Nigh Times

By JAMES TARANTO
April 2, 2008

Mary Ann Lindley is an editor at the Tallahassee Democrat, the main newspaper in Florida's capital. In a blog entry on the paper's Web site, she writes that a friend recently gave her a copy of the Democrat dated Jan. 21, 1981--the day after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated and the mad mullahs who ran Iran released the American diplomats they had taken prisoner, a crime that has gone unpunished in the 27 subsequent years.

"But the thing that caught my attention in that 27 year old newspaper," Lindley writes, "was a letter to the editor from a Darrell E. Levi":

In 1981, Mr. Levi's concern was the "accelerating devastation of the world's tropical forests and with that the possibility of major changes in the world's climate." 

He went on to write that "over the past 20 years, it has become clearer that the main, most inexorable threat humans face is not political or ideological conflict, social disintegration or economic chaos--as real and important as these things are--but destruction of the very biolgoical [sic] basis of life."

That was long ago, and yet the warnings he issued are almost precisely the ones we hear today: that we run great risk if we ignore our interdependency with soil, air, water, plants and animals and that a global ecological crisis is upon us and will destroy us without an informed citizenry prepared to respond and help steer a new course for "Spaceship Earth."

Now, we're not exactly sure what kind of "changes in the world's climate" Levi meant to warn about. Back in the 1970s, people worried about a new Ice Age, but at some point between then and 1988, the concern shifted to global warming. It's possible that in the interim, an informed citizenry did steer a new course for Spaceship Earth, one that took the craft dangerously close to the sun.

Possible, but--let's be honest--not probable. We like to think we're pretty informed, and we don't remember anything like this happening. Anyway, the Earth isn't really a spaceship. Its course is fixed by nature, God or some combination thereof.

The lesson of Darrell E. Levi would seem to be that doomsayers will always be with us. They were with us in 1981, they are with us in 2008, and we feel confident predicting that they will be with us in 2035.

Incredibly, though, Lindley draws the opposite conclusion--that Levi's predictions were prescient not because they came true but because people are making similar predictions now:

It's easy to dismiss today's "alarmists" who speak of the dire consequences of our various policy choices and personal decisions. But Mr. Levi's letter is riveting. He was--and is--right on the money. Everything he said then still applies, squared.

The good news is that some of today's citizenry is more informed and some leaders, such as Governor Crist, are aiming their sites [sic] on solutions, however incremental, to save the ship known as Spaceship Earth.

LiveScience.com, meanwhile, reports that the climate was changing millennia before the Industrial Age:

Humans may have struck the final blow that killed the woolly-mammoth, but climate change seems to have played a major part in setting up the end-game, according to a new study. . . .

Scientists have long debated what finally drove the furry beasts over the edge. Researchers led by David Nogues-Bravo of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain used models of the climate, as well as models of woolly-mammoth and human populations, to study the relative importance of various factors leading to the mammals' demise. . . .

The team found that the brunt of the damage done to mammoths was due to Earth's warming weather around 8,000 to 6,000 years ago. Since Earth was coming out of a glacial period at that time, temperatures were climbing and recasting the planet's landscape, and the mammoth's preferred habitat, steppe tundra, was vastly reduced.

As far as we know, no one worried about climate change back then. They were too busy worrying about getting trampled by mammoths.

Remedial Math

Here's a fun story from the New York Times, headlined "Elite Colleges Reporting Record Lows in Admission":

The already crazed competition for admission to the nation's most prestigious universities and colleges became even more intense this year, with many logging record low acceptance rates.

Harvard College, for example, offered admission to only 7.1 percent of the 27,462 high school seniors who applied--or, put another way, it rejected 93 of every 100 applicants, many with extraordinary achievements, like a perfect score on one of the SAT exams. Yale College accepted 8.3 percent of its 22,813 applicants. Both rates were records.

Record lows, that is, just like the headline says. And the decline is precipitous: "Yale's admittance rate--the proportion of applicants offered admission--was nearly 18 percent in 1998, more than double the rate this year." If the trend continues, the admittance rate will be down around 4% by 2018 and 2% by 2028. Soon the faculty will outnumber the students, and by century's end there will be no Yalies left, as even the best and brightest are forced into open-admission state schools. It's another sad chapter in America's decline.

Or maybe not. Buried in the Times story is this clue to the origin of the declining admissions rate:

Ten years ago, slightly fewer than 12,000 students applied to Yale, compared with the 22,813 who applied this year, Mr. Brenzel said.

This is complicated, so bear with us. What the Times is saying is that the number of applicants has doubled while the percentage of those accepted has declined by half. What this means is that the number of students admitted is approximately the same as it was in 1998. The Times does get around to explaining this in the penultimate paragraph--a real anticlimax for anyone who bothers to read the story all the way through.

All the Rage

The campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is getting even more heated. Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle report that Bill Clinton suffered "one of his famous meltdowns" over the weekend, during a meeting with California "superdelegates" at the state party convention:

"It was one of the worst political meetings I have ever attended," one superdelegate said. . . .

As the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former [Bill] Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how "sorry" she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a "Judas" for backing [Barack] Obama.

It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade.

"Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that," a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

The former president then went on a tirade that ran from the media's unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama. It ended with him asking delegates to imagine what the reaction would be if Obama was trailing by just 1 percent and people were telling him to drop out.

"It was very, very intense," said one attendee. "Not at all like the Bill of earlier campaigns."

Emotions are running so high that today's New York Times features a story headlined "Democrats' Turmoil Tests Party's Low-Key Leader." That would be . . . Howard Dean.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

Faint Praise

A congressional supporter of Hillary Clinton has some novel arguments against Barack Obama, the Associated Press reports:

Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, who is black, told Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that Obama "is articulate. In the black tradition, he would probably be mediocre."

"For White Americans, it's like, this guy can speak," Cleaver said in the radio interview. "If you put him on a level with a lot of other African-American public speakers, he may not even measure up."

Usually we hear that it's invidious to call a black person "articulate" because it implies that most blacks are inarticulate. Kudos to Cleaver to turning the stereotype on its head. Cleaver goes on to predict that Obama will win both nomination and election, an outcome that makes him uneasy, again for counterintuitive reasons:

He claims much of the support for Obama is driven by a sense that his election will prove the country has solved its problems with race.

"I think for many white Americans, they are looking at Barack Obama and saying 'This is our chance to demonstrate that we have been able to get this boogeyman called race behind us,' " Cleaver said. "And so they are going to vote for him, whether he has credentials or not, whether he has any experience--I think all that's out the window."

Yet Cleaver asserts that Obama as president could actually hamper efforts to curb racial injustice. He said future concerns about race "would be met with rejection because we've already demonstrated that we're not a racist nation."

Allow us to turn this on its head. What Cleaver seems to be saying is that those who claim they want to "curb racial injustice" have an interest in maintaining the perception that America is "a racist nation," regardless of whether that is true.

This is a game that no one can win. White guilt has been a powerful cultural force because it is rooted in history. But it seems destined to diminish as that history recedes. Encouraging blacks to think that racism is as strong as ever, meanwhile, promotes anger and defeatism--hardly a prescription for successful integration.

Where's Fox Butterfield When You Need Him?

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reports that a "law and order campaign" among West Bank Arabs is being hindered by a shortage of prison space:

At Ramallah's civil penitentiary, a facility meant to hold no more than 180 inmates, there are 240 prisoners, according to the Palestinian attorney general.

In the town of Jericho, near the Dead Sea, 51 detainees cook, pray and wait in sweltering concrete cells so small they barely have room to stand up and stretch. The facility is meant to hold 40 people. "You sit here and you rot," said Yousef Judeh, a 34-year-old father of five accused of collaborating with Israel. His case still pending, he has been languishing here for two years.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's law and order campaign has improved security in some areas.

So the prisons are full despite a decline in crime. What a paradox!

Two Editorial Pages in One!

Republicans on Capitol Hill are warming to the idea of the government's bailing out homeowners who got mortgages they couldn't afford, according to the New York Times. The paper approves:

After weeks of often heated talk, including warnings from some Republicans that they did not want to commit taxpayer funds to what could be nothing more than a bailout for greedy lenders and irresponsible homeowners, there has been a more reasoned discussion in recent days about taking prudent steps to protect the wider economy.

Not a surprising position for a Times editorial to take--but the paragraph we've just quoted appears in a news story.

Metaphor Alert

"In the very near future, the Democratic Party Primary War will be over. When that happens, the joint right-wing/media monster will begin in earnest deploying sleazy sideshows to render toxic the character of the nominee--way beyond what they've already been doing--while further venerating John McCain and his political comrades, from Joe Lieberman to Lindsey Graham. Allowing that to fester unchallenged will cause it to take root and make it very difficult to undermine."--Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, April 1

BUSH LIED, MARTIANS DIED!!!!

"Bomb Mars Show of Force in Basra"--headline, Associated Press, April 2

It Worked for Mata Hari

"ACLU: Military Skirting Law to Spy"--headline, Associated Press, April 2

If Only Col. Mustard Had One in the Billiard Room

"Home Defibrillators Save Lives in Study"--headline Associated Press, April 1

What's Wrong With a Navy Blazer?

"City Seeks Halt, Gag in Greene Suit"--headline, Detroit Free Press, April 2

En Garde!

"Government Issues Waiver for Fencing Along Border"--headline, New York Times, April 2

We Prefer to Call Them 'Undocumented Primates'

"Illegal Marmosets Seek New Home"--headline, Denver Post, April 1

News of the Oxymoronic

"Bill Would Require Parents to Volunteer at Schools"--headline, WEWS-TV Web site (Cleveland), April 1

Breaking News From 1842

"Dickens Stands as Key Hurdle to Rezoning of 125th Street"--headline, New York Sun, April 2

News You Can Use

"Study: Octopuses Lie, Cheat and Kill for Sex"--headline, FoxNews.com, April 2

Bottom Stories of the Day

• "Firefighters Rescue Guinea Pig From Burning Home"--headline, Chicago Tribune, April 1
 
• "Donnie Osmond Urges David Archuleta to Enjoy American Idol"--headline, Associated Press, April 2
 
• "Royal Canadian Air Farce Set to End"--headline, CBC.ca, April 1
 
• "Angry Journalists Vent Their Frustrations to the World"--headline, Agence France-Presse, April 1
 

If Homicide Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Commit Homicide

In an April Fool's Day session, the Los Angeles City Council considered a "ban" on homicide, the Los Angeles Times reports. We use those scare quotes advisedly, since the ban would be temporary and nonbinding. As the Times explains:

The symbolic ban on homicides had been proposed by Los Angeles author and political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who had urged the city to make a bold statement about the recent increase in homicides.

"If this works, then the next logical thing is: If a city like Los Angeles can go 40 hours without one homicide, then why not 40 days?" said Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable.

Forty hours, 40 days--heck, why not 40 years? Apparently fearful of that slippery slope, the council said no:

Despite the expressions of support, council members voted only for a resolution that promised to build awareness and dialogue about "the root causes of violence and killing."

Our understanding is that in some places, homicide is against the law, so that if you kill someone, you can actually spend time in prison. Perhaps the L.A. council could take up a nonbinding measure urging the California Legislature to criminalize homicide statewide. Wow would that ever be bold.