Month: December 2011

The Dutch have historically been regarded as extremely clean. Dr. Science at Obsidian Wings has a theory as to why:

One thing that has been IMHO overlooked is that this level of cleaning is a way for women to compete with each other. It's a form of conspicuous consumption: it takes a lot of resources (servants, especially), which means money, and it *is* conspicuous: Dutch women were especially scrupulous to clean their front steps and hallway, so that passers-by could see at a glance who was ahead in the housewife competition. Preachers said that cleanliness was aligned with godliness, so women could say that they were merely working to be as godly as possible — but I don't think there was much of humility in it. They were practicing Extreme Cleaning, and because so much of it was publicly visible they could rank each other's performance to an exacting degree.

Assad is greeting the Arab League monitors with mass bloodshed. Estimates of the murdered in the past two days alone are reaching 250, an astonishing number given that the most recent UN figure had the death toll of the entire conflict at 5,000. Amira Al Husseini documents the Syrian Twittersphere's collective scream. Jerrorld M. Post and Ruthie Pertsis try to comprehend how Assad could countenance this sort of murder:

Like Saif [Qaddafi], and for all his veneer of Westernization, Bashar never learned from a powerful father how to respond to protest without resorting to violence, and totalistic violence at that. After all, the Hama massacre kept Hafez al-Assad in power for nearly two more decades. It seems likely that Bashar, like Saif, will persist with the present destructive course charted by his father until the end, for in the end "blood will out."

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alasdair Smith look to more mundane political explanations. Dennis Ross thinks, regardless, Assad is screwed, but Michael Rubin worries that the Arab League's chief monitor has connections to the genocide in Darfur. Maysaloon, in addition to explaining some opposition chants, brings us back to the sheer depravity:

[T]he Syrian regime is going to execute soldiers that had defected from Assad's armies. Dubbed "traitors", this news comes shortly after the regime signed an agreement with the Arab League agreeing to let in a number of observers and after 100 to 110 people were reported killed by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which, as we all know, is being bashed by so-called "leftist" sceptics who find the deaths of twenty, let alone one hundred, Syrians per day less outrageous than the "standards" of impartiality and fairness that they expect; fair play and all that. It begs the question why they think they are anti-imperialists in the first place when their outrage is only provoked by some injustices and not others.

This man's skull was caved in:

And yet these protestors at a Damascene funeral take over the streets under Assad's nose:

These protestors in Idlib chant, sing, and hold signs in English:

That's same city where these young men were murdered yesterday:

Evanston, Illinois 11.25 am

Update from a reader:

I'd recognize that Evanston picture anywhere. My Mom and Dad spent the last years of their lives in that neighborhood, a block away in a retirement home. When things got really bad with their health, I used to take my mom for walks in that park, with me pushing her in her wheelchair. Thanks for posting.

Ryan Avent considers the view that wealth will help us adapt to climate change:

If future wealth is the most important thing, then it makes little sense to borrow heavily from the future for current consumption. Insuring against catastrophe means trying to boost future wealth, and that means that if you're going to borrow, it's important to channel that borrowing into investment. The good thing current consumers get as compensation is the ability to burn away cheap fossil fuels. If disaster prevention is the key, by contrast, then consumers can borrow now for the purpose of consumption, but they must compensate the future by facing strict limits on carbon emissions.

Instead, America is consuming more than it can afford now, leaving the future less rich, while also pouring carbon into the atmosphere. That strategy only makes sense if destruction is already a foregone conclusion—if there will be no future to pay off the debt. 

Felix Salmon says that inherited wealth isn't what it used to be:

People might become stupendously wealthy, but we’re not really creating a new class of dynasts here. Instead, the money comes, and then, almost as fast as it came, it goes.

One reason is just that the idea of preserving wealth in one’s own family for many generations to come has rather gone out of fashion. If you inherit a fortune which has been in your family for hundreds of years, then you do generally feel a responsibility for maintaining it and passing it on to future generations. But families are smaller now than they used to be, and self-made billionaires don’t necessarily consider multi-generational wealth preservation as a particularly top priority. Indeed, it's more common to see billionaires swing the other way: Warren Buffett, for instance, likes to say that he wants to leave his children "enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing".

Romney feels your pain:

Send more entries to andrew@thedailybeast.com. Previous ones here, here and here.

D.W. Sabin rediscovers the environmentalism of James Madison:

Fifty years before the acclaim of Thoreau or Emerson, James Madison delivered one of the most groundbreaking speeches in American farming and conservation history. In May of 1818, engaged in farming pursuits like the rest of his Cincinnatus former Presidents, Madison delivered an address to the Agricultural society of Albemarle. In it, Madison covered here-to-for generally unknown notions of ecology, plant physiology, nutrient recycling, soil erosion control, soil chemistry and in a word, Conservation. The speech was enthusiastically received at the time and pamphlets detailing it were published both here and in Britain as well as France. This co-author of the Federalist Papers knew that American Liberty was deeply indebted to the long-term health of the land we live upon.

An excerpt from Madison's address: 

But although no determinate limit presents itself to the increase of food, and to a population commensurate with it, other than the limited productiveness of the earth itself, we can scarcely be warranted in supposing that all the productive powers of its surface can be made subservient to the use of man, in exclusion of all the plants and animals not entering into his stock of subsistence; that all the elements and combinations of elements in the earth, the atmosphere, and the water, which now support such various and such numerous descriptions of created beings, animate and inanimate, could be withdrawn from that general destination, and appropriated to the exclusive support and increase of the human part of the creation; so that the whole habitable earth should be as full of people as the spots most crowded now are or might be made, and as destitute as those spots of the plants and animals not used by man. 

The supposition cannot well be reconciled with that symmetry in the face of nature, which derives new beauty from every insight that can be gained into it. 

Xtreme … pogo? It works:

This quote distorted a conversation between a gay Iowan and Newt Gingrich. Timothy Kincaid watched the above video of the exchange:

Newt Gingrich gave the only answer that any candidate could give when presented with “I disagree with you on Issue X and Issue X is the most important issue to me.” There simply is no other answer than, “So don’t vote for me.”

But let’s be VERY CLEAR here. Newt Gingrich did NOT say that he “didn’t need” Arnold’s support. He did NOT tell gay Iowans to vote for Obama. Rather Gingrich suggested that if marriage is not the central issue in their life that they consider other issues on which agreement might be found.

Adrian Hong outlines a strategy for ending Kim Jong-Eun's reign before it gets going:

[P]ressure is still the key. Western nations, in conjunction with China and Russia, should overtly offer senior DPRK leadership asylum in exchange for defection, while pursuing action at the International Criminal Court against senior leadership implicated in crimes against humanity. Although distasteful, efforts should be made to pledge immunity from prosecution for key leaders in exchange for going into exile.

Dan Trombly is aghast:

[E]very single attempted North Korean uprising has been met with lethal force.

… Even if a mixture of bought-off [Korean People's Army] generals, dissidents reinfiltrated across the border, and spontaneously invigorated Korean people was able to coalesce into a serious fighting force, the regime would likely retain enough support to militarily crush such a rebellion, and would be able to use its nuclear weapons to ward off any kind of foreign military intervention. While the KPA is hardly a perfect military, the Kim family regime’s Songun policies put the strengthening of the military force first. Contrast this to Gaddafi’s explicit weakening of the military and reliance on a variety of security services, mercenaries, and local paramilitaries, and one can see why the KPA would be a much more formidable fighting force for an incipient revolution to confront.

Along the same lines, John Sides points to a paper on the consequences of a North Korean collapse:

Based on optimistic assumptions about how a collapse might occur, we estimate that 260,000–400,000 ground force personnel would be required to stabilize North Korea. This means that even in the relatively benign scenario that we describe, the requirements for stabilizing a collapsed North Korea would outpace the combined U.S. troop commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan.