Month: August 2009

by Chris Bodenner

I want one:

Designer and artist Kevin Cyr provides more images of his fully-functional RV.

(Hat tip: BF)

by Conor Friedersdorf

Matt Yglesias writes:

I’ve come to be increasingly baffled by the high degree cynicism and immorality displayed in big-time politics. For example, Senators who genuinely do believe that carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to a global climate crisis seem to think nothing of nevertheless taking actions that endanger the welfare of billions of people on the grounds that acting otherwise would be politically problematic in their state. In other words, they don’t want to do the right thing because their self-interest points them toward doing something bad. But it’s impossible to imagine these same Senators stabbing a homeless person in a dark DC alley to steal his shoes. And what’s more, the entire political class would be (rightly!) shocked and appalled by the specter of a Senator murdering someone for personal gain. Yet it’s actually taken for granted that “my selfish desires dictate that I do x” constitutes a legitimate reason to do the wrong thing on important legislation.

Making it all the odder, the level of self-interest at stake isn’t all that high. Selling the public good down the river to bolster your re-election chances isn’t like stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving children. The welfare rolls are hardly stocked with the names of former members of congress. Indeed, it’s not even clear that voting “the wrong way” poses particularly serious threats to one’s re-election. But even if it did, one might assume that people who bother to dedicating their lives to securing vast political power did so because they actually wanted to accomplish something and get in the history books, perhaps, as one of the big heroes of their era. Nobody ever writes a biography about the guy who did a good job of reconciling his party’s ideological base with the parochial interests of local businesses and his campaign contributors.

Breaking ranks with your party doesn't merely risk losing a politician the campaign contributions of special interests and the votes of constituents — a lifelong partisan who bucks his ideology risks losing his influence in Congress and destroying his ability to advance his legislative aims on the few issues about which he genuinely cares.

The partisan politician also risks his friends, future speaking engagements, a well-compensated spot as a fellow at an ideologically friendly think tank, business deals with ideologically friendly entrepreneurs, and sundry other opportunities to enrich himself after leaving office. That former Congressional members are rich isn't incidental to the fact that many are willing to sell out their actual beliefs. And even a desire to get into the history books hardly predicts the pursuit of sound public policy. Hence the members of Congress who love nothing more than to name stuff after themselves.

It helps to remember that many of the people who rise to national office come up through local politics, a realm that doesn't tend to reward the principled or virtuous. If you're unwilling to pander and obscure or even change your actual beliefs as you rise from City Council to the County Board of Supervisors to the State Prison Board to a seat in Congress, you're probably not going to rise at all.

by Patrick Appel

Iraq has slipped off the front page.

by Chris Bodenner

Christian aid officials are accusing Euna Lee and Laura Ling of making it more difficult to help North Korean refugees in China after the duo's confiscated footage exposed them to authorities. Hamilton Nolan reacts:

Understandable, but not fair. You can hardly blame Ling and Lee for having their records snatched after they were arrested. Could they have been more careful? Maybe. But they wanted to get a story in North Korea, and that involves risk. There's no getting around it. And just as the reporters take risks to get the story, organizations speaking to the reporters voluntarily take risks by speaking to the media. The reward is getting the message out about North Korean refugees; the risk is having what happened happen. […] If you want to blame someone, blame Kim Jong-Il, for being a crazy evil bastard.

by Hanna Rosin

Finally, a great cat story. Julie Powell, of Julie and Julia fame, writes an obituary for her cat, Maxine, on DoubleX today. Read between the lines. Like all good pet stories, it's not really about the cat.

What we see is not the sardonic, complicated, talented cat of my longtime acquaintance, but a sweet, thin, red-headed doll of a thing who watches old episodes of The French Chef with her head pertly cocked, as if to echo the words of her owner, “Julie Powell,” regarding Julia Child: “Isn’t she adorable?”

The trouble is, I would never say something like “Isn’t Julia Child adorable?” Julia Child, for chrissakes, this literal and figurative giant of a woman who changed the lives of thousands and the entire American culinary landscape … adorable? And neither would Maxine. 

by Patrick Appel

After noting that Holder may re-open CIA detainee abuses cases, Greg Sargent wonders:

The health care failings that have eroded Obama’s support on the left could, paradoxically, increase pressure on the White House to pursue some sort of prosecutions in order to avoid further angering the base. And if Attorney General Eric Holder does take this course of action, it could actually repair relations with liberals. But if he doesn’t things will only get worse with the left.

Maybe, but only prosecuting a few low-level CIA grunts isn't going to appease those of us who would like to see blame directed towards the lawyers and policy makers responsible.

by Andrew

"As the Christian nuns focused on God – on a word like Jesus or Elohim that helped them connect to the divine – their frontal lobes shifted into overdrive. Similarly, as the Buddhist monks meditated on an image that allowed them to connect with the ground of being, their scans showed their frontal lobes as a red glow of activity. Newberg found another peculiar similarity. With both the [Catholic] nuns and the [Buddhist] monks, the parietal lobes went dark during deep prayer and meditation. Newberg calls this the "orientation area" because it orients you in space and time: those lobes tell you where your body ends and the rest of the world begins.

That is why Sister Celeste (and countless other mystics) described a unity with God 'permeating my being'. It was the neurological reason that [Buddhist] Michael Blaine felt a 'deep and profound sense of connection to everything, recognizing that there never was a true separation at all.' And I might add, it was what those who enjoyed psychedelic drugs and natural mystical experiences reported …

In The Doors Of Perception, Aldous Huxley proposed that the brain is a 'reducing valve.' He suggested that all around us is what he called "Mind At Large". This mind comprises everything – all of reality, all ideas, all images, seen and unseen, in the universe … [The brain] narrows this information to a 'measly trickle,' only that information required for survival. And so we ignore thoughts of the cosmos to focus on the lion crouching behind the bush. We turn from the stirrings of transcendence to the email on the screen. We nudge aside insights about the universe in favor of dinner. Most of us live on that level of reality, satisfied we are missing nothing."

– Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Fingerprints Of God.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Let's imagine a frightening hypothetical: a foreign organized crime organization establishes itself in an upscale American suburb, where it begins donning law enforcement uniforms, posing as police officers, and kidnapping affluent residents in broad daylight.

by Patrick Appel

Laura Secor writes up the Iranian show trials:

[T]he spectacle has found a subversive afterlife on the Internet. One image that has gone viral is a split frame showing two photographs of former Vice-President Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Before his arrest, on June 16th, he is a rotund, smiling cleric; in court on August 1st, he is drawn and sweat-soaked, his face a mask of apprehension. The juxtaposition belies the courtroom video, making the point that the only genuine thing about Abtahi’s confession is that it was coerced through torture.

Drezner pipes up:

Stalin's show trials were not broadcast on television — they were reported in state-run newspapers or aired, edited, over state-run radio.  This gives the state much greater editorial powers than a live television transmission.  Furthermore, as Secor's first paragraph suggests, it's the non-verbal cues that come from television that completely undermine the intended effect of the spectacle. 

It is possible that, in the future, more sophisticated CGI effects will allow governments the capacity to digitally edit these images, a la The Running Man, to maximize the desired effect (i.e., making Abtahi look as healthy as he did pre-incarceration).  For now, however, such efforts would only look like bad plastic surgery.  No, I don't think televised show trials really work at all. 

Before and after pictures from Ahmedi's revolutionary weight loss plan courtesy of Flickr user Iran 360.