Month: May 2010

Obviously electrifying:

A reader points me to the precedent of the Ixtoc oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979. The rate of discharge was 10 – 30,000 barrels a day, compared with 12 – 19,000 now estimated for the BP spill. And the oil kept gushing for ten months before it was plugged. 3 million barrels of oil hit the coastline. It could be worse.

Max Fisher rounds up reaction to the escalating tension between Pyongyang and Seoul sparked by the North's sinking of a Southern ship in March. Fred Kaplan surveys the not-so-cold war between the two countries, which have clashed at least ten times since 1999. Hitch vents:

The dirty secret here is that no neighboring power really wants the North Korean population released from its awful misery. Here are millions of stunted and unemployable people, traumatized and deformed by decades of pointless labor on the plantations of a mad despot. The South Koreans do not really want these hopeless cases on the soil of their flourishing consumer society. The Chinese, who have a Korean-speaking province that borders North Korea, are likewise unwilling to suffer the influx of desperate people that is in our future. I can't see the United States accepting them in its present mood. Kim Jong-il's junta knows this, as it knows that we are not prepared to fight him. So the deliberate mass starvation and the nuclear blackmail are two aspects of the same depraved system. (Incidentally, if that system doesn't deserve to be called evil, I don't know what does.)

Drezner proposes banning North Korea's soccer team, which is participating in its first World Cup finals in 44 years. The lameness of that sanction, and the fact that it would hurt mainly those poor souls playing footie at the pleasure of their deranged dictator, merely adds to the poignancy.

At the same time, here is an example of an unfathomable evil that the US simply cannot end, but can merely contain as best we can.

Adam Ellick posts an unembeddable video on the Pakistani press's infatuation with conspiracy theories. The attempted Times Square bombing was the latest instance of mass denial:

Eight years ago Pakistan had one television news channel. Now there are 26 news channels, half of which broadcast 24 hours a day. But most of what is on offer hardly qualifies as rigorous, fact-based news. Rather, shows follow a familiar formula of a roundtable discussion by middle-aged men hashing out political conspiracies.

If that problem sounds familiar to an American audience, consider that in Pakistan it has taken on daunting proportions.

I'm hardly surprised that Sarah Palin has had a conniption over someone threatening to commit journalism in her vicinity. She has kept it at bay for so long. But whining about her next door neighbor is a little conveenient after all these years:

The home Joe McGinniss is renting used to be an Oxford House from 2005 until 2008. The tenants were men recently released from prison who were recovering addicts. What? No fence to protect sexy Sarah in her tank top? Dear God! Who was lurking in that house watching her children play?

The Palins themselves rented the home McGinnis is staying in for six months in 2009, but weren’t interested in purchasing it. They didn’t want to spend the money. Last October they were “done with the house”.

Palin's implication that Joe McGinniss is some kind of pedophile is de rigueur but still disgusting. My hope is that now that McGinniss has been smeared by Palin and threatened by Todd, he will forge a bond with everyone else in Alaska who has experienced the same. They must have some stories to tell.

Good luck, Joe. Hang in, Sherry and Mercede. C'mon, Levi!

Joyner refuses to admit that DADT repeal is no longer a "hot button issue" for the vast majority of the country. As evidence that gays serving openly is controversial he writes that "referenda to ban gay marriage, for example, seem almost always to pass easily." His attempt to square the circle:

At least three possible explanations obtain.

First, people are more passionate about gay marriage than gays in the military.

Second, people are lying to pollsters about their views on gays in the military, in a variation of the so-called Bradley Effect, or what pollsters term the “social desirability bias.”

Third, the issue is much more salient for the 22 percent who oppose gays in the military than the 78 percent who favor.

My guess is a combination of the three, with the third being the most powerful explainer. 

The referendums on full marriage equality have been getting narrower and narrower – and are in line with most polls. But compare the polling on marriage equality with the polling on gays in the military. Most Americans rightly see this is unfair discrimination that we can ill afford in wartime.

A reader writes:

It is generally accepted by most biblical scholars that in the course of his argument in Philippians 2, Paul cites an existing hymn that would have been well known to his readers. As one of your readers has already pointed out, Paul's writing pre-dates the writing of the Gospels. But it should be added that this hymn predates Paul, and has evidently become well known throughout the early Christian community by the time Paul is writing (about 60 CE). 

This points to the existence of a rather robust belief in Jesus' divinity quite early in the history of the Jesus movement.

That passage remains for me a fulcrum of my faith – because it wraps together the two great Christian mysteries, the Incarnation and the Resurrection, and casts it in terms of God "emptying himself." The longer I live, the more I think "emptying oneself" is the critical Christian move.

Duck, North Carolina, 12.54 pm

Some ghastly social experiments have indeed gained force with the dawn of gay equality. A reader writes:

I was a beta-male (basement dwelling, video gamer, overweight, unfashionable, creepy around the opposite sex) until I was about 20. The change was gradual, but the single biggest factor was my acceptance and emulation of gay culture: dressing well, enjoying high culture, reveling in your eccentricities.

Will Wilkinson addressed the Menaissance a while ago with the same conclusion. And the use of the term "retrosexual" is just proof the spectrum of masculinity is here to stay. "Heterosexual" wasn't a category until "homosexual" was; now, a "retrosexual" isn't an archetypal male, just one type among many. Really, gay men and lesbians figured all these little gender nuances out ages ago (bears, butches, femmes, twinks, etc.), but the straight world is a bit slower on the uptake.

Some provisional good news from the Gulf. But I'll wait for the cement to set before I pop some champers.