Month: April 2013

Today on the Dish, Andrew let loose on the continued degrading effects of Gitmo on America, wondered at the etch-a-sketch mentality of McCain and Butters on injecting America into Syria’s war, and took note of the absurd minutiae of the sectarian Mideast. He considered whether Obama has shackled his economic legacy to the fate of the sequester, meditated on the once and future form of blogging, and groaned at the ongoing effects of prohibition on medicinal shroom study. Later on he batted away the taboo on talking condoms and good sex and cringed at video of an airplane crash in Bagram.

In political coverage, we noted the enduring effects of the “yellow cake” snafu in debating Syria’s chemical weapons and Steve Coll warned of drone blowback as Rauch investigated our obsession with medical interventions. We sensed some vibrations in the market for pot lite, Phillip Smith connected PTSD with the healing effect of marijuana, and readers asked Josh Fox how he ended up in the anti-fracking movement. We realized the effect Nixon had on presidential privacy, uncovered psychological prints of natural prejudice and observed the evolutionary desire for basic equality. John Gray situated Marx in his proper place and time, Frum perked up at the drop in American homelessness, a Republican strategist spoke a vision of gloom and doom for the GOP and Dana Mackenzie perused formulas for justice.

In assorted coverage, Kevin Hartnett sized up the largest festival on Earth, William Germano proposed a looser, more bloggy academia, and DL Cade surveyed air crash art. We got to know the significance of oncoming datafication, spotlighted a grim commercial of botched suicide in the Creepy Ad Watch, and Tim Frenholz watched art imitate life in Sim City. Things got volcanic in the answers to this week’s VFYW contest, Daniel Kramb sampled fiction of our hot, crowded future and Laetittia Barbier tracked the grim history of wax museums. Finally, we cranked a Tom Waits/Cookie Monster mashup for the MHB, met the property owner of Bangladesh’s collapsed factory in the Face of the Day and looked out over Rome, Italy for the VFYW.

­–B.J.

Sean Dunne’s documentary Oxyana depicts the rise of opiate addiction in the town of Oceana, West Virginia:

In a matter of 15 years, a normal community where people felt safe raising their kids has become a town where it is common for teenage girls to prostitute themselves for money. Oceana was a place where you didn’t feel the need to lock your doors. Now, it is tortured by violence. One of the most unforgettable people we meet in Oxyana is an Oxy dealer (and addict) who says bluntly, “It’s an epidemic around here.”

Frum sees the film as an argument against more lenient drug policies:

Many people can experiment with drugs, then quit without excessive trouble. Some people can use drugs for years and remain more or less functional. But more of us – most of us – can’t. I haven’t seen Oxyana yet myself. But I’m looking forward to seeing somebody speak up for those who need their ability to “say no” to be supported by the law, not undermined by it.

Warren Jason Street argues that Frum misses the point:

Opioids, and Oxycontin in particular, are dangerous, addictive substances. You cannot prescribe them to people and then just cut them off. The law is incapable of handing the social ramifications of legally putting people on an addictive substance that then requires them to break the law–and destroy their own lives–in order to keep getting that substance.

Reviewing Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life, John Gray puts the philosopher in context:

Sperber’s aim is to present Marx as he actually was—a nineteenth-century thinker engaged with the ideas and events of his time. If you see Marx in this way, many of the disputes that raged around his legacy in the past century will seem unprofitable, even irrelevant. Claiming that Marx was in some way “intellectually responsible” for twentieth-century communism will appear thoroughly misguided; but so will the defense of Marx as a radical democrat, since both views “project back onto the nineteenth century controversies of later times.”

Certainly Marx understood crucial features of capitalism; but they were “those of the capitalism that existed in the early decades of the nineteenth century,” rather than the very different capitalism that exists at the start of the twenty-first century. Again, while he looked ahead to a new kind of human society that would come into being after capitalism had collapsed, Marx had no settled conception of what such a society would be like. Turning to him for a vision of our future, for Sperber, is as misconceived as blaming him for our past.

Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger herald its benefits:

Once we datafy things, we can transform their purpose and turn the information into new forms of value. For example, IBM was granted a U.S. patent in 2012 for “securing premises using surface-based computing technology” — a technical way of describing a touch-sensitive floor covering, somewhat like a giant smartphone screen. Datafying the floor can open up all kinds of possibilities. The floor could be able to identify the objects on it, so that it might know to turn on lights in a room or open doors when a person entered. Moreover, it might identify individuals by their weight or by the way they stand and walk. It could tell if someone fell and did not get back up, an important feature for the elderly. Retailers could track the flow of customers through their stores. Once it becomes possible to turn activities of this kind into data that can be stored and analyzed, we can learn more about the world — things we could never know before because we could not measure them easily and cheaply.

Derek Mead passes along the above video:

As photographer Rick Smolan tells it, Big Data is now like the internet was in 1993: People are just learning what it’s about, and people are just figuring out what it is. But then you hear Google CEO Eric Schmidt say things like “There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing…People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.” Then you realize that, like the early Web, we’re not sure where Big Data is headed yet.

Phillip Smith points out how difficult it is for veterans to get medical marijuana:

Despite mounting evidence that medical marijuana can help with PTSD, only a handful of medical marijuana states have approved its use. According to Americans for Safe Access, only California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Mexico and Massachusetts would allow for its use for PTSD, and as we have seen above, it’s still up in the air in the Bay State. … In states that do have medical marijuana laws, but don’t allow it to be used for PTSD, they are criminals, too — unless they hide what they’re actually using it for.

Noting that a major roadblock to approval is the lack of research showing the efficacy of cannabis in treating the condition, Smith fumes:

PTSD sufferers are not waiting for peer-reviewed, clinically-controlled studies to tell them what works. PTSD is a real and growing problem, and medical marijuana appears to do some good. The scientific studies that would satisfy legislators and state review boards need to be done, and that is happening, albeit too slowly, but in the mean time, people are suffering because the government they served at risk to life and limb is now obstructing the research that would legitimize their treatment.

Hyundai tries to tap into the marketing power of failed suicide attempts:

Evidently this ghastly theme is a trend.

Thomas Weber shoots down oft-repeated myths about Hitler, including the claim that he actually was Jewish:

The idea that the nemesis of the Jews of Europe was, according the logic of his own Nuremberg laws, a ‘quarter-Jew’ himself dates back to the attempt of some of his opponents to prevent Hitler from coming to power. As Hitler’s father was born out of wedlock, the claim was that Hitler had been fathered by the head of the Jewish household for which Hitler’s grandmother Maria Anna had worked for a while.

If the results of the unethical DNA testing of Hitler’s Austrian and American relatives, carried out a few years ago by the Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders, are to be trusted, we now finally know for certain that the step-father of Hitler’s father was indeed his biological father and therefore Hitler did not have a Jewish grand-father. Yet what may be more important than the question of whether objectively speaking Hitler had a Jewish grandfather is what Hitler himself thought of the matter. It is likely Hitler feared being the grandson of a Jew, as he seems to have commissioned Hans Frank, his chief jurist, to look into the claim that he had Jewish ancestry in 1930.