Month: September 2011

Anne-Marie Slaughter makes some bold predictions:

The second Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan are ending boots-on-the ground wars of counter-insurgency and regime change. The great power wars of the twenty-first century will be fought by special forces: specialised in combat against pirates, terrorists and global criminal networks; in focused search and rescue and search and destroy missions; and in civilian protection units capable of disabling but not destroying an enemy. They will be fought by cyber-warriors, skilled in manipulating unmanned weapons and in deterring and responding to system-wide cyber-attacks. And they will be fought in multilateral coalitions aimed at stopping the wars that criminal governments wage against their own people and bringing individual leaders and their coterie of high-level supporters to justice.

Dreher says that Romney's attacks against Perry aren't working:

The lesser reason [Perry hasn't been damaged] is that people may not agree with [Perry] on Social Security, but they appreciate his willingness to stake out a risky position on the issue (and, truth to tell, they may well be confident that he won’t be able to do squat about it). I think the far more likely reason is that Cowboy Rick looks exactly like the kind of guy who is going to take the fight to Obama, and take it to him hard.

I think this is a misjudgment. If the economy is bad next fall, people will be looking for a reason to vote against Obama. Reasonable, pinstriped Romney will come across as a safe choice for many independent voters. It will be very, very easy for Team Obama to make Perry look like Yosemite Sam.  Nevertheless, if Romney can’t take some flesh out of Perry’s hide in tonight’s debate, GOP primary voters are going to have their doubts that he’s got what it takes to go up against Obama solidified.

A reader writes:

I read Jan Grave’s self-pitying essay on "the Anti-Racist White Movement" in Seattle but I pretty much gave up after this choice bit describing young African-American men who choose to walk in the center of the street and ignore the attempts of motorists to get them to move out of the way: "Honking was an attempt to reassert privilege." Oh please. Honking was an attempt to get these idiots to stop walking in the middle of the street and blocking the flow of car traffic. Why does a city have sidewalks, for the sweet love of Christ? 

Graves equates this walking in the street to the "loping" that African-Americans habitually did in the Deep South and which they brought with them to Seattle in the migration of the 1950s.  Thus, I guess, it should be preserved and respected by tremulous whites as some sort of cultural touchstone rather than the inconvenience, lack of regard for others,  and evidence of failure to adapt to the circumstances of Northern urban life that it clearly represents.

Jan Graves drips with whining self-hatred for her damnable whiteness. Really, she struck me as an almost  laughable caricature of a super sensitive, desperately earnest,  white suburban liberal trying to "do the right thing". I thought we left that stereotype behind in the '70s!

David Dow relays his experience as a defense attorney:

As Perry prepares for his presidential run, he’s showing no signs of doubts. It’s not just his debate answer. Next week, the state is set to execute my client, Duane Buck. At Buck’s trial, the prosecutor urged the jury to sentence him to death on the basis that because Buck was black, he would be dangerous in the future. Earlier this summer, I had a client executed whose lawyer neglected to raise any issues during the very appellate process Perry lauded during Wednesday’s debate as a safeguard against mistakes. Two years ago, I had a client executed after prosecutors had removed all the blacks from the jury. One of my intellectually disabled clients was executed because his previous lawyer neglected to inform the court of the inmate’s IQ score. Another client was executed because the court of appeals refused to stay open past 5 p.m. so we could file a last-minute appeal. I don’t know of any definition of fair that could be applied to these cases.

Researchers at UC Irvine have discovered a connection between hormonal contraception and the way memory works in women:

The birth control pill, taken by more than 100 million women worldwide, appears to impact how the brain remembers events. Those taking the pill will recall more of the emotional aspects of an occurrence, while non-users will hold onto more factual details…the impact makes sense, according to the research team. Birth control pills work by suppressing the natural production of hormones estrogen and progesterone, which have already been associated with strong “left brain” memory skills — the part of the brain responsible for fact retrieval.

The findings may also contribute to a better understanding of PTSD:

[T]he findings could help lead to fuller answers about why women experience post traumatic stress syndrome more frequently than men, and how men remember differently than women. Men typically rely more on right-hemisphere brain activity to encode memory. They retain the gist of things better than details. Women on the pill, who have lower levels of hormones associated with female reproduction, may remember emotional events similarly to men. 

Orion, age 13, from Charlotte Dumas's portraits of the remaining rescue dogs who worked the 9/11 recovery effort.

"Imagine instead that Bush had actually waged the war in accordance with [Bush's] own (correct) formulation of the Axis of Evil. The major sponsors of state terror were North Korea (chiefly as an arms merchant), Iraq, and Iran — and Iran’s junior partners, Syria and various Palestinian groups. North Korea, as a non-ideological foe, could be safely isolated by taking away its customers. Israel can — and mostly does — keep the Palestinian problem a local one. As for the rest? An ultimatum, mid-2002, after ejecting the Taliban, to turn over all records, funds, and materials related to terror. If not, a long, rapid march from the beaches of Syria to the streets of Tehran, destroying all government buildings — and any military forces stupid enough to stand in the way. Then get our soldiers back on their ships in the Persian Gulf, with the stern message: 'Don’t make us come back here again,'" – Stephen Green.

Ramesh Ponnuru tires of the debate:

Social Security, unlike a Ponzi scheme, is not run for the financial profit of the people who run it; in fact, the government is running it at a loss, and that loss is projected to increase. Participating in Social Security, unlike a Ponzi scheme, is involuntary. And Social Security, unlike a Ponzi scheme, can be reformed so that it becomes a sustainable program. How to do that is probably what we should be talking about, instead of the validity and limits of an analogy.

Michael Lind agrees that the analogy is fatally flawed. As does Matt Steinglass. Alex Tabarrok makes a distinction:

Social Security is not necessarily a Ponzi scheme but it only generated massive returns in the past because of its Ponzi-like aspects. The Ponzi-like aspects are now over and social security is turning into what is essentially a forced savings/welfare program with, as Krugman recognizes, crummy returns for average workers. Social security is thus a Ponzi scheme which has not gone bust but it has gone flat.

Earlier posts in this thread here, here, here and here.

Breaking down post-9/11 TV drama:

Back in the real world, Balko reports on the creeping militarization of police departments:

The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military's job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It's dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, "Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize." That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.

(Hat tip: Tod Kelly)

In an interactive infographic.