THIS MODERN WORLD

It hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for the people who are supposed to keep the President safe. First there was the potential terrorist attack that wasn’t as important as Bush’s bicycle ride :

The White House launched an investigation Thursday into the 47- minute delay in notifying President Bush about the intrusion of a single- engine aircraft into restricted airspace over the nation’s capital that provoked emergency evacuations.

The violation of the no-fly zone Wednesday led more than 30,000 people to quickly leave the White House complex, the Capitol and the Supreme Court and triggered an eight-minute-long “red alert” at the White House.

At the time, Bush was riding a bicycle at a wildlife center in suburban Maryland and wasn’t told of the alert until after he had completed his ride at 12:50 p.m. — 47 minutes after the “red alert” was issued and 36 minutes after an all-clear.
. . .
McClellan said Secret Service agents accompanying Bush to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Beltsville, Md., and the uniformed military aide who accompanies the president with the nuclear warfare launch codes had been in touch with authorities at the White House during the scare.

And now we find out that the “dud” grenade in Georgia was an assassination attempt :

The FBI said on Wednesday a grenade thrown at President George W. Bush during a visit to Georgia last week had been a threat to the American leader and had only failed to explode because of a malfunction.

In a statement, a Federal Bureau of Investigation official at the U.S. embassy said the grenade, thrown while Bush made a keynote speech in Tbilisi’s Freedom Square on May 10, had been live and landed within 30 metres (100 feet) of the president.
. . .
The FBI’s statement contradicted an account by Georgian police at the time who said the grenade was a dud, left at the spot to sow panic among the tens of thousands who turned out to greet Bush.

A White House spokesman also said then that Bush, who had visited the ex-Soviet republic to show support for its pro-Western government, had never been in danger.

These security guys had better watch their backs. If they continue screwing up this bad they might end up getting nominated for an ambassadorship or something.

The New York Times has announced that starting next fall, its op-ed pages will be only be available online to people who pay a $50 subscription. The response from the blogs has been predictably negative, in the way that wood ticks might complain if they found that their ability to suck blood from deer in the forest was about to be curtailed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not any happier about this than any other blogger — sometimes I feel like half my posts are devoted to Mister McBobo — but we do need to have a little reality check here. Those of us who partake in this little game of online commentary, either as writers or readers, tend to have a skewed view of, well, our own importance. I genuinely hate to take issue with Markos, for whom I have the greatest respect, but the notion that the Times will become irrelevant as a result of this move borders on delusional. Look, the Times is — well, it’s the Times. It’s the house organ for the New York/DC power axis, it’s the hometown paper for the residents of the largest and arguably most important city in this country, and it looks to be one of the few newspapers currently whose circulation is actually rising.

In short, they own the ball, the bat, the field and the bleachers, and if they decide to start charging us to enter, then we either pay or find a way to peek in through the fence (Times op-ed columns are usually syndicated out pretty quickly). But they don’t become irrelevant because the slim minority of their readership which reaches them via the snarky commentary of bloggers such as your host can no longer do so. (I’m not even sure the benefits of being online outweigh the negatives, from their perspective. You think Thomas Friedman thinks he’s losing out here?)

One more thing: the suggestion that “in a world of endless punditry,” Paul Krugman is “easily replaceable” is equally misguided. Personally, I’d like to believe that Brooks and Tierney are easily replaceable, but even those two have influence far disproportionate to their insight, simply by virtue of the real estate they occupy. And Krugman — well, he actually is pretty irreplacable. He’s very, very smart — on the verge of winning the Nobel Prize smart — and not only does he enjoy similarly prestigious placement, he uses his power for good and not evil. He’s one of our best and most prominent advocates, and it’s just silly to suggest that he will no longer matter, as a result of the Times’ new policy. The blogs just aren’t that important, not yet, and maybe not ever.

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’s oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s OK to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

* * *
In Orwell’s 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy — or worse.

Much more.

In case you missed it, British MP George Galloway gave an incendiary speech before the U.S. Senate’s committee investigating the oil-for-food scandal.

Now, senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life’s blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq, which killed a million Iraqis, most of them children. Most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis, With the misfortune to be born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq.

And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies. I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to Al Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives, 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac, who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we’re in today.

Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth. Have a look at the real oil- for-food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months, when $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and the other American corporations that stole Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer. Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where. Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it. Have a look at the real scandal, breaking in the newspapers today. Revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee, that the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians; the real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own government.

The always great Crooks and Liars has the video and an MP3 of this portion of the speech. Earlier in his address, Galloway also threw a couple more pointed barbs at the Bush Administration :

As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country – a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.
. . .
You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I’ve never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he’s your prisoner, I believe he’s in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

I’m not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances.

I long for a day when our lawmakers are equally blunt.

Not that you should be too surprised by the rigged outcome :

The mock trial of Darwin’s theory by Kansas’ Board of Education, which concluded on May 12, included testimonies and cross-examination of and by pro-evolution and pro-creationism experts.

The board’s trial voted 6 to 4 in favour of bringing the concept of “intelligent design” within the methods of teaching science in schools. Over two dozen scientists, teachers and lawyers said the state’s science standards be amended to incorporate alternative thinking.
. . .
At the centre of the trials is Steve Abrams, a veterinarian and Republican, who among other things believes that earth is only 5,000 years old, a view propagated by Christian conservatives, as opposed to 4.5 billion years as argued by scientists.

Abrams as the board chairman has challenged the validity of evolution as the only valid explanation of life. He has said evolutionary biology is inadequate in terms of evidence and there ought to be an intelligent designer at the helm.

Now let’s put aside the obvious fact that the folks pushing intelligent design are the same ones who think the Bible code is real, are looking for Noah’s ark, and think dinosaur bones were hidden underground by the devil. On its own merits, intelligent design is complete horseshit.

First of all, if you’re an ID advocate, stop using the word “theory”. You don’t get to use that word. What you’re trying to push is a hypothesis, which is always trumped by a theory. Just ask one of the kids whose science classes you’re trying to screw up. When scientists have an idea about how the world works, they come up with a hypothesis that they can test. If it stands up to repeated scrutiny, it eventually gets labeled a scientific “theory”. There’s a few decades of research and peer review to do before you earn the right to use that word.

Before that happens, you should also deal with the fact that intelligent design is a crappy hypothesis. It would be one thing if your “alternative thinking” was based on an observation of some sort, but it’s just a half-assed inferrence based on a lack of evidence. Looking at nature’s complexity and jumping to the conclusion that it must have been to the work of a “designer” holds about as much scientific merit and assuming that thunder is the sound god makes when she’s angry.

So if you’re serious about the “Gosh, the world sure is complicated. It must be god’s work.” hypothesis, go back to the drawing board. Stop concentrating on what you percieve to be evolution’s weaknesses and try working on ID’s strengths. Find a way to incorporate your beliefs with every bit of evidence that the scientific world has previously discovered and figure out how to test the damn thing. Submit your new hypothesis to some scientific journals and pray that the free marketplace of ideas favors your side.

It bears repeating that ID advocates already tried to get some respect for their hypotheis in the scientific community back when it was called “creationism”. They failed. This route isn’t about getting respect for intelligent design, it’s about trying to take a short cut (and in the process cripple the next generation of scientists) by appealing to the beliefs and exploiting the ignorance of school board members. As much as I want to religion out of public schools, my big concern here is protecting the integrity of our educational system from being slowly eroded by a flood of pseudoscience.

UPDATE : Reader Tony writes in to point out a mistake in the article I quoted above :

The “trial” was held before a subcommittee of three of the board’s most conservative members. They will supposedly take their findings to the rest of the board, which will vote sometime in the summer about which science standards to accept. The “minority” standards that they are likely to report won’t, as your post claimed, require Kansas teachers to instruct their students in intelligent design. The ID supporters are more subtle than that. Instead, they change the definition of science itself so that it will be open to “objective” approaches (i.e., allowing the role of miracles in the development of life).