Of the Alternate Universe of the “Progressives”

A popular theory has it that the Internet is contributing to political polarization by providing innumerable blogs, news aggregators and other websites that enable users to filter reality to fit their ideological preconceptions.  Whether that’s really true is still open to question, but I recently noticed some anecdotal evidence in the form of a couple of web essays that tends to confirm it.  The first was a piece written for the Telegraph by Janet Daley, who (for a European at least) showed a remarkable grasp of the reasons for the popular unease that fuels the Tea Party movement and disenchantment with Barack Obama and Big Government.  For example, quoting Daley,

The president’s determination to transform the US into a social democracy, complete with a centrally run healthcare programme and a redistributive tax system, has collided rather magnificently with America’s history as a nation of displaced people who were prepared to risk their futures on a bid to be free from the power of the state.

Americans who have risen from poverty to become qualified tradesmen or entrepreneurs generally believe that they have a right to put what wealth they produce back into their own businesses, rather than trusting governments to spread it around among those judged to be deserving.

What is more startling is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) “enlightened” class with the poor and deprived.

A little later I ran across the second piece, which seemed almost purposely written to confirm Daley’s take on contemporary America.  Written, appropriately enough, for CNN (you remember, the news organization Germany’s Spiegel Magazine recently described as “non-partisan“) by Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton and a quintessential member of the elite Daley was writing about, it was entitled, “Why Obama’s poll numbers have sunk.”  Zelizer’s take:

How should we understand the fate of a president and a party who have been relatively successful at passing their agenda, yet don’t seem to be enjoying an electoral bounce?

With the unemployment rate over 9 percent, many Americans are unhappy and scared. But there is more to it than that.

The first factor has to do with President Obama’s decision to focus on controversial issues that he felt were important to the nation, even if they were not the most beneficial issues for his party. In other words, Obama selected issues such as health care and financial regulation that were sure to stimulate conservative opposition and cause concern among moderates.

At the same time, the president is a pragmatic politician who has been willing to cut deals to survive a notoriously difficult legislative process. In making those compromises, he has often angered many of his supporters on the left.

…citizens are deeply cynical. Given the large donations that private interest groups make to candidates, including the health care industry and Wall Street executives, it is naturally hard to believe that Washington would ever really pass government reform.

And so on.  In other words, the factors that Englishwoman Daley has apparently had no difficulty understanding have gone completely over the Princeton professor’s head.  He can come up with all kinds of good sounding reasons for Obama’s drop in the polls, but the one reason that is energizing the Tea Party movement and is ubiquitous above all others on every conservative and libertarian blog, not to mention talk radio and Foxnews, namely, unease at the cancerous growth of the nanny state and the intrusion of state power in the lives of average citizens, has gone completely over his head.  It’s as if the citizens of the United States could not possibly fear the growth of big government itself.  In the good professor’s alternate universe, the possibility that any of them might object to the prospect of serving as dutiful milk cows,  exploited by the state to support programs that benefit other people, whether that prospect is real or not, could not possibly even occur to them.  Based on his article, the thought has never even entered his mind.  Mind you, we’re not discussing whether the real motivations of Obama’s opposition are real or imaginary, rational or the product of some strange hysteria whipped up by Rush Limbaugh.  We’re talking about the very existence of that concern.

If members of the elites Ms. Daley refers to have not merely discounted popular unease at the growth of big government as a problem in itself, but have so insulated themselves from reality that they honestly believe that unease doesn’t even bear mention as a reason for Obama’s drop in the polls, to say they are out of touch is an understatement.  A large and growing number of the citizens in this country fear their future role will be as tax slaves to an alien state power that will milk them to support programs whose chances of ever providing them with benefits in any way commensurate with the resources they will be forced to hand over are vanishingly small.   The question about whether they are right or wrong in that surmise is not the point.  The point is that elites who pride themselves on their infallibility actually seem unaware that such concerns even exist.  The “best and the brightest” among us are, once again, suffering a remarkable disconnect with reality.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Designer Babies” and Transhumanism

Internet chatter over “designer babies” has died down considerably since early 2009, when a chain of fertility clinics headquartered in Los Angeles offered to allow prospective parents to select for cosmetic traits such as hair, eye, and skin color. However, the subject bears on the genetic future of mankind, and is of enduring importance whether the media gatekeepers are paying attention to it or not. The clinics in question quickly withdrew the offered services in response to the inevitable “storm of protest” by those who consider themselves the guardians of public morality.  Regardless, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the technology involved, has been around since the early 1990′s, and continues to advance. It involves checking the genetic material in a cell taken from an embryo very early in its development, when it only consists of about six cells. Initially developed to screen for diseases such as Down’s Syndrome, or reduce the probability of developing diseases such as diabetes or cancer, in principle it can be used to select for arbitrary inherited traits.  Recent research has focused on diseases and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia that do not appear traceable to simple genetic variations, and are more likely genetically heterogeneous; dependent on what is likely a complex combination of genetic factors.  As our knowledge increases along these lines, we will inevitably learn to better understand and eventually control the similarly complex genetic factors affecting cognitive ability, or intelligence.  One must hope that day comes sooner rather than later, and that when it comes, prospective parents will have the right to use it without state interference.

If we are to survive, we must become more intelligent, and the sooner the better.  The matter is urgent, and there is no alternative.  If we do survive, we will become more intelligent.  The only question is how.  Will it be by controlled genetic engineering, or by the “survival of the fittest” in the future holocausts we bring on ourselves because we are too stupid to avoid them?  Consider the events of the 20th century.  A great wave of popular idealism that had been growing ever stronger since the days of the American and French Revolutions among a large proportion of the most intelligent and highly educated elements of societies around the world metasticized into the incredibly destructive pseudo-religion, Communism.  The better part of a century and 100 million deaths later, we seem to have weathered that particular ideological storm, at least for the time being.  There is no compelling reason to believe that it was inevitable that we would, or that it was impossible that, under somewhat different but plausible conditions, Communist systems could have dominated the entire world, or that the resultant clash of ideologies might have culminated in a general nuclear exchange.  Orwell’s 1984 might very well have become a reality.  International boundaries might very well have been reduced to the role of marking where one North Korea ended, and another begun.  There is no guarantee that the outcome of the next storm will not be different. 

Communism was no historical anomaly.  It was a phenomenon dependent for its existence and its power on some of the best and brightest minds of its day.  As such, it provides us with an objective metric of our intelligence.  We are not nearly as smart as we think we are.  Messianic Islamism has already begun occupying the ideological vacuum left by its demise, and the true believers of new and, perhaps, yet unheard of systems will surely swarm forth eventually to promote new “scientific” paths to the “salvation of humanity.”  Meanwhile, the technologies of mass destruction continue to develop at an alarming pace.  Unless we become intelligent enough to control them it is only a question of time until they are used.  If we take control of our own genetic future there is a slim chance that we will be able to avoid the worst.  If not, it will at least improve our chances of surviving it.

When it comes to making the necessary decisions, it would be best to leave the state out of it.  State eugenic programs have not been remarkably successful in the past, and they are unlikely to be more successful in the future, because states cannot be depended on to act in the interests of the individuals who are their citizens.  Individuals are remarkably acute judges of their own best interests.  Give individuals the power to use the technology or not, as they see fit.  Their genetic survival will be the metric of whether they made the right choices.  As noted in Psychology Today, they have always made those individual choices in the past by selectivity in the choice of a mate.  Technologies such as PGD will not change that.  It will merely give them the opportunity to make the choice more accurately.

Many articles have been written about the need to explore the “ethical” implications of the choices we must make about these technologies.  In fact, virtually anyone who describes themselves as a “bio-ethicist,” or, for that matter, an “ethics expert” of any other stripe is, objectively, a charlatan.  Their “ethical debates” are merely so much emotional posturing, in which the various sides carry on fantastical arguments about whose deeply felt emotions are the most “legitimate.”  Ethical debates that do not start with the recognition of the evolutionary origin of these emotions, of the reasons and conditions under which they evolved, and their nature as subjective constructs deriving from predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain, are no more rational than the raving of madmen. 

Values can never be legitimate in themselves.  They are, by their nature, subjective.  They exist, like virtually everything else of significance about us, because the wiring in the brain that gives rise to them promoted our survival.  If, then, one finds it necessary for some reason to pursue a “value,” none can rationally take precedence over survival.  That is the only “value” that can be accepted as seriously at issue here.  We can ignore the rest of the blather about “ethics,” because the “ethicists” quite literally do not know what they’re talking about.

I wish to survive, and I wish for my species and life in general to survive.  I don’t flatter myself that those wishes have any objective legitimacy, but, subjectively, I am very attached to them.  Assuming there are others out there who also wish to survive, I have a suggestion about how to fulfill that wish.  Let us become more intelligent as quickly as possible.

“Right Wing Terror” vs. the Real Thing

Remember the recent hysteria on the left about imminent right wing terror and insurrection promoted by subversive institutions such as freedom of speech?  Here’s what the real thing looks like, but I doubt that the “right wing” was involved in an attack on an oil company executive.  It doesn’t fit the narrative.

ITER: Throwing Good Money after Bad

According to the journal Nature, European nations hope to redirect more than €1 billion (US$1.25 billion) earmarked for research grants to make up a budget shortfall at the experimental ITER fusion reactor.  In an article that appeared in the July 7 issue, the editors note,

The proposal has alarmed scientists, who say that it will rob researchers of vital funds at a time when governments are planning to scale back domestic research budgets in response to the global economic downturn.

This is surely an understatement.  If I were a European scientist, I would be screaming bloody murder.  Like the International Space Station, ITER is a white elephant whose potential benefits will never come close to justifying the cost of building it.  It’s projected cost has tripled since it was estimated in 2001.  The fond hopes of the aging scientists who have devoted their careers to the pursuit of magnetic fusion energy will not be realized.  Like the International Space Station, ITER’s real effect will be to serve as a huge financial vacuum cleaner, soaking up billions in research money that could be much better spent elsewhere, including in the field of fusion energy research itself.

The problem with magnetic fusion, at least in the form represented by ITER, is that, while it is scientifically feasible, it will never be able to compete with alternative methods of producing electric power in terms of cost.  There are certainly hundreds of reactor design studies out there that claim the opposite, but, as the future will demonstrate if ITER is ever built, they are all wrong.  Among other things, the cost of a tritium economy has been grossly underestimated.  Tritium is a heavy form of hydrogen whose nucleus contains two neutrons in addition to the usual single proton.  Mixed with deuterium, another heavy isotope of hydrogen with a single extra neutron, it will be an essential fuel material in reactors such as ITER.  Deuterium occurs naturally, and is relatively common.  In other than trace amounts, tritium does not.  It must be produced artificially.  In order to produce the quantities necessary to keep a reactor like ITER running indefinitely, it will be necessary to surround the burning plasma with a thick layer of lithium.  Fast neutrons produced by fusion in the burning plasma can then produce the necessary tritium in nuclear reactions with this material. 

However, there is a slight problem.  Tritium is highly radioactive, with a half-life, the time it takes for half of any given quantity to undergo nuclear decay, of something over 12 years.  In spite of the fact that hydrogen is a notoriously slippery substance, passing with ease right through some types of metal, it will be necessary to control and contain kilograms of this material in a working magnetic fusion reactor.  In addition to its intrinsic radioactive hazard, tritium must also be carefully guarded to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.  For example, if terrorists were able to secure enough special nuclear material to build a nuclear bomb, they could potentially greatly increase its explosive yield by using tritium in the process known as boosting.  All this, not to mention the legal challenges that NIMBY’s are sure to mount to avoid living next to such an objectionable material, is unlikely to be cheap.

This and other potential show stoppers will insure that magnetic fusion reactors like ITER will never be able to compete economically.  Don’t believe me?  Wait and see.  It would be much better to use the increasingly scarce research dollars now being used to fund this particular white elephant on smaller projects, including fusion research projects, where it could do some real good.  Who knows.  They might even result in the discovery of a way to finesse Mother Nature after all and build fusion reactors that don’t need tritium and are economically competitive.

ITER

Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Quantum theory is one of the most important and least understood advances in physics over the last 150 years.  Beginning with Max Planck’s supposition in a paper published in 1900 that energy could only be emitted in quantized form, it eventually led to the realization that, particularly at the atomic and sub-atomic level, it was more accurate to represent objects and their interactions, mathematically at least, in terms of wave functions and probability distributions than in terms of the deterministic prescriptions of classical physics.  There has been a great deal of speculation regarding the implication of these discoveries touching the matter of free will (see, for example, here, here, and here, and Google will turn up many more examples).  As often happens in such philosophical speculations (and as some of the authors of the linked articles themselves point out), the various hypotheses occasionally go considerably further than is warranted by what we actually know. 

One can’t really say anything positive about free will unless one understands what it is, and to understand what it is, one must understand consciousness.  Unfortunately, we don’t.  We can be more confident in speaking about what free will is not.  For example, let us assume for the sake of argument that insects are not self-aware or conscious, and they only react to their environment via instinct.  They may seem to make decisions such as whether to fight or flee, admit another insect into the hive or nest or not, etc., but free will is not involved.  Machines could be programmed to react in exactly the same ways.  Proponents of free will believe that, somehow, the human mind can consicously override such programming, and deliberately make choices that are not pre-ordained by physical law or instinct.  These choices, in turn, can alter the outcome of events.  Again, without resorting to supernatural arguments, we cannot state positively that free will exists because we lack sufficient understanding of what goes on in the human mind to do so.  We literally don’t understand what we’re talking about.  We can, however, discuss whether it is even possible for it to exist to begin with.

In that limited sense, the implications of quantum physics are profound.  If everything in the universe obeyed the laws of classical physics, there would be no room for free will.  Given a certain initial state of the universe, everything in the future would be pre-ordained by physical law, or so, at least, it has seemed to many great thinkers in the past.  In principle, we could create mathematical models that would predict the future with absolute certainty, although, at least at the current state of the art, the complexity of the universe is so great as to put such models completely out of the question.  We would just be along for the ride, and free will would be just an illusion.  In a quantum universe, at least we have some wiggle room. 

True, we still don’t know at a fundamental level what all this stuff in the universe around us really is, or why it exists to begin with.  However, we can demonstrate with repeatable experiments that it conforms to mathematical models in which probability plays a significant role.  Now if, once again, we are given a certain initial state of the universe, the claim that the future outcome of events is pre-ordained by the laws of physics is not as plausible in such a probabilistic universe.  The mathematical models may be misleading us about the true nature of things, but, in principle, an infinity of possible outcomes becomes possible.  In such a universe, it is at least possible for free will to exist, although it is hardly certain, and the manner in which it exists, if it does, must remain a mystery to us until we learn a great deal more about the nature of our own minds. 

That is the implication of quantum physics regarding free will.  From a classical universe whose eventual fate was written in stone depending on its state at some point in the past, we have proceeded to one in which many outcomes are possible, and free will is, therefore, not completely excluded.  It seems a rather limited implication on the face of it.  However, it’s comforting that a universe in which what we think or do actually matters is, at least, not out of the question.

Incident on the Way to the Airport

I was taking my son to the airport this afternoon when we noticed a guy in a pickup truck in front of us driving erratically.  He drove dangerously close to the ditch on the right, then started drifting over the center line into the left lane.  It was a country road with thick woods on either side,  so it would have been nearly impossible to avoid him.  Eventually, he drifted far over into the left lane before correcting himself and almost running into the ditch on the right again.  As he once more drifted left, three motorcyclists approached us and passed safely by.  They’ll probably never know how lucky they were today.  Shortly thereafter, he drifted erratically to the left, across the opposite lane, and up a hill, almost tipping over before coming to a stop in our lane with two blown tires and smashed up doors and fenders.  Apparently the truck was damaged too badly to move, so he began blowing the horn with his feet.  We called 911 and waited in the parking lot of a nearby recreational area.  When the police came, he was sitting on a guard rail, apparently completely stoned.  After checking to see if he was injured, they searched him, and found an ugly looking knife.  They immediately knew who he was.  He had been involved in another incident a week earlier, in which he had resisted arrest.  One of two officers who questioned him had been involved in that affair as well, and said he was lucky that three brave motorists helped him subdue the man on that occasion.  He had appeared completely incoherent, and hardly capable of walking, but when the officers pulled out the cuffs, he suddenly began resisting fiercely.  He was a young, strong, man, and it was all they could do to subdue him.  One of the officers had to taser him, and the effect was almost unnoticeable.  Once he was on the ground and in handcuffs, he became a great deal more voluble.  It was like being in the middle of an episode of Cops.

I gained a great deal of respect for our county police.  They were well spoken, didn’t use more force than was absolutely necessary to subdue the man, and acted with admirable professionalism throughout the incident.  When you see something like this up close and personal, you realize how hard their job really is.  They take a lot of abuse, but I take my hat off to the two pros I saw in action today. 

It makes you think about the wisdom of riding a motorcycle.  I had a couple of dirt bikes myself in my younger days, but managed to get through that phase with only a few bumps and bruises and a scar on my chin as a souvenir.  Those three bikers we saw today might just have easily have been killed, and they would have had no chance of getting out of the way.  At least in a car you have a fighting chance. 

I doubt they’ll be able to keep the dopehead responsible for today’s incident in jail for long.  When he gets out, he’ll climb back into another pickup truck, license or no, and will be a death sentence on wheels for some unsuspecting motorist.  If it has to come to that, I hope he is the unsuspecting motorist.

Human Morality and the Sport of Mutual Villification

Virtuous indignation is in high fashion as I write this. To hear them tell it, those who take any interest in politics at all go about in a state of permanent outrage. The stalwarts of both the left and the right are adept at demonstrating that their opponents are not merely wrong, but must necessarily be evil as well. A time-honored way of “proving” this is to first identify a villain whose villainy is beyond question. Then, to demonstrate that ones political opponent is a villain, too, it is merely necessary to come up with some more or less flimsy way to connect him with the arch-villain.

The Stalinists were masters of the art. Their arch-villain was Trotsky, who appears in Orwell’s novels, Animal Farm and 1984 as Snowball and Emanuel Goldstein, respectively. He figured largely in the Great Purge Trials of the 1930’s. For example, from the Indictment of the trial of the “bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” that doomed Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda, and many other once powerful Bolsheviks in 1938, the arch-villain is identified:

This (the crimes attributed to the bloc) applies first of all to one of the inspirers of the conspiracy, enemy of the people TROTSKY. His connection with the Gestapo was exhaustively proved at the trials of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center in August 1936, and of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre in January 1937.

The investigation has definitely established that TROTSKY has been connected with the German intelligence service since 1921, and with the British Intelligence Service since 1926.

and then the sub-demons are associated with him:

Thus, the accused N. N. Krestinsky, on the direct instruction of enemy of the people TROTSKY, entered into treasonable connections with the German intelligence service in 1921.

The accused K. G. Rakovsky, one of L. TROTSKY’s most intimate and particularly trusted men, has been an agent of the British Intelligence Service since 1924, and of the Japanese intelligence service since 1934.

and so on, and so on. Today, the “progressive” Left, is playing the same game with their foes in the Tea Party movement. In this case, the arch-villain is the John Birch Society. They would have us believe that there are more Birchers behind every Tea Party Bush than there were Reds infesting the halls of government in Joe McCarthy’s most fevered imagination. Examples of the ploy abound. For example, from OpEdNews.com’s “Tea Party Reminiscent of John Birch Society,”

The surge of the Tea Party as a potential shaker and mover of the American political system is reminiscent of a movement from the sixties that became particularly popular in the bellwether state of California. The John Birch Society became active and many grassroots members attached themselves strongly to the national political figure they saw as an agent for change, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

From E.J. Dionne’s “Birch and Barry,”

The reaction to Obama has also radicalized parts of the conservative movement, giving life to conspiracy theories long buried and strains of thinking similar to those espoused by the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups in the 1950s and ’60s.

From the Anti-Fascist Encyclopedia’s “Ohio: Birch Society, Racism, More Tea Party Ugliness,”

CityBeat first wrote about the Springboro Tea Party last month, detailing the agenda for a rally planned Saturday that’s heavy with speakers from the John Birch Society and movies about far-right conspiracy theories.

and so on. Google the connection, and you’ll find the meme repeated like a mantra on the websites of the left. Of course, the Right does exactly the same thing, with such worthies as Marx and Lenin in the leading role as Über-villain. The goal is the same in either case. To arouse the emotions associated with human morality by attempting to connect ones political opponents with some indubitable evil, and then use those emotions as weapons against them.  Of course, many other morally loaded tactics are employed for the same purpose. It’s interesting to consider the matter from first principles.

To begin, what is morality? The answer is that it is a term used to describe innate human behavioral traits that evolved at a time when the relations between human groups bore little or no resemblance to those between the massive political parties, nation states, and other social groups of our own time. “Good” and “evil” are constructs that exist in our imaginations for the sole reason that they promoted our survival in times now long forgotten. They have no other mode of existence, and cannot possibly be “legitimate” as objects in themselves, by virtue of the subjective nature of their existence. However, the modes of political conflict described above positively require them to be legitimate and real, else the arguments predicated on the reality of one’s own good, and one’s opponents evil, evaporate into the mist. In other words, the powerful emotions evoked in this process of mutual villification are fundamentally irrational.  Seen in this light, they emerge as what they really are; manifestations of human behavioral traits that are irrelevant to the goals pursued in terms of the reasons they exist to begin with. By evoking them in modern political struggles, one is not serving a holy cause. Rather, one is manipulating the human emotions associated with morality as political weapons.

To the extent that we consider survival an attractive goal, it would be well for us to finally climb off of this treadmill of morality. In our daily interactions with other human beings, that goal is impossible. We lack the intelligence to routinely substitute rational analysis for emotional response, or for behavior according to “human nature” at that level. However, it is to be hoped that the same is not true of political decisions involving the fate of thousands or millions of people. The history of the last hundred years has provided ample justification for this hope. Time after time, the identification of whole racial, social, or religious groups as “evil” has resulted in mass slaughter. The mayhem is still with us today, and can be expected to continue into the future. It is not to be expected that we will invariably be fortunate enough to be among “the good.” We could just as easily find ourselves among “the evil,” and share the fate suffered by millions of others in recent history. The idea that what happened so recently in such advanced countries as Germany and Russia “can’t happen here” is an illusion.

Under the circumstances, we would be wise to keep the genie of good and evil in its bottle. We should at least make an effort to substitute reason for emotion. In practice, this would imply a conscious decision to limit our judgment of the opinions of others to the categories “true” and “false,” and dispense with “good” and “evil.” As weapons, “good” and “evil” can be highly effective. If we routinely use them against political opponents, we are, in a very real sense, threatening them. They may quite reasonably conclude that they have no alternative but to wield the same weapons as the only effective way of fighting back. It would be better to refrain from using the weapons to begin with. The history of the last hundred years has amply demonstrated what is sure to follow if we don’t.

The Euro: A “False Friend?”

Far be it from me to claim any insight into the gyrations of the currency markets, but I couldn’t help noticing an article that appeared on the website of Business Week a while back warning readers against putting too much faith in the Euro, which had just recovered a couple of cents in value against the dollar. Although carefully hedged about with if, buts, and maybes as such financial articles always are, it suggested that the rally would be short-lived, and the European currency would soon test new lows. At the time, it stood at 1.2229. Bad call, Mr. Expert! As I write this, the Euro is bid at 1.2522. Meanwhile, both the Canadian dollar and the Swiss franc are worth more than the U.S. dollar, at 1.0586 and 1.0590, respectively. Not to worry, though, gold and silver both fell off a cliff today, so our dollar still managed to appreciate in value against “hard currency.” Go figure. I’ll be in Canada if you need me.

Another Thigh Slapper from Der Spiegel: CNN a “Non-partisan Sender.”

Anyone who’s spent a significant amount of time in Germany will have occasionally encountered what the locals describe as a “Besserwisser,” someone who credits himself with invariably “knowing better” than anyone else about any subject one might name. Occasionally they will be so good as to educate you about your own country, which they have likely never visited, but regarding which they still deem themselves experts, having read many articles in Der Spiegel on the subject. The Germans have another wonderfully expressive word for this; “beglücken,” used to refer scornfully to the act of ostensibly intending to make you “happy” or “fortunate,” in this case with their informative lectures, while accomplishing exactly the opposite. When it comes to expressing scorn, the German language has no equal. Today Spiegel’s Marc Pitzke “hat uns beglückt” by delivering himself of a particularly ludicrous example of the sort of “reliable information” the Besserwisser use in concocting their yarns about Amerika.

In his latest, Pitzke’s theme is the demise of CNN, as exemplified by the retirement of star broadcaster Larry King. He breaks the depressing news to his countrymen in his byline: “The departure of talk king Larry King is symptomatic – in the USA the non-partisan broadcaster is losing out to its opinionated competition in prime time.”

CNN “non-partisan!?” After wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes, I checked their website just to make sure nothing drastic had happened since the last time I looked. Had someone given Wolf Blitzer a lobotomy, perhaps? No. The familiar slant was still there; a puff piece about the ACLU’s latest pious anathema’s against Arizona. Lots of coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf without the slightest allusion to the dial tone coming from the President’s office on the subject, in stark contrast to their constant breathless reporting about the lapses of George W. Bush following hurricane Katrina. An odd disinterest in the Gore rape scandal. A helpful suggestion that I may have misspelled my words when I searched the site for “Weigel” and “Journolist.” In a word, business as usual.

All this appears to have escaped the attention of Mr. Pitzke, who writes from his alternate universe;

There’s more behind the problems than just bad management. The competition has set itself apart with unabashed opinion mongering in recent years, whether towards the right (Fox News) or towards the left (MSNBC). CNN persists in keeping to the golden middle way. “We’re not partisan,” said (CNN spokesman) Klein. “We don’t promote a point of view.”

He must have said it with an amazingly straight face, as Pitzke didn’t notice the least bit of irony. Charging blithely ahead, he wonders gravely,

But can non-partisan, purely news-oriented reporting stay in the running in the days of Google, Twitter, and Facebook? When everyone can click up news according to his own taste? Many see the downfall of CNN as the handwriting on the wall: the end of journalism is near.

I know! I wondered the same thing. Does this guy really believe his own cant? The thought is depressing, but is it that far-fetched? After all, more than a billion people in this asylum of a world believe in a tyrannical super-being who plans to fry the lion’s share of the rest of us in hellfire for millions and billions of years (and even longer in my case). Well, there is an encouraging note to all this. If the end of the type of “journalism” Pitzke refers to really is near, the world is bound to be a bit less irritating, and any number of condescending, holier-than-thou, “non-partisan journalists,” will be constrained to find, if not a more honest, then at least a less ostentatious line of work.