I have not said much about the impending life change of late. Heather has been doing a great job though. She is also blessed/cursed with more free time these days than me. Above all, we are obviously happy that the girls are still cooking.

Are we ready? Of course not. Am I excited? Very much so.

I feel that the sleep-deprived weeks and months that marked my Accenture career were decent training for the months ahead. At least I keep telling myself that will help. Very few of my co-workers back then required as much attention as the girls will need.

Heather posted about my first gift for the girls last week. I would like to note, for the record, that my first gift would be splendid genetics. The Atlantic Monthly onesies are gift number two. The accountants at Atlantic Media were likely confused by this order as I am probably the first non-employee to make such a purchase.

Yesterday I discussed some of the ways in which women are discounted in Australia.  For example, women are paid 83% of what men are paid, and women have a minimal presence in the forums of power and influence. 

One such forum is the opinion-forming publication, The Monthly.  This is a magazine with an audience that would also read, say, The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker.

I analysed the gender of authors featured in 11 issues of The Monthly and found that 73% of articles were written by a male author, 27% by a female author.

Following on from that post, my trusty North American correspondent, Phil, has analysed 5 issues of The Atlantic Monthly and 5 issues of The New Yorker.  Eerily, the gender breakdown for The Atlantic Monthly is exactly the same as for The Monthly: 73% and 27%.  And The New Yorker is very similar. 

Here are the charts:

And here is the issue-by-issue breakdown for The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker (blue-shaded figures=male authors, yellow-shaded figures=female authors).

It does not comfort me one whit that Australia may be as good as it gets.

*****

My sincere thanks to Phil for assembling the figures and sending them to me so promptly. SGxx

Rob and I often bemoan the difficulty of getting people to think deeply on theological matters in the midst of what amounts to a functionally illiterate society.  Although most of us know how to read (and, I assume all of us reading this post), we don’t use that gift very frequently.  I personally blame this on the downfall of liberal arts education.  As a history major at The Citadel, I was often perturbed to hear my business major classmates cry out, “this semester is going to be so hard, I have to write a paper.”  In this article, Nicholas Carr bemoans the same shift in Western society in this Atlantic Monthly article, although he ascribes it to a different cause, Google.  Much like the advent of the codex, the invention of the printing press, and the rise of television, the internet changes the way we think.  Carr rightly diagnoses our shallow, sound bite mode of thinking conditioned by scanning through loads of information on the internet.  he says

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

That being said, we should neither uncritically accept the change in human thought brought about through this medium nor should we uncritically reject it. We should, however, strive to hold on to those mental faculties of focusing our attention span and thinking through long complex ideas. My advice is simple. Make sure you set aside 20 minutes a day, EVERY DAY, for reading through something that’s just a little bit challenging to you.  We all have the time to turn off the TV (and close the laptop) for twenty minutes.  In twenty minutes a day, you can easily work through three or four major theological works a year.  As you do so, you’ll keep using those brain muscles that increase focus, attention span, and knowledge retention.  If the church committed to doing this, we might just be the guardians of thinking, much like the medieval church was the guardian of learning and literacy after the fall of the Roman Empire.  So, Christians, open your books and save your brains!

December’s edition of the Atlantic Monthly features a disturbing article by Hanna Rosin entitled “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” What is disturbing about this article is not the insinuation that many conservative Christian groups have caused far more problems than they’ve solved (“guilty as charged”), but the utter duplicity of the movement. The deception begins with the claim of the Prosperity Gospel pundits that they are holding true to biblical principles. In reality they rewrite the Bible to make it fit their vision of personal gain at the expense of the weak and needy. You can hear the sounds of Amos and Micah being ground beneath their wingtip heels.

The Prosperity Gospel is a particularly virulent disease in the United States, a nation of incomprehensible contrasts. The clergy of the Prosperity Gospel (churches of this stripe are among the largest and fastest growing in America) demand tithes on the part of their sometimes poor but always hopeful congregants. Most of them are being set up for failure. But it will be failure with a smile. As I read Rosin’s article, I was saddened that a growing number of those buying into this “Gospel” are those among the exploited Hispanic community. The message they are being given is the worst kind of blasphemy. One such believer, according to Rosin, claimed “the rich are closer to God.” A message farther from the actual Gospels would be difficult to concoct.

Prosperity Gospelers, decidedly not mainstream Christianity in theological outlook, judge a book by its glitzy cover. Its leaders, often fabulously wealthy, hold out unrealistic hope to their gullible and disappointed followers. It is so easy when a congregant looses everything simply to blame it on a lack of faith. This bogus idea of material payoff for spiritual righteousness is not only dangerous, but it is redefining the religious scene in North America. The article follows the story of Fernando Garay, the leader of Casa del Padre, a Prosperity Gospel church. When asked by Rosin about buying a house (a sign of God’s blessing) he tellingly replied, “Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house. In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian.” Americans have a fondness for snake-oil and entrepreneurs. Now the hucksters are the ones claiming the right to define what Christianity really is. It is a religion that even Jesus would fail to recognize.

I think many of us (especially those prone to cynicism) are watching the health care legislation that has cleared the House and is about to visit the Senate with a pained sense of inevitability. Something is going to get passed and it’s going to be a trainwreck. There is even a part of me that wants to have the Dems pass a bill with everything they want (public option, insurance exchanges, etc.) just to see what happens. At least that way you end up with some coherent policy vision. We know that is not what is going to happen though.

Here is a post from Megan McCardle from a month ago. Some times I like to save predictions from the pundocracy and reread them weeks or months later. One month in (still very early), I still agree with the one that she makes in this post. I also agree with her when she says “This is one time I’d be happy for my predictions to fail in both directions.”

Since getting my first iPod as a gift some four years ago, I’ve downloaded countless gigs of all forms of media. One of my favorite things to download is podcasts. Over the last few years, I’ve tried out hundreds of different podcasts, but have now narrowed it down to 15 or 20 that I listen to on a regular basis. I thought I would share with you my top 5 podcasts:

1.) Slate Culture Gabfest – This is a must listen if you want to stay current on all things related to culture. The shows regular panel consists of Dana Stevens, Julia Turner and Stephen Metcalf, though they are frequently joined by other members of the Slate.Com staff. The content leans towards the “high brow” and much of it involves material published in Northeast publications (i.e. New York Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, etc.), but it provides an inside look at what intellectual elitists all over the nation are talking about.  The most recent episode included a review of the controversial new Lee Daniels’ movie Precious, a review of the Ian McEwan novel Black Dogs to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Jim Windolf’s recent Vanity Fair article on “cuteness.”

2.)  Slate Political Gabfest – Functions in pretty much the same fashion as the Culture Gabfest–three person panel discusses three issues–only involving politics instead of cultural issues. The normal panel consists of John Dickerson, Emily Bazelon and Slate managing editor, David Plotz. Be warned, the panel leans Left–far Left, but it’s entertaining and informative all the same.

3.) Anything You Ever Wanted to Know – This show is produced by KERA, Dallas’ local public radio station. The show airs each Friday afternoon, but I always listen to it via podcast. The show provides an open forum for listeners to submit questions, either on the phone or through e-mail, to be answered by other members of the listening audience and is moderated by Jeff Whittington. Over the past three years, I’ve learned some fascinating things from the show.

4.) The Writer’s Almanac Podcast – Hosted by Garrison Keillor, the show serves as a “this day in literary history” for lovers of words.  Normally, Keillor lists off several key events for each day and then will focus heavily on one birthday or event before reading a selected “poem of the day.” More than anything else, the show has introduced me to some great new poetry.

5.) NPR Playback – While the other podcasts I listed are released on a weekly or daily basies, the NPR Playback podcast is released on a monthly basis and features audio clips from the archives from 20 years prior. For example, the November podcast features audio from NPR segments from November 1984. I love being transported back to the 80’s and this podcast does just that.

Preppy.

It’s a word that we hear often.  Used in many different ways.  But what does it mean exactly?  What does it mean to be preppy?  I used to think that I was in no way even kind of preppy, that preppy meant to be be a jerk and wear Abercrombie & Fitch clothing all the time.  Then I found out that I was a bit more preppy than I thought, and that wearing Abercrombie pretty much means that you are not a prep.  My friend, Justin, voted “Most Preppiest” at his relatively preppy private high school thinks that being preppy in his situation was basically about perception.  He was awarded the title because he was black and didn’t dress in a ghetto style.  This marked him as extraordinarily preppy.  So, to me, its kind of up in the air, exactly what it means to be preppy.  Someone who does have a good idea of what it means is Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.  I’m not saying that this guy is delivering any sort of earth shattering new, but this is definitely a good read.  A bit lengthy, but fun.  Click on the photo above to link to Aldrich’s dissertation printed over 30 years ago in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Preppies: The Last Upper Class?”  I found the article on one of my favorite style and fashion blogs, Ivy Style.

I was running with a friend on Friday morning and we were discussing the shootings. I was lamenting the coming onslaught from the talking heads as they all race to say something profound and meaningful first.

Instead, I ran in to this post from James Fallows. He has been a journalist (the real kind) for a long time and his experience writing about these types of events (and world events in general) shows:

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the “expert” talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre “mean”? A decade later, do we “know” anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They’ve got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don’t mean nothing.

RIP.

Here are links regarding an article by Nadya Labi in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly about “snatchbacks.” The article focuses on Gus Zamora, who does this for a living.  Japan is mentioned in the article, including details about an unsuccessful attempt by Zamora do a snatchback in Japan.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910u/snatchback-story

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/labi-snatchback

This month the Atlantic Monthly published a list of 27 “Brave Thinkers.” These 27 Brave Thinkers, are what you and I will most likely become.

Regardless, I noticed the use of the acronym ICC– in the case of Alex de Waal, Program Director at the Social Science Research Center the acronym ICC stands for International Criminal Court.

Good thing de Waal argues that it doesn’t exist, so that we can use it to reference the InterCorps Council.

Read It!

Satire is Surrender

Christopher Hitchens article (Cheap Laughs) about John Stewart is right but for all the wrong reasons.  The self-satisfied smugness of Stewart’s satire is a problem for satire itself not for the right.  The problem with modern satire is that it has devolved into consolatory moral triumphalism, that is not a problem because it is bogus, but rather because its satiric exercise leaves the political situation it mocks intact.  This in turn creates a cheap cynicism that declares its impotence when it surrenders to what it perceives to be a morally indecent political situation and announces that the only remaining power it has is the ability to say “Well we might as well laugh at it”.  This kind of satire is inscribed with an acceptance that the political scene it derides is permanent. The biggest danger, then, for satire is when it is cheered only by its own sense of self-righteousness that Hitchens rightly dislikes.  Satire’s function shouldn’t be to console the left but to confront the right.

But doesn’t the right also win by not only allowing satirists to laugh at them in public but also allowing themselves to laugh at themselves? Doesn’t this short-circuit satire?  A nice example of this is Tony Blair’s appearance on The Daily Show.  Expecting to be comically condemned by Stewart he showed his understanding of the function and intention of satire when this satirical trial wasted public anger by acting as a substitution for any real criminal investigation.  It was enough to see to see him feebly deny that he was wrong about the Iraq war and then put his decisions into the mild terms of “mistakes”, giving him the luxury of an opportunity to vindicate himself.

This shows the inadequacy of Philip Sidney’s definition of satire in his The Defence of Poesy where he claims that satire should shame people out of their vice by making their position look so ridiculously absurd that nobody could possibly continue such “folly”.  The obvious failing of this is the recent realization that the bankers and politicians, whom satire has attacked, are comfortable with their “abuses”.  However, even if it does succeed in making them ashamed, this is always a concession to making them afraid of prosecution.  Satire, therefore, should be the start of the punishment not the end.

In ‘As I Please’, George Orwell gave a warning about the dangers of a soothing satire when he wrote: “The fact is that this business about the moral superiority of the poor is one of the deadliest forms of escapism the ruling class have evolved.  You may be down-trodden and swindled, but in the eyes of God you are superior to your oppressors and by means of films and magazines you can enjoy a fantasy experience in which you constantly triumph over the people who defeat you in real-life”.

Hitchens may think that liberal humour debases the national conversation but he can at least be happy that it doesn’t correct the national politics.

Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh

Dorchester, England

Much has been made of how the mainstream media is obsolete, and that the internet not only provides a greater volume of coverage, but also provides for a wider range of voices in the media. In addition, if one wishes to enquire into a news source, one can check it oneself, even viewing official statements from the Whitehouse, and viewing videos os the related events in real time, so there is no opportunity of deniability. This of course varies with one’s access to online media (i.e. pay-for-view news, a la Wall Street Journal, or access to a Lexis-Nexis account). Meanwhile the mainstream media is complaining that sites such as Craigslist (as well as free online media) is undermining their traditional revenue sources, and are being forced to cut back on salaried staff, as well as investigative journalism, and are increasingly being forced to rely on a limited choice of wire services to fill their pages (or news programs, as the case may be).

But what is the effect of all this?

From the Atlantic Monthly, October 2009:
Mark Bowden

the Incestuous Mass Media

The Story Behing the Story

If you happened to be watching a television news channel on May 26 [FOX News], the day President Obama nominated U.S. Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, you might have been struck, as I was, by what seemed like a nifty investigative report.

First came the happy announcement ceremony at the White House, with Sotomayor sweetly saluting her elderly mother, who as a single parent had raised the prospective justice and her brother in a Bronx housing project. Obama had chosen a woman whose life journey mirrored his own: an obscure, disadvantaged beginning followed by blazing academic excellence, an Ivy League law degree, and a swift rise to power. It was a moving TV moment, well-orchestrated and in perfect harmony with the central narrative of the new Obama presidency.

But then, just minutes later, journalism rose to perform its time-honored pie-throwing role. Having been placed by the president on a pedestal, Sotomayor was now a clear target. I happened to be watching Fox News. I was slated to appear that night on one of its programs, Hannity, to serve as a willing foil to the show’s cheerfully pugnacious host, Sean Hannity, a man who can deliver a deeply held conservative conviction on any topic faster than the speed of thought. Since the host knew what the subject matter of that night’s show would be and I did not, I’d thought it best to check in and see what Fox was preoccupied with that afternoon.

With Sotomayor, of course—and the network’s producers seemed amazingly well prepared. They showed a clip from remarks she had made on an obscure panel at Duke University in 2005, and then, reaching back still farther, they showed snippets from a speech she had made at Berkeley Law School in 2001. Here was this purportedly moderate Latina judge, appointed to the federal bench by a Republican president and now tapped for the Supreme Court by a Democratic one, unmasked as a Race Woman with an agenda. In one clip she announced herself as someone who believed her identity as a “Latina woman” (a redundancy, but that’s what she said) made her judgment superior to that of a “white male,” and in the other she all but unmasked herself as a card-carrying member of the Left Wing Conspiracy to use America’s courts not just to apply and interpret the law but, in her own words, to make policy, to perform an end run around the other two branches of government and impose liberal social policies by fiat on an unsuspecting American public.

Holy cow! I’m an old reporter, and I know legwork when I see it. Those crack journalists at Fox, better known for coloring and commenting endlessly on the news than for actually breaking it, had unearthed not one but two explosive gems, and had been primed to expose Sotomayor’s darker purpose within minutes of her nomination! Leaving aside for the moment any question about the context of these seemingly damaging remarks—none was offered—I was impressed. In my newspaper years, I prepared my share of advance profiles of public figures, and I know the scut work that goes into sifting through a decades-long career. In the old days it meant digging through packets of yellowed clippings in the morgue, interviewing widely, searching for those moments of controversy or surprise that revealed something interesting about the subject. How many rulings, opinions, articles, legal arguments, panel discussions, and speeches had there been in the judge’s long years of service? What bloodhound producer at Fox News had waded into this haystack to find these two choice needles?

Then I flipped to MSNBC, and lo!… they had the exact same two clips. I flipped to CNN… same clips. CBS… same clips. ABC… same clips. Parsing Sotomayor’s 30 years of public legal work, somehow every TV network had come up with precisely the same moments! None bothered to say who had dug them up; none offered a smidgen of context. They all just accepted the apparent import of the clips, the substance of which was sure to trouble any fair-minded viewer. By the end of the day just about every American with a TV set had heard the “make policy” and “Latina woman” comments. By the end of the nightly news summaries, millions who had never heard of Sonia Sotomayor knew her not only as Obama’s pick, but as a judge who felt superior by reason of her gender and ethnicity, and as a liberal activist determined to “make policy” from the federal bench. And wasn’t it an extraordinary coincidence that all these great news organizations, functioning independently—because this, after all, is the advantage of having multiple news-gathering sources in a democracy—had come up with exactly the same material in advance?

They hadn’t, of course. The reporting we saw on TV and on the Internet that day was the work not of journalists, but of political hit men. The snippets about Sotomayor had been circulating on conservative Web sites and shown on some TV channels for weeks. They were new only to the vast majority of us who have better things to do than vet the record of every person on Obama’s list. But this is precisely what activists and bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum do, and what a conservative organization like the Judicial Confirmation Network exists to promote. The JCN had gathered an attack dossier on each of the prospective Supreme Court nominees, and had fed them all to the networks in advance.

This process—political activists supplying material for TV news broadcasts—is not new, of course. It has largely replaced the work of on-the-scene reporters during political campaigns, which have become, in a sense, perpetual. The once-quadrennial clashes between parties over the White House are now simply the way our national business is conducted. In our exhausting 24/7 news cycle, demand for timely information and analysis is greater than ever. With journalists being laid off in droves, savvy political operatives have stepped eagerly into the breach. What’s most troubling is not that TV-news producers mistake their work for journalism, which is bad enough, but that young people drawn to journalism increasingly see no distinction between disinterested reporting and hit-jobbery.

What gave newspapers their value was the mission and promise of journalism—the hope that someone was getting paid to wade into the daily tide of manure, sort through its deliberate lies and cunning half-truths, and tell a story straight…

…But while the Internet may be the ultimate democratic tool, it is also demolishing the business model that long sustained news­papers and TV’s network-news organizations….

What people have seemed to overlook in this debate is that investigative reporting is a very capital-intensive endeavor (frequently to compensate for extremely hazardous semi-clandestine investigation). Most of what appears in the seemingly more-diverse-than-it-appears internet “press”, is that most amateur sleaths (myself included) tend to largely reprint that which is being reported elsewhere. It’s like an enormous echo chamber.

Morgen Richmond, for one—the man who actually found the snippets used to attack Sotomayor. He is a partner in a computer-consulting business in Orange County, California, a father of two, and a native of Canada, who defines himself, in part, as a political conservative. He spends some of his time most nights in a second-floor bedroom/office in his home, after his children and wife have gone to bed, cruising the Internet looking for ideas and information for his blogging. “It’s more of a hobby than anything else,” he says. His primary outlet is a Web site called VerumSerum.com, which was co-founded by his friend John Sexton. Sexton is a Christian conservative who was working at the time for an organization called Reasons to Believe, which strives, in part, to reconcile scientific discovery and theory with the apparent whoppers told in the Bible. Sexton is, like Richmond, a young father, living in Huntington Beach. He is working toward a master’s degree at Biola University (formerly the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), and is a man of opinion. He says that even as a youth, long before the Internet, he would corner his friends and make them listen to his most recent essay. For both Sexton and Richmond, Verum Serum is a labor of love, a chance for them to flex their desire to report and comment, to add their two cents to the national debate. Both see themselves as somewhat unheralded conservative thinkers in a world captive to misguided liberalism and prey to an overwhelmingly leftist mainstream media, or MSM, composed of journalists who, like myself, write for print publications or work for big broadcast networks and are actually paid for their work.

Richmond started researching Sotomayor after ABC News Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos named her as the likely pick back on March 13. The work involved was far less than I’d imagined, in part because the Internet is such an amazing research tool, but mostly because Richmond’s goal was substantially easier to achieve than a journalist’s. For a newspaper reporter, the goal in researching any profile is to arrive at a deeper understanding of the subject. My own motivation, when I did it, was to present not just a smart and original picture of the person, but a fair picture. In the quaint protocols of my ancient newsroom career, the editors I worked for would have accepted nothing less; if they felt a story needed more detail or balance, they’d brusquely hand it back and demand more effort. Richmond’s purpose was fundamentally different. He figured, rightly, that anyone Obama picked who had not publicly burned an American flag would likely be confirmed, and that she would be cheered all the way down this lubricated chute by the Obama-loving MSM.

“The goal is to develop original stories that attract attention,” he told me. “I was consciously looking for something that would resonate.”

But not just anything resonant. Richmond’s overarching purpose was to damage Sotomayor, or at least to raise questions about her that would trouble his readers, who are mostly other conservative bloggers. On most days, he says, his stuff on Verum Serum is read by only 20 to 30 people. If any of them like what they see, they link to it or post the video on their own, larger Web sites.

Richmond began his reporting by looking at university Web sites. He had learned that many harbor little-seen recordings and transcripts of speeches made by public figures, since schools regularly sponsor lectures and panel discussions with prominent citizens, such as federal judges. Many of the events are informal and unscripted, and can afford glimpses of public figures talking unguardedly about their ideas, their life, and their convictions. Many are recorded and archived. Using Google, Richmond quickly found a list of such appearances by Sotomayor, and the first one he clicked on was the video of the 2005 panel discussion at Duke University Law School. Sotomayor and two other judges, along with two Duke faculty members, sat behind a table before a classroom filled with students interested in applying for judicial clerkships. The video is 51 minutes long and is far from riveting. About 40 minutes into it, Richmond says, he was only half listening, multitasking on his home computer, when laughter from the sound track caught his ear. He rolled back the video and heard Sotomayor utter the line about making policy, and then jokingly disavow the expression.

The rest of Richmond’s take can be found HERE on the Atlantic Monthly website. But let me point out the primary reason for my interest in the story. Again, we take you back to Mark Bowden’s insight into the (potentially dangerous) phenomenon taking place here (and this is not to be considered something peculiar to the neo-conservative wing of the greater (if one includes the blogosphere in this context) Mass Media.

I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view. We accept the harshness of this process because the consequences in a courtroom are so stark; trials are about assigning guilt or responsibility for harm. There is very little wiggle room in such a confrontation, very little room for compromise—only innocence or degrees of guilt or responsibility. But isn’t this model unduly harsh for political debate? Isn’t there, in fact, middle ground in most public disputes? Isn’t the art of politics finding that middle ground, weighing the public good against factional priorities? Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes blood sport.

Television loves this, because it is dramatic. Confrontation is all. And given the fragmentation of news on the Internet and on cable television, Americans increasingly choose to listen only to their own side of the argument, to bloggers and commentators who reinforce their convictions and paint the world only in acceptable, comfortable colors. Bloggers like Richmond and Sexton, and TV hosts like Hannity, preach only to the choir. Consumers of such “news” become all the more entrenched in their prejudices, and ever more hostile to those who disagree. The other side is no longer the honorable opposition, maybe partly right; but rather always wrong, stupid, criminal, even downright evil. Yet even in criminal courts, before assigning punishment, judges routinely order pre­sentencing reports, which attempt to go beyond the clash of extremes in the courtroom to a more nuanced, disinterested assessment of a case. Usually someone who is neither prosecution nor defense is assigned to investigate. In a post-journalistic society, there is no disinterested voice. There are only the winning side and the losing side.

There’s more here than just an old journalist’s lament over his dying profession, or over the social cost of losing great newspapers and great TV-news operations. And there’s more than an argument for the ethical superiority of honest, disinterested reporting over advocacy. Even an eager and ambitious political blogger like Richmond, because he is drawn to the work primarily out of political conviction, not curiosity, is less likely to experience the pleasure of finding something new, or of arriving at a completely original, unexpected insight, one that surprises even himself. He is missing out on the great fun of speaking wholly for himself, without fear or favor. This is what gives reporters the power to stir up trouble wherever they go. They can shake preconceptions and poke holes in presumption. They can celebrate the unnoticed and puncture the hyped. They can, as the old saying goes, afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. A reporter who thinks and speaks for himself, whose preeminent goal is providing deeper understanding, aspires even in political argument to persuade, which requires at the very least being seen as fair-minded and trustworthy by those—and this is the key—who are inclined to disagree with him. The honest, disinterested voice of a true journalist carries an authority that no self-branded liberal or conservative can have. “For a country to have a great writer is like having another government,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote. Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth. Those who forsake it to shill for a product or a candidate or a party or an ideology diminish their own power. They are missing the most joyful part of the job.

There are two voices, and the first says, “Write!”
And the second voice says, “For Whom?” . . .
And the first voice says, “For the dead whom thou didst love.”

-John Berryman, 1968, quoting Kierkegaard, who in turn is quoting Hamann.

            Just to be on the up-and-up, I too am quoting someone here — Peter Davidson from the Atlantic Monthly.  The great irony of this is that all these people are writers.  What is it about writers?  We are storytellers and lovers of language-the manner in which words can be used not only to express any circumstance and situation, but also gradations of truth and radiations of perception.  Somehow we never consider the backdoor that old saw, “a picture is worth a thousand words”: the thousand or ten thousand words we spend unpacking a picture create a reality, a new and actual dimension that pixels and even the atomic substructure of creation cannot express.  Writers are re-creators, people for whom possible realities are all “variations on common themes.”

            At some point somebody is going to figure out what makes a writer need to write.  It may be a geneticist who discovers some funky mutation of a certain chromosome; they’ll “fix” us with gene therapy in order to give us back our lives-and then wonder three months later why all the joy and mystery went out of the world.  Or maybe it isn’t genetic.  Maybe it’s behavioral.  Maybe a human organism, exposed to the extremes of emotional experience in infancy before verbal ability is acquired, seizes the creative initiative over the course of a lifetime to put into words an experiential cataclysm that is no longer consciously remembered.  Third choice-and this is my favorite: it’s an addiction.  Here’s my definition of writing: compulsive creative behavior combined with an obsessive mental state of storytelling resulting in the inability to function without ever increasing doses of literary acting out.  Of course, as William Glasser pointed out, there are both positive and negative addictions. . . .  So, which is writing?  Depends on how tolerant one’s family and friends are, I suspect.

            Anyway, whatever the source of the condition that afflicts us, the important thing is to determine whether or not you are indeed a writer.  Here is a simple list of ten characteristics in the form of questions.  If you answer “yes” to three or more of these . . . well, I really don’t have to tell you, do I?  [By the way, wherever the word "story" appears below, feel free to substitute the words "poem" or "essay."] 

1. Do you have the ability to tell what a character in a book, play, movie or TV program is going to say long before it’s actually said; or the ability to tell what’s going to happen to each character before the story is half-over; or the desire to rewrite the ending of the story before it’s over?
2. Does it irritate you that professional critics often don’t understand the most basic elements of the books, movies, plays or stories they are critiquing?  [I'm still waiting for any critic to notice and figure out Spielberg's use of the colors red and blue in the remake of War of the Worlds.]
3. When you sit down to write a story or to describe a character, does he or she take on a totally unexpected life or “say” something you never consciously intended?
4. Have you ever had difficulty “killing off” a character in your story because she or he was so intriguing and full of possibility for you, his or her creator? [This is why I'll never be a great crime writer; what use is a dead character?]
5. Have you ever been unable to sleep because a character or story was creating itself in your mind; or awakened from sleep because a character or story needed your consciousness to develop itself; or stayed awake and focused for hours while you were driving, walking, run or pretending to work as a story wrote itself in your mind?
6. Did you ever write or create a story and afterwards discover that it fit a genre you had never written in before; or created a character who was totally unlike anyone you had ever known, and yet was totally believable?
7. Do you consider the finished stories you have written to be creations you value somewhere between children and friends; yet do you yearn with each new story to “get it right this time?” [So, does this mean that best selling authors who basically recycle their stories with ever diminishing creativity are no longer writers?]
8. Do you have mental list or a computer file or a spiral notebook with the ideas for or outlines of stories that you have not written but intend to one day?
9. Have you ever had the experienced of a family member, acquaintance or friend being totally amazed at the world you created in a story you wrote and then regarding you differently; and then did you feel as if you had “exposed” yourself?
10. When you consider Berryman’s command to write for the dead whom thou didst love, do you know immediately for whom you write? 

If you did not answer yes to three of more of these questions, good for you.  If you did, then you know.  Go back now and try to put it into words.

-Laz Barnhill

Mike Adams summarizes the key information in an important new Atlantic Monthly article on flu vaccination. This excerpt is from the COTO report blog:

Do vaccines descend from the "snake oil" lineage in American medical tradition?

“Prepare to have your world rocked. What you’re about to read here will leave you astonished, inspired and outraged all at the same time. You’re about to be treated to some little-known information demonstrating why seasonal flu vaccines are utterly worthless and why their continued promotion is based entirely on fabricated studies and medical mythology.

If the whole world knew what you’re about to read here, the vaccine industry would collapse overnight.

This information comes to you courtesy of a brilliant article published in The Atlantic (November 2009). The article, written by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, isn’t just brilliant; in my opinion it stands as the best article on flu vaccines that has ever been published in the popular press. Entitled Does the vaccine matter?, it presents some of the most eye-opening information you’ve probably ever read about the failure of flu vaccines. You can read the full article here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/brownlee-h1n1

Perhaps its impressive narrative shouldn’t be too surprising, though, since writer Shannon Brownlee is also the celebrated author of a phenomenal book on modern medicine entitled Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (http://www.amazon.com/Overtreated-M…) (http://www.naturalpedia.com/book_Ov…).

While I’ve never done this before, I’m going to summarize this article point by point (along with some comments) so that you get the full force of what’s finally been put into print.

This information is so important that I encourage you to share the following summary I’ve put together. Email it to family, friends and coworkers. Or post it on your blog or website (with a link and proper credit to both NaturalNews and The Atlantic, please). Get this information out to the world. People need to know this, and so far the mainstream media has utterly failed to make this information known.

(The really good information begins after around a dozen bullet points, so be sure to keep reading…)

Does the vaccine matter?

What follows is my point-by-point summary of this groundbreaking article by Shannon Brownlee, originally published in The Atlantic. My opinion statements are shown in brackets and italics.

• Vaccination is the core strategy of the U.S. government’s plan to combat the swine flu.

• The U.S. government has spent roughly $3 billion stockpiling vaccines and anti-viral drugs.

• The CDC is recommending that 159 million Americans receive a swine flu vaccine injection (as soon as possible).

• What if vaccines don’t work? More and more researchers are skeptical about whether they do.

• Seasonal flu (that’s the regular flu) currently kills an estimated 36,000 people each year in the United States. [But most people who die are already suffering from existing diseases such as asthma.]

• Most “colds” aren’t really caused by the flu virus. As few as 7 or 8 percent (and at most, 50 percent) of colds have an influenza origin. There are more than 200 viruses and pathogens that can cause “influenza-like” illnesses (and therefore be easily mistaken for the flu).

• Viruses mutate with amazing speed, meaning that each year’s circulating influenza is genetically different from the previous year.

• The vaccine for each upcoming flu season is formulated by health experts taking a guess [a wild guess, at times] about what strain of influenza might be most likely to circulate in the future.

• The 1918 Spanish Flu infected roughly one-third of the world population and killed at least 40 million.

• In the U.S., the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology predicted that H1N1 influenza could infect up to one-half of the U.S. population and kill 90,000 Americans.

[Keep reading, the good part is coming...]

• Of those who have died from the Swine Flu in the U.S., roughly 70 percent were already diseased with some serious underlying condition such as asthma or AIDS.

• Public health officials consider vaccines to be their first and best weapon against influenza. Vaccines helped eradicate smallpox and polio. [I don't agree with that assessment. Vaccines did relatively little compared to improvements in public sanitation.]

• Each year, 100 million Americans get vaccinated, and vaccines remain “a staple” of public health policy in the United States.

Why the research is bogus

• Because researchers can’t exactly pin down who has influenza and who doesn’t, the research conducted on the effectiveness of vaccines simply calculates the death rate from all causes among those who take the vaccine vs. those who don’t. [This includes deaths from accidents, heart attacks, medications, car wrecks and everything.]

• These studies show a “dramatic difference” between the death rates of those who get the vaccines vs. those who don’t. People who get vaccinated have significantly lower death rates [from ALL causes, and herein lies the problem...].

• Flu shot propaganda cites these studies, telling people that if they get their flu shots every year, they will have a significantly reduced chance of dying. But this is extremely misleading…

• Critics question the logic of these studies: As it turns out, compared to the number of deaths from all causes, the number of people killed by influenza is quite small. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, deaths from influenza account for — at most — 10 percent of the total deaths during the flu season (and this includes all indirect deaths aggravated by the flu).

• This brings up a hugely important dilemma: If influenza only accounts for roughly 10 percent of all deaths during the flu season, how could an influenza vaccine reduce total deaths by 50 percent? (As is claimed by the vaccine manufacturers.) [It doesn't add up. Even if the vaccines were 100% effective, they should only reduce the total death rates by 10%, given that only 10% of the total deaths are caused by influenza.]

• Here’s a direct quote from the story: Tom Jefferson, a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of researchers who appraise medical evidence, says: “For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That’s not a vaccine, that’s a miracle.” [Emphasis added.]

The failure of cohort studies

• So how do the vaccine companies come up with this “50% reduction in death rate” statistic? Through cohort studies.

• Cohort studies compare the death rates of large groups of people who received the vaccine to large groups of people who did NOT receive the vaccine. But there’s a fatal flaw in this approach: People self-select for vaccinations. And what kind of people? As it turns out: People who take more precautions with their health!

• [Thus, you automatically have a situation where the more health-cautious people are getting the vaccines because they THINK it's good for them. Meanwhile all the masses of people who don't give a darn about their health tend to skip the seasonal flu vaccines. And these people tend to not take very good of their health in lots of other ways. In other words, in terms of the masses, people who get vaccines are more likely to avoid junk food and live a more health-cautious lifestyle. This explains the differences in the death rates between the two groups! It has nothing to do with the vaccine...]

• There is extreme “cult-like” peer pressure put on doctors and researchers to swallow the vaccine mythology without question. Quoted from the story: Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.” [In other words, don't dare question the vaccine, and don't ask tough scientific questions because the vaccine industry runs on dogma, not science... and if you ask any questions, you might find yourself out of a job...].

[Here's where the really good part begins...]

• Lisa Jackson was not deterred. She and three other researchers began to study the widely-quoted vaccine statistics in an attempt to identify this “healthy user effect,” if any. They looked through eight years of medical data covering 72,000 people aged 65 or older and recorded who received flu shots and who didn’t. Then they compared the death rates for all causes outside the flu season.

The vaccine made no difference in mortality

• What she found blows a hole right through the vaccination industry: She found that even outside the flu season, the death rate was 60 percent higher among those who did not get vaccines than among those who do. [In other words, even when you take the flu season completely out of the equation, elderly people who don't get vaccines have other lifestyle factors that makes them far more likely to die from lots of other causes.]

• She also found that this so-called “healthy user effect” explains the entire apparent benefit that continues to be attributed to vaccines. This finding demonstrates that the flu vaccine may not have any beneficial effect whatsoever in reducing mortality.

• How well done were these particular studies? Quoted from the story: Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

• Many pro-vaccine experts simply refused to believe the results of this study [because it conflicts with their existing belief in vaccine mythology]. The Journal of the American Medical Association refused to publish her research, even stating, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” [Which just goes to show you how deeply ingrained the current vaccine mythology is in the minds of conventional medical practitioners. They simply cannot imagine that vaccines don't work, so they dismiss any evidence -- even GOOD evidence -- demonstrating that fact. This is what makes the vaccine industry a CULT rather than a science.]

• Jackson’s papers were finally published in 2006, in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

[And here's the really, really juicy part you can't miss...]

Vaccine shortage proves it never worked in the first place

• The history of the flu vaccine reveals some huge gaps in current vaccination mythology, essentially proving they don’t work:

• For example: In 2004, vaccine production was low and there was a shortage in vaccines (a 40 percent reduction in vaccinations). And yet mortality rates did not rise during the flu season. [Clearly, if vaccines actually worked, then a year when the vaccine wasn't even administered to 40% of the people who normally get it should have resulted in a huge and statistically significant increase in mortality. It should have spiked the death rates and filled the morgues... but it didn't. You know why? Because flu vaccines don't work in the first place.]

• In the history of flu vaccines, there were two years in which the formulated flu vaccine was a total mismatch to the widely-circulating influenza that made people sick. These years were 1968 and 1997. In both of these years, the vaccine was a completely mismatch for the circulating virus. In effect, nobody was vaccinated! [Knowing this, if the vaccine itself was effective at reducing death rates, then we should have once again seen a huge spike in the death rates during these two years, right? Seriously, if the vaccine reduces death rates by 50% as is claimed by vaccine manufacturers, then these two years in which the vaccine completely missed the mark should have seen huge spikes in the winter death rates, right? But what really happened was... nothing. Not a blip. Not a spike. Nothing. The death rates didn't rise at all.]

• If vaccines really worked to save lives, then the more people you vaccinate, the lower death rates you should see, right? But that’s not the case. Back in 1989, only 15 percent of over-65 people got vaccinated against the flu. But today, thanks to the big vaccine push, over 65 percent are vaccinated. And yet, amazingly, death rates among the elderly have not gone down during the flu season. In fact, they’ve gone up!

• When vaccine promoters (and CDC officials) are challenged about the “50 percent mortality reduction” myth, they invoke dogmatic language and attack the messenger. They are simply not willing to consider the possibility that flu vaccines simply don’t work.

• Scientists who question the vaccine mythology are routinely shunned by the medical establishment. Tom Jefferson from the Cochrane Collaboration is an epidemiologist who questions the claimed benefits of flu vaccines. “The reaction [against Jefferson] has been so dogmatic and even hysterical that you’d think he was advocating stealing babies” said a colleague (Majumdar).

• Jefferson is one of the world’s best-informed researchers on the flu vaccine. He leads a team of researchers who have examined hundreds of vaccine studies. To quote directly from the article: The vast majority of the studies were deeply flawed, says Jefferson. “Rubbish is not a scientific term, but I think it’s the term that applies [to these studies].”

[And here's the real kicker that demonstrates why flu vaccines are useless...]

Flu vaccines only “work” on people who don’t need them

• Vaccines supposedly “work” by introducing a weakened viral strain that causes the immune system to respond by building influenza antibodies. However, as Jefferson points out, only healthy people produce a good antibody response to the vaccine. And yet it is precisely the unhealthy people — the ones who have a poor immune response to the vaccine — who are most at risk of being harmed or killed by influenza. But the vaccines don’t work in them!

• [In other words -- get this -- flu vaccines only "work" in people who don't need them!]

• [At the same time, it's also accurate to say that vaccines don't work at all in the very people who theoretically could benefit from them. They only produce antibodies in people who already have such a strong immune response that they don't need the vaccine in the first place.]

• Jefferson has called for randomized, placebo-controlled studies of the vaccines. But vaccine pushers are resisting these clinical trials! They call the trials “unethical” [but, in reality, they know that a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled study would reveal the complete failure of flu vaccines, and they will do anything to prevent such a trial from happening. Don't you find it amazing that drug pushers and vaccine advocates claim they have "science" on their side, but they won't submit their vaccines to any real science at all?]

• [No placebo-controlled studies have ever been conducted on flu vaccines because the industry says they would be "unethical." So where do these people get off claiming their vaccines work at all? The whole industry is based on fabricated statistics that are provably false... and the injections continue, year after year, with absolutely no benefit to public health whatsoever...]

Why anti-viral drugs don’t work either

• On the anti-viral drug front, hospitals are urged to hand out prescriptions for Tamiflu and Relenza to almost anyone who is symptomatic, whether they actually have swine flu or not. Concern is growing about the emergence of drug-resistant strains of swine flu. ” Flu can become resistant to Tamiflu in a matter of days…” says one researcher.

• In 2005, the U.S. government spent $1.8 billion to stockpile antiviral drugs for the military. This decision was made during the time when Donald Rumsfeld was Defense Secretary. Rumsfeld also held millions of dollars worth of stock in Gilead Sciences, the company that holds the patent on Tamiflu. That company saw its stock price rise 50 percent following the government’s stockpiling purchase of Tamiflu.

• The evidence supporting Tamiflu’s anti-viral benefits is flimsy at best. Even worse, as many as one in five children taking Tamiflu experience neuropsychiatric side effects including hallucinations and suicidal behavior. [In other words, your kid might be "tripping out" on some bad Tamiflu...]

• Tamiflu is already linked to 50 deaths of children in Japan.

• The evidence supporting Tamiflu is based on cohort studies, just like the vaccines, which may distort or exaggerate the apparent benefits of the drug.

• Even supporters of Tamiflu admit it’s never been proven to help. A CDC official says that randomized trials to determine the effectiveness of Tamiflu would be “unethical.”

• In all, neither vaccines nor anti-viral drugs have any reliable evidence that they work against influenza at all. Both are being promoted based entirely on pure wishful thinking, not hard science.

• The history of pharmaceutical medicine is littered with other examples of drugs that doctors “knew worked” but which later turned out to harm or kill patients. [All along, the proper scientific studies were avoided because, hey, if you already know everything, why bother conducting any actual science to prove anything?]

• The hype about vaccines provides a false sense of security, taking away attention from other things that really do work to prevent influenza deaths. That’s why, except for “hand washing,” virtually no advice has been offered to the public on preventing influenza beyond vaccines and anti-viral drugs.

• Concluding quote from the author: “By being afraid to do the proper studies now, we may be condemning ourselves to using treatments based on illusion and faith rather than sound science.”

A recap of these astonishing points

Let’s recap what we just learned here (because it’s just mind-boggling):

• There have been no placebo-controlled studies on flu vaccines because the vaccine pushers say such clinical trials would be “unethical.” Thus, there is actually no hard scientific evidence that they work at all.

• The “50 percent reduction in mortality” statistic that’s tossed around by vaccine pushers is a total fabrication based on “rubbish” studies (”cohort” studies).

• Scrutinizing the existing studies that claim to support vaccines reveals that flu vaccines simply don’t work. And when vaccines aren’t available or the formulation is wrong, there’s no spike in death rates, indicating quite conclusively that these vaccines offer no reduction in mortality.

• Flu vaccines only produce antibodies in people who don’t need vaccines. At the same time, they fail to produce antibodies in people who are most vulnerable to flu. Thus, vaccines only work in people who don’t need them.

• The entire flu vaccine industry is run like a cult, with dogma ruling over science. Anyone who asks tough, scientific questions is immediately branded a heretic. No one is allowed to question the status quo. (So much for “evidence-based medicine,” huh?)

As you can see from all this, the flu vaccine is pure quackery. Those who administer vaccines are, by inference, QUACKS. They claim to have scientific minds, and yet they are the most gullible of all: They will believe almost anything if it’s published in a medical journal, even if it’s complete quackery.

Today, countless doctors, nurses and pharmacists across North America and around the world are pushing a medically worthless, scientifically-fabricated chemical injection that offers absolutely no benefit to public health… and yet they’re convinced it’s highly effective! It just goes to show you how easy it is to brainwash people in the field of conventional medicine.

They’ve abandoned real science long ago, you know. Now the whole industry is just run on the momentum of dogmatic arrogance and the illusion of authority. From the CDC and FDA on down to the local pharmacist at the corner store, the American medical system is run by some seemingly smart people who have been brainwashed into become full-fledged members of the Cult of Pharmacology where vaccine mythology overrules real science.

The vaccine industry is perhaps the greatest medical scam ever pulled off in the history of the world. Don’t fall for it.

And don’t forget to read the full article in The Atlantic by Shannon Brownlee: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/2009… ….”

Get the rest of the summary on COTO report blog

You and I complain about this a lot. Ok, maybe it’s just Heather and I complaining about it. We have gone back and forth on this topic for years now. We get angry at big media for putting so many resources against stories like Jon and Kate, Britney, etc. and they ignore health care policy, climate change, education policy, et al. After we calm down, we remember that all of these evil media empires are motivated by profit and that you and I are the customers. This is what we are asking for. Sure, we subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly and readers of this blog know that I will link to it over and over again (see the next paragraph). We also get the Washingtonian, People Magazine, Bicycling and yes, US Weekly. There are nights when I am happy to pickup US Weekly and read the captions because it doesn’t involve my brain. Reality TV does a nice job of not using up any processing power after a long day at work as well.

Ta-Nehise Coates post about the coverage we deserve, most of which I have excerpted below, spoke to me. He is responding to many other posts a few weeks ago. If you have time, browse a few of them, but if you don’t at least stay with me a bit longer.

Tough medicine. It’s always more comforting to think that some all-powerful being (rich white men, the media, big business etc.) has brainwashed “The People.” But when you start delving into this stuff, you realize that often those institutions are performing in the service of actual human beings, many of them not so rich, and not so powerful.

“The People” aren’t noble. And they aren’t evil, either. After dealing with my own writing, with my own family, and with my own person, I find it difficult to muster the energy to master the details of climate change. And I write for a living. But damn if I can barely keep my living room clean.

I thought about this last week while attempting to follow through on a promise to my family, to cook more. I grew up in household where my Dad cooked. My cornbread game is not to be slept on. But cooking right, and cleaning right is hard work, and takes a lot of time. There is a reason people go to McDonald’s every night for dinner.  Perhaps the reason isn’t a good one, but it’s not stupid or pathological.

Ditto with political coverage. The shouting heads exist for a reason–we invented them.

By now I suspect we have all read a little or a lot about ACORN amidst the recent videos. However, there is much more to know about this organization. This post from the Atlantic hits the nail on the head and expresses what I believe perfectly. An organization can make a mistake (or mistakes), face up to it, remedy the issue in some fashion and try to move on. ACORN is not good at this. Read the whole thing.

The Atlantic Monthly has put together a list of the top 50 commentators in the US. I like that they used data to form the list (see their methodology here) based on some measure of influence, reach and web engagement. I am familiar with many of the names and actively follow some of them. I am trying with all of my might to refrain from boring you with my opinions on many of them. That would be a long post that none of us have time for anyway.

Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a 47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came unglued.

So says Sandra Tsing Loh in her riveting piece in the July/August Atlantic Monthly about the disintegration of her marriage. She begins a deep exploration of marriage and whether we even need it in this day and age.

Is D-I-V-O-R-C-E no longer a dirty word and M-A-R-R-I-A-G-E is instead? Discuss.

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• Research On Marrying Women Will Definitely Lead To Sweeping Generalizations [I Thee Dread] (jezebel.com)

This morning on NPR, I heard an interesting story about Norman Bourlaug, the winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. He died Saturday at age 95.

Bourlaug was known as the father of the “green revolution,” which transformed agriculture through high-yield crop varieties and other innovations, helping to more than double world food production between 1960 and 1990. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.

Borlaug was one of only five people in history to score the feat of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal–placing him in the company of Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Elie Wiesel.

Googling for more information about Bourlaug, I came across a fascinating 1997 Atlantic Monthly article by Gregg Easterbrook–”Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity.”

Easterbrook starts the article by talking about the almost absolute lack of public recogntion in the United States of Bourlaug’s contributions to bettering the world and Western media’s role in this.

Though barely known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman Borlaug is widely considered to be among the leading Americans of our age…Yet although he has led one of the century’s most accomplished lives, and done so in a meritorious cause, Borlaug has never received much public recognition in the United States, where it is often said that the young lack heroes to look up to. One reason is that Borlaug’s deeds are done in nations remote from the media spotlight: the Western press covers tragedy and strife in poor countries, but has little to say about progress there.

Bourlaug’s methods averted mass food shortages and famine most notably in Mexico, Indian, Pakistan in the 1960s. In recent years, Bourlaug tried to bring high-yield agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, but large-scale success eluded him. In the Atlantic Monthly article, Easterbook suggests that Bourlaug lost support because of opposition from environmental groups. Easterbrook is highly critical of this. I bolded a phrase which really struck me.

Reflecting Western priorities, the debate about whether high-yield agriculture would be good for Africa is currently phrased mostly in environmental terms, not in terms of saving lives. By producing more food from less land, Borlaug argues, high-yield farming will preserve Africa’s wild habitats, which are now being depleted by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. Opponents argue that inorganic fertilizers and controlled irrigation will bring a new environmental stress to the one continent where the chemical-based approach to food production has yet to catch on. In this debate the moral imperative of food for the world’s malnourished — whether they “should” have been born or not, they must eat — stands in danger of being forgotten…

…Borlaug’s reaction to the [environmentalists'] campaign was anger. He says, “Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Today more than 1 billion people–mostly in the developing world– suffer from chronic hunger. Who will continue Bourlaug’s work? And are there still those who oppose it?

The Battle Hymn of the Republic is an American abolitionist song.  The lyrics were written by Julia Ward Howe in November 1861 and first published in The Atlantic Monthly on February 1862 that became popular during the American Civil War.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:

“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on.”

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,

So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.