March 11, 2003
THE WAR HAS ALREADY BEGUN
Why aren't more in the media reporting that the war has already begun, asks Constantine von Hoffman , a freelance journalist based in Boston, MA.:

"I direct people to this, found in yesterday's Washington Post (Page A21 in print or on line ): The commander of U.S. air forces in the Persian Gulf region said yesterday that several months of intensified U.S. airstrikes had hit all fixed air defenses in southern Iraq known to American officials. But he added that mobile antiaircraft guns and missiles remained a threat to U.S. pilots.... More than 400 U.S. planes are now operating from about 30 locations in the gulf and elsewhere, according to other officials. In the past month, U.S. pilots have struck from seven to 14 targets in Iraq a week. But [Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael] Moseley said patrols are still not being flown 24 hours a day, and Iraqi forces continue to shoot at U.S. aircraft."

Here's the money quote: "We've killed what we know is there," Air Force Lt. Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley said.
(via Romenesko )


March 9, 2003
Greymatter or Movable Type?
I've registered my own domain ( davidappell.com ) and am soon to move blogging over there. I'd appreciate any suggestions for content management tools. I've downloaded and begun playing with Movable Type , but the installation instructions seem especially obtuse and complicated -- and as someone who even once used UNIX (at AT&T) and once built a PC-based voice-mail system, though in DOS, not UNIX), I have too much pride to pay the $40 installation fee that MT is asking.
   So, to get things going, I do have Greymatter up and running on my new domain. Maybe it takes some time getting used to...
   In any case, I'm open to suggestions: is it worth the pain of getting MT running now? (Write me here .)

March 7, 2003
RUMSFIELD GREETS SADDAM
Here's a picture of Donald Rumsfield shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, Dec. 20, 1983, from the National Security Archives at George Mason University:

"Rumsfeld said nothing about Saddam's pursuit of nuclear weapons or his use of chemical weapons. Or about the terrorists he was sheltering in Baghdad. Or about his monstrous record of torture and murder. Rumsfeld's instructions were to 'establish personal rapport' with the dictator and to make it clear that the United States firmly supported Iraq in the war it had started with Iran." -- Jeff Jacoby in yesterday's Boston Globe.   

Jacoby then argues that because the US did the wrong thing then, it's incumbent on it do do the right thing now -- the right thing being, invade Iraq. But he doesn't seem to understand the conclusions of his own conclusion: that short-term goals may have as little to do with the long-term good now as they did then; that we may be just as morally blinded by self-interest now as we were, in retrospect, then; and that our attempts to rearrange the world to our liking may have as many unintended consequences now as they did then.
   Why is that so difficult for him to see?


March 6, 2003
2:30 pm
GILLESPIE RESPONDS
The public spat continues: Reason's editor Nick Gillespie responds to Fumento's charges (below), via RiShawn Biddle :

"I intend this to be my last few words on this matter. As a journalist and especially as an editor-in-chief, I'm used to being on the receiving end of all manner of wild, odd, and totally false accusations. However, Mike Fumento has set a new standard by calling me--the editor who just published a feature-length article by him *and* defended that article in a public letter--a liar.

In insisting that Reason ran Gary Taubes' reply to "Big Fat Fake" because of threatened legal action, Fumento throws together an unconvincing case of conjecture that surely fails to convince anyone of anything other than Fumento's own rather sad self-absorption. Why he cannot accept the simple truth in this issue is beyond me. On Feb. 20, Taubes contacted me after reading the article and told me he wanted to reply. I told him to go ahead and he sent me his response on Feb. 25. We posted it, along with a final response by Fumento, on Reason Online on March 4. Taubes and I never discussed anything of a legal matter. As I stated previously (quoting from a Feb. 27 email to Fumento), I decided to run Taubes' reply at the length at which he submitted it because we could do so easily on the Web and because I thought the length and content of the reply helped Fumento's case substantially.

Fumento's bizarre behavior does not particularly interest me, even as a pathetic tragicomic spectacle, except insofar as it attempts to slag my reputation and that of Reason's. We don't cave in to nuisance writers--even, alas, when they have written for Reason--any more than we cave into "nuisance lawsuits," real or imagined.

When properly edited and restrained from indulging in the sort of baseless invective he has displayed regarding this matter, Fumento is capable of producing good stuff, including "Big Fat Fake" in the March issue of Reason. Sadly, these days he seems more interested in spinning out e-mail accusations that have no basis in fact and only redound negatively to his own reputation. I wish him well in his new line of work."

9:30 am
COUNTERPOINT
Michael Fumento responds to the contretemps over Reason's publication of Gary Taubes' response to Fumento's article (whew):

"I know this sounds awfully lawerly, but let the facts speak for themselves. The Taubes letter was about 20 times the length of the average Reason letter. Log on now and take a look. It was obviously unedited, yet it's their policy to edit for brevity. It was almost twice the length of the original article. Excuses about the Web having unlimited room don't cut it, because it's actually harder to read off a screen. Try sending a thousand-word letter to them and see what happens to it.To say that this is the longest letter Reason has ever run doesn't do it justice; the only comparisons I've found are two articles that had responses each totaling about 5,000 words. BUT they were written by many different people, both pro and con. I know he threatened to sue the Washington Post over the Squires piece because he told me so. But again, that they published his 1,100-word response rather speaks for itself when their average letter is about 200 or so words. Finally, Reason was in such a hurry to run the Taubes letter as soon as my article was posted that they sent it to me already coded in HTML. Try responding to a 9,400-word letter with code every few lines and see how much fun it is. It obviously doesn't reflect well upon a magazine that it caved into a nuisance suit, so Gillespie's response was to be expected. And don't expect Taubes to come to my aid and say, "Yeah, I threatened to sue 'em, so what?" Having given up on doing good old investigative science reporting, Taubes first went into infomercials and is now doing science by litigation."
    Michael Fumento
    www.fumento.com

March 5, 2003
3:10 pm
Ned Leonard, Executive Director of the Greening Earth Society, emails me with the Society's six largest funders, at a "Board level" of participation, in 2002:

Western Fuels Association, Inc.
Basin Electric Power Cooperativ e
Associated Electric Cooperative
Dakota Coal Company
Minnkota Power Cooperative
Burlington Northern Santa Fe

Two have decided not to continue at the Board level or participation in 2003, Ned says: Associated and Burlington. Furthermore, Leonard writes:

"If you want to continue to construe Greening Earth Society as a front for
anything, you might try 'coal-fired electricity generation interests' and be
more accurate in your characterization."

3:25 pm
Ned declines to give dollar amounts, though, "at the rist of appearing slippery":

"Only Western Fuels gave more than $50,000 and its contribution has been reduced by two-thirds over the last couple of years. Greening Earth Society was incorporated in a way that did not require disclosure of contributors. That is why we are not a 501(c)3 or any variation of that."

EXTREME WEATHER & GLOBAL WARMING
2:00 pm
I don't agree with much that the Greening Earth Society writes -- their rhetoric alone makes one immediately suspicious that they're a front for fossil fuel interests [ * ], and Ned Leonard is always slippery when I write and ask him who his major funders are -- but in this case I do agree with them: scientists lately do seem to attribute any weather anomaly to global warming.
   I can't prove that. It's just my impression, something I've been thinking about since Paul Epstein and James McCarthy -- both reliable, prominent scientists who are important participants in the global climate change community -- wrote this Boston Globe piece about a month ago during the deep cold snap in New England.
   The cold spell was brutal, no doubt about it: a few days in southern Maine, where I live, had average temperatures of 1 to 3 degrees (F). That was cold, but it didn't strike me as anomalously cold -- there was a very similar cold snap in January 2000, for example.
   I had to read their article three times until I followed their logic about about why global warming can lead to such extremes. In general, I understand and accept that a warming atmosphere will lead to extreme events. I just don't try to apply it every time.
   On the one hand, scientists take caution to point out that weather is not climate -- one takes place in days, the other in decades. They caution that no particular weather event can be attributed to global warming, but that on average global warming will lead to more extreme weather events, higher sea levels, etc.
   On the other hand, I understand why Epstein, McCarthy and others write such Op-Eds: global warming is in need of episodes that will imprint themselves on the consciousness of the general public, if the fact of human-induced climate change is to take hold.
   But I think such Op-Eds are a mistake, because no particular weather anomaly can be attributed to global warming -- it's all statistical. If scientists are to remain true to science, they have to accept that and focus on that, PR-wise.
  
* In 1999 Grist Magazine said the Greening Earth Society "is housed by the Western Fuels Association," and Los Alamos Labs says here that they're "sponsored by Western Fuel Association." So you have to take anything they write in that context -- they're protecting Big Oil. I don't see their work published in scientifically established peer-reviewed journals, for example....
 
TAUBES UPDATE:
RiShawn Biddle presents his own take on Fumento's Reason article, via Instapundit .
   

REASON UPDATE:
8:00 am
Yesterday afternoon I checked with Reason's Online editor about whether their Taubes article was published in response to a threatened lawsuit, and got this back from Reason's editor, Nick Gillespie, denying the story. I'm posting it in its entirety:

The email exchange between science writers Michael Fumento and Oliver Baker that's attached below was first brought to my attention by a third science writer, David Appell, after it was posted to a National Association of Science Writers listserv.

Contrary to the claim made below, Reason did not run Gary Taubes' response to Fumento's "Big Fat Fake" story due to "a threatened lawsuit." (Fumento's original story, Taubes' response, and Fumento's reply are all online at
http://www.reason.com/0303/fe.mf.big.shtml,
http://www.reason.com/0303/taubes.shtml, and
http://www.reason.com/0303/fumentoreply.shtml.)

In the few interactions I've had with Taubes regarding the story (two phone calls and a half dozen emails), absolutely nothing of a legal nature came up or was discussed; rather we discussed the timetable for his reply. I ran the reply in the interests of good and thorough journalism--as most of you know, it is Taubes' writing on the Atkins diet that is extensively and, in my opinion, persuasively critiqued by Fumento in "Big Fat Fake." As I explained to Fumento in a February 27 email, I decided to run Taubes' reply at the length he submitted it at for two reasons: "a) we can publish differently on the Web than in print...and b) his reply to my mind helps your case rather than hurts it. All the words in the world don't make for a convincing argument--length, like size, doesn't matter." It was an editorial decision, not a legal one.

Yours,
Nick Gillespie

I've received a reply from Fumento, but am awaiting his permission to blog it.


March 4, 2003
PUBLISHING BY LAWSUIT?
Last summer, Gary Taubes stirred up a hornet's nest with his NY Times Magazine article supporting the Atkins diet, "What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" ( cached , original ). He also got himself a $700,000 book deal, which apparently his marketing people want to protect: according to a post today on the discussion listserv of the National Association of Science Writers, science writer Oliver Baker says Michael Fumento told him that Taubes threated Reason magazine with a lawsuit unless they published this response to Michael Fumento's recent Reason article questioning Taubes journalism, "Big Fat Fake: The Atkins diet controversy and the sorry state of science journalism." Fumento, via Baker:

"...as a result of a threatened lalawsuit, Reason is posting an incredible 9,400-word Taubes article. It's absolutely mind-numbing and ultimately unreadable. Best to skip to my response (only 2,000 words) and then try to wade through Taubes's "kill
'em with words" tome.

   (The discussion list of the National Association of Science Writers is a public list, but its archives are open only to association members.) 

   * UPDATE (7:30 pm): Reason has denied the threatened lawsuit, but Fumento has not backed down. See my March 5th entry .

GENETIC DISCRIMINATION
Personally, I can't wait for the day when insurance companies begin discriminating on the basis of genetic information.
   As someone who's self-employed, I struggle mightly to obtain health insurance, and in fact have not had any in the last three months, since moving to Maine. That's because the cheapest plan available to individuals here is about $650/month, which I certainly can't afford. So I'm taking my chances, secure in the knowledge that should I have a catastrophic accident, some hospital or somebody or other will pick up the tab by adding an invisible surcharge to your bill -- you who have health insurance. That's one reason your premiums are so high.
   Thank you.
   But come the day when genetic discrimination takes hold, insurance companies will be finding something wrong with each and every one of us -- your gene that points to heart disease, that recessed gene on your father's side that points towards an elevated risk for CF in your offspring. Come then, we'll all be vulnerable, and insurance companies won't want to insure any of us.
   Or rather, they will, but on a gene-by-gene basis. At that point even insured Americans will rebel, aghast that they're being charged different rates than anyone else (a discrimination the self-employed have been putting up with for years, even while the US government discriminates against them by disallowing them from deducting 100 percent of their health insurance costs, as they do allow corporations. (In 2002, the self-employed may only deduce 70 percent of the costs of their health insurance -- a discrimination that alleviates my concerns I might cost you money should I go to the ER.)
   At that point, when we're all discriminated against, all Americans and all employers will demand that the government offer what we should have been offering all along: universal coverage.
   Wait for it -- it'll happen, sure as day. It's happened in most other civilized countries in the world, and it will happen here. Meanwhile, people like me will be skipping annual checkups, going to the ER for ailments that could have been handled in simple doctor's visit two years earlier, and generally passing the buck to you.
   Thanks for your contribution. Oh yes: you're next.   


February 27, 2003
MATHEMATICS OF CROWDS
The mathematics of crowds have recently come into question, as march organizers, journalists, and security officials grapple with the best way to count the number of people in protest marches. This ABC News article chooses instead to just cover all the bases, all in the same story:

   "Thousands Worldwide Protest War in Iraq"
   "Hundreds of Thousands Worldwide Open Day of Rallies..."
   "Millions of protesters...."
 
February 26, 2003
SCIENCE EMBARGOES
A contretemps over an Australian news story offers a revealing insight into the increasing power of science journals.
   Australian science journalist Bob Beale recently wrote this February 19th story in The Bulletin on Mungo Man, suggesting he lived about 45,000 years ago instead of the previously established 65,000 years ago. The finding, Beale wrote, "...will be seen to lend fresh weight, for example, to the 'recently out of Africa' theory favoured by Richard Klein of Stanford University in the United States."
   Nature magazine was also on the story, and on February 20th published this story on Mungo Man. Nature had earlier informed journalists of the Mungo Man story, but Beale's story was published ahead of Nature's embargo, and Nature apparently became aware of this fact. This happens from time to time, for various reasons, and the major science journals do not like it when it happens.
   Today, Carol Oliver, Executive Officer of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University, posted a message to the list of the U.S. National Association of Science Writers about the Beale incident. (The list is open to all, but its recent archives are not available to the general public.) In it, Oliver quotes Beale as saying that Nature has suspended him from receiving further embargoed material, even though it accepts Beale's argument that he obtained the Mungo Man story from his own independent reporting, not from Nature's material.
   Oliver quotes Beale as follows (emphasis mine):

   The British science journal Nature has suspended me indefinitely from its press service (which gives a brief summary - embargoed and a week in advance - of highlights of the following issue and permits access to the relevant researchers, then access to the full articles). This includes all its sister journals.
   I am not outraged. So it goes. But I am surprised at the reasons they give and I draw them to your attention.
   They claim I broke their embargo last week on the Lake Mungo fossil research paper. I have explained - and they now accept - that I did not use any material supplied to me by the press service or the journal and that I did not communicate in any way with any of the scientists involved in the research, who were themselves under media embargo. The story leaked from third parties; it was filed and scheduled for publication - in The Bulletin - the day before their first press advisory came out. I did not know exactly when the paper would be published and did not read or download the paper after I received the one-paragraph advisory notice about it: indeed, I still have not seen it because of my suspension.

Beale then goes on to give Nature's response (again, all emphasis mine):

   Nature's press office says:
   "The bottom line as far as we are concerned, however, is that, by signing up to our press service, you are bound to abide by our embargoes in a more all-encompassing way (as opposed to just press release by press release).
   So, as soon as you became aware that the work you were researching was to be published in Nature , you should have waited for notification from us as to when its embargo would legitimately lift, or sought this information from us. "

In other words, even though a reporter has established facts on his own, he should wait on the story if at any time before publication Nature magazine independently publishes embargoed information on the same topic.
   That, clearly (it seems to me) clearly can't be right.

Beale continues:

   My response to them was:
   "Why should I? I am a journalist and I am not paid by you. My only ethical obligation to you is to respect mutually agreed embargoes on material you provide to me, which I have always done. It is not my concern whether other journalists are annoyed or inconvenienced when a story leaks early. This story did leak early - before and beyond what I think is the legitimate realm of influence of the Nature press service. I simply did my job. If you deem that - or the appeasement of hurt feelings - to be worthy of punishment by cutting off me and my publication indefinitely from your press service, I'm puzzled as to what Nature thinks is the role of the popular media. We're not a tame cheer squad."
   I have also told them that their "all-encompassing" view on embargoes strikes me as a novel concept. It seems that there are unwritten conditions to their press service that become known to journalists only after they deem them to be broken. I did not previously understand, for example, that there were so many other possible parties to the contract I thought I had made with them.
   I invite you to read the conditions of registration to the Nature press service and the journal's embargo policy (both at http://press.nature.com) and see if you can find this "all-encompassing" view stated anywhere. As I see it, they're saying in effect that by agreeing to receive embargoed information from the Nature press service, a journalist is also in effect signing up to countless other contracts concerning the timing of publicity for research published in the journal that they subsequently make with third parties - the scientists. And if one of those scientists breaks that contract and talks about their work to a fourth, fifth or even sixth party who then passes on what they know, they require the journalist to be bound by an imaginary chain of contracts linking all of the parties. This is so apparently regardless of whether the journalist gets any advance information from the press service or the journal itself.
   I acknowledge their legitimate wish to be first into print and their efforts to be fair and orderly about publicity for what they publish. But surely science journals cannot and should not seek or expect to control the popular media as well to such a degree? Leaks happen and must be taken on the chin. So it goes.
-- Bob Beale 

 As a magazine writer I don't have much opportunity to write breaking stories based on journal embargoes, though I do receive Nature's embargoed news and respect their embargoes whenever I do. But Nature has overstepped its bounds on this one, it seems to me -- they can't overwrite a journalist's independent work merely from the fact of their embargo's existence.
   The question is larger than Beale's suspension from embargoed Nature material (though that should be remedied). The question is, what are the rights of journalists to independently investigate a story?
 

February 15, 2002
A WARM JANUARY
January 2003 was the second warmest January on record, says the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The major exception was the east coast of the United States, and parts of Scandanavia and the Arctic.
   But other parts of the Arctic were as much as seven degrees (Celsius) above the long-term normal (defined as the period from 1951 to 1980), and most of Asia, Africa, South American and Europe were all above normal.


MORE TECH CENTRAL STATION DISHONESTY
This is rich: in a Tech Central Station column alledging that CAFE standards have failed -- the "corporate average fuel economy" standards that regulate the mileage requirements of cars, John Merline of USA Today writes:

"CAFE hasn't improved energy independence. Fuel efficiency of cars on the road has climbed 52 percent since 1975, but that hasn't cut the nation's reliance on imported oil. Quite the opposite, in fact. Overall, the nation imports 51 percent of its oil, up from 36 percent in 1975. The share of oil from OPEC countries is now 27 percent, up from 22 percent when Congress passed the CAFE law."

The implication here is clearly that increased fuel efficiency and CAFE have increased the nation's reliance on foreign oil--which is a blatant piece of dishonesty. We import more oil because we've sucked our own reserves dry!
   US domestic oil production peaked in 1970, and annual output has declined about 1/3rd since then. It'd declined not because we're not looking for it, but because most of it is already gone.
   We have no choice but to import oil, regardless of CAFE standards. In fact, without CAFE standards we'd probably be importing more than we already do.
   (The Arctic National Wildlife Preserve would not add much to domestic production: "EIA analysts predict a maximum production rate from the refuge of about half a million barrels a day 10 years after development begins, with a peak of nearly a million barrels a day about a decade after that," according to Wayne Gibbs in Scientific American. US consumption is over 11 million barrels a day, according to the American Petroleum Institute.)
 

February 12, 2003
BEGALA'S ARITHMETIC
Paul Begala, on last night's Crossfire:

"Of course, in his new budget, President Bush propose increasing homeland security by 7 percent total cost of 41 billion dollars. By contrast, the president wants to cut tax for the rich by $100 billion, 250 percent more than the total for homeland security."

Uh, that's 150 percent more.

WIND POWER
The European Union is way ahead of the United States when it comes to wind power, and their lead is increasing:


February 10, 2003
Matthew Ygelsias writes :

"The French are probably exactly where the Americans were in 1938 as Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia, in 1939 when he invaded Poland (and France fought to stop him), in 1940 when his armies overran France and most of Scandinavia, and all throughout 1941 when England stood alone — namely, not interested in taking risks when it looks like someone else might solve the problem."

Remember that even FDR was not initially willing to take risks to dismantle the Nazi holocaust camps, as historian Michael Beschloss has recently pointed out. 


   "To be on the brink of war is to have failed utterly at imagination.
   To consider dropping bombs on children or flying hijacked planes into buildings is to be less than fully human.
   The words of poets remind us that there are better choices."
      -- Maerwydd McFarland, letter to the NY Times


February 3, 2003


February 2, 2003
COLUMBIA
I'm sorry, but I resist the idea that this is a national tragedy.
   The loss of the space shuttle is, of course, a terrible tragedy for the astronauts, their families, and their colleagues. There's no denying that, and everyone can feel for their loss.
   But has this, as Bush said yesterday, "brought terrible news and great sadness to our country"? Is, as the NY Times editorialized , American in mourning yet again?
   Please.
   Let's not confuse the spectacular with the tragic. The Columbia disaster is, in essence, a one-billion dollar car accident. Space flight is still very risky business, and everyone involved with it knows that, I'm sure.
   People are dying all over the place in this world, and our national leaders don't engage in paroxyms of emotion over it. People die in my family, and in yours. Fourteen Central American immigrants went over a bridge last year in Maine and the national news barely saw fit to mention it.
   The World Trade Center was a national tragedy. The dozens of handgun deaths in this country every day are a national tragedy. The thousands of innocent people we will kill in a war on Saddam Hussein are a national tragedy.
   You want real tragedy? How about Africa, where thousands die every single day from AIDS and preventable diseases. They die without every getting the brave chance to join NASA, or attend college, or even seeing a shuttle launch on television. Mostly they just die.
   That's tragedy. Too bad there's no spectacular video involved.