Month: March 2012

Mike Riggs argues that legal cannabis isn't going to solve our budget woes:

"To get a sense of the disparity in price between legal and illegal drugs," Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote in 2007, "compare the production value of marijuana—about $1,600 per pound, by Gettman’s estimate—to the production value of tobacco, a legal psychoactive weed that U.S. farmers sell for less than $2 per pound."

Let’s go back to 2005, make marijuana legal, and give it an astronomically high production value of $800 per pound, or half of Gettman’s black market estimate: It would have tied with soy beans in 2006 as America’s third largest cash crop, with an average production value of roughly $17 billion. If it had the same production value per pound as tobacco, or $2, its APV in 2005 would have been $44 million; or less than 10 percent of beans, 2005’s 20th most valuable cash crop.

(Photo: Police officers guard seized packages of marijuana totalizing 20 tons on February 24, 2010, in Santander de Quilichao, department of Cauca, Colombia. According to authorities, this is the largest marijuana seizure in Colombia's history. By Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images)

Peter Singer, sensitive as ever, considers the idea while at an airport:

A slight Asian woman has checked in with, I would guess, about 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of suitcases and boxes. She pays extra for exceeding the weight allowance. A man who must weigh at least 40 kilos more than she does, but whose baggage is under the limit, pays nothing. Yet, in terms of the airplane’s fuel consumption, it is all the same whether the extra weight is baggage or body fat. … [T]he point of a surcharge for extra weight is not to punish a sin, whether it is levied on baggage or on bodies. It is a way of recouping from you the true cost of flying you to your destination, rather than imposing it on your fellow passengers. Flying is different from, say, health care. It is not a human right.

James Joyner dismisses the idea:

If we take Singer’s data as face value, added passenger weight has a negligible impact on fuel costs. $472 in fuel costs on a large airliner (which seats 525 people) on an incredibly long flight is next to nothing. After all, a flight from London to Sydney is billed at more than $2000 per passenger. And, frankly, it would almost surely cost more than $472 per flight to carefully weigh, assess, and haggle with 525 passengers.

Yousef Munayyer, at Zion Square, talks definition:

"The 1998 Rome Statute to the International Criminal Court defines Apartheid as actions or policies “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime” … The question of Apartheid in Israel, or in any place for that matter, comes down to a simple test based on the Rome Statute: Would merely granting full human rights (including suffrage) to persons of all ethnic and religious backgrounds ruled by a regime, or whose human rights are systematically denied by that regime, fundamentally challenge the regime itself? If the answer is yes, then it is Apartheid. If the answer is no, then it is not."

Beinart counters:

[I]f Israel gets branded an apartheid state although Palestinian Arabs sit in the Knesset and on the Supreme Court, how should we classify Syria, where Palestinian refugees and their descendants are not allowed to vote or become citizens? Or Lebanon, where Palestinians cannot own property or work in numerous prestigious professions? If Israel practices apartheid towards its Palestinian Arab citizens, what should we call Saudi treatment of its Shia minority, who cannot serve as judges in ordinary courts? And what about migrants throughout the Gulf who are barred from citizenship on ethnic grounds?

In an ugly region, these are valid points. But wasn't Israel supposed to be different and better? And isn't Greater Israel undermining Israel itself on these grounds?

David Wood pushes the military to pay more attention to the tragedy:

Couples like Mark and Heather, who want the option of natural childbirth, can turn to in vitro fertilization, using donor sperm. But the process is expensive, well beyond the means of typical enlisted soldiers and Marines. At Walter Reed, the cost of a single in vitro procedure runs from $4,800 to $7,000, and success may require many attempts. Yet the military's medical insurance program, Tricare, specifically excludes coverage for the procedure, even in cases where the husband's reproductive organs have been destroyed in combat.

Rich Juzwiak sees a staple of the Internet slowly dying out:

The limitless ubiquity of recaps makes writing them a challenge. Competition is stiff and deadlines are brutal, typically requiring just a few hours for turnaround to remain relevant. For this reason, formal and technical advances are few and far between: Typically, the biggest adventure a current recap can take is a shticky template tailored specifically to a show's format (as Vulture once did in its song-by-song breakdowns of Glee).

A hitchhiker's guide to his photo gallery:

J.L. Wall deems Beinart's thoughts on Israel unoriginal:

I suspect that if there is a movement to "Ignore. Peter. Beinart." it comes not from fear of his words than from the perception that he generates loud headlines and loud debates while contributing little of new substance to the discussion of what to do.  As perplexed as I was about why his 2010 essay was such a big deal, I was pleased that it seemed to open avenues for discussing the future of Zionism as practiced by American Jews.  I still find his passionate insistence that American Jews must do something, that the status quo is not sustainable, relevant and inspiring.  Nevertheless, two years later, I can’t help but feel that it has done little more than add to the polarization of the debate — in part because those on the right have grown more defensive.  But an equal measure of the blame falls on those who, like Andrew Sullivan, insist that any refusal to unquestioningly accept Beinart’s generally lackluster proposals indicates that one is on Bibi’s payroll.

A reader writes:

Regarding your video about the apparent lack of female readers, it may really be about your particular appeal to male readers. I’ve thought for some time that the affection you appear to inspire in your male readers is a form of bromance. You’re our go-to guy: you’re smart, capable, hardworking, reliable, and invariably an honest provider of insight and advice. Besides this, more than anyone we can likely think of, you’ve been a successful champion of gay rights, and you have banished any thought of anxiety about homosexuality as anything but masculine. In that sense, you make us more masculine by freeing us to appreciate what it might mean to be fully male.

The Romney gaffe piques Alex Knapp's curiosity: 

[The Etch-A-Sketch is] actually pretty elegant in its simplicity. Inside the plastic case is a non-toxic aluminum powder, mixed in with some plastic beads to keep the powder flow smooth and consistent. The screen of the Etch-A-Sketch is glass, and when you shake the Etch-A-Sketch, the powder coats the inside of the glass. The knobs are connected to a pulley system, which moves a brass stylus along an X-Y axis. Twiddle the left knob, and the stylus moves horizontally. The right movies it vertically. As you turn the knobs, the stylus is actually etching the powder from the screen, not drawing on it.

TNR is holding a symposium on the topic. Steve Coll's view:

My fear is that the center will not hold when 2014 arrives. All this technocratic planning on transition and security handover—that whole narrative—depends on there being a political center and a government that’s unified enough, with security forces that aren’t crumbling, to prevent an ethnic-based civil war that’s even worse than the one we have right now. It’s important to start thinking ahead about some of those political questions, and I don’t see that happening right now. The last few years, the White House has been sticking to its plan, but it’s pointless to couple that outward resolve with an internal refusal to deal with reality, which is what I’m afraid is going on.