Month: February 2011

by Zoe Pollock

Robert Scheer explores Suleiman's shady past:

[The Obama] administration has fallen back on the sordid option of backing a new and improved dictatorship. Predictably, it is one guided by a local strongman long entrusted by the CIA, Vice President Omar Suleiman, described by U.S. officials in the WikiLeaks cables as a "Mubarak consigliere." The script is out of an all-too-familiar playbook: Pick this longtime chief of Egyptian intelligence who has consistently done our bidding in matters of torture and retrofit him as a modern democratic leader. But this time the Egyptian street will not meekly go along.

… The scenes of the demonstrators in recent weeks have in some ways been reminiscent of those I witnessed in Cairo back in 1967, but their significance is exactly the opposite. Back then, when huge crowds took to the streets their anger got perversely twisted by nationalist rage into the demand that Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had presided over a humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War, not make good on his threat to resign. The failure of the Egyptian street to hold Nasser accountable for the stark failures of his dictatorship ushered in a 44-year reign of tyranny, corruption and stagnation at the heart of the Arab world. …

A key cable discussing the enormous unpopularity of both Anwar Sadat and Mubarak, who replaced him 30 years ago, states: "Mubarak seems to have managed the dilemma better in at least one key area: he has systematically and 'legally' eliminated virtually all political opposition." Our kind of guy?

by Chris Bodenner

Reason's Tim Cavanaugh sits down with Steve Silverman to discuss how to deal with cops trying to search your stuff. Another money quote from Silverman:

The Fourth Amendment is not just some ball and chain around a policeman's ankle…. The Bill of Rights is actually, I would argue, a template for good policing. It requires officers to actually have evidence to search someone, so they're not wasting their time spreading large nets…. I think an officer should feel a sense of embarrassment asking someone to consent to a search when they otherwise have no actual probable cause to search someone.

(Hat tip: Scott Morgan)

by Patrick Appel

The Economist measures global waistlines (click on the above tabs to see changes over time):

The three maps [above], which are drawn from a new global study led by Professor Majid Ezzati of Imperial College, London, and published in the Lancet, show that, Polynesia aside, obesity was a rich-world phenomenon in 1980. By 2008 the rich world had itself expanded, bringing obesity to groups within countries that were previously considered poor, such as Brazil and South Africa. During that period, the prevalence rate of obesity among men doubled to nearly 10%. One country has stubbornly resisted this trend. For all its dynamism since India opened up its economy in 1990, its men have on average become even thinner. The study suggests that Congo is the thinnest country in the world, and Nauru the fattest.

(Hat tip: Compass)

by Patrick Appel

Bagehot suspects deductions don't have much effect on the marriage rate:

[D]o any of [the family values politicians] really, seriously think that the tax rules or boxes on forms have a decisive impact on whether people marry or not? To dip into anecdote, there were many reasons why I proposed to my wife nearly 13 years ago, but the tax implications were not high on the list. In fact, though I am painfully conscious of the tax that I pay, I am not even sure I could tell you, hand on heart, precisely what impact marriage (as opposed to co-habitation) has on our family tax affairs.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Nicholas Lemann sure can write:

It’s worth listening to the audiobook version of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, because not so long ago Obama had both the time and the inclination to spend many hours voicing the recording himself. His regular speaking voice is by now in all our heads, but in the spoken version of the book we also get something that has had to be put away from public display: Obama’s uncanny gift for mimicry. Again and again he will encounter a character and deliver the material that appears within quotation marks on the printed page in the character’s voice. He can do men and women, old and young, foreign accents and street slang.

To pull this off requires not just vocal ability but an intensity of observation of other people—a quality of attention, of absorption—so fierce it’s as if one’s life depended on it. And there is a sense, in the case of Obama, in which his life did depend on it, sociologically and psychologically. He had to imagine his way into the center of American society from a very unusual point on the periphery, to invent an identity for himself that felt comfortable, to find a way to love parents whom one would more naturally resent for having been so often absent.

That's from a TNR review of George W. Bush's memoir. He observes that "in Decision Points, everybody but Bush exists, characterologically, as a figure in the drama of Bush, not as an independent figure under observation."

by Patrick Appel

Schneier stumbles across a new term:

I'd never heard the term "micromort" before. It's a probability: a one-in-a-million probability of death.

Incredible interactive micromort chart here.

by Zoe Pollock

Greg at Rhymes With Right applies the Reagan quote above to CPAC's boycott of GOProud:

I disagree with plank #7 of the GOProud statement of principles. But unlike the boycotters, I refuse to make gay marriage the litmus test for conservatives, any more than I would make school choice, support for Israel, or even opposition to legal abortion a litmus test upon which one's inclusion as a conservative will stand or fall, even though those are all positions of importance to me. To do so is to create a conservative political correctness that will be every bit as destructive as the liberal variety, and will ultimately drive away those "80% friends and allies" who Ronald Reagan embraced.

(Hat tip: Gay Patriot)

by Conor Friedersdorf

I'd missed this post by Adam Ozimek:

…many states have regulations preventing dental hygienists from practicing without the supervision of a dentist. Dentists have an average of six years more schooling than a hygienists, who on average have 2.6 years of post high-school education. In addition, dentists make on average $100 an hour, and are 80% male, whereas hygiensts are 97% female and make around $37 an hour. Kleiner and Park find that these regulations transfer $1.5 billion dollars a year from hygiensts to dentists. This is a highly regressive transfer to a male dominated, higher educated, higher paid job from a female dominated, lower educated, lower paid job.

He goes on to demonstrate that professional licensing requirements indeed do unnecessary harm to consumers. The crux of his case:

…there are times when licensing is probably the best way to handle things. This is when you have a clear public safety interest, a minimal set of standards that are easy to agree upon, low price elasticity of demand, unlikely chance of a black market, and the economic forces interested in limiting licensing are as strong as those pushing for more of it. Airplane pilots come to mind here. But huge state by state variation in licensing without concomitant state by state variation in quality shows that we have a lot of licenses we can get rid of without any hugely negative consequences. In the meantime, the most disadvantaged workers and consumers are being hurt.

What I find most nonsensical are hurdles that make it harder to do professionally what lots of people do as amateurs without any adverse consequences – the average American housewife of the last generation did some barbering and interior decorating in her day, yet some states require a test to do those things for a living.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I'm the guy who sent in the Stonetown, Zanzibar photo.  Man, your readers are amazing!  I took the picture from the Dhow Palace Hotel, just down the street from the Shanghai Hotel, as your winning reader guessed.

Another writes:

Hi, Andrew and Co.  So I see that my girlfriend has won this week's VFYW contest. Do you have any idea what you've done to me?  Let me fill you in on Bonus Points Subrule A from our VFYW Contest Bylaws:

a. If a contestant emails his or her correct answer to Andrew Sullivan and wins a weekly contest, the loser must add – to his or her monthly total – the distance from his or her house to the actual location.

So instead of being 2,650 miles off this week (I guessed Gaza), I'm off by over 12,700 miles. (It's almost exactly 10,000 miles from Redondo Beach to Zanzibar. Huh.) So for the remaining two contests in February, I have to make up almost 14,500 miles (I was way off last week too).

Sheesh.

Well at least she'll share the book with you. Maybe?

by Patrick Appel

Ta-Nehisi applauds a documentary on the subject:

The process by which writing goes from bad to good–or even great–totally fascinates me. I think the main reason more people don't write is the sheer terror of confronting yourself on the page. Somewhere there are people who–on their first try–can make great writing. These people do not have bathrooms in their homes, as they are not human.