ARTS & FARCES internet

Traction is a funny thing; you get it when you least expect it and it’s nowhere to be found when you really need it. Like the stem cell research controversy, for example. I wrote about President Bush II’s doublespeak on the issue more than two years ago. I sensed a groundswell of opposition to Bush’s position within the medical research community that I thought would percolate into the American consciousness. It didn’t happen.

But here it comes again. Maybe we’ll catch the bus this time around.

Michael Kinsley wrote a wonderful piece earlier this week for Slate—“Taking Bush Personally”—that precisely explains why those of us to the left of Grover Norquist don’t only disagree with Bush II’s policies but just don’t much like him. Kinsley deftly uses the stem cell research quagmire to illustrate why we have a hard time abiding his intellectual and ethical dishonesty.

While I’m on the transplant list, I’ll pass when I’m called. This position never fails to confound and anger friends and family, mostly because they know what a pain in the ass dialysis is. But that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

The reasons are diverse, but deeply intertwingled. There’s the issue of a transplant being a treatment, not a cure. There’s the cost of anti-rejection drugs—monetary costs alone would be well into unaffordable territory at four figures each month for the rest of my life; and that doesn’t factor the emotional and physical costs. Having failed to wrestle the ethical issues into submission for myself in almost four years, there’s little reason to believe that’s going to happen now. No matter where I am on the list, it’s a kidney that could be used by someone else.

The hope for me has always been regeneration. After all, salamanders can readily grow whole new legs when one is lost or damaged. It’s only logical that an organism higher up the food chain should be able to regrow their own parts. It’s basically a hacking problem.

We have consolidated all of our websites here, for a variety of reasons, none of which are important enough to write about.

All of our content—except some of the original Internet Tour Guide series tutorials which have been updated and expanded—is here; use the advanced search to locate it.

Forty-five percent of Americans polled by Gallup between 8 - 10 September believe the news media are too liberal; only 14% believe the news media to be too conservative. These numbers, according to the professional pollsters, remain unchanged over the past three years. Perhaps most disturbing of all was the poll’s findings that more than half of the respondents “have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the news media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly,”—a number which hasn’t changed significantly in the past six years.

The Gallup Poll results are especially troubling in light of the results of a study from the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), an affiliate of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs. PIPA released the Report of Findings for its “Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War” study earlier this week. The PIPA study found that “heavy viewers of the Fox News Channel are nearly four times as likely to hold demonstrably untrue positions about the war in Iraq as media consumers who rely on National Public Radio or the Public Broadcasting System….” The study, surveying 3,334 Americans who “receive their news from a single media source,” were questioned about holding three beliefs characterized as “egregious misperceptions:”

1. Saddam Hussein has been directly linked with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
2. Weapons of mass destruction have already been found in Iraq.
3. World opinion favored the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Fully 60% of all survey respondents held at least one of the statements to be true. But the breakout of news sources proved most interesting:

“Twenty-three percent of those who get their news from NPR or PBS believed in at least one of the mistaken claims. In contrast, 80 percent of Fox News viewers held at least one of the three incorrect beliefs.”

Is the explanation for this that we’re a collection of inattentive dim bulbs or that we succumb to the agendas of corporate media?