Hisham Matar, a Libyan novelist living abroad, is following the conflict closely. His recommendations:
I appeal to the international community to follow France and recognize Libya’s transitional government. This would help isolate the dictatorship even more and, more importantly, provide a logistical framework for Libyans to manage the needs of their people. We also need, desperately, medical and food supplies. Qaddafi is trying to starve the rebel strongholds.
Deborah Blum provides a brief history of food regulation in America. Among the more extreme efforts to increase food safety:
[USDA scientist Harvey Washington Wiley's] plan was simple from the beginning. He'd build a test kitchen and dining room in the basement of the Agriculture Department building on Independence Avenue. Then he'd serve poisoned food to a group of young volunteers. Wiley chose men in their 20s because he thought they were sturdy enough to withstand the diet he had in mind.
A reader writes:
Arcades died because of a lack of a $1 coin? Really? I have real trouble with such a statement when there are other ways of taking $1 in video games without a $1 coin (I played a video bar game just last week that accepted $1 bills). I suspect the death of the arcade has much more to do with video game systems and the Internet than a $1 coin being ubiquitous.
Why spend lots of money becoming good at an arcade game when you can buy a game and play it at home on your PlayStation or Xbox as many times as you want? And you can connect with your friends and play a game without everyone leaving their house.
Here’s my theory (backed up with just about as much fact as the article): arcades did well when people were used to going somewhere to play video games. When the generation of kids came along whose initial experiences with video games were in their homes, they didn’t see playing video games as something you went somewhere to do. So the video arcade is not a "destination" anymore. They might be successful where there is foot traffic or something else in the area that’s a draw (movie theater, bowling alley, etc.) but just as stand-alone places they won’t survive.
Another writes:
In Canada, we’ve had a dollar coin for 22 years, and a $2 coin for 15, and both bills were taken out of circulation when the coins were introduced. Arcades still didn’t come back.
Photo of a LAN party by Zachary Wolf. What's a LAN party?
A temporary, sometimes spontaneous, gathering of people with computers, between which they establish a local area network (LAN), primarily for the purpose of playing multiplayer computer games. The size of these networks may vary from the very small (two people) to very large installations. Usually smaller LAN parties consist of people bringing their computers over to each others' houses to host and play multiplayer games.
South Park has another example.
Peter Beinart calls out the new head of the homeland security committee:
[Peter] King, a Long Island Republican, will hold hearings this week on terrorism by American Muslims. Think about that for a second. King isn’t holding hearings on domestic terrorism; he’s holding hearings on domestic terrorism by one religious group.
Is most American terrorism Muslim terrorism? Actually, no.
Over the last decade or so, there’s been at least as much domestic terrorism by folks like Timothy McVeigh, Theodore Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph (who bombed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics), Bruce Edwards Ivins (the main suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks), and most recently, Jared Lee Loughner. But even if American Muslims are statistically more likely to commit terrorism than non-Muslims, it is still wrong to define the problem in religious terms. I’m pretty sure that in the 1950s, Jews—given their overrepresentation in the American Communist Party—were overrepresented as Soviet spies. Italians may have been overrepresented in organized crime. Yet for a member of Congress to define either Soviet subversion or organized crime as the province of a particular religious or ethnic group would still have been wrong.
Adam Serwer reminds us:
[A]ccording to the Triangle Center on Terrorism at Duke University, 40 percent of domestic terror plots have been foiled with the aid of the Muslim community. That number is as much a sign of cooperation from Muslims as it is an indication of how relatively few domestic terror attacks there have been in comparison to the attention they receive. While domestic radicalization is a serious issue worthy of Congress's attention, King's own history of support for violent extremism in the context of Irish nationalism and his record of making broad, unsupported negative generalizations about American Muslims makes him a poor candidate to lead that examination.
Today on the Dish, Andrew reengaged Palin on her life as a redacted "open book." Andrew deconstructed the empty GOP field for 2012 (read: blame shameless Fox and Palin), and, with the help of Aristotle, denounced inequality in America and the right. Andrew offered support for Bailey's libertarian healthcare mandate, and Tom Coburn stood up to Hewitt on housing and the deficit. Andrew sided with Gates against Kristol's cheap shots, Obama gained ground over Walker, and Doug Elmendorf revealed the advantages to tackling the debt now. Glenn Reynolds preferred a syphilitic camel over Obama, the GOP lusted after styrofoam cups and pulled a Charlie Sheen in #winning. Mickey Kaus defended John Edwards, David Brooks got a blog, and gay marriage mattered less to black voters. Ross categorized everyone's sex lives into two camps, readers responded with their own tales of premature monogamy, Saletan inquired about lesbian anal, and Mike Huckabee vibrated.
Andrew urged caution in the face of John McCain and John Kerry's calls for a no-fly zone and Arab regimes realized the status quo cannot be maintained. Black African migrants were rounded up and forced to be mercenaries in Libya, and food shortages affected rebel forces. We charted the timeline of psychology and torture, and former Guantanamo prosecutor Morris Davis called out Obama for standing on a rocky pedestal, re: Libya. Afghanistan's mission to protect wasn't clear cut, and Saudi Arabia turned ripe for revolution. Some countries will always lead the world, gays wore plaid, and a blind man could see your crappy parking job. Arcades died without dollar coins, the era of cheap food ended, and humans liked avatars the more they look like us. James Parker unpacked Bieber's appeal, and an artist ordered flowers for all the mental health patients who never received them.
MHB here, VFYW here, FOTD here, chart of the day here, quotes for the day here and here, and dissents of the day here.
–Z.P.
Marc Lynch takes a big picture view of the Middle Eastern uprisings. A snippet:
[T]he Obama administration is now wisely beginning to think regionally and strategically about where the region is headed. The upheavals have obviously exposed the myth that the status quo could be sustained indefinitely, and that Arab authoritarian regimes could be counted upon to suppress the preferences of their people indefinitely. The administration has already been using the new urgency to push regimes to begin serious reforms, and should continue to do so. They are trying to say that the U.S. is not abandoning its friends, but rather that it can only protect them and help them if they take the initiative and begin meaningful reforms immediately. Whether "reform" can satisfy a revolutionary moment remains very much uncertain. But what is not uncertain is that even where existing regimes survive, they will be far more attentive to the views of these newly empowered publics.
Video of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions set to Carl Sagan's Earth The Pale Blue Dot via Exum.
Amy Davidson is disappointed:
“The American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against al-Qaedaand its affiliates,” President Obama said in a statement today. Very true, which is why it was frustrating that his comments came with an executive order that moved away from a recognition of what our courts can do. The order lifted a block on new military-commission trials at Guantánamo, which had been put in place two years ago, when Obama said that he wanted to close the prison in a year. According to a “fact sheet” the White House put out today, he still wants to close it, in theory. In practice, though, it doesn’t look like it will be anytime soon, and, with the new commitment to commissions, certain suspects are less likely to have to answer the accusations against them in real courts, before American juries.
Massimo Calabresi provides more background.
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A reader writes:
Regarding the lack of flowers for patients of mental health, it reminded me of a stunning art project done in Boston in reaction to the closing of an old psychiatric hospital. Installation artist Anna Schuleit calculated the total number of patients that had stayed there and not received flowers, and then filled the hospital with all the flowers that had not been given. Here's an article on the artist and her project.
Doug Elmendorf, director of the politically neutral Congressional Budget Office, explains it:
Although there are tradeoffs in deciding how quickly to implement policy changes that would reduce future budget deficits, there are important benefits to deciding quickly what specific combination of reductions in spending and increases in taxes will be used to put fiscal policy on a sustainable path. Most important, enacting policy changes soon would allow for gradual implementation of those changes while still limiting further increases in federal debt and the negative consequences that would flow from those increases. Moreover, enacting policy changes soon would probably provide some boost to economic activity by reducing uncertainty and holding down interest rates.
(Hat tip: Adam Sorenstein)
Salim Hussein Attia, a resident of the key oil port of Ras Lanuf, is treated in Ajdabiya's hospital after being wounded by an air strike that hit his car as he was fleeing the city with family on March 7, 2011. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images.
The Dish 