Month: June 2010

Tuesday night on the O'Reilly Factor, former half-term governor of a state which has the population of a little more than Raleigh, North Carolina, said:

"… as governor of Alaska, what I did in dealing with the oil companies and I’ll betcha 75% of my time was being taken up by energy issues here in this state. I had to set up our Petroleum Systems Integrity Office so that we could be there on the front lines making sure what the oil companies were telling us was legit when they were dealing with their corroded pipes that we find out and other lax maintenance issues. It took us putting that as the highest priority to to protect our resources to protect our environment including not just the physical environment but the human environment here."

In her novel, Going Rogue, she is pretty clear as well:

So one of my first priorities was to establish the Petroleum Systems Integrity Office (PSIO). With the creation of the PSIO, Alaska became the first state to require industry operators to document their compliance with maintenance and quality assurance standards, and to share that information with the state.

But this is clearly misleading. The push for greater government scrutiny of Arctic Pipeline Technology first came from Palin's predecessor, Frank Murkowski, who set up the team to achieve this in 2006. Yes, Palin continued and moved this forward but it was not her idea, its core architecture was not set up by her, and under her brief tenure, BP, the major culprit, cut its budget for safety and maintenance by around a third. Full details at Palingates. It seems to me that this kind of truth-blurring is just as salient in a public official as loose language about former military service or teaching credentials – as in Blumenthal and Kirk.

If Palin had ever been subjected to the kind of scrutiny today's candidates are getting, she'd be toast. But the genius of Palin's appeal is that her base loves toast – as darkly burnt as possible.

Introducing North Korea's football fans.

Yglesias thinks this map is misleading.

The panda has some competition:

Conor notes this statement by Mark Steyn:

The media's attitude to "honor killings" is not only shameful and dishonors the dead; it's also part of the reason why America's newspapers are sliding off the cliff: Their silence on this issue is merely an especially ugly manifestation of how their news instincts have been castrated by political correctness.

Thus is reproduced as fact at the Corner, the way Newsweek uses a campaign book like Going Rogue as self-evidently part of the historical record. But, to read only the NYT for the past decade reveals Steyn to be hallucinating:

Over a period of roughly a decade, the newspaper ran everything from major internationally reported stories on honor killings in its glossy magazine to a crime story about a local honor killing on its New York regional page. It covered honor killings in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

The topic garnered attention from magazine editors, freelancers, staff reporters in the newspaper, writers on the book review and arts pages, and multiple op-ed columnists from across the ideological spectrum. One of those columnists wrote multiple items about honor killings across several years (and even mentioned them in a couple columns that won a Pulitzer Prize!). Considering the magazine stories on honor killings alone, the Times must have spent tens of thousands of dollars at minimum covering the subject in its Sunday glossy. Honor killings were also deemed important enough to frequently appear in the World Section briefs.

So what on earth is Mark Steyn talking about?

Himself, I think. But since there is only a tenuous connection between what Steyn writes and what most people deem as non-wingnut reality, this critique will hold no water on the right. What matters to them is not grappling with what is, but asserting an ideology and cultural solidarity against libruls. So we have a simple test: will NRO correct the record (as if Steyn has ever conceded an error on anything), or will epistemic closure reign on?

Tom Gross rounds up some of the worst anti-Semitic cartoons published in the Middle East since the Mava Marmara killings. Ugh.

A different take on Erdogan's shift toward populism, Islamism and nationalism:

If you scratch the surface of what seems to be a secular versus Islamist divide in Turkish attitudes toward the West, you will quickly see that both the so-called Islamist and secular camps embrace the same narrative vis-à-vis Europe and America: nationalist frustration. New obstacles to EU accession, perceived injustice in Cyprus, growing global recognition of the Armenian genocide and Western sympathy for Kurdish national aspirations are all major factors forcing Turks to question the value of their long-standing pro-Western geostrategic commitments.

The whole blog, Istanbul Calling, is a great resource for understanding what's going on in Turkey.

Tara Parker-Pope finds:

Only 41 percent of respondents said children were important to a happy marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990. The only thing less important to a happy marriage than children, the survey found, was whether a couple agreed on politics.

So why do kids rank so low on the list? The fact is, marriages today are increasingly adult-centered, rather than child-centered, an issue identified in a sweeping 2008 report from Rutgers marriage researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. In the report, called “Life Without Children: The Social Retreat From Children and How It’s Changing America,” Dr. Whitehead notes that the percentage of our lives that we devote to parenting is shrinking. Because married couples are delaying children and having fewer kids, they start parenting later and finish parenting sooner than couples of earlier generations.

Dan Ariely made a list. Number four:

Checking email is addictive in the same way gambling is. You see, years back the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that rats would work much harder if the rewards were unpredictable (rather than a treat every 5 times they pressed a bar, one would come after 4, then 13, etc). This is the same as email, most of it is junk, but every so often, it’s fantastic: an email from the woman you’ve been chasing for instance. So we distract ourselves from work by constantly checking and checking and waiting to hit the email jackpot. And to be perfectly honest, I’ve checked my email at least 30 times since starting writing this article.

Diego Valle Jones created a statistical analysis of Mexico's drug war:

In the beginning, the war proved a success by all objective measures: in 2007 the homicide rate decreased to its lowest level in recorded history and murders in Michoacan went down by more than 40%. Not that it mattered much, all the while the government was losing the psychological war—the use of torture and beheadings became common in executions carried out by drug cartels as they sought to protect their turfs and intimidate the population.

And then 2008 rolled around and the Sinaloa Cartel decided to take advantage of the weakening of the other cartels and the corruption that is endemic in Mexico to gain control of the drug trade…