Month: July 2008

by Chris Bodenner
Christian Bale is accused of assaulting his mother and sister (!)

(Matt defends him — or rather, his performance in the movie.)

by Chris Bodenner
"John McCain has said he will only support a withdrawal based on conditions on the ground. It is our belief that the Iraqi leaders share that view. The disposition of a sovereign, democratically elected government is one of the conditions that will be taken into account," — McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb, with shades of rhetoric perilously close to imperialism.

By Patrick Appel

Jonah Lehrer is amused by the myth of the rational voter:

The problem, as political scientist Larry Bartels notes, is that people aren’t rational: we’re rationalizers. Our brain prefers a certain candidate or party for a really complicated set of subterranean reasons and then, after the preference has been unconsciously established, we invent rational sounding reasons to justify our preferences. This is why the average voter is such a partisan hack and rarely bothers to revise their political preferences. For instance, an analysis of five hundred voters with "strong party allegiances" during the 1976 campaign found that, during the heated last two months of the contest, only sixteen people were persuaded to vote for the other party. Another study tracked voters from 1965 to 1982, tracing the flux of party affiliation over time. Although it was an extremely tumultuous era in American politics – there was the Vietnam War, stagflation, the fall of Richard Nixon, oil shortages, and Jimmy Carter – nearly 90 percent of people who identified themselves as Republicans in 1965 ended up voting for Ronald Reagan in 1980.

That said, when our preferences in the voting booth can be influenced they are often influenced by completely arbitrary factors. (In a 2004 paper, Bartels argued that "2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet" as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. In other words, these climatic acts of god cost Gore the election.)

By Patrick Appel

First Read:

Turning back home, all indications are pointing to Obama’s veep pick getting announced in the 10-day window after he gets back from Europe and before the Olympics. (Maybe, given the calendar, we’re stating the obvious at this point, but everything is about timetables in the Obama campaign, right?)

Scheiber wrestles with the logic of that time-frame. McCain is also getting closer to announcing a veep. It is possible, but not likely, to come this week.

by Chris Bodenner
Though the victory is bittersweet:

The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force “on par with men,” and the potentially disastrous consequences for families.
…
After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.
…
The pattern is roughly similar among the well-educated and the less educated, among the married and never married, among mothers with teenage children and those with children under 6, and among white women and black.

by hilzoy

Ezra Klein points out this startling fact from the PB&J Campaign:

“Each time you have a plant-based lunch like a PB&J you’ll reduce your carbon footprint by the equivalent of 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions over an average animal-based lunch like a hamburger, a tuna sandwich, grilled cheese, or chicken nuggets. For dinner you save 2.8 pounds and for breakfast 2.0 pounds of emissions.

Those 2.5 pounds of emissions at lunch are about forty percent of the greenhouse gas emissions you’d save driving around for the day in a hybrid instead of a standard sedan.

If you have a PB&J instead of a red-meat lunch like a ham sandwich or a hamburger, you shrink your carbon footprint by almost 3.5 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.”

As they note, you’ll also conserve 133 gallons of water, and save 24 square feet of land from deforestation. In addition, you won’t be contributing to the moral and environmental nightmare that is factory farming, or contributing needlessly to the world’s food shortage.

And that’s just lunch.

Reducing your consumption of meat doesn’t have to involve becoming a complete vegetarian, any more than reducing your consumption of fuel has to mean selling your car. Every little bit helps.

by Chris Bodenner
My favorite film critic, Christopher Orr, reviews the latest Batman:

The Dark Knight‘s villain may be a psychopath, but his tools are all too chillingly familiar: the thirsty knife, the patient bomb. (This is not a film for children, and the MPAA should be ashamed of its PG-13 acquiescence.) … Nolan wisely minimizes the use of CGI (even when the semi is flipped), and the difference is palpable.

The director’s most remarkable special effect, however, is Heath Ledger’s Joker. It’s a difficult performance to rate on any conventional scale, a whirlwind of energy and effects, tics and tells, Brando and Hopkins and Nicholson thrown in a blender set to "puree" and then dynamited mid-spin. To call it compelling would be a criminal understatement, and yet it seems less the creation of a living self than the annihilation of one, an exercise in the center not holding. Even without Ledger’s death, this would be a deeply discomfiting performance; as it is, it’s hard not to view it as sign or symptom of the subsequent tragedy.
…
In the end, The Dark Knight is less a film about good versus evil than about order versus chaos, a morality play into which a wild card, the Joker, has been inserted to devastating effect. … But despite the tensions between its form and its function, The Dark Knight succeeds far more than it fails, and lingers provocatively in the mind.

by hilzoy

From the NYT:

“Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals for his part in the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, was arrested Monday in a raid in Serbia that ended a 13-year hunt.

Serge Brammertz, the prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, hailed the arrest as an important step in bringing to justice one of the architects of Europe’s worst massacre since World War II. He said Mr. Karadzic, 63, the Bosnian Serb president during the war there between 1992 and 1995, would be transferred to The Hague in “due course.”

“This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade,” Mr. Brammertz said. “It is also an important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice.” (…)

It came just weeks after a new pro-Western coalition government in Serbia was formed whose overriding goal is to bring Serbia into the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc. The European Union has made delivering indicted war criminals to The Hague a precondition for Serbia’s membership.

The arrest was hailed by Western diplomats as proof of Serbia’s determination to link its future to the West and put the virulent nationalism of the past behind it. The capture under the stewardship of the new government has particular resonance because the government is made up of an unlikely alliance between the Democrats of Mr. Tadic and the Socialist Party of Mr. Milosevic, which fought a war against the West in the 1990s, but has now vowed to bring Serbia back into the Western fold. (…)

The former leader is charged with genocide for the murder of close to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. The indictment charges that Mr. Karadzic also committed genocide, persecutions and other crimes when forces under his command killed non-Serbs during and after attacks on towns throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, rounded up thousands of non-Serbs and transferred them to camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities.

The charges state that forces under Mr. Karadzic’s command killed, tortured, mistreated, and sexually assaulted non-Serbs in these camps.

Further, he is charged with responsibility for the shelling and sniping of civilians in Sarajevo, during the 43-month siege of the city, which led to the killing and wounding of thousands, including many women and children.”

I have to assume that people like Karadzic assume that they can act with impunity; that they will never have to answer for what they did in a court of justice, or face the prospect of punishment. It matters immensely that they be proven wrong.

By Patrick Appel
Ross parses PEW’s numbers:

There are two ways to read Pew’s numbers on evangelical voters and the ’08 election. You could read them the way Mark Hemingway does, emphasizing the fact that Obama is currently running a point behind where John Kerry was among white evangelicals at this point in the 2004 race. Or you could read them as good news for Obama, since McCain is currently running eight points behind where George W. Bush stood at this point in ’04. I’d choose the latter reading. In July of 2004, only 4 percent of white evangelicals said they were undecided about whom to vote for. Now 12 percent say that they are – and while it’s possible that nearly all of those undecideds will come home to the GOP once the chips are down, undecided voters do tend to break against the incumbent party, which seems to open a pretty sizable opening for Obama.

By Jessie Roberts

From a radio interview with Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky:

This idea (for the museum) came about from when I was a teacher in public schools in Australia actually, teaching in the science classes and students saying, “Sir, you’re a Christian, how can you believe the Bible when we know that’s not true because of evolution and what’s in our textbooks?” And then when I took them to museums and saw that they were presented evolution as fact, I thought why can’t we have a creation museum? And so I had this embryonic idea 25 years ago in Australia. But of course, Australia’s not really the place to build such a facility if you’re going to reach the world. Really, America is.