Month: May 2011

Larison challenges this line of reasoning:

[T]he more that Americans come to believe that killing individual leaders is a ready-made solution to policy problems, the easier it will be to sell supposedly low-risk, promiscuous interventionism facilitated by missile strikes or special forces. It also helps to keep people from thinking very much about any of the other things that stoke jihadism and insurgency, and it encourages the false comfort that we just need to kill enough of the right people to prevail.

Sure. But we are not supposed to be glad that this monster is dead? Please.

Peter Beinart argues Obama just cured the myth of liberal effeteness:

Three days ago, Republicans were getting ready to run against [Obama] for supposedly pursuing a foreign policy doctrine of “leading from behind.” Now all those generalities have evaporated. Obama has inoculated himself against charges that he’s soft on national security in a more visceral way than any Democrat in decades. Even getting out of Afghanistan will be easier now. Does he deserve all the praise he’s getting? Not quite; this was more a triumph for intelligence and Special Forces than for Obama’s foreign policy strategy. But for decades, Democrats have taken undeserved abuse. There will be less of that now, and for a long time to come.

The White House walks back various details:

The White House backed away Monday evening from key details in its narrative about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, including claims by senior U.S. officials that the Al Qaeda leader had a weapon and may have fired it during a gun battle with U.S. forces. Officials also retreated from claims that one of bin Laden’s wives was killed in the raid and that bin Laden was using her as a human shield before she was shot by U.S. forces.

Asra Q. Nomani covers the Sila Sahin controversy:

I'm not a fan of porn as a symbol of empowerment, but as a Muslim woman, hearing divinely sanctioned mandates all my life about what a good Muslim girl looks like, I can understand why Sahin has responded to our community sanctions about honor, shame and modesty by stripping—and why members of her family have ostracized her for it. The battle over the Muslim woman's body is a debate over a simple Islamic concept: awrah (or awra), an Arabic word that refers to the zones of women and men forbidden from the public eye. While it's an equal opportunity word, it's the excuse some Muslim men use to subordinate, silence, segregate and cloak women from Afghanistan to Seattle, Washington.

Andrew Exum explains the "reason we have some of these special operations capabilities":

[Y]ou are witnessing the late stages of an evolutionary process that began in a cold desert base in Iran some three decades ago. You cannot understand why the U.S. military was able to execute this extraordinary operation deep in the heart of Pakistan without first understanding the failures of Iran in 1980. I've got Tim Harford's new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure on my desk right now, and I'm thinking Tim should add our special operations forces as a case study in time for the paperback.

A reader writes:

It sure is lucky that we killed bin Laden.  What would we have done if he was captured alive? Stick him in Guantanamo? Torture him? The Republicans would be calling for it. Put him on trial? Like that would happen? We can't try little pissant terrorists in court, no way we could try Osama. Keep him jailed without trial for the rest of his life? Most likely.  Lucky we killed him, indeed.

More Mike Luckovich cartooons here.

Nina Bai reveals a new study where "mice given a weeklong binge of alcohol were more likely to remember the environment in which they later received cocaine":

The type of learning that alcohol and other addictive drugs may promote is best described as "subconscious" reward-based conditioning, much like the classic example of Pavlov's dog. Just as the dog learns to associate the sound of a bell with food (a reward), a person may similarly associate a particular street corner in his hometown with cocaine use. After much repetition the dog salivates at the sound of a bell, and a cocaine addict craves a hit when he returns to the old hangout. The new insight from [neurobiologist Hitoshi] Morikawa's work is that alcoholics may be more vulnerable to reward-based conditioning—meaning they would learn new cravings sooner.

Vivek Nemana ponders the Civil War and "the cleavage between an industrial, prosperous North, and a rural, underdeveloped South, a distinction that persists in some ways even today":

The Union won in large part because of its industrial advantage, and its victory installed in the South what should have been better conditions for economic growth – liberal, more universal property rights and the abolition of slavery.

But, according to a report by Art Carden:

Mutual fear and distrust made contracting and doing business across racial boundaries more expensive. As a result, Carden writes, “Southern entrepreneurs, innovators, and laborers relied more heavily on kinship networks and informal arrangements than on formal markets.” And these factors were self-reinforcing, Carden argues, breeding a cycle of mistrust, ignorance and poverty.

(Map: U.S. wealth distribution in 1870)

Christopher Brosius creates fragrances like Gathering Apples, Baby Aspirin, Clean Baby Butt, Coppertone 1967, Green Bean, Crayon, and Wet Mitten. Geoffrey Gray test drives CBMusk with scent critic Chandler Burr:

“Have you smelled this?”

Of course I had.

“Do you like it?”

Kind of. Yeah.

“Are you straight?”

I nodded. Why?

“Because that smell isn’t musk. It’s not even close to musk. That?…” He looked back at my wrist. “That is the smell of man’s anus—a very clean man’s anus.” (Brosius’s response: “I can see where he would get that. That is exactly what musk is designed to do. It is designed to be an erotic perfume.”)