Last week, I think it was, there was a big swivet over some leaked, or stolen, documents from the Heartland Institute, purporting to show the underhanded role the think tank plays in pushing climate-change denialism. Though I generally believe the case for man-made global warming, and hate the way many conservatives treat the whole thing as a test of ideological purity, I hesitated writing about all of this after seeing Megan McArdle’s post raising questions about the authenticity of one of the documents. Nota bene, some of them are true and accurate, and reflect poorly on Heartland. But Heartland adamantly claimed that one of the worst was a fabrication. McArdle said they might have a point, and made a case for her suspicions about this sting.

She was right, at least in part. As McArdle posts tonight, Peter Gleick, chair (until, like, yesterday) of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics, confesses to having contacted Heartland under a false name, and tricked them into sending him the confidential material. As a gobsmacked McArdle writes:

This is . . . just . . . words fail me . . . I mean, seriously . . . um . . . well, what the hey?!?!

The very, very best thing that one can say about this is that this would be an absolutely astonishing lapse of judgement for someone in their mid-twenties, and is truly flabbergasting coming from a research institute head in his mid-fifties.  Let’s walk through the thought process:

You receive an anonymous memo in the mail purporting to be the secret climate strategy of the Heartland Institute.  It is not printed on Heartland Institute letterhead, has no information identifying the supposed author or audience, contains weird locutions more typical of Heartland’s opponents than of climate skeptics, and appears to have been written in a somewhat slapdash fashion.  Do you:

A.  Throw it in the trash

B.  Reach out to like-minded friends to see how you might go about confirming its provenance

C.  Tell no one, but risk a wire-fraud conviction, the destruction of your career, and a serious PR blow to your movement by impersonating a Heartland board member in order to obtain confidential documents.

As a journalist, I am in fact the semi-frequent recipient of documents promising amazing scoops, and depending on the circumstances, my answer is always “A” or “B”, never “C”.

It’s a gross violation of journalistic ethics, though perhaps Gleick would argue that he’s not a journalist–and in truth, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Heartland, given how gleefully they embraced the ClimateGate leaks.  So leave ethics aside: wasn’t he worried that impersonating board members in order to obtain confidential material might be, I don’t know, illegal?  Forget about the morality of it: the risk is all out of proportion to the possible reward.

Read McArdle’s entire post. If you like, here is Heartland’s reaction to Gleick’s confession. Looks like Pete better lawyer up. To be clear, this by no means exonerates Heartland from the embarrassing material in the bona fide documents. But Peter Gleick lied to trick someone into giving him confidential information. In so doing, he made himself the story — and handed to his opponents a public relations victory of monumental proportions.

Here’s a photo of the remains of the king cake we bought at Whole Foods today:

The little plastic baby is phthalate-free, and comes with instructions on how to deploy him safely. Lord have mercy, that’s Whole Foods for you. SWPLs hate they phthalates. Though I missed the umami goodness of phthalate essence, it was, in fact, quite possibly the best king cake I’ve ever eaten. Happy Mardi Gras, people.

How exhausting it must be to be a liberal in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where you can never stop thinking about politics, especially cultural politics. Remember the 2006 Park Slope freak-out over a resident posting a “found” notice on a neighborhood e-mail list involving what she identified as a “boy’s hat”? The gender politics exploded over that one. It started with this:

I’m sorry, I know that you are just trying to be helpful, but what makes this a “boy’s hat”? Did you see the boy himself loose it? Or does the hat in question possess an unmistakable scent of testosterone?

It’s innocent little comments like this that I find the most hurtful…

What does this comment imply about the girl who chooses to wear just such a hat (or something like it)? Is she doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with her?

And then the crazies really came out. At one point:

As someone else pointed out, this was the very same forum where, just recently, all kinds of people wrote of the anguish they felt about their young children already acting in gender-stereotyped ways. Although I myself did not realize at first that there was anything amiss about saying “boys’ hat,” and I say things like that, unwittingly, all the time, I do recognize how such expressions are caused by and contribute to gender stereotyping. Without people to point this out to us, how do we change our language, and thereby change the way our children perceive gender?

Can you imagine? Well, here’s the latest Park Slope bourgeois lefty Gotterdammerung, via the Wall Street Journal:

After three years of heated debate, the Park Slope Food Coop is at last ready for a vote.

That is, a vote on if, in fact, there should be a vote at all.

Next month, the 15,500-plus member cooperative will decide whether to hold a referendum on what may be the most controversial issue in its nearly 40-year history: a boycott of products made in Israel.

The boycott—which has dominated the coop’s newsletter with back-and-forth letters for months—is expected to draw as many as 1,000 people, forcing co-op staff to look for an alternative meeting location.

… The co-op is used to spirited discussions. The decision to introduce meat at an institution where organic and nonorganic products don’t comingle was divisive. The green light to sell beer came only after two referendums spaced more than a decade apart. And a ban on bottled water took two years to push through.

But the issue of an Israeli boycott has evolved into the most polarizing debate yet.

Conor Friedersdorf defends homeschooling. Excerpt:

Society benefits from institutional diversity too. Goldstein writes, “I benefited from 13 years of public education in one of the most diverse and progressive school districts in the United States. My father, stepmother, stepfather, and grandfather are or were public school educators.” Says deBoer, “What I learned by coming up, K-12, surrounded by children who were not like me on many dimensions was that this diversity is in and of itself the best education.” They seem curiously blind to the fact that many attendees of private schools and homeschooling collectives can speak as eloquently about unique things they learned at school. The Catholic school system, where I was educated, soured me on the faith, but I was able to glean substantial wisdom from the Catholic perspective on the world, and I’d doubtless have learned a different set of valuable lessons had I been educated by Hindus or Muslims or Alan Jacobs.

Would these different sorts of wisdom all survive if an increasingly centralized public school system operated as a monopoly? Aren’t we better off in a society that draws on folks who got different sorts of education? Some progressives seem to think a diverse society is one where every 14-year-old in America arrives at school, pledges allegiance to the nation’s flag, takes out an American history textbook shaped by panels of bureaucrats in California and Texas, and proceeds to be guided by a teacher with a state issued credential in how best to pass a standardized test. Who is celebrating diversity, the champions of putting every kid in the education wonk’s vision of the ideal classroom, or the folks who want some kids to start their day interacting with multi-ethnic classmates while others start their school day praying and still others learn about raising backyard chickens?

The final question is what sort of educational system is likely to produce the best results in the long run, or to be more specific, what system is best suited to evolving in advantageous ways. I’d bet on the diversified system, the one where there are always competitors with different models to measure public schools against.

Read the whole thing. 

Reader GingerMan points to these two James Poulos posts — here’s the first, and here’s the second — as being accurate descriptions of the culture war, as it touches upon human sexuality. GingerMan writes:

It comes down to belief in natural law vs. the liberation of the protean self.

The precise problem facing cultural conservatives is that we have a rights-based legal and constitutional framework combined with a large and polyglot cultural society. Coming to agreement upon the boundaries of natural law seems to be well nigh impossible in such an environment, therefore only procedural liberalism can fill the vacuum.

Poulos writes, in his first column:

In a simpler time Sigmund Freud struggled to understand what women want. Today the significant battle is over what women are for. None of our culture warriors are anywhere close to settling the matter. The prevailing answer is the non-answer, a Newt-worthy challenge to the premise that insists the real purpose of women is nothing in particular.

Such an answer may or may not be a landmark in the progress of the human race, but it is anathema to most conservatives of any political party, and for that reason conservative folkways, prejudices, and ideals are once again on trial.

Poulos explores the divisions on the cultural left about the purpose of femininity, and of women, if indeed there is purpose there. If women are entirely free to define themselves and to choose their own behavior, then that puts them in conflict with others on the cultural left. In his follow-up column, written in response to an avalanche of contempt from the left, Poulos writes:

It’s not very controversial to point out that sex and gender are foundational to the culture wars. But it is apparently extremely controversial to claim that we can’t make sense of how and why they’re foundational without acknowledging that the root of the battle is over reaching — and enforcing — a consensus about the relationship between what women do and who women are.

This despite the fact that many on both sides of the culture war are frank about their desire to craft an enforceable consensus on issues like abortion, birth control, prostitution, gay marriage, and gay adoption.

For many on both sides, the belief is that their opponents really do stand for barbarism and against civilization. Supporters of the right to choose to have an abortion are believed by many pro-life people to support a barbaric, uncivilized act. Those who would restrict officially recognized marriages to one man and one woman are seen by many gay marriage advocates as using the power of the law to atavistically reverse the partly organic, partly hard-fought progress of civilization.

I confess I don’t really understand what James is advocating for, other than the general point that GingerMan discerns, and James’s view that the clash of orthodoxies here is more than our political system can bear. But that itself is enough. Read the responses to James’s columns, and you see how fierce this battle is. There’s a reason it’s called a culture war — and I do wish the left would disabuse itself of the pretense that only the right fights it.

A young friend who’s in college gave up Facebook for the spring semester, saying it was too much of a distraction, and that she needed to focus on her schoolwork. She told me recently that getting off of Facebook was a really smart move. She was an avid Facebooker.

Longtime readers know that I keep Facebook very much at arm’s length. I see the appeal, but I don’t have time for it. I never check it. Every day I approve friend requests automatically, but again, I never actually use Facebook, so I don’t know why I do it. The more I read about how Facebook compromises one’s privacy, the more I question whether I ought to be participating in it. The one thing I do use it for is the occasion that someone who doesn’t know my e-mail address wishes to write me — but even then it can be a long time before I get that message, depending on how often I check it. Oh, and sometimes it’s easier to write to old friends via FB than to try to remember their current e-mail address. So that’s another use.

I don’t hate Facebook, but I do sometimes wonder if I’m giving people a false impression of my availability by having an FB page. And, well, the privacy thing. What’s the point in being a part of something I never participate in, and possibly compromising my privacy? I’m feeling very Bartleby the Scrivener about Facebook these days. Maybe I should give it up for Lent. Simplify, simplify, et cetera.

Ken Myers — whose fantastic Mars Hill Audio Journal you Christians in my readership really ought to subscribe to — delivered the keynote address last year to a conference of the Society for Classical Learning, an organization devoted to promoting and supporting the classical model of education among Christians. There are variations on the classical model within Christian communities, but they all involve the study of Greco-Roman literature and philosophy, and the Christian humanist tradition of the West. At the SCL convention in Baltimore last summer, Ken spoke on the importance of classical education in our own time and place. I will quote generously from his speech, with his permission:

I’m not a follower of the Evangelical writer Lauren Winner’s work, but I was surprised to read that she has been ordained an Episcopal priest, has been divorced from her husband, and has written a book about it, her second memoir. She’s 35. Excerpt from a story about it:

Winner said she no longer feels comfortable doling out advice on sexual ethics. Nor does she want to talk about her marriage or any other subsequent relationships. The couple were married six years and split up in 2009.

“Still” reflects that tightrope act: It is at once a veiled attempt to describe a personal crisis and what Lischer called a “book of hours,” a collection of devotions comprising prayers and meditations.

If her life turned out messy, Winner seems to say, why not use that as an example to help others going through similar quandaries?

“In Christianity there’s this script of, you do the right things and you will not come to that place of despair, and something is wrong with you if you do,” she said. “I didn’t feel I had an abundance of preparation for hitting that experience.”

Hmm. I’ve read her work before, and she’s a good writer, but I’m not sure that someone that young, with so much tumult in her background — raised Reform Jewish, she converted to Orthodox Judaism as an undergraduate, then to Christianity as a grad student; married, divorced, and now a priest — I’m not sure what someone so incredibly unsettled has to teach others about the spiritual life. I say that as someone who has followed a comparably winding, rocky, and restless spiritual path. It’s no false humility to say that I don’t have anything all that useful to advise people about how to conduct their spiritual lives, given the disorder and instability in my own history. It’s a relief to be working on a book about my sister’s way of life, to just tell it like it was for her, and to try to convey the lessons in the life and death of someone so alien in her steadfastness and certainty. It’s a disburdening process, simply learning how to shut up and learn something.

People interested in the “Catholic Moment” threads (see here and subsequently here) may be interested to read Russell Shorto’s long NYT Magazine piece from 2011 about the relationship between Church and State in Ireland, in the aftermath of the abuse scandals. (And people who aren’t, keep reading this post … I’m going to get to “Downton Abbey” in a moment.) From Shorto’s report:

Over the course of the 20th century, Station Island became a symbol of the way that Catholicism rooted itself in the Irish nation. Politics at the beginning of the century centered on two debates: British rule and religion. There were those — like the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the poet William Butler Yeats — who thought that the potential break with England constituted an occasion for Ireland to cut the strings to the Catholic Church and to embrace a progressive, international sensibility. Others wrapped Irish patriotism together with Catholicism, agrarian traditions and the Gaelic language, and they won the day. Eamon De Valera, the political leader, drafted a constitution side by side with the all-powerful archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, which gave the Catholic Church a special role in state affairs and which to this day begins with the words, “In the name of the most holy trinity.”

Thus the 20th-century image of “Irishness” came into being: rural, charming, locked in an eternal, tragicomic struggle with the church. The archbishops of Dublin became something like grand inquisitors, wielding great power. The church’s heavy influence on Irish society kept the wider world at bay for a surprisingly long time. Eamon Maher told me that in the 1970s, his parents found it profoundly disorienting when the evening recitation of the rosary suddenly had to compete with American shows like “Dallas,” and “the world of wealth, flash cars and extramarital affairs.” Contraception was illegal in Ireland as recently as 1980, and until 1985 condoms were available only with a prescription.

As secularism advanced in other parts of the world, successive popes relied on Ireland as a bulwark and pushed Irish leaders to keep the church in the country’s structure. In 1977, Foreign Minister Garret FitzGerald noted that in a private meeting, Pope Paul VI stressed to him “that Ireland was a Catholic country — perhaps the only one left — and that it should stay that way” and that he should not “change any of the laws that kept the republic a Catholic state.” That continues to this day, according to Ivana Bacik, a senator for the opposition Labor Party who has been a leader in the effort to extricate the church from the state. As she put it, “In no other European nation — with the obvious exception of Vatican City — does the church have this depth of doctrinal involvement in the affairs of state.”

According to Abbot Hederman, the hierarchy of the church in Ireland believed that the nation had a special role as a kind of citadel of Catholicism: “Ireland was meant to be the purest country that ever existed, upholding the Catholic ideal of no sex except in marriage and then only for procreation. And the priest was to be the purest of the pure. It’s not difficult to understand how the whole system became riddled with what we now call a scandal but in fact was a complete culture. Because you had people with no understanding of their sexuality, of what sexuality even was, and they were in complete power.”

I’m not the first to observe that for a show set in a world in which people are grouped by their inherited privilege or ineluctable servitude, the popularity of “Downton Abbey” seems paradoxical in these times of Occupy protests and presidential candidates who aren’t concerned about the very poor and who pay less in taxes proportionally than does Warren Buffett’s secretary. Clearly, something about this show appeals to our deepest desires, granting us the cake-having and cake-eating satisfaction of indulging in a fantasy of a bygone era that we’re actually thankful is gone.