Month: May 2009

Israel’s Nuclear Closet

This is one of those things that to someone coming across the debate for the first time seems utterly mysterious. Why should the United States have to pretend that Israel has no nuclear weapons when everybody knows it does? I’ve been reading the usual suspects on this for insight and … not much luck. From the point of view of, say, Iran, it seems perfectly reasonable for them to ask why they can’t have a couple of nukes when their chief regional rival, Israel, has scores. And how do you have an adult conversation with a country like Iran when we are required to keep lying about the regional arms situation … because the Israelis want to have their nuclear cake and eat it too?

Since I’m a believer in nuclear deterrence – it worked pretty well with the Soviets – you could even argue that a formal, MAD-style Iran-Israel stand-off, like the US-USSR stand-off, would help keep the Middle East from the apocalypse the way the world was from the 1940s to the 1990s. But what do I know? Even hinting at some basic public honesty on this matter will presumably unleash another wave of accusations that I’m a nineteenth century Jew-baiter. But isn’t it obvious that Israel would be smarter to develop a more normal relationship with the US as a sounder basis for its long-term security than the cloying and unhealthy clusterfuck we currently have? This gets it about right to me:

Why couldn’t Israel just declare that it is a nuclear power?
It is one of those secrets that everyone knows about but nobody publicly acknowledges. Expect the smirking President of Iran which gives him credibility he certainly does not deserve. Israel should just come clean about its nukes and also its intent to use them on anyone desiring to erase Israel off the face of the earth (as some adversaries dramatically like to put it). It would make certain negotiations a lot easier. Of course, it would also force us to acknowledge our double standards on why only certain select countries (that we like) deserve to have nukes. But I think that would also be a positive outcome.

Maybe I’m missing something here. I’m not versed in the history of this. But it begins to look once again as if Israel is privileged not as normal allies are privileged, but as a very special case which has the right to have nukes, while demanding none of its neighbors does, and that we cannot even say it has such a capacity; that it has the right to launch wars and threaten wars against its neighbors, but its neighbors have no right to do the same, and so on. It doesn’t seem healthy to me – for the US or for Israel.

The View From Your Recession

A reader writes (with perhaps an insight into why Obama's approval ratings keep ticking up):

My brother is a dyed-in-the-wool, fiscal and social conservative, and before the election he had some not-so-nice things to say about our current president.  But we had a funny conversation with his wife/accountant the other day.  See, they are in the Heating/Venting/Air Conditioning business and had to lay off all but 1 of their 5 employees over the past year.  In the last month or two, however, he's seen quite an uptick in demand for energy efficient systems, allowing him to hire 2 guys back.  She said, with appropriate shock and surprise in her voice, that it's all stimulus money they're seeing.

I, like a lot of other rational people, worried about the effectiveness of the stimulus bill, but I'm not schooled enough in economics to have a truly informed opinion on the possible outcome.  What the situation with my brother has told me, in anecdotal form, is that for some people, it is working as expected.  Of course, anecdotes are one thing, systematic numbers are something else entirely, but still, it gives me hope (the enlightenment of my brother/sister-in-law is just icing for me.)

Palin Update

Will she be at the White House Correspondence Dinner? Since I'd have to rent a tux, and she's the only reason to show up, could she let me know? Or is this factual information also subject to debate? Here we go …

“The governor may be on the East Coast this weekend to attend state events and meetings. If she is there, the governor may accept one of the standing invitations for dinner.”

Jeez. It's not as if we're asking for a medical record or something. Meanwhile, pregnant teen Bristol, having opined that abstinence is "not realistic at all" is now being paid to promote abstinence. Yeah, they're not going away, are they?

The Beard Awards

Yes, my interest was piqued. But they're for food-writing and Corby cleaned up (what a year for the Atlantic). If you're in any way interested in food and even if you're not (I confess it's a blind spot for me), Corby's channel is never boring. If you've ever wondered what fresh turkey eggs taste like, why trendy food isn't necessarily good food, or just enjoy posts about the charms of weeds, or the chemistry of a great sandwich, it's all here. Bon appetit.

You, The Editors

In addition to 8,000 votes and counting, we have gotten some great feedback in the comments section of our book cover poll. A sample of the various input – the kind of editing most mainstream publishing companies don't provide any more (they're too busy generating buzz):

I'm a book designer. New Orleans, hands down. Good color, quirky, will help sell the book. Liked Wisconsin too, but Ft. Lauderdale is the best candidate for the back cover! It's a great, if seedy, image. Pebble Beach: too pretty.

Silver Spring. Ain't that America?

I'm actually against New Orleans, the current frontrunner with 6,000 votes, because so much of the picture is the window itself. Isn't the basic idea here supposed to be about the view? And I know it's cliche, but I'd pick one of the more panoramic ones (Rome or Ho Chi Minh) for visual effect if you're interested in grabbing everyday book buyers, contra the book designer's advice above.

Agreed about New Orleans. … This View From My Window series has been so great because of the hints you get of both interior and exterior (not to mention the cool sense of community it engenders once a day). This one favors inside (all about me) over outside (all about the world) a little too much, so for my money it neglects half the poem.

I like Rosso, Mauritania, @ 6.30 am. It reminds me of my grandma's screen door in her poor neighborhood in north Minneapolis.

Can't believe anyone finds the Ft. Lauderdale one ugly — to me it may be the most beautiful in the sense of evocative.

Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, is the one. A little sad, like a one room, 2nd floor student rental in somebody's house. But that means the photographer's whole life is ahead of them, right?

New Orleans is too cliche, a pre Katrina cliche, a pre-GWB coffee table cover cliche. I like Wauwatosa cause I've never heard of it.

Wauwatosa for me. I tried not to be partial, because I grew up two blocks from that Milwaukee suburb, but so many of the other pictures had no focal point: the eye wanders around trying to settle on something that it never finds. The Tosa picture, on the other hand, has a semi-formal arrangement of planes, rectangles and triangles. And it has a theme: my house to yours. We're neighbors. It may look forlorn, but that's just the post-winter, not-yet-spring season. The east side of Tosa, where that was taken, is full of charming bungalow homes and tree-lined streets.

Hate to be a contrarian, Andrew, but none of these are right. Part of the charm of this project was the simple reminder that we're from many places in the world, with several sharp differences between us, and yet, here we all are … drawn together, sharing your words within our own room, but also looking outward. That's powerful internet magic! And now you want us to rate one another's views? No. All the cover really needs is the view from YOUR window.

I am saving mine for the forward. A beagle is involved (hey, I get to break my own rules).

The View From His Recession

Limbaugh helps the GOP out some more:

But during all this growth I haven’t lost any audience. I’ve never had financially a down year. There’s supposedly a recession, but we’ve got – what is this May? Back in February we already had 102% of 2008 overbooked for 2009. [applause] So I always believed that if we’re going to have a recession, just don’t participate. [laughter]

Hey, Paul Krugman

Richard Posner's argument against nationalization:

Impatience with the [Geithner] plan leads some economists to advocate the government's "nationalizing" the weak banks, but that would be a mistake. This is not only because of the manifest inability of the government to manage banks competently, but also because the vexing problem of valuing the overvalued assets cannot be avoided in this way. The banks are not broke; if the government takes them over, it will have to compensate the owners for the net value of the assets that the government takes, including any overvalued assets that, despite being overvalued, have some value. Perhaps what the government could do would be to take (with compensation) all the good assets of the bank, leaving the overvalued ones with the shareholders; then the bank's balance sheet would be "clean." But then what would it do with the bank? Run it? Sell it? The practical complications would be immense.