Wikipedia is implementing a new policy requiring that changes to articles about living people be approved by moderators before going live, essentially abandoning the wiki model.

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

The change is part of a growing realization on the part of Wikipedia’s leaders that as the site grows more influential, they must transform its embrace-the-chaos culture into something more mature and dependable.

[...]

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” said Michael Snow, a lawyer in Seattle who is the chairman of the Wikimedia board. “There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

[...]

Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia’s contributors into two classes — experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else — altering Wikipedia’s implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries.

This will slow down the addition of breaking news — a death or some other hot item — to the site but otherwise likely won’t have much in the way of negative effects.  And, certainly, the ability to create mischief is greater for a public figure than, say, the entries on aardvarks or moon rocks.

Presumably, however, this will make it more difficult to add biographies of marginally famous people .  Some years back, for example, there was a hubbub over whether Megan McArdle was sufficiently noteworthy to merit an entry.     This will make Wikipedia more like a traditional encyclopedia, which is a mistake.  The Internet is essentially infinite, so there’s little reason to limit the scope of topics in the same way that the editors of a dead tree set do.  One of the beauties of the wiki model was that it allowed the development of a rich database of knowledge of interest to niche users.

Not sure this is BREAKING NEWS, as CNN does, but it’s amusing nonetheless:

How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it’s just one — if that one is Michael Jackson.

The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.

“Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson,” a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as “volcanic.”

As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton’s blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.

CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke.

Twitter crashed as users saw multiple “fail whales” — the illustrations the site uses as error messages — user FoieGrasie posting, “Irony: The protesters in Iran using twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of ‘Michael Jackson RIP.’ Well done.” The site’s status blog said that Twitter had had to temporarily disable its search results, saved searches and trend topics.

Wikipedia saw a flurry of activity, with close to 500 edits made to Jackson’s entry in less than 24 hours. CNET reported that by 3:15pm PDT, Wikipedia seemed to be “temporarily overloaded.”

And so forth and so on.  It’s amazing that even robust servers can go down with too many simultaneous queries.  One would think that the advent of cloud technologies and redundancies would have ended that by this stage in the Internet’s maturation.  Apparently not.

Matt Yglesias snarks,

Watching the Senator from Alabama’s press conference, I’m comforted by the fact that whatever our ideological disagreements this is a man who’s made it in life without any preferential treatment. One hundred percent meritocracy in action. America is a beautiful place.

Presumably, no one makes it to high office without some sort of “preferential treatment.”  Still, Sessions’ biography hardly suggests that success was handed to him on a silver platter.  Here’s the Wikipedia entry on his early life:

Sessions was born in Selma, Alabama, to Abbie Powe and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, Jr. His father owned a general store and then a farm equipment dealership. Sessions grew up in the small town of Hybart. In 1964 he became an Eagle Scout. In his adult life, he became a recipient of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award from the Boy Scouts of America.

After attending school in nearby Camden, Sessions studied at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1969. He was active in the Young Republicans and student body president there.  Sessions received a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Alabama in 1973.

Sessions became a practicing attorney first in Russellville and then in Mobile, where he now lives. He was also an army reservist in the 1970s, achieving the rank of captain.

His parents were decidedly middle class and he went to the local public school in a not particularly affluent part of Alabama.  He was an Eagle Scout.  He went to a Methodist college down the road.  After a year teaching elementary school, he got into the state’s only public law school and did his time in the Army.

He got tabbed as an Assistant United States Attorney under President Ford just two years out of law school and then as a U.S. Attorney and later a U.S. District Court Judge by President Reagan (albeit not confirmed by the Senate to the latter).   There’s not much treatment more “preferential” than a presidential appointment. Even though I was living in Alabama during Reagan’s tenure and when Sessions was later elected Attorney General and then United States Senator, I honestly have no idea how he came to presidential attention at such a young age.   It certainly wasn’t because his daddy owned a farm equipment dealership.

Given what I know about Alabama politics circa 1975-1981, the fact that he was an active College Republican — and I’d guess a leader among that group, given his rapid success in actual politics — during a period when the Democratic primary was the election in that state was likely quite helpful.  A Republican president needing to appoint someone from Alabama had a relatively limited field in those days.  But it’s not like Sessions Peter Principled after getting his first appointment; he was quickly moved up to ever-loftier posts.

If Matt’s simply making the point that Sessions isn’t acquitting himself with particular distinction in the present debate . . . meh.  I haven’t watched any of it but it wouldn’t surprise me.  But we don’t select Senators in the same way we do brain surgeons or even Supreme Court justices; let’s just say that not all of them would have been candidates for NASA if politics had been unavailable to them as a career choice.   Beyond that, even bright Senators often come across as yahoos on television.  They’re talking to their constituents, not policy wonks.

Richard Florida passes along this snippet from The illustrated History of Canada:

American draft dodgers in Canada were far outnumbered by the young Canadians who joined U.S. forces to fight in Vietnam.

This factoid may be in that category Stephen Colbert would call “truthy” and Dan Rather would call “false but true.”

Canada did not participate in the Vietnam War for a variety of reasons.  Still, “about 30,000″ Canadian citizens volunteered to fight with U.S. and other Western forces and 110 of them were killed in action and have their names on the Vietnam Memorial. According to Wikipedia, “Canadian immigration statistics show that 20,000 to 30,000 draft-eligible American men came to Canada as immigrants during the Vietnam era; estimates of the total number of American citizens who moved to Canada due to their opposition to the war range from 50,000 to 125,000.”

Regardless, the fact remains that a huge number of Canadian citizens volunteered to fight in a controversial war and a not insignificant number died there.  They, along with others in the Anglosphere (sorry, Québécois) have long been America’s most stalwart wartime allies, willing to pick up a rifle when others would not.

AP Photo/Fionn Kidney

The erstwhile Dr. Leopold Stotch passes along news of the exploits of a fellow Irish prankster:

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.  They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.

“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia. “I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin. “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”

Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.

This was something of a perfect storm:  The sudden death of a notable but relatively obscure figure combined with a superbly crafted quote.

Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh says, “We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too.”  That’s generally been my practice.   Trouble is, once a quote is out there, it quickly loses its Wikipedia moorings.   My guess is that many of those who used the quote found it at The Guardian or elsewhere.   Yes, journalists use Wikipedia without attribution.   Even more lift quotes and story ideas from other journalists, with or without attribution.

I’ve been quoted or asked for interviews many times based on blog posts that were mostly excerpts of media stories or others’ blog posts.  Given the formatting of this site — which has long used very well marked blockquotes and which highlights the name of the source being quoted — that would seem rather obvious.  But those searching for information stumble on the site via Google search, where we tend to rank well, and see an authoritative byline and go with it.

Similarly, the Atlantic Council put out a report on Afghanistan in January 2008 which began, “Make no mistake: NATO is not winning in Afghanistan.”  A subsequent edition of the report two months later changed that to, “Make no mistake: The international community is not winning in Afghanistan.”  It has thus been more than a year since the original quote appeared on the Council website or was available in a fresh print copy.  I still see the original version with some frequency.   It’s the quote that’s being quoted, not the report.

Indeed, were this report on the fake quote written differently, I’d expect that people would have used this report of the fake quote — and reports on the reports on the fake quote like this one — as a source of the quote. I’m not sure if AP’s Shawn Pogatchnik, whose report I quote above, intentionally broke up the fake quote with the phrase “Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read” to forestall that happening or whether it’s a happy accident.   I have had enough blog comments and emails resulting from blog posts to know that quite a few people will mistake, say, a commentary about Jesse Jackson as a posting by Jesse Jackson.  People doing Internet searches will glom onto a single sentence and ignore everything else on the page.

Oliver Kamm declares himself “an enemy of Wikipedia” because its “purpose is to secure consensus rather than accuracy.”  Norm Geras demurs:

This is a metaphysical rather than practical objection. In matters of information, of truth and falsehood, I, too, am for accuracy. But when I go to Wikipedia I am not doing philosophy, I am not researching a scientific paper, I am not seeking medical advice for a desperately ill person that I will then get him or her to act upon, and I am not figuring out how to construct a bridge over which millions of tons of traffic are to pass. I am mostly trying to get a quick answer to some factual question – such as what is someone’s date of birth, what is the location of a certain town, in what order did Darryl Heimschmarrel write his 15 books, and where is the Droke of Garwinton. Most of the information I get off Wikipedia is accurate. I am at liberty to check anything I doubt, or anything at all.

As with my discussion with Stacy McCain on cultural literacy, I find myself strangely on the populist side.

No, Wikipedia isn’t a scholarly tome or even Encyclopedia Britannica. Then again, my very expensive volumes of the latter are no longer even displayed on valuable bookshelf space, having escaped the rubbish bin only because my visceral self has not caught up to my intellectual self on the matter of sunk costs.

Wikipedia is convenient, incredibly up-to-date, and generally quite good.   Only on the most controversial and timely topics is it sometimes wildly inaccurate — and even then for short periods. (See British Conservative Party Edits Wikipedia to Back Brown Claimfor an amusing recent example.)

Photo by Flickr user Todd Mecklem, used under Creative Commons license.

After decades suffering through a mere two plies, the toilet paper industry has finally come through for us:

If two-ply toilet paper is good, then three-ply tissue must be better. At least that’s what toilet-paper researchers in northeastern Wisconsin hope.

Yes, there is such a thing as a toilet-paper researcher. And a team of them at Georgia Pacific’s Innovation Institute in Neenah has come up with a three-ply version of its Quilted Northern product.

The new product will be launched Monday. The company touts the toilet tissue as “ultra-soft” and says it plans to market the product to women 45 and older who view their bathroom as a “sanctuary for quality time.”

I have no especial insights to offer here, nor even any particularly clever puns. I wonder, though, what the holdup has been.

Two-ply tissue has been available since, if Wikipedia is correct, before my parents were born. Contrast that to, say, the history of razors. The first twin blade razor, Gillette’s Trac II, was introduced in 1972. It was, if memory serves me correctly, the razor that I started shaving with ten years or so later. Since then, “shaving researchers” have come up with multiple innovations: lubricating strips, pivoting heads, razors that heat shaving cream, THREE blades, battery-powered vibrating heads, FOUR blades, and, yes, FIVE blades. Meanwhile, the toilet paper industry has been content to stagnate.

Surely, the idea of a third ply is not entirely novel. Indeed, it’s occurred to me on more than one occasion when, for example, adapting to new razor technology, I’ve needed the product as a patch for nicked skin (one of its many alternative uses).

So what, exactly, is it that ” toilet-paper researchers” have been doing since 1942?

Today’s Outrage of the Day comes to us from Taegan Goddard, who notes, in a CQ Political Insider piece entitled “Did McCain Plagiarize His Speech on the Georgia Crisis?” that there are “some similarities between Sen. John McCain’s speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia.”

Wikipedia and McCain

You can click Goddard’s name to see the examples in full but they’re rather weak.  There are three examples where purely fact-based assertions about Georgia are somewhat similar.  The first is incredibly short — less than a sentence — and the third involved radically different sentences with overlapping facts.  The only interesting example, then, is this one:

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Georgia had a brief period of independence as a Democratic Republic (1918-1921), which was terminated by the Red Army invasion of Georgia. Georgia became part of the Soviet Union in 1922 and regained its independence in 1991. Early post-Soviet years was marked by a civil unrest and economic crisis. (Wikipedia)

vs.

After a brief period of independence following the Russian revolution, the Red Army forced Georgia to join the Soviet Union in 1922. As the Soviet Union crumbled at the end of the Cold War, Georgia regained its independence in 1991, but its early years were marked by instability, corruption, and economic crises. (McCain)

This one, too, strikes me as thin gruel.  The overlap are rather common facts and there’s substantial variation and additional information in the McCain version.  As William Beutler observes,

[I]n all three examples, the text is purely expository: none of it expresses any thoughts, feelings, emotions or other content that would be an obvious case of intentional plagiarism. Additionally, it’s worth noting that historical facts cannot be plagiarized, only their expression. If there is any here, it’s probably inadvertent.

Meanwhile, consider that plagiarized text is almost always longer than original text. This is because the original writer is likely to state things in as few words as possible while the plagiarizer is trying to hide the origin, which means more words.

Professors React

My former Troy colleague Steven Taylor, while noting that he doesn’t think it’s a big deal, disagrees.

The passages noted in the post, especially the first two, would suggest rather convincingly that whomever it was that wrote that speech for McCain based a great deal of it on the Wikipedia entry on Georgia with a little bit of poor undergraduate-y word re-arrangement to try and make the new text “original.”

I will say that sans attribution, the examples given are enough for me to have given the speech a zero (and failure of my course) had it been a paper handed in to me (not to mention I take off a letter grade for every cited usage of Wikipedia in a research paper anyway).

Mark Kleiman runs the speech through TurnItIn, a plagiarism detection software for teachers, and pronounces McCain guilty.

It’s not just the facts that are parallel: “brief period of independence,” “regained its independence,” “early years,” “marked by … crisis.” Also the use of “Red Army” to stand for the Soviet state, which makes sense in the Wikipedia entry, since it refers to an invasion, but not in the student paper.

And you notice that there’s no fact in the passage from the student’s paper that wasn’t in the source: not, for example, the name of any Georgian political leader, not the fact that Stalin was a Georgian.

Now you can’t even pretend to believe it’s a coincidence. If the original sentences in question came from different sources, you might give the student the benefit of the doubt, but two unattributed near-quotes from the same source? Plagiarism, beyond reasonable doubt.

I agree that it’s probable that McCain’s speechwriter(s) looked at the Wikipedia entry for basic facts when crafting the historical portion.  But that’s hardly “plagiarism.”  Or, frankly, even noteworthy.  It’s hardly a novel finding that there was a Russian Revolution, that Georgia was annexed in 1922, that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and that Georgia struggled mightily in its early years of independence.

It’s been a while since I’ve graded papers but I can’t imagine that my attention would have been flagged by the recitation of some background facts if the remainder of the essay put together a coherent argument, which, certainly, the McCain speech did.  I would probably have expected citation but students are often taught that they’re not required to cite “general knowledge,” which much of the above falls into.  So, if the student otherwise cited original thoughts and quotes, I wouldn’t have been overly concerned that he was trying to get away with passing a paraphrase off as an original thought given that there’s no original thought here but rather throat clearing setting up an argument.

Academic Papers vs. Campaign Speeches

More importantly, a political speech isn’t a term paper.  For one thing, candidates seldom write them, so they’re almost always passing off others’ work as their own.  For another, crediting of sources is incredibly uncommon in speeches yet mandated in academic work.  It’s not just minor facts like the year the Red Army invaded Georgia or when the Soviet Union collapsed, either, but big ideas like Leagues of Democracy or Third Ways.  Candidates — or, again, their speechwriters — routinely expropriate these things with nary a mention of who came up with them in the first place.

The only time “plagiarism” is an issue with political speeches is when it’s absolutely blatant.  The classic case is Joe Biden’s lifting wholesale passages of speeches from Neil Kinnock, including parts of the man’s biography that radically differed from his own life.  (In fairness, it should be pointed out — as Biden’s Wikipedia entry notes — that Biden had generally made it clear that he was quoting Kinnock when giving the stump speech but inexplicably failed to do so on the one caught on tape.)   Similarly, Barack Obama was tarred with the plagiarism brush for lifting some passages from Deval Patrick’s speeches.  That one died pretty quickly since Patrick was an Obama advisor and was happy to share.  (And, for the record, I dismissed those charges from the outset.)

The best line on this comes from piscivorous, one of Beutler’s commenters: “Looks like the Senator can use the internet after all!”

Steve Tuttle takes to the pages of Newsweek to proclaim the ascendency of Appalachia as the decider of the next president.

“Hick.” “Hillbilly.” “Redneck.” “Inbred.” “Cracker.” “Ridge Runner.” I heard and self-effacingly used them all when I left the mountains of Appalachia to attend college in the great metropolis of Williamsburg, Va., in the ’80s. I was mercilessly ribbed as a rube when I brought along my sky-blue JCPenney suit—with reversible vest—and my stack of Willie and Waylon albums, and entered a world that was as foreign to me as I must have seemed to my fancy William & Mary roommates from the private schools. Imagine my surprise at their surprise when, thinking nothing of it, I casually mentioned that I missed my mom’s home-cooked squirrel.

Well, look who’s laughing now. In this strangest of political seasons, Appalachia, the last forgotten place in America, suddenly matters. Never mind Florida and Michigan. In a close election come November, the difference between President McCain and President Obama could come down to me and my people: a bunch of ornery, racist, coal-minin’, banjo-pickin’, Scots-Irish hillbillies clinging to our guns and religion on the side of some Godforsaken, moonshine-soaked ridge in West Virginia. The Democrats comically pandered to all these stereotypes during this spring’s primaries, when the 23 million people of Appalachia—that 1,000-mile mountainous stretch from southern New York to the middle of Alabama—briefly hijacked the presidential race. Scrounging for every last vote, the candidates went out of their way to look country. Hillary got all twangy. Barack tasted beer.

West Virginian Don Surber figures this is old news, noting that, “If Al Gore, boy genius, had taken Arkansas or Tennessee or West Virginia, Florida would not have mattered.”  Tennessean Glenn Reynolds adds, “Apparently, the vote for me, you ignorant rednecks approach isn’t working that well.”

Of course, as Clark Stooksbury points out, “I’m not sure how dumb hillbillies decided the 2000 race when every single state mattered–had George Bush lost one more state anywhere, he would not have been president. If you compare the 1996 and 2000 electoral maps, you see that Gore lost a lot of states, with more than 100 electoral votes, that Clinton carried in 1996.”

True that. A lot of states are likely to be in play this go-round.  All of them matter.  Indeed, for all we know, it could come down to Georgia and how many votes Bob Barr siphons off from John McCain.

In a recent interview with the Orange County Register’s Martin Wisckol, John McCain said that, not only doesn’t he know how much gas costs, it doesn’t matter. (Tangentially related: “Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did” was an excellent album title. The album itself was so-so.)

When was the last time you pumped your own gas and how much did it cost?

Oh, I don’t remember. Now there’s Secret Service protection. But I’ve done it for many, many years. I don’t recall and frankly, I don’t see how it matters.

I’ve had hundreds and hundreds of town hall meetings, many as short a time ago as yesterday. I communicate with the people and they communicate with me very effectively.

Well, apparently not. The price of gas is the number one issue on the minds of just about every voter these days. It’s an issue that virtually transcends class. Most of us know, to the penny, what we’re paying for gas and where the cheapest gas is in our area. (Both my wife’s car and mine require high octane gasoline. The station where I generally buy has been stuck at $4.32 for quite some time now. Prices vary radically from block to block, with some charging as much as $4.65.)

I get that McCain is sheltered from many of the mundane details of everyday life because of his position. It wouldn’t bother me in the least if he didn’t know how to operate a modern gas pump. Nor would I expect him to know the price with the specificity that those of us who pump it regularly do. But, given the amazing amount of attention this issue has gotten in recent months — so much so that he’s pandering about “gas tax holidays” and the like — it’s not unreasonable to expect him to answer with something like, “It’s been so long since I pumped my own gas that I don’t remember what it cost. But I do know that it’s now over $4 a gallon and people are pissed.”

As an aside, this is one of those incidents that, absent the blogosphere, would probably have escaped people’s attention. Even apart from the interview being originally published on Wisckol’s blog, it didn’t get any notice until it got picked up elsewhere and started spreading.

UPDATE: Patrick Frey points out that John McCain knew the price of gas four days before the interview quoted above:

“The price of a gallon of gas in America stands at more than four dollars. Yesterday, a barrel of oil cost about 134 dollars” said McCain. “And various oil ministers and investment firms have confidently informed us that soon we can expect to pay 200 dollars for every barrel, and as much as seven dollars for every gallon of gas.”

It stands to reason, then, that McCain knew the price at the time of the interview. It would seem, then, that he’s guilty merely of giving an irritated and dismissive answer to what he perceived as a “gotcha” question rather than being out of touch. He’d have been far better off, however, giving the answer I suggested above.

A group “dedicated to ending discrimination against and harassment of military personnel affected by ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’” reports that Darren Manzella has been discharged under said policy.

Decorated Army Sergeant Darren Manzella has been discharged under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law banning lesbian, gay and bisexual Americans from military service, effective June 10. The Iraq war veteran was one of the first openly gay active duty service members to speak with the media while serving inside a war zone. In December 2007, Manzella was profiled by the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes. He told correspondent Lesley Stahl that he served openly during much of his time in the Army, with the full support of his colleagues and command.

[...]

Sergeant Manzella said, “My sexual orientation certainly didn’t make a difference when I treated injuries and saved lives in the streets of Baghdad. It shouldn’t be a factor in allowing me to continue to serve.”

This is causing a stir in the blogosphere.

Steve Benen notes that Manzella was serving quite openly, “even introducing his Army buddies to his boyfriend.” His bosses knew, too, and didn’t care. But “now that Manzella’s revelations have become embarrassing to the Army, he’s been discharged.” Pam Spaulding goes further, claiming, “The Pentagon has decided that it was time to boot yet another decorated service member from its ranks not simply for being gay — but for exposing the fact that the boots and the ground and most COs don’t give a damn about someone’s sexual orientation.”

Well . . . not so much. By going on “60 Minutes” and drawing public attention to the fact that his commanders were breaking the law, of course they were backed into a corner.

Benen asks a reasonable question, though: “Which poses the great risk, Manzella being deployed and serving honorably, or Manzella not being deployed? Which is better for the troops? Which does more to help those in uniform? Which leaves the military stronger, and which leaves it weaker?”

The countervailing argument, which struck me as perfectly reasonable when DADT was passed in 1993, was that openly gay personnel, especially males in combat arms specialties, would disrupt unit morale. Having recently left the Army at that time and quite cognizant of its organizational culture, I had no doubt that this was the case. Recall, too, that DADT was actually criticized as a liberal social experiment on the part of the dope smoking (but not inhaling!) draft dodger Bill Clinton. Prior to DADT, soldiers were subject to being asked, for no apparent reason, whether they were gay. (Indeed, one of the more surreal experiences of my military career was going through the interrogation for my Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information clearance and being asked a whole host of questions along the lines of whether I was gay, had ever been gay, or thought it conceivable that I might at some point in the future become gay.) DADT was designed to end the witch hunts.

That was fifteen years ago and society’s views on homosexuality have changed dramatically. The military is more socially conservative and slower to change its culture than the society as a whole but the vast majority of the enlisted soldiers and most of their officers have joined the Service since DADT was passed. As Amanda Terkel points out, such luminaries as JCS Chairman Mike Mullen and* former Senator Sam Nunn (a DADT sponsor) have indicated that the military might be ready for rethinking this policy. She even cites a recent Zogby poll [PDF] showing 73 percent of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan being “comfortable with gays and lesbians.” Then again, only 26 percent in the same survey thought gays should be allowed to serve, compared to a plurality of 37 percent opposed.

It should be noted, too, that the number of people being discharged under DADT is less than half what it was during the last year of the Clinton administration. Still, 612 people (the number in 2006, the last year for which data are available) is a lot to lose during wartime when we’re struggling to meet recruiting and retention goals. One highly qualified medic who wants to stay in, whose unit members and leaders want him to stay in, is too many.

As to Manzella, personally, though, it’s not unreasonable to ask why the hell did he go on “60 Minutes” to talk about this if he wanted to remain in uniform?

__________

* UPDATE: Actually following the link, I see that Terkel merely links to her own account of Mullen’s remarks. What he actually said was that the military is following the law now and, if Congress changes it, they’d follow the new law. That’s hardly advocacy for changing the law.

That’s how Instapundit refers to James Hansen, apparently the most intemperate of the global warming alarmists (yes, he’s worse than Gore because he’s Gore’s science advisor). Here’s Hansen’s latest proposal:

James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress – in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming – to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the “perfect storm” of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

Hansen isn’t clear as to which court would have jurisdiction, nor is he very specific on any other details. Frankly, any attempt to prosecute people for their opinions like this strikes me as authoritarian and something that should be avoided. In addition, when scientists become activists I find it pretty alarming; they’re supposed to be dispassionate about their conclusions and should be aiming for the truth. Maybe they are, but episodes like this make me question their objectivity.

It’s a shame it comes down to something like this as well. As a non-scientist I am forced to trust people who do understand these things to make informed judgments of my own. It’s difficult to trust their conclusions when they put someone like Hansen front-and-center and he makes statements like this. I suspect it does more harm to their cause than good.

For my own part, I’m content to go with what the scientists say on this issue, mostly. One very basic item would make it much easier to go along with the scientists unequivocally. In all I’ve read about climate change in the popular press, I haven’t seen that they even have a model that can predict the earth’s average temperature from one year to the next, much less decades into the future (if anyone can point me to an example of this, please put it in the comments). Hopefully this is something they took care of long ago.

Also, whether climate change is true or not, that doesn’t tell us what, if anything, needs to be done about it. My personal preference would be a revenue neutral, distribution neutral carbon tax.

One of the oddities of this election cycle is that, with all the focus on Barack Obama’s race, he’s almost invariably referred to as “black” or “African-American” despite having a white mother. The same phenomenon is true pretty much across the board, from Tiger Woods to Halle Barry. Biracial or multiracial people, regardless of hue or other characteristics, are seen and seem to see themselves as black.

Woods briefly fought back against this trend, telling Oprah Winfrey and her audience that he was actually “Cablinasian,” owing to his complicated ancestry. (His father, the late Colonel Earl Woods, was half black, a quarter Chinese and a quarter American Indian. His mother, Kultida, is half Thai, a quarter Chinese, and a quarter Dutch.) Nobody bought it and he’s still considered “black.”

Is this a vestige of the old “one drop of black blood” nonsense? A function of our identifying race through visual characteristics and the dominance of African traits? That Americans think anyone not what is therefore “black”? Or what?

UPDATE: In related news, South Africa’s high court ruled last week that the country’s 20,000 citizens of Chinese descent will henceforth be considered legally “black.”

The creationists deserve a few props here. Since the Dover loss they’ve switched strategies away from claiming that ID is science and are instead focusing on “academic freedom”. That the concept of academic freedom doesn’t generally apply at the elementary and secondary levels seems to be of no consequence. The Louisiana legislature has passed, by a veto-proof majority, a bill that protects the “academic freedom” of teachers to teach creationism as science:

Sen. Ben Nevers, D-Bogalusa, has introduced the Louisiana Academic Freedom Act in the form of Senate Bill 561. The bill is now in the Senate’s education committee, which Nevers chairs.

The Louisiana Family Forum suggested the bill, Nevers said.

“They believe that scientific data related to creationism should be discussed when dealing with Darwin’s theory. This would allow the discussion of scientific facts,” Nevers said. “I feel the students should know there are weaknesses and strengths in both scientific arguments.”

Opponents, however, maintain that creationism is religion, not science.
“Louisiana is being used as a pawn in the Louisiana Family Forum’s scheme to force a narrow set of religious views on public schools and, indeed, on the entire state,” said Barbara Forrest, Ph.D., a reseacher, author and professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University.

According to the Senate’s digest, Nevers’ bill prohibits the state or any school official from hindering a public school teacher “from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review, in an objective manner, the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories” such as evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning. It also prohibits officials from censoring materials on the topics.

As a soon-to-be-resident of Louisiana, it has me wondering what I’ll be walking into. This will do nothing to help the image of the state, or of the state’s high school graduates. Indeed, I can see it making the more prestigious schools avoid Louisiana graduates and it will probably discourage the best professors from working at Louisiana’s finer schools, such as Tulane and Loyola.

Furthermore, if Governor Jindal signs the bill, as opposed to just letting it become law without his signature, it will reduce his chances of being McCain’s VP pick. It would make McCain have to defend, at least for a time, something he has spoken out against. The choice of Jindal, who otherwise seems like a very fine governor, would also make the ticket look provincial. If you’re trying to shore up the image of the Republican Party, I don’t see how Jindal will help do that if he signs this bill.

BTW, if you want to see Professor Forrest, referenced in the news article, describe the Dover trial, she does so here. The letter from her and the Louisiana group she founded can be seen here.

School vouchers is an idea I’ve supported ever since I first read Capitalism and Freedom in 1989. It’s an idea so simple, and sound, that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been embraced. Yet here we are, forty-six years after CaF was published and choice hasn’t caught on (except when dismembering a fetus) and is even reviled by most of the American public (I can’t find the source, but a few days ago I read that close to 60% are against vouchers, no doubt reflecting teachers’ unions’ well-funded opposition).

In fact, people in Washington D.C., like House Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton are trying to strangle a pilot program in its crib:

On Tuesday, a House Appropriations subcommittee is set to take up provisions in President Bush’s budget for $18 million to continue the five-year-old D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program for next year. It is part of an unprecedented $74 million earmarked for education in the District. In April, Mr. Fenty and D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray appeared before the House subcommittee on financial services and general government to speak in support of the initiative, which gives low-income students scholarships to attend private schools. Ms. Norton is not a member of that subcommittee, but she made a special appearance to attack the program.

Even worse, as The Post’s Valerie Strauss and Bill Turque reported Monday, it now turns out that Ms. Norton is preparing a plan that could end the program after just one more year. Ms. Norton won’t discuss her plan, and she would, rather disingenuously, have the public believe that she is acting only to ensure an orderly transition of students from a program doomed because of the opposition of others in her party. But, at best, by refusing to support the mayor, she is helping to doom a program that gives poor parents an opportunity that others in this country take for granted: the chance to choose a decent school for their children.

For parents such as Patricia William, that means the probable loss of an educational opportunity that has transformed her 11-year-old son. Ms. William is not alone in her praise of the program and in her panic about the possibility of its demise. The voucher pilot is intended to measure and compare children’s progress in private schools over a span of several years. But one result already is known: Poor parents do not want their children automatically consigned to failing schools any more than middle-class parents would. Talk to parents and grandparents of children afforded what should not be the luxury of choice and you’ll hear stories of thanks and success — stories of young women such as Tiffany Dunston, this year’s valedictorian at Archbishop Carroll High School. Ms. Norton turned a deaf ear to these accounts during a recent meeting, dismissing the scholarship families as “befuddled.” Catherine Hill, whose grandson graduated from the Academy for Ideal Education, told us that the only thing the group doesn’t understand is why Ms. Norton “hates a program that works so well.” (Her response to this editorial is here.)

The depth of the opposition to school choice has convinced me that a new approach is needed, though my proposal is a long shot at best. It is modeled on welfare reform and would involve breaking up the Department of Education and releasing the money to the states as performance-based block grants.

For instance, the almost $60 billion dollars in discretionary spending that was used to fund the DoEd this year could be allocated among the states and each individual block grant could be broken into thirds: one-third for construction of schools, purchase of books and computers; one-third for augmenting teacher pay; and, one-third for performance improvements. The data collection functions of the DoEd could be moved to Health and Human Services, along with administration of the block grants.

Whatever happens, something different needs to be done. Inflation-adjusted, per-pupil spending on education has more than tripled since the mid-1960s and we have very little to show for it. Time to try something new.