...the trailing edge.

Fair and balanced e-mail #2

An e-mail to Fox News:

Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 18:01:09 -0500 (CDT)
From: Steve Casburn
To: comments@foxnews.com
Subject: White House phone logs

Based on your story last week about Wesley Clark, Fox News is familiar with the fact that "the White House [...] logs each and every incoming phone call", and that the White House checked these logs in response to a request from The Weekly Standard.

Have you requested that the White House check its logs for calls to and from Robert Novak during the month of June? If they'll do a log check for a bunch of McCainiacs, I'm sure they'd happily do one for the loyalists at Fox News.

 
Steve

 
(Credit for the idea goes to Josh Marshall.)

 
Update: I botched two things in the e-mail: One, the only phone logs the White House has admitted to keeping are for incoming calls, and not outgoing as well; two, the calls to check should be the ones for July, not June.

What I think of the Bush administration, part 2

Brad DeLong asks the question I have asked many times since 1995: Where are the grownups in the Republican Party?

I recently read Henry Fairlie's 1978 book, The parties: Republicans and Democrats in this century, and Fairlie agrees with Hubert Humphrey that

Democrats seem to love government, while, I suspect, high-level Republicans too often really do not. For too many of them, service in Washington is nothing more than a break between two jobs in private industry, or banking or law, and the art of government is itself less appealing, less exciting than it is to Democrats. [pgs. 215-16]

 
(Again, that was in 1978, before the Reagan wing, with its slogan of "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem", took over.)

So I wonder (as does Fairlie) if a main reason for the many mediocre or failed Republican presidencies of the last 100 years — Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Nixon, Ford, Bush 41, Bush 43 — is that Republicans since Theodore Roosevelt have had such contempt for government that they have never learned (and don't see a point to learning) how to govern?

Or, as an alternate explanation, I wonder whether Republicans govern so poorly because the agencies and aims of the federal government have been created and determined almost exclusively by Democrats during the past 70 years?

What I think of the Bush administration

Kevin Drum says it better than I could.

Remember: [the Plame affair] is not just some run of the mill political dirty trick. It's perilously close to treason. No truly principled conservative administration would do a thing like this, and the fact that they've been trying to dodge it for two months tells you everything you need to know about them.

There are plenty of honorable conservatives out there who deserve conservative support, but not the ones running this administration.

On proper forms of revenge

A "Viva Mexico" party held by Duke University's Sigma Chi fraternity has angered Mexican-Americans at that campus.

Sad to say, the anger of the aggrieved students, as they are now expressing it, will not deter future such parties or even provide catharsis. Protests, denunciations, administrative warnings...these so-called remedies neither punish the offenders nor console the offended. The offense is that the men of Sigma Chi at Duke think that the cultures of other nations are funny. The true redress is to point out that the culture of Sigma Chi can be funny, too.

Why doesn't one of local Latino student groups re-enact Sigma Chi's secret rituals in the middle of campus, while distributing flyers explaining each one in exhaustive detail? Or throw a "Rush Sigma Chi" party, complete with every variety of stereotypical fraternity behavior? Or visit a local homeless shelter, give the residents Sigma Chi clothing, and teach them the Sigma Chi handshake? (Readers are invited to suggest better ideas in the comments section.)

Are these responses immature? Perhaps.

Would they do more to stop offensive fraternity parties than crying will? Yes.

And isn't that the point?

 
[Link courtesy of Critical Mass.]

Wheatcroft knocks 9-11 response

Geoffrey Wheatcroft scorns how silly many of "the literary intelligentsia" were when responding to September 11:

Imaginative writers are distinguished not by a sweeter character (too often very much not), greater intellectual honesty, or even deeper intelligence, but—apart from the gift of expression which is their stock in trade—a way of looking at the world which is interesting because it is exaggerated or distorted. After an event like 11th September, such expressive gifts might be more hindrance than help; some things are best said simply rather than dressed up in look-at-me prose.

 
[Link courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.]

Journalistic malpractice

A recent Associated Press article demonstrates how the news media often miscover medical and scientific news.

The title and first paragraph of the article sound promising:

Study: Even mid-life diet change can extend life

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It has long been known that laboratory animals live longer on a low-calorie diet. Now a study suggests that even if sensible eating is delayed until middle age, health can be improved and life extended.

 
And with childhood and adult obesity a serious problem in the United States, who wouldn't find these paragraphs reassuring?

The carry-home message from the study, said Linda Partridge of University College London is that it is never too late to improve health by switching to sensible eating habits.

"If this works in humans, then it means that from the time a person starts on a restricted diet, they'll be like individuals of the same age who were always on that diet," she said. "Their prospects of survival are the same."

 
That reassurance fades, though, if you read to the end of the article:

James R. Carey, a University of California, Davis, researcher who studies the biology of aging, said the Partridge study is "important to the field," but does not provide final answers about the true effects of restricted diets.

He said that fruit flies and other animals on restricted diets tend to stop reproducing. In mammals, for instance, the females stop ovulating and, hence, cannot reproduce.

As a result, Carey said, animals on restricted diets may live longer simply because they are not expending energy and stress in the rigors of reproduction. He said studies still need to specifically isolate and prove that it is the lean diet alone that leads to longer life, and not related factors.

 
If we can extrapolate from an experiment on fruit flies that a restricted diet can improve health and extend life for people, then can we not also extrapolate that a restricted diet will lead to infertility as well?

I don't understand why the Associated Press chose to run a story as weak as this one (and such weak stories are not uncommon on scientific and medical topics). Why waste the reader's time and hope — why risk misleading the reader — with speculation disguised as medical advice? What's wrong with waiting for better evidence?

Book Review: The Info Mesa

I have given up on Ed Regis' book, The Info Mesa (Norton, 2003), because of the shallowness of the writing. The final straw:

Unfortunately, all this business activity had taken its toll, and in 1972 he and his first wife divorced. He remarried two years later, however, and he and his new spouse, [...], both of them being good Catholics, would wind up raising six kids. [page 50]

 
"Catholics have a lot of kids" is cliché, and calling a man a "good Catholic" right after mentioning his divorce and re-marriage is careless (and, judging from the tone of the book, not meant as irony or sarcasm).

It's a shame that The Info Mesa is such a weak popularization — its subject, the Silicon Valley-like grouping of information science companies around Santa Fe, is worthy of and could provide the material for a good general-interest book.