Stone washed genes

Do not get rid of the junk in the attic. It's evolution--Life just turns out to be more complicated every day and don’t look for genetics to figure it out just yet. The common concept is that genes are strung like beads on a string (pearls for some of us) and that the individual, discrete genes are what makes us. Not so.

Rick Weiss in the Washington Post went through a whole bunch of papers published in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (Encode), which among other things suggested that the $3 billion Human Genome Project produced a cartoon of the human genome. Weiss’ survey indicates that there is growing awareness that the individual genes is not just a biological code; they are elements in a complex operating system. It is what happens between and among the genes that counts. Many genes overlap and share stretches of code. The system would be totally chaotic but a switching system has evolved to make sense and order out of the instructions contained in the genes. Diseases like cancer are probably not errors in genes but errors in the DNA between them, which should disturb those in molecular medicine who have been aiming their attention on the genes, especially in their attempts at producing targeting medicines.

Another new concept concerns the so-called junk genes, the 95% of genes that did not appear to do much. When you think about it, that notion is silly. Evolution doesn’t waste 95% of anything. Now it appears that those junk genes are anything but. In fact some researchers have found that many creatures share their junk genes, meaning they are probably crucial for life and even the billion of years of evolution has failed to alter them.

“Oh my gosh,” one scientists told Weiss. “This is really complicated.” Yup. That’s us.

Encode, incidentally, is an interesting project. The goal is to find out whether it is worth the time to go deeply into each section of the human genome. For 3-1/2 years, scientists explored 1% of the genome as deeply as they could to see if this idea would be fruitful. The answer is a resounding yes, if for no other reason than to discover the misconceptions in the common wisdom. Of particular interest are those genes that do not appear to produce proteins. What are they doing hanging around?

Speaking of DNA, we reported earlier that James Watson, he of the Double Helix, had chickened out to having his DNA sequenced. He changed his mind, apparently. He donated some of his illustrious DNA to Baylor in 2003 but then decided he did not want it published because of privacy concerns and because his children might find out things about their own genetics they might not want to know. Now he agreed to have it published, or at least almost all of it. One spot shows a predisposition to cancer and Watson has survived skin cancer. He is not going to find out about Alzheimer's’ however, or have it published. He had a grandmother with the disease and that gives him a one in four chance, he says, and he simply doesn’t want to know. On the other hand, he’s 79 and probably would know by now.

Jersey girls and onion rings--UPDATED

Maybe Paris Hilton was the next one through the door--Never one to let a cultural phenomenon go unanswered (and coming from North Jersey, which gives me a particular insight into all of this) I feel obliged to comment on the last episode of the Sopranos. I loved it, and the more I think about it, the more I loved it.

It's a bit like Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. You get to put in your own explanation and it is just as right as everyone else's. I, of course, would be happy to explain that movie to anyone needing an explanation. Just think Nietzsche. Here, we have something else going, but it still can be defined as art.

To be actually serious for a moment, I think that episode will wind up in every film class in the world as a lesson in how to build inexorable tension with absolutely nothing actually happening. Nothing happened. The family met for dinner at a restaurant and Tony ordered onion rings. People came and went. (The only sour note was Meadow's inability to park her car properly--every Jersey girl knows how to parallel park). And I'm sure when the unpleasant guy at the counter went into the bathroom everyone thought immediately of Godfather, which is, of course, the reason David Chase sent him there. Even the songs on the jukebox seemed to have some ominous meaning, even if they really didn't. And it ran 5 minutes late, just to build the tension. I kept looking at my watch. My God, he has only two minutes left to do something.

Want to know what happened? At least four times in the last minute of the program, Tony looked up and every time the camera showed what Tony saw. We see what he sees. So when Meadow walked into the restaurant, Tony looked up and then the screen went blank. Obviously we see blank because Tony saw blank. He obviously got whacked.

Works for me.

UPDATE: And apparently, I'm not alone. See here.

j

What would Jesus do? You don't mean.....

Let’s pray together but would you take your pants down first?—It sounds just wonderful. Premarital sex is wrong, it’s a sin. Don’t do it. Evangelicals even throw virginity proms so the kids can publicly take vows of chastity. Kids coming from Catholic parochial schools have it drummed into their heads. Orthodox Jews tell their children not to do it, and the very Orthodox arrange it so that it is virtually impossible. All of this would be of just passing interest (I wasn’t the only non-Catholic teenager to discover that girls from parochial schools were pushovers) except that current government policy in combating AIDS, poverty, and under-age mothers has been taken over by Christianists who insist that this policy concentrate exclusively on abstinence. They also battle, often successfully, against sex education in schools. The fact that this strategy doesn’t work--or worse--doesn’t register. Why should it? Science is not part of their world.

In fact, abstinence pledges work for only a minority of kids and then often for not very long. Sociologist Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas, did a study on just how seriously these pressures work, and like everyone else who has studied the issue, his answer to the question in his book, Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers is: it depends. Mostly, it doesn’t work at all.

Much of the publicity has been on the failure among evangelicals to make it work. Evangelical teens actually are more likely to loose their virginity before marriage than are Catholics and mainstream Protestants. Indeed, they tend to lose it at an earlier age (16.3 years) than the others (16.7). And they tend to do it with more partners than the other kids. (Regnerus points out there is a problem with definitions. Many who list themselves as evangelicals may belong to an evangelical church but that doesn’t mean they buy the program. Also they tend to be of the lower economic class, which makes them more likely to have sex, and many are African-Americans, who really tilt the statistics.) Promising, often in public, to refrain from sex doesn’t help much. On average, studies show that the kids taking the vows keep the promise for about 18 months and then jumped into the sack with someone or got a rear seat dirty.

Worse, the young evangelicals in the study were more ignorant of sexual matters than their peers and tended to get knocked up at a greater rate, so a good argument could be made that their parents did them no favors. There also is the difference between religiosity and religion. Kids who were profoundly religious (about 16 %), as opposed to the ones walking around with religion on their sleeves, were likely to keep their promises and refrain. Those going through the motions will quickly lapse. Working against the abstinence model is the overly sexual nature of modern American society. You’d have to cloister kids (as very Orthodox Jews do) to keep them even partially immune.

Perhaps those writing our government policies might want to reconsider. Nah, won't happen.

So, where does a guy go to get laid, you may ask? Regnerus's data would recommend staying away from Asian girls who go to church; you are probably wasting your time with Mormons (but not, I assure you, fallen Mormons), so you ought to find himself a nice Catholic or mainline Protestant girl. Jewish girls are less amenable to rolls in the sack, although Regnerus (and others) point out they are more likely to enjoy it when they do it. Until, as Woody Allen points out, you marry them.

The rear end above belongs to the actress Lindsey Lohan, who, to the best of anyone's knowledge, has made no such pledge.

There are reasons why some animals eat their young

Oh darling. Oh sweetheart. Get out of bed. MOVE YOUR ASS! Sweetie.--OK, here's the picture. My daughter and I have moved to Fairbanks and she has begun school. It is now mid-winter in interior Alaska. It is 6:30 in the morning, it is pitch dark and going to stay pitch dark for all but an hour or two. The temperature has fallen to minus 40. I think there is ice fog brewing. I have to get a 14-year-old girl up for school.

Good luck, you may say, and good luck I will need. But, I have a legitimate complaint that the parents of every teenager shares, even those who are smart enough to avoid the sub-Arctic. Teenagers are not morning creatures. Schools that start early in the morning are doing them no favor and making hard for the schools to fulfill their tasks. Even scientists say so. Here. Here. And here, among other places.

Study after study has shown that teenagers who get more sleep because school start later in the day, do better than those who do not. Their growing, changing bodies need sleep a lot more than do the teachers. In this case its biology not behavioral psychology that needs to be paid attention to.

One study published by the American Thoracic Society of 280 high school students found that most are not getting enough sleep and that more sleep would produce better grades. The kids went to Harriton High outside of Philadelphia and the study was done by the University of Pennsylvania's Richard Schwab, who has a personal stake in the findings: his daughter was one of the subjects. He noted--he couldn't help it, I promise you--how bloody hard it is to get her up in the morning. Since teens gradually change their internal clocks to stay up later, many of these kids were not getting to sleep until 1 or 2 in the morning and getting 6-1/2 to 7 hours of sleep and sometimes less. They need more. Notice how late they sleep on weekends.

But high schools usually start even earlier than elementary schools for some reason. My daughter's new school in Fairbanks, starts a half hour earlier than the day school she goes to in Baltimore. Why? It should be the reverse.

Mary Carskadon at Brown found the same thing. She found that teenagers are out of it in the morning, simply unplugged. No kidding! By studying teen saliva (now there's a thought) she found that melatonin (the sleep-inducing hormone) levels rise later at night for teenagers than they do for adults or children and stays higher throughout the morning. Sleep deprivation affects mood, performance, attention, behavior and learning, according to Stephen Sheldon at Northwestern.

And it makes them real sweet too, doesn't it?

They race horses, don't they?

There's a guy peeing in my azaleas--Before catching up on the news of the world--it's going to hell in a hand basket--I might describe to the gentle readers the circumstances under which this is being written. We live in Baltimore, a block and a half away from Pimlico race track, and today, the third Saturday in May, is Preakness day, the running of the second of the Triple Crown horse races. I don't much care about horse racing, although one of the joys of living here is occasionally getting to see these most graceful animals practice in the mornings. I don't know a thing about horses and wish I knew more, but these thoroughbreds are spectacularly beautiful.

Anyway, for most of the year, the fact anything is happening at Pimlico is irrelevant to life even a block and a half away. But on this day, it takes over the place. You should know we are in the Mt. Washington section in north Baltimore, one of the remaining great neighborhoods in this old somewhat benighted city. It is a neighborhood of old homes (ours is more than 100 years old), old trees, children and some of the lushest vegetation you are likely to come across in the temperate zone. Maryland is where southern foliage meets northern foliage and we get the best of both--gorgeous springs and awesome autumns, and the place is seriously green. I mean green. The city also is known for its azaleas and although they usually all come out together and are gone by now, they are staggered this year because of the weird weather, and so many of the bushes are still in bloom.

Into this lovely place one day comes 100,000 people, some of whom are coming to see the race, many of whom are coming because it is an EVENT, and most of whom because the infield is home to one of the best parties in America. By 8 o'clock in the morning, the cars start parking on the streets (many of my neighbors convert their lawns to parking lots for $25-50 a shot and make hundreds today) and African-American kids from nearby collect every stray supermarket shopping cart and for $5 will tote your beer coolers to the racetrack. Some kids, my daughter and her friends included, set up lemonade and candy stands to service the visitors, and the church down the street has a huge barbecue going. The relative quiet is shattered by low-flying planes toting advertising banners and at least once a Preakness, an Air Force stealth bomber will blast the sky overhead in a publicity stunt.

It also is the largest single collection of drunks (many of them beautiful women) I've ever seen and when the race is over, they all pour out of the track and try to find their cars, pee in the bushes and, happily, buy lemonade and refuse the change. The place, of course, is a wreck by nightfall, but surprisingly, Baltimore City moves in and by Tuesday you would never know anything odd took place. There rarely is trouble and we've not had anything broken or stolen.

We can go up the street and watch the race through a fence, but for the Preakness itself, odd as it sounds, we watch it on television. We can see it better.

I'm on my front porch, my favorite place in the world, watching the people go by, admiring my fuchsias, and writing. It is sunny and quite lovely.

And now for the world...

I'm here captain. I just went into the bushes to pee in this guy's azaleas--As we reported here earlier, the ashes of James Doohan, Scotty in "Star Trek," were blasted into space in April and the capsul containing old Scotty returned to earth somewhere in New Mexico--"somewhere" because no one could find them. Everyone on the S.S. Enterprise can now relax: They found the capsul, and that containing the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper. They will be given to their families with a plaque.

Oh God, not Barbra Steisand!--One of my favorite "South Parks" is when the town is attacked by the giant ego of Barbra Streisand, a weapon of mass destruction if ever I heard of one. The kids save the place. I bring this up because a gentle reader pointed out something I didn't know. Earlier this month I posted an item about what happened when Digg.com posted the encryption code used by anti-pirate software to protect DVDs. They got threatened by lawyers. They pulled the item only to find that their readers were in revolt over the censorship and told the lawyers to shove it The code popped up in hundreds of thousands of sites and even wound up on a t-shirt.

My gentle reader pointed out this is called the Streisand Effect.

In 2003, an environmental activist Kenneth Adelman posted a series of aerial photos of Streisand's Malibu beach house on his web (see above). She sued him for $50 million, which of course, he didn't have. The purpose of the law suit was to get him to remove the house picture, censorship by law suit. Until news of the suit, no one paid much attention to his site; after he was sued, more than a million went to look. The suit was thrown out and the pictures distributed all over the world, having, obviously, the opposite effect Streisand's lawyers intended.

The old rules no longer apply. Says one crisis manager, now you actually have to go and talk like a decent human to a site owner. That doesn't always work, of course, but launching lawyers on them has the opposite effect--the Streisand effect.

Why is that person sticking their fingers up my ass? Oh, she's looking for vitamins-I have mentioned here before that I believe the three things medical science knows the least about are sex, nutrition and lower back pain. Now let's talk nutrition--and how the press covers it.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute reported last week that men who take multivitamins are more likely to die from prostate cancer than those who do not. As reported in the NCI Journal, the government scientists tracked 300,000 men, about a third of whom took multivitamins, 5 percent took lots of vitamins. Within five years, 10,241 had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, 1,476 of them had advanced cancer and 179 died of it. Heavy user of multivitamins were almost twice as likely to die as those who didn't take any. (The scientists reported that there was no evidence the pills increased your chances of getting cancer of the prostate, only that if you got it, you were more likely to die of it.)

Here we go again. I do not know if multivitamins are good for you or bad for you. I do take them. But I do know that for years we have been hearing about how vitamins prevent diseases including cancer and now there appears to be a reversal. Suddenly vitamin E, which has been touted as being able to prevent cancers and heart disease, is now responsible for causing them; antioxidants like vitamin C which have been reported to do all kinds of good things are found not to do a thing at all, and now we get the evils of multivitamins.

Stick around for a couple of years and we'll get the reverse again. They truly don't know what they are talking about and misuse statistical correlations. My favorite example is the time some researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that college students who smoke marijuana heavily were more likely to wind up in student health with psychosis than those who do not. They studied 12 students. The point is that if they tested to see how many of those 12 were breast-fed as infants, or were born on streets with maple trees, or read comic books, they might have found the same correlation. At least this study had a larger sample.

Not a single journalist I know of listed all the studies that show the alleged benefits of vitamins, studies this one contradicts. Even the veteran Judy Foreman wrote she was throwing out some of the vitamins because of the new studies. She should know better.

The motto of this blog used to be: "Everything causes cancer in mice. Everything cures cancer in mice." Keep that in mind too.

I am happy to report that the lady with her fingers up my ass (actually, a urologist at Johns Hopkins) found my prostate to be smooth and sturdy and enlarged if somewhat under-utilized. I have found another thing that won't kill me this year. I keep popping vitamins.

"I can't do that, Jim. Someone stole my trailer hitch."

The perfect woman has reflective lips—Here's one you won't see around much, but what are friends for. A study just published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that people who have oral sex with more than five others in their lives have a greater chance of getting throat cancer. They also have a better chance of getting a date, but that's another story. In research at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (and I'm delighted to know that goes on in this city), the suspect is the human papilloma virus (HPV), which also pops up in other orifices when used for pleasure. The suspicion makes sense because it is already established that HPV helps trigger oropharyngeal squamous-carcinoma, an extremely unpleasant form of cancer. The Hopkins folks used 200 patients with that cancer and 100 controls in the hospital-based study. They tested blood and saliva samples and measured the samples against lifestyle variables, including sex habits. Must have been a helluva questionnaire. Those who had oral sex with six or more other people were 3.4 times as likely to have the throat cancer. That's not all they found:

• Those who had 26 or more vaginal-sex partners during their lifetime had a wonderful time but also had 3.1 times more likely to have the throat cancer.
• Those who had a really uproariously life had even more likelihood of the disease as the threat increased with the acts.
• Oropharyngeal cancer was most linked to HPV type 16. Cigarettes and booze did not see to alter the result.

That gal of legend who could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch probably ought to be more careful. Dang.
[Thank you, Charles]

The rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down; it's not my department, ask Wernher von Braun—Poor Scotty. It isn't that the anti-matter warp field failed again and he had just one hour to save the ship and crew. The rocket worked beautifully. It's just that no one knows where it came down.

The rocket carrying the ashes of James Doohan, Scotty in the original Star Trek is lost. It was shot to the edge of space along with the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper on April 29. The capsule crashed down somewhere in New Mexico. Unfortunately, no one can find it. It's lost in mountainous terrain, hard to reach, according to a spokeswoman for Space Services Inc., which ran the "memorial spaceflight." And the weather is crappy. Eighteen other people's remains, besides Doohan and Cooper are on the capsule. The company charges $495, so even you can afford a trip to space and to get lost in the woods.

Heroes, we got heroes. Lawyers, we got lawyers--UPDATED YET AGAIN.

I keep hammering the damned thing and it pops up out of another hole--One of the cardinal rules in life is that you hire lawyers to give advice not make decisions. Have another example.

Bloggers and blog readers love a site called Digg. If you like a posting (say, this one for the sake of argument) you send it to Digg (see the little icon to the right, hint, hint?). Digg readers then can go to it and if they like it, vote for it. The larger the vote, the higher the posting appears on the home page and the more readers you get. Hint. hint. It's pretty powerful stuff. A posting making the top five on any given day can simply crush a server.

Recently someone posted the cryptographic key to unlocking HD-DVD formats, making it possible to pirate them. Pirating regular DVDs is old hat to those inclined to do these things, but the high definition ones were a challenge until someone posted the 16-digit hexadecimal number and it found its way to Digg. Administrators immediately deleted it, saying that the "owners of the intellectual property" believe the posting infringed on their property rights. [Editor's note: your obedient servant owns hundreds of copyrights, at least two of them valuable, and ought to be sympathetic but isn't]. The trigger was probably a lawyer letter from the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Authority which owns the system, and lawyers being lawyers, law suits were threatened. Bad move.

Digg readers revolted. The story, with the code, has now popped up in hundreds of places and is reproducing like a germ. The code even made it to Wikipedia for a few hours before they got a lawyer letter. Someone designed a screen saver with the number on it and posted that. You can now buy a t-shirt with the number on it. There's a song on YouTube containing the code. Digg's readers were in full rebellion.

Then an odd thing happened. Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, realizing that the credibility of his site was deeply endangered told the lawyers to shove it. He wrote on his blog:

...We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code. But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying

My man, I bow. He went further, of course. He posted the code on his blog posting. Guess which Digg entry has the most hits on the site?

Having the code is of limited use to pirates because it requires considerable technical skills to to actually use it, but the points remain as does one question. The question is: can you copyright a number? Does that number have intellectual value? I don't think so. And the points: One, trying to censor the internet is difficult if not impossible. You may have a short term victory (see China) but in the end you lose. Two, you hire lawyers.... well, you know.

Oh, the number is the headline on Rose's posting, again, here. According to Slashdot, the code has been revoked.

I'm worried that there seems to be less concern about the size of my penis and my ability to buy quality fake drugs in the Ukraine-- Most of the concern lately is about the state of my mortgage. This is all reflected in the spam that has made it through multiple spam filters at .Mac, Yahoo and gmail. Obviously, the answer is lawyers

A large group of anti-spam fighters, called Project Honey Pot (no kidding), has filed a law suit against the firms that harvest names from the internet and sell them to spammers. Not the spammers themselves, but the suppliers of addresses. The suit in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA (lots of suits are filed there because it is a notoriously conservative jurisdiction), seeks to identify the harvesters and collect more than $1 billion in damages for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and the Virginia Computer Crimes Act. Project Honey Pot represents 20,000 anti-spam activists in more than 100 countries and Unspam Technologies, a Utah firm, filed the suit. The problem, of course, is that many if not most spammers and suppliers are offshore, working in such distinguished places as Belorussia, Russia, and Serbia, where they are immune from U.S. civil law suits. Mostly, the plaintiffs hope the suit will squeeze out useful information that will help the fight against the spam plague or at least give them pause. See, lawyers can be useful.

My penis is as it always was, just older; I don't need to get cheap drugs because I have good insurance and my mortgage was actually refinanced last night with a bank that doesn't send spam.

I realize Apple is a religion but we can at least lighten up until the end of the world--Harry McCracken is not a name you've ever heard of but he gets elevated to the Pantheon of Journalism Heroes too. He quit this week. McCracken was editor-in-chief of PC World magazine. He quit because the new CEO of the magazine killed a satirical article he was preparing on Steve Jobs and Apple, called "Ten Things We Hate About Apple," still in draft form [Number one: "no sense of humor?"]. According to Kim Zetter in the Wired blog, Colin Crawford told McCracken not to bother with finishing the piece and McCracken told him politely to shove it. Actually, he just quit--I made up the "shove it" stuff. Crawford also told the staff at PC World that their reviews were too critical of vendors, especially those who advertise in the magazine. Crawford was CEO of MacWorld, owned by the same company, IDG, and apparently used to take telephone calls from Steve Jobs if Jobs saw something in the magazine he didn't like.

Oddly, my subscription to MacWorld just expired and I got a renewal notice in the mail. Hmmm.....

UPDATE: PC World did the right thing, and posted the stories on its website, here. And this week, it turns out McCracken came back to PC World and Crawford went back to management. All is well.

Life, death, life, death, whatever

Clang, Clang, Clang, Beep, Beep. It must be that stealth soldier again. Fire at the beeps--The Pentagon has long coveted the notion of the high-tech soldier. Donald Rumsfeld was a leading proponent. The military has spent half a billion dollars for a new high-tech gear for the modern soldier, part of Rumsfeld's now-discredited notion that the wars of the future can be won by a small, highly technical, mobile army. The gear includes displays of maps on helmet headpieces showing the position of the unit, radios using encrypted electronic messages to replace hand signals, gun-mounted video cameras to peek around corners and over walls, and a small, light computer to rule them all.

The intent is the creation of a combat intranet. It’s all on its way to Iraq.

There’s only one flaw in the latest version of this equipment, dubbed the Land Warrior System: soldiers hate it and even in training exercises refuse to use it. “It’s just a bunch of stuff we don’t use, taking the place of useful stuff like guns,” one soldier told Noah Shachtman of Popular Mechanics. Among other things, it adds weight (16 pounds) and slows you down, he explained. In the desert heat of Iraq, it will not be greeted, well, warmly. It would bring the total weight of the armor and equipment they shlepp around to 80 pounds.

It sounds wonderful. The flip-down eye-piece would show every other soldier in the unit as a blue triangle, the first time a soldier could track his mates without having to actually see them. That might even cut down on friendly fire incidents. The eye-piece also will show nearby vehicles and maps of the immediate area. The unit includes a battery pack, a paper-back sized computer, a GPS transponder and a controller on the chest armor.

Some of the equipment is off-the-shelf from Fryes Electronics (after the initial defense contractor blew the development and several million dollars). Some of it is already wildly outdated, including the processor running the system which is circa 1999.

Response is slow, taking seconds to create an image on the video monitor, which could get somebody killed.

Fortunately, the Pentagon is rethinking the funding. A billion here, a billion there.…


We’re very squeamish about executing people so just lie there quietly while I try to find a vein to put the poisons in--For several years, lawyers for condemned prisoners have petitioned courts to cancel executions on grounds the method of choice these days, IV-inserted lethal drugs, was cruel and unusual punishment. For years, these claims were rejected as just another excuse to delaying a death penalty. But recently, courts and state legislatures are coming around to the notion that the drugs, which would be illegal for vets to use putting your dog to sleep, really are not a humane way to kill someone, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron. Now there is scientific evidence to support the claim.

Two of the three drugs, including the anesthesia used in the standard protocol, are not administered in a way that would provide a painless death. Indeed the sometimes leave the prisoner fully conscious, in excruciating pain and unable to move or scream.

The multi-institutional study, published in the Public Library of Science’s PLoS Medicine, of executions in California and North Carolina also found that the drug designed to stop the prisoner’s heart often didn’t.

First used in 1982 (in Texas, of course) as a humane way to executions, lethal injection now is used in all but one of the more than 30 states with a death penalty. The protocol employs one drug to render the prisoner unconscious, another to paralyze him or her, and third to stop the heart. What apparently happens is “chemical asphyxiation.”

Questions about the procedure have led 12 states (not including Texas, of course) to put executions on hold while all this works out. Two states, New Jersey and Maryland appear close to ending capital punishment altogether.

I believe the only way to finally end capital punishment in the U.S. is to use the guillotine and televise the executions, probably on Fox. The blood and gore would put the act in its proper context and hopefully, when the public is done vomiting, they'd decide to change the law. One would hope.

Freedom of the press belongs to him who owns one and he may be an idiot--UPDATED

When I grow up, I'm going to be a newspaper CEO. I don't have the brains to do anything useful--From time to time we’ve reported on the declining state of American journalism here, and this is a really good time to do it again. I have a new set of heroes and a surprising non-hero. [And don't miss the update below]

A dozen Wall Street Journal reporters based in the Middle East, have sent a letter of protest to the newspaper over contract negotiations in which the Journal seems intent on cutting benefits and diminishing the scope of news coverage. This is, I remind you, one of the three best newspapers on America. The letter, printed in Jim Romenesko’s great journalism blog here, came from both union and non-union reporters and had a really nasty and totally justifiable tone to it. These are the reporters who live in the most dangerous places on earth, risking their lives on a daily basis, while executives of the newspaper cash checks. Keep in mind one of their colleagues, Danny Pearl [below, left], was beheaded by terrorists while on assignment for that newspaper.

The pay package of the CEO, Rich Zannino was particularly galling. [The pay packages of all CEOs is galling--actually, they are immoral]. While the reporters are risking their lives and providing the product, Zannino is making obscene amounts of money. Here are excerpts:

* In 2006, Mr. Zannino received $173,441 to cover commuting costs from his Connecticut home to Manhattan. That means that each and every working day the company pays $667 just to get him to show up at the office. He gets far more just to sit in the back of a limo on his way to work than we get to go into combat.
* Mr. Zannino’s compensation package more than doubled when he became CEO in 2006, to $4.16 million from $2 million. Peter Kann was both CEO and chairman the previous years, yet his compensation was just under $3 million. So Mr. Zannino earned 42% more for half the job.
* If Mr. Zannino does that job badly and gets fired, the company has agreed to give him $10 million to clean out his desk.
It's very clear: We take the risks; top managers reap the rewards

They go on to point out that what sells the paper isn’t the skill of the CEO but the reporters and editors who report and write the news, even from such God-forsaken places as Pakistan (where Pearl was killed) and Iraq (where almost 200 journalists have died). They point out that after the last contract negotiations, a group of some of the best reporters quit the newspaper, which certainly doesn’t improve the product any.

The Journal, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, is family controlled, one of the reasons it remains a great newspaper. There really is no excuse for this.

It gets worse, at my old newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer. So hard up are they for reporters to gather the news after massive layoffs and the sinking of Knight-Ridder, Gail Shister, the long-time television critic, has been taken off the job and put on feature writing. The Inquirer says it can no longer afford a television columnist and needs her body covering news. She has had the job for a quarter of a century and is one of the most esteemed television critics in the country. If the Inquirer doesn’t have enough reporters to cover the news maybe they shouldn’t have laid off so many.

Somewhere, in a conference room of overpaid executives, faced with declining circulation and advertising, a decision was made to give the customers less of a product. These same executives are now puzzled and lamenting the continued decline. Shister, incidentally, is considering suing, but I’m not sure on what grounds. Stupidity is not actionable. Her wisdom, knowledge, connections, and her readers are not important enough to the management.[The line about the product comes from Gene Roberts, the legendary editor of the Inky in its glory days. He won his own Pulitzer this week and a hearty mazel tov to him. Live long and prosper]

Bill Marimow, my old colleague who is now running the Inky said that moving her to features is part of the Inquirer’s move to focus on local coverage and she was covering national stuff. The Inky also brought back its last foreign correspondent for the same reason. Shame on him.
[The Baltimore Sun let its political cartoonist go giving the same rationale. The Sun continues to sink in the east as every day there is less and less reason to buy the paper. They teach this shit in business schools?] The owners of the Inquirer will learn that self-mutilation is not a business plan.

I have a friend, Laurie Garrett, who won a Pulitzer for her incredible coverage of AIDS around the world, a project very few newspapers would try now: It costs money and is not productive to the bottom line. She was asked to give a speech to stockholders of her newspaper (Newsday, then, I think, owned by Times-Mirror before the horrors of the Tribune Co.). She pointed out that newspapers play a unique role in a democracy, one of the reasons the press is singled out in the U.S. Constitution. While it is certain that newspapers are not charities and should earn a profit, the profit is not superior to the other responsibilities of the press. She suggested that if they, the stockholders, were not prepared to earn a bit less so that the newspapers can do their job in a democracy well, they ought to take their money and invest it someplace else--and leave us the hell alone!

Yes.

I hope Marimow recovers from his bout with prostate cancer and lives a long, happy life. Maybe it's the chemotherapy that made him silly.

UPDATE:

Oh, it gets worse.

I was in Philadelphia over the weekend and got a chance to read the Inquirer. Most of the front section now consists of AP stories in a newspaper that once covered most of everything itself. No reflection on wire service reporters (I was one for 7 years), but the Inky had superb reporters around the country and the world and they had an unexcelled level of coverage. Except for the local stories, all done well, incidentally, the coverage of the rest of the world was no different than what you would get in the Fairbanks News-Miner. A really great city (I love Philly) deserves better.

And, according to the New York Times, the Inky is now instituting a column paid for by a bank. What the Times doesn't seem to get into in much detail is the foul ethics of such a thing. I think the word is whoring.

Meanwhile, the Tribune Co., which is systemmatically destroying itself has announced layoffs at the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. They seem intent on eliminating reasons to buy their product. Of course the Tribune Co. is going private, a move that will enrich the executives while reporters, editors and photographers are being forced out the door. Feh!

He is going where?

If the temperature falls below -35, Sunday school is canceled--A personal note, if you don't mind. Wondering what the hell I was doing in Alaska? Getting a job.

I thought you all would like to know that starting in mid-August, I become adjunct professor of journalism (Snedden Chair) at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. It's a one-year appointment and I'm the first person to hold the position. I just came back this week from five days in Fairbanks. I'm also happy to report that Hannah is coming with me next year, and will start 9th grade at West Valley High School in Fairbanks. She is already wearing a Wolf Pack sweatshirt. Carol will join us periodically when her job permits--she hates cold weather. We hope to live on campus and will return to civilization once or twice during the academic year. We also intend to maintain a place in Alaska through next summer for exploration. It is very beautiful.

I will teach two courses, Prospectives in Journalism, which I can design myself (think corporate ownership, the new media, political pressure etc.) and science writing. Additionally, my students and I will be working on a year-long project, probably on climate change, which is occurring in Alaska faster than anyplace else in the world--or at least is being better measured than anyplace else. I hope to turn it into a book. All that will require some time in the field, an adventure. Muck-lucks and whale blubber, yum. The International Arctic Research Center is based at the university, so a major resource is up the street.

We will return to Baltimore late spring next year. We're home until August 13th or so. Alaska is allegedly the best-wired state in the country so I will not be out of ready touch. I will keep this going until then and then I'll either post on my Alaskan adventures here or start a blog for that purpose. I've had requests.

And the line about the Sunday school--it's an actual message on the website of the only synagogue in Fairbanks, which claims to be the northernmost synagogue in the world. Now imagine kids trudging off to Sunday school in -35 degrees and darkness. The frozen chosen. Oh, and the bear photo? That is a nine-foot Kodiak bear on display at the Anchorage airport. One's only possible reaction to seeing a nine-foot bear--even stuffed--is 'oh shit.'

Now where the hell did he go?

Time to rent the John Wayne movie--If you are wondering why this site seems neglected, your obedient servant is on the road--in Alaska--and won't be filing until next week. There is a logical (well, maybe not) explanation for all of this, probably the result of too many episodes of "Northern Exposure" and I will explain. At the moment it is 6 a.m. in a pitch-dark Fairbanks and I will soon explain the bear at the airport. By the way, if Douglas Adams ever found out that the restaurant at the end of the universe is a Pizza Hut, he'd have been pissed.

Rectal exams and the son-of-a-bitch gene

Do you ever wonder how medical students practice prostate exams?--Prostate cancer doesn’t get nearly as much attention as, say breast cancer, for reasons sociological, not medical. It is the second greatest killer of men after lung cancer. The American Cancer Society estimates that 232,000 men will be diagnosed with the disease this year and 27,000 will die of it. Thanks in some part to PSA testing, the death rate is declining rapidly, a drop of 32.5 percent in 10 years. If it is caught early, 100 percent of men are alive five years later; if it has metastasized, only 34 percent are still alive.

In a really important study, scientists have found a genetic basis for the disease that has all kinds of ramifications. They also found more evidence that the politically correct attack on the notion of race as a biological attribute is hogwash.

The researchers found seven genetic risk factors, all bunched close together on chromosome 8 that predict a man’s probability of developing prostate cancer. Five are newly discovered; two were known before and the experiment, done at USC, the National Cancer Institute and a company in Iceland, confirmed them. That of course does not mean it’s all genetic; other risk factors like environment also play a role, but if you have the genes you know to be extra cautious and get tested regularly. The role the genes play in this still is unknown. The study is reported in Nature Genetics.

An interesting aspect, however, is it may explain the disparity between blacks and whites in prostate statistics. A black man is twice as likely to die of prostate cancer than a white man and the reason now appears to be genetic. For several decades some scientists have been attacking the whole biological definition of race, claiming it has no scientific meaning. This, of course, is politics, not science, and is nonsense. The list of ailments that have a racial component is long and impossible to ignore and with prostate cancer, there is now a demonstrable genetic explanation: blacks tend to have more of those genes.

And the answer to the question above is: on themselves. And good practice it is. Haven’t you always wanted to stick something up a classmate’s ass?

Oh, on second thought, maybe we should look for the cute and cuddly gene--James Watson, Nobel laureate and codiscoverer of the helix structure of DNA, thought it might be fun to have his DNA scanned using a new technology that would make it possible for all of us peons to knows what lurks in our genes. The technology comes from 454 Life Sciences, a company that hopes to bring the cost of genome scanning down to manageable levels from the several hundred thousand dollars it costs now. They asked Watson to be the first to be scanned and he agreed. Now it seems he is chickening out. According to David Ewing Duncan at Technology Review, Watson first asked the company to delete any results for genes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Now he is worried that publication of the rest of his genome will violate his privacy and that of his sons. And since there is now a firm genetic basis for certain behavioral traits, they might be able to show genes in his scans for arrogance and temper. Craig Venter, who sequenced the human genome, who may also have the arrogance and temper genes, appears less concerned and is still planning on release his.

Barbarians here, barbarians there, everywhere barbarians

Let's see: computer? Check. Cell phone? Check. Pens and notebook? Check. Body armor? Check. Stock price? Uh oh. Come home--The most important story in American journalism is getting harder and harder to cover, is being covered less well than ever before, and presents vast new problems for newsrooms. Four years into the Iraq war--probably the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history--the media is up against stinging truths. Covering this war is so expensive that even the largest and best newsrooms are finding they are shifting resources from elsewhere to cover it or are dropping out altogether; it is getting harder to find people willing to go, and the people who are there need a break desperately. The only good news is that the people back here are paying attention as reflected in the polling data.

Because the economics of the media and the relentless pressures of the barbarians on Wall Street, whose concern for the stock price exceeds their concern for democracy, coverage is diminishing. The United States is at war and the bulk of American media have stopped covering it, an unprecedented situation.

In the history of American journalism, you will find few examples of greater heroism than the reporters, photographers and editors in Iraq. So far, 155 journalists, Iraqi and foreign, have been killed covering this war. Several are missing. The reason the war is not being covered as well as other wars is simple: it is too damned dangerous. Many, if not most, reporters are reluctant to leave the Green Zone, the haven in central Baghdad for fear of their lives, and even that sanctuary isn't safe. Stray rockets and mortar shells blow in sporadically. Going out on the streets or into the country to report the wars simply is no longer an option. The best many bureaus can do is send its Iraqi nationals out to cover the story but even that is difficult. Many have been killed, many have been forced to leave the country because of threats, and others live in total terror of what will happen to them or their families. Translators often wear ski masks to protect their identity. Some media now resort to non-Americans in their bureaus. Note the number of British and Australian accents on the air.

Part of the problem undoubtedly is getting volunteers. When I was a young reporter it was clear that if you wanted to cement your career, you went to Vietnam. I volunteered but UPI at the time would not send married reporters, so I never went. Iraq is different. Those willing to go have been sent and recycled in and out for years. Susan Chira, foreign editor of the New York Times, told Editor and Publisher that the pool of volunteers is getting smaller and the people who had been cycled in and out need to move on. John Burns of the Times, possibly the worlds' best war correspondent, is finally being removed to take over the London bureau. I think he was pushing his luck.

The Los Angeles Times put three new people in Baghdad, but all were hires from other bureaus hired in Iraq. Internal volunteers ran out. The Associated Press, which has 85 staffers, including Iraqis, in Baghdad admits that many cycled out for a rest are reluctant to return. The fact the AP has lost four staffers, two recently, probably hasn't helped recruiting. The LA Times admits that the expense--largely security--is draining the foreign news budget. Other stories go unreported in other parts of the world.

The Wall Street Journal, the last of the big four newspapers, does not have a permanent staff covering the war. They have one person assigned permanently, but that person is not there full-time and sometimes, their office is empty. In part, Bill Spindle, the Middle East Editor of the Journal says, it is the cost of security that makes it hard to operate here.

While all this is going on, the barbarians are loose. Two newspapers, the Boston Globe (owned by the Times, of all companies) and the Baltimore Sun (owned by the Tribune Co.), which once had legendary foreign correspondents, either have totally closed their foreign bureaus or are doing so. Neither covers Iraq. The Globe, which once had five people in Baghdad, closed its bureau in 2005, in part after one of its reporters, Elizabeth Neuffer was killed.

This is serious stuff. The media have a responsibility in a democracy and they are not able to fulfill it as well as they might. And everyone is to blame.

[The picture above is Anna Badkhen, on temporary assignment in Iraq for the San Francisco Chronicle.]

I am now going to scare the crap out of you.

While you were out we redecorated your office and abolished the First and Fourth Amendments--An excerpt from John Murrell's "Good Morning Silicon Valley" and linked to the original in the Washington Post. The Post has verified this is accurate. Just out of curiousity, whatever happened to the First Amendment and why isn't the correct answer to the FBI gag order something in the order of "up yours?" [I had something else in mind but children might wander by.] The Post said it published the op-ed piece anonymously despite its rules not generally to do so. Good for them.

"Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled. ... I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation."

-- An anonymous businessman describes the gagged life; between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 such letters.

The person involved heroically took the FBI to court with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, essentially telling them to shove it. The FBI responded by withdrawing the request for information but keeping the gag order, which I would think is unconstitutional on its face.

Oh, arragh.

It's 2007, you idiot--Decline of Western Civilization, Part IX

So if I close the covers, the content stays on the pages, even without being plugged in?--What follows are two absolutely true stories, both of which happened this week.

My daughter has been accepted in a Jewish high school for next year. The school is now in its fifth year, with only about 100 students and using borrowed space until they can build their own permanent home. The school is well-funded and resources are not lacking. At an orientation meeting a few day ago, they opened the floor to questions and I asked about the library. I know it fills about half of a normal-sized classroom (they haven't had time to build a real one, yet), but was curious about their plans. They responded that eventually they will have a full-sized library but it is not on the top of their list because the kids don't really use books. They would much rather use the Internet for research.

Quick fade to the home front. My daughter (and I am not picking on the little darling) has an assignment about ancient Greece, the mythology and the Greek alphabet. For reasons we will not go into here, she computer-grounded for the time being. Occasionally, we will let her have her iBook either as a reward or to do homework that requires a computer. Last night we had a bit of a tussle because she insisted she needed the computer to research the Greeks. Reluctant to let her have the computer, I pointed out that we have a brand-new set of the World Book Encyclopedia downstairs, so unused that most of the volumes are still wrapped in plastic. I unwrapped the G volume, opened it up to about 20 pages of text and pictures on Greece, including the alphabet and a whole section on mythology, all beautifully laid-out and easy to search. World Book does a really excellent job. I got the look you normally give a large animal that just peed on the rug. "I don't want to read through 20 pages of text," says she. "It is much faster on the Internet." But using books is something you have to learn to do research, says I. Not everything is on the Internet and some of the stuff on the Internet is not very good.

"This is 2007!" says she, stalking away.

Take me now before it gets worse.

Which gives me an excuse to point you to this positively hilarious sketch, I think from Sweden. You will note I'm not the only one peeing on the rug. Have a laugh on me.

j

[Thank you, Amy]

Beam up the chickenpox, it's getting warm in here

Beam me up, Scotty, and good God, start with my pancreas--Scientists at CERN trying out a new technology to kill cancer cells--antimatter. Yes, the stuff that powers the Starship Enterprise, the stuff that annihilates itself when it meets matter, the opposite of, like everything. In an experiment, cancer cells were targeted with antimatter particles and the cells, predictably warped to Vulcan--no, died. The technology is similar to zapping the cells with conventional particles, except the scientists think the antimatter beam would have less serious side effects. Conventional radiotherapy is extremely unpleasant. Some of the larget machines used are proton accelerators, huge machines, staggeringly expensive, and there is no reason to think that if they ever figure out how to do it reliably, using antimatter, wouldn't be even more so.


While we're talking about chickens...--One of the rituals of being a kid was getting chickenpox. I know parents who deliberately sent their kids to the homes of friends with chickenpox to make sure they got the disease on vacation days--and the subsequent immunity. Then came Varivax, the chickenpox vaccine. in 1995. It works well enough to change the demographics of the disease: the only kids with chickenpox are those who are unvaccinated or those for whom the vaccine didn't take. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine tells us something we didn't know: the vaccine wears out and that means that people are getting chickenpox later in life, when it becomes more dangerous. You have 20 times greater risk of dying and have a 10-15 times greater chance of getting hospitalized if you catch it when you are older. The suggestion: booster shots at age 4 to 6 and for older adults and children. It still is unclear how much protection the second shot would bring.

I guess we can move to Alaska now--The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that last winter was the warmest winter ever recorded on ailing planet earth, with land and water temperatures running 1.3 degrees F (0.72 degrees C) warmer than normal. El Nino was one factor. The temperature has been rising a fifth of a degree every decade and the warmest 10 years on record have occurred since 1995. 2007 could be the warmest year on record. NOAA did not give a cause-and-effect--it didn't lay the blame on us poor innocent humans. But other research by the same team said that was a likely cause--except in Oklahoma, where the state's U.S. Senator James Inhofe has assured everyone it is a communist-media plot.

Arsenic and old lies

I'll have chicken sticks, an order of fries, and could I have cyanide instead of arsenic with that chicken?--I’m sure you will be pleased to learn that that factory-raised chicken you just ate had been fed arsenic to make it plumper and happier. Plumper and happier, is, after all, what factory farming is all about.

At least one huge chicken company, Perdue, requires its farmers to feed their birds roxarsone, a feed additive containing arsenic. Many other producers do as well. The additive fights parasites and produces birds with bigger chests. It gets worse: the chickens poop, and the manure, containing the arsenic, is spread on fields where farmers grow vegetables. Farm workers in the fields handle the stuff. Said one farmer in the Baltimore Sun, “we don’t know what the risks are.” Right.

Not all poultry producers use arsenic. Tyson Foods, the largest, stopped using it last spring, and two other producers have already dropped the additive. Perdue, the largest on the east coast, defends its use, pointing out that the FDA says it is safe.

The Europeans disagree. While the FDA have approved the arsenic additive since 1944, the Europeans ban it because there are no studies attesting to its safety.

A Johns Hopkins study in 2004, found that the levels of arsenic found in young chickens was three or four times higher than in any other poultry and meat, and since the average chicken consumption in the U.S. is 350 grams of chicken per day, people "may ingest 1.38-5.24 microg/day of inorganic arsenic from chicken alone." Some may ingest far more. Perdue claims that the arsenic in the additive is organic arsenic, which is not the same as the classic poison, inorganic arsenic. But a new study out of Dusquesne University in Pittsburgh found that the organic arsenic was chemically and quickly transformed into inorganic, the poisonous, carcinogenic stuff. Bacteria in the soil speeds the conversion along much faster than anyone thought. The inorganic arsenic was found in the fertilizer, which means it also will find its way into drinking water. Other studies have shown similar results. Arsenic also is linked to heart disease and diabetes.

Arsenic also is a byproduct of coal-burning power plants and some mining and smelting operations and is closely monitored. It is banned from pesticides, but is commonly is used in fertilizers on home lawns.

Says the industry spokesman (the National Chicken Council, would you believe): “There’s never been any showings of human health risks from the addition of small amounts of roxarsone to the feed.” The manufacturer of roxarsone, Alpharma, is not amused, calling the studies opinions, not science.

I’ll pass. Actually, in our house we usually use only range-fed, free roaming chickens that have been tickled to death with goose feathers. Talk about plump and happy.

[Thank you , Carol]

Shockley was dead: To begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

I'd get organized but I have this genetic malfunction, you understand--Bill Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, founding father of Silicon Valley and a serious son-of-a-bitch, destroyed his career on the notion that intelligence was genetic. He also claimed that blacks were genetically less intelligent than whites because they scored--as a group--lower on standard IQ tests than did whites. You know all of that, of course. The uproar in the scientific community against his assertion was one of the low points of American science in the 60s and 70s. Shockley insisted people actually go out and do the research and see if he was right; the scientific community (or at least the loud and politically correct) raged against it.

(Disclaimer: your obedient servent is Shockley's biographer and you can read all about it here. End of commercial)

As time goes--Shockley died in 1989--it turns out he was correct about the non-racial assertion. Over the years, scientists have found myriad examples of human traits hidden in the genes, including (and depending on how you define) intelligence. In a piece of research that got very little publicity, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have even found a particular gene.

The gene activates a signalling pathway to the brain involved with organizing, certainly an aspect of intelligence. The gene CHRM2 is "not a gene for intelligence," says Danielle M. Dick, assistant professor of psychiatry and lead author of the study. "It's a gene that's involved in some kinds of brain processing, and specific alterations in the gene appear to influence IQ. But this single gene isn't going to be the difference between whether a person is a genius or has below-average intelligence." They did find, however, that several variations in the gene could slightly influence the results of IQ tests, particularly performance IQ scores.

The study, published in Behavioral Genetics, was the offshoot of a large study of alcoholism. Some of the subjects (2,150) also took the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised, and the results were matched with individual's DNA.

The study confirms others hinting at the same link

CHRM2 isn't the "intelligence gene." It appears that it affects only one aspect of what we call intelligence. Dick says there could be hundreds of genes involved in intelligence, which seems an entirely intelligent surmise.

Too bad Shockley was cremated--his corpse would be smiling.

Our president doesn't read, why the hell should you?--Decline of Civilization Part VIIII

I’m reading Gibbon. Please go away--Every one has their own measure for the health and well-being of a society. Mine is libraries. How a society treats its libraries (and its literacy) tells you a great deal about it. Folks, we are in deep doodoo.

Thanks to cutoffs in federal funding, 15 libraries in rural Oregon are going to shut down in April, the largest library closure in U.S. history. The libraries in Jackson County lost $7 million in federal funding, about 80 percent of their budget. They are all either brand new (Medford) or newly rebuilt. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, other library systems have been on the brink, including Salinas and Merced Counties in California and Niagara Falls in New York. They were rescued eventually. But this, according to the Chronicle, is different, at least in scope. There are political charges flying back and fourth, children are marching in the streets, and an effort to increase library funding through a property tax has triggered a backlash from the same kind of boar heads who helped destroy California's school system with Proposition 13.

The libraries will close April 7.

The origin of the problem was the failure of Congress (controlled then by Republicans, of course) to reauthorize $400 million for rural counties to goose their economies. Oregon was hit the hardest, and Jackson County lost $23 million. They had to cut everything in sight, including jail beds and first responders. The county was left with the choice of emergency services or books, so they chose the former. Otherwise "we won't be able to monior misdemeanor sex offenders anymore," the county administrator lamented. A crooked railroad deal a century ago--not uncommon in the West--also was involved but that is too complicated to get into, except to say Oregon thinks Congress reneged on funds promised in an agreement with Teddy Roosevelt. Trust me on this. Oh yes, the spotted owl gets involved too.

Three times the good citizens of Jackson voted against a tax to fund the libraries. It's coming up for a vote again and is unlikely to pass because of voting rules on tax increases. God forbid they should have to pay for government services.

The Medford library is brand new and just opened this week.

Just as well. It will be harder to figure out what to read. According to the Wall Street Journal (this one is free), separate book sections in newspapers are becoming a thing of the past. The latest one to fall will be the Los Angeles Times, a paper being sliced to death by its corporate owner and the barbarians on Wall Street. The section will be merged into an opinion section. The reason in this case can't be necessarily blamed on the owners of the newspapers--book publishers are no longer buying ads in these sections. That leaves only five newspapers with separate sections, down from a dozen 10 years ago. Other papers also are reconsidering, including the Washington Post (what will Bush do without a book section, you may ask), the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Only the New York Times, which has a book section too powerful for even the dumbest publisher to ignore, seems immune. The publishers have been putting their advertising money in paying bookstores to prominently display copies. The move from the newspapers, the Journal points out, however, doesn't seem to work--book sales are down.

Of course they are.