Month: April 2011

Bryan Walsh says that scientists "really don't know":

It's true that the average number of April tornadoes has steadily increased from 74 a year in the 1950s to 163 a year in the 2000s. But most of that increase, as A.G. Sulzberger reports in the New York Times, comes from the least powerful tornadoes, the ones that touch down briefly without causing much damage. Those are exactly the kind of tornadoes that would have been missed by meteorologists in the days before the Weather Channel and Doppler radar—scientists today would almost never miss an actual tornado touchdown, no matter how brief or weak. That makes it very difficult for researchers to even be sure that the actual number of tornadoes is on the rise, let alone, if they are, what might be causing it.

Alexis Madrigal ponders global warming's role. The Daily What captions the above clip:

Steven Hoag calmly converses with his sister from the Fred’s Food Club parking lot in Wilson, NC, as an EF2 tornado barrels toward his truck. Asked by ABC11 how he was able to maintain his composure, Hoag replied “I was a Marine, and I love Jesus!”

Today on the Dish, Andrew came to the defense of the monarchy in all its human frailty, the people wanted wedding coverage, and the bloggers admitted we all have our guilty pleasures. Cowen sized up the success of austerity, Andrew tried to nail down the mainstream media's role in gatekeeping stories, and responded to Weigel's call to the Alaskan hospital, verifying Trig's birth. Andrew and readers revisited Sam Harris' comments on torture, and Andrew didn't approve of gay culture mocking faith. Andrew approved of Ezra's tweaks to the living will stipulation, debated policies that were once considered conservative, and defended the "legitimacy" of Obama's policies. Jonathan Bernstein didn't think the birth certificate would matter for 2012, Rand Paul yucked it up, and the Tea Party swooned over Trump. We followed the Independent vote, but still gulped over the prospect of Trump.

We weighed our options in Syria, civil servants broke ranks with the army, and a father stood up for his gay daughter in Damascus. The ambassador was no longer invited to the royal wedding, but it may just be the cause celebre of the week. Palestinian factions united, Mexico chose TV over fridges, and Shani O. Hilton critiqued the catcall. We admired the Graffiti of War, Europe slipped on its environmentalism, and Trump dissed China, while still producing his line of clothing there.

Andrew wondered about the religious exception to San Fran's proposed ban on circumcision, and Ann Friedman wanted better birth control. Gay marriage can change how how honest we are about straight marriages, Overthinking It examined Death Star economics, and Keynes battled Hayek. Tuscaloosa twister here, nature clip of the day here, crazy avatar spy story here, and monkeytail beards here. Creepy ad watch here, cool ad watch here, dissents of the day here, Malkin award here, FOTD here, VFYW here, and MHB here.

–Z.P.

A reader writes:

My mother always said that hell was this earth. Or at least she said it for the last ten years of her life, while I was growing up, as she lived with a chronic, incurable condition that had left her as physically helpless as a baby, in the prime of her life, unable even to swallow soft food or speak understandably without a great struggle.

She was not religious, but she showed a kind of hope and faith by believing that post-death could not be as bad as what she was living through.

Recently I've met a man now aged 90 who, as a young man in his early 20s survived the Holocaust, using a small, concealed knife to cut a little opening in the wall of a boxcar bound for Auschwitz, then jumping free of the car, along with his mother, and landing beside the tracks in the dark of night. He was unable to find his mother after they both jumped from the train a few minutes apart and he then made a decision to leave the vicinity of the tracks rather than continue to search for her, a decision that still haunts him daily, nearly 70 years later.

He continued on the run until the war ended, homeless, hungry, exposed to the elements, always in danger, witnessing the enormous brutality of war and of the Nazis against his own, losing his entire family. He also has known hell on earth, as have so many people (and creatures, too) in all places and times. Yet he had so many very narrow, one might say miraculously narrow, escapes in those years that he continued to retain a certain faith in the possibility of good overcoming evil.

What is faith? What is hope? What is hell? What, for that matter, is heaven? Pat answers of any sort would scarcely seem to suffice. Traditional concepts seem inadequate.

I think the endurance of human beings like these is a function of faith and hope combined. True faith is almost always run through with doubt; and hope is not the same as optimism. I have felt both and could not have made it thus far in my life without them. My own experience is saturated with my own religious faith; but obviously people of all faiths and none share these things as well.

Where do these strictly speaking irrational things come from? That is the question. Do they evaporate upon our deaths? That is another question. Neither has a definitive answer.

Douthat echoes the Dish:

Whatever their customs and traditions, even the most modern polities often find themselves yearning, like the Israelites of old, for a kinglike authority. And the existence of a largely-powerless royal family can be a useful hedge against the perpetual temptation to invest ordinary politicians with quasi-royal powers, and then (almost inevitably) watch them run amok. (The experience of post-Franco Spain suggests that the restoration of a hereditary monarchy after a long period of dictatorship can play a similar stabilizing role.) Having a monarch as the symbolic head of state keeps elected officials in their place, provides an apolitical outlet for popular hero worship and the cults of celebrity, and satisfies the human hunger for ceremonial authority. If it’s an affront to democratic sensibilities, it’s also a safeguard for democratic institutions. Better a real king, crowned and powerless, than the many pseudo-kings who have strutted (and still strut) so destructively across the modern stage.

This is an interesting quote:

It's far more desperate than the president's policies are taking us in the wrong direction. His policies are illegitimate when contrasted with the United States of America as founded.

Not wrong or misguided, but "illegitimate when contrasted with the United States of America as founded." That's an astonishingly broad standard. I do not take it to mean that Obama, as a black man, should be a slave, not a president. Even Limbaugh isn't that crude. But this standard must violate every subsequent amendment, every subsequent court ruling, every social change, and especially the New Deal, social security and a military being more powerful than all the others in the world put together.

Is Limbaugh actually saying that all policies that would not be considered in the 1770s are illegitimate today?

A spider hogties an ant, with an unexpected twist. Arachnophobes beware:

A reader writes:

Though the lottery and other gambling revenues are enticing (and have led many states to expand legal gambling in recent years to shore up their accounts), they are the very definition of a short-term fix. A study by the Rockefeller Institute several years ago [pdf] found that gambling revenue tends to grow more slowly than the expenditures of the programs it is meant to finance. The regressive nature of lotteries does in fact make me squeamish, but the biggest problem with them is that they don't help states work their ways out of long-term fiscal holes.

Chait begins to:

I don't mean to overstate things here. Trump faces massive barriers. With his long history of liberal position stances and donations to the Democratic Party, he's a ridiculously easy oppo research hit. And he may well be putting us all on anyway. But the right combination of circumstances could let Trump build momentum and steal the nomination from a divided field. It's a longshot, but I wouldn't say anymore it couldn't happen.

I feel the same way. The more I have observed American politics, the more I am aware that long shots do come true here. And I should say that despite Trump's manifest unsuitability for high office, I prefer a system where a total outsider has a chance to break in from time to time rather than the more closed parliamentary systems of Europe.

Of course, I should be careful what I wish for. But Trump will only be president if enough people vote for him. And this, in the end, is a democracy. The people decide.

Gulp.

Larison rolls his eyes at the news that Syria's ambassador won't be attending the royal wedding:

The withdrawn invitation links the uninteresting royal wedding story with something important, and it makes royal wedding enthusiasts more aware of things elsewhere in the world that actually matter, but it doesn’t make much sense as a matter of British policy.

Many other equally abusive or even more wretched governments will have their representatives in attendance, because Britain has diplomatic relations with many governments whose human rights records are no better and some of which are far worse. Even though it goes against the Foreign Office’s own view of what invitations to these events mean, Syria is out because Syria happens to be the cause celebre this week. Call it the CNN-and-tabloids effect. Like everything else about British foreign policy lately, the decision-making here is purely reactive and opportunistic.

Like, er, the Libya mess. The NYT today offered a figure of 30,000 possible civilian deaths so far. How many before the intervention? Obviously, there's no counter-factual and Qaddafi's triumph would have been awful. But sometimes freezing conflicts into drawn-out stalemates is not the most efficient way of preventing civilian deaths, if that is your sole criterion.

Dana Goldstein makes it.