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Several Catholic bloggers have responded to Monday's piece on the new "common-ground" abortion reduction bill. Two of their points are particularly worth addressing. First, this objection from Rick Garnett at Mirror of Justice:
I would be more enthusiastic about a compromise proposal that including increases in [welfare] spending *if* the the pro-abortion-rights side were actually compromising. But ... that side is, generally speaking, not giving anything up. Indeed, they are asking pro-lifers to agree that it is "compromise" to accept the roll-back of the gains they have secured. What is happening, instead, is that many of us who are pro-life are being asked to accept a legal—indeed, a constitutional—regime in which citizens are disabled from meaningfully regulating (as opposed to financially disincentivizing) abortion. ...
That would be a fair objection, if the pro-lifers supporting the bill were indeed accepting abortion's legality. But they aren't. Read their statements. Several of them make clear that they're going to keep right on working to outlaw abortion. They're supporting this bill anyway, because they think it will help the bottom line: fewer abortions.
Second, Charles Camosy, one of the bill's pro-life endorsers, has elaborated on his objections to its contraceptive provisions. In a post at Commonweal, he writes:
I wonder what people think about pro-lifers (and particularly Catholic pro-lifers) compromising their views on contraception to support a bill like this? I was asked to giving a supporting statement (in particular because, not surprisingly, they found themselves in need [of] pro-life Catholic moral theologians), but I had about a difficult, three-day-long e-mail conversation with the person who asked me before I gave one. I don't think the contraceptive provisions of the bill will lessen the abortion rate (in fact, they may [make] it worse in promoting as a ‘solution' a mentality which continues to perpetuate the moral and actual divide between sex and procreation and thus, to a large extent, the logic of abortion), but because (1) there was so much other good stuff in this bill and (2) it is a major step in building common ground and beginning to find a way out of this horrific mess of a culture war, I decided to offer provisional support while making my making my reservations known.
At the American Catholic, a commenter expresses a similar concern:
[I]f one seeks to increase the amount of sex that people who think they are currently unable to support a child have (which is what the pushing of "safe sex" amounts to) the failure rate of popular means of contraception will inevitably result in an increase in the number of unplanned pregnancies ...
I respect these concerns, but the data don't support them. To repeat:
On average, contraception lowers your odds of pregnancy by a factor of seven. If you're capable of having seven times as much sex, congratulations. The rest of us will get pregnant less often, not more. ...
Among [low-income] women, the percentage using contraception declined from 1995 to 2002. As predicted by contraception opponents, the rate of sexual activity also declined, though only slightly. Even better, from a pro-life standpoint, when these women got pregnant unintentionally, the percentage who chose abortion fell. Less contraception, less sex, more women choosing life. So, the abortion rate among these women went down, right? Wrong. It went up. The decline in contraception overwhelmed the decline in sexual activity, resulting in a higher rate of unintended pregnancy. And the increase in unintended pregnancy overwhelmed the increase in women choosing life, resulting in more abortions. From a pro-life standpoint, trading contraception for abstinence and a "culture of life" was a net loss.
Critics of the contraceptive approach to abortion reduction are right that contraceptive availability, by itself, doesn't guarantee a decline in unintended pregnancy. That's because contraception doesn't work unless people use it. But that isn't an argument against contraception. It's an argument for teaching and preaching its use. And yes, that's a more realistic goal than abstinence.
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Ultimately, the militants don't care what's in the abortion-reduction bill. The mere fact that some pro-choicers support it is, by their reckoning, grounds to oppose it. NRLC Legislative Director Doug Johnson scoffs that the bill was drafted "under the direction of [a] career pro-abortion activist" (Rachel Laser of Third Way) and her congressional "sock puppet" (Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio), who's trying to hide "his close collaborative relationship [with] key pro-abortion groups." Never mind that Laser has put in years of work, antagonized her friends, and risked her career as a pro-choicer for Johnson's cause. Never mind that Ryan has stood up for unborn life, vote after vote after vote after vote, in a party committed to legal and publicly funded abortion. Any pro-lifer who collaborates with pro-choicers is a traitor, any pro-life bill involving a pro-choicer is a "scam," and any Catholic who supports such a bill is a "fake" Catholic. Common ground is impossible. In the name of life, we must fight to the death.
More here.
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Oops!
Remember that Chinese policy of restricting most couples to one child? Apparently, the bean counters in Shanghai (actually, they're human-being counters) have changed their minds. According to Reuters:
Shanghai is urging eligible couples to have two children as worries about the looming liability of an aging population outweighs concerns about over-stretched resources, a city official said on Friday. The policy marks the first time in decades Chinese officials have actively encouraged procreation. ... More children would help relieve the heavy pressure from aging people, said Zhang Meixin, a spokesman for the Shanghai Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission ...
The U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies warned in April that by 2050 China ... will have just 1.6 working-age adults to support every person aged 60 and above, compared with 7.7 in 1975. ... China's underfunded state pension system and shrinking family size has removed a traditional layer of support for elders, leaving society ill-prepared to cope with an aging population.
You don't say.
This is the main problem with central family planning (if you don't count the tyranny). Centralized systems are more farsighted but less sensitive and adaptive than decentralized systems. Look at abortion rates in nontotalitarian countries: They go up or down in conjunction with economic indicators. Each woman decides how big a family she can afford and whether now is a good time to have a baby. Sure, there are outliers and mistakes. But overall, the crowd of procreators acts prudently. And when circumstances change, family size adjusts accordingly.
Centralized systems interfere with this natural dynamic. They make it harder to change course. And they never seem to learn that the problem is centralization itself.
So good luck, Shanghai being counters. May your generational ledgers even out, despite you.
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Should baseball teams be prohibited from DNA-testing prospective players?
Here's the background, provided by the New York Times:
Confronted with cases of identity and age falsification by Latin American baseball prospects, Major League Baseball is conducting genetic testing on some promising young players and their parents. Many experts in genetics consider such testing a violation of personal privacy. Federal legislation, signed into law last year and scheduled to take effect Nov. 21, prohibits companies based in the United States from asking an employee, a potential employee or a family member of an employee for a sample of their DNA.
It looks to me as though the tests should be allowed in this case, but with certain conditions.
1. You can test for contractual identity fraud, not necessarily for medical conditions. According to the Times,
Major League Baseball said that it used DNA testing in the Dominican Republic "in very rare instances and only on a consensual basis to deal with the identity fraud problem that the league faces in that country." The statement added that the results of the tests were not used for any other purpose. ... The DNA test does not reveal an age, but it can reveal whether the player is the son of his claimed parents. Players have been known to find families willing to lend a younger child's birth certificate so that a player can appear younger.
2. There has to be a prior evidentiary basis for suspecting fraud. In this case, there is. "Dozens of Latin American prospects in recent years have been caught purporting to be younger than they actually were as a way to make themselves more enticing to major league teams," says the Times. Several years ago, "more than 300 players in the major and minor leagues were found to have falsified their birthdates, according to Baseball America."
3. Less invasive verification methods must be tried first. Baseball investigators "look into whether prospects are being truthful about their identities and ages," the Times reports. "If those findings are inconclusive, the player is invited to clear up the concerns by providing a DNA sample from himself and his parents, according to [a league] official." And DNA isn't the only way to check your story against your body: "Some players have also had bone scans to be used in determining age range."
4. All testing and records must be controlled by an independent party. Here's where the league has to change its policy. When queried by the Times, "[a] spokesman for Major League Baseball declined to say how many players had been tested and whether the results were stored or destroyed." Furthermore, in at least one case, a prospective player says he "provided samples of his blood, urine and feces to Major League Baseball investigators so they could assess his DNA and any possible use of performance-enhancing drugs."
These practices won't cut it. DNA tests for identity fraud should be permitted precisely because they aren't tests for predicting future health. The two practices have to be kept separate. To guarantee this, any DNA sample or records that can be used to make inferences about health must be either destroyed or retained by an agent who is not under the control of the employer. The point isn't that employers are never entitled to information about health conditions. The point is that such information, if permitted, must be sought and approved separately.
It won't surprise me if these issues end up in the Supreme Court within the next few years. And it won't surprise me if the ruling includes these four conditions.
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Cell-phone use while driving is a brain problem, not a hands problem. Even with hands-free use, phones suck your brain out of the physical world, fatally distracting you from the road. Second, the effect is as bad as driving drunk. Hands-free phone use can impair driving skills more than intoxication does.
We prohibit driving under the influence of alcohol. We should prohibit driving under the influence of cell phones, too. But giving up our phones is hard. How can we do it? How can we maintain what cell phones offer—mobile access—without endangering others?
More here.
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Here's a real-life horror story, reported by Joby Warrick and Peter Finn in Sunday's Washington Post:
Abu Zubaida was waterboarded 83 times over four or five days, and Mitchell and Jessen [two CIA contractors on site] concluded that the prisoner was broken, the former U.S. official said. "They became convinced that he was cooperating. There was unanimity within the team."
CIA officials at the Counterterrorist Center were not convinced. "Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent," the former official said. "Headquarters said it would be on the team's back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, 'You've lost your spine.' " ...
The two men threatened to quit if the waterboarding continued and insisted that officials from Langley come to Thailand to watch the procedure, the former official said. After a CIA delegation arrived, Abu Zubaida was strapped down one more time. As water poured over his cloth-covered mouth, he gasped for breath. "They all watched, and then they all agreed to stop," the former official said.
The nice way of looking at this episode is that the officials from Langley immediately recognized Zubaida's water-boarding as useless torture. The not-so-nice way is that they authorized it 83 times, and demanded 30 more days of it, before they took the trouble to see it firsthand. Apparently, one look was enough to change their minds. Too bad they didn't try that a bit earlier.
According to Warrick and Finn, an Obama administration task force is about to submit protocol recommendations for future interrogations. Here's Human Nature's proposal: No technique shall be applied until the authorizing official has witnessed it, at least on video.
I'm not ruling out water-boarding. But before you tell your pals around the water cooler that it's a vital interrogation tool or that the bastards deserve it, check out one of the demonstrations posted on the Internet, such as the waterboarding of Slate and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens. You can also read David J. Morris' firsthand account of a water-boarding, published here six months ago.
The same goes for any other violent or lethal practice you countenance from the comfort of your desk. Capital punishment? Watch an execution. Eating meat? Check out a slaughterhouse. Abortion? Peruse the video library or, if the pregnancy is yours, look at an ultrasound. And don't think that opposing these practices insulates you from the same responsibility. If you think capital punishment is never warranted, acquaint yourself with the handiwork of a few murderers. Before you defund international family-planning agencies, meet some malnourished children.
You're entitled to your opinion. But you're not entitled to your ignorance. Go educate yourself. It's worth leaving the comfort of your desk, even if you work at Langley.
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If you've ever seen a TV cop show, you know you're entitled to one phone call after you're busted. But that was before you could get unlimited, unmonitored calls from a cell phone chucked over a prison fence. Want to call your lawyer? The employees in your still-thriving drug business? A hit man to take out that witness who's scheduled to testify against you? The getaway driver you've hired to complete your escape? Thanks to prepaid, concealable, untraceable mobile communication devices, it's no problem.
Check out the latest numbers. Cell phones confiscated in federal prisons last year: more than 1,600. In Mississippi state prisons: more than 1,800. In California: more than 2,800.
Yesterday the Senate held a hearing to debate what to do about this. The bill on the table would authorize jamming of cell-phone signals in prisons. The wireless carriers' association, CTIA, showed up to testify against it. You can find good writeups and overviews from Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica, Ryan Singer at Wired's Epicenter, and Chloe Albanesius at PC Magazine.
The industry's argument is that jamming could disrupt legitimate cell-phone use, including cops and firefighters, whereas more sophisticated methods would nail just the bad guys. I'm skeptical of the first argument but interested in the second. Cell phones in prison, like IEDs in war and submersibles in drug-running, are part of a technology arms race. You can't win such races with sheer force, killing civilians or causing other collateral damage. You need precision.
Steve Largent, CTIA's president, proposed two alternatives to jamming. First,
With cell detection systems, prison administrators and correctional officers can detect, locate, and confiscate unauthorized wireless devices found in a correctional environment. Confiscated wireless devices can provider correctional authorities and law enforcement with call records, address information, and even photographs that can assist in disciplinary actions and criminal prosecutions. Alternatively, once illicit devices have been detected, prison officials and law enforcement may decide to leave them in place and arrange to monitor them in accordance with the wiretap statutes.
Second,
another promising technological solution to this problem involves the use of managed access. This approach enables a corrections facility to manage wireless access in a controlled area, such as a prison. Managed access would restrict communications on the commercial wireless networks to only a subset of allowed users (also known as a "white-list"). Other users are blocked from the commercial system access in the area.
I like both ideas. But are they ready to deploy? Largent told the committee:
Just last week, CTIA convened a day-long meeting involving North American vendors of cell detection and managed access solutions and engineers from a number of CTIA's carrier members to discuss potential solutions to this issue. We hope our efforts will put the industry in a position to trial alternative solutions in partnership with various states ...
Good for you, CTIA. But I don't believe for a minute that you'd be working hard on these alternatives if you weren't facing the threat of federally authorized jamming. And this is one reason why I'm not a pure libertarian. Can technology help the good guys stay ahead in the cell-phone arms race? Yes. Is industry better than government at coming up with creative, pinpoint solutions? Yes. Will industry do this without the threat of clumsy, burdensome government intervention? No.
So thank you, senators, for applying the heat. And don't forget the same lesson as you're legislating health care reform. Government-run alternatives don't always have to outperform private industry. They just have to scare it.
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Two years ago, we studied the lessons of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in Iraq. Since then, the United States has begun to implement withdrawal plans from that country. Now IEDs are spreading in Afghanistan. Have we learned our lessons?
In today's New York Times, James Dao reports that Afghan IEDs
are becoming more common and more sophisticated with each week, American military officers say. This year, bomb attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan have spiked to an all-time high, with 465 in May alone, more than double the number in the same month two years before. At least 46 American troops have been killed by I.E.D.'s this year, putting 2009 on track to set a record in the eight-year war. ... At the current rate, I.E.D. attacks on Afghan forces could reach 6,000 this year, up from 81 in 2003, an American military official said.
At least three of the lessons we drew from Iraq seem to apply in Afghanistan. First, IEDs enable insurgents to strike with a level of precision that would be impossible from a distance. Second, IEDs can be assembled from inexpensive, readily available components, such as fertilizer, artillery shells, and cell phones. Third, instead of risking human lives, you can hunt or disable IEDs with dogs or robots. The bomber isn't risking his life. Why risk yours?
Afghan insurgents are exploiting the same cheap technology that worked in Iraq. According to Dao, "The bombs are often made with fertilizer and diesel fuel, but some use mortar shells or old mines that litter the countryside. Some bombs are set off when vehicles pass over pressure plates. Others require remote control, like a cellphone. Still others detonate with a button or a wire touched to a battery." Likewise, we're using familiar detection methods: dogs, robots, and drones.
So what has changed? One difference is a lower level of technology in Afghanistan. Sometimes this works to the insurgents' advantage:
With few paved roads, Afghanistan is even more fertile territory for I.E.D.'s. than Iraq, where hard pavement often forced insurgents to leave bombs in the open. Not so in Afghanistan, where it is relatively easy to bury a device in a dirt road and cover the tracks.
But it can also make them vulnerable. U.S. officials tell Dao that IED deployment networks connect top layers of "financiers, logistical experts, bomb designers and trainers" with lower layers of "bomb planters, often villagers or nomadic herdsmen paid $10 or less to dig holes and serve as spotters." The weak link is the top layer. In Afghanistan, there may be fewer people with the expertise to run such networks than there were in Iraq.
To get the key players, you have to operate like a crime scene investigator. Dao reports:
Like a police forensic unit and a bomb squad rolled into one, Lieutenant Brown's 25-member team not only disarms I.E.D.'s but also scours sites—more than 50 this year—for telltale signatures of a bomb. Soil samples, electrical parts, fingerprints and photographs are sent for analysis, and detailed reports are compiled in a central database.
This is one of the main questions being tested in Afghanistan: Can forensic investigation and a pooled database unravel IED networks? Can high-tech police work catch the experts and organizers instead of settling for the suckers who plant the bombs? IEDs, like drones, are an evolving story of measures and countermeasures, technologies of destruction and technologies of detection. We don't know how the story will turn out. But we know which weapon will prevail. It won't be a device. It will be a process, a talent, and an attitude: innovation.
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Black people, on average, are more likely to die of cancer than white people. Is part of that difference genetic? The Journal of the National Cancer Institute just published a big study on this question. If you haven't heard about the study, maybe that's because you get your news from television, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, or the New York Times, which have ignored it. Why would they ignore it? Because the study suggests the answer is yes. It's OK to report that racial differences in cancer outcomes are caused by poverty and discrimination. It's not OK to report that they're inherited.
More here.
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In outer space, when an object becomes so powerful that it sucks everything nearby into itself, we call it a black hole.
In cyberspace, when a device becomes so powerful that it sucks every electronic function into itself, we call it a BlackBerry.
Over the last couple of years, we've witnessed the consolidation of more and more functions into what used to be called a cell phone. First it was a phone, then a texting device, then a camera, then a game console, then a Web surfer, then a music player. Then it became a reader of physical hyperlinks. Then a reader of 3-D digital maps. Then a universal remote. Today, we call this thing a smartphone. Within three years, we'll be calling it something else. As it absorbs one function after another, it's becoming strong enough to consume the ultimate prey: the minds of its users.
Here's one more job the phone is devouring: GPS.
Jenna Wortham presents the latest trend data in the New York Times:
More than 40 percent of all smartphone owners use their mobile devices to get turn-by-turn directions, according to data from Compete, a Web analytics firm. For iPhone users, the figure is even higher, eclipsing 80 percent. ... Sales of traditional GPS units from companies like TomTom, Garmin and Magellan (a unit of MiTAC International) have fallen sharply recently. During the first quarter, TomTom said it shipped 29 percent fewer GPS units compared with the period in 2008. Garmin said unit sales fell 13 percent in the first quarter compared with the previous year. ... Meanwhile, shipments of smartphones in North America are expected to grow by 25 percent this year, with more than 80 percent of them equipped with GPS, according to ABI Research.
One reason for the exodus from dedicated GPS devices is cost: You can get a smartphone for $100 to $300 instead of spending $177 on a GPS unit. But the main reason is consolidation: Nobody wants to carry two devices—or three, or four, or five—when you can carry one that does all five things.
Some GPS makers, Wortham reports, are responding to this trend by selling GPS as software for smartphones instead of selling it as hardware. Others are adding phone service to their GPS devices. Good luck with that. But the bottom line is that no matter how this fight ends—smartphones with GPS, GPS with smartphones, or add-on GPS software for your smartphone—only one device will remain. Consolidation is inexorable.
What will the smartphone eat next? In no particular order, my money's on credit cards, car keys, flashlights, flash drives, books, television sets, and laptops. Some of these functions are already being absorbed. And one of these days, somebody will figure out how to add a stun gun. Just try not to hit the wrong button.
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According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, masturbation is "intrinsically and gravely disordered." That's because "sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes."
But what if playing with the equipment helps you make babies? Dr. David Greening, an Australian infertility expert, reports that 81 percent of the men in his study significantly improved their sperm quality, as measured by DNA fragmentation, through a simple one-week program. According to a summary of the study, "The men were instructed to ejaculate daily."
More here.
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Shankar Vedantam is a people person. I don't mean that in the ordinary sense, as in, "Do I look like a @#$% people person?" I mean that, in addition to being delightful company, he writes about people. He's interested in how we think.
So when he writes about machines, as he did last week, something funny is going on. His topic was the recent Metro train crash in Washington, D.C., which killed nine people. How did it happen?
One theory is the automation paradox:
The more reliable the system, the more likely it is that humans in charge will "switch off" and lose their concentration, and the greater the likelihood that a confluence of unexpected factors that stymie the algorithm will produce catastrophe. ... After the previous fatal accident on Metro, in which a train overshot the Shady Grove station on an icy night, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the driver of the train had reported overshooting problems at earlier stops but was told not to interfere with the automated controls.
In that case, automation researcher Greg Jamieson points out, "For a year before the accident, the transit authority had put in position a directive that you were not to drive the train in manual." Vedantam concludes: "No matter how clever the designers of automated systems might be, they simply cannot account for every possible scenario, which is why it is so dangerous to eliminate human ‘interference.' "
This is the problem we discussed after the February plane crash that killed 50 people near Buffalo, N.Y. Initial evidence indicated that the pilot misunderstood what the autopilot was doing, and, by overriding the machine, caused the crash. Further evidence presented at a May hearing confirms that
the plane, which was collecting ice on its windshield and wings, was slowing to an unsafe speed. But when a warning system began vibrating the control column to get their attention, the captain pulled the nose up when he should have pushed it down. ... [C]onfronting the vibrating column, called a stick shaker, was probably something new and startling. The airline that was contracted with Continental Airlines to make the one-hour commuter flight, Colgan Air, said on Wednesday that it had given the crew simulated training in the activation of the stick shaker, but not in the next step, activation of the stick pusher, which takes control and pushes the nose of the plane down. In this instance, the stick pusher kicked in shortly after the captain pulled instead of pushed. "I don't see any evidence that he ever understood the situation he was in," said Dr. Dismukes ...
Shortly after the Buffalo crash, I outlined three possible responses to such disasters. One was take the controls away from the machines, on the grounds that difficult conditions require human attention and judgment. The opposite approach was to take the controls away from the humans, on the grounds that pilots can't be trusted to override the machine's superior judgment. A third, hybrid solution was to teach the humans how to read and collaborate with the machine's intentions.
The third approach seems to be the one most clearly supported by the evidence in the Buffalo crash: Flight crews must be trained to interpret and interact with their autopilots. Vedantam makes a similar point about automated systems in general: "Several studies have found that regular training exercises that require operators to turn off their automated systems and run everything manually are useful in retaining skills and alertness." We have to know when to second-guess our machines and how to operate without their help. Sometimes, they'll err fatally unless we intervene. But our intervention can itself be fatal. The key is to understand when to step in and when to butt out. That's the role of human intelligence in a machine-controlled world.
It's fun to go to summer sci-fi movies and wonder whether humans or machines would prevail in a mortal showdown. But in the real world, machines aren't our enemies. They're our collaborators. If those 50 people in Buffalo died in a fight between a human and a machine, it wasn't a fight chosen by either side. It was a misunderstanding. And since we're the ones who made the machines, it's our job to teach one another how to work with them, around them, and without them.
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A couple of weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture tentatively approved a flu vaccine for dogs. The agency said the vaccine's purpose was "the control of disease associated with canine influenza virus infection, type A, subtype H3N8," which "has now been detected in dogs in 30 states." The vaccine was approved only after "the acceptance of data supporting product purity, safety and a reasonable expectation of efficacy."
At the time, I thought this was a nice expression of man's love for his best friend. We don't just develop medicines for ourselves; we also make them for animals under our care. And we don't just treat your dog like, well, a lab animal; we test the vaccine first to be sure it's safe.
Then I saw this follow-up from Donald McNeil Jr. in the New York Times:
Some veterinarians have found that the dogs that tend to die from [this flu] are the "brachycephalics"—dogs with short snub noses. Just as obesity has proved dangerous to human flu victims because of the weight on their chests, being bred to have a short, bent respiratory tract is dangerous for dogs. "It really puts a strain on their ability to breathe," Dr. Crawford said. "They can't move air in and out of their lungs."
This is the kind of thing that sickens me about dog breeding. This health defect we're so generously treating? We caused it. As I've noted before, dogs are a 15,000-year reckless genetic experiment. We've bred collies for vigilance, Rottweilers for aggression, and retrievers for obedience. We've given some dogs legs so short they couldn't run, and we've given others, such as the unlucky pooches now dying of H3N8 flu, noses so flat they couldn't breathe.
So congratulations to us. We're now trying to fix a problem we created. Will this teach us to stop breeding such defects into animals? Don't count on it. Some creatures are just slow to learn.
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Sanford's e-mails paint a vivid and sad picture. It's a picture of two people in love but tragically bound by commitments they have already made. A man who has been married for two decades seems to be discovering, for the first time, how love feels. He writes of solitude, longing, and spirituality in a style that oscillates between Spanish love songs and bad country music. He seems naive about everything: love, poetry, and e-mail. He is writing for publication and doesn't know it.
Wise up, cheaters. Your passion for what's-her-name may be gone with the sunrise, but text is forever. Just because it has vanished from your screen doesn't mean it has ceased to exist, any more than your wife and kids cease to exist when you fly to Argentina.
More here.