PostWatch

Yes, Someone Is Misinformed

From today's webchat with the Post's Dan Balz:

Dunn Loring, Va.: If the WSJ poll is right and 50 percent of all Americans believe that we really did find WMDs in Iraq and 64 percent think Saddam Hussein and al Qaida were linked what does that say about the ability of the press to inform? Or does it say more about the administration and its allies skill to misinform?

Dan Balz: I think the finding suggests that people get and digest information in all kinds of ways and that the news media are just one part of that rather elaborate system.

Terror Links To Saddam's Inner Circle, Fox News, June 12

Saddam, Al Qaeda Did Collaborate, Documents Show, NY Sun, March 24

Report: Hundreds of WMDs Found In Iraq, Fox News, June 22

I could spend the rest of the day putting up links to reputable stories about Saddam's chemical weapons program and the continually growing evidence about his relationship with Al-Qaeda. But I don't think they will penetrate Dunn Loring.

On The Road Again

Heading out of town for a few days, so blogging may be light.

More Is Worse

Howard Kurtz writes about the extent to which a CNN reporter was manipulated by Hezbollah:

My "Reliable Sources" interview with CNN's Nic Robertson--on whether journalists are being used by Hezbollah and properly explaining the limitations of the bomb-damage tours they are getting--is generating comment at Betsy's Page and some other sites. I'd point out that every major network has aired one of these Hezbollah tours, with varying disclaimers about the inability to do independent reporting.

That raises more questions about every major network, rather than raising fewer about Robertson.

Betsy's Page is a fine blog, but let the record show--as Betsy's Page does--that Rich Noyes at Newsbusters got there first. As early as July 19, Noyes was raising flags about the oddly pro-Hezbollah report filed by Robertson.

You Can Say This For The 1,000th Time. It'll Still Be Wrong.

In Sunday's Warming to the Inconvenient Facts, the Post's Michael Grunwald misrepresents, as current fashion dictates, the degree to which there's a scientific consensus on global warming, and what the consensus is about. I'd summarize the rational case this way: Average temperatures may well have risen in recent years. There have been far warmer and colder periods during pre-industrial  periods. We don't understand our role in climate change and the extent to which we can alter it.

The Op-Ed does provide at least one benefit, showing how many on the global-warming bandwagon want radical changes across society. Grunwald's premise is false, but he's honest about what he's asking for:

The problem is, most scientists now believe dramatic action is necessary to prevent a climate catastrophe. They warn that unless humans can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent, global warming could threaten the habitability of the earth. That's the inconvenient part of "An Inconvenient Truth." And when Gore's critics complain that such drastic reductions would require an assault on our way of life, they're telling the truth, too.

If our get-serious rhetoric on climate change were to be more than a new form of low-carbon emissions, we would have to change not only the way we live and the way we drive, but the way we think about political issues. And not only the politics of energy and the environment. If the scientists are right about an apocalyptic future of floods, droughts, dead coral reefs, rising sea levels and advancing deserts, global warming is an existential threat that should affect our approach to just about every issue. To take it seriously, we would have to change the way we think about transportation, agriculture, development, water resources, natural disasters, foreign relations and more.

Kumbaya. Ken Shepard at the Media Research Center's Business and Media Institute notes some of Grunwald's past work, including a 2003 piece saying "many scientists believe" that 40 million Africans were facing the possibility of starvation, supposedly the result of changes in climate linked to global warming. Is Grunwald still working as a straight reporter? Because this is pretty strong stuff. As Shepard says about Grunwald's global-warming Op-Ed and a related piece on the glories of Al Gore:

It’s a slow news day and you’re an environment reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. What do you do to kill time before your bicycle ride home? If you’re The Washington Post’s Michael Grunwald, you might pen a couple opinion pieces telling your readers they are destroying the Earth and that Al Gore can help save it with another vice presidency.

The latter a reference to Another Kind of Gore '08 Bandwagon. You're on your own with that one, but hopefully it's more reliable than the global-warming piece and its claim that "most scientists" think we need to reduce greenhouse emissions by 70% to avoid killing the planet.

It's possible that "most scientists" believe dramatic action is called for, but remember that many of the alarmist documents flying around are signed by scientists whose expertise is unrelated to climatology. I'll go with groups like the 60 scientists who informed Canadian PM Stephen Harper about the limits of current knowledge. Via Les Jones:

As accredited experts in climate and related scientific disciplines, we are writing to propose that balanced, comprehensive public-consultation sessions be held so as to examine the scientific foundation of the federal government's climate-change plans....

Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada's climate policies are based. Even if the climate models were realistic, the environmental impact of Canada delaying implementation of Kyoto or other greenhouse-gas reduction schemes, pending completion of consultations, would be insignificant. Directing your government to convene balanced, open hearings as soon as possible would be a most prudent and responsible course of action.

While the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups may provide for sensational headlines, they are no basis for mature policy formulation. The study of global climate change is, as you have said, an "emerging science," one that is perhaps the most complex ever tackled. It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth's climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary....

Kyoto being one of the most ridiculous iniatives in recent history, requiring a massive upheaval in Western economies to produce a minuscule reduction in greenhouse gasses to be completely overwhelmed by non-signatories including China and India. Well played, my green friends. Well played.

More commentary and excellent link pointers at Red State.

Giving A Terrorist The Microphone

I haven't blogged much about the Mideast partly out of a simple lack of time, and because other bloggers and sources are saying more than I usually can. But let me put up a late comment on a piece by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, A Mideast Maelstrom of Complaints, which took up, among other things, the paper's decision to print an Op-Ed by Ismail Haniyeh. The Post politely calls him the Palestinian Prime Minister but he's also a leader of Hamas, the terrorist organization whose goal is to exterminate Israelis.

Strange fellows get elected sometimes; Haniyeh, Hitler, and the comparison is apt.

To excerpt from comments I sent to the polite and professional Howell when we were talking about some other matters: I had mixed feelings about her column.

Howell certainly gave ample space to people who, like me, thought it was ridiculous to give an editorial platform to a terrorist leader. But I don't think she really grappled with that very fact.  I don't think the Post would run an Op-Ed by a white-race supremacist who heads an organization that bombs black neighborhoods, and if some Postie B-Team somehow let that happen, I don't think the Post would allow such a writer to escape basic fact checking. Haniyeh's piece is filled with nonsense,  including the proposition that Israel's military faces no conventionally armed adversaries and that there's no conflict among Palestinians over who's to rule there. Guess all those Hamas-Fatah shootouts are really celebrations.

I think running the piece showed the lack of a moral compass at the Post. As I said when it ran, American newspapers must have printed some guest columns by Nazis in the late 30's, but eventually most people wised up. Yet here we go again.

Howell cites other, pro-Israeli columns, but Charles Krauthammer writing in favor of Israel doesn't balance a terrorist writing against it. There is no balance to be achieved there. If Rudy Giuliani wrote an Op-Ed on crime, I wouldn't look for a rebuttal from Charles Manson.

This Can't Be True

Robert Novak, writing about various House floor debacles in Sting of Stem-Cell Veto Unrelieved:*

Last week's convoluted congressional developments, though raising questions of life, death, morality and religion, reflected election year politics. Seasoned Democratic political operatives regard stem cell research as the most important issue affecting the 2006 elections.

Stem-cell research? I can see how the Democrats want to elevate it, with arguments about the anti-science faith-based Bush and all that, never mind that most of the science past, present and future points to adult and other non-embryonic stem cells as the most promising... sorry, where was I?

Could be wrong, I'm no deep analyst. It's not on the Post's Bellwether list.

*Novak's column appears in the Post, but probably for contractual reasons I can never find it in the Post archives.

 

Now Where's That Story About Evolution

Shankar Vedantam writes And The Evolutionary Beat Goes On, citing new findings that evolution is not just real but is actually happening to human beings right now. He then proceeds to write about natural selection.

"From 1970 to 2000, there was a widespread view that although natural selection is very important, it is relatively rare," said Jonathan Pritchard, a geneticist at the University of Chicago. "That view was driven largely because we did not have data to identify the signals of natural selection. . . . In the last five years or so, there has been a tremendous growth in our understanding of how much selection there is."

That insight has only deepened as scientists have gained the ability to read the entire human genome, the chain of "letters" that spell out humanity's genetic identity.

"Signals of natural selection are incredibly widespread across the human genome," Pritchard said. "Everywhere we look, there appears to be very widespread signals of natural selection in many genes and many processes."

I don't have any big problem with the theory of evolution, but let's define our categories. Natural selection is how an organism adapts over time to changes in its environment. When a small number of bacteria resistant to antibiotics survive and reproduce, becoming a new dominant strain that you can't kill with simple penicillin, they're still bacteria. Evolution is how, say, bacteria might turn into Stephen Jay Gould.

Natural selection is obviously crucial to the theory of evolution; multiple mutations over profoundly long periods produce the more radical transformations evolution proposes. But they're not the same thing.

Europeans seem to be adapting to the increased availability of dairy products, with genetic changes that allow the enzyme lactase, which breaks down lactose in milk, to be available throughout life, not just in infancy. Similarly, East Asians show genetic changes that affect the metabolism of the sugar sucrose, while the Yoruba people in sub-Saharan Africa show genetic changes that alter how they metabolize the sugar mannose.

Hooray for natural selection. Send us a memo when you locate modern evolution.

What Is Missing From This Picture

Yep, still on the Banks and with a rickety connection I can't go into much detail.

Briefly, however, in Senate Passes Stem Cell Bill; Bush Vows Veto and Long Fight Has Slowed Progress On Stem Cells, what kind of progress are we kind of forgetting? Michael Fumento writes what the Post won't:

Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) receive tremendous media attention, with oft-repeated claims that they have the potential to cure virtually every disease known. Yet there are spoilsports, self included, who point out that they have yet to even make it into a human clinical trial. This is even as alternatives — adult stem cells (ASCs) from numerous places in the body as well as umbilical cord blood and placenta — are curing diseases here and now and have been doing so for decades. And that makes ESC advocates very, very angry.

Read it all--really. Among other things Fumento addresses recent claims that non-embryonic stem-cell research and therapies have been exaggerated. An excerpt:

The letter claims ASC “treatments fully tested in all required phases of clinical trials and approved by the U.S Food and Drug Administration are available to treat only nine of the conditions” on his list.

Well! One answer to that is that it’s nine more than can be claimed for ESCs. Further, there are 1175 clinical trials for ASCs, including those no longer recruiting patients, with zero for ESCs. But a better response is that the letter authors come from the Kenneth Lay School for honesty, as do the editors at Science.

Fumento is his usual shy and retiring--and factual--self.

P.S. It's possible that someone we admire who tells us I'm not an expert on this subject may not be in the best position to judge whether the issue is almost purely symbolic and a minor issue.

Here

Frist: Please Start Making Sense

I'm leaving for an excursion to the Outer Banks, so blogging will be lighter and I don't have time to do anything justice this morning. But I couldn't leave without commenting on Bush Set to Use First Veto on Stem Cell Bill by Michael Abramowitz and Chuck (Chuck?) Babington. Naturally it includes virtually nothing about adult and other non-embryonic stem cell work, other than an unintentionally amusing line about another bill that would "encourage research into creating stem cell lines without destroying human embryos. Gee, I sure hope that works out. Mainly, however, I want to ask what the heck majority leader Sen. Frist, in backing the bill to permit frozen embyros to be destroyed for their stem-cell lines, thinks he is doing:

Frist, a heart-transplant surgeon, said he believes human life begins at conception, but he defended medical advances that might derive from embryos that are "100 percent" certain to be destroyed and have no hope of being adopted.

"We have learned that fewer than the anticipated number of cell lines have proved suitable for research," Frist said in a floor speech, "and I feel that the limit on cell lines available for federally funded research is too restrictive."

But you cannot really believe what you say you believe, senator. If you believed that human life begins at conception, you'd be doing everything you can to block this bill, which is merely a variation on the theme of destroying one life for the benefit of another. And there's no embryo 100 percent certain of being destroyed until it's, you know, destroyed.

Good man. Means well. Fact-challenged. Non-president.