Protester Scott Osberg holds up a sign behind Republican members of Congress while they hold a press conference on the Vitter Amendment as Congress remains gridlocked over legislation to continue funding the federal government on September 30, 2013. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid has said the Senate would not vote on any legislation passed by the House to continue funding the federal government unless the legislation was free of Republican added amendments. By Win McNamee/Getty Images.
Michael Popp, who has chronicled his leukemia on his blog The Letting Go, just marked down 100 days since a stem cell-transplant:
My body is slimmed down to a basic structure. I have to rebuild it. I like this. I don’t like how weak I am. I don’t like that my legs have trouble lifting me. That my arms are incapable of lifting me. That after pushing myself the pain is almost debilitating. I don’t like any of it, but I like the challenge. I like that my entire life needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. I like that the change I am experiencing is complete, from head to toe.
Not only do I not feel like me, I don’t look like me either. I will physically become a new person, internally, genetically, emotionally and externally. Could I have achieved the same results with a life coach, personal trainer and some plastic surgery? Not really, but that probably would have been much more affordable. As I approached 100 I kept clinging to the idea that my life would be better once I got there. I was surprised at how little a difference it ends up making. Yes, I made it. No, life isn’t suddenly normal. It’s not even close. I have a year before things really start to normalize, before I begin to do things in my daily life that most of you take for granted. A year, possibly longer. The 100th day is a marker for certain things, like blood work and a biopsy but it isn’t a ticket to freedom, it isn’t a ticket to anything.
Scott McConnell dreams of a “love-affair” between the US and Iran:
[I]magine: the nuclear diplomacy track gets going, and Iran makes it clear that it will trade transparency and inspections to ensure non-weaponization. Obama does what he can strip away the sanctions, encouraged by Europe, which is eager to trade and invest in Iran. And suddenly Americans realize there is this large, sophisticated Muslim country, with a large middle class and a huge appetite for American culture and business.
… My guess is that many Americans will fall in love with [Iran] —or at least with the combination of exoticism and profits that detente with Iran promises. Yes, there will be blind and naive aspects to the love—when is there not?—but it will unleash powerful forces that governments cannot control.
Millman counters:
[T]hese kinds of fantasies can be quite destructive as we approach the diplomatic process, because by raising expectations they invite the perception of failure. Our goal is not “flipping” Iran from the enemy to the allied column.
We should not be surprised or offended if Iran continues to posture against America in international forums, or even take more concrete actions to frustrate our aims in the region. We should expect them to want to drive a wedge between us and our allies, and to spin any agreement as our defeat. We should keep our eye on our primary objectives. Our goals are avoiding war and neutralizing the destabilizing threat of Iranian nuclearization. Their goals are avoiding war and ending the sanctions regime. We have concrete goals and interests, and so do they. That’s what we should be talking about – and getting to a deal on. If love follows in its season, well and good. But we don’t need it.
Larison chimes in:
I would add that the most successful negotiation between the U.S. and Iran might be one that results in an agreement that both governments can sell to their respective hard-liners as a national victory. As appealing as rhetoric about moving beyond “zero-sum” relationships may be, an enduring deal between the U.S. and Iran probably has to be one that placates enough hard-liners in both countries, and that could mean portraying the deal as a loss for the other country. As desirable as full rapprochement with Iran would be, that will likely have to wait for a later time.
(Screenshot by Andrew Kaczynski, who captured the tweets before they and others were deleted from Rouhani’s account. Mackey has more: “Another of the deleted updates, captured by The Lede, described the two presidents wishing each other farewell in their own languages. Mr. Rouhani offering the American blessing, “Have a nice day!” and Mr. Obama responding with the Persian word for goodbye, “Khodahafez” —literally, “May God protect you.”)
Such stuffed animals have a practical purpose:
Astronauts have carried stuffed dolls to space before, and cosmonauts have a tradition of launching with small plush toys as talismans and “zero-g indicators.” When the dolls, which are suspended from the Soyuz spacecraft’s control panel, begin to float, the crew can tell they have entered orbit. Nyberg’s crew launched with a plush white dog her Soyuz commander, Fyodor Yurchikhin, had received as a gift 30 years ago and had flown into space twice before. A small black cat doll, named “Dimlar,” served as the zero-gravity indicator for the crew that arrived Wednesday (Sept. 26), named after cosmonaut Oleg Kotov’s children, Dima and Lara.
Astronaut Karen Nyberg took the above photo:
Made in space!! I made this dinosaur for my son last Sunday, September 22. It is made out of velcro-like fabric that lines the Russian food containers found here on the International Space Station. It is lightly stuffed with scraps from a used t-shirt.
(Hat tip: Lauren Davis)
Responding to Hanna Rosin’s recent declaration that the patriarchy is dead, Ann Friedman opines that “America is finally getting around to having the conversation about what it means to be a man that, decades ago, feminism forced us to have about womanhood”:
Women still face social consequences when they don’t conform neatly to gender norms, but many of even the most ideologically progressive men are just now starting to talk about how to break with masculine stereotypes and still hang onto a sense of gender identity. [Bryan] Goldberg and [Hanna] Rosin, in using traditional definitions of manhood (the simple, stoic breadwinner), declare him dead, or at least less marketable to advertisers. Men’s magazines, which now peddle facial moisturizers but still often shy away from heartfelt confessionals, have spotted how hard it is for men to balance both embracing and rethinking masculine stereotypes — and they’ve made some attempts to address it, but mostly ended up documenting the confusion.
For her part, Stephanie Cootz dismisses the idea that men have historically served as the “stoic breadwinner.” She calls it “a late-arriving, short-lived aberration in the history of the world, and it’s over”:
It wasn’t until the 1920s that a bare majority of American children came to live in a family where the husband earned the income, the wife was not working beside him in a small business or on a farm or earning income herself, and the children were either at home or in school and not working in a factory on in the fields. That family form then grew less common during the Great Depression and WWII, but reappeared in the 1950s thanks to an unusual economic and political situation where real wages were rising steadily and a government flush with cash was paying veterans benefits for 44 percent of young men starting families. This was a period when your average 30 year old man could buy a home on 15 to 18 percent of his own salary, not needing his wife’s.
That era is gone—for good. And yet America formulated its work policies, school hours, and social support programs on the assumption that this kind of family would last forever, that there would always be someone at home to take care of the children and manage the household.
A reader quotes an earlier one:
“The right is tone-deaf to the issues effecting its base – Southern and rural working-class whites – while the left seems to think any infringement on someone’s ability to use government benefits is unacceptable.” Come on! Do you really think it is “the left” who doesn’t want any sensible infringement on peoples’ right to buy Mountain Dew and Pringles with food stamps, OR do you think it might have something to do with the lobbyists who work for the sellers and manufacturers of soda and chips, and who have strong influence on Farm Bill legislation?!
Another sends the above graph:
Of course banning sugary and drink and sweet foods seems like a simple analgesic to improving health and dental outcomes, but in reality this would actually be a massively expensive and complex undertaking for the government, with absolutely zero certainty it would reduce tooth decay or obesity.
For instance, the very definition of “unhealthy” is extremely amorphous. Dana Liebelson chronicled 9 foods that have more sugar than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, including a six-inch Subway sub (two doughnuts worth of sugar), 8 oz of Tropicana Orange Juice 2.5 doughnuts) and Yoplait Yogurt (almost 3 doughnuts). This is one reason USDA has emphatically rejected attempts to restrict SNAP benefits in the past: the government would have to sort through almost 300,000 products currently on the market and the 15,000 introduced each year and decide what is healthy and what is not – a subjective and almost impossible task, one that could basically create a federal food surveillance program that would have some serious implications for government intrusion into both food manufacturing and personal grocery store purchasing choices.
And SNAP recipients, especially children where tooth decay actually begins, don’t actually drink more soda than non-SNAP recipients (see graph). The problem, especially amongst low-income individuals, is access to care, and West Virginia ranked 42nd in the country with only 4.7 dentists per 10,000 residents. So you can’t blame SNAP for subsidizing bad teeth. In the end, the real root of the problem your previous reader should be blaming isn’t Mountain Dew Mouth; it’s Lack of Medical Care Mouth.
In light of his decision after six months of sobriety to buy a 30-pack of beer and drink until he blacked out, Sam Wilkinson considers the research of Columbia psychologist Carl Hart, who argues that addicts are capable of making reasoned decisions and that “there’s a certain rationality to keep taking a drug that will give you some temporary pleasure”:
It would be easy to describe my actions that day as being those of a man who was out of control, who despite knowing that he had a serious drinking problem still made the irrational decision to drink. … But I knew what I was doing when I stormed out of my house. I knew what I was doing when I drove straight to a convenience store. I knew what I was doing when I bought the case of beer. I knew what I was doing when I drove to a friend’s house. I knew what I was doing when I called from the road to make sure that she would let me come over. I knew what I was doing when I went inside, when I put down the beer, when I opened the first one, and when I drank my sobriety away. Everything I did was cold and calculating and based on the knowledge that the fastest and most effective way I understood to make emotional devastation go away was to be unable to feel anything at all.
The first of Alcoholic’s Anonymous’s twelve steps is the following: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol— that our lives had become unmanageable.” Although I do not intend to argue about Alcoholics Anonymous – it is a vital mechanism that has helped so many people to get sober – I do take great issue with the idea that addicts are powerless. … [T]he scales in their lives are weighted in such a way as to make having a drink more appealing than not taking a drink. Outsiders peering in often claim otherwise – “Why doesn’t he stop drinking? He’s hurting himself!” – but that is not their calculation to make. It is not irrational take a drink when taking a drink is the best of the available options.
Obama’s frustration with the House GOP was palpable near the end of his statement on the looming government shutdown:
David Corn had hoped that Obama would get mad:
Obama has long eschewed the partisan rancor of Washington, and maintaining an above-the-fray status has often served his political interests. But he’s never going to run for president again—avoiding the angry-black-man trap is now not as important—and desperate times do demand reconsideration of assumptions and behavior. This could well be the moment in his presidency that demands a strategic flash of anger and/or derision. Obama ought to tell us how he really feels about the House Republicans willing to close the government or trigger a default in order to undo his signature domestic law. Whatever the political impact of such a statement, it would sure have the benefit of being the truth.
Michael Ignatieff reviews Totally Unofficial, a new biography of Raphael Lemkin, the man who invented the word genocide and campaigned for the Genocide Convention:
Potential friends drew away from him because his normal conversation was apt to dwell at unsavory length on horrible punishments and excruciating cruelties. He was a man who could not desist from telling strangers his nightmares. He devoted every spare minute of his final years to a world history of genocide. This project, mad in its Borgesian determination to create a total encyclopedia of world cruelty, lay unfinished at his death. It would be easy to turn aside from Lemkin’s bleak obsessions or to dismiss them as sadomasochistic were they not paired with a redeeming belief that fate had chosen him to save future generations from the genocidal furies that had claimed his own family.
The question that the autobiography raises but leaves unanswered is how he chose for himself the role of the humanitarian hunger artist. Extreme moral careers often have aesthetic roots: people choose their lives as dramatic acts of self-creation. There is something childlike, and also as unyielding as a child’s desire, in Lemkin’s self-dramatization. From an early age, he imagined himself as a hero in the popular turn-of-the-century Polish romantic novel Quo Vadis, with its kitsch world of noble slaves and lasciviously corrupt Roman owners. At the height of his influence right after World War II, he struck the disabused and cynical diplomats at the United Nations as “an agreeable fanatic,” but by the end of his life, his self-dramatization was a crippling caricature of lonely defiance, surrounded by imagined enemies bent on his humiliation and defeat.
The Dish 