Month: March 2011

Ackerman keeps tabs on kills in Afghanistan:

[I]t’s the easiest statistic to understand: a dead fighter. The trouble is, the militants never seem to run out of ‘em. The insurgents have between 25,000 and 35,000 fighters, according to a guess by the Afghan Ministry of Defense. As Joshua Foust of the American Security Project notes, that’s been the estimated total for years, suggesting that the insurgency is a) very large and b) opaque to the U.S. and its allies. Clearly the insurgency can replenish its ranks, discrediting the suggestion that NATO can kill its way to victory. And it’s that insight that caused many in the military to gravitate toward counterinsurgency theory in the first place.

This meditation on the Lenten season we enter today is worth reading in full. Money quote:

Ash Wednesday should be seen as standing guard over Lent, reminding us at its start of the core truth of Christianity: we must give up.

We must give up not this or that habit or food or particular sin, but the entire project of self-justification, of making God’s love contingent on our own achievements. And the liturgy of this day goes right to the ultimate reality we struggle against, which is death itself. We are reminded, both by the words we say and the burned palms imposed on our foreheads, that we will die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Give up! Give up, for you will not escape death.

The entire logic of the theology of glory, of all our Pelagian impulses, of all human attempts at mastery and control, are searched out and stripped away on Ash Wednesday. We are seen for what we are – frail mortals. All power, all money, all self-control, all striving, all efforts at reform cannot permanently forestall our death. Our return to dust is the looming fact of our existence that, in our resistance to it, provides a template of sorts for all the more petty efforts we make to gain control of our lives.

In this way, the repentance that takes place on this day also can be seen for what it is. The penitential rite is not a kind of shame inducing act of self-hatred. It simply is a recognition, and thereby acceptance, of our inability to love and do perfectly, which no amount of self-help strategies can change. It points to the utter gratuity of grace, its unearned, unmerited, even inexplicable nature. Repentence, then, is liberating.

On Ash Wednesday, our confession of sin really is saying, “we give up.” By repenting, we opt out of the logic that turns the good news of Christianity into another form of bondage, of accusation and moralizing. We do not, on this day at least, pretend to be anything other than the flawed human beings we are. And it is this very lack of pretending that is such a relief to sufferers weighed down by guilt. Ash Wednesday is a day for honesty. We no longer have to fear or elide the truth about ourselves.

(Photo: View of the sign of the cross on a man's forehead during Ash Wednesday's celebrations at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Medellin, Antioquia department, Colombia on March 9, 2011. The 40-day period of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, with Catholics around the world observing the season which culminates in Holy Week. By Raul Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images)

From a Paul Ryan report (pdf):

Austin Frakt applauds this chart because it gives interest on the debt its own category:

Using some set of assumptions … interest on the debt will consume about as much of the federal budget as will all health care spending by 2040. By 2060, interest on the debt will be akin to another entire federal budget. By 2080 debt interest will be larger than the entire federal budget. Meanwhile, if future government revenue is no higher than it has ever been in the past, relative to GDP (~19%), we already cannot afford the government we have, let alone the interest payments on it.

Yikes!

The Economist, using CBO numbers, depicts the revenue gap Frakt mentions. 

Lexington diagnoses the American public:

In 2005 John Mueller, a professor of political science at the Ohio State University, predicted in Foreign Affairs that an “Iraq syndrome” would eventually make America more sceptical of unilateral military action, especially in places that presented no direct threat to it, and less inclined to dismiss Europeans and other well-meaning foreigners as wimps. “The United States may also become more inclined to seek international co-operation, sometimes even showing signs of humility.” A bull’s eye for the professor.

Greg Scoblete shakes his head:

It's always puzzled me why much of the Washington foreign policy community saw the "Vietnam Syndrome" as a bad thing, as if the U.S. had curled up into a geopolitical fetal position, unwilling to use force even to protect vital interests (not true: when push came to shove we ejected Saddam from Kuwait). But to the extent that a "Vietnam Syndrome" prevented policymakers from blundering into an unnecessary conflict, so much the better, I would argue.

A realist is a neocon who has been mugged by reality.

Along with Shep Smith, legal analyst Andrew Napolitano is one of the good guys at Fox News, and above he prompts Republican Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee to repudiate the Obama Administration's treatment of War on Terror detainees. (Via Adam Serwer.)

Leslie Gelb's makes his case against intervention:

It is folly to start that incredibly dangerous process of arming and protecting rebels on the supposition that they are democrats, or that they would be better than their present dictators, or that they could "win" with U.S. help.

Instead, the only safe and sound course is to continue to freeze Libyan funds in the United States; warn Libyan killers of all stripes that they will be held to humanitarian account; provide active and massive humanitarian relief services and aid to refugees; condemn Gaddafi's actions at the U.N.; call for the peaceful resolution of the civil war; and leave any military action and military aid to the African Union, the Arab League, the Europeans, or individual states from these groups. And should Britain and France seek a U.N.-approved no-fly zone, Washington should neither thwart nor join it. In the end, the United States cannot and should not be more helpful than Libya's neighbors themselves. Remember, no one maintains that Libya is a vital strategic interest to Washington.

From a four-year-old.

Tyler Cowen compiles a list. These leaped out at me:

3. Lower taxes don't spur economic development as much as it is often claimed, at least not below the "fifty percent or less of gdp" range…

5. I'm all for Health Savings Accounts, but unless done on a Singaporean scale, and with lots of forced savings, they're not a health care plan to significantly benefit most Americans.  There is less of a coherent health care plan, coming from this side, than one might like to think. 

6. There is already considerable health care cost control embedded in the ACA, most of all for Medicare, and this is not admitted with sufficient frequency.

I'd like to see a universal health insurance proposal based on HSAs that really does provide enough for people to get healthcare. So far, not so much.

A reader writes:

Jesus had a beard? What makes you think that? It's just like so much about Jesus, people have been culturally conditioned to an image that is almost certainly false.

There are no surviving images of Jesus, if there ever was one. It wasn't until the 4th century that Christians began making images of him in artwork and relics and the like. And those images were most likely crafted from the likeness of the former pagan gods, particularly Zeus, who was represented with long hair and a beard.

At the time the images of Jesus were controversial. For one thing, Christians had been conditioned against worship of anything with images. Another argument was that Jewish men in the 1st century were believed to have been clean shaven and short-haired, like the Romans, while it was the pagan Greek philosophers who wore long hair and beards. And of course Paul had written that long hair on a man was a shame. How could he have said that if Jesus wore his hair that way?

So the hippie Jesus worshipped in so many evangelical churches today more than likely represents the image of the pagan god Sarapis (or Zeus). Just another one of those historical ironies, and of course bad news for beard-worshipping gay Catholics everywhere.

Busted. But stubble surely?

John Cassidy attacks NYC bike lanes and "the bike lobby." Felix Salmon defends bicyclists:

Cassidy is convinced that the addition of bike lanes has increased the time he spends stuck in traffic, or looking for his beloved free on-street parking. (As Naparstek notes, his argument can basically be boiled down to “Street space should not be set aside for bike lanes. It should be set aside for free parking for my Jaguar XJ6″.) But the fact is that impatient motorists will always want to blame someone else for traffic, when, clearly, they themselves are the main culprit in that regard.