THE SCENE (a.k.a. vpostrel.com)
Comments on current ideas and events

Week of April 22, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

AGAINST THE WALL: The other Postrel makes the case against the simplistic "build a wall" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via email to Tres Producers. I have to say I agree, gloomy though the analysis is, but then I nearly always find Steve convincing. [Via Joanne Jacobs.]

For those who follow Steve's appearances on other blogs, this is an elaboration of the central part of his earlier analysis posted at Unqualified Offerings and the point that Jim Henley never really addressed. In his response, Jim concentrated entirely on attacking the idea of "serious occupation" as an (undesirable but best available) alternative to a wall. [Posted 4/26.]

WORTH A SHOT: You readers were such a great help with my questions about the proliferation of Christmas lights that I figure I'll try you with another book-related query: Does anyone know where I can get some sort of reliable count of the number of clothes in a typical American's wardrobe? (Don't suggest the Census unless you've found a specific source. As far as I can tell, they don't ask about clothes. I also struck out with ACNielsen.) [Posted 4/26.]

L.A. CRACKUP: Mickey Kaus writes what I've long maintained: that if the San Fernando Valley secedes from Los Angeles, West L.A. will surely follow eventually, taking the airport and much of the tax base with it. That's all the more likely if Hollywood goes, leaving the Westside to foot most of the city's tax bills. But Valley secession alone would leave West L.A. almost entirely surrounded by independent cities: the Valley to the north, Santa Monica (home of Kausfiles) to the west, Beverly Hills to the east, Culver City to the south, with just a sliver of Los Angeles weaving down to LAX.

The truth is that "Los Angeles" is, like "Chicago" or "Dallas," already a metropolitan area full of independently governed cities. You know Pasadena and Santa Monica and Beautiful Downtown Burbank and Inglewood, thanks to the once-Fabulous Forum (now the home of a megachurch), but much of the area's industry is located in places like Downey, Torrance, or City of Industry. The strength of "Los Angeles" is that it isn't one city at all, but a bunch of competing towns. As hurtful as a breakup would be to L.A. pride, it's not such a bad idea—especially if it doesn't stop with the Valley. [Posted 4/26.]

WELFARE REFORM: In his latest Reason Online column, Mike Lynch doesn't measure welfare reform against utopia but against the actual alternative—life before welfare reform:

The proper benchmark for success is not whether women become clones of Martha Stewart or suddenly strike the perfect balance between work and family imagined by Ph.D. poverty experts—they most certainly haven't. It's whether they've improved their lives since the time when they had to wait for the mailman to deliver a government check each month. All signs are that they have.

Despite all the personal struggles the researchers observe, three in four women surveyed say that working made them "better off than a year ago." That's all we need to know.

In 2000, Mike spent a lot of time with former welfare mothers in Camden, New Jersey, and filed this nuanced report. [Posted 4/25.]

RATIONAL RITUAL: My latest NYT column discusses the value of public rituals—from the Super Bowl to weddings to presidential inaugurations—in creating "common knowledge." [Posted 4/25.]

BAFFLING HEADLINE: "Why do free-market advocates oppose therapeutic cloning?" asks Slate's "other web sites" entry for today. Say what? A quick look at the Franklin Society petition demonstrates that lots of "free-market advocates" are sticking their necks out to defend the procedure.

So who's Slate's idea of a "free-market advocate"? Bill Kristol, son of Irving "Two Cheers for Capitalism" Kristol and even less enthusiastic about markets than his dad. The good news: The Slate item links to Ron Bailey's latest column, which deserves the attention. [Posted 4/24.]

CLONING TERMS: After finding seven different terms on Charles Murtaugh's blog, reader Randall Parker writes asking for definitions of some common phrases in today's cloning debates: "Too many people in this debate using too many terms to mean the same thing. I happen to have a degree in bio and it's a little hard for me to follow since the writers don't explain what procedure they are assigning to each name and I know what most of the procedures are. Well, if it's confusing for me it's gotta be way confusing for everyone else."

I'll provide definitions (approved by Charlie Murtaugh), but first a bit of background. The basic technique at issue in today's policy debates is what is precisely known as "somatic cell nuclear transfer." A "somatic cell" is a cell in the body that is not a sex cell (not a sperm or egg). Somatic cells (skin, muscle, nerve, etc.) have the full complement of genetic material, or chromosomes, while sex cells, known as gametes, have only half a set; when a sperm fertilizes an egg, a full set of chromosomes is created. Chromosomes are contained in the nucleus of the cell, which you can think of as the yolk of an egg.

In somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT, a biologist takes an egg from which the nucleus has been removed, inserts another cell (most likely a skin cell) into the egg, and zaps the egg with electricity. If all goes according to plan, the egg, which now contains full genetic material, begins to divide just as it would if an egg with a nucleus (containing half a set of chromosomes) had been fertilized with a sperm (containing the other half).

Hence, the cell that emerges from somatic cell nuclear transfer is considered an embryo, just like a egg fertilized by a sperm. This cell is the "clone" at issue in today's policy debates. As with an egg fertilized in vitro, the cell produced through nucleus transfer could develop into a fetus if transplanted into a woman's uterus but cannot grow indefinitely in a petri dish. The Brownback-Landrieu bill currently before the Senate would make somatic cell nuclear transfer, with or without implantation, a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Other bills forbid implantation but allow SCNT for cell research purposes.

Now, to define Randall's terms:

embyro cloning: any SCNT

therapeutic cloning: SCNT for research on diseases, no implantation

reproductive cloning: SCNT and implantation to produce pregnancy

research cloning: SCNT for research (could be not directly oriented toward therapy), no implantation

cloning to engineer children: SCNT that might someday lead to pre-birth genetic changes (or control) in children, whether for treatment of disease (e.g., no cystic fibrosis) or enhancement (e.g., intelligence, height, resistance to cancer, whatever)

cell cloning: SCNT, no implantation

human cloning: any SCNT of human cells

baby cloning: SCNT, implantation, pregnancy

"Human cloning" is the term preferred by opponents of all forms of SCNT, for good reason. While scientifically accurately, it's highly misleading, since it conjures up not just images of cloned babies but of soulless Star Wars storm troopers. As Randall rightly suggests, the terminology in this debate is confusing, in part because words that mean one thing to scientists create very different pictures in the public mind. [Posted 4/24.]

APOLOGIES: My apologies to readers who've tried to go to the Franklin Society petition only to be victimized by my bad HTML coding. And my thanks to readers Scott Magoon and Ken Miller, who alerted me to the two errors in my original coding. I'm sick (bad head cold), and it shows. Here's hoping the stuff I wrote today on my book is better than my HTML. The link is fixed now, so sign away! [Posted 4/24.]

HARRY & LOUISE: Harry and Louise are back. Having helped save America from nationalized health care with their blunt and frightening descriptions of the details of the Clinton health care plan, the famous commercial characters are now discussing another scary prospect: putting scientists in prison for doing basic biomedical research. Dan Pink has the transcript. According to today's WSJ, which has details on the second section's front page, the ads will debut in the DC area on tonight's West Wing. They'll also run in states with swing-vote senators.

Unlike the original Harry and Louise ads, which were ubiquitous, the reprise appears aimed at getting a lot of free media, aiming at elite publicity rather than grassroots persuasion. The original ads were part of a $20 million campaign, while CuresNow, the network of Hollywood types who made the new ads, has reportedly raised $500,000. I'm delighted to see the effort, and to see ads bluntly describing the legislation currently before the Senate. But it's going to take more than a half million dollars in advertising to beat the well-organized and well-financed supporters of the ban.

In related news, Ron Bailey takes on Bill Kristol's argument that government control of health care is inevitable, so we need to ban genetic research in order to avoid mandatory eugenics.

If you haven't done so yet, please sign the Franklin Society petition against the ban and enlist others to do so. My op-eds on the subject are here and here. [Posted 4/24.]

SUPER PRESIDENT: James Lileks has made my husband very happy by discussing Super President not once but twice. Super President was a one-season cartoon from the late '60s—the ultimate New Frontier fantasy—but when Steve first told me about it many years ago I swore he must have dreamed it. Numerous Internet sites now confirm his account, right down to the really bad theme song. [Posted 4/22.]

MARTIAL ART: It takes a fast connection, but this martial arts mini-movie, with a cast of stick figures, is a lot of fun. And it raises an interesting question: What are the filmmaking conventions, and psychological assumptions, that lead us to root for a protagonist we know nothing about? [Posted 4/22.]

FRENCH ELECTIONS: Former lycée student and math whiz Sasha Volokh offers a detailed and level-headed analysis of the French election results. Bottom line: "There is less to these election results than meets the eye. This election is not a crushing defeat for the left, nor does it show any significant resurgence of the far right or of extremist parties. If there's an overall rightward shift at all, we didn't see it in this election. Everything is about the same as it used to be!" (Sasha seems to be channeling Kausfiles style, especially when you add the links and boldface type.) [Posted 4/22.]

OLIVER'S BLOG: Now that he's hunkered down in the carpet capital of the world, rather than driving across the country, Charles Oliver's blog has gotten pretty lively. (His ex-pat pal in Japan is still AWOL.) Among his recent reports: an item on those wacko "libertarians who want to bomb most of the rest of the world back to the Stone Age." He means the folks at the Ayn Rand Institute, who will probably sue him for calling them libertarians rather than Objectivists (with a very capitalized and dogmatic O). Their lack of strategic realism is matched only by their bloodthirstiness.

Charles also manages to work in the headline, "Anna Kournikova Nude." If I didn't know him so well, I'd swear he was just trolling for hits. [Posted 4/22.]

DYNAMIST DISASTER RECOVERY: Reader Kevin Wenzel sends a link to this ComputerWorld article on disaster-recovery planning. A snippet:

"The idea is to plan around a particular set of outcomes, as opposed to planning for any particular emergency," [Alan Lloyd Paris, a partner at Capco, a financial IT consultancy in New York] says. "You can't plan for everything, so you have to develop a plan that's flexible and that takes a look at a tiered set of problems."

For instance, Paris says, rather than planning recovery based on certain external threats — such as a bomb, or a chemical or biological attack — use a simple triple-tiered approach: Plan what to do when building access is denied, what to do when a certain floor that's needed to transact business is closed and how to recover from a particular system outage.

Kevin, who's revising his company's disaster-recovery plans, writes, "This article basically describes what I've been trying to devise—rather than a multitude of unmanageable 'one best ways' for each possible situation, I want to use a set of hierarchical and transparent rules that can be applied to a wide range of problems. This should allow me to plan for any foreseeable disaster without having to actually foresee every distinct permutation." [Posted 4/22.]

RESILIENT ECONOMY: The current issue of Fortune features a terrific cover story on the economy's remarkable resilience. Writes Justin Fox:

What is going on is this: After the longest expansion ever, the economy screeched to a halt last year. Then, after a brief and not very deep recession, it started growing again. It survived a stock market slide and an outright crash in the tech and telecom sectors. It survived a near-vertical drop in corporate profits. It survived the bankruptcies of Enron, Kmart, and Global Crossing. It survived the destruction of the World Trade Center.

As always, dangers may be lurking just ahead (for more on that, see Ten Things to Keep You Up at Night). But the current debate over whether growth will be 2% or 4% this year, whether housing sales will hold up, whether business investment will rebound anytime soon, misses an essential point: The American economy of 2002 is a remarkable sight to behold. At 5.7% in March, unemployment is certainly up from the 3.9% of October 2000. That stuff happens when you have a recession. But it's at a level that would have signaled near boom times during the 1970s and 1980s. While growth was slow last year, it wasn't negative—real GDP actually expanded 1.2% in 2001, a recession-year performance surpassed only in 1960. Real after-tax personal income rose 3.6% for the year. Productivity, that flawed but powerful measure of how much economic value Americans generate per hour worked, grew a stunning 5.2% in the fourth quarter. And while it won't keep up that pace, it does appear to have returned to an upward trajectory not seen since the 1960s.

We have arrived at this moment of relative economic bliss despite being told over and over again during the past 20 years that we were headed for the abyss. I'm something of a connoisseur of economic doomsaying. Among the books stacked on my office shelf are The End of Affluence [by my fellow NYT "Economic Scene" columnist, Jeff Madrick—vp], The Endangered American Dream, The Downsizing of America, and The Internet Depression. My wife and I were even characters in a scaremongering European bestseller a few years ago that was translated into English as The Globalization Trap. The author, an Austrian journalist and family friend, used the cramped dimensions of our old Manhattan apartment as evidence of the failure of American-style free markets.

The article is well worth reading in its entirety and, for bonus points, also take a look at my NYT column on the mid-1980s changes that produced the smoother economic ride. [Posted 4/22.]

CLONING CARTOON: The great Tom Toles, whose cartoons I like even when I disagree with them, weighs in on cell cloning. If you agree that it would be wrong to send scientists to federal prison for creating cloned cells, sign the Franklin Society petition. (The petition page also includes links to further information) [Posted 4/22.]

BLOG COVERAGE: Just in case you missed it on all the other blogs, here's a link to Howard Kurtz's column on blogging.

And just in case you think blogging is just for pundit wannabes, my friend and former Reason Foundation colleague Lynne Kiesling draws my attention to another blog genre:

Here's topic that hits both blogs and design—knitting blogs are all the rage! I kid you not; within 72 hours in mid-March, at least two dozen young women (typically in college or just out) started setting up knitting blogs. One of them linked them all up into a webring, they all link to each other sites, and post comments for each other.

The grandmammy of knitting blogs (fall 2001) is Bonne Marie Burns at chicknits. She lives in Chicago and is in my Stitch 'n Bitch group, although we seem to go on different evenings as I've not met her yet.

Lynne notes that her favorite knitblog name is "Homemade Slice of Chaos."

Those with an interest in graphic design generally, or the WSJ redesign specifically, should check out Lines and Splines, a graphic-design blog. The current lead item looks at the typography of the new WSJ, which is dramatically different from the old multi-font Journal. It concludes with a discussion of the WSJ nameplate: "The letters are a little taller, their stems are wider, and the spacing is tighter. It is good to see that the period at the end has been kept."

Blogs can be, and are, about any subject writers want to cover. The underlying technology of blogging says nothing about how it should be used—a traditional strength of Internet protocols and a necessary characteristic of rules that allow open-ended innovation. Hence the amazing proliferation and diversity of blogs. (For more on such rules, see this excerpt from chapter five of TFAIE.) [Posted 4/22.]

BROCK CROCK: I have friends who want to take David Brock's latest book seriously, partly because it's so salacious and gossipy and partly because it's among the few accounts of the inner workings of conservative organizations over the past decade or so. But, I always caution them, you can't believe any of it without independent confirmation. Even if he thinks he's telling the truth, Brock obviously has some sort of reality-distortion field around him.

Andrew Sullivan points to this convincing rebuttal by David Horowitz of Brock's charge that Horowitz makes anti-gay slurs when he thinks no gays can hear him. (Actually, the charge is that David Horowitz made such a slur once, but the reader is to draw the conclusion that it's a habit. The apparent source of the anecdote categorically denies it.)

Now David Horowitz and I aren't best friends (both of us are far too prickly for that), but I've spent plenty of informal time with him over my years in L.A., time during which he was not putting on his public persona. During all that time, I've never heard him say anything bad about gays. He's not the kind of guy who uses slurs to begin with and, as far as I can tell, he likes gays just fine. More to the point, I have seen David on several occasions defend gays to hostile conservative audiences when he had absolutely nothing to gain, and plenty to lose, by doing so.

True, The American Spectator was laced with anti-gay rhetoric (I used to be able to tell when Andy Ferguson had written "The Continuing Crisis" because the column's usual Tyrellean anti-gay swipes would be absent), but a single publication does not a political movement make. Brock's public (and perhaps private) identity now depends on portraying every conservative heterosexual as a hater of gays, and that's simply not the case. [Posted 4/22.]