SONIA ARRISON WRITES about the mainstreaming of transhumanism. And Alyssa Ford writes that the next big political divide will be between transhumanists and technophiles on one side, and bioconservatives and lefty-Luddites on the other.

I hope not, but as Rand Simberg observes: “If this is the next political divide, I know which side I’m on.”

LINDA SEEBACH emails with the news that the National Conference of Editorial Writers is thinking about ethics. Here are some of the questions they’re asking their members:

The task force will contact all of the syndicates to go over questions that have been raised on this groupserv and elsewhere. This will allow us to compare how syndicates are set up to deal with issues like those that have come to the forefront this year and also ascertain how we can be effective in correcting factual errors.

Among the questions:

How do you screen columnists and editorial cartoonists?
Do you have an ethics policy?
What policy do you follow if contracted columnists/cartoonists violate standard journalism ethics (regardless of where you have an individual ethics policy)?
Do you have a fact-checking process for columnists? How does it work?
When editorial writers or editors find a factual error in a column or cartoon, what effective means can be used to communicate that error and have a correction made?

It’s a start, I guess. Meanwhile, on the ethical front, Patrick Ruffini has some comments on how Big Media folks use blogs:

The Globe takes the White House to task for not distinguishing between conservative and “non-partisan” media. But the Globe does the same in its article, failing to disclose which “Internet bloggers” are fueling the story — (cough)Hatrios(cough)Kos(cough) — and any hint of which political party they might be associated with.

With all the discussion about policing the blogosphere, shouldn’t there be a journalistic code of ethics for how the blogosphere’s work is cited? The Globe glosses over its sourcing by noting that “issue was raised by a media watchdog group and picked up by Internet bloggers” — which is a euphemism for “I didn’t do any original reporting on this. I just cribbed it from Atrios, Daily Kos, and David Brock.”

Why would the Globe be hesitant to provide hyperlinks to the two or three key blogs that brought the story to public attention, or mention their names in its print edition? Is it because disclosing what blogs Globe reporters actually read in their spare time might reflect poorly on the credibility of the story?

Indeed it might.

EASON JORDAN GETS HAMMERED FOR HIS DAVOS STATEMENTS, which seem to be untrue in all respects:

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, during a discussion on media and democracy, Mr. Jordan apparently told the audience that “he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by U.S. troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted,” according to a report on the forum’s Web site (www.forumblog.org). The account was corroborated by the Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, although no transcript of the discussion has surfaced. Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Christopher Dodd were also present, but calls to their offices were not returned in time for publication.

In any event, it’s an assertion Mr. Jordan has made before. In November, as reported in the London Guardian, Mr. Jordan said, “The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the U.S. military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by U.S. forces.” This is very serious stuff, if true. Yet aside from Mr. Jordan’s occasional comments, there’s no evidence to support it. Mr. Jordan’s almost immediate backpedaling seems to confirm this. In a statement to blogger Carol Platt Liebau, Mr. Jordan said, “To be clear, I do not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists in Iraq. I said so during the forum panel discussion. But, nonetheless, the U.S. military has killed several journalists in Iraq in cases of mistaken identity.” He added, “three of my CNN colleagues and many other journalists have been killed on purpose in Iraq.” He didn’t elaborate by whom.

According to information on CPJ’s Web site (www.cpj.org), between 2003 and 2004, 12 journalists were killed as a result of U.S. fire. None was from CNN. At least a few of those were instances of mistaken identity. In one case, Terry Lloyd of ITV News was in an SUV at the start of the war in March 2003. As CPJ notes, an investigative report in the Wall Street Journal cited accounts of U.S. troops who recalled firing upon cars marked “TV” since it was believed suicide bombers were using them to attack U.S. troops. It appears, however, that Mr. Lloyd’s vehicle was caught in a crossfire. Aside from this one dubious case, none of the other reported deaths even remotely resembles intentional targeting by U.S. troops.

Jordan needs to stop hiding behind the PR people and explain what he was talking about. Or resign. There is corruption in Jordan’s business, and he looks to be part of it.

SHOULD WARD CHURCHILL BE FIRED? Eugene Volokh has a long and thoughtful post; he agrees with me and with Steven Bainbridge that the answer is no — except that false claims of being an Indian, under his circumstances, might constitute resume fraud. Read the whole thing.

And here’s Bainbridge’s take:

This is one of those occasions when those of us on the right need to suck it up and echo the line famously attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” We do not remain true to our values if we are willing to say “free speech for me, but not for thee,” even if that is what Churchill likely would say if the shoe were on the other foot.

He’s right.

UPDATE: More background on Churchill from Gerard van der Leun. And The Belmont Club wonders why the story is getting so much attention, nationally, concluding: “the attention lavished on a relatively obscure academic recalls the inordinate power of the Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson cases to put more newsworthy subjects into the shade. The fascination may not be with Ward Churchill himself but with the Leftist demimonde glimpsed briefly through him.”

APPARENTLY, JAMES WOLCOTT has found a new pseudonym. And an editor.

A PACK, NOT A HERD:

Citizens of Al Mudiryiah were subjected to an attack by several militants today who were trying to punish the residents of this small town for voting in the election last Sunday.

The citizens responded and managed to stop the attack, kill 5 of the attackers, wounded 8 and burned their cars.

Heh. May there be more such responses. (Via GayPatriot).

THE L.A. TIMES IS BUSTED AGAIN for repeating an already-exploded canard. What’s next, the return of the plastic turkey?

AFTER YUSHCHENKO, this is going to make a lot of people suspicious:

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) – Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania, who helped lead Georgia’s revolution that toppled the corruption-tainted regime of Eduard Shevardnadze, died early Thursday in a friend’s apartment from what officials claimed was an accidental gas leak from a heater.

Georgia’s interior minister said there was no reason to suspect foul play, but a lawmaker reportedly pointed the finger at “outside forces.” His remarks were aimed at Russia, which has ties with Georgia’s separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and prompted a terse response from Moscow.

I think that this is likely to hurt Putin’s position.

UPDATE: Thoughts on Georgia, and why it matters, here.

DAVID ADESNIK: “Safia al-Souhail was a special guest of the First Family last night at the State of the Union Address. According to al-Souhail, the man who murdered her father on Saddam’s behalf just happens to be one of the businessman who made millions off of the Oil-for-Food scam. Al-Souhail even says that the assassin received the oil vouchers as a reward for his work.”

YESTERDAY, I noted some math problems at the New York Times and joked that this made me worry about their social security coverage.

Well, it’s not the NYT, but the Washington Post had its share of dropped balls on the subject today. More here. To its credit, the Post corrected quickly — just as a blogger might. Perhaps this suggests a gradual convergence between the two modes.

AUSTIN BAY has more thoughts on Eason Jordan:

I’m waiting for CNN to release the actual audio or a full-written transcript of Eason Jordan’s remarks in Davos, Switzerland. That will clarify and –to pinch CNN’s word—properly “contextualize” Jordan’s alleged anti-US slur. We do know this: Jordan’s statement –whether chitchat or slander– was made before an international audience that included a score of Third World elites. These are the ruling class fat cats who have a big say back home about who gets to do what. They are the movers and shakers who have power to influence industrial concessions and –here’s the kicker in this analysis– with a wink and a nod can grant a news organization access to people and places. These elites are themselves potential news sources, bigshots who can add hardhitting soundbites.

Read the whole thing. And read this, too.

UPDATE: Oil-for-food, RatherGate, Eason Jordan — Roger Simon sees a common factor.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Michael Totten has more on Jordan.

LEGALIZING ABORTION IN IRAN? Perhaps they’re trying to demonstrate that they’re progressive.

YOU REALLY CAN buy anything on Amazon!

GAY GROUPS are trying to stop San Francisco from crushing their civil rights.

WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE:

The American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council representing the National and International leadership of the American Indian Movement once again is vehemently and emphatically repudiating and condemning the outrageous statements made by academic literary and Indian fraud, Ward Churchill in relationship to the 9-11 tragedy in New York City that claimed thousands of innocent people’s lives.

Churchill’s statement that these people deserved what happened to them, and calling them little Eichmanns, comparing them to Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who implemented Adolf Hitler’s plan to exterminate European Jews and others, should be condemned by all.

The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement, a situation that has lifted him into the position of a lecturer on Indian activism. He has used the American Indian Movement’s chapter in Denver to attack the leadership of the official American Indian Movement with his misinformation and propaganda campaigns.

That’s got to hurt. One can, of course, be of Indian descent without being an enrolled member of a tribe. Churchill, however, appears to have misrepresented his status.

UPDATE: Indian Country Today has much more:

Suzan Shown Harjo, a columnist for ICT who has tracked Churchill’s career, said that aside from the in-laws of his late Indian wife, he has not been able to produce any relatives from any Indian tribe.

Beyond the question of his personal identity is the question of his standing to represent Indian opinion, not only on 9/11 but also in his other published works. Mohawk ironworkers helped build the World Trade Center and other monuments of the New York City skyline, and one crew was actually at work in the flight path of the plane that struck the second tower. St. Regis Mohawk Chief James Ransom noted that they joined rescue teams at great personal risk.

Churchill’s other writings repudiate not only the U.S. but also most Indian tribal institutions. In one 1994 essay, he described tribal self government as a ”cruel hoax” carried out by ”puppets” of ”an advanced colonial setting.” He equated the status of Indian tribes in the U.S. to that of European colonies in Asia and Africa. His analysis reflected an extreme version of European left-wing ideology.

But wait, there’s more:

Far from suffering for his views, Churchill appears to have been sought out by many in the universities as a representative of American Indian thinking. But to many Native intellectuals, he is traveling under false pretenses, both in his ideology and his personal identity.

So Henry Farrell is rather wide of the mark (as usual) when he suggests that I’m being dishonest in noting that Churchill’s beliefs are representative of a depressingly wide swath of academia. There’s clearly a swath that prefers a fake Indian spouting extreme European leftism when it can get one, so much so that the spouter is actively sought out because of those views. That’s no surprise, of course, to anyone who has been paying attention to academia, which Henry apparently has not.

(Via View from a Height).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Boy, Farrell sure picked the wrong week to try to argue that support for hate-filled leftist stupidity isn’t really a problem in the academy. Churchill, after all, was an administrator at a major American state university. Now we have the ongoing problems at Columbia, a major private university:

COLUMBIA University is about to host yet another apparent anti-Semite. But President Lee Bollinger is still bent on saving his school’s image — rather than grappling with its real problems.

On Feb. 10, Columbia’s Heyman Center for the Humanities will host a talk by Tom Paulin, an Irish poet infamous for telling an Arab paper that Brooklyn-born Israeli settlers “should be shot dead . . . they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.”

Paulin also says that Israel has no right to exist and that he resigned from Britain’s Labor Party because it was “Zionist.”

Of course, Paulin may be defended — if that’s the word — as a mere anti-semite, not an anti-American. Except that he seems to have a special hatred for American Jews:

THE Board of Deputies of British Jews is considering making a complaint to the police over a newspaper interview with the poet Tom Paulin in which he is reported as saying that American-born settlers in Israel should be shot dead.

Honestly, the problem seems hard to deny — unless, that is, you’re in denial. Hostility toward America, and the West generally, is far too common in the academy, and members of the academy not only aren’t doing much about it, too many of them are trying to pretend it doesn’t exist now that people are pointing it out. This is doubly ironic in light of decades of PC efforts to purge the adademy of “hate speech,” efforts which seem to be applied with a rather sharp double standard in which the likes of Paulin and Churchill are seen as “provoking debate,” rather than as practicing hate speech. This certainly makes it appear that some kinds of hate speech are viewed as acceptable, or even good. (Would C.U. have hired this guy?).

MORE: Matt Bruce says that Churchill shouldn’t be fired for his remarks, as that would be a violation of academic freedom. I agree, of course, but academic freedom is no guarantee against criticism. Whether his rather dubious status as an Indian is a firing offense is a different question, and I don’t know enough to have an opinion.

And it’s nice to see that Brown University is not only admitting the problem, but also trying to figure out what to do about it.

On the other hand, here’s another university shutting down efforts to help American soldiers.

IT’S NOT JUST ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS, CONT’D: “NBC Reporter Was on U.N. Lobby Payroll .”

AUSTIN BAY IS ALL OVER THE VOLCKER REPORT: Bottom line: “This is damning. It’s clear Oil For Food was a corrupt mess, that it was used by Saddam’s regime, and that very senior UN leaders benefited from the corruption. Oil For Food boss Benon Sevan has been publicly fingered.”

What’s more, it’s likely to be the tip of the iceberg, as internal investigations usually don’t get all the way to the real dirt.

UPDATE: Mark Coffey says it’s the Thornburgh Report all over again. Yeah.

IT WAS DENTAL SURGERY THIS MORNING, and I’m now in the window between the sedation wearing off and the codeine pills kicking in. I’ll be kicked back watching Gilligan’s Island and Lost in Space DVDs, and not blogging for a while.

But in the meantime, Hugh Hewitt and Ed Morrissey are all over the Eason Jordan story, as is Power Line. Reportedly there’s a video of Eason’s talk — so let’s see it. Now.

And here’s an interesting comparison of media treatment of Social Security reform in 1998 vs. media treatment today.

Finally, Jeff Jarvis isn’t letting go of the Sarah Boxer scandal. And keep scrolling at The Belgravia Dispatch for some interesting analysis of Bush’s foreign policy points last night.

HOPES AND FEARS FOR BUSH’S SECOND TERM: Reason rounds up comments from a lot of smart and famous people. Also me.

And, by the way, this from the Reason folks is also highly recommended.

THOUGHTS on Bush’s Iran Strategy.

UPDATE: Max Boot: “George Bush Talks Big, and He Delivers.”

DUMB INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAWSUITS are killing the model aircraft and ship business.

WINDS OF CHANGE has a State of the Union roundup. And Hugh Hewitt ties it together with Eason Jordan. Well, sort of.

Meanwhile, Dartblog offers a Tom Shales State of the Union review retrospective. And Mickey Kaus writes: “The NYT’s Todd Purdum seems to have heard the grand, ‘sweeping’ speech he expected Bush to give as opposed to the speech Bush actually gave. … When the facts go against the safe, hack, preordained CW theme, print the safe, hack, preordained CW theme!”

HARDBALL’S SOTU ANALYSIS wasn’t quite this bad, but it was pretty lame — especially Chris Matthews’ recycling of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as if he were saying something new and profound.

EASON JORDAN HAS RESPONDED to his critics, but this doesn’t make sense to me. Am I missing something?

UPDATE: Apparently, I’m not. And Steve Sturm has questions about Jordan’s numbers.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reportedly, foreign journalists aren’t corroborating Jordan.

Meanwhile, I just searched Poynter and there doesn’t seem to be any mention of this story at all there. And Ed Morrissey notes that it’s being ignored across the big media. I notice, however, that Poynter found time to mention charges that one obscure correspondent might actually like Bush.

Even Wonkette isn’t buying this.

IDEALISM ON CAMPUS hasn’t died, after all.