Month: June 2010

Laura Freschi won't be jumping on the charter cities bandwagon:

These ideas share an overly-optimistic belief in a neutral, benevolent international community and its power to peacefully oversee imposed changes. All are tone-deaf to the very real degree of nationalism that does exist in basically all countries by now, regardless of whether they were misbegotten colonial creations or not. They also violate sovereignty as conventionally defined, which may be good or bad but is sure to provoke a nationalist reaction.

Early development economists working at the hopeful dawn of colonial independence believed that they really were starting from scratch. The last fifty years have shown us that they weren’t, and this has been—and remains—one of development’s biggest blind spots.

Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine. A taste:

The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals. Worse, the fear is that the knowledge has grown beyond our capacity as a society. When we talk about the uncontrollable explosion in the costs of health care in America, for instance—about the reality that we in medicine are gradually bankrupting the country—we’re not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.

Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.

Keith Hennesy isn't a fan of the term "fossil fuels":

Someday when battery technologies improve, the fuel and power worlds will blend in the U.S., and there will be strong and direct economic relationships between the production of electric power and the use of oil.  Until that day, from an energy perspective, “fossil fuels” conflates oil with coal and natural gas in a way that is at best confusing and at worst misleading.  Substituting biofuels for oil or making vehicles more fuel efficient has almost no effect on the amount of coal or natural gas we use.  “Produc[ing] wind turbines,” “installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses making solar panels” are quantitatively irrelevant to our use and production of oil.  All the windmills and solar panels you could imagine will not reduce our dependence on oil as a transportation fuel.

Ezra Klein calls the above graph "the clearest visualization of our energy economy that I've seen." (Click the image to enlarge it.)

Seth Godin gives the last rites:

If we were starting this whole office thing today, it's inconceivable we'd pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show 'the Office' will be seen as a quaint antique.

When you need to have a meeting, have a meeting. When you need to collaborate, collaborate. The rest of the time, do the work, wherever you like.

The gain in speed, productivity and happiness is massive.

Today on the Dish, Andrew took a long look at Obama's competence in the face of the media and partisan critics on both sides. Amen from a reader. Boehner distanced himself from Barton's "shakedown" comments while NRO backed the charge. The employment forecast didn't look good. More on Britain's war crimes here. Palin blurred the truth again, Julian Sanchez addressed her views on pot, readers piled on her O'Reilly appearance, and E.D. cheered the Dish's efforts.

In other coverage, Tom Gross collected cartoons of anti-Israel ugliness, Diego Valle Jones illustrated the resurgence of drug killings in Mexico, Pareene profiled Canada's version of Fox News, Bruce Bawer was hounded for his "hate speech" about Islam, and Liz Mair exposed FGM at Cornell. Female Viagra fell flat and Eminem stood up for the gays. World Cup crack here.

In assorted commentary, Joe Klein was bummed about Afghanistan, Josh Green challenged Obama on defense spending, John Michael Greer tackled tea-partiers and peak oil, Lee Harris defended the partiers, Friedersdorf called out Steyn for his epistemic closure, Bernstein marveled at McCarthy, and Dan Ariely shared some insight on email. Tara Parker-Pope showed how marriage and children are increasingly decoupled and Andrew offered his take on the institution.

A reader served up a creepy ad, another added to the celebrity thread, others broadened the recognition of gay rights pioneers, others continued the discussion of soccer in the US, and others gave feedback on the window contest. Ralph Maccio made his comeback, Comic Sans put the smack down, and Gaga emulated another pop group. Great videos of bears (the literal kind) here and here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. 

— C.B.

 

Julian Sanchez is "surprised and pleased to discover that Sarah Palin is willing to publicly declare recreational marijuana use a 'minimal problem' that ought to be low on police priority lists," but he challenges her rationale for keeping marijuana illegal. She thinks "that [legalization] would just encourage our young people to think that it was OK to go ahead and use it." Julian:

There are all sorts of things that are legal for adults but not children, and it seems perverse to suggest that the failure to universally prohibit something counts as any kind of endorsement. But that's how the snowballing logic of paternalism works: The more we take it as given that the government will endeavor to prohibit harmful substances or behaviors, the more a failure to prohibit will come to be seen as a tacit certification of relative safety. To legalize what had previously been banned, then, may indeed seem like an affirmative endorsement. As people start outsourcing their safety assessments to the law, a vicious cycle kicks in: The more we prohibit, the more it seems we must prohibit. Maybe the better message to send "our young people" would be that many things they'll be legally able to do when they reach adulthood aren't necessarily wise or safe–and that they'll have to take responsibility for determining which are which.

Of course, one assumption here is that Palin in any way actually cares about what teenagers get up to. She doesn't. She pretends to. In this, as in so many things, Palin is simply a phony of vast proportions. But we all have to pretend to take this joke in some way seriously.

Their reporter at the BP hearings agrees with the substance of Barton's remarks, just not the way he said it:

Oh, and for the record, I agree in part with Rep. Barton that the establishment of the escrow fund — over and above the claims process that is already in place, and run by an Obama administration hack sold as an "independent third party" — is, if not illegal, than at least extra-legal, and another example of Democrats' selective disdain for the rule of law when it gets in the way of a government-run redistribution scheme.

But, what a stupid way to say it, Rep. Barton! Apologizing to BP????? "A tragedy of the first proportion???" Yeeesh.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

What are the odds that Obama's huge success yesterday in getting BP to pledge a cool $20 billion to recompense the "small people" in the Gulf will get the same attention as his allegedly dismal speech on Tuesday night? If you take Memeorandum as an indicator, it really is no contest. The speech is still being dissected by language experts, but the $20 billion that is the front page news in the NYT today? Barely anywhere on the blogs.

This is just a glimpse into the distortion inherent in our current political and media culture. It's way easier to comment on a speech – his hands were moving too much! – than to note the truly substantive victory, apparently personally nailed down by Obama, in the White House yesterday. If leftwing populism in America were anything like as potent as right-wing populism – Matt Bai has a superb analysis of this in the NYT today – there would be cheering in the streets. But there's nada, but more leftist utopianism and outrage on MSNBC. And since there's no end to this spill without relief wells, this is about as much as Obama can do, short of monitoring clean-up efforts, or rather ongoing management of the ecological nightmare of an unstopped and unstoppable wound in the ocean floor.

I sure understand why people feel powerless and angry about the vast forces that control our lives and over which we seem to have only fitful control – big government and big business. But it seems to me vital to keep our heads and remain focused on what substantively can be done to address real problems, and judge Obama on those terms. When you do, you realize that the left's "disgruntleist" faction needs to take a chill pill.

Take Iran. Everyone – part from still-delusional neocons – accepts that this is a hugely difficult issue. To read the neocon right, you'd think all our problems would be solved by the president declaring the regime "evil" and launching military strikes all over the country. Sound familiar? In the real world, most of us understand that the military option is madness, that the machinery of repression is strong enough for the  coup regime to survive – but only just. Since Obama was elected, the legitimacy of the Tehran regime has been shredded – and I'd argue that removing America from the equation helped Iran's opposition, rather than stymying it. Most of us knew, moreover, that Russia and China would oppose any and all sanctions.

But in fact, after a painstaking process in which Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have been successfully cornered in world opinion as the transgressors, sanctions, with Russia's and China's support, have passed the UN Security Council. More focused sanctions are in force against the financial interests of the Revolutionary Guards, and will soon come from the US Congress and European capitals. The price of Ahmadi's paranoia will be high, which may explain his recent fulminations. Will this pragmatic step resolve the situation immediately? Of course not. Does it make a lot of pragmatic sense? Yes it does. Is it the best we can truly do? I suspect so. In other words: Obama and Clinton got difficult shit done. I think part of the message of "Goodbye To All That" as a core rationale for the Obama presidency is acknowledging when a president does difficult, messy but necessary things.

My own provisional judgment is the same on the economy, where Obama's actions helped prevent what could have been a Second Great Depression. Historians will fight over this, but it seems pretty clear to me right now that Obama picked most of the least worst options and is prepared, unlike the GOP, to speak honestly about the deficit in the next two years. In the bank bailouts (much more successful than we first thought), the stimulus (still working), the health insurance reform (a real start on a deep and vexing problem across the developed world), and even the swarm of issues around Gitmo (torture has ended, while necessary, lawful military detentions and renditions continue), you see the same pattern of emotionally unsatisfying but structurally deep changes in the orientation of the ship of state. This is very gradual change we can believe in.

In other words, while I haven't scanted on occasional criticism, I remain an enthusiast for this presidency's competence and long-term direction. Even on gay rights, where I have whined the loudest, we have achieved an end to the HIV travel ban, and the legislative end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, with a buy-in from the top brass. Broader progress is coming, as it should, not by presidential diktat but by the decisions and actions of those in the trenches, most notably the current work of Ted Olson and David Boies in grasping the core matter at hand: unconstitutional, arbitrary, animus-based, government-imposed discrimination against a minority. In less than two years, on another obvious policy of irrationality – the war on marijuana – the Obama years have also seen a deeper sea change than any of us expected.

I don't see all this as ideologically liberal or leftist – which is where I agree with some of Obama's sternest critics. But I never saw Obama as such and never supported him as such. He may, however, end up a liberal hero. To see why check out Michael Tomasky's sharp essay in Democracy Journal. Money quote:

Our political culture affects the way we think about the past as well. Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting. It’s not for Obama’s sake, but for liberalism’s over the long haul, that we need to consider this reality and proceed in full awareness of it. It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. We don’t do nearly enough of that. Cable news and op-ed pages and websites are a kind of modern-day camera obscura, giving us an image to be sure, accurate in a way, but upside-down.

The changes we want to see won’t happen in 18 months, or in two years, or four, or probably even eight. Indeed, the entire Obama era, if it lasts eight years, is best thought of not as a culmination, or a self-contained time frame that should be judged a failure if X, Y, and Z don’t happen. It’s the start of a process that may take 16 years, or 24; that may be along the way interrupted or undone; that will be fought tooth and nail, as we’ve plainly seen these recent months, by others whose idea of America is incomprehensible to us but who are citizens too, with the same rights we have. They (and by the way: no despair on their side! There is rage, to be sure, but judging from the Tea Party events I’ve been to and watched, it is a joyful rage) and the corporate interests and the elected representatives on their side have a lot of power. Liberal despair only reinforces their power and helps to ensure that whatever gains are made during the Obama term could quickly be rolled back. And if that happens, we are back, ten years from now, to fighting the usual rearguard battles.

And that's why Obama's incrementalism, his refusal to pose as a presidential magician, and his resistance to taking the bait of the fetid right (he's president – not a cable news host) seems to me to show not weakness, but a lethal and patient strength. And a resilient ambition.

Know hope.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

Jonathan Bernstein is in awe of Andy McCarthy's reasoning skills.

A reader writes:

Bless their hearts, many of my closest friends are hardcore lefties (and — dare I say it? — former humanities majors, *sigh*), and I love them with all my heart, but omg, they are getting on my last nerve.  I'm an old yellow dog Democrat, like my daddy and his daddy before him, and God knows I don't like watching the Gulf of Mexico fill up with crude oil any more than they do, but they need to (a) grow up and stop living out of the emotional, lizard part of their brain all of the time, and (b) stop w HuffPo 24/7. 

They all huff and puff about Fox News, but nobody seems to get that MSNBC and HuffPo make their money by scaring people and stirring them up every bit as much. For God's sake, get a hobby!  Go for a walk!  If they're so upset about animals, go volunteer to work at their local wildlife rescue!

Okay, it's lunch time.  I'm ignoring them now…