Month: October 2011

Blake Hounshell sees the debate over manner and cause of death as unimportant:

[A]m I troubled by the manner of Qaddafi’s death? Yes. But it’s not realistic to expect people that have been ruled for four decades by a brutal tyrant, who left no institutions left behind and called his people “rats” as he vowed to hunt them down “alley by alley” to behave like Western democrats when they finally catch him. Far more important than getting to the bottom of Qaddafi’s end is to stabilize the country itself and stand up a legitimate government as soon as possible.

Max Fisher seems to disagree:

For all the meticulous legality and diplomatic decorum of this war’s start, its end was as dirty as they come: the former leader of a nation hauled off the back of a truck and shot by an angry mob that was appointed by no one and accountable to nothing. It’s an inauspicious start for what the interim Libyan leadership also said was the same moment that formal political transition began. 

More parting thoughts:

Noreen Malone reports on how millennials are dealing with a miserable economy:

It’s part of the American way to get a lot of self-worth from your job. Meanwhile, one of the reasons there aren’t enough of those jobs out there is that America no longer makes enough stuff. Young people feel that void, intrinsically. Making stuff is what got us smiles from our parents and top billing in refrigerator art galleries. And since we are, as a generation, more addicted to positive reinforcement than any before us, and because we have learned firsthand the futility of finding that affirmation through our employers, we have returned to our stuff-making ways, via pursuits easily mocked: the modern-day pickling, the obsessive Etsying, the flower-arranging classes, the knitting resurgence, the Kickstarter funds for art projects of no potential commercial value. … Of course, funny videos and adorable hand-sewn ikat pillows aren’t the only kind of stuff that people are making as a way of coping with harsh economic realities—meth, for instance, comes to mind.

Matt Honan plays the world's smallest violin:

Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession. It had even shittier jobs, and actually had to pay for its own music. (At least, when music mattered most to it.) Generation X is used to being fucked over. It lost its meager savings in the dot-com bust. Then came George Bush, and 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generation X bore the brunt of all that. And then came the housing crisis.

(Photo from LATFH)

President Obama claims the Iraq War is ending. Ackerman isn't buying it:

[I]t’s a big deal that all U.S. troops are coming home. … But the fact is America’s military efforts in Iraq aren’t coming to an end. They are instead entering a new phase. On January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hired army of about 5,500 security contractors, all to protect the largest U.S. diplomatic presence anywhere overseas.

Exum chimes in:

[W]ars, like history, do not stop when America decides it no longer wants to be involved. This is worth remembering, both in terms of what is taking place in Iraq today as well as what might take place in Afghanistan in 2014. So by all means, say U.S. involvement in the war has ended. But think carefully before saying the war has ended.

Naples, Italy 5.15 pm

David Brodzinsky says there are currently 65,000 adopted and 14,000 foster children in the US being raised in homes headed by gays and lesbians:

About one-third of the adoptions by lesbians and gay men were "open," and the birth families' initial reactions regarding sexual orientation were very positive (73%). Interestingly, male couples more often reported having been chosen because of their sexual orientation than did lesbians, explaining that the birthmothers expressed a desire to remain the child's "only mother."

Over 10% of the children adopted were 6 or older – a population generally perceived as more difficult to place – and 25% were at least 3 years old. Interestingly, the household incomes of respondents were high – and more so for the male parents, $212,380 vs. $115,467, indicating (among other things) that more lesbians adopted as individuals and more gay men as couples.

Among Brodizinsky's recommendations:

Remove legal and cultural barriers so that all qualified, vetted prospective parents can be considered, notably including the passage of "gay marriage" laws, because the social institution of marriage brings clear long-term psychological (and other benefits) to children.

(Italics in the original.)

A reader writes:

As a consistent reader of the Dish, I am aware of your strong opinion of the financial sector bailout: it was absolutely necessary to prevent Armageddon. Unfortunately, I have to agree. The government was able to avert a disaster that is truly impossible to imagine, and while the results are hardly perfect, I prefer them to whatever "Mad Max" style scenario would have resulted from refusing to rescue the industry.

Nevertheless, you cannot claim that the bailout is a rousing, profit-generating success. The sums presented in your link highlighting the bailout's profitability are not only laughably tiny ($6 to $20 billion, maybe) but also describe ONLY the performance of TARP. The world seems fixated on TARP as a measuring stick for the government's response and the banks' accountability. And yet, as we now know, an audit of the Federal Reserve has demonstrated that the Fed's total involvement in rescuing the global financial industry is somewhere approaching 16 trillion dollars, several trillion of which were disbursed to financial institutions in foreign nations.

The audit, done by the Government Accountability Office and available here, has failed to become a top-of-the-heap story, but that shouldn't be a surprise. No one – not the Obama Administration, the Fed, Wall Street, their Republican friends, or anyone other than people interested in the true costs of the Great Recession (or Great Failure) – has an interest in that information becoming a true story. Dodd-Frank forced the audit via an amendment by Sen. Sanders (which he rightfully crows about), and Dodd-Frank also required disclosures of who received trillions of dollars in emergency loans, disclosures which the Fed and the Clearing House Association have been fighting for years.

The result is that the know-it-all college hippie who was probably holding the "WE WANT OUR BAILOUT MONEY BACK" sign may actually be more right than he knows or understands. Sure, the bailout was a necessary evil, but don't present it as a profitable, unqualified success. TARP receives the focus, but it was but a sliver of an inconceivably enormous intervention by the US government which, let's face it, will NEVER be "paid back." And even TARP itself has been lambasted by the very man who ran it and was largely financed by borrowing at a thrifty 0% interest rate. By endorsing the idea of the profitability of "The Bailout," which is really just TARP, you are endorsing a completely mythical representation of the government's response and Wall Street's supposed accountability.

The overall point becomes incredibly disheartening and only shores up the anger of OWS even more: "The Bailout" was 30 times the size of TARP, TARP itself has been largely repaid thanks to favorable borrowing practices allowed by the Fed, and the culture which allowed the entired disaster to unfold has not been forced to examine itself for one second. As Vanity Fair recently put it, Wall Street views the entire incident with a "Shit Happens" mentality, shrugs its shoulders, and now feels persecuted by OWS and the outrages of Dodd-Frank.

(Chart, which appears to show only US-based bailout, via EconMatters)

"We can go over there and help them build their infrastructure up … One of the problems I have from leading from behind is when a day like this comes we don't have the infrastructure in place that we could have," - Lindsey Graham, who supports infrastructure spending in Libya but not the US. 

A new study counters a common misconception:

"[S]exual behaviors involving the anus were least common," researchers found. Around 75 percent of participants reported kissing their partners, giving oral sex, and/or receiving oral sex in their most recent sexual encounters. By contrast, only 36 percent of men reporting receiving anal sex and 34 percent of men reporting giving it.

Where did that missing 2 percent disappear to? Up their own assholes?

(Trailer for Weekend, a new film reviewed here, and an interview with the director here.)

A reader writes:

Is there any way for you to post all your "Ask Andrew" things in one convenient place?  I haven't been able to visit your blog as frequently as in the past and I love these. I'm also lazy as hell and I don't want to have to work to find all the ones I've missed.

The Beast is currently creating a page within their video section that will feature all of the "Ask Andrew Anything" videos, and it should be up within the next week or so. But for now you can view most of them on their YouTube channel.

With purpose:

Skeinz, a yarn store in New Zealand, is calling on knitters throughout the world to knit sweaters for the penguins affected by a massive oil spill that occurred earlier this month. The tiny sweaters, while eliciting aww's and squee's, serve a very important function: they prevent the oil-soaked birds from poisoning themselves by preening, as well as keeping them warm before it's their turn to be cleaned up by cleanup workers. And, you know, who doesn't want to save the lives of penguins by dressing them in the most adorable way possible?

The yarn store, unsurprisingly, has been inundated. It no longer needs sweaters.

(Image from Grist.)