Month: December 2010

It's enough to make you weep:

Israeli officials on Tuesday canceled a ceremony planned to honor the Palestinian firemen who assisted in battling the Carmel fire last week, after a number of crew members were refused permits to cross the border. Palestinian Fire Services Commander Ahmed Rizik said that he and his staff were surprised to learn when they arrived at the checkpoint that only seven out of the 10 fireman would be granted entry into Israel, although all of them had been allowed in at the time of the disaster.

A snafu because of a security bureaucracy that, for a brief moment, was not supposed to treat Palestinians like … Palestinians.

A reader contributes to the thread:

It is indeed great news on the HIV front. The stem-cell re-boot has long been thought of as the most promising avenue for ridding the body of HIV rather than merely controlling its growth. All I'd say is that this is an extreme and difficult procedure and impractical on any general level – at least right now. But it does suggest that HIV can be gotten rid of entirely if you try hard enough.

I remain in awe of the science and the scientists involved in all of this. Sometimes we really ought to take stock and comprehend the sheer magnitude of the current successes of science. I literally live and breathe because of them.

Adam Ozimek rejects the "small government" and "big government" dichotomy:

I’d like in some cases more government, like a carbon tax, but I’m also not okay with that being used as a revenue prop for the status quo of way-too-inefficient policies that we do have. I’d like the  government to spend money efficiently subsidizing and incentivizing effective early childhood education, but can’t bring myself to let government take more money and become a larger player in education until they stop doing the things they already do so poorly.

I think in the whole I would be comfortable with a fairly large amount government spending that was efficient and effective. In part I’d be ok with this because in the long-run, my small fantasy is that a successful government should make itself less necessary. If we got early childhood education up through high school working really really well, I think government would be able to roll itself back significantly in a lot ways, from prisons to welfare.  With efficient and robust safety nets and a dynamic and healthy economy we could arrive at a place where who are poor are very likely to have chosen such a state, and so we don’t have to have the impossible, expensive, and sisyphean task of preventing all poverty.

Some, perhaps much, of this, I understand, is wishful thinking. 

And yet so immeasurably sane.

More context – via the Obama administration. I have a feeling that Dick Holbrooke would not be that sorry that his last words created this much of a fuss.

A reader writes:

Now it is easy to see the current situation as a disaster for Obama and the Palestianians, but Mr. Long Game might have some other ideas in mind. While the neocons and Bibi celebrate their short term victory of keeping the status quo, it may be Obama that is driving them down this road. The status quo does not lead back to the bargaining table or even the way things used to be, it leads to the UN Security Council and then all bets are off.

Conventional wisdom suggests that no American President would ever vote yes or even abstain from a resolution on a Palestinian state, but the truth is that this is the only place that Congressional fealty has no currency.

You can make all of the assumptions you wish about what may or may not take place under such circumstances, but this is exactly the worst place for Israel to end up because Cantor can blather, but he can't vote or even overrule the President in this forum.

The only way an American President could actually survive abstention or a positive vote is to demonstrate the total futility of direct negotiations and make a solid case that there is no alternative any longer. Maybe Obama didn’t offer Bibi the sun, moon and even a promise not to take this to the UN because he thought Bibi would go along, but rather he was convinced he would not and provide just the sort of cover he is looking for to impose peace.

Bottom line is that the best deal Israel will get is in negotiations and the worst deal is at the UN. Note that Obama said a UN resolution would be “premature” at this point, not because he isn’t done trying for peace, but he is not done exhausting the world with Israeli intransigence. When Bibi is finished killing all efforts, the look at the UN will be far different and the Israeli/Neocon fate will be entirely in the hands of someone they cannot control and do not trust.

If Bibi really believed that Obama would go along with a UN resolution, the settlement freeze would be reinstituted tomorrow and a deal would be had in months, but Obama has to prepare the ground in advance of instilling that fear in Israel. This is not a conventional President, so don’t expect him to always follow conventional wisdom even when it comes to Israel. 

A remarkable young chap plays a medley of British hits from the last five decades:

Adam Ozimek gives some wise investment advice:

If you are someone who is getting ready to retire, and you see 17% returns on your portfolio you should be terrified, not proud, because the investments which you will shortly be living off of are clearly exposed to large amount of risk. There is no magic that brings large returns without risks. Where you see one, there will almost certainly be the other. So if you don’t like huge risks, be wary when you see huge returns.

A reader writes:

As a professional poker player whose livelihood may or not be hurt, enhanced, or eliminated by Senator Reid's proposed bill, I have much interest in what is going on and would like to correct a few points from Christopher Beam's article.

First, it is true that players are not protected from fraud or cheating, but whether or not this issue will be sufficiently dealt with through US legislation is yet to be seen and, to be honest, somewhat unlikely.

Secondly, Pokerstars and Full Tilt are not exactly self-policing. It is true that the governing bodies regulating online poker are largely jokes (the main one is a totally fraudulent group run on a Canadian Indian reservation), but Pokerstars is licensed in the Isle of Man, operates a chunk of their business out of London, and there are ways to file complaints with the gaming commission of the Isle of Man. These organizations may not do much in the way of policing, but there is certainly no guarantee that the United States will be interested in anything other than the moneygrab.

Third, what happened at Absolute Poker and has also happened at Ultimate Bet was outright cheating done by the top members of the company. It was not an "employee" at Absolute Poker who stole the money but a cabal of Americans who started the site in Costa Rica. A vocal contingent of poker players has routinely requested that the FBI look into the matter– what they did should be considered along the same lines as securities fraud– but nothing has happened.

And finally, one thing Beam leaves out is that the very best police for online poker is the players themselves. Both the Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet scandal were detected by players using sophisticated statistical methods– in short, there are certain things that happen so many standard deviations from what is normal that it almost has to be cheating, and these things get investigated. There is ZERO chance a government entity would employ people capable of catching and policing this stuff because only poker players with a lot of knowledge about how the game works can catch it. It is unlikely that the government would realize this or pay the amount necessary to get some of these experts on their side.

Last week the Dish wondered why only 6% of scientists identify as Republican. Doctor Science's guess:

My memory of the 70s and 80s is that Republican Party was not particularly anti-evolution at the time. There were discussions and debates about "Evolution and the Bible" and such, but they didn't have a particularly partisan character yet.

What I recall being much more significant were environmental issues. Although the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act were passed under Nixon, by the time the Reagan administration rolled into town the Republicans were pretty strongly on the side of pollution and extinction. Many of you are probably too young to remember Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, but that Wikipedia article covers the high points. Basically, he was completely on the side of extractive industries (including forestry and mega-agriculture). He justified it with Christianism: God wants man to have "dominion" over the earth, and besides, Jesus was coming back any day now.