Tag: Premium

Parental Whoa-vershare, Ctd

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Alex Goldman rounds up some responses to the latest parental overshare debacle, and provides a note of clarification:

The original article was written mistakenly as though the [author] had written about his son using his son’s real name. He was, in fact, using a pseudonym for his son, though critics note that his son’s real name can easily be found online with the information given in the article.

Slightly less nausea-inducing, then, but not much. Goldman sort of defends sharing of this nature, because stigma:

I’m of two minds on this one. It certainly wouldn’t have marginalized the impact of the story had [the author] pseudonymized his son. At the same time, I feel like this conversation has some implicit porn shaming in it that doesn’t acknowledge pornography as something that should be destigmatized (which is, to be clear, hardly a settled matter, rather a personal opinion). I think that Eagle handled the subject as delicately as he could in his article, but I wonder if that’s enough for a kid who is about to enter adolescence and will always deliver search results that include an article called “I didn’t expect to find pornography in my 9-year-old’s web history.” Placing myself in the shoes of this kid, I think I would be annoyed about this article when I turned 15, and find it funny by the time I turn 18. And no sane employer would fault someone for finding an article his dad wrote about him when he was nine in his search results. It’s kind of a matter of perspective.

I was, I should say, good and ready to be done with this topic. But I feel compelled to return, because Goldman’s point is the now-standard defense of these pieces. Sure, the thing revealed about is embarrassing (Goldman hedges on this, but kind of admits it), but it shouldn’t be. That goes for any number of topics broached in such essays – mental or physical illness, body-image neurosis, awkward early-dating woes, why-do-all-my-friends-hate-me middle-school tantrums, and so on. The defense, then, hinges on the notion that, by writing about these sensitive issues, parents shed the relevant stigma, thereby helping both their child and others with the same concern.

The most obvious problem here is that if there is a stigma on whatever it is, even if there shouldn’t be, you’re humiliating your kid. If dude wants to reduce the stigma on porn consumption, by all means, let him tell the Atlantic about his own preferred websites. But how much is stigma, and how much is a matter of privacy? It’s one thing to say that many, many people look at porn, and another entirely to say that the specific porn they look at, or looked at at age nine, is a public matter. It’s hard for me to picture just what this stigma-free utopia would look like where all information about every moment of every person’s life is happily shared at all contexts.

A War Without A Winner, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Juan Cole casts doubt on how much of a victory the Gaza ceasefire really is for Israel:

[W]hat the Israeli military was going for was a result similar to its 2006 war on Hizbullah in Lebanon; since that conflict Hizbullah has not fired any rockets into Israel or Israeli-occupied territories like the Shebaa Farms (which belong to Lebanese farmers). It is not at all clear that the war produced any such similar cessation of hostilities between Gaza and Israel. In part, there are undisciplined small groups in Gaza perfectly able and willing to construct some flying pipe bombs and send them over to Beersheva and Sderot (former Palestinian cities from which Gaza refugees hail that are now Israeli cities). One drawback of Israel reducing Hamas’s capabilities is that it also reduced its ability to police the Strip. Hamas itself has in the past honored cease-fires as long as Israel has observed their terms. In part, that 70% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugee families from what is now Israel and that 40% still live in squalid refugee camps means that they are very unlike the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who are farmers with their own land.

The Dish looked at the hazy definition of “victory” in Gaza during the previous ceasefire earlier this month. Mitchell Plitnick observes how Netanyahu failed to achieve his strategic goals:

Netanyahu is now going to face international pressure to seriously engage in peace talks through Egyptian mediation. His preference, and that of his right flank in Israel, will be to stall on such talks, but with the United States and Europe increasing their support for a resolution to the issue of Gaza, Netanyahu will find himself in the middle of a tug o’ war battle. With that same right flank becoming increasingly alienated from and hostile to him, he may be forced to the table. That table will house yet another massive failure on Bibi’s part. … Bibi’s purpose in all of this was to rend asunder the Palestinian unity government. Now the United Nations, the European Union, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and crucially, the United States, are pushing for that same unity government—currently composed of technocrats led by Mahmoud Abbas—to take over in Gaza.

But Hamas didn’t exactly “win” either, Adam Chandler remarks:

Hamas made many promises that they did not deliver. The group said they would fight until the blockade of Gaza ended. Despite some cosmetic shifts, the blockade is still in effect. They demanded that Israel release the prisoners it rearrested, pay its salaries, and establish a seaport. None of those things have happened, although some discussions are set to take place next month. As many have pointed out, after 50 days, Hamas ultimately accepted a ceasefire proposal that is almost identical to one proffered by Egypt on the war’s eighth day. Hamas rejected that proposal. And the wages for all this bluster was death. A lot of Palestinian death and misery, including 100,000 homeless.

Ed Krayweski suggests that the ceasefire might have come thanks to America’s stepping back from the negotiations, demonstrating that we’re not as indispensable in the Middle East as we think we are:

Reserving judgment on Kerry’s skills as a negotiator, his attempt to negotiate a truce was doomed from the start. The U.S. plays too active a role, yet is not vested enough in the situation in Israel, to have acted as an effective negotiator. Egypt, with which the Gaza strip also shares a tightly controlled border, which sends aid to Gaza, and which has a 35 year old peace deal with Israel, was far better positioned to negotiate a truce than the U.S. America’s participation in negotiations may have also made them harder to succeed by drawing so much public and press attention to the process. In those conditions, Israeli and Hamas negotiators might have been more interested in not appearing weak in the court of public opinion.

Keating looks ahead:

I don’t think a brief return to fighting is out of the question, but a return to the level of carnage we saw in July seems improbable. It’s likely that Israel will agree to ease but not entirely lift the travel and trade blockade on the territory. This could involve some opening of the checkpoints on the territory’s borders, the construction of a port and expanding of fishing rights, the expansion of humanitarian aid, and talks on prisoner releases. It’s been obvious for weeks that this is what a final settlement would look like, which raises the question of why it couldn’t be reached earlier. … The talks will continue and will get messy, and they may be punctuated by renewed bursts of violence, but things are slowly returning to normal. Which is to say that things are returning to an intolerable situation that is unsustainable in the long run for both parties.

But Noah Efron thinks the aftermath of the war offers some opportunities to both Israel and the Palestinians:

Likely, the Palestinian Authority will have renewed influence in Gaza. Possibly, the reach and power of Hamas is diminished. The project of rebuilding all that was destroyed in Gaza may offer opportunities for world leaders who have little sympathy for Hamas to develop alternative civic leadership in the region. The greater involvement of Egyptian leaders, also untrusting of Hamas, suggests as well that a future can be hewn for Gaza that is different from its recent past. All of these things, taken together, are not enough to make one optimistic about future relations between Gaza and Israel. But they do show that, rather than disengage, Israel needs to engage with Gaza. If we are smart, energetic, creative and, above all, lucky (all things at which Israelis, at our best, excel), this war may prove to be a turning point toward a Gaza that we can live with and, perhaps, towards a Palestine that we can live beside.

A Zoolander Award? Ctd

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

I guess my beat here is known, because everyone is passing along the following:

Where European anti-Semitism meets offensive fashion, indeed. As Elena Cresci’s piece (like so many of the many, many others discussing this) mentions, this is only Zara’s latest oops-my-bad:

It seems there were also some keffiyeh-print shorts…

…but I’m not sure whether those are a problem because a) they seem to some to be too supportive of the Palestinian cause, or b) it’s cultural appropriation to turn a keffiyeh into haute jogging shorts. As in, basically everyone can be offended by those shorts. Well done, Zara! With one pair of probably not all that flattering shorts, you’ve created the common enemy that will bring peace to the Middle East once and for all!

But back to their latest blooper. Is the “sheriff” tee the ultimate in Zoolander? That it had been available in Israel definitely adds to the cluelessness. Seems the shirt itself was relatively affordable – I mean, it’s a kid’s shirt from Zara – so there isn’t that added Zoolander level of something being in poor taste as well as comically expensive. But something resembling a concentration-camp uniform for a child scores fairly high on the tone-deafness scale, I should think. I’d say it’s a serious contender.

Yep, This Sure Looks Like An Invasion

by Dish Staff

Just one day after Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko met in Belarus to discuss a resolution to the Ukrainian conflict, the NYT is reporting that Russian forces have invaded southeast Ukraine near the city of Novoazovsk:

The attacks outside this city and in an area to the north essentially have opened a new, third front in the war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and pro-Russian separatists, along with the fighting outside the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. Exhausted, filthy and dismayed, Ukrainian soldiers staggering out of Novoazovsk for safer territory said Tuesday they were cannon fodder for the forces coming from Russia. As they spoke, tank shells whistled in from the east and exploded nearby. … A Ukrainian military spokesman said Wednesday the army still controlled Novoazvosk but that 13 soldiers had died in the fighting. The behavior of the Ukrainian forces corroborated assertions by Western and Ukrainian officials that Russia, despite its strenuous denials, is orchestrating a new counteroffensive to help the besieged separatists of the Donetsk People’s Republic, who have been reeling from aggressive Ukrainian military advances in recent weeks.

The Interpreter’s live blog rounds up reports of other incursions:

The ATO press centre has announced that reports have been received of a column of up to 100 Russian military vehicles, including tanks, armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles and Grad rocket launchers, on the move towards Telmanovo along the road from Starobeshevo, which reportedly fell to Russian or Russian-backed forces earlier. According to Ukrainska Pravda, the ATO press centre noted that the vehicles were marked with white circles or triangles. A battalion task force of the Russian Armed Forces has reportedly set up headquarters in the village of Pobeda, just to the south of Snezhnoye. Russian or separatist reinforcements have been sent to Amvrosievka, where they are fighting Ukrainian forces, claims the ATO press centre.

In Max Fisher’s interpretation, Putin’s stealth war strategy is now paying off:

That lesson is this: the Western world can set all the red lines it wants — don’t use chemical weapons, don’t invade sovereign countries — but if you cross that red line just a little bit at a time, inching across over weeks and months, rather than crossing it all at once, then Western publics and politicians will get red-line fatigue and lose interest by the time you’re across. … Russia’s meddling in eastern Ukraine became a stealth invasion, which has become an overt invasion. But it was all done just gradually enough, and with just enough uncertainty around each incremental escalation, that Russia has managed to invade a sovereign European country, in the year 2014, without sparking any larger war or the credible threat of any substantial response beyond sanctions.

That’s because, as Thomas Graham underscores, Russia cares a lot more about Ukraine than we do:

Tellingly, throughout this crisis, no prominent Western leader has seen it fit to make a major address to explain what is at stake in Ukraine and to request significant sacrifices to advance Western goals. Indeed, it was the upsurge of public outrage over the downing of Flight MH17 and the desecration of the crash site that compelled reluctant European governments to accede to the more stringent sectoral sanctions against Russia. But with that outrage subsiding, the preference remains to focus on what both governments and publics see as their more salient domestic political and economic challenges rather than divert resources to either punish Russia or help Ukraine. Putin knows all this, even if many armchair generals in Washington do not. This balance of interests, resources, and sacrifice means that the West and Kyiv will have to accommodate Russia to some extent, especially on the question of Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation and Russian influence in Eastern Ukraine, to resolve the crisis.

One Perfect Thing, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Inspired by Bill McKibben’s musings on his beloved solo canoe, readers share stories of their prized possessions:

sat-2apr-11-15 I’ll pony up one: my Dad’s old 6″ Criterion Dynascope telescope. He bought it shortly after I was born and took it out all through my childhood. About the time he moved out of the old house, he gave it to me.  It’s had 46 years of use – I’ve had to replace the focuser, rebuild the secondary mirror mount, and try to repair the clutch on the tracking drive. At the same time I also built a solar filter for it, as well as modified an old webcam to do low-level astrophotography (see right).

Technology has long since passed it by; these days you can get far lighter, easier-to-use scopes with computerized tracking, error-correcting drives and everything else. But the Dynascope is still optically sound, and if the astrophotos I’ve taken with it won’t compare to what you see in the back of Sky & Telescope, they’re mine. I’m hoping one of my kids will want it.

Another:

I’m sure I’ll not be the only one to say this, but the only truly prized possession I own (aside from my dog, which I don’t think counts) are my guitars. I’m a professional musician, but even if I weren’t, they’d be the only things that I own that I’d never want to part with.

The irony is that I’m quite sure someone else will e-mail about how he or she is finally cleaning out their storage unit and getting rid of the guitar they always thought they’d learn how to play. Your post immediately brought me back to this Onion classic: Local Self-Storage Facility A Museum Of Personal Failure. One of my all-time faves.

Another:

Mine is easy. It’s my sailboat. It’s not big, new, or fancy; it’s a 1981 Hunter 27-footer that cost as much, when I bought her 14 years ago, as a used Toyota. And yet, how she restores my soul; she’s perfect for sailing my home waters of the Chesapeake Bay and for cruising to the many towns and gunkholes (sheltered anchorages) that make it such a fascinating place.  And she’s been capable of much longer voyages. She’s built like a tank, can sleep two very comfortably (and up to five much less so).

I think that for most of we sailors, sailing fills an aesthetic need. It’s not the fastest or even the most practical way of getting from Point A to B (particularly if the wind is blowing from B). But with the gentle heel of the boat, the sound of wind and water (no engine noise when sailing), stimulating conversation or none at all as my companions nap in the gentle rhythm of the waves or when I sail alone; everything about sailing seems to make life feel a little deeper, vibrant, and more colorful.

Another:

At one time, while living in downtown DC, I owned six motorcycles. I regularly spent more on tools than suits and food (though my day job required ties and not oily jeans). While most thought my interest in motorcycles was absurd, I found it oddly liberating. Furiously bucking the “de-clutter” or “downsizing” trends, I loved every broken part, stripped bolt, and odd Craigslist purchase. I once defiantly started all six motorcycles at the same time, because I was proud I could make them all work.

Over the years I’ve learned that it’s not the stuff that burdens people, but our modern inability to take apart, understand, rewire, hack, solder, work on, fix, and ultimately enjoy the things we own. If I had to call an electrician for every switch or socket that didn’t work in our house or schedule auto repairs and have some teenager try and talk me into $80 windshield wipers, I’d be stressed about the stuff I own, too.

Another:

When I graduated high school, my parents let me choose my gift: a suit for interviewing, or a fly rod. I opted for the fly rod. Since then, that rod has gone with me from coast to coast, from salt flats in Florida to high mountain streams to my favorite place of all time, the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park. Every time I pick up that rod, I feel the magic in it. It’s now imbued with the memories of all of the places I’ve been, the experiences I’ve had, and – especially – the friends I’ve fished with for the past 26 years.

Ally With Assad? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Fred Hof points out that an American air campaign against ISIS in Syria would serve Bashar al-Assad’s material and propaganda interests whether or not we officially declare a partnership with him. He worries that we are walking into a trap:

How to avoid the ambush? Demonstrate real hostility toward Assad, whose removal for the sake of neutralizing ISIS is even more justified than the ouster of Iraq’s Nouri Al Maliki. If, in the course of U.S. anti-ISIS air operations over Syria, regime air defense radars lock onto U.S. aircraft, the relevant air defense site or sites should be engaged decisively. Robust and timely aid for Syrian nationalist rebels fighting both the regime and ISIS is a must. Relevant security assistance for a Syrian National Coalition trying to set up an alternate governing structure in non-Assad, non-ISIS Syria is mandatory. Building an all-Syrian national stabilization force in Turkey and Jordan for eventual anti-regime and anti-ISIS peace-enforcement is essential. American leadership in creating mechanisms that can one day bring Bashar Al Assad and his principal enforcers to trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity is vital. These are the steps that can put the lie to Assad’s libel.

Larison has another idea: don’t start the war at all:

Fighting wars of choice is bad enough, but it is simply perverse to insist on making deals with ugly regimes in order to facilitate the war of choice. If the most effective way of fighting ISIS requires the U.S. to go to war in Syria in concert with the Syrian government, that is just one more argument against waging a war on ISIS in the first place. The supposed need to ally with such a horrible government against ISIS depends entirely on grossly exaggerating the threat that the group poses to the U.S. and its allies. The one error flows from the other, and if put into practice would produce an indefensible policy.

And Assad might not be much help in the fight against ISIS even if he wants to be, Zack Beauchamp adds:

Here’s a big problem with the help-Assad case: it’s not clear that he’s actually strong enough to take on ISIS. Around August 19th, ISIS launched an offensive targeted at the government-held Tabqa airbase, in north-central Syria. Assad fought hard to keep the base, directing punishing airstrikes and ground forces at ISIS. On August 24th, ISIS took Tabqa anyway. The fact that Assad is already using airpower against ISIS, and failing, makes it hard to imagine that supplementing the Assad campaign with some US air strikes would be enough to push back ISIS. The US Air Force is obviously orders of magnitude more capable than its Syrian counterpart, but airpower can’t take and hold territory on its own. It needs to be done by competent ground troops. Assad simply doesn’t have the ground forces to spare, given that he’s also fighting other Islamists and moderate rebels around the country.

Mark Kleiman muses on how he might eventually be ousted:

Assad is a mass murderer, by character and by heredity. Maybe if the rest of the Syrian security forces and political players were scared enough, they’d take a polite hint from the U.S. and kick Assad out in order to qualify for assistance; providing a little bit of intelligence in the meantime is one way of giving that hint. But I wouldn’t count on it. No, if Assad is going to go, he probably has to be kicked out the same way Maliki was, by losing the support of his key foreign sponsor. That would be our old friend Volodya. Does Russia really want to see an actual Islamist state willing and able to help support the Chechen rebels? Maybe not. Whether, suitably supported, the new Iraqi and Syrian governments could actually get their act together and squash ISIS remains to be seen. But getting rid of the Thief of Baghdad and and the Butcher of Damascus in one summer wouldn’t be a bad score all by itself.

To Greenwald, the fact that we are talking about this at all is a sign of the times:

It seems pretty clear at this point that U.S. military action in the Middle East is the end in itself, and the particular form it takes – even including the side for which the U.S. fights – is an ancillary consideration. That’s how the U.S., in less than a year, can get away with depicting involvement in the war in Syria – on opposite sides – as a national imperative. Ironically, just as was true of Al Qaeda, provoking the U.S. into military action would, for the reasons Fishman explained, help ISIS as well. But the only clear lesson from all of this is that no matter the propagandistic script used, U.S. military action in that region virtually never fulfills the stated goals (nor is it intended to do so), and achieves little other than justifying endless military action for its own sake.

The Golden Era of Radio

by Bill McKibben

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I may have mentioned that most of this week is being spent cleaning. That means I’ve had my earbuds in for several hours at a time. And that means, in turn, I’ve been reflecting on just what a golden age of radio, or at least of words spoken magically through the ether, we are lucky enough to live in.

Almost no one ever covers radio, though its reach is astonishing: All Things Considered beats the network tv newscasts (in more ways than one). But ATC and Morning Edition are smooth and dependable but rarely intriguing, provocative, sublime. Those adjectives are better reserved for the various podcasts that have grown up in the wake of This American Life. There’s only one Ira Glass, but there are other wonderful and quirky voices, many of them at the moment allied together in the Radiotopia collective, a kind of Justice League for smart documentarians and sound artists sponsored by the wonderful Public Radio Exchange, one more brainchild of Jay Allison who is the man behind much of the great radio that ever gets made. All seven of the podcasts in the series will draw you in and make you forget you’re washing windows; one of the newest and most intriguing voices belongs to Benjamen Walker, whose Theory of Everything evolved from a show he did on WFMU for years. He specializes in a kind of shaggy dog storytelling that lingers in one’s ear.


Most of these shows are not on most of your radio stations—they largely get listened to on podcasts, because most public radio program directors are about as conservative as it’s possible to be. (There are times when it appears public radio stations are in a contest to see who can achieve the oldest possible demographic).

I don’t promise I won’t write more about some of my favorites this week, in part because it annoys me how little attention gets paid these programs. The Times reviews almost every movie that comes out (I enjoy reading their reviews of part 6 of some slasher series) and even though I’ve never seen Breaking Bad I can tell you pretty much everything about it because of the number of stories I’ve read. Radio not so much—the people who make it do so without much public feedback about what’s working and what isn’t. So plug your favorites via dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Update: Read the follow-up to this post here.

(Photo, which has been cropped, by Johan Larsson)

Let Someone Else Defeat ISIS

by Jonah Shepp

Doug Bandow wants us to stand back and let regional actors take care of the Islamic State, which threatens them much more directly than it threatens us:

Rather than turn ISIL into a military priority and take America into war against the group, Washington should organize an Islamic coalition against the Islamic State.  Even Gen. Dempsey called for a regional effort to “squeeze ISIS from multiple directions,” but that actually requires Washington to do less militarily.  ISIL’s rise has set in motion the very forces necessary for its defeat. Rather than hinder creation of a coalition by taking charge militarily, Washington should encourage it by stepping back.  The U.S. already has gone to war twice in Iraq. There’s no reason to believe that the third time will be the charm.

And indeed, that seems to be (NYT) what the administration is trying to do, although Syria is not on its list of potential coalition members:

As Mr. Obama considered new strikes, the White House began its diplomatic campaign to enlist allies and neighbors in the region to increase their support for Syria’s moderate opposition and, in some cases, to provide support for possible American military operations. The countries likely to be enlisted include Australia, Britain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, officials said.

The officials, who asked not to be named discussing sensitive internal deliberations, said they expected that Britain and Australia would be willing to join the United States in an air campaign. The officials said they also wanted help from Turkey, which has military bases that could be used to support an effort in Syria.

Bobby Ghosh argues that the recent airstrikes in Libya by Egypt and the UAE open the door to such a regional alliance, and were perhaps intended to do so:

If the UAE and Egypt can collaborate to can bomb Islamists in Tripoli, then the Sunni nations can do likewise in IS strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul. Of course, they might hesitate, especially before doing anything that helps Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. But the taboo on intervention has been lifted. Political space is beginning to open up for just such a coalition. IS’s barbaric treatment of fellow Muslims has been greeted with alarm and revulsion in Sunni Arab nations. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti declared IS Islam’s greatest enemy. The highest spiritual authority in Egypt has issued a similar denunciation.

Meanwhile, the UK continues to play hard to get:

Britain, like Australia, has taken part in humanitarian operations on Mount Sinjar as well as deploying Tornado fast jets and a spy plane to gather operational and tactical-level intelligence. But David Cameron, who has said that Britain and its European allies will provide equipment to Kurdish forces fighting Isis, has played down the possibility of air strikes and has categorically ruled out any use of ground troops. “Britain is not going to get involved in another war in Iraq,” he told BBC1′s Breakfast programme last week. “We are not going to be putting boots on the ground. We are not going to be sending in the British army.”

Here’s a little thought experiment: what about Israel? If Netanyahu claims that Hamas and ISIS are indistinguishable, why is he only at war with the lesser of the two? Everyone talks about how Maliki and Assad don’t have the military strength to effectively combat the Islamic State, but Bibi does. And Israel is already technically at war with both Syria and Iraq, so there’s nothing stopping the Israelis from dropping bombs on either country (they have attacked both in the past when they believed their existential security demanded it). Israeli strikes on the “caliphate” would also confound the emerging conspiracy theory that ISIS is an American-funded project to advance the global Zionist agenda, and wreak havoc on the talking points of Israel’s greatest enemies. Just imagine how Iran would react to the news that an Israeli operation had saved thousands of Shiites from persecution.

I know it’s not going to happen, for a number of reasons, but would it really be a bad idea? If someone has to do it, and if we’re clearly committed to paying for it, and if we’ve already paid for Israel’s military supremacy, wouldn’t it make sense to ask them to take on some regional leadership here and participate in getting rid of this threat?

Death To Monarchs

by Sue Halpern

By all accounts, the 21st century has not been kind to monarch butterflies in North America. The orange-and-black creatures, who make a remarkable 3500 mile migration from Canada, through the United States, to the Transvolcanic Mountains of Mexico where they spend the winter, have seen a 90 percent decline in population. There are many causes, but all of them have to do in some way or other with habitat loss, both here and in Mexico. A particularly virulent culprit is the herbicide Roundup, which farmers spray on their fields to curtail weeds, and which has had the unintended consequence of wiping out the milkweed monarch need to survive. As Chris Clark explains it:

With the advent of genetically modified corn and soybeans designed to resist the effects of the broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate, trade-named Roundup, use of the herbicide has increased dramatically over the last two decades. That increased use of Roundup is also spurred by federal energy policy, as we reported here in February: subsidies to encourage growing corn for ethanol have encouraged a huge increase in acreage devoted to growing corn: about 30,000 square miles more than in 2007.

The monarch’s population decline is so precipitous–from about a billion in 1990 down to about 33 million overwintering in Mexico last year–that yesterday a petition was filed by three environmental groups asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that the monarch butterfly be designated an endangered species.

In the words of perhaps the world’s leading monarch researcher, the zoologist Lincoln Brower, who was also a signatory to the petition, “Monarchs are in a deadly free fall and the threats they face are now so large in scale that Endangered Species Act protection is needed sooner rather than later, while there is still time to reverse the severe decline in the heart of their range.”

But time may not be on the monarch’s side. The Fish and Wildlife Service has 90 days to decide if it it will consider the request, and after that, as Clark reports, “the soonest the butterfly could win ESA protection is two years from the petition date.”

Where The Taxes Are Less Of A Whopper, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Vauhini Vara contends that Burger King flirting with Canadian citizenship is about more than taxes:

If being based in Canada is more favorable, from a tax perspective, one might expect Tim Hortons to have a lower effective tax rate than Burger King. But, in fact, the individual companies have similar effective tax rates, of about twenty-seven per cent. Also, the tax inversions that the government is trying to avoid tend to involve large companies acquiring much smaller foreign ones, largely for the tax benefit of moving their headquarters. But while Americans might assume that Burger King is much larger than Tim Hortons, it’s not. Before news of the talks emerged, Tim Hortons was worth about eight billion dollars and Burger King around nine billion dollars; the combined company will do a significant portion of its business in Canada.

Jordan Weissmann differs:

[T]he idea that Burger King won’t really get any tax advantages out of relocating to Canada, where the corporate rate is about 15 percent compared with 35 percent in the U.S., seems transparently untrue.

Yes, it will continue paying American corporate rates on its U.S. profits, just like any other foreign company. But Canadian citizenship will likely give it more opportunities to use various accounting and business tricks to shift profits north of the border and out of the reach of the IRS (multinationals with foreign subsidiaries excel at that sort of thing).

However, McArdle sees “not much of an argument for global taxation”:

OK, yes, most people born and raised here were educated and provided various services by the government to get them to adulthood. But we’re overwhelmingly the largest net recipient of immigrants, and most of those people were educated and provided various services by their governments to get them to adulthood; we don’t seem to think there’s a problem with us free-riding on all those other nations. And surely there’s a statute of limitation on what you owe the government that raised you; 40 years later, should those expats still have to file insanely complicated returns to the IRS? Because that’s what we currently demand.

The argument is even weaker for corporate taxation; it boils down to “the police kept people from sacking your first headquarters, so therefore you owe us 35 percent of everything you make, forever.” Loan sharks and protection rackets offer more reasonable terms than this.

Barro weighs in:

As Matt Levine of Bloomberg notes, proposed legislation to prevent corporate inversions would not be likely to interfere with a Tim Hortons-Burger King merger, because this deal would pass the test those laws require: that the company is really, substantively shifting the locus of its operations outside the United States for reasons beyond taxes. We can change the tax code, but we can’t prevent an American fast-food company from going global.