its existence, but merely a contention to believe in it – that runs as follows:

[E]ven though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should “wager” as though God exists, because so living has potentially everything to gain, and certainly nothing to lose.

Game theorists might explain the wager using a chart like this:

	God exists	God does not exist
Wager for God	Gain all	Status quo
Wager against God	Misery	Status quo

Already we see one problem – if belief in the Christian God costs us nothing, it also means nothing. You can argue over what a belief in the Christian God requires: consumption of the Eucharist? regular attendance at Sunday Mass? faith alone? faith plus good works? In fact, millions have been arguing this for the last twenty centuries, and millions have died in the arguing. But it strikes me as common sense that belief must entail some behavior that non-believers aren’t doing. There has to be some obvious difference between belief and non-belief. Otherwise, the term “belief” is meaningless.

Okay, the apologist says: belief costs something. But that’s a relatively minor pittance compared to the infinite reward of Heaven. A small price is worth paying if there’s a chance of an infinite payoff.

This bugged me for a while until last night, as I got off the shuttle from work. As usual, I was thinking about gaming.

Consider: I have a die with six sides. You examine it to your satisfaction to prove that it’s not weighted or tricked. If you like, we can substitute a die of your own, provided I get to examine it as well.

I say, “Pay me $5 and I’ll let you roll this die. I’ll pay you whatever number comes up.”

You say, “That’s a sucker bet.”

I say, “But! If you roll a 6, I’ll let you re-roll and add the new number to the total. If you roll a 6 again, I’ll let you roll again. I’ll let you keep doing this as many times as a 6 comes up.”

You say, “Really? I dunno …”

I say, “Come on! A small price is worth paying if there’s a chance of an infinite payoff!”

So you fork over $5 and roll. Ten rolls later, I’m up at least $8, if not more.¹

Pascal’s Wager has a lot of problems, but the biggest is: he never gives you the odds of each outcome. And you never trust a game where they don’t post the odds. Let’s say the Commonwealth of Massachusetts holds a special lottery where the prize is infinite money for life – the ultimate charge card. Should I pay $1 for a ticket? $10? $50,000? Depends on the odds of winning.

The “infinite payoff” of Heaven sounds nice and all, but I don’t know if the odds of the Christian God existing are one in a thousand, one in a trillion or one in ten. And that’s a lot of hours to give up on Sunday if I guessed wrong.

These are the things I think about on the bus.

____________
¹ The average roll on a fair die with six sides is 3.5. The average roll on an exploding die with six sides – meaning, one that lets you re-roll and add on every time you get a six – is 4.2.

like joseph stalin and gandhi

Quick survey: what is the worst thing that someone would have to do or say before you stopped respecting him or her?

If you agreed with a political figure in every way but one, what would that one have to be for them to lose your vote? Abortion? Same-sex marriage? Evolution?

If you idolized a rock star or professional athlete, what’s the one stupid thing they could shout during a performance that would make you throw out their albums? “Keep Britain White“? “We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas?” “You can’t say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them?”

If you had a close friend whom you trusted with your secrets, how abhorrent would their views have to be for you to stop trusting them? Could you disregard a little casual bigotry or social naivete? If they had a BUSH/CHENEY 04 sticker on their bike? Or if they had a NADER sticker?

I’m genuinely curious about people’s limits; I’m not trying to make a point of any sort.

Of those three above, I can only answer the last question. Politics entertain me too much for any one representative to disappoint me. And since I have accused pederasts pedophiles on my iPod and convicted rapists on my DVD shelf I apparently have zero standards there. But I would have a hard time being friends with a proselytizer. Not just someone who believes, and not just someone whose beliefs inform their life choices, but a person who feels obligated to Bear Witness and to Convert. Someone who slipped tracts into my messenger bag, or campaigned to get evolution out of the curriculum. Someone who stood on a street corner and waved signs at drivers. Someone who knew – just deep down in their hearts knew – that I could one day believe.

But enough about me. What gets your goat?

now let’s get it all in perspective

You caught me on a busy day, so just some links to get us started.

First, our nation’s capital has gone under martial law:

D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.

Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.

Though the guys at Cato still aren’t getting any of my money (too many conservatives on their payroll), I do appreciate a good smackdown of National Review as much as anyone:

Andrew McCarthy:If we are detaining such a terrorist, it is because we already know he is a terrorist.

Except when they’re not terrorists.

I love the use of hypertext for irony. I love the era that’s made that possible.

In juvenile delinquency news: I can think of no better way to get children to hate Robert Frost than making them study his poetry as punishment:

More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost’s former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.

Using “The Road Not Taken” and another poem as jumping-off points, Frost biographer Jay Parini hopes to show the vandals the error of their ways – and the redemptive power of poetry.

“I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people’s property in the future and would also learn something from the experience,” said prosecutor John Quinn.

Now granted, vandalizing Robert Frost’s home for a wicked kegger is pretty despicable. I have no sympathy for these punks. But – seriously? You think lecturing them on poetry at gunpoint will strike them as anything but torture?

On the lighter side of things, The Smoking Gun got their hands on Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ concert rider. It’s an insane, hilarious glimpse into the mind of a bizarre man:

3 X MARSHALL VBA BASS AMPLIFIERS: Make sure they’re good ones or we’ll all end up as wormlike web-based life forms in the bass player’s online literary diarrhea. Honestly. He’s like a sort of Internet Pepys or Boswell, except without the gout and syphilis. For all I know.

He works in an ICP diss on the first page too. And there’s 17 more!

For those of you who wondered why I never backed Ron Paul during the early stages of the Republican runoff, Jim Henley explains it better than I can:

The full measure of Paul’s failure isn’t even that he’s not going to be the Republican nominee. It’s that, even since everyone else dropped out of the race but Paul and McCain, he’s still been losing to Mike Huckabee in every state where the Huckster was on the ballot except Pennsyvlania. (Paul was born in Pennsylvania.) Idaho is the only other primary state where he broke 10%. (He hit low double-digits in a few caucus states.) He has 35 delegates by CNN’s reckoning. Huckabee has 275 and Romney 255. With his $30 million in donations, he’s barely breaking the million-bucks-a-delegate mark. That’s ten times the much-ridiculed rate of Mitt Romney.

Paul failed to win any states, to move the GOP debate in his direction, to accrue significant delegates or to leverage his fund-raising into a third-party run. And word is he’s staying quiet about endorsing an independent because he doesn’t want the Congressional GOP leadership to strip him of committee assignments come the fall. Paul accomplished the one thing he’s always been good at: using political appeals to get people to send money. I don’t feel freer.

Finally, if the economics of gas prices baffle you beyond the ability to reason, I suppose prayer is a reasonable response:

unlike the customers rolling up to the station’s pumps this week, resigned to the fact that their wallets were about to take a beating, Rocky Twyman and company had a plan to bring that number tumbling down.

They would ask God to do it.

“Our pockets are empty, but we’re going to hold on to God!” Twyman, a community organizer from Rockville, said as he and seven other people formed a semicircle, held hands and sang, pleading for divine intervention to lower fuel prices.

It was the latest demonstration by Twyman’s movement, Pray at the Pump, which began in April. Since then, he has held group prayers at gas stations as far away as San Francisco, garnering international media attention and even claiming success in at least a couple of cases.

I’d get more irate, but I don’t suppose praying to lower gas prices is any more ridiculous than praying for a cancer patient to get better, or praying for your football team to win, or praying for peace in the Middle East. So who am I to throw stones?

chain chain chain

This week’s links have some games in them:

Budget Hero: a colorful online game that challenges you to balance the budget. First, you assign yourself various badges to reflect your priorities, like Health and Fitness or National Defense or Fiscal Responsibility. Then, you choose which programs you want to expand or cut, in the form of cards to be played. Then you pull the trigger and see how long you can last before the debt becomes unsustainable. Challenging and deep, despite its simple appearance. I submit that the libertarian fantasy of wantonly slashing federal programs might not even be possible, much less realistic. The infrastructure has become tangled with kudzu and it may be tough to clear it.

I’ve been talking about Bayes a lot lately, and not always as clearly as I’d like. Here’s Cory Doctorow, writing on Bayesian probability and terrorist screening, in the Guardian:

Our innumeracy means that our fight against these super-rarities is likewise ineffective. Statisticians speak of something called the Paradox of the False Positive. Here’s how that works: imagine that you’ve got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that’s 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them – because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that’s what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there’s only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your “99% accurate” test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000!

Terrorism is a lot less common than one in a million and automated “tests” for terrorism – data-mined conclusions drawn from transactions, Oyster cards, bank transfers, travel schedules, etc – are a lot less accurate than 99%. That means practically every person who is branded a terrorist by our data-mining efforts is innocent.

In other words, in the effort to find the terrorist needles in our haystacks, we’re just making much bigger haystacks.

You don’t get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It’s something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction. If there’s one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it’s this: teach us how statistics works.

Let’s break up all this depressing political talk with a little alternate universe cosmology:

Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe—hot, dense, homogeneous—is completely different from today’s—cool, dilute, lumpy. The universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.

I hate how the modern news cycle discards stories just as they get interesting: a Texas Appeals court has thrown out the state’s seizure of children from a polygamist compound:

In a ruling that could torpedo the case against the West Texas polygamist sect, a state appeals court Thursday said authorities had no right to seize more than 440 children in a raid on the splinter group’s compound last month.

The Third Court of Appeals in Austin said the state failed to show the youngsters were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court action.

It was not clear when the children – now scattered in foster homes across the state – might be returned to their parents. The ruling gave a lower-court judge 10 days to release the youngsters from custody, but the state could appeal to the Texas Supreme Court and block that.

The decision in one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history was a humiliating defeat for the state Child Protective Services agency. It was hailed as vindication by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who claimed they were being persecuted for their religious beliefs.

Child Protective Services vs. the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I’m honestly not sure who to cheer against here.

I wonder how much worse England would have grown, as a surveillance state, if Orwell hadn’t given us his last name as an adjective. Very few people understand the true dangers of the state described in 1984 – namely, historical revisionism and control of language – but the general thrust, “cameras = bad,” is better than nothing.

I mention this as a prelude to the Home Office’s plan to monitor every single phone call and e-mail sent in the UK:

A Home Office spokesman said: “The Communications Data Bill will help ensure that crucial capabilities in the use of communications data for counter-terrorism and investigation of crime continue to be available.

“These powers will continue to be subject to strict safeguards to ensure the right balance between privacy and protecting the public.”

The spokesman said changes need to be made to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 “to ensure that public authorities can continue to obtain and have access to communications data essential for counter-terrorism and investigation of crime purposes”.

But the Information Commission, an independent authority set up to protect personal information, said the database “may well be a step too far” and highlighted the risk of data being lost, traded or stolen.

Assistant information commissioner Jonathan Bamford said: “We are not aware of any justification for the state to hold every UK citizen’s phone and internet records. We have real doubts that such a measure can be justified, or is proportionate or desirable.

“Defeating crime and terrorism is of the utmost importance, but we are not aware of any pressing need to justify the government itself holding this sort of data.”

Let’s break up the depressing news with some photographs.

Here’s some wedding photography, taken during last week’s 7.9 quake in China:

Finally, the Economist does some math:

Data centres consumed 0.6% of the world’s electricity in 2000, and 1% in 2005. Globally, they are already responsible for more carbon-dioxide emissions per year than Argentina or the Netherlands, according to a recent study by McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Uptime Institute, a think-tank. If today’s trends hold, these emissions will have grown four-fold by 2020, reaching 670m tonnes. By some estimates, the carbon footprint of cloud computing will then be larger than that of aviation.

I’m innately leery of any figure that arises from predicting 12 years worth of trends. But a “peak server” crash could be just as bad as a peak oil crash. Having a 1980 volume of oil in 2020 would be terrible; having a 1980 level of computing power in 2020 would fuck us. Hard.

I think his name was Chips Ahoy

Links for breakfast:

Jesus Made Me Puke: Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone goes undercover at a Texas megachurch’s “Encounter Weekend.” The text speaks for itself:

“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?” He paused. “There are some people out there who will tell you it’s genetics. It’s in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it’s not genetics. It’s a generational curse!”

Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. “Take homosexuals,” he said. “Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created — by pedophiles.”

The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world: Once a preacher says it, it’s true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a “rod of iron” to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in Ezekiel he was citing — but the audience ate it up anyway. When they’re away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That’s because they know that their audience doesn’t give a shit. So long as you’re telling them what they want to hear, there’s no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.

A team of twenty of the world’s leading scientists wouldn’t be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.

Hillary Clinton Rejects Science, Reasoning:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Can you name one economist, a credible economist who supports the [gas tax] suspension?

CLINTON: Well, you know, George, I think we’ve been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven’t worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans. From the moment I started this campaign, I’ve said that I am absolutely determined that we’re going to reverse the trends that have been going on in our government and in our political system, because what I have seen is that the rich have gotten richer. A vast majority — I think something like 90 percent — of the wealth gains over the last seven years have gone to the top 10 percent of wage earners in America.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?

CLINTON: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.

Couple this with her support for the autism/vaccination link and we finally have the pure Anti-Science candidate that this country has been aching for since its inception.

(I kid, of course – none of them are that great)

Bridging the gap between mathematics and civil liberties, Radley Balko talks about the problem of DNA databases. Knowing that a test has a 99.9996% (or whatever) accuracy rate does not tell you all you need to know – you also need to know the actual incidence of what’s being tested for within the population. Few people know that. Hell, I still need to remind myself from time to time. Bayes’ Theorem in action.

Let’s say the U.S. adopts a Great Britain policy on collecting DNA–basically a move toward, at some point in the future, having DNA on file for everyone in the country. Well now the 1 in 1.1 million odds against the suspect in the L.A. Times case are being run against a database of 380 million people. The numbers say that you’re going to pull up about 345 matches in the U.S. alone. In the California case, the database is obviously much smaller than the entire U.S. population, and only one of those 345 people showed up from the 330,000-person FBI DNA database–the (admittedly unsympathetic) subject of the article. But any of the other 344 potential matches in the U.S. (or the 2,200 matches worldwide) could have committed the crime. They just weren’t in the database.

To put it another way: if I run an anabolic steroids test with 99% accuracy in a nursing home with 400 residents, I’m going to get at least 4 positive results. Does this mean that 4 octogenarians shoot themselves in the butt with parabolan every morning? Probably not.

Finally, for all my cheerleading about globalization, it helps to have a saner mind like IOZ put me right once in a while:

So, you know, on one hand “there were once nation-states,” but now there are “dynamos like India and China,” which are, what, anarchoprimitive agricollectives? The idea that some sort of stateless transnational borderless economic singularity is swiftly ripping away borders like stagehands rip up gaff tape on load-out is plain kooky. I am of course for the free movement of labor and capital. Call me the next time you hit Charles de Gaulle, or Beijing Capital International Airport for that fucking matter, without a passport. I’m just saying.