When applying the Rational Basis standard of review, the Court seems to be giving the government ever-wider freedom to act as it sees fit, without any meaningful check from the judiciary. In 1949, Justice Jackson’s concurrence in Railway Express v. New York lauds the “salutary doctrine that cities, states and the Federal Government must exercise their powers so as not to discriminate between their inhabitants except upon some reasonable differentiation fairly related to the object of regulation.”

  In 1973, the Court said that a suspect classification would be “examined to determine whether it rationally furthers some legitimate, articulated state purpose.” San Antonio Independent School Dist. v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 1, 17 (1973).

  By 1980, United States Railroad Retirement Bd. v. Fritz saw Justice Rehnquist proclaiming that “where, as here, there are plausible reasons for Congress’ actions, our inquiry is at an end.” The Court no longer required that the actual reason for a law be rational. Rather, any sufficiently convincing post hoc justification that could be conceived of would suffice.

  In 1993, the Court in FCC v. Beach gave up all pretense of oversight, and instead placed the burden on litigants challenging a discriminatory law “to negate every conceivable basis which might support it.” One pictures competing attorneys filling up notebooks with possible justifications and counterarguments. If the government attorney manages to think of just one more than the challenger, it’s a check in the win column.

  The Court has done a neat job of ruling itself into a corner. When the Court found that the challenged Amendment in Romer v. Evans was discriminatory and motivated purely by hatred for homosexuals, the Court had to bludgeon the Rational Basis standard into a nearly unrecognizable state to enable it to strike the Amendment down. Critics who say that the Court was actually engaging in a stricter review are right. Unfortunately, the Court had very little choice. The Rational Basis standard has so little practical power to invalidate a law that the Court had to choose between dressing Intermediate Scrutiny in a hand-me-down Rational Basis t-shirt, or declaring sexual orientation a quasi-suspect classification and granting it the automatic protection of that stricter standard.

  Comparisons to the sexist reasoning in Muller v. Oregon immediately spring to mind. Again, the Court granted a much-needed protection, while (albeit a tad more subtly) endorsing intolerance toward the class it was protecting by upholding a particular discriminatory perception, namely that sexual orientation is a voluntary, rather than immutable, characteristic.

  All of that was the long way around to the following question; can the Rational Basis standard of review possibly get any more deferential? Is the chance to argue about the justification for the challenged legislation a certain thing, or will we see a day where the Court will simply deny certiorari if the government’s list of justifications is longer than the challenger’s list of arguments against them?

The Order of the Stick has a touching tribute to the recently deceased E. Gary Gygax, the founding father of the modern roleplaying game. If I were designing an afterlife, there would definitely be a place for a man whose work brought such joy to so many.

Arthur C. Clarke, technological prophet and pillar of science fiction, is himself now indistinguishable from magic.

As part of its Expelled Exposed project, the National Center for Science Education tackles that tired creationist argument, irreducible complexity. If you’re not familiar with this line of reasoning, it basically goes like this:

“I can’t imagine how [COMPLEX ANATOMICAL STRUCTURE] could possibly have evolved from simpler structures, without any deliberate guidance. Therefore, relying only on my own ignorance as evidence, I conclude that [COMPLEX ANATOMICAL STRUCTURE] must have been conjured up fully formed by a benevolent sky-grandpa.”

Luckily for the poor, misguided creationist, there are plenty of scientists who can imagine, and describe in great detail, the intermediate stages and slow development that led to the current version of [COMPLEX ANATOMICAL STRUCTURE]. In the video below, they demystify the development of perhaps the favorite target of the irreducible complexity argument, the eye. Enjoy.

I’ve been a video game geek for most of my life. It started in the Seventies with Space Port, a local hangout in the Mall for kids with an excess of time, energy, and quarters. My parents bought a Magnavox Odyssey for family fun. It had FOUR games, and they were all variants on PONG, although they had much catchier names like Tennis, Hockey, Racquetball, and the one I can’t remember.

Because I was an overweight schmuck who thirsted for pixels and eschewed sweat, the Odyssey became the standard for sporting events. When I saw my first tennis match, I was amazed that the players could move toward the net - unbelievable!

After the Odyssey, my parents went with an Atari 2600 instead of the Intellivision system (like the one owned by my friend down the street), and they supplied me with game after game from Atari and Activision. This piqued my interest in game programming, which I tried once or twice on a Commodore 64. This lead to playing bigger and better games, as well as running my own BBS service. I went to college and soon forgot all of that. It wasn’t until I was introduced to Mechwarrior 2’s multi-player options that I got re-hooked into the gaming world.

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A few years ago, I stumbled across an interesting, if bizarre, turn-based strategy game set in space. The goal was to build up colonies, explore, and basically become a sci-fi middle manager. What a perfect opportunity to get my geek on again, years later.

It had been such a long time I had to do a Google search to find the site and see if it still existed. It does, much to my delight! It’s called Galactic Conquest, and clicking my mouse to build and destroy a Galactic Empire has eaten up valuable hours of my life over the past two weeks.

While the membership seems to be down to about 60 or so gamers logged in on average, it is sometimes amusing to watch the real-time scrolling chat as other members talk trash on each other in a way that only the hardest of hardcore geeks can do. (I find myself at quite a loss when it comes to the trash talk.)

It’s a complicated, yet simply run game that just takes up space and time in your browser. No need for any downloads, no payments made (unless you want to pay them, and I have in the past but not yet for this session), no need for hardcore dual Xtreme graphics accelerators with fluid release cooling solutions. None of that is needed for this turn-based game. What is a turn-based strategy game, you may ask? *snort* Noob!

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