Breaking News: WaPo Meltdown

The Washington Post recently abandoned any appearance of balance by firing their one liberal columnist, Dan Froomkin. Then a couple of days ago, The Post's Dana Milbank, who I normally like, threw a snit on a news show because a blogger got called on in a Presidential press conference. The blogger, Nico Pitney, was the one who had put together the terrific web site following events in Iran as they unfolded -- we linked to it last week -- and he had elicited questions for the President from Iranian people. Milbank was apparently outraged because someone from the administration called the blogger the day before the news conference to tell him he would be asked a question. It was an embarrassing episode for The Post.

But that was nothing.

Today a lobbyist revealed a flyer that had been sent to him by the Washington Post. Politico has it:

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders."

The flier promised the dinner would be held in an intimate setting with no unseemly conflict between participants. "Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No," it said. "The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less."
...
The first "Salon" was to be called "Health-Care Reform: Better or Worse for Americans? The reform and funding debate." More were anticipated, and the flier described the opportunities for participants:

"Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters' CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 … Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ... An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. ... A Washington Post Salon ... July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m. ..."

"Washington Post Salons are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard," the flier says. "At the core is a critical topic of our day. Dinner and a volley of ideas unfold in an evening of intelligent, news-driven and off-the-record conversation. ... By bringing together those powerful few in business and policy-making who are forwarding, legislating and reporting on the issues, Washington Post Salons give life to the debate. Be at this nexus of business and policy with your underwriting of Washington Post Salons." Washington Post cancels lobbyist event amid uproar

This is just incredible. One of the nation's premier news sources is selling the opportunity to lobby their journalists, and apparently planned to sell access to their news sources in insider Washington as well.

Now they say they have canceled the first "salon."

The story as of ten o'clock Thursday night, from Politico, who broke the story:

Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

With the Post newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Weymouth said in an email to the staff that "a flier went out that was prepared by the Marketing department and was never vetted by me or by the newsroom. Had it been, the flier would have been immediately killed, because it completely misrepresented what we were trying to do."

Weymouth said the paper had planned a series of dinners with participation from the newsroom "but with parameters such that we did not in any way compromise our integrity. Sponsorship of events, like advertising in the newspaper, must be at arm's length and cannot imply control over the content or access to our journalists. At this juncture, we will not be holding the planned July dinner and we will not hold salon dinners involving the newsroom."

But you know, lady, it's too late, the cat's out of the bag. You had the invitations, they were printed up and distributed to K Street wheeler-dealers, this isn't some crazy idea that's being batted around the conference room. This was a done deal.

Personal access to Post reporters and administration officials, $25,000 for one, and special for you my friend, $250,000 for eleven. This story is going to last a long time and go a long way. I can't think of anything in modern journalism that quite compares to this. This isn't a lazy reporter making up quotes, this is selling out the entire organization from the very top, a major American newspaper. I think this could be the end of an era.

Tomorrow's page A1 is going to be one of the most important pages The Post has ever laid out. If this story isn't there, they're toast.


[ Friday morning Update: I don't see it in the print edition this morning, but online The Post has the story HERE. They're blaming a marketing executive, Charles Pelton, even though the "salons" were going to be held at publisher Katharine Weymouth's private residence. Various people are appalled, journalists were stunned and angry, etc. ]

Endocrine Disruptors in the NYT

Let's see what you think about this one. Kristof in the New York Times the other day.

Some of the first eerie signs of a potential health catastrophe came as bizarre deformities in water animals, often in their sexual organs.

Frogs, salamanders and other amphibians began to sprout extra legs. In heavily polluted Lake Apopka, one of the largest lakes in Florida, male alligators developed stunted genitals.

In the Potomac watershed near Washington, male smallmouth bass have rapidly transformed into “intersex fish” that display female characteristics. This was discovered only in 2003, but the latest survey found that more than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

Now scientists are connecting the dots with evidence of increasing abnormalities among humans, particularly large increases in numbers of genital deformities among newborn boys. For example, up to 7 percent of boys are now born with undescended testicles, although this often self-corrects over time. And up to 1 percent of boys in the United States are now born with hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the penis improperly, such as at the base rather than the tip. It’s Time to Learn From Frogs

So there's something in the air, or in the water, or somewhere in our environment, that is affecting the sexual development of wildlife and humans. I like to catch bass but I admit I can't tell a male fish from a female unless there are eggs. It is interesting to know that our own Potomac River has intersex fish. What do you suppose that water is doing to your kids?

Apprehension is growing among many scientists that the cause of all this may be a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products. Some also enter the water supply when estrogens in human urine — compounded when a woman is on the pill — pass through sewage systems and then through water treatment plants.

These endocrine disruptors have complex effects on the human body, particularly during fetal development of males.

“A lot of these compounds act as weak estrogen, so that’s why developing males — whether smallmouth bass or humans — tend to be more sensitive,” said Robert Lawrence, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s scary, very scary.”

Okay, I think we might have here a perfect example of irony. Unregulated free enterprise resulted in the dumping of endocrine disruptors, including chemicals that act as female hormones, into the environment. Even while they campaigned against gay and transgender rights, the cowboys of the Bush administration let business set its own standards for pollution and toxins, and the ironic result is the demasculinization of the American man.

How do you like that?

The scientific case is still far from proven, as chemical companies emphasize, and the uncertainties for humans are vast. But there is accumulating evidence that male sperm count is dropping and that genital abnormalities in newborn boys are increasing. Some studies show correlations between these abnormalities and mothers who have greater exposure to these chemicals during pregnancy, through everything from hair spray to the water they drink.

Endocrine disruptors also affect females. It is now well established that DES, a synthetic estrogen given to many pregnant women from the 1930s to the 1970s to prevent miscarriages, caused abnormalities in the children. They seemed fine at birth, but girls born to those women have been more likely to develop misshaped sexual organs and cancer.

There is also some evidence from both humans and monkeys that endometriosis, a gynecological disorder, is linked to exposure to endocrine disruptors. Researchers also suspect that the disruptors can cause early puberty in girls.

A rush of new research has also tied endocrine disruptors to obesity, insulin resistance and diabetes, in both animals and humans. For example, mice exposed in utero even to low doses of endocrine disruptors appear normal at first but develop excess abdominal body fat as adults.

The Wikipedia page on endocrine disruptors is pretty informative. Bisphenol A is an important endocrine disruptor that is found in baby bottles, infant formula cans, and, you might be interested to know, in the plastic that bottled water comes in. It's bad stuff, even Wal-Mart agreed to remove it from their products. At 0.025 µg/kg/day it causes permanent changes to genital tract -- the EPA limit for human exposure is 50 µg/kg/day, which has been shown to cause adverse neurological effects in primates. It affects breast tissue, prostate weight, testosterone production, maternal behaviors ... this is nasty stuff.

This is just the kind of thing where conservatives complain about Big Brother government monitoring and setting limits, they argue that consumers will choose safer products if that's what they want, and the market will adapt. But the public doesn't know, people can't tell when something has an endocrine disruptor in it -- gazillions of people think that pure bottled water they're drinking is good for them, they don't realize the plastic is undermining their endocrine system. I don't like Big Brother government telling citizens who they can and can't marry, but I don't mind if objective studies are done by agencies with no profit incentive to learn the effects of toxins on humans, I don't mind if regulations are established and enforced to protect the population from businesses who only respond to the bottom line.

CNN: Transgender People are Here to Stay

CNN had an article online last week titled "Commentary: Transgender people are everywhere," by a transsexual woman named Donna Rose. She starts out reminding us of Chaz Bono, Sonny and Cher's kid, formerly named Chastity, who recently announced that he was transitioning from a female to male gender identity. This is a high-profile celebrity transition, Rose says, but it is not such a rare event.

We're a cross-section of society -- pilots, engineers, doctors, factory workers, artisans and pretty much anything else you can imagine. It was only a matter of time before we came to Hollywood. Make no mistake -- Chaz isn't the first and certainly won't be the last.
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In a very real sense, transgender people are no one thing. We are everyone, everywhere. Whether you realize it or not, we go to your school, we are active in your communities of faith, we are your neighbors, your co-workers, your family members. Commentary: Transgender people are everywhere

We sometimes quote an estimated statistic that about one tenth of one percent of the population is transgender. That's not very many people, which makes the situation harder, because many people have no experience at all interacting with a transgender person. They haven't given it a thought, don't know what to say, and sometimes respond with anger at their own awkwardness when they do find themselves face to face with someone who does not conform to their expectations about gender. Rose's point here is a good one, that in fact there are transgender people in all walks of life. A few celebrities might get noticed by the media or whatever, but there are a lot of people who have quietly made adjustments in their ordinary lives to correct the erroneous assignment of gender at birth.

We live in a world that tries to force all of us to conform to the expectations and roles established for our bodies at birth, yet our heart and our spirit often realize that we have been miscast in life. We are forced to ask questions of ourselves about things that few ever consider.

The search for answers is indeed the pathway for overall happiness and fulfillment in life. This is a journey that each of us is on -- trans and not -- and the simple fact of the matter is that the transgender journey may appear unique, but the end goal is a universal one: Happiness.

Needless to say, there are those who continue to live in a world where "different" somehow automatically means bad, or is a threat. These are people who would keep transgender people trapped in stigmas of mental illness, moral weakness, sexual perversion and general societal freakishness.

It seems to me that nature gives us sexual qualities, we don't need to pretend to have them. A man shouldn't need to "act like" a man, a woman shouldn't have to "act like" a woman, you are what you are already, and everything you do is an expression of that. Maybe your nature is stereotypical of your sex, and maybe it is not, by degrees. But there is social pressure pushing us as individuals toward the ends of the continuum, a feminine man or masculine woman is punished in everyday interactions by stares and comments and worse, discrimination, violence.

I like her comments about people who believe "different" somehow automatically means bad. Really, that's the heart of it, that's the thing we argue about here on this blog, this is what brings TTF to the cultural battlefield. Our unifying value is the belief that someone can be different from us and still be a good person. We undermine social pressure toward conformity, especially on sex and gender dimensions, and oppose efforts to dehumanize and sanction individuals who are different from the statistical norm. We stand for freedom of personal expression.

Our defense is a simple one: We prove who we are, individually and collectively, not with words but with the courage to come out and the ability to live our lives with dignity and grace.

It may come as a surprise for many people in this country to recognize that many of us who are transsexual are not embarrassed, ashamed or otherwise apologetic of who or what we are. We refuse to go back into the stifling closet of trying to be something we're not.

We enjoy each and every day being unique, as men and women and everything in between, and we rejoice in our diversity rather than fear it. The ties that bind us are far more than the obvious connections of gender. They are bonds of courage, authenticity, integrity and pride.

You have to admire people who have the courage to make their lives right. You know there is almost no social support for someone changing the public expression of their gender identity. Our society, in fact I expect it is accurate to say all societies, have characteristic role expectations dichotomized by gender, and when someone switches roles or expresses an identity somewhere in the middle it makes people uncomfortable. We don't have routinized behaviors for interacting with someone of uncertain gender, and many people react negatively. Yet thousands of people every year are brave enough to make the transition. I can't even imagine how hard that must be.

Ms. Rose has a good point to make here.

Transgender people are victimized by crime more frequently than the general population. Many of us find ourselves unemployed and unable to be hired for jobs for which we are well qualified simply because we are transgender. And, as harsh as this life can be for us, many previous generations had it even worse. Things are changing -- slowly but surely.

Why are they changing? Because transgender people are here to stay. We've been here all along and we're finally acknowledging that our unique journey is part of who we are, but not ALL of who we are. Chaz is a courageous brother. He is a role model to others struggling with similar issues and questions. He is someone who has taken control of his life and intends to live it to the fullest. These are not things to fear. These are things to admire.

The message here is not one of our bodies, but one of our spirits. It is not one of becoming something you're not; it is of accepting what you are. As French writer Andre Gide said: "It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you're not." Many of us have experienced these words first-hand and know them to be true. Chaz knows who and what he is. That is not something to fear. That is something to celebrate.

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, which in many minds marked the beginning of the revolution for gay rights. We use an acronym "LGBT," sometimes switching the L and the G, and sometimes forgetting about the T. In recent years, as Congress has debated an act that would require equal employment opportunities for gay and lesbian citizens, there has been real debate about whether that protection should be offered to transgender individuals, too, or just LGB. The debate has caused tension in some quarters between gay and transgender people, with gay people explaining that they really don't feel much in common with the transgender community and hoping that gay rights are not postponed while Congress considers whether to include this other group. I think the transgender community is realizing that they have to speak up for themselves, they will not ride automatically on the successes that gay and lesbian people have seen. That may be the good that comes out of the inclusive-ENDA debate.

LGBT Leaders Visit the President

Barack Obama won the gay vote on a campaign of inclusiveness and fairness, but the administration has been very slow to make any actual policy decisions that benefit gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens. A recent brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act in the strongest way outraged almost every leader in the gay community, and some have turned against the entire administration as being hypocritical. Well, there is a kind of trend in following some of the more alarming policies of the Bush administration. A lot of people are worried.

Yesterday Obama invited a group of gay leaders to the White House. Here's The Post, page A1:

President Obama opened the doors of the White House to hundreds of gay and lesbian leaders yesterday, continuing his cautious outreach to a constituency that has loudly criticized his efforts on its behalf.

In an event in the East Room marking the 40th anniversary of the riots surrounding New York's Stonewall Inn, where gay patrons rose up against a police raid in Greenwich Village, Obama sought to reassure guests that he had not abandoned the issues important to them. He also drew a parallel between the progress gays and lesbians have made in recent decades and the struggles of black Americans to win equality.

"The truth is, when these folks protested at Stonewall 40 years ago, no one could have imagined that you or, for that matter, I would be standing here today," Obama said, promising to continue to push to overturn several laws that are anathema to gay activists.

His comments were received enthusiastically by some attendees. "This is so incredibly historic and symbolic," Mitchell Gold, a gay rights activist from North Carolina, said after leaving the White House. "I don't think for a minute that we can forget that under the Bush administration we didn't see that."

Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist, said Obama gave "people confidence that he understood their movement, understood their struggle, and had a plan to do something about it." At White House, Obama Aims to Reassure Gays

It's true, you would not have seen such a gathering under the Bush administration. The issue, of course, is that so far Obama's gestures to the gay community have been symbolic. Gays are still being kicked out of the military, a marriage that is conducted in one state may not be recognized in another, there need to be equal rights in employment for LGBT people, there are lots of things that need to be done -- or undone -- and this administration has moved backwards, if anything, when it comes to real policy. The usual comment is that they need legislation, but the executive branch can do a lot to make that happen.

So -- you can expect that last sentence to be followed by the word "but."

But the excitement among many of the several hundred guests invited to the White House was tempered by frustration among some who say they think the president has moved too slowly to make good on his campaign promises.

That frustration has centered on Obama not taking quick, unilateral action to end discrimination against gays in the military and on his administration's support for a legal challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act.

"Cocktail parties are fun, but if we are impatient, there's a reason," said Alan Van Capelle, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, who said he was not invited to the White House event. "There are a lot of us who believe in change but do not believe it is a passive word. It is an active word. There is a level of disappointment that exists."

He compared the Obama event to an unsatisfying meal, calling it "nouveau cuisine" and adding: "It costs a whole lot to get into the White House, but somehow, the meal feels unfulfilling."

Even Gold, who called the president "courageous" for holding the event, conceded that it did little to soothe the concerns of a community of people who expected Obama to change their world.

"It doesn't take away the pain that the Justice Department issued a brief equating gays to pedophiles and incest," he said. "It doesn't take the pain away that 'don't ask, don't tell' hasn't been sent to Congress to be repealed."

Obama confronted that criticism yesterday, renewing his campaign promises to overturn the military policy on gays, repeal the marriage act and pass a federal hate-crimes bill named for Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who was slain in Wyoming in 1998.

"I expect and hope to be judged not by words, not by promises I've made, but by the promises that my administration keeps," the president said to sustained applause. "We've been in office six months now. I suspect that by the time this administration is over, I think you guys will have pretty good feelings about the Obama administration."

I hear people say, he can't do everything all at once. And you know that civil rights issues are easy to push to the back burner. Like, c'mon, the guy's got unjustified war and a collapsing economy to worry about, never mind all these celebrities dying! I think the wise thing to do right now is to continue to put the pressure on, in a way that motivates policy-makers without alienating the straight public, but don't give up hope quite yet. There is a lot of time for good things to happen. The new guy said he was going to fix a few things, maybe he still intends to.

The fact that he met with this group tells you he's at least not trying to keep the whole issue hidden away. Let's see where this goes.

Metro Fail

It took me an hour and a half to get to work this morning, twice as long as it should. I can't tell if Metro thinks they are going to get more funding by providing pitiful service, if they think that they need to pretend to be "more careful" to inspire confidence in their customers, or if they actually think they are making things better.

Okay, they had a wreck, people were killed, it was horrible. In the aftermath we found out that Metro had screwed up in every way, their collision-avoidance system wasn't working, the brakes on the train were months overdue for maintenance, the train itself was old and the government had told them years ago to stop using it, and so on. We pay top dollar for public transportation here, I spend nine bucks a day not including parking, and what do we get? Junk. Dangerous junk.

Now we have a new routine on the Red Line. Well, first of all, every other train is supposed to turn around at Grosvenor. All locals who live out beyond that know you can get off a train at Grosvenor and wait a few minutes and an empty train will come out of the tunnel. You can get a seat. Apparently Metro has stopped doing that. They don't announce it or anything, they just stopped it. Today there was a "No Passengers" train scheduled to come into that station, which means that it is not picking up passengers going outbound but will turn around, so a lot of people waited while a full train stopped, headed downtown. A train came into the station with signs saying "No Passengers," and then changed them to "Shady Grove" and kept going. So we all missed a train for nothing, hundreds of us.

The new routine is this. You wait forever on a crowded platform, until finally a crowded train pulls into the station. The doors open and more people jam into the cars. After several stations, the crowding is so bad that the doors can't close. The operator's announcements get crankier and crankier, until finally they "offload" the train, which is their way of saying they kick everybody off. The platform is already crowded, but another thousand or so passengers pour out of the "disabled" train to join them. Everybody waits until another already-crowded train pulls into the station. Repeat.

What, they can't tell which door is stuck? They can't send somebody to walk to that car, tell people to get out of the way and let the door shut? If it's a bad car, they can't offload one car, they have to do the whole train? (I know they can, I've seen it.)

This happened to me Thursday and it happened today, that is, it happened to the trains I was on, we got offloaded because the doors wouldn't close. During the course of the morning it must happen a lot of times.

Metro is clearly running fewer trains than they need, I don't know what the rationale is.

I took the Metro shortly after the June 22nd accident. Most people did not yet know that the accident had occurred. I went into Union Station at about 6:15 (the wreck was at about 5:00) and the platform was not crowded. Trains came on a regular schedule, true they could not go all the way out, but they went to Rhode Island Avenue and turned around without problems. In other words, even with an obstruction at Fort Totten, it is entirely possible for most of the Red Line to run smoothly.

There is apparently a 35 mph speed limit in effect on the stretch of track where the accident happened, and Metro blames this for delays everywhere else. What is the point of going slow there? The sensor that prevents collisions was not working two weeks ago, but I honestly hope they have fixed it by now! Are they slowing down so people can look out the window and see what's left of the debris? Or is Metro trying to make people think it is safer somehow to go slower there? It doesn't make any sense to me unless there are people working on the track and the investigation, but I don't think there are. The mess has been cleared up, there's nothing to see at this point, now they're working at their desks.

Every day after the accident, Metro service got worse. It is now intolerable. People need to get to work on time, and Metro is not meeting that need.

Ancient Flute Found

This is totally unrelated to anything we talk about here, but it is cool.

BERLIN (AP) — A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.

A team led by University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.

Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch (22-centimeter) instrument with five holes and a notched end. Conard said the flute was 35,000 years old.

"It's unambiguously the oldest instrument in the world," Conard told The Associated Press this week. His findings were published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

The reassembled instrument was too fragile to be played, but Conard worked with another academic to make a copy of it from the same type of bone and to play it and produce recordings of songs such as "The Star-Spangled Banner." Prehistoric flute in Germany is oldest known

Just think of people thirty-five thousand years ago, this is nearly thirty thousand years before agriculture, there were still Neanderthals running around. Emerging culturally from the animal kingdom, struggling with the elements, our earliest ancestors found the time to make music.

First somebody had to notice the pretty sound you get when you blow across an opening. Like a kid with a soda bottle, except there weren't soda bottles, somehow somebody noticed the effect of wind over a rock or tree branch and then generalized it, they figured out it wasn't magic but a principle of air against an opening. Then they applied that generalization to human breath blown over a man-made opening in a resonating chamber -- this is scientific thinking at its best, thirty-five thousand years ago, a beautiful pure example of creativity supported by abstract knowledge.

Then the second step. You can make a pretty sound blowing across an opening, but this is a bird-bone flute that plays different notes. The maker of this instrument drilled five holes in the cylinder at regular points, you cover those holes with your fingers and uncover them to change the pitch of the pretty sound. The principle here is complex, having to do with the wavelength of sounds, and I doubt these cave-men understood the Pythagorean principles involved, but somehow they had figured out, back in dim antiquity, how to vary the pitch of a woodwind instrument so that melodies could be played. This instrument does not seem significantly different from the flutes we have today, in principle.

The article mentions that the scientists intend to make a replica of the flute "and produce recordings of songs such as 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'" The melody of the Star Spangled Banner is mostly arpeggios with few passing tones, which may make it a good candidate for such a project, I'm sure that there are harder and easier tunes to play on a flute with five holes, maybe this is an easier one. At any rate, the comment suggests that the holes are placed in such a way that a performer can play the notes of diatonic Western music, and that in itself would imply that these Palaeolithic rockers were not just making pretty sounds, but might have actually had melodies, they might have had real songs that they played.

I have long thought that it would be interesting to develop a theory of psychology based on music, where an individual life is like a melody playing out over time, its fitness determined by the dynamic harmonic context that defines a note (or behavior) as sonorous or dissonant. The harmonic context, in turn, is provided by other melodies, and it all fits together, hopefully, at least the improvising musicians try to make it fit.

At any rate, if you think about the calculations that have to be done to recognize a melody you realize it is a very complicated problem. Imagine there was a database full of music files, and you wanted to find a particular one. The ideal interface would be one where you hum the melody you want into a microphone and the computer finds the file that matches it. The fact is, there is no computer program that can do that, the computation is simply too hard. But your brain can do it, even a little kid can instantly recognize a familiar melody and name it, even if it's played in a different key and on a different instrument from where it was learned. The human brain is able to analyze the waveforms, and in particular is able to identify the ratios of the frequencies of notes in relation to one another, and instantly recognize melodies -- this is an amazing thing to be able to do, and if you think about it there does not seem to be much evolutionary payoff for such an adaptation. But in the discovery of this flute and other very ancient musical instruments we see that the aptitude for music has always been part of being human.

There is something pleasing to me in considering our descent from primitive origins. It is pleasing to think of people living in small bands, cooperating to overcome the harshness of nature -- people with exactly the brains, exactly the intelligence, we have today. What did they think about all day? Were they able to speak? We can't know some things. But now we know they played music.

Nebraska Psychologists Reject Discriminatory Wording

We were talking about this the other day, and now the decision is in. A Catholic group in Nebraska wanted psychotherapists to be able to reject gay patients and not have to refer them. They were trying to get that written into the licensing law. It didn't work:

Wording that would let psychologists not treat or not refer patients because of a moral conflict -- opposing homosexuality, for example -- met with skepticism Wednesday from the state board of psychology.

After 90 minutes of debate, the board chose not to endorse a proposal put forth earlier by Jim Cunningham, director of the Nebraska Catholic Conference.

While Wednesday’s inaction may not be the final word on the issue, board member objections left little room for compromise.

Catholics did not propose the change in regulations in order to ignore patients’ needs, said the Rev. Christopher Kubat, director of Catholic Social Services for the Lincoln diocese. He added the proposal had been widely misconstrued.

If, for example, a homosexual client went to a Catholic therapist for help, Kubat told the board, it still would be improper for the therapist to deny treatment for depression or suicidal tendencies.

What the church seeks, Cunningham said, is to protect providers from complaints of discrimination should a psychologist refuse a request to, for example, make a person a more giving homosexual partner. Psychologists reject wording that would limit treatment, referrals

Well, it is discrimination, and somebody might complain. That's just the price you pay, seems fair enough to me. And anyway, do you think this ever happens, that somebody files a complaint because their shrink won't help them become a "more giving homosexual partner?"

Supreme Court Rules Against School in Strip-Search of Girl

I'm glad to see this one. From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A public school violated the privacy rights of a teenage girl who had to disrobe on suspicion she had ibuprofen pills, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in its first decision on student strip searches.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices upheld a ruling that the school and its officials violated the U.S. constitutional right that protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

The ruling by the nation's high court was a major defeat for school officials who had defended the strip search as necessary for student safety, school order and combating a growing drug problem.

School officials in Safford, Arizona, had ordered the strip search in 2003 of Savana Redding, who was 13 and in the eighth grade. It did not turn up any ibuprofen -- an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory medication used to treat fever, headaches and pain -- or any other drugs.

"Because there were no reasons to suspect the drugs presented a danger or were concealed in her underwear, we hold that the search did violate the Constitution," Justice David Souter wrote for the court majority. Supreme Court rejects school strip search

It's got to be tough to run a school, I'm sure, teenagers are hard to manage when you've got one or two at home, I can just imagine trying to maintain order at a middle school. So I understand at some level that when another girl tattled and said this girl had drugs, they may have felt they had to follow up. But, first, c'mon, it was Motrin, fer cryin' out loud. Maybe she's not supposed to have it, but sheesh. And then you have to weigh the seriousness of violating a thirteen-year-old girl's sense of modesty. If it was a machine gun, okay, you do everything you can to find it. A bottle of Motrin, I'm sorry, this is beyond what a school should be doing.

Clarence Thomas disagreed:

Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the part of the ruling that Redding's privacy rights had been violated.

Thomas said the ruling "grants judges sweeping authority to second-guess the measures that these officials take to maintain discipline in their schools and ensure the health and safety of the students in their charge."

Yes, I suppose it does put some limits on what school authorities can do to students. Good.

Falling From the Throne

A married guy has a girlfriend, that's not a news story. A governor disappears for nearly a week to rendezvous with his mysterious lover in South America without telling anyone, there's a story. How about this: man runs for office, telling everyone he believes in family values and will uphold the dignity of marriage, and then after he's elected he runs off to South America to see his girlfriend. Yeah, that's a story.

When I saw Keith Olbermann reading those sappy emails last night, with that sappy music in the background, I almost felt sorry for Mark Sanford. I had a little dog once that could jump a six-foot fence when a certain smell was in the air, and if he could have written emails to the female in heat on the next block they would sound just like these that Sanford wrote to "Maria."

Don't get me wrong, I do not feel sorry for Mark Sanford. He thought he was better than everybody else, he thinks everybody will forgive him, everybody will understand that because he wrote goo-goo letters to "Maria" he is somehow a martyr for love. Naw, he's just another dog, just like everybody else. His story is no different from anybody else's, he's just got more money.

It was cute when my dog used to jump over the fence. It's not cute when an elected offical abandons his post and lies to his family and his constituents to jump over the fence and run down the block.

Republicans and Democrats are equally susceptible to the temptations of the flesh, straight people and gay, white and black, Christian, Jew, Arab, and atheist. This isn't about sex, it's about dereliction of duty and it's about thinking you're better than other people. It should be -- I'm not saying it will be -- a wake-up call to Republicans to back off the holier-than-thou angle in campaigning, maybe they should run on the basis of policies and not make statements about family and marriage that they can't live up to.

There. I got through it without using the word "hypocrisy." Alvin McEwen has a good summary of events at his site, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters. He lives in South Carolina, has lots of links here, I think he's captured the essence of it from the local point of view.

Oh, and one more thing. How come we aren't seeing any photographs of the lovely temptress who brought down this King of the Old South? Somebody knows who she is, I want to have a look at this one.

This I Why They Call It Hate

We tend to think the "God Hates Fags" people are out there in a world of their own, protesting at the funerals of the fallen, hating people they don't know, you never think there are people like that in our own community. But we have people whose hatred is so intense that they intentionally inflict the greatest pain they can on those whose suffering is already unimaginable.

HYATTSVILLE, Md. - As people's hearts continue to go out to the family of victims killed in Monday's tragic Metro crash, some grieving family members say they're being harassed.

Forty-year-old Ana Fernandez, an immigrant from El Salvador, was on her way to her cleaning job when she was killed in Monday's Metro collision. On Wednesday, her family and friends gathered outside their home where her daughter said they need help but are upset with prank phone calls they have received.

"And I'm serious if you're going to call and leave messages like that, don't call at all," Evelyn Fernandez, the victim's daughter.

"That we're using this to make my cousin legally here… no she was a resident -- all her kids are citizens here, they were all born here," said Thelma Bautista, the victim's cousin.

Metro has set up a $250,000 emergency hardship fund for families of those who lost their lives to provide medical, funeral and other immediate expenses.

"[It's set up to] provide immediate assistance for families that obviously weren't planning for something like this to happen," said Angela Gates of Metro.

"People that are really willing to help us thank you very much and if not don't cause we'll get through this. I have family who cares -- I have people [who] care for my mom. My mom has friends and we're good with that," said Evelyn Fernandez.

Fernandez's six children who were left motherless do qualify but right now, the phone calls have them upset. "OK, that's not nice, they don't respect our pain. They [have to] stop," added Bautista.

Metro says they're in the process of notifying the families about the fund. It is limited, sources say, to families who lost loved ones -- not to people who may have been injured in the crash. Crash Victim's Family Harassed Over Mother's Immigration Status

I said recently that if there is evil it exists in the dehumanization of people, evil is the force that reduces human beings to objects. This is what I was talking about. A family is in such pain and evil people want to hurt them more to make a political point. I hope the callers are identified and punished.

SC Governor Reappears With New Story

Okay, this is the least important thing in the world, but it is really weird. The governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, disappeared and has re-appeared. First he was just gone. His wife, the Lieutenant Governor, his PR people, nobody knew where he was. Then his office said he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, interestingly during Nude Hiking Day. Then somebody said they'd seen him getting on a plane in Atlanta, with clothes on.

Now he says he took a trip to Argentina.

ATLANTA (Reuters) - South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford returned to the United States on Wednesday from a secret private trip to Argentina, ending days of speculation over his whereabouts and raising questions about his judgment.

Sanford is the chairman of the Republican Governors' Association and a prominent fiscal conservative who has been talked about as a potential Republican candidate for the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

Analysts said his mystery retreat to South America could damage his political career if he has presidential aspirations.

When media reported Sanford's whereabouts were unknown since last Thursday and that even his wife did not know where he was, his aides said he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the eastern United States to get away for a break after a tough state legislative session. "Missing" U.S. governor was on private Argentina trip

I guess they think this guy might run for President in 2012. He's a Republican, some scandal isn't going to hurt him any, but ... don't you wonder what in the world is going on here?

This article says, a little farther down:

Sanford flew to Atlanta early on Wednesday and told reporters for The State, South Carolina's biggest newspaper, he had decided at the last minute to go to Argentina and drive along its coastline.

"I wanted to do something exotic ... to get out of the bubble I am in," he told the paper, adding he had traveled alone.

Yeah, sure.

[Note: Of course I have to update this one. Here's the headline and summary from the LA Times: South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford admits to extramarital affair: Sanford admits to a love affair with an Argentine woman. 'The bottom line is this: I've been unfaithful to my wife.' He apologizes to his family and the people of South Carolina.]

[I am shocked, I tell you.]

Complaining About Metro

It has not been widely noted that the Red Line was already a mess when the accident happened Monday. Trains were being single-tracked around a malfunctioning train in one of the stations on the other end of the horseshoe from the wreck, perhaps Tenleytown, and the whole Red Line was backed up. Trains were moving a few hundred yards and stopping, moving a little more, stopping, waiting. This makes the crash even more mysterious, operators should have been watching carefully, trains were holding all up and down the Red line. Nobody was going fast. I talked to somebody who said that at four-thirty it took fifteen minutes to get from Takoma to Fort Totten, which is the next stop, and the accident happened in that stretch of track. It will be interesting to find out what was wrong with the train, maybe the throttle stuck and the brakes failed at the same time, but it doesn't make any sense, on the face of it, for a train to be going that fast in that spot at that time.

I have been thinking about writing about the Metro for a while. You hate to complain, and I understand that it's a big job moving all of the Washington Metro population to work and back, to Nats' games and concerts, taking tourists to the museums and monuments. But there are some things that make you question the whole operation.

Escalators. Have you ever had to walk up a broken escalator at a mall? You have not, because the mall wants your business, they want their customers to be happy. Metro doesn't care. The escalator at Union Station is a stairway most of the time, and lots of others, too. It's not that anybody is working on them, they're just turned off. I was on one a couple of weeks ago that was moving and suddenly, with about fifty people on it, it stopped with a jolt. Everybody just about fell over. There was no complaining, no muttering, people just started walking. I didn't see anyone near the panic button, no Metro staff looking at the escalator, it just turned off. How can an escalator be broken for weeks at a time? It doesn't happen anywhere else, only at the Metro, and it happens a lot at the Metro.

I am as concerned about the security effect as anything. I don't know the actual numbers, but with trains coming from both directions, I'll bet the downtown stations have a thousand people at a time going from the platform to the street on a weekday morning. I hate to think it, but what if something happened? What is there was a gun or a bomb on the platform, and they had to evacuate people? I guarantee people would be trampled on one of those stationary escalators.

And then when you get to the top of the escalator in some of the stations they have stupidly engineered the pedestrian pattern so that the stream of people leaving the building crosses the stream of people going into the system. You have to dodge moving bodies, and it is not always graceful or successful.

The same thing has happened at the Twinbrook parking lot, only with cars. They re-did the whole parking lot last year. To exit the parking lot now, you have to come out to your right and make a U-turn to get into the line of traffic moving to your left. It is just bad planning. People don't complain, there's nothing you can do, they put the exit to the parking lot too close to an intersection, traffic backs up past the exit and you simply cannot get out into the flow.

The Metro has a web site that supposedly tells you when there are delays. You can see it HERE if you're curious, I wouldn't bother to bookmark it if I were you. On Monday, when the wreck happened at five o'clock, Metro announced delays at six twenty-two, an hour and a half later. You're leaving work, you're probably going to head for the Metro between five and six twenty, that notice of a delay was too late for you -- and there was no notice at all for the earlier delay that same afternoon, which had rides taking up to an hour longer than usual.

At 6:22 the notice said, "Disruption system-wide. Customers traveling or connecting to the Red Line, due to significant Red Line delays, customers are encouraged to add an additional 30 minutes to their travel times." Listen, if you commute, you've been on a train where you can hear the operator's announcements get crankier and crankier, telling people not to lean on the doors, until they finally kick everybody off the train. Now they're going to put a whole trainload of passengers onto the next train, which is also already full. If you get information from Metro, you want to know the difference between a collision with multiple fatalities that will clog the line for days and an operator at the end of their shift who has had it up to here with tourists leaning on the doors. Metro can say, "There was a collision at Fort Totten," and we'll know, this will take a while. They don't tell you that.

It was lucky, if you can call it that, that the accident happened on the incoming train during outgoing rush hour. I saw an interview with somebody who said there were about eight people on his car when they hit. It could have been much worse.

An hour after the accident I took the Red Line from Union Station back into Rockville, and there was no problem. The platform was not crowded, trains were on time -- they were only coming from Rhode Island Avenue, not the whole length of the line, but that didn't affect my trip any, I was going the other way. You wouldn't have known anything was wrong. But then, day after day, it has gotten worse. This morning I waited at Grosvenor for an empty train -- normally every other one turns around there and starts fresh -- but apparently there are no Grosvenor trains since the wreck, so I boarded a train that was already full. We were like sardines, and then they offloaded a train in the city, the platforms were packed and our overcrowded train got even more overcrowded. I talked to one guy who said his ride from Rockville took forty minutes longer than usual. It appears that in the aftermath of this tragic accident Metro service is going to deteriorate in a frenzy of CYA.

My kid got stuck in the parking lot the other day, he didn't know you need to have a cleverly-named SmarTrip card to get out of the Metro parking lot. Do you remember why that is? They used to take cash at the booth, but the people they hired were robbing them blind. They'd take your money and put it in their own pockets. I don't recall reading the news that any of them were fired, instead Metro made it more inconvenient for the customer, they forced everybody who drives to the station to buy a computerized card.

There are pluses to Metro. A lot of the cars leak when it rains, water drips on the seats and on your head, and a lot of cars smell moldy, but in general the system is cleaner than a lot of cities have. You occasionally hear about a crime committed on, at, or near the Metro, but it's not a big concern, riders are very safe throughout the system.

Oh, hey, here's something -- have you ever dealt with Metro's lost and found? Here's some advice for you. If you find somebody's stuff on the train, don't turn it in, take it home. See if you can figure out who it belongs to. Call them. If it gets sucked into the Metro's lost and found system it'll never come out again.

We're reading now that the "striking" train (don't you wonder where that terminology comes from?) was old, was running in an unusual configuration, that the brakes were two months overdue for maintenance, and that the National Transportation Safety Board had told Metro three years ago to replace it. The computerized anticollision system was supposed to stop a train that gets too close to another train, the operator apparently pushed the emergency brake but nobody felt the train slow down before the accident -- how did this many things go wrong simultaneously?

This blog deals mainly with issues in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is a collection of suburban towns outside Washington, DC. Many readers here work in the city or in Virginia, and take the Metro to work. It's one of the good things about living here, Metro is generally safe and reliable. But there are a lot of problems flowing from the bureaucracy that runs the system. More than seventy people were injured in Monday's wreck, nine dead, and it was not an "accident" in the sense that falling down the stairs is an accident. A lot of things had to go wrong for those two trains to collide, there was a lot of negligence involved. They've asked if the poor driver of the striking train might have been texting or talking on the phone, and I hope Metro will be careful not to let her take the blame. This collision was caused by neglect and incompetence throughout the Metro organization. You hope it will be a wake-up call, but I'm not holding my breath.

Rush Hour Metro Wreck

Man, this is terrible. I hope all our readers are safe.

Two Red Line Metrorail trains collided this evening between the Fort Totten and Takoma stations, striking with such force that part of one train was left resting on top of the other, and killing at least two people, authorities said. Red Line Collision Kills at Least 2

The headline at The Post's main page says Metro Red Line Trains Crash, Killing Four, not two, so I am guessing this story will be updated. [Note: 7:39PM, the headline and story have been updated to four killed.] [Note: 8:15PM now it says "at least four" killed. There may be more.] [Note: 9:00PM now the Post headline says "At least Six" killed -- please follow the link for the most up-to-date report.] [Note: 11PM -- Channel 9 just said at least nine killed.]

According to Metro spokewoman Lisa Farbstein, the two trains were both headed in the same direction. One rear-ended the other. The female operator of the trailing train died, she said.

"Obviously something went terribly wrong for two trains to be on the same track," she said.

It is unclear how many were injured in the collision, which occurred in Northeast Washington. A D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services department spokesman said that rescuers were still working to evacuate the trains.

"We're using heavy rescue equipment to cut open the cars to get whoever's trapped in there out," spokesman Alan Etter said.

The crash has shut a section of the Red Line, Metro's busiest. Trains are operating between Glenmont and Silver Spring and between Shady Grove and Rhode Island Avenue. In the middle, Metro is offering a shuttle bus service, but cautioned that it would likely be overwhelmed.

Yes, the so-called "shuttle bus service" is typically ... nothing. There might be a bus, maybe.

I just wanted to get this out there in case you've been stuck on the train somewhere or are waiting for somebody. Metro typically has no plan for moving passengers when something like this happens, and anybody going out to the Silver Spring end of the Red Line horseshoe -- which does include a lot of Vigilance blog readers -- is going to get home very late. Again, I hope everyone who reads this blog is all right, and our hearts go out to those whose lives are touched by tragedy today.

NYC Synagogue Double-Curse Is Opportunity for Fundraising

Here's a story that will warm your heart. From Haaretz:

When a predominantly gay synagogue in Manahattan learned that a group of ultra-Evangelical Christians were planning a protest outside their building, the congregation decided to turn the hate rally into a fundraising event.

Parishoners from the Westboro Baptist Church, a Kansas-based institution, gathered on Sunday outside Congregation Beth Simchat Torah with signs reading "God hates fags" and "Jews stole the land."

The synagogue heard several days in advance of the church's planned demonstration and decided to counter the protesters' publicity drive with one of their own, rather than pursuing legal action.

The congregation encouraged its supporters to donate at least $1 for every six minutes that the demonstration lasted.

Following the 51-minute protest, the synagogue was able to raise more than $10,000 in donations. The congregation, which has been renting the West Village space, hopes to eventually buy a building of its own.

Some 150 people - including members other nearby synagogues and churches - held a counter-demonstration during the fundraising event, where they sang Jewish songs and prayers.

The Westboro Baptist Church is run by Fred Phelps, an outspoken evangelist who claims natural disasters and terrorist attacks are the result of America's "tolerance" of homosexuals. Phelps targeted Congregation Beth Simchat Torah because it works primarily with the Jewish gay and lesbian community. Gay-lesbian synagogue turns hate rally into fundraising event

The Westboro Church group, known for their "God Hates Fags" web site and picketing of ridiculous events such as veterans' funerals, came to our county a few months ago because we have a high school named after a poet who might have been gay. They also made stops in Baltimore and Fairfax, as I recall.

Last week the Southern Poverty Law Center put out a notice titled Rabidly Anti-Gay Westboro Baptist Church Now Targeting Jews, noting that:

Now WBC has turned its ire on the Jewish community, targeting synagogues and Jewish community centers with a new hate-filled taunt, “God Hates Jews.”

The Topeka, Kan., based church began picketing Jewish religious and cultural institutions in April of this year when they issued a press release that read, “Yes, the Jews killed the Lord Jesus…Now they’re carrying water for the fags; that’s what they do best: sin in God’s face every day, with unprecedented and disproportionate amounts of sodomy, fornication, adultery, abortion and idolatry!”

So hey, if God hates fags and God hates Jews, I suppose this NYC gay synagogue figured it was only a matter of time till they got on the schedule. It sounds like it worked out pretty well for them. Ten thousand bucks, pretty good.

British Police Keep the Statistics Balanced

From The Guardian, over in jolly old England:

Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under their counter-­terrorism powers – simply to provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government's official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed.

Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he had "ample anecdotal evidence" of it happening, adding that such a practice was "totally wrong" and constituted an invasion of civil liberties.

"I can well understand the concerns of the police that they should be free from allegations of prejudice," he said. "But it is not a good use of precious resources if they waste them on self-evidently unmerited searches."

He said there was little or no evidence that the use of section 44 stop and search powers by the police could prevent an act of terrorism.

"While arrests for other crime have followed searches under the section, none of the many thousands of searches has ever resulted in a conviction for a terrorism offence. Its utility has been questioned publicly and privately by senior Metropolitan police staff with wide experience of terrorism policing," said Carlile. He added that such searches were stopping between 8,000-10,000 people a month.

Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the ­"section 44 stops" allow the police to search anyone in a designated area without suspicion that an offence has occurred. Terror law used to stop thousands 'just to balance racial statistics'

I just thought you might appreciate the fact that we're not the only place where these kinds of things happen ...

Sunday Rumination: Twitter, #iranelection, The Post

This morning I picked up the paper out of the driveway. The top story on page A1 is "Police Unleash Force on Rally in Tehran." Here's how it kicks off:

TEHRAN, June 20 -- Fiery chaos broke out in downtown Tehran on Saturday as security forces blocked streets and used tear gas, water cannons and batons to break up a demonstration against the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Security forces were seen firing warning shots into the air, but there were also unconfirmed reports that several people were hit by gunfire. Police Unleash Force On Rally in Tehran

Listen, people, the world has changed. We don't have to accept this kind of "coverage" any more.

Yesterday I spent a good part of the afternoon reading Twitter. The revolution in Iran is completely unprecedented in world history, the people on the street are reporting what is happening in real time, and anyone in the world can read about it and see it.

I'll back up. Twitter is a "microblogger" application. You can set up an account at twitter.com and it asks you at the top of the screen, "What are you doing?" You have 140 characters to say something, you can say, I'm nearly out of gas, or my foot itches, or I wish I was outside ... anything. You can tweet from your computer or from your cell phone, which is a big thing, people can post information from the street, literally. It is not a medium for profound monologues, you can get in one or two sentences and you're finished. Most of Twitter is absolutely uninteresting. People actually do tell you they're nearly out of gas, and their feet itch. But sometimes they have something to say. In some recent catastrophes it turned out you got immediate news -- "I see a big wave coming!" long before the commercial media picked it up. Of course you don't know what's accurate and what's not, but those things have a way of working themselves out.

So yesterday (and today, of course) you could read Twitter posts coming from the streets of Tehran. During the time I was following it closely, I'd say there were approximately 500 messages per minute, about half of them coming from the people of Iran. Try it, go to SEARCH TWITTER to read tweets about the trouble in Iran. This is a search engine that shows all the tweets with the keyword "iranelection."

So, The Post says the security forces blocked the streets and used tear gas. Well, you can see video from the streets on the Internet, you can see that the people are roaming the streets, rioting, throwing rocks and confronting the basij where they find them. On Twitter you can read accounts about, for instance, how the people chased government security goons into a building and then set fire to it. You can watch video, horrible video, of a woman named Neda dying after being shot in the heart by a government sniper while she stood on the street and watched what was going on, you can see her eyes roll back in her head, see the blood leak out of the corner of her mouth, see her family holding her, crying. It's not an "unconfirmed report," as The Post tells us, you can see the video, and further, on Twitter you can read accounts by doctors who have reviewed the video and confirm that is almost surely not faked.

Yesterday you read tweet after tweet describing the fact that the government in Tehran was dumping acid on crowds from helicopters. It's one thing if one crazy rioter says it, but when you read one account after the other, when you read instructions about what to do if acid is poured on you, explanations of what to do to cover up, links to maps showing where to go for help -- the hospitals are closed, but certain embassies provide medical assistance -- you end up knowing that this really happened, the Iranian government really is dumping acid on people in the streets. The Post doesn't mention it. A government dropping acid on crowds of its own citizens, not worthy of mention in the mighty Washington Post.

I saw a TV news guy the other day who appeared to be sitting in front of a window looking out on Tehran, and he explained that they were not allowed to show the city itself, it was just a picture of Tehran. They are simply not allowed to report the news -- this is unbelievable, really, to see that our castrated information sources going along with the wishes of the oppressive regime, reporting whatever the tyrannical Iranian leadership tells them to report.

But it doesn't matter, the Internet is growing up and information cannot be contained. The Iranian government turns off the cell-phone infrastructure and people still find a way to get calls out -- people are having their phones taken away from them and if they catch you filming a scene they might arrest you, beat you, or shoot you. YouTube has thousands of videos from the streets of Iran -- tens of thousands of them -- and our big corporate news media are afraid to let the camera point out the window at the lights of the city.

Do you think The Post mentions that helicopters are dropping acid on the citizens? No, I do not see that here. Let's say it's an unconfirmed rumor. That does not seem to make it any less of a news story, the newspaper can say "There were unconfirmed rumors that the government was dropping acid on people," but for some reason a newspaper like The Post can't say that unless they can get the government of Iran to confirm it.

I heard somebody recently use the phrase "the establishment," saying how we baby boomers were against "the establishment" when we were young, and to tell you the truth, I don't remember ever using that phrase back in the day. It was a term coined by ... the establishment ... to describe young people's perception of that good ol' boy network that is sometimes confused with reality. The establishment marketed anti-establishment attitudes and made a good living off it. Most of us just didn't care about it, which to their mind was the same as being against it. I suppose it was.

What is happening here actually truly undermines the establishment. Anybody can go into Twitter and say "The government is dumping acid on the people," and if it's not true somebody else will say "Disregard that statement, that person is not credible," and the statement will fade. I am seeing that today, there are rumors that Mousavi has been arrested, and people are tweeting "That is not correct, don't believe those rumors." (Note: it may be true that he was arrested today.) Overall the facts come out in this self-organizing system of the free evolution of knowledge.

The monolithic media like The Post give some sanitized version of events, they report on life as if it were being written in a future history book with all the blood drained out of it, they pick the good guys and tell you the story so that it will look good for them in the long run when the winners they pick have won the battle.

History in fact runs on two rails. On one hand there are the stories of the leaders, royalty and leaders and elected officials who make big decisions and then the world watches those decisions play out, maybe there is a war or a change of policy that affects the way people live. But the other rail is the people, the man on the street, who is always left out of the history books. You can say "The United States under George Bush invaded Iraq," and there will be a history-book chapter about the war and how it affected relations among Middle Eastern nations, but there is also the street-level version of the story, the people whose homes were invaded by foreign soldiers, the women and children who were raped, the people killed by capricious bullets, the pointless torture, homes without water or electricity, as well as the stories of Western families who sent their sons and daughters into battle to fight an unwinnable war against an unnamed enemy with no goal or way to measure victory.

To me, that's what matters, the lives of the people. I don't like to think in terms of a broad concept like "evil," but if there is evil it exists in the dehumanization of people, evil is the force that reduces human beings to objects. Its opposite and antidote is love. It is a constant presence in our lives, you might be jockeying for position at a grocery store cash register, you might read a news item about someone doing something incomprehensibly brutal, you might even view friends and lovers in a less-than-fully human light at times, we all do it. When you read statistics about the number of people affected by something it sucks the life out of every single case -- one close friend killed or maimed in a traffic accident is one thing, tens of thousands of people killed or maimed and you just turn the page, looking for the funnies.

The Internet has been evolving as a medium for the people as individuals. You may not appreciate blogs but the fact is that any person can create their own web page for free and put any information there that they want. If nobody reads it, well, there you go. Most blogs, I think, are not read by anybody, but there are subcultures in the blogosphere, clusters of bloggers who interact and feed off one another. There are commercial bloggers, in fact there are some big-budget blogs out there, but really anybody can do it -- Drudge was just a guy, posting news stories that caught his eye.

In Iran now we are seeing the Internet being put to work for the common person on a scale that we have never seen before. The government is doing all it can to shut it down, but it's too big and too widely distributed, they can't stop people from getting the word out. There are videos, sound recordings, Twitter notes, blog posts, emails, and the whole world is watching the Iranian government's brutal oppression of the citizenry.

Our commercial media are put to shame. The "official" reporting is pathetic. It misses the point, professional reporters are afraid to leave their hotel rooms, and when they do they are searched, arrested, deported. They have an arrangement with officialdom, with "the establishment," that they will publish stories that are acceptable to authorities with the agreement that they will be guaranteed access to the official version of stories as they emerge. These kinds of news reporters are just groupies with notepads. We think they are reporting for us, but they are reporting, first of all, for paying advertisers, and second, for the favor of those prominent people who are featured in the stories. If any information flows out to us, the reading public, it's a miracle, an anomaly, the system is not set up to allow that to happen but sometimes you can fit the pieces together and come up with some idea of what has happened.

Twitter can't be stopped. Of course most Twitter content is vacuous, but if you weed through it, for instance with a focused keyword search, you can get a very good idea about what is really going on in a situation.

The problem for you and me, of course, is that we can't read five hundred posts a minute, even when they are as dramatic as the word out of Iran has been. We need a distiller, and there you are putting yourself at the mercy of someone's judgment. So, for instance, the Huffington Post is carrying an archive of video and information from Iran, updating several times an hour, pointing out the big questions that are coming up and showing readers the more important events. Some of the video, especially, is very disturbing, lots of fire and blood and violence and weeping. But you end up with a very good feel for what's going on in the streets of that country, up to the minute. And if that site started posting a biased sample, you can be sure somebody else will be summarizing just as well or better, and the audiences will swarm there instead. The financial markets might not regulate themselves well, but the Internet is excellent at it There is a famous saying from the earliest days of the Internet: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." We are seeing the truth of that statement today. (One fascinating phenomenon, Iranian agents are on Twitter, too, posting misinformation, and other users are tweeting their names and telling people to block them.)

The corporate media do not route around censorship, they call it "editing" and it is a feature, not a bug, in the commercial news presentation app. To get back to the Washington Post, they have fired their best guy because he was critical of the way they covered the news. The kid in the bleachers might shout out that the emperor has no clothes, but he is not likely to land a job in the royal court making announcements, you might say. The Post wants to lick the hand that feeds it, they want to become an official mouthpiece for authorities, okay, they can do that. In a world where newspapers are going out of business left and right, you can see where this leads. Who's going to read The Post? In the end, only the people who the stories are about. The rest of us are going to get our information from the street, unfiltered.

Oh, and hey, Happy Father's Day.

A Little Debate Over Ignorance and Transphobia

I came across this interesting debate at the Questioning Transphobia (motto: "My gender is rage") blog this week. The issue in this case is transphobia, but the same arguments apply as easily to homophobia or racism. The question has to do with ignorance versus outright prejudice. I have tended to distinguish between people who just don't know anything about something, for instance transgender people, and people who know something and actively promote an agenda of discrimination. I tend to call one "ignorance" and the other "hatred." There is a little more to it than that, though.

It started with a post on another blog called sexgenderbody (motto: "There is no 'should'"):

Most people in our culture view transsexual and other gender expressions as "freaks", "weird", "ill", whathaveyou. Television has far too frequently portrayed us as such, and let's face it--some of us have not been Our Own Best Representatives. And how many people that do not participate in Queer Community can actually say, "I have a friend who is trans"?

So how are they to understand? How easy is it to assume that the Television is true? How easy to be misinformed? Though biologists have known for years it's not true, we still teach kids that penis = male and vulva = female. If my position is unclear, let me say directly:

THERE IS NOTHING TO FORGIVE WHEN SOMEONE DOES NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY ARE SAYING. Transignorance is not Transphobia

It's a pretty readable and interesting monologue. Skipping down, the writer, LanceWorth, says:

The assumption that despite my statements, I am female because that's what they always thought; and that therefore, I should feel the same toward my body as they do about theirs. Consider the ratio of folks whose sex and gender do/not match and it's a reasonable assumption, just incorrect.

It's possible that as we get to know each other (provided I manage not to act like some self-entitled, whiny moron), her discomfort may cease. It may not, but it's certainly not worth fighting over.

Lanceworth's point is that a lot of people haven't really thought about gender and what it would be like for somebody to have a different experience from themselves, and it's not really worth it to get upset with them. They just don't know better.

At Questioning Transphobia, queenemily responds this way (note: I am leaving in some language that I would not allow myself to use in a post and would most likely delete if a commenter used it):

Seriously? I understand the distinction being made there between outright wishing us violence and ignorance, but it’s not one that’s ultimately sustainable. Why? Violence against trans bodies is maintained by ignorance.

Ignorance is what fuels the vast majority of transphobia, not necessarily outright hatred. It’s what makes it hard for us to get work, what leaves us with few options to get by. Combined with fear, it fuels the bathroom panic.

Ignorance is what makes it hard to get decent medical care. When a doctor doesn’t know how to treat you, I’m sorry that’s a fucking problem. When a housing shelter doesn’t have a policy for people like you so you “just happen” to get put into your assigned sex to be put at risk of violence and rape, that’s a problem. Indeed, it’s not overstating the case to say that ignorance directly contributes to our deaths.

Ignorance is what tires us out, what saps our energy by making us answer the same question with every new person, every new institution. What makes us fight the same battles, over and over so we don’t have the energy to take care of ourselves.

The one thing ignorance is not is innocent, it is about having the power not to know and not to care.. and we simply can’t afford to be naive enough to think otherwise. Actually, ignorance *is* transphobia

I think the resolution comes by considering that there are two aspects to ignorance. First of all, ignorance is just a lack of knowledge. Any of us could make a bad decision or express something really stupid about a topic we don't know anything about, and you can't blame somebody for that. In particular, very few people have given much thought to gender identity as a subject, or have learned anything about it. There are not very many transgender people, and as LanceWorth noted, most people do not have a transgender friend. You have to forgive people for not knowing what it's like for someone to have a gender identity that's different from their own.

On the other hand, there is an attitude we call "an open mind," where we accept that there are things we don't know about and assume the best about them. The problem occurs when someone hears about something they have not thought about, for instance they hear about someone transitioning from one sex to the other, and assume that that person has bad reasons for doing so. It's as simple as that. If somebody does something I would never dream of doing, I can either think there is something evil or something wrong with them, or I can think there are valid things that people do that I don't understand.

You can't blame people for not knowing about something that they might never have encountered. You can blame them for judging without understanding.