Best of the Web Today - December 29, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
Satirists Can't Keep Up
On Monday blogger David Burge published a funny satire titled "Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry." Here's a sample:
Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly "make water spirits angry." . . .
"Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku," explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. . . .
"If not act now, it too late," said report editor Paul Erlich of Stanford University.
Erlich, whose 1978 best seller "Ice Time Come Soon" is widely credited with saving millions of lives by warning of the massive age of glaciation that threatened Earth during the 1980s, said inaction might anger the spirit world further.
"Me not know when Tai-Waku make wrath again," said Erlich. "Me need more grant money."
This is a wonderful spoof of the eco-wackos who've been explaining the tsunami in terms of their pet theories (the topic of a Wall Street Journal editorial yesterday), but that "spirit world" stuff is over the top, right?
Wrong. Believe it or not, today's New York Times carries an article by author Simon Winchester called "The Year the Earth Fought Back," which makes a similar argument, apparently in all seriousness:
In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system--the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.
Mr. Lovelock's notion, which he named after the earth goddess of the Ancient Greeks, makes much of the delicacy of the balance that mankind's environmental carelessness increasingly threatens. But his theory also acknowledges the somber necessity of natural happenings, many of which seem in human terms so tragically unjust, as part of a vast system of checks and balances. The events that this week destroyed the shores of the Indian Ocean, and which leveled the city of Bam [Iran] a year ago, were of unmitigated horror: but they may also serve some deeper planetary purpose, one quite hidden to our own beliefs.
Winchester also notes that this year "has been that of the Monkey," as "the all-too-seismically-aware Chinese will remind us," and therefore it is "generally much prone to terrestrial mischief."
In fairness, Winchester's central point--that there may be connections between seismic events in disparate parts of the world--is a lot more plausible than the notion that "global warming" causes earthquakes. But it is at the very least amusing that the Times, which last month famously published an overwrought op-ed claiming that President Bush's re-election marked "the day the Enlightenment went out," feels the need to tart up some interesting scientific speculation in superstition.
This Just In: Tidal Wave Risk Low in Inland Deserts
"No Tsunami Danger From Local Fault"--headline, Desert Sun (Palm Springs, Calif.), Dec. 28
What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Experts Say Tsunami Warning System Would Have Saved Lives"--headline, Voice of America Web site, Dec. 28
"Experts: Tsunami Kills Few Animals"--headline, Associated Press, Dec. 29
"Experts' Deadly Mistake"--headline, Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland), Dec. 28
Wag the Blog
We'll confess we've had a soft spot for Tom Shales, the Washington Post's TV critic, ever since we appeared with him in a segment on "The O'Reilly Factor" back in September. Boy did he make us look good. But when he gets onto politics, you have to wonder if he really thinks through what he's writing. This is from a year-end roundup of TV news he wrote for Sunday's Post:
Tireless press critics during war or peacetime, the conservatives were handed a valuable new weapon when CBS News fumbled a report detailing the president's shoddy record as a member of the National Guard back in Texas. The report was attacked virtually the moment it aired on "60 Minutes"; documents used to bolster the allegations were condemned by conservative critics as phony and forged, though no forging has yet been proved. . . .
As the year wound down, the Bush administration, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and all their talkative conservative supporters got a surprise of their own. The troops themselves were heard from, and their complaint was not a lack of support from the media but rather from their own leaders. A young soldier stood up at a Rumsfeld appearance in Iraq to complain about the crucial lack of armor for Humvees and other vehicles that are repeatedly targeted by Iraqi insurgents and fanatics.
The story got big play on television, partly because the embarrassing moment was caught on videotape. Could there come a day when media power is concentrated in so few hands that a story could effectively be suppressed?
Blogger "BummerDietz" says Shales made 18 errors in the first paragraph quoted above (though actually No. 3 is just a style disagreement). More interesting, though, is that Shales seems not to realize that the Rather scandal, in which scrappy, independent bloggers exposed mighty CBS's fraudulent story, makes nonsense out of Shales's worry over "media consolidation."
Meanwhile, Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, last seen drawing unfounded conclusions about our religious beliefs, has penned a hysterical attack on PowerLine, which Time magazine named "Blog of the Year" for its pioneering work on the Rather story. "They are Extreme Media. Call them reliable partisan hacks," Coleman froths:
These guys pretend to be family watchdogs but they are Rottweilers in sheep's clothing. They attack the Mainstream Media for not being fair while pursuing a right-wing agenda cooked up in conservative think tanks funded by millionaire power brokers.
They should call themselves "Powertool." They don't speak truth to power. They just speak for power. . . .
Time magazine's "Blog of the Year" is not run by Boy Scouts. It is the spear of a campaign aimed at making Minnesota into a state most of us won't recognize. Unless you came from Alabama with a keyboard on your knee.
PowerLine's John Hinderaker responds far more calmly, in a post titled "A Columnist Nips at Our Ankles." And it's true: Even though Coleman works for a semimajor newspaper owned by one of those fearsome media conglomerates, his attack on PowerLine does have the feel of irrelevant ankle-biting.
Blogs have certainly come a long way since 1959, when, as blogger Joey DeVilla notes, journalist Lois Lane encountered a caveman named Blog. "This Blog!" another caveman explains to Lois, who is stranded with fellow reporter Clark Kent in a land that time forgot. "Blog only unmarried man in tribe! No female will have Blog! But you female prisoner! You must marry Blog when we reach village . . . or you die!" (ellipsis in original).
Lois and Clark escaped, with a little help from Superman. Blog became a tribal hero after Superman taught him how to use a cigarette lighter. "Poor Blog will set fire to many a heart!" observes Clark Kent at the comic's close. And today, 45 years later, lots of females have blogs.
Fetus Don't Fail Me Now
Our item yesterday in which we expressed puzzlement about the difference between a fetus and a baby brought this thoughtful response from reader Andrew Coulson, who blogs as The Gantelope:
When you write about abortion, it isn't clear whether you really fail to understand the abortion rights position, or you are simply feigning ignorance as a rhetorical device. If it's the former, I'd like to answer your question on the difference between a fetus and an infant.
Many supporters of abortion rights consider self-ownership to be the most elementary and inviolable right of all: We are all the owners of our own bodies. The difference between a fetus and an infant is that a fetus is a part of a pregnant woman's body whereas an infant is not. Libertarians do not want the very visible hand of government rooting around in women's uteruses, telling them what they can or can't do with any fetuses that happen to reside there. Any rights of a fetus are secondary because its existence is secondary to (and until late in the pregnancy, entirely dependent on) the woman in whose womb it is located.
The fact that abortion is a sad business is moot.
This is pretty interesting, but it does seem to us that there are some flaws in the argument. First of all, this concept of "self-ownership" is archaic at best. The notion that human beings are property that can be owned has been pretty much universally discredited since the 19th century.
More to the point, what if a pregnant woman is carrying a baby? This happens more often than you might think; indeed, we don't recall ever meeting a woman who said she was carrying a fetus. As we noted yesterday, pro-lifers say that a baby and a fetus are the same thing, but we are given to understand that this view is based on religious superstition. Perhaps science will one day solve this problem by developing a test to distinguish between a fetus and a baby. Until then, sad to say, journalists are apt to remain very confused.
Just Call Him the Viewmaster
An Independence, Mo., man is facing charges of filing a false police report, according to the Examiner of Eastern Jackson County:
Floyd Elliot, 22, told police two subjects attacked him in a parking lot and tried to burn the word "FAG" into his chest and carve the same thing on his forehead. Police initially investigated the incident as a hate crime but thought it seemed suspicious because the carving on his forehead was backwards, according to reports. During police interviews, Elliott admitted his injuries were self-inflicted and he falsified the report because he wanted to increase police presence in his neighborhood.
If he were smart, he would've carved "OMO" instead.
Where Are They Now?
Theresa LaPore, who designed the famous "butterfly ballot" and lost her re-election bid as elections supervisor in Palm Beach County, Fla., "is mulling a $2,500-a-month clerical job in State Attorney Barry Krischer's office so she can qualify for a 30-year pension," reports the Palm Beach Post:
LePore, 49, began working in the elections office as a teenager in the 1970s and has accumulated 29.7 years in the state retirement system.
After 30 years of employment, she could retire and immediately receive a pension of around $70,000 a year.
If she doesn't reach 30 years, LePore could not begin drawing that pension until she turns 62 and the money is likely to be substantially less. If she begins drawing a pension immediately with less than 30 years of employment, LePore would receive less than $30,000 a year. . . .
At $2,500 per month, her pay rate would be less than one-quarter that of the elections chief.
"We got one e-mail that said, 'You're a Democrat. How could you hire her?' " Krischer said.
Ah, those Democrats, full of compassion for the unemployed.
'A Case of One-Sided History'
Reggie White, a former defensive end for the Green Bay Packers, died over the weekend at 43. Richard Sandomir of the New York Times is out of sorts because football broadcasters "remembered him as a great football player but an even greater man, and a man loved by everyone." According to Sandomir, they should have talked about an "infamous speech" in which White "denounced homosexuality and traded in ethnic stereotypes":
White's good deeds and discordant rhetoric were part of a life abundantly and unrepentantly lived. Both were self-generated and unforced, and must coexist in assessing what he left behind. There should have been no reason to ignore what some might feel is unsettling in order to focus only on the harmonious.
Makes you wonder why no network has snapped up Sandomir as a football commentator. Meanwhile, check out this passage from the Times' obit of Susan Sontag:
Through four decades, public response to Ms. Sontag remained irreconcilably divided. She was described, variously, as explosive, anticlimactic, original, derivative, naïve, sophisticated, approachable, aloof, condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic, sincere, posturing, ascetic, voluptuary, right-wing, left-wing, profound, superficial, ardent, bloodless, dogmatic, ambivalent, lucid, inscrutable, visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant, passé, ambivalent, tenacious, ecstatic, melancholic, humorous, humorless, deadpan, rhapsodic, cantankerous and clever. No one ever called her dull.
In fact, a 2000 piece in London's Guardian observed: "You read Sontag's early work, and it lies flat and lifeless on the page," which would seem to refute the claim that "no one ever called her dull." Maybe Sandomir should give the Times' obit writers a tutorial in how to speak ill of the dead.
Who'll Correct the Corrections?
Yesterday we noted a New York Times correction that said, among other things, that "Earthjustice is an environmental law firm, not affiliated with the Sierra Club." Reader Richard Belzer says the Times had it right the first time:
Earthjustice used to be called the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. It split off from the Sierra Club in 1997, apparently to separate its litigation back office from the club proper. But the relationship between Earthjustice and the Sierra Club remains quite extensive. A search of the Sierra Club's Web site yields 212 hits for "Earthjustice." A review of the first 20 of 479 hits for "Sierra Club" on the Earthjustice Web site lists the Sierra Club as a "client" to its offices in Denver, Seattle, Bozeman, Oakland and Tallahassee. The Washington DC office touts as accomplishments litigation it undertook on behalf of the Sierra Club here, here, and here, and lobbying here and here. I don't have time to review the remaining 459 hits, but you get the picture.
Thus, the article's characterization of Earthjustice as "a law firm affiliated with the Sierra Club" is reasonably accurate and certainly more true than the correction, which seems to deny that they know each other at all. I can understand Marty Hayden not wanting to be libeled as being an attorney (eeek!) and an unusually hirsute woman (argh!). But beyond that, why is Earthjustice so interested in denying its relationship to the Sierra Club?
Wouldn't It Be Easier to Run First?
"Woman to Run 26.2 Miles After Being Stabbed 27 Times"--headline, KPRC-TV Web site (Houston), Dec. 24
Dialectical Materialism
Those who think Red China is the next big global threat can take solace in this Los Angeles Times report out of Shanghai:
Thousands of years of Chinese linguistic heritage have come down to this: a squabble over Tom and Jerry. . . . The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has ordered an end to broadcasting in dialect, saying kids should be raised in a "favorable linguistic environment."
The move has put Tom and Jerry--or "Cat and Mouse," as the show is called here--at the center of a long-running debate about how to maintain national cohesion amid a linguistic sea of highly distinct regional accents, dialects and wholly separate language groups.
"As an artist, I think dialect should be preserved as a part of local culture," said Zhang Dingguo, deputy director of the Shanghai People's Comedy Troupe, which does Tom and Jerry in Shanghainese.
"Schools don't allow Shanghainese to be spoken, and now TV doesn't either. It looks like Shanghai comedy will be dying out," he added.
No country whose leaders think Tom and Jerry are supposed to talk is a serious rival to the United States.
Don't Juice Your Rats
Yesterday we noted that limonene, "a key ingredient in the aroma from citrus fruits," can relieve asthma in rats, according to a new study. We hope you didn't give any of the stuff to your rats, at least if they're male. For according to a 2001 story by Brian Lee in the Rat & Mouse Gazette, limonene causes cancer in male rats (but not females, and not other animals). Two glasses of orange juice are enough to put a male rat in danger.
Life isn't easy if you're a male rat; lots of other dangers lurk as well:
Copy machine toner, unleaded auto fuels, and some bathroom deodorizers also contain such male rat kidney cancer inducing chemicals. (In fact, the cancer warning you see at the gas pump is because of this!) But I don't think you are very likely to feed those to your rats.
Speak for yourself, Lee.
A Sad Panda
It seems liberals are catching on to the Roe effect. A testimonial on the Democratic Singles Network ("dating for Democrats, liberals & progressives") declares:
You DO have a great site. I figure--the worst case senario [sic] is, if we can't vote the Republicans out--we can hook up Democratic couples and breed them out. Hee hee--well, we could have fun trying. Anyway-- thanks for all your hard work to create the site---its a brilliant idea.
Jeff Morrissette, an "organizer" for the far-left group MoveOn.org's California chapter, claims to have discovered the Roe effect before we did. In an article titled "Red Babies, Blue Babies, Liberals Need to F--- More" (the link, which uses the actual obscenity in the headline--so be warned--is here), Morrissette says that "in casual conversation over the last decade or so I have been putting forth the theory that domination by cultural and religious conservatives is going to increase in coming generations simply by the fact that they are breeding faster":
For all their talk about abstinence these Christians are popping out babies left and right--mostly right, as in right-wing. They don't practice birth control, don't believe in abortion, and their children are going to be narrowly educated. . . .
If liberals don't start having more babies and raising them with good, sound, scientific, conscious, enlightened liberal values then we are doomed to go the way of the panda. Yes, the panda. The panda is a dying breed because they just aren't popping out enough offspring.
Morrissette fails to note the connection between pandas' procreative privation and the fear of sexual harassment litigation. And he concludes by renouncing his whole argument:
Of course I'm not really serious about liberals having more babies. I believe it is the responsibility of all humans to be economically and socially accountable by limiting the number of children we bring into the world.
All of which helps explain why MoveOn liberals are so vehement. |
