27 September 2007 @ 7:13AM >> When CBS dumped Dan Rather and replaced him with Katie Couric, the network changed the gender, the generation, and as Kenneth will tell you, even the frequency of its top newsreader.

The one thing that remains constant at CBS is the ideology of the anchor:

Speaking at the National Press Club Tuesday evening, CBS “Evening News” anchor Katie Couric pulled back the curtain on her personal views of both the war in Iraq and former “Evening News” anchor Dan Rather.

[...]

The former “Today” show anchor traced her discomfort with the administration’s march to war back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ’shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable. And I remember feeling, when I was anchoring the ‘Today’ show, this inevitable march towards war and kind of feeling like, ‘Will anybody put the brakes on this?’ And is this really being properly challenged by the right people? And I think, at the time, anyone who questioned the administration was considered unpatriotic and it was a very difficult position to be in.”

I don’t think disagreeing with the administration makes one unpatriotic, although I do have to wonder about someone who becomes uncomfortable when she sees people displaying American flags or referring to fellow Americans as “we.”

27 September 2007 @ 2:04AM >> I am happy to report that the public premiere of Indoctrinate U has sold out. Thanks to everyone who supported this project by sending well-wishes, by telling friends, and by writing about it.

And thanks especially to everyone who bought tickets—I’ll see you Friday night at the Kennedy Center!

26 September 2007 @ 9:00AM >> This Washington Monthly column reminded me of something...

Recently, The New York Times announced that they were ending TimesSelect, the wall that the paper built around their opinion columnists to prevent non-subscribers from reading them online.

When TimesSelect was announced, some folks reacted as if Ambien had just been taken off the market. Without the interchangeable columns of Bob Herbert, how were people supposed to ease their way into dreamland?

To solve such a weighty problem, I wrote a piece of software called Automatic Bob, the bot that generates Bob Herbert columns in much the same way that the author himself does.

I did not have time to build sentience into Automatic Bob, but I’m sure if he had feelings, he’d sense the bittersweet nature of this moment. On the one hand, Automatic Bob’s mentor—the real Bob—is back. But on the other hand, will Human Bob’s return lead to a decommissioning of AutoBob?

Not to worry!

You see, even though Human Bob has returned to the public web, he is still human and therefore only capable of generating a small number of columns each month. AutoBob has no such limitation.

So, even though the TimesSelect wall is down and there is nothing standing between you and the latest Bob Herbert column except a free registration, Automatic Bob will remain ready to serve you for all those times when your insomnia requires something stronger than the mere trickle of columns that a Human Bob can produce.

25 September 2007 @ 9:28AM >> After days of denials, The New York Times has finally admitted that a controversial MoveOn.org ad referring to General Petreus as “General Betray Us” was not handled according to the paper’s usual advertising guidelines. Public Editor Clark Hoyt writes:

For nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq.

But I think the ad violated The Times’s own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to.

On Monday, Sept. 10, the day that Gen. David H. Petraeus came before Congress to warn against a rapid withdrawal of troops, The Times carried a full-page ad attacking his truthfulness.

Under the provocative headline “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” the ad, purchased by the liberal activist group MoveOn.org, charged that the highly decorated Petraeus was “constantly at war with the facts” in giving upbeat assessments of progress and refusing to acknowledge that Iraq is “mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

“Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us,” MoveOn.org declared.

The ad infuriated conservatives, dismayed many Democrats and ignited charges that the liberal Times aided its friends at MoveOn.org with a steep discount in the price paid to publish its message, which might amount to an illegal contribution to a political action committee. In more than 4,000 e-mail messages, people around the country raged at The Times with words like “despicable,” “disgrace” and “treason.”

[...]

Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?

The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.” Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was “rough,” he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.

By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”

For its part, MoveOn has decided to pay the Times an additional $77,083 for the ad, to make up the difference between what they paid and what they should have paid. This move shields the Times against accusations that it made an in-kind contribution to MoveOn, something that could be legally perilous for the paper.

But it strikes me that MoveOn giving more money to the Times after the paper gets caught doesn’t change the equation much. One high-profile wing of the Surrender Now movement gives some cash to another high-profile wing of the Surrender Now movement. Big deal.

23 September 2007 @ 8:59AM >> Some folks at Reuters need to go back to school to learn what a metaphor is.

In a press conference, President Bush used a metaphor to explain why civilian leaders in the style of Nelson Mandela have not yet emerged from Iraqi society:

Part of the reason why there is not this instant democracy in Iraq is because people are still recovering from Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule. I thought an interesting comment was made when somebody said to me, I heard somebody say, where’s Mandela? Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.

Here’s how Reuters characterized that statement:

Nelson Mandela is still very much alive despite an embarrassing gaffe by U.S. President George W. Bush, who alluded to the former South African leader’s death in an attempt to explain sectarian violence in Iraq.

[...]

“I heard somebody say, Where’s Mandela?’ Well, Mandela’s dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas,” Bush, who has a reputation for verbal faux pas, said in a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal website OpinionJournal.com theorizes on how such an obvious mischaracterization of President Bush’s statement could make it past the layers of editors that supposedly ensure quality control at Reuters:

Stupidity. The reporter was so bone-headedly literal-minded that he simply did not understand the rhetorical device Bush was employing.

Laziness. The reporter wasn’t actually at the press conference and didn’t bother to check the context of the quote.

Dishonesty. The reporter knew full well that Bush was speaking metaphorically and deliberately twisted his meaning in order to fit the stereotype that Bush “has a reputation for verbal faux pas.”

None of these possibilities are terribly flattering for Reuters. One might even venture to say that this piece is itself “an embarrassing gaffe”.

As a full-time employee of Reuters (I’m not on the editorial side; I write software), all I know is that this is the kind of underhanded reporting that makes me embarrassed to tell people where I work.

Update: By making the statement above, I may have violated corporate policy. And in retrospect, whatever opinion I may have of this editorial coverage, I am most decidedly not embarrassed to work at Reuters. The people with whom I work directly are top-notch, and I’m proud of the innovative work we’re doing. I just think that newsrooms can benefit from more intellectual diversity; it would help prevent errors like this from seeping into news coverage, and it would make news consumers less likely to perceive bias.

I decided to strike rather than delete the statement above because owning up to the transgression feels more honest than trying to send it down the memory hole.

19 September 2007 @ 8:04PM >> Recently, I was invited by the Pope Center to write a piece for their Clarion Call describing some of the resistance I faced from college administrators while putting together Indoctrinate U.

In the article, I talk a bit about my run-in with the head of security at my alma mater, Bucknell University. It was one of some half-dozen times police and security officers were called on me while making the film.

The public premiere of Indoctrinate U is next Friday evening (September 28th) at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. For the time being, tickets are still available. And if you want to come to the after party at the infamous Watergate Hotel, you can get a package that includes tickets for the premiere and after-party admission.

18 September 2007 @ 7:08AM >> The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) just introduced a novel way to publicize the restrictions on free speech and free thought that many schools impose on students.

You may already be familiar with the concept of speech codes, but you may not know about FIRE’s system for classifying the severity of those speech codes. Schools receive a “red light” rating if they have regulations that “substantially restrict” speech. Yellow light schools have regulations on the books that could be abused by administrators to restrict speech. And schools that do not restrict speech at all get “green light” ratings.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs in academia that fewer than 10% of all schools surveyed by FIRE have green light ratings. This means that over 90% of those schools have some administrative mechanism for restricting speech.

Legally, as government-run entities, public universities must adhere to the First Amendment. Despite this, some of them have speech codes that haven’t yet been challenged in court, and therefore haven’t been struck down. Private universities may legally restrict speech, but very rarely do they publicly acknowledge that they are doing so. Schools regularly entice prospective students with glossy-brochure promises of a vigorous intellectual environment that welcomes impassioned debate. But after coming to campus, these students—the customers of the university—soon discover that there are certain directions their minds are not allowed to go.

In any other industry, such behavior would constitute false advertising and business fraud. But for some reason, customers of educational institutions never seem to question it.

Thankfully, FIRE is doing for consumers of education what Consumer Reports did for consumers of just about everything else.

In the interests of helping prospective students understand the potential for a Kafkaesque entanglement with university administrators, FIRE has created the Speech Code Widget.

Here’s the one for my alma mater, Bucknell University.

Bucknell gets a red light. Boooo!

You can add Speech Code Widgets to your site using some very simple HTML code. Here’s the code I used to add the Bucknell widget shown above:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://thefire.org/codes/widget.php?id=2484"></script>

You can go to FIRE’s Spotlight website to lookup any schools you’re affiliated with. There, you’ll find the HTML code for each school’s widget. If you find any red or yellow lights among the schools that are important to you, maybe you can help shame them into respecting free thought.

It’s worth a shot...

17 September 2007 @ 10:16AM >> Did nuclear material make it from North Korea to Syria, destined for detonation in Israel?

An article published in London’s Sunday Times yesterday makes it seem like a distinct possibility:

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.

[...]

“This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel,” said an Israeli source. “We’ve known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds, but Israel can’t live with a nuclear warhead.”

An expert on the Middle East, who has spoken to Israeli participants in the raid, told yesterday’s Washington Post that the timing of the raid on September 6 appeared to be linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying North Korean material labelled as cement but suspected of concealing nuclear equipment.

The target was identified as a northern Syrian facility that purported to be an agricultural research centre on the Euphrates river. Israel had been monitoring it for some time, concerned that it was being used to extract uranium from phosphates.

[...]

Washington was rife with speculation last week about the precise nature of the operation. One source said the air strikes were a diversion for a daring Israeli commando raid, in which nuclear materials were intercepted en route to Iran and hauled to Israel. Others claimed they were destroyed in the attack.

There is no doubt, however, that North Korea is accused of nuclear cooperation with Syria, helped by AQ Khan’s network. John Bolton, who was undersecretary for arms control at the State Department, told the United Nations in 2004 the Pakistani nuclear scientist had “several other” customers besides Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Some of his evidence came from the CIA, which had reported to Congress that it viewed “Syrian nuclear intentions with growing concern”.

“I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” Bolton said last week. Syria, he added, was a member of a “junior axis of evil”, with a well-established ambition to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The links between Syria and North Korea date back to the rule of Kim Il-sung and President Hafez al-Assad in the last century. In recent months, their sons have quietly ordered an increase in military and technical cooperation.

15 September 2007 @ 12:13PM >> Syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock discusses Indoctrinate U in his latest piece.

14 September 2007 @ 9:28PM >> Erwin Chemerinsky, “a well-known liberal expert on constitutional law” according to the Los Angeles Times, was hired and then quickly fired by the Irvine campus of the University of California. The culprit, says Chancellor Michael V. Drake, was “conservatives out to get” Chemerinsky. Later on, an “emotional” Drake, “his voice at times quivering,” reversed his position and “said there had been no outside pressure and that he had decided to reject Chemerinsky” himself because the professor’s views were “polarizing.”

Given the unreliability of Chancellor Drake’s public testimony, it’s hard to know whether there really was a conservative cabal trying to take out Chemerinsky, or whether he was just the victim of a spineless administrator seeking to avoid controversy. Either way, the only decent thing for the university to do is to re-hire Chemerinsky, assuming he’d be forgiving enough to take the job instead of taking the school to court.

Controversy is the enemy of the typical university administrator. Their concerns are getting students in the door, extracting dollars from alumni, keeping politicians happy so the tax breaks stay in effect, and hoping parents don’t notice how quickly the cost of college is rising. Controversy causes the public to pay attention to what happens on campus, and that’s the last thing an administrator wants. If people are paying attention, they can’t get away with using heavy-handed tactics to shut down any speech that might offend somebody.

Typically, it’s the people on campus who have more conservative perspectives who run into trouble for not being “politically correct.” But that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen to liberals. And when it does, it’s just as odious.

The lesson is: if you create a hyper-politicized environment in which ideological litmus tests routinely affect the trajectory of someone’s career, there will come a day when those tests don’t yield results you favor.

If there was a concerted effort among conservatives to block Chemerinsky, they probably felt justified in doing so, thinking that they’d just be preventing the dominant campus thinking from dominating another campus. But it’s hard to argue for tolerance of your views when you’re damaging the career of a man whose only transgression is disagreeing with you.

Whatever the sequence of events that led to Chemerinsky’s firing, conservatives who believe that their views deserve better respect on campus must stand with him on principle.

And who knows? Maybe the next time a conservative professor runs into career trouble for his or her views, some decent-hearted decision-maker will think back to this story and remember how not to act.

Respect can be brought back to campus if only enough people have the courage to practice it.

Update: UC Irvine has re-extended its offer to hire Erwin Chemerinsky. As quickly as he was hired and fired, he was re-hired. If only all cases were handled this fast...

12 September 2007 @ 12:06AM >> In the course of defending myself against accusations of quote doctoring, a reader discovered that MSNBC silently changed a quote in an article about journalists’ contributions to political causes.

A few days ago, I was criticized by a reader for allegedly removing an important part of a quote. The reader said I was “bad for democracy” and that I “should be ashamed of [myself].”

I replied that the quote I cited in my post appeared that way in the article at the time I wrote my post. My only defense was that I copied and pasted the text out of the article and did not change it. But the text that the reader cited did differ from mine, and I could not prove that the text had changed since my post appeared. MSNBC had apparently changed the quote without mentioning the change, even though the article does list another correction.

Yesterday, another reader did a bit of forensic websurfing and found proof that I was not lying:

Hi Evan,

The reason that the internet is so great is that information is rarely ever lost. It’s there if you know where to look. You can, for example, use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

If you use it to search for the URL of the MSNBC article <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113485/> you come to this page:
<http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113485/>

It seems that the page has been updated only twice. Once on June 25th, when it was created, and once on June 26th. The June 25th version has the Mark Singer quote exactly as you posted it. But then it’s changed in the June 26th version. And, oddly enough, this change is not included with the other correction noted.

Hope this was helpful!

Best Regards,

[Name withheld]

As happy as I am to be vindicated, I do think it’s odd that MSNBC added to Mr. Singer’s quote apparently to take some of the sting out of it. Especially when the network obviously has a policy of noting corrections—after all, they posted a different correction notice to the very same article.

So what led to the change in Mr. Singer’s quote? Did he demand it? Or did someone at MSNBC just think he needed to be softened up a bit?

Inquiring minds want to know!

11 September 2007 @ 12:02AM >> Last year, for the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I posted a video entitled Crystal Morning. The video consisted of footage shot on the morning of the attacks and the day after. The audio track was taken from emergency response calls and radio dispatch transmissions.

Yesterday, I received this e-mail from a woman who watched the video shortly after it was released. I thought it was a fitting memorial for today:

Last year, shortly before the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was looking for online video to show my then nine-year-old daughter, who has little memory of the event and had been asking me some questions about it. Within the first minute of the film, something made me stop and reverse the video. There, standing behind a guy with a bike and to one side of a guy in a green uniform was the familiar figure of another witness to the events of that day, my husband, Larry.

Larry had spent the 10th in a training seminar on the 17th floor of one of the towers - he was an internet architect in charge of the Technology Lab for AIG on John Street at that time - and was supposed to be there that morning to meet up with co-workers and attend an exposition at Windows on the World. Having just been diagnosed with diabetes a few weeks before, he and some of his co-workers decided to get bagels for breakfast before going upstairs. Doing that probably saved their lives. He was standing in the street when the first plane hit, still standing there, trying to get his boss on the phone for instructions when the second plane hit. That is roughly the point he appears in the video in his blue shirt, with cellphone to his ear, like everyone else that day, unable to get a connection as he watched the buildings burning a few blocks away.

Our daughters have heard him talk about all the things that happened to him that day, but seeing this video finally made it real to them. Later that day, his life was saved again when workers in a condo office in Battery Park City pulled him and his secretary off the street as the first tower fell and they were running for their lives - he had fallen while trying to climb a fence, and been pulled to his feet by another stranger seconds before the collapse, and she was running barefoot, having lost her shoes as they went over the fence.

He and I both knew people that were not as fortunate that day, and it remains important to us to have our children understand the magnitude of what happened, not as an abstract bit of history, but as something that forever altered all our lives. I just wanted to thank you for being a part of that.

Sincerely,
[Name Withheld]

Thank you for taking the time to write and for letting me share this story with the rest of the world.

Here is my experience from that day.

10 September 2007 @ 10:33PM >> In an e-mail entitled “Why you’re bad for democracy,” a reader takes me to task for this post, in which I passed along a study analyzing the political contributions of journalists. (The study said that reporters give $9 to Democrats and liberal causes for every $1 given to Republicans and conservative causes.)

The e-mailer wrote:

It’s so funny that someone who blogs about biased reporting does what you did:

You quote Mark Singer as saying...

“If someone had murdered Hitler â€â€? a journalist interviewing him had murdered him â€â€? the world would be a better place. I only feel good, as a citizen, about getting rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don’t regret it.â€?

In fact, the quote, in the very article to which you linked, was...

“If someone had murdered Hitler â€â€? a journalist interviewing him had murdered him â€â€? the world would be a better place. As a citizen, I can only feel good ABOUT PARTICIPATING IN A GET-OUT-THE-VOTE-EFFORT to get rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime. I certainly don’t regret it.”

You actually then proceeded to suggest that he advocated the murder of Bush (”Ah yes, the fine reporter would have killed President Bush”), when in fact, he was actually EXPLICITLY supporting the notion of ousting him by the vote - which in case you didn’t realize it, is actually what democracy is all about.

I know you’re not too stupid to know the absolutely massive distance in meaning between your quote and the actual quote. So I can only assume you deliberately chose to misquote him. So you could skew it to your own biases. If that’s not “Michael Moore-ish”, then I don’t know what is!

You should be ashamed of yourself.

The reader is correct in pointing out that the article now contains the Singer quote as rendered in the e-mail.

However, the quote as shown in my post is a direct copy-and-paste from the MSNBC article as it appeared at the time of my post. That’s always how I quote chunks of text from other sources. I’m too lazy to retype all those long quotes.

Whenever I modify something I’m quoting, I enclose all changes in brackets, even if I’m just changing the case of a single letter at the beginning of a word. If I’m removing anything from the quote, I note this using an ellipses enclosed in brackets: “This is a quote from which I’ve removed a few [...] words.”

I do this whether I’m removing a word, a sentence, or a paragraph.

The only exception to the rule of using brackets is if I’m changing the case of a publication that for stylistic reasons capitalizes words or several words at the beginning of a paragraph or section.

This is a standard that I’ve used since starting Brain Terminal over six years ago.

I can’t guarantee that I haven’t missed something, and if I have in any way rendered a quote inaccurately, I hope vigilant readers will let me know. I will post the criticism, I will note the mistake, and I will somehow correct the original post.

Still, I do know that the quote in my original post is a direct copy-and-paste. In this case, MSNBC must have modified the page after my post.

Outlets often quietly change text after an article’s original publication. I sometimes update posts after they’re published if there is a simple typo or of I decide that different wording conveys my thoughts and feelings more accurately. I’ve seen a number of establishment media outlets change text after publication without noting it.

In the future, I should keep screenshots of quotes I cite in order to have more fixed documentation than a simple web link can provide.

[Update: Another reader found proof that the original text of the article matched what I originally quoted in my post.]

But even with the new wording, I don’t think Mark Singer sounds any more sympathetic.

A good writer knows that mere juxtaposition can cause readers to draw inferences that the writer doesn’t want to explicitly state. In this case, Singer doesn’t want to come out and say it would be a good thing to kill President Bush, but here is what he said (at least as it appears in the MSNBC article as of now):

1. Singer says there should “probably [...] be a rule against” journalists making political contributions.

2. Singer then says, “But there’s a rule against murder.”

3. He then states it would have been good to murder Hitler (thereby implying that a rule against murder isn’t necessarily a good thing).

4. And then he starts talking about “feel[ing] good about participating in a get-out-the-vote effort to get rid of George Bush, who has been the most destructive president in my lifetime.”

Either the leap from item 3 to item 4 is an addle-brained non-sequitur, or Singer is saying (1) it’s not necessarily good that there’s a rule against murder, but there is and (2) that’s why I contribute money to anti-Bush causes. And if it isn’t necessarily bad to murder someone as destructive as Hitler, is it such a leap to assume that Singer would support murdering someone he considers “the most destructive president in [his] lifetime.”

I suspect Singer didn’t put those statements in that order by accident. If he’s smart enough and a good enough writer to work for the New Yorker, then I don’t think he’s careless with words.

My take on it is, he’s equating President Bush with Hitler and hinting that Bush’s murder would be a positive event.

6 September 2007 @ 8:38AM >> Whatever name it goes by—socialized medicine, national healthcare, a “single-payer” system, etc.—when the government controls the market for healthcare services, the government can use that control to tell you how to live your life. In Britain, that’s exactly what the so-called conservatives are now proposing:

Failing to follow a healthy lifestyle could lead to free NHS treatment being denied under the Tory plans.

Patients would be handed “NHS Health Miles Cards” allowing them to earn reward points for losing weight, giving up smoking, receiving immunisations or attending regular health screenings.

Like a supermarket loyalty card, the points could be redeemed as discounts on gym membership and fresh fruit and vegetables, or even give priority for other public services - such as jumping the queue for council housing.

But heavy smokers, the obese and binge drinkers who were a drain on the NHS could be denied some routine treatments such as hip replacements until they cleaned up their act.

Those who abused the system - by calling an ambulance when a trip to the GP would be sufficient, or telephoning out of hours with needless queries - could also be penalised.

The report calls for a greater emphasis on the “citizen’s responsibility” to be healthy and says no one should expect taxpayers to fund their unhealthy lifestyles.

Taxpayers should not be expected to fund someone else’s unhealthy lifestyle, but then again, taxpayers should not be expected to fund anyone else’s lifestyle, healthy or not.

The problem with asking taxpayers to pay for some aspect of someone else’s life is that taxpayers are then given an incentive to minimize the cost of that aspect of life. And under the guise of minimizing costs, people are then told how they can live their lives.

Inevitably, government will assume more and more control over our personal decisions if we decide that other taxpayers should handle our healthcare bills.

Think it can’t happen here? It already is. Here in my hometown of New York City, the government tells chefs what type of cooking oils they can use, the government tells women whether or not they should breastfeed, and there are even politicians attempting to dictate whether little league kids use aluminum or wooden baseball bats.

And the argument that politicians give in favor of micromanaging our lives is that we will be healthier and safer, so arguing against giving government this control is inherently cast as an argument against health and safety. You don’t want to be seen as opposing health or safety, do you?

This trend will only accelerate, because the appetite of government is insatiable. Left to its own devices, government will continually accumulate more money and more power. And there seems to be no countervailing force to prevent that from happening.

Sure, lots of people will be happy if the day comes that the government relieves them of the burden of having to pay for their own healthcare. But those people should think through the consequences before giving government that power.

Once individuals give away their personal power to government, they don’t get it back.

4 September 2007 @ 8:54AM >> Every time I post an article like this, I get e-mails pointing out that such stories are scientifically meaningless. Perhaps, but that doesn’t make them any less amusing:

A BRITISH yachtsman attempting the first solo Arctic sea passage across northern Russia was examining his options after heavier than expected ice blocked his route, his manager said.

Adrian Flanagan is discussing with Russian authorities the possibility of using a nuclear-powered icebreaker to lift his boat out of the water and carry it round the most icebound stretch of Russia’s Northern Sea Route.

“Basically it just means we’re putting plan B into operation so if the worst comes to the worst and there isn’t a break in the weather, we’ve got a plan,” Louise Flanagan, his manager and ex-wife said from Britain.

The 46-year-old entered the eastern end of the treacherous sea route that stretches from Asia to Europe across northern Russia in late July.

He had hoped that his 11m reinforced yacht would be able to get all the way to Europe due to lighter ice conditions observed in recent years, thought to be a result of global warming.