This is why they hate us: Fox News, drones, “American Sniper” and the gross face we show the world

Marcy Wheeler, Salon

Friday, Feb 20, 2015 08:30 AM EST

Imagine if the United States had waged its Cold War ideological struggle with the Soviet Union on the same three-year cycle consumer goods companies currently use for branding?

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Instead, you might have the shoddy branding campaign the U.S. is fighting ISIL with right now, conceived largely in terms of unique impressions on Twitter rather than whether we can change larger narratives about America and the West.

“We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,” Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Richard A. Stengel said for a recent New York Times story.

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Another persistent misconception lies in where ISIL’s own propaganda has been effective. Both British and – less officially – American officials have called on Twitter to police speech, rightly pointing out the influence of ISIL propaganda posted there. Yet such views utterly ignore the powerful boost Fox and (until it came to a Jordanian pilot burned alive on video) CNN have given the very same propaganda by airing it for hours and days. ISIL propaganda on U.S. cable channels “radicalizes” different groups of people in ways that are every bit as dangerous as a young Muslim kid watching ISIL videos online, ways that feed a clash of civilization narrative rather than that of America’s Middle Eastern allies combating murderous thugs trying to take and hold territory in a region of strategic importance.

That also seems to breed a lack of awareness of the degree to which our own actions serve as propaganda serving ISIL’s goals. Yes, the U.S. flies drones because they are viewed as a safer (for our service members, as well as civilians on the ground) alternative to airstrikes. But the drones also persist as an audible and visual presence that permeates the consciousness of those who might otherwise oppose Islamists. “I see them every day and we are scared of them,” Mohammed Tuaiman, a 13-year-old killed, as an alleged al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula member, in an American drone strike last month, said to the Guardian in an interview laws year. “We even dream of them in our sleep.” And yet people in the U.S. rarely weigh those dreams against the nightmares we see over and over on Fox and CNN. It’s not enough to say we don’t behead people (though our close allies in Saudi Arabia do) or burn them alive in cages if our omnipresent weapons permeate people’s consciousness like an ISIL video being replayed on Fox.

But a very big part of the problem, it seems to me, is that the U.S. is thinking only in terms of “countering” an enemy. “We’ve got to discredit these ideologies,” President Obama said at today’s CVE summit. In part this means their American narratives end up scolding ISIL’s narrative, rather than presenting another more resonant one. More generally, however, it doesn’t even try to offer up America as the kind of promise to others it represented during the Cold War. The U.S. will not win this ideological war by attempting to do no more than drown out ISIL’s message in Twitter hits.

What does America think it is offering the world, beyond submission under the weight of an unrivaled military?  Why would people choose that over an ideology that promises – falsely – principle and morals? With the austerity America’s bankers demand, the U.S. isn’t even offering financial stability.

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And the president who has presided over six years of impunity for the bankers who crashed the global economy promised to combat corruption. “We’ll keep leading a global effort against corruption, because the culture of the bribe has to be replaced by good governance that doesn’t favor certain groups over others.”

“The essential ingredient to real and lasting stability and progress … is institutions that uphold the rule of law and apply justice equally,” said the president to a community often deprived of just that.

So to the extent we’re promising something, we’re not delivering on it.

Then there’s the larger picture. Consider what we’ve sold in two of our greatest export industries in recent years. Hollywood continues to sell its product around the world (with illegal knockoffs extending its reach). Yet it has been selling – with the explicit assistance of the administration – the torture of “Zero Dark Thirty” or the blind targeting of “American Sniper” rather than America as a beacon of freedom.

America’s tech giants had been a vehicle for communication and even for mobilization in recent years, until we learned the degree to which the NSA had prioritized a futile bid of omniscience online over the viability of those brands and what they stood for, both from a commercial and ideological perspective. More recently, we’ve learned American hardware, too, may have been hijacked as another tool of spying.

I’m not a fan of intelligence agencies buying out cultural institutions, as they did during the Cold War.

But if you’re going to wage an ideological war, do so competently. You’re not trying to sell a consumer an overpriced box of cereal or watery beer.

Yup, our elites folks.  The best and the brightest.

I thought we were pals after all that riding we did together. All of a sudden he’s worried about some mutt. Well, we did like he asked. We left him, and he went to jail for a dog. You want to hear the funny part? Paden didn’t even like that damn dog.

It evened out in the end. They locked me up; the dog sprung me.

So, what does it mean to love America?  I for one think it means recognizing the United States is not the only damn country on two continents and a land bridge and never confusing one with the other, but then again I have a lot of “crazy” ideas about ‘Liberty and Justice for All’ and ‘We, The People’ that are just so Enlightenment as to make me quaint and cuddly like a Mennonite kneecapper at an Amish Field Party.

Anyway, tonight we get to hear Martin Short (Canadian), Big Sean, Frank Rich and former senior media adviser to Mitt Romney Tara Setmayer (nee Wall) pontificate on the subject which will be a relief for you since you generally get me spouting off about it 3 or 4 times a day.

Continuity

James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now.  The report of my illness grew out of the report of his illness, the report of my death was an exaggeration.

Mark Twain, May 1897

To the death, serious wounding, or ‘Uncle’ saying Arby’s.

Horny Las Vegas Teens

This week’s guests-

• Monday 2/23: Christine Lagarde
• Tuesday 2/24: Lynsey Addario
• Wednesday 2/25: Conan O’Brien
• Thursday 2/26: Olivia Wilde

Christine Lagarde is the head of the IMF.  Do you think we will hear anything about SYRIZA and Greece?

Hmm…

This is why electing Judges is a bad idea.

Not all “reform” is good.

Of course this is waste of time.  What did you expect?

NYPD officers call re-training in wake of Eric Garner death a ‘waste of time’

by Lauren Gambino, The Guardian

Monday 23 February 2015 09.27 EST

A majority of New York police officers called the re-training program they were ordered to undergo after the death of Eric Garner a “waste of time”, according to the New York Post.

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But during the training, officers fell asleep in their seats and eight out of 10 gave the $35m program a negative review when they finished, the Post reported, citing a high-ranking NYPD official.

Relations between the NYPD and the mayor deteriorated in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of two officers in Brooklyn in December, with many officers angry with De Blasio for supposedly siding with protesters against perceived police brutality.

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The entire encounter – from Garner resisting arrest nonviolently to the officer locking his arm around Garner’s neck to Garner’s final words: “I can’t breathe” – were captured on video. Despite this, no indictment was returned. His family is supporting a legal push by civil liberties groups to release the grand jury proceedings.

The three day re-training program was touted by the mayor and his police commissioner, Bill Bratton, who said it would be both cognitive and tactical. The officers were meant to learn new techniques to use on resisting arrestees rather than the forbidden chokehold.

“I think you’re going to see a very different reality after this training has been achieved,” De Blasio said in December. “This will protect our officers, it will protect live citizens. I have no doubt some tragedy will be avoided because of this training.” The official, however, told the Post the program included eight-hour lectures rather than hands-on training.

“Officers thought they were going to get some real hands-on, quality training on how to deal with a hostile prisoner or arrestee,” the source said. “They didn’t get that.”

The three sessions included a cultural sensitivity workshop, followed by a course on the “legitimacy of policing” and, on the last day, training on the “high-low takedown”, a tactic to be used on suspects.

“It’s more of a self-reflection kind of course – reflecting on how they can improve as police officers,” the official told the Post.

2,631,126 Views

It’s actually much worse than this footage makes it.  Not just this incident.  It’s everywhere, all the time.

Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher

By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOHN SCHWARTZ, The New York Times

FEB. 21, 2015

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

The documents show that Dr. Soon, in correspondence with his corporate funders, described many of his scientific papers as “deliverables” that he completed in exchange for their money. He used the same term to describe testimony he prepared for Congress.

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Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

Fossil-fuel interests have followed this approach for years, but the mechanics of their activities remained largely hidden.

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“What it shows is the continuation of a long-term campaign by specific fossil-fuel companies and interests to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change,” said Kert Davies, executive director of the Climate Investigations Center, a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change.

Charles R. Alcock, director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center, acknowledged on Friday that Dr. Soon had violated the disclosure standards of some journals.

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Dr. Soon is employed by the Smithsonian Institution, which jointly sponsors the astrophysics center with Harvard.

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Though often described on conservative news programs as a “Harvard astrophysicist,” Dr. Soon is not an astrophysicist and has never been employed by Harvard. He is a part-time employee of the Smithsonian Institution with a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering. He has received little federal research money over the past decade and is thus responsible for bringing in his own funds, including his salary.

Though he has little formal training in climatology, Dr. Soon has for years published papers trying to show that variations in the sun’s energy can explain most recent global warming. His thesis is that human activity has played a relatively small role in causing climate change.

Many experts in the field say that Dr. Soon uses out-of-date data, publishes spurious correlations between solar output and climate indicators, and does not take account of the evidence implicating emissions from human behavior in climate change.

Hmm…

Loretta Lynch confirmation as attorney general dogged by HSBC scandal

Dan Roberts, The Guardian

Friday 20 February 2015 13.58 EST

Opposition to Barack Obama’s nominee for US attorney general over her handling of the [HSBC ] scandal is growing in Congress after she admitted deciding not to prosecute the bank for money laundering offences without hearing from key regulators or a separate investigation into tax secrecy.

A Senate vote to confirm Loretta Lynch, who as US attorney in the case instead agreed a $1.9bn financial settlement, has already been postponed until next Thursday amid concern she was insufficiently aggressive in pursuing Wall Street criminal allegations.

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But new responses to questions on HSBC put to Lynch by Senate judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley reveal just how isolated her decision was from other allegations swirling around the giant bank and has now prompted another member of the committee, Senator David Vitter, to demand further disclosures.

“These decisions by the [Department of Justice] and Ms Lynch’s office raise troubling questions about whether pertinent information of public concern regarding HSBC was ‘swept under the rug’, if justice was served, and why HSBC was given special treatment that allowed it to walk away from such serious offences unscathed,” Vitter writes in a letter to current attorney general Eric Holder. “This case is increasingly relevant and pressing now that Ms Lynch has been nominated as the next attorney general.”

Lynch has confirmed she was not aware of the damning tax allegations against the bank when negotiating a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) over it facilitating money laundering by Mexican drug cartels and helping clients evade US sanctions.

This was despite a separate investigation into documents from whistleblower Hervé Falciani showing HSBC’s role in colluding with Swiss bank clients to hide their assets from tax authorities, which were passed to the US government by French authorities.

“To my knowledge, my office did not have access to the Falciani documents prior to execution of the DPA,” said Lynch in responses published on Thursday. “I am not aware of whether or how the information was conveyed to the department, nor do I have information about why my office did not have access to it.”

The admission has angered campaigners who say the crucial Facliona documents were “lost in the haystack of information” at the DoJ but their public existence could have been easily verified.

“She could have looked it up on Wikipedia,” said Bart Naylor, an expert at Public Citizen. “She oversees 340 attorneys; at least somebody should have been thinking about this and put it on Google alerts,” he added. “At the time of December 2012 when she signs this deal she should have said to somebody, can I have a fuller account of this?”

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“From a policy perspective, that’s the most troubling aspect of this: that people not expert in this made an otherwise momentous policy that this bank was too big to jail.”

The ‘too big to jail’ argument was subsequently undermined by successful prosecutions of Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas, who entered guilty pleas in similar cases without triggering a banking meltdown.

So instead of what I should have been doing, which was writing a kick ass Breakfast Club, I spent last night watching a movie called Moonrise Kingdom with my family and a few friends.

I think their intention was that I should like this movie, which I do.  It’s a coming of age love story between two quirky misfits set in the Penobscot Islands, just about the best place on the planet as far as I’m concerned.  It features Bill Murray, one of my favorite actors, and Bruce Willis, in one of his less objectionable roles.

Things work out well in the end, most of the jerks come to the realization that they are being jerks and stop it and become inspired to aid the course of true love.

If it’s still available on YouTube I’ll put it up tonight as a Sunday Movie Spectacular, but I’ll warn you in advance that unless you want to spend between .99 and $2.99 for an Amazon stream or a month or two rooting around the remainder bin, you’ll want to install this tool (Free YouTube Downloader) and grab a copy for yourself.  It comes with the usual load of bloatware, so choose ‘custom install’ and decline where possible.  View on YouTube, Share, copy the http:// code and paste it in the downloader, hit the downward pointing arrow on the right.

The rest of the audience felt it was terrifically uplifting and funny, but it left me kind of sad and depressed.

I haven’t quite worked that out yet which is why I’ll have to watch it again, but I think a part of it is that I am 120+ years old and no longer have the innocence and enthusiasm of youth and true belief.  Instead I am trapped in the ashes of past decisions, mostly good but some bad, along with the awful certainty that things never really change for the better and the best and most heroic you can hope to do is keep sticking your fingers in the dike until the tide overwhelms you.  The closest thing to actual excitement I can muster is a rather cynical and insincere quote from a better known Bill Murray movie-

Excuse me Egon?  You said crossing the streams was bad!  You’re going to endanger us, you’re going to endanger our client – the nice lady, who paid us in advance before she became a dog…

Not necessarily.  There’s definitely a very slim chance we’ll survive.

…

I like this plan!  I’m excited to be a part of it!  Let’s do it!

But how does this relate to Art Music?

Well, most of the music in the movie comes from the pen of Benjamin Britten, a central figure of mid-20th Century British Art Music which the female lead plays incessantly on a battery powered record player she stole borrowed from her brother.

This is not surprising, among the works he’s best known for is The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra which if you are of a certain age and cultural background will fill you with instant nostalgia.

But he wrote other, more serious, things too and while he has a resume that proves his mastery of all the conventional forms, he’s best known by older students for his vocal compositions which include many popular Operas (“according to Operabase, they are performed worldwide more than those of any other composer born in the 20th century, and only Puccini and Richard Strauss come ahead of him if the list is extended to all operas composed after 1900.”) and many, many complicated and difficult a cappella pieces sadistic Choirmasters use to torture their Choruses and expose their vocal weakness in front of the public (have I mentioned I spent 5 years in purgatory Choir and am a natural, but very bad, Tenor?).  I suppose this is only to be expected given his Edwardian, Public School education.

Once upon a time there was a prep-school boy. … He was quite an ordinary little boy … he loved cricket, only quite liked football (although he kicked a pretty “corner”); he adored mathematics, got on all right with history, was scared by Latin Unseen; he behaved fairly well, only ragged the recognised amount, so that his contacts with the cane or the slipper were happily rare (although one nocturnal expedition to stalk ghosts left its marks behind); he worked his way up the school slowly and steadily, until at the age of thirteen he reached that pinnacle of importance and grandeur never to be quite equalled in later days: the head of the Sixth, head-prefect, and Victor Ludorum. But – there was one curious thing about this boy: he wrote music. His friends bore with it, his enemies kicked a bit but not for long (he was quite tough), the staff couldn’t object if his work and games didn’t suffer. He wrote lots of it, reams and reams of it.

He was very conscious of the tenuous hold Art Music had on the public and did many film scores and live appearances as a featured performer (pianist) or conductor to pay the bills.  Many of his pieces dealt with alienation, existential angst, and the corruption of innocence.

He was an out homosexual in a long term relationship with his protégé and partner Peter Pears and because of his orientation and his interest in educating young people (as well as his habit, unfortunately common among people of a personality type I share, of simply writing off relationships that don’t work) was the subject of many scurrilous rumors about pedophilia which extensive historical analysis has shown to be no more justified in his case than that of Charles Dodgson, and a secret syphilis infection that was dismissed as “complete rubbish” by his Doctor and the Hospital where he died in 1973 of complications after cardiac surgery.

Rather than the overplayed Young Person’s Guide, today I offer Gloriana, an Opera in 3 Acts written in celebration of Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953.  It’s one of a few works of his that was not a critical success, probably because Elizabeth I (Gloriana) is portrayed “as a sympathetic, but flawed, character motivated largely by vanity and desire.”

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Greece wants to save Europe, but can it persuade Europeans?

by Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Al Jazeera

February 18, 2015 3:40PM ET

Greek voters last month rejected continuation of an austerity program that has plunged their economy into depression, voting in a government determined to break out of the current terms on which Greece gets help from the Troika.

On Monday, it looked as if the negotiations had reached an impasse. Euro members refused to provide Greece with a bridging loan, demanding adherence to the austerity bailout terms negotiated under the previous government.

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European officials, so far, have refused to budge. They are betting that Greece will seek to avoid a default at all costs to dodge a possible banking crisis, which could inflict more hardship on the population and undermine confidence in the new government.

Default on its debts is not an appealing option to Greece, although the consequences of such a move may not be as dire as some expect. Greece currently runs a primary surplus, and may well have enough cash on hand to pursue its stimulus reforms for a while. But at some point, the funding problem will re-emerge. Greece is hoping that improvements to the economy, including rapid growth in employment, incomes and profits that would bring more tax revenue and reduce anti-poverty spending would be sufficiently swift to produce rapid short-term growth, all of which would improve Athens’ ability to borrow from private markets for long-term public investment projects. The fundamental problem, however, remains a loss of monetary sovereignty.

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Fears of a banking crisis in Greece in the event of a default, though, may be overstated. Greek banks are all already regulated by the European Central Bank (ECB). Continuing the U.S. analogy, would the Fed shut down Citibank if the state of Georgia went rogue and refused to pay its debts?

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Germany may be determined to hold the eurozone together, but on terms that enforce the conservative economic orthodoxy first championed by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher across Europe. If, indeed, all parties at the table seek to make the EU a political union, Varoufakis will be arguing that cannot be achieved on the basis of the Troika recipe, but requires broad embrace of more progressive pro-growth principles.

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Greece takes to the negotiating table a desire to stem the humanitarian crisis created by austerity, while avoiding the go-it-alone option of ditching the euro and reintroducing the drachma. But convincing the powers that be in the eurozone, and the vested interests behind them, of the need for a fundamental policy re-orientation toward a more progressive consensus remains a tall order.

Obama Administration Throws Greece Under the Bus; ECB Leak Recommends Capital Controls; Greece Weighing Capitulation (Updated: Germany Rejects Greek Proposal)

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

February 19, 2015

As we’ve said from the outset, as much as we’d liked to see Greece prevail in its efforts to restructure its relationship with its creditors, not just for its own sake but for the benefit of other periphery countries and the Eurozone project, it was unlikely to prevail unless it could rally support. One possible source was the anti-austerity and anti-Eurozone parties in the rest of Europe. Perhaps we’ve missed it, but we’ve seen nary a sign of Marine Le Pen in France or Spain’s Podemos, the two proximate threats to business as usual in the Eurozone, using the extraordinary hostility of the Eurogroup to economically rational proposals from Greece as a talking point.

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And as we pointed out at the time, the Administration had legitimate reason to try to push the recalcitrant Germans and northern countries to relent. The Eurozone is on utterly unsustainable foundatoins. It isn’t just that its structure is defective, with monetary integration but no Federal fiscal structure to allow for Eurozone-wide government spending to help equilbrate economic performance across regions. It is also that the design of the Eurozone is far too skewed to Germany’s advantage. Germany continues to run large trade surpluses with the rest of the Eurozone; they’ve even widened to a record 7.4% of GDP. Germany wants the impossible, to run persistent trade surpluses with its trade partners, yet not finance their purchases.

Unlike the Eurocrats, the Administration, along with most financial analysts, knows that persisting in this course of action assures a Eurozone breakup. And unlike Germany and its allies in the Eurogroup, it believes that a Grexit would pave the way for other countries leaving, and that the consequences of a Eurozone implosion would be catastrophic for Europe and not too pretty for the US either. So the intervention was hardly selfless. And our sources tell us Treasury did expend some effort on Greece’s behalf, although given the lack of movement from the Eurogroup side over the last week, we doubted how forceful a case was made.

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The Greek government should have imposed capital controls by now but was loath to do so, since any leak of that line of thought would increase the deposit run. While it could be done in isolation, simply as a protective measure to prevent deposits being moved out of the country and to reduce daily withdrawals. it would be entirely logical to see it as a step on the way to a Grexit. Anyone with an operating brain cell would want to minimize their exposure to having cash in the bank turned into less valuable drachmas.

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The irony here is that if Greece were willing to default, Germany would have turned an intended subjugation of Syriza into a devastating political wound to the ruling German parties. Refusing to extend the ELA any further, if it were to come to that, merely limits ECB losses. If Greece were to default, it would suddenly expose the size of the commitments to Greece through the Target2 system, the vehicle used to launder the bailout money from Greece to French and German banks. Most Germans have the inaccurate picture than the rescue funds went to stereotypically lazy Greeks, when 91% of the payments actually went to banks.

So this is a story I’ve told before but not with such detail and outrage.

The essence of the scientific method is that theories are disprovable (by contradictory experimental results) and that experiments are replicable.  The reason I call Economics no more than Shamen dancing around a corpse shaking rattles is that the theories are not disprovable (for the most part, since like all social sciences experiments to test the conclusion are impossible to arrange and only observation is feasable) and when examining the results of natural experiments (oh, say austerity in Greece) they are shown to be in direct contradiction of the predicted results.

It’s worse than that he’s dead Jim, Dead Jim, DEAD!

Not that this keeps the Shamen from shaking their rattles and dancing.  It’s FAITH you see and when we’re talking about WASP Christianity the firm belief that the elect, favored by God and predestined before birth to sit at his side on the big rock candy mountain in the sky by and by, display the benefits of God’s grace even in this mortal coil.

That’s why the rich are rich you know.  They deserve it.  And all you all expecting divine justice like some kind of after-life lottery don’t really understand that ‘so above as it is below’ and the opiate of justice is merely to numb your pain as you suffer and die for the benefit of your betters.

You think God wants to hang with you?  You wouldn’t know a pickle fork (two tines) from a dessert fork (three) unless a servant laid them out in the correct order (always good to wait until you can see what your host uses).

Which brings us to the Chicken Heart.  This is why I’m conflicted about Cosby.

My dear readers, you may disagree with my opinions, object to my theories, but when I talk about science I insist that my experiments are reproducible and consistent.

What pushes scientists to lie? The disturbing but familiar story of Haruko Obokata

John Rasko and Carl Power, The Guardian

Wednesday 18 February 2015 08.30 EST

The man in the middle of it all was Alexis Carrel, a brilliant and rather dapper Frenchman working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Carrel discovered that, if you remove some cells from the body, sit them in a nutritious broth and handle them correctly, they can not only survive, but thrive and multiply. Also, if you take some cells from one culture, you can start a new one and, with that, a third, and so on. The importance of this technique – know as cell “passaging” – can’t be overstated. With it, Carrel literally opened a new era in cell research. Unfortunately, he did so with an experiment that, while earning him international superstardom, proved to be a complete and utter train wreck.

On 17 January 1912, Carrel removed a chick embryo from its egg and cut out a small fragment of its still-beating heart with the aim of keeping it alive as long as possible. He had hardly begun this experiment when he announced to the world that his chicken heart culture was immortal, that immortality belonged potentially to all cells, and that death was only the consequence of how cells are organised in the body. In other words, the secret of eternal life is within us all, an attribute of our basic biological building blocks. It captured the public’s imagination and was soon accepted by the scientific community.

Carrel and his assistants kept – or claimed they had kept – that culture alive for 34 years, which is five times longer than the average chicken. For many years, around 17 January, journalists wrote birthday stories on the chicken heart and wondered how large it would have grown had Carrel nurtured every one of its ever-multiplying cells. (According to calculations, it swiftly dwarfed the Earth and filled up the entire solar system.)

The problem was, no one else could keep a cell culture alive indefinitely. Lab after lab tried and failed, decade after decade. Because Carrel was a giant in the field of cell research and a Nobel Prize winner, few dared to doubt him. Scientists blamed themselves when their cells died. They assumed that they lacked the master’s skill, that his lab had higher standards than they could reach, that they had somehow exposed their cells to infection or failed to keep them properly nourished. We now know that the reverse was true. Other researchers probably couldn’t duplicate Carrel’s results because they weren’t incompetent or dishonest enough.

It was only in the mid-60s – half a century after Carrel established his chicken heart culture – that the dogma of cell immortality came crashing down. That’s when Leonard Hayflick, an ambitious young researcher at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, discovered that ordinary body cells have a finite life span – or, more precisely, an average number of times they can multiply in vitro. This is their Hayflick number. For chickens, it is 35. In other words, a population of chicken cells can double about 35 times before they die, which usually takes several months.

By the time Hayflick proved this, Carrel was long dead and his “immortal” chicken cells discarded. Which means that we know Carrel’s most famous experiment was a sham, but not why. If it was fraud, it was one of the most outrageous cases in the history of science. However, the cause may have been carelessness rather than dishonesty. Carrel and his staff used “embryonic juice” as a culture medium and, if they prepared it badly, it might have contained live chick cells. In that case, instead of just feeding their culture, they re-seeded it. It’s an easy enough mistake, but to make it consistently enough to keep their chicken heart cells alive for 34 years suggests an astonishing degree of negligence.

Reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of modern science. Unless an experiment can be repeated again and again by different researchers, each time yielding similar results, it can’t be said to prove anything much. At least that’s the theory. Carrel’s chicken heart experiment shows how far science can stray from the scientific method. And the fault doesn’t just lie with Carrel and his laboratory. The entire scientific community shares some of the blame because it upheld the dogma of cell immortality for more than 50 years despite the fact that it was based on a single, sensational, irreproducible experiment.

Tha-thump.  Tha-Thump!  THA-THUMP!

So why is credibility so important to you ek?

I write pseudonymously.  I don’t delude myself that it protects me from various initialed government agencies, that’s not the point.  What it has done (so far) is keep my mail relatively spam free and save me from random strangers who want me to help them and people who fiercely disagree with me and would like to burn a cross on my lawn (kerosene just ruins the grass, you have to re-sod).

I can not expect you to accept my assertions merely on the basis of my expertise and reputation.  Test them yourself!

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Slimy Microbes May Have Carpeted Earth 3.2 Billion Years Ago by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science
• New Horizons spots Nix and Hydra circling Pluto and Charon, By Emily Lakdawalla, The Planetary Society
• In a Curious Case for Astronomers, a Brown Dwarf Goes Missing, by Andrew Fazekas, National Geographic
• John P. Craven, Scientist Who Shaped Cold War Spying at Sea, Dies at 90, By WILLIAM J. BROAD, The New York Times
• Taps Start to Run Dry in Brazil’s Largest City, By SIMON ROMERO, The New York Times
• “I don’t think a guy would have made ‘Tampon Run'”: Salon talks with gaming girl wonders Andy Gonzalez & Sophie Houser, by Jenny Kutner, Salon
• I gave up social media for Lent, by Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
• Elon Musk Clarifies That Tesla’s Patents Really Are Free; Investor Absolutely Freaks Out, by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt
• A close call of 0.8 light years, University of Rochester, EurekAlert
• The world’s new strongest natural material: Limpet teeth, by Michelle Starr, CNet

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.