Everything that is wrong in journalism

In the lefty blogs that I read, there is a school of media criticism that refers to the Washington pundits as "the Village." The term is meant to convey the myopic, small town character of a society made up of a few thousand politicians, journalists, and "informed sources." reporters in the Village measure events primarily through the lens of how those events affect the Village. The intrinsic value of political discourse and decisions and how they affect the rest of the country and world comes in a distant second.

One aspect of this is that, to Villagers, manners matter far more than substance. Look, for example, at last week's state dinner: while the president hosted the prime minister of the world's second most populous country and one of its fastest growing economies, the Village press was most concerned with who was or was not on the guest list and on a couple of self-promoting gate crashers. Pundits columns often belong more on the society page than beside serious political reporting.

Other aspects of reporting by Villagers are their double standards for covering the parties (political parties, that is, not Village soirees) and their backwards looking introspection. For an example of these faults, this week's Newsweek gives us Jon Meacham's latest column entitled "Why Dick Cheney Should Run in 2012." I don't need to tell you my opinion of Cheney 2012; I'm sure you all know what that is. Let's focus on what Meacham thinks is important for 2012.

I think we should be taking the possibility of a Dick Cheney bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 more seriously, for a run would be good for the Republicans and good for the country. (The sound you just heard in the background was liberal readers spitting out their lattes.)

Meacham made a funny. You see, liberals are nothing more than a bunch of effete, latte sippers. It's always funny to make fun of liberals.

Why? Because Cheney is a man of conviction...

But not a man who has been convicted, a perpetual source of disappointment to us latte sippers. Okay, I made a funny too. Seriously folks, why does conviction matter? We should be far more concerned about what Cheney's convictions are. The Village school of journalism cares more about whether or not their comic book characters have a steely jaw than whether those characters are superheros or supervillains. When picking a president we should be informed more about the latter.

... [who] has a record on which he can be judged, and whatever the result, there could be no ambiguity about the will of the people. The best way to settle arguments is by having what we used to call full and frank exchanges about the issues, and then voting.

Why would merely having Cheney run for president change the way we hold elections in this country? Why would the press suddenly become interested in a full and frank exchange about the issues if Cheney was on the ballot. Meacham doesn't say.

A campaign would also give us an occasion that history denied us in 2008: an opportunity to adjudicate the George W. Bush years in a direct way.

Because the most important issue in 2012 will be looking back to the Bush years to find out what people thought about them. Is that the issue that we most need to have a "full and frank exchange" about?

Historically the country has tended to muddle through somewhere between the extremes of right and left. There is often much virtue in conducting public life by fits and starts. When things drift too far one way in ideological terms, Americans are pretty good about tugging them back to the middle. ... Given Cheney's views, even conservatives who dislike him or think it is time to open a new chapter might give the possibility another thought, for it seems much more likely that Cheney would pull Obama to the right than that Obama would pull Cheney to the left.

Why would this be a good thing? Because it makes conservatives happy, or because it's always good when Democrats try to be more like Republicans? Even as the Republican Party is careening off into black helicopter land, Meacham thinks it would be "good for the Republicans and good for the country" to drag the Democrats to the right. To what end? Just to make liberals spit their lattes? Does he think the country needs to move further to the right?

This is Village reporting at its most typical. It'd fun to insult liberals. When the Republican Party has been taken over by extremists who wouldn't even have been allowed in the party a few years ago, the realignment that's best for the country is for Democrats to move to the right. The most important issue that the he can foresee in the next election is a navel-gazing expedition into our feelings for villagers of the past.

I do agree with Meacham about one thing; we need a full and frank exchange about the issues. I just don't think we're going to get it from Meacham and the Villagers.

Bad history - Christian nation edition

Facebook is promoting a poll today that reads, "Obama said we are not a Christian nation. Do you agree?" The results--45% yes, 55% no--are alarming, but probably confused. I think some people who were thinking "we are not a Christian nation" might have voted "No" instead of the correct "Yes" we are not, with the Christian nationalists suffering the reverse confusion. It is possible that the results are right--Facebook poll takers are only a little less conservative than AOL poll takers--but the comments seem to running in the opposite direction at the moment, so I'm voting for confusion.

As might be expected, the comments are just as confused as the polling. This exchange shows bad history on both sides. Sharon Bland takes the Christian nationalist side.

This country was founded by Quakers and its laws are based on that quaker faith. Therefore this is a Christian country.

Um, Sharon? Quakers didn't found this country. They founded Pennsylvania long before this country was founded and long after Virginia and the Plymouth colony were founded. Besides, if we want to define what this country by the intentions of the first settlers, then we would have to say that this country is a British colony. Fortunately, we have Calvin Yeager to set Sharon straight>

No, they didn't. Teddy Roosevelt put "God" in the anthem to scare off Communists. You need to go back to Grade School.

Sigh. Let's go through this one at a time. We didn't have a national anthem when Teddy Roosevelt was president. No one has ever changed the lyrics to the "Star Spangled Banner." If we want to talk about adding "God" to something to tweak the Communists, that would be the Pledge of Allegiance (something that was written by a Socialist) which was changed during Eisenhower's tenure. Most Communists are made of sterner stuff than to run away from the mere word "God." There were also no Communists when TR was president. All of the Marxist Parties called themselves Socialists or Social Democrats until the Russian Revolution. TR's big bugaboo was Anarchists. Did I miss anything?

I'm not saying that both sides are equally misinformed. For the most part, the Christian nationalists spout a lot more nonsense that the secularists do.

It doesn't matter that the majority of Americans call themselves some sort of Christian. It doesn't matter whether the majority of the founding fathers called themselves some sort of Christian. The Constitution says we are a secular country. Our treaties say we are a secular country. The law says we are a secular country. The courts say we are a secular country. We are no more a Christian nation than we are a white nation. The majority is not entitled to a special position in America. Cows outnumber us three to one, that doesn't make us a nation of cattle. In America we do not merely tolerate minorities. Minorities are part of our society, part of our culture, and part of our national identity. Minorities have the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities as the majority. To say otherwise is un-American.

Fun fact

The first Thanksgiving was not followed by a big Christmas sale down at the mall.

How to avoid 2012

You could just skip the movie. That's always an option, but boycotting the movie won't save you from the real 2012. I've given this some thought and I think I have a workable solution. If the leaders of all the world's nations cooperate and put together a Manhattan Project like effort, we can adopt a new calendar before 2012.

There are many ways we could approach it. We could jump straight from 2011 to 2013. It would be disorienting but it's been done. We survive changing our clocks for daylight savings time every year. When Europe went from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar people had to jump over almost two weeks, but they made it. Another possibility is that we could reverse the calendars and start counting down. This too has a precedent. The last time they reversed the calendars, there were naysayers ("Count up? That's crazy talk!") and disorientation ("What do mean this is year one? I though last year was year one!"), but they got over it. Admittedly, we face far more powerful entrenched interests today than they did during either of those changes. Even though Big Calendar and the organizers of the London Olympics will do everything they can to frustrate us, I think we could come to an understanding with them. If we can bail out General Motors, we can bail out Hallmark. London can be given the prestige of having the first Olympics of the new era.

If we all work together, we can make it through this. Remember, if there is no 2012, there can be no 2012.

I was wrong... about bacon

For months, I've been warning anyone who will listen that we've reached peak bacon; the bacon bubble is about to burst. If you want to keep your hipness cred with the kids, it's time to get out of bacon find the next big thing. And zombies or sulky, sexy vampires are not it; they've also peaked.

I'm still right about zombies and vampires, but it looks like I was wrong about bacon. Bacon still has a few tricks up its tasty, tantalizing sleeve.

Technology has given us a lot lately. The car. TV. X-rays. The refrigerator. The Internet. Heck, we even cured polio. But what have our envelopes tasted like for the last 4,000 years? Armpit, that's what.

Really, people? If we can't overcome this kind of minor technical challenge, it's only a matter of time until some super-advanced race of aliens with lasers, spaceships and a delicious federal mail system comes down and colonizes the world. And nobody wants that (except for the aliens, of course).

So, after thousands of years and kajillions of horrible tasting envelopes licked, we're happy to report that J&D's Bacon-Flavored Mmmvelopes™ are here to save the day. No longer will envelopes taste like the underside of your car. You can enjoy the taste of delicious bacon instead.

That's right, bacon. It's not real bacon, mind you, so you won't have to start storing your envelopes in the refrigerator. But it really does taste like bacon. Which is what you really wanted in the first place, isn't it? And it only took us 4,000 years to get there. Eat that, alien invaders.

Bacon - not dead yet (source)

They came from Uranus

David Brooks deserves some kind of award for his use of a tired metaphor:

But deep in the bowels of the G.O.P., there are serious people having quiet conversations.

These are the people who are looking to save the Republican Party> Brooks doesn't make it clear whether these serious people will come exploding out the bowels with their ideas or whether their plans will trickle out of the bowels one fetid detail at a time. We can be assured, however, that these bowel-hatched ideas will make all of us unserious people go "eewwww" when we are finally exposed to them.

Feel free to insert your own scatological humor in the comments.

Math is not his strong suit

Jim DeMint has decided to revive an idea that was dumb when Gingrich made it part of his Contract with America fifteen years ago and which is still dumb today. The dumb seems to a bit infectious, as this Hill piece by Jordan Fabian shows.

A Republican senator on Tuesday introduced a Constitutional amendment that would mandate term limits for all federal lawmakers.

Sen. Jim DeMint's (R-S.C.) amendment would limit House members to three terms and senators to two terms. Every lawmaker then could serve no longer than six years in Congress.

Um, Jordan, I hate to break this to you, but two six year Senate terms amounts to twelve years, not six. The text of the amendment also has no restriction on Representatives going on to the Senate after finishing their three terms in the House, meaning lawmakers could serve up to eighteen years in congress.

Today hasn't been a good day for the three Rs in journalism.

Somewhere, Noah Webster silently weeps

From Politico:

"Few political observers or elected officials doubt that an energized GOP has a headwind at its back."

Pointed out by TPM.

Where's my mammelephant?

It seems that there is a rule that all news stories about woolly mammoths be framed around two questions: "what killed the mammoths" and "when will we be able to clone some new ones?" The answers are "bad luck" and and "not yet." Knowing the answers hasn't been enough to stop the endless repetition of the two questions.

There never can be a completely definitive answer to the first question. Even a written confession by the hunter who shoved a spear into the last mammoth leaves room for us to question whether that really was the last mammoth or if he just thought it was. We can never completely rule out the possibility that aliens vacuumed up most of the mammoths and left that poor hunter to take the blame. Uncertainty is is an inescapable part of all historical sciences. We've learned to live with it and so should you.

The second question has some interesting possibilities. Even if we never manage to do it, the "not yet" answer can stand forever. Just as we must allow that there is a vanishingly small, but never quite vanished, chance that even the most ridiculous explanation is possible in history, we must also allow that, in technology, the impossible is only impossible because we're not doing it right. There is always a remote chance that new information or a new philosophical approach will show that everything we believe is wrong and that yesterday's "obviously, it's impossible" is tomorrow's "I can't believe they were so blind." We have already cloned living animals and living animals from frozen cells. In theory, that means the biggest problem in cloning a mammoth should be finding some intact cells to clone.

Image source.
Mammoths could be revived in two ways. The first is simple in vitro fertilization. If we find a mammoth testicle (presumably attached to a mammoth, but you never know) that has a few sperm cells in it that were undamaged by freezing, we can use those sperms to fertilize an egg from an Indian elephant (genetically, the closest relative to a mammoth). We then impregnate the elephant and she carries the mammoth to term. The resulting baby is not really a mammoth, but rather a mammoth-elephant hybrid. With more mammoth sperm, we can impregnate the hybrid and produce ever more mammothy hybrids. Of course, if we are still working from our original supply of mammoth sperm, the hybrids will become increasingly inbred. In time we will have almost pure mammoth, but they will be really stupid.

The other plan is true cloning. For this we can use any cell from a mammoth. We remove the nucleus from the cell and use it replace the nucleus of an egg cell from an Indian elephant. We start the cell dividing by electrically or chemically shocking it. We then place the mammoth blastocyst in an elephant surrogate mother who gives birth to a genetically pure mammoth eighteen months later. Two variations on this method involve building our own mammoth DNA to place in the nucleus of an elephant egg. This is done by reassembling the fragments of DNA that we normally find in frozen mammoth tissue or by going over an elephant genome and modifying all 400,000 places where it differs from a mammoth genome.

As much as I would love to have my own pet mammoth, I know I will never see one. The big flaw in both plans is that we have never found any type of mammoth cells that weren't damaged by freezing, let alone fertile mammoth sperm. The two variants on plan B involve a level of genetic manipulation that is beyond our ability at the moment. Technologies of that sort always turn out to be harder to achieve than the sounded in theory. We probably will be able to assemble DNA bit by bit someday, but I strongly doubt I will live to see them assembling extinct animals using that method.

Some people worry about the ethics of recreating a mammoth. The mammoth's world is gone. The environment in which it flourished has vanished. I don't mean the ice age. Woolly mammoths evolved several ice ages ago and survived through several interglacial periods similar to the one we are living through today. What's missing is the mammoth steppe, the Arctic grassland that sustained mammoths. I'm less worried about that. Colombian mammoths lived in environments similar to those still found in parts of North America. Woolly mammoths should be able to adopt to one of those. If they can't, it is possible to recreate the mammoth steppe. For over twenty years, a Russian wildlife biologist, Sergey Zimov has been doing just that at a reserve in the northeastern corner of the Sakha Republic (that's Yakutia to you Risk players). The plan is, that by recreating an animal assemblage made up of analogs of the animals that lived there during the Pleistocene, the animals will do the work of selecting plants until the mammoth steppe has been recreated. Beyond simply being an interesting experiment, Zimov's Pleistocene park has the very real application of serving as a refuge for Asian animals that are endangered in their current range. Candidates include saiga antelope, Tibetan antelope, Amur leopard, and the Siberian tiger.

There is final reason why I'm quite sure I will never see a mammoth. Even if we manage to produce a genetically correct, living mammoth using one of these methods, it still will not be a real mammoth. Animals are a product of their environment. Genetics is only one factor in making an animal. Zimov's Pleistocene park ecology will only approximate the real thing. However, I won't make too much of a fuss over that. The mammoth steppe wasn't unchanging. Pleistocene park is close enough. My objection is that, however genetically correct a reconstructed mammoth is, and however close its environment is to the original, the nurture part of the nurture vs. nature equation can never be replaced. A reconstructed mammoth will have to be raised by an elephant. However well intentioned the elephant is, she can only teach the mammoth how to be a mammoth. Without time travel, we can never have a real mammoth; we can only have an almost-mammoth.

Not that I would turn one down.

Note: I was inspired to write this after reading a nice post that Brian Switek wrote about the first great mammoth cloning controversy. Go read it.

Wake up America!

More terrorism:

A 40-year-old engineer who was dismissed from his job two years ago returned to his former workplace in downtown Orlando, Fla., on Friday morning and opened fire, killing one person and shooting five others, the authorities said. A police SWAT team detained the man, who was identified as Jason S. Rodriguez...

Rodriguez. The name tells all we need to know. Another Catholic extremist has been allowed to infiltrate our engineering services and wage "crusade" against the American people. Their medieval religion has no respect for democracy and American values. They have no loyalty to America. Their fanatical religious leaders, called "bishops," seek to undermine our system of government by controlling every facet of their primitive followers lives, including how they vote. Americans died bringing freedom to Catholics in 1945 and this is the thanks we get. Our leaders in Washington need to stop worrying about whether they like us in Rome and start doing what needs to be done to keep America safe. Michelle Malkin is right; we need to stop being so politically correct and reconsider the wisdom of internment.