Month: September 2011

The article lives up to its title.

And returns his Orwell Prize for past sins:

The worst part of this for me has been thinking about two sets of people. The first are all the readers over the years who have come up to me and told me they like my articles and believe in the causes and the people I’ve been championing. I hate to think of those people feeling let down, because those causes urgently need people to stand up for them, and they need their defenders. The second are the people here at The Independent, whom I have watched for the past eight years working phenomenally hard to get their stories right and to produce world-class journalism. I am horrified to think that what I have done has detracted from the way they get it right every day. I am sorry…I am going to take an unpaid leave of absence from The Independent until 2012, and at my own expense I will be undertaking a programme of journalism training.

The report on his alleged plagiarism convicted him only of sloppiness, and the charge against his reporting in one instance were counter-balanced by two sources who backed him up. The Independent concluded there was no solid evidence he had made anything up. Nonetheless, the meddling with Wikipedia under an alias was deeply dumb, and Johann has done the right thing here. I hope after a period in which he is not so frantically working at writing copy, he'll return with guns blazing (and a clear, online tape recording of every interview he'll ever do).

Larry Bartels has a paper (pdf) connecting economic growth to political support. Ezra Klein summarizes:

To try to separate whether abnormally good policies led to abnormally good results, Bartels constructed a model that tried to predict election outcomes based on relative growth rates — that is to say, the country’s growth rate subtracted from the average growth rate of developed nations. … there is no evidence that voters are at all interested in whether their economies are performing better relative to other economies in other countries. The only thing that interests them is the absolute performance of their economy. And as you can see in this graph, that interests them rather a lot

Room for Debate asks whether the American fertility industry should be regulated more closely. Debora Spar wants to civilize the "Wild West." David Plotz warns against overdoing it:

[W]e’ll miss the lawless fertility business when it’s gone. Its lack of rules spurred innovation, and transformed fertility from a prudish, conservative corner of medicine into a consumer-driven business. Entrepreneurial sperm bankers broke the monopoly that organized medicine had over fertility choices, giving women the chance to choose — no, to shop for — their sperm donor. This willingness to try anything made the American fertility business the liveliest in the world. More regulation — necessary as it is — will diminish that capitalist energy, and bring fertility back in dreary line with the rest of American medicine: more expensive, more defensive, and more responsive to insurers than to customers.

Previous discussion here. 

Christian Caryl explains the revolutionary impact of unmanned weapons of war:

The ethical and legal implications of the new technology already go far beyond the relatively circumscribed issue of targeted killing. Military robots are on their way to developing considerable autonomy. As noted earlier, UAVs can already take off, land, and fly themselves without human intervention. Targeting is still the exclusive preserve of the human operator—but how long will this remain the case?

As sensors become more powerful and diverse, the amount of data gathered by the machines is increasing exponentially, and soon the volume and velocity of information will far exceed the controller’s capacity to process it all in real time, meaning that more and more decision-making will be left to the robot. A move is already underway toward systems that allow a single operator to handle multiple drones simultaneously, and this, too, will tend to push the technology toward greater autonomy. We are not far from the day when it will become manifest that our mechanical warriors are better at protecting the lives of our troops than any human soldier, and once that happens the pressure to let robots take the shot will be very hard to resist.

Roland Paris worries about global drone proliferation. David Axe zooms in on their growing role in Asia.

Ackerman believes that military service dispels the fear of Muslims:

[E]ver since last year's "Ground Zero Mosque" flap, it's struck me that the Robert Spencers and the Pamela Gellars and the lot of them don't have their stock veterans to trot out in service of the idea that the mosque down the street is a threat to your grandmother. I do not believe that is an accident.

The Economist reports on the use of game-theory to solve conflicts:

Today’s game-theory software is not yet sufficiently advanced to mediate between warring countries. But one day opponents on the brink of war might be tempted to use it to exchange information without having to kill and die for it. They could learn how a war would turn out, skip the fighting and strike a deal, Mr Bueno de Mesquita suggests. Over-optimistic, perhaps—but he does have rather an impressive track record when it comes to predicting the future.

McArdle warns that antibiotics become ineffective over time and that we aren't making enough new ones:

Antibiotics are an exhaustible resource. We should be treating them like an oil field, or an endangered species. Instead, we handle them like consumer electronics. The patent system is designed to promote human invention, not conserve what has already been discovered.

Kevin Outterson nods. Chart from (pdf) the IDSA.

A reader writes:

One of the aspects that I have not seen mentioned in the HPV vaccine debate is the huge increase in oral cancers resulting from HPV.  My brother is an ENT surgeon specializing in head and neck cancers in a traditional tobacco-growing area.  We were recently grilling him for gory stories about huge tumors resulting from chewing tobacco or lifelong smoking, but he said that the cases he sees the most nowadays are from HPV.  This was the first we had heard of this and eyebrows were raised all around.  My good friend even commented, "I'm gonna have to rethink 'My Move'." 

These vaccines will not only protect the girls from future cervical cancer, but many men and women from horrible oral cancers. For more, see this link to the Oral Cancer Foundations Site.

Today on the Dish, Andrew believed Obama could easily best Perry even with a bad economy, and Paul Burka told Perry to watch out for Palin's bid. More papers hopped on the censorship bandwagon to avoid offending Palin's fans with a Doonesbury comic strip, and details leaked from "The Rogue." Bachmann's anti-vaccine nonsense incensed the bloggy right, Chris Good urged Perry to stick with his pro-immigration policies, and readers parsed the libertarian argument against emergency rooms. Dissents of the day addressed where exactly the cheers were directed, and Kornacki argued Perry's GOP weaknesses are actually national strengths. Nate Silver expressed concern for Dems in the Senate after the special election, while Robbie George chalked it up to Jewish Fundamentalism in New York. Elizabeth Warren threw her hat in the Senate race, contractors make way more money than federal employees, and Jonathan Bernstein didn't believe in equal media coverage.

In international news, Tony Judt didn't go easy on Israel in his last interview, Benny Morris captured the social inequality, and Obama still doesn't hate Israel. Israel wasn't prepared for non-violent Palestinian protests, and Frontline tracked when torture arrived in America. John Quiggin wondered if China can weather its serious economic shocks, Dave Betz explored the extreme loyalty and bonding of terrorists, and News International's list of victims expanded. Libya faced a political nightmare for reconstruction,

In other national affairs, we examined how much we pay into and get back from Medicare and Social Security and immigration depresses the wages of established immigrants more than any other group. Bartering and debt is more personal than we think, and the US has had a lucky history with regards to buying and holding onto stocks. HIV could hold the key to curing cancer, and the science of testosterone was catching up to a more egalitarian theory of masculinity. Readers stormed the gates with examples of democratic children's literature, we faced up to the ugly truths of rape and war for women in battle, and two female vets relayed their experiences. Plastic surgery could fulfill the transhumanist dream, American tennis fandom declined, having a nice camera doesn't make you a great photographer, and rural areas resemble cities more and more.

Chart of the day here, email of the day here, MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

–Z.P.

(Photo: People gather at the Tea Party Express rally on September 5, 2011 at Veteran's Memorial Park in Manchester, New Hampshire. By Darren McCollester/Getty Images.)