News-Record.com

OK, is this thing on?

:: taps mouse several times, mutters "oops," closes Minesweeper window ::

Check! One, two, check!

All righty, then. In three, two ...

Welcome to The Lex Files, the News & Record's second staff-written blog (the first, SportsExtra, is here). I'm Lex Alexander, and I've been a writer and editor for the N&R for a little over 17 years. Currently, I supervise the enterprise/investigative reporting team, in addition to which I'm overseeing some of the political and education writers temporarily while some other editors are on special assignments or cross-training or whatnot. Want something investigated? Get in touch.

When Editor John Robinson gave me the OK to start this blog, I asked the N&R's brand manager what I should say in my first post. She gave me a funny look and said, "Tell 'em who you are. Tell 'em what you're doing. And tell 'em how they can help."

Easy enough, I guess.

I'll spare you the resume, but in the context of this blog, the key thing you need to know about my professional background is that for an English major and a content (the noun, not the adjective) guy, I've got an unhealthy interest in computers. I pushed the N&R to add database analysis to its reporting mix back in the winter of 1990-91, and I led the team of reporters and editors who launched the paper's first Web site, Triad Online, back in late 1994. At the time, we were one of the first 30 or so newspaper Web sites in the country. I also was, so far as I know, the first N&R news staffer to launch a personal blog.

I started blogging in the fall of 1997, although I didn't know that's what it was called, as I kept an online journal of what was going while my wife was pregnant with our first child. This was mainly for the benefit of friends and relatives, of course. I got serious about blogging in April 2002, when I launched Blog on the Run, which I continue to this day.

I encouraged the Powers That Be here at the N&R to get us involved in blogging for a number of reasons, primarily because of the possibilities I saw for the medium to enhance the relationship between the paper and the community. That said, I don't have any grand master plan for The Lex Files. (I didn't have any ground master plan for database analysis or building a Web site either; I figured the important thing was to start doing it as fast and cheaply as possible, first, and then figure out later where we were going with it. That approach has worked OK so far.) What I have is the capacity to blog, without being edited, from home or office, on almost any subject I choose, subject to a few facts and ground rules:

The "safety gap" between sport-utility vehicles and passenger cars is widening:

The gap in safety between sport utility vehicles and passenger cars last year was the widest yet recorded, according to new federal traffic data.

People driving or riding in a sport utility vehicle in 2003 were nearly 11 percent more likely to die in an accident than people in cars, the figures show. The government began keeping detailed statistics on the safety of vehicle categories in 1994.

They're not, of course, as Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-seller "The Tipping Point," wrote earlier this year in The New Yorker:

The truth, underneath all the rationalizations, seemed to be that S.U.V. buyers thought of big, heavy vehicles as safe: they found comfort in being surrounded by so much rubber and steel. To the engineers, of course, that didn't make any sense, either: if consumers really wanted something that was big and heavy and comforting, they ought to buy minivans, since minivans, with their unit-body construction, do much better in accidents than S.U.V.s. (In a thirty-five-m.p.h. crash test, for instance, the driver of a Cadillac Escalade--the G.M. counterpart to the Lincoln Navigator--has a sixteen-per-cent chance of a life-threatening head injury, a twenty-per-cent chance of a life-threatening chest injury, and a thirty-five-per-cent chance of a leg injury. The same numbers in a Ford Windstar minivan--a vehicle engineered from the ground up, as opposed to simply being bolted onto a pickup-truck frame--are, respectively, two per cent, four per cent, and one per cent.) But this desire for safety wasn't a rational calculation. It was a feeling.

I don't hate SUVs or even begrudge them to anyone else. But I spent several years in my 20s going out to fatal wrecks, and so I won't buy an SUV. (Won't buy a motorcycle, either.) Your mileage, of course, may vary.

So if you're not into off-roading, you don't need one to get to work in winter weather and you know SUVs aren't as safe as passenger cars, why would you buy one?

In my first post I mentioned that I had an RSS feed for this blog lying around somewhere. Turns out I had two, and thanks to N-R.com's Stephen Paschall, they're now active. If you look down near the bottom of the page, you'll see two links labeled "RSS 1.0" and "RSS 2.0."

Fascinating, you're thinking, but how is this going to make my life better? Like this: With an RSS newsreader, you can be notified automatically whenever this blog, or any other with an RSS feed to which you subscribe, is updated. No checking back frantically every couple of hours, desperate for another fix of the bloggy goodness that is The Lex Files -- when it's hot 'n' fresh, your RSS newsreader will tell you.

Well, you're thinking, where do I get one? I don't know, but I know how to find out: Google the phrase "free RSS newsreader." Oh, here, never mind, I'll do it for you.. If you don't want to download a program, you can get a free account to use the Web-based news aggregator at Bloglines to keep track of your blogs and indicate when they've got fresh posts.

Once you've installed your program or opened your Bloglines account, that's where the RSS feeds come in. Right-click on one or the other, then click "Copy Shortcut" and paste that link into the appropriate place in the program or Bloglines screen to subscribe to The Lex Files. And you're done!

Either way -- program or Bloglines -- you can keep an eye on your favorite blogs and know when fresh posts are up. Now, tell me, am I making your life easier or what?

In my (limited) experience with people with post-traumatic stress disorder, I somehow had gotten the notion that it derived exclusively from what one experienced. It does, but this fascinating story in The New Yorker says that in the case of the military, it also can derive, with far more devastation, from what one does -- specifically, from killing other human beings. An Army historian, S.L.A. Marshall, who pioneered the after-action report during extensive post-combat interviews with soldiers and Marines during World War II, concluded that this happens because, despite the training soldiers receive, they remain enormously reluctant to kill other humans directly, even when doing so may be essential to their survival:

In 1947, in a slim volume entitled "Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War," Marshall took the military by surprise. Throughout [World War II], he declared, only about fifteen per cent of American riflemen in combat had fired at the enemy. One lieutenant colonel complained to Marshall that four days after the desperate struggle on Omaha Beach he couldn't get one man in twenty-five to voluntarily fire his rifle. "I walked up and down the line yelling, 'God damn it! Start shooting!' But it did little good." These men weren't cowards. They would hold their positions and willingly perform such tasks as delivering ammunition to machine guns. They simply couldn't bring themselves to aim a rifle at another human being-even an armed foe-and pull the trigger. "Fear of killing, rather than fear of being killed, was the most common cause of battle failure in the individual," Marshall wrote. "At the vital point, he becomes a conscientious objector."

In the current Iraq war, though, soldiers are killing with small arms on battlefields the length of a city block. Exactly how many Iraqis American forces have killed is not known-as General Tommy Franks said, "We don't do body counts"-but everyone agrees that the numbers are substantial. Major Peter Kilner, a former West Point philosophy instructor who went to Iraq last year as part of a team writing the official history of the war, believes that most infantrymen there have "looked down the barrel and shot at people, and many have killed." American firepower is overwhelming, Kilner said. He ran into a former student in Iraq who told him, "There's just too much killing. They shoot, we return fire, and they're all dead." Even some of the most grievously wounded Iraq-war veterans seem more disturbed by the killing they did than they are by their own injuries. I spent a week in December among amputees at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and was struck by how easily they could tell the stories of the horrible things that had happened to them. They could talk about having their arms or legs blown off in vivid detail, and even joke about it, but, as soon as the subject changed to the killing they'd done, a pall would settle over them.

Kilner and a number of observers inside and outside the Army worry that the high rate of closeup killing in Iraq has the potential to traumatize a new generation of veterans. Worse, they say, the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs avoid thinking or talking about it.

We ask our young men and women to be prepared to kill in our name. This is the real world; we have little alternative. However, if we're going to ask them to accept that obligation on our behalf, we must accept an obligation on their behalf: to give them all the help and resources they need to deal with the consequences of what they have done, once the shooting has stopped. The military can't simply pretend the problem doesn't exist; to do that is to send these young men and women back to civilian life potentially as disabled as if they had lost an arm or leg. And by extension, we have an obligation to send those young people to kill only when it is absolutely necessary and, therefore, morally justifiable. Doing that makes them better fighters, the research finds. Doing otherwise, on the other hand, significantly increases the chances that they will have psychological problems, either at the time or later. How much? In World War II, before this research had been conducted, the U.S. lost more front-line servicemen to psychiatric problems than to death from enemy fire. If nothing else gets the military's attention, that should.

Well, it's late in the day, I'm swamped and I've got nothin', so I'm going to do what every other blogger in the whole freakin' world is doing today and link to the story of the bear that drank all the beer:

BAKER LAKE, Wash. - When state Fish and Wildlife agents recently found a black bear passed out on the lawn of Baker Lake Resort, there were some clues scattered nearby -- dozens of empty cans of Rainier Beer.

The bear apparently got into campers' coolers and used his claws and teeth to puncture the cans. And not just any cans.

"He drank the Rainier and wouldn't drink the Busch beer," said Lisa Broxson, bookkeeper at the campground and cabins resort east of Mount Baker.

Fish and Wildlife enforcement Sgt. Bill Heinck said the bear did try one can of Busch, but ignored the rest. The beast then consumed about 36 cans of Rainier.

1) Before this summer, my dad had drunk Busch beer for more than 50 years. Finally, this summer, he decided he liked something I can tolerate -- Negra Modelo, which spared me from having to use the ultimate put-down on him: "Geez, Dad, even bears won't drink Busch, and bears will drink anything!"

2) It was a funny story, but it would have been even funnier if the bear had waked up next to some sleeping quadriped whose name he didn't know and he couldn't remember how he got there or where he left his shoes.

I'm just sayin'.

* * *
UPDATE: Punctuation glitches fixed.

A slightly different version of this story was on our front page this morning:

LONDON - Doctors working for the U.S. military in Iraq (news - web sites) collaborated with interrogators in the abuse of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, profoundly breaching medical ethics and human rights, a bioethicist charges in The Lancet medical journal.

In a scathing analysis of the behavior of military doctors, nurses and medics, University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles calls for a reform of military medicine and an official investigation into the role played by physicians and other medical staff in the torture scandal.

He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured. No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found.

"The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations," Miles said in this week's edition of Lancet. "Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib."

The analysis does not shed light on how many doctors were involved or how widespread the problem of medical complicity was, aspects that Miles said he is now investigating.

A U.S. military spokesman said the incidents recounted by Miles came primarily from the Pentagon's own investigation of the abuses.

"Many of these cases remain under investigation and charges will be brought against any individual where there is evidence of abuse," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, U.S. Army spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq. ...

"The detaining power's health personnel are the first and often the last line of defense against human rights abuses. Their failure to assume that role emphasizes to the prisoner how utterly beyond humane appeal they are," Miles said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

So: Is this ever justifiable? If so, under what circumstances? If not, what should happen to those physicians who participated?

Talk to you Monday.

From Will Baude (via Dan Drezner):

I remember being struck that if you took the various signs of "alcoholism" and replaced books and reading as appropriate, nearly all of them applied to me:

Are books a necessary part of your daily routine? Check. Do you become grumpy and irritable if your books are taken away from you? Check. If you begin reading, just a little bit, do you find it hard to stop? Check. Do you find yourself growing distant from friends who disapprove of your book habit? Big check. Do you find yourself needing more and more books to get the same "fix"? Check. When you meet a new person or enter a new room, do you instantly size up his bookshelf? Check. Does your book habit sometimes get in the way of leading a "normal" life? Check. (Think of the countless social engagements I have declined because I preferred to finish an addictive read.) Do you buy books to make yourself feel better when sad or lonely? Check. (Hence: some fifty books purchased in two months in England last fall; less than a dozen this summer).

The moral of the story is-- what exactly? Perhaps that "addiction," especially addiction to things other than ingested chemicals, is a badly-formed concept (consider gambling addiction, internet addiction, book addiction, religion addiction, sex addiction, exercise addiction, and begin to try to draw lines). Of course, [the] joke about water addiction reminds us that even ingested-chemical-addiction may not be a well-formed concept. And also that our ideas on these things are incredibly vulnerable to a status quo bias.

But anyway: What are YOUR addictions? Reading? Reality TV? Breeding rabbits? God forbid, blogging? Can you quit any time you want?

Oh, I've heard that before ...

One thing I'm trying not to do on this blog is blog about blogging itself -- you can go a lot of other places for that. However, I would be remiss if I didn't let you know about the Piedmont Blog Conference, this Saturday in Greensboro, where at least part of the focus will be on political blogging. It's free; additional info is here. Local blogging impresario (and N&R Sunday columnist) Ed Cone has put it together, but it's looking like a large number of less-well-known local bloggers will be attending as well. (I had hoped to, but I have a family commitment that morning.) If you're new to blogging, or if you are familiar with it but want to learn more about political blogging, you ought to go. It promises to be lively and enlightening; I'm looking forward to reading some participants' blogs next week to see how it went.

UPDATE: This conference now has its own blog, which will be updated during the proceedings.

If you think you've been reading an awful lot about school buses in the News & Record lately, you're right.

That's because the Guilford County Schools, in an effort to save money and reduce some lengthy bus rides endured last year by magnet-school students, introduced a new bus system this year that involved students' transferring from one bus to another at "hubs" in the mornings and afternoons. Problem was, almost everything that could go wrong did. The computer software (ancient by computer standards) couldn't do what was asked of it. Students' names were lost by the software, or were never entered in the first place. Students were stranded at stops. Buses ran way late. Parents couldn't get through on the phone to get information. And on and on. If you've read the N&R recently, you already know all this.

But has the N&R overplayed this story? A few readers have said so, as did Superintendent Terry Grier, who called twice -- the second time contacting one of our education reporters at home -- to complain about what he considered excessive coverage of the issue.

Well, I won't speak for the News & Record -- I'll leave that to Editor John Robinson. But as the editor who works with our education reporters (temporarily; some editors are out on special assignment or cross-training), and in the interest of engendering the kind of transparency I think newspapers need more of -- and that blogs can provide -- I'm happy to talk about why *I* think our coverage has been appropriate. (Full disclosure: I have a child at a magnet school. But we've always driven her to school because it's on the way to work, so I have no direct involvement in the issue.)

My reasons, in no particular order:

I was surprised and delighted to read a slightly different version of this story in today's paper:

WASHINGTON - A former dictator's cocktail preferences and a facetious plot against Santa Claus were classified by the government to prevent public disclosure.
Also stamped "secret" for six years was a study that concluded 40 percent of Army chemical warfare masks leaked.

These and other ludicrous and lethal examples of classification were cited Tuesday by members of Congress and witnesses at a House subcommittee hearing into the Sept. 11 commission's conclusion that secrecy is undermining efforts to thwart terrorists.

Some classifications were made in error or to save face.

The CIA deleted the amount Iraqi agents paid for aluminum tubes from page 96 of a Senate report on prewar intelligence. The report quoted the CIA as concluding, "Their willingness to pay such costs suggests the tubes are intended for a special project of national interest."

That price turned out to be not so high. On page 105 of the same Senate report, the same security reviewers let CIA's figure — up to $17.50 each — be printed twice, along with other estimates that the Iraqis paid as little as $10 apiece.

"There are too many secrets" and maybe too many secret-makers, said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., chairman of the Government Reform Committee's national security panel. There are 3,978 officials who can stamp a document "top secret," "secret" or "confidential" under multiple sets of complex rules.

No one knows how much is classified, he said, and the system "often does not distinguish between the critically important and comically irrelevant."

Why? Welcome to Lex's Civics 101:

The government has the power to tax you, and if you don't pay it can imprison you, and if you try not to go to prison it can shoot you. When you strip all the societal and cultural niceties off your relationship with the government, that's pretty much what you're left with. The only way to impose any kind of balance in that relationship is to insist on the maximum level of openness consistent with public safety (including national security). Anything else encourages -- and, I would argue, almost inevitably leads to -- mischief. For every legitimate use of secrecy to protect national security, there are multiple examples of frivolity, self-dealing and even outright fraud. Indeed, if a contractor knowingly sold the Army gas masks when 40% of those masks wouldn't keep the wearer alive and healthy as advertised, you could argue that the contractor has taken the step from fraud up to manslaughter if any soldier dies as a result.

I've been paid for the past 20 years to watch the government, and with very few exceptions (routine hiring decisions among them), the good that comes from government secrecy is outweighed by the bad. On the national level, I'd love to see Congress impose tighter rules on what can be classified in the first place and rigorous standards for declassifying what's already secret. Right now, the executive branch has too much leeway to decide via executive order, when what they're deciding on isn't just their business. It's also yours and mine.

Duuuuudes! My boss is joining the party!

Wait. Does this mean blogging isn't cool anymore? :-)

I had barely begun my adult working life in 1983 when Alan Greenspan was appointed the chairman of a commission charged with figuring out a way to keep Social Security from going broke.

The commission recommended changing Social Security from a pay-as-you-go system, one in which this year's workers pay this year's retirees' benefits, to a trust-fund system, intended to build up enough of a surplus so that the money would be there to pay baby boomers' benefits when they began retiring. As part of those changes, the amount withheld from workers' checks for Social Security (FICA) was raised -- a regressive tax increase because only about the first $75,000 or so ($87,900 in calendar year 2004) of income was subject to it.

Still, the change had the merit of forcing working people to pay more toward their own retirement, and it was projected to lead the Social Security trust fund toward the goal of having a $1.5 trillion surplus on hand when the baby boomers started retiring in large numbers.

Just one tiny problem: Congress looted the trust fund, so to speak, by using that surplus to disguise the true size of the budget deficits we ran in the 1980s and most of the 1990s. That is to say, we used the Social Security surplus to fund government spending and investment. And Greenspan, knowing this, nonetheless said during the 2000 campaign that George W. Bush's proposed tax cuts wouldn't harm Social Security -- even though he knew those tax cuts actually would have to be paid for, to a significant degree, with Social Security money.

But those cuts were approved, as were additional cuts in 2003. And so what happens? Earlier today, at an economic conference in Wyoming, Greenspan called for scaling back federal retirement benefits, warning, "If we delay, the adjustments could be abrupt and painful."

Grrrr. I'd like to show him "abrupt and painful."

I'm not arguing against changes to Social Security, in and of themselves. But I dearly wish our elected officials would bring themselves to discuss the costs of their proposals, and who pays and who benefits, honestly. We Americans are big boys and girls. We can handle the truth.

A fellow member of the N&R's enterprise/investigative team, Taft Wireback, has teamed with sports writer Jeff Carlton to produce a piece for Sunday's N&R examining the prevalance of steroid use among area prep athletes. Editor John Robinson talks a little about that story here.

The online edition of the UNCG student newspaper, The Carolinian, currently offers an article titled, "The Solution to Nudity."

I hadn't been aware that it was a problem.

I wish I could have attended the Piedmont Bloggers Conference on Saturday, but family matters called. I'm delighted to see (in my nowhere-near-comprehensive survey of participants' blogs) that a good time appears to have been had by all. I hope, and expect, that a lot of good things will come out of the event.

At least one good thing already has: my friend and colleague Mark Binker's reflections on the event. You need to read his whole post, which isn't all that long, but I was particularly struck by this passage:

... as people disengage from traditional media, it presents a two-side problem: one side for the [newspaper] industry and one side for the bloggers. (This is the point I was trying to stumble through right before I left.)

For traditional media reporters, we are losing feedback by some of our best and most critical readers. Simply put, if people stop calling you up to talk about the news and go somewhere else (their favorite blog) to rant, you are no longer able to service their wants and needs as effectively. We lose some of the natural network a reporter relies on to collect tips and advance the news.

I heard some folks say that newspaper reporters, especially at big papers, don’t pay attention to individuals. Then those folks aren't very good reporters/journalists/newspeople. A good newsman should always accept and appreciate feedback. Does this mean we can go on every adventure that a caller would like us to? No. But it does mean that we should and do listen to feedback and suggestions when they're offered.

For the folks who are disengaging from traditional media, they are silencing their own voices. They no longer are influencing reporters by their suggestions, no longer influencing editorial page readers with their letters, no longer influencing editors with their critiques of coverage. And as unhappy as they are now with traditional media, if they disengage altogether they simply let traditional media drift further away from meeting their needs.

Precisely. But why does this matter -- other than my obvious self-interest in ensuring that my employer stays in business?

For one thing, although a few bloggers do independent reporting for their blogs (one example being Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo), most rely on the mainstream media, defined here to include Fox News as well as the other cable news networks, for their raw material. That's not to devalue the contributions of bloggers who don't do independent reporting; many bloggers who don't report nonetheless help to advance the issue by raising questions the original reporters didn't.

Why do the mainstream media provide such a big proportion of the raw material? For two related reasons. No. 1: The mainstream media, despite loss of audience and market share in recent years, still have the resources bloggers lack. When a New York Times or a "60 Minutes" goes after a big story, it has the luxury of sparing no expense. And when it's not going after a big story, it can use the same resources to go after lots and lots of small and medium-sized stories. No blog in the world can apply that level of firepower to a big journalistic target, and no single-author blog can spread itself that widely.

Reason No. 2, which is intimately related to Reason No. 1, is that no blog reaches that many people -- at least, not yet -- and it's the size of the audience that determines the ad revenue that makes all those resources possible. All the cable networks' audiences combined still constitute a fraction of what even the least-watched news operation for one of the original Big 3 over-the-air networks can pull in.

Locally, the disparity becomes even more acute. When the News & Record puts a story on A1 above the fold, almost 100,000 people are going to buy that story on any weekday, and a couple of multiples of that number are at least going to glance at it, if not read it all the way to the end. If you want to get a story in front of a big segment of this community quickly and with authority, depth and context, you don't blog it and wait for Greensboro to beat a path to your door: you come to us. And for all the good that blogs do, it's far from clear at this point whether even a wide-ranging network of local blogs ever will be able to fulfill the same function as effectively.

I hope that the N&R will continue to exercise this responsibility for a long, long time. And I expect that it will ... as long as the paper continues to ensure that its stories matter to readers. But I also expect that we will rely increasingly on blogs to help us note stories bubbling up in neighborhoods, issues that might resonate citywide or even more broadly, and to provide feedback on our coverage of those issues so that our coverage remains fearless, independent, useful and relevant.

No new medium has ever wholly replaced another. What happens instead is that each medium adapts, to a greater or less degree, to the presence of the newcomer. Blogs being a kind of hybrid medium, their effects are a bit difficult to predict with confidence. Still, although I'm not an optimist by nature, there is something about blogging that makes me optimistic. You, too, I hope.