Laurence Grant defends the composting toilet he's had in his house for 17 years:
There are occasionally odors, but I light a candle to dissipate them. I think they have more to do with atmospheric conditions and the strength of the draft. If there is occasionally a "smell", it is an earthy one.
(Image by Grant/Used under CC 2.0)
It's grueling work, and even when Nick Denton isn't lashing the galley-slaves with whips, it can be a miserable dead-end for wannabe journalists. A depressingly credible story about the WaPo. Money quote on the agg-serfs:
They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.
Finally, finally, someone within mainstream Jewish journalism expresses disbelief at the disgraceful, bitter, ad hominem, unhinged mainstream media reviews of Peter Beinart's excellent little polemic, "The Crisis Of Zionism." JJ Goldberg's money quote:
One of Beinart’s key goals is to question the narrow parameters that communal leaders attempt to impose, with some success, on American Jewish discussion of Israel. The trouble is, those narrow parameters also preclude questioning the narrow parameters.
Pushback was inevitable.
But that doesn’t explain the attacks’ venomous, ad hominem intensity. For that we must look to the general mood of panicked rage sweeping some segments of Israeli and American Jewry: the McCarthyite attacks in Israel on human rights organizations and the New Israel Fund, the attempts to keep J-Street speakers out of synagogues and to defund or shut down Israeli film festivals screening the wrong Israeli films. The legal threats against campus Arab student groups. The hounding of M.J. Rosenberg. It’s hard to remember such a dark mood of repression since the days of the enemies’ lists circulating in the community in the early 1980s.
Back then, Israel was giving back Sinai and the PLO was between bombings, quietly building its base in Lebanon. And today? It’s been five years since the last Palestinian suicide attack. They’re building a state from within and adopting nonviolent protest. Is the right panicking because the noose is tightening? It sounds crazy. I’m just saying.
As for explaining the participation of The New York Times and The Washington Post in this anger-fest, I’m stumped.
Perhaps the most dishonest McCarthyite review was written by Daniel Gordis. I have read the book. His review can only be explained as a deliberate act of grotesque misrepresentation, as Peter lays out in a response. But Gordis is at least not hiding behind bullshit like so many of his fellow travelers. He wants an Israel, dedicated to survival as a Jewish state by means of ethnic and religious cleansing. He is a proud tribalist: "Do we aspire to America’s ideal of a democracy? Not at all. We’re about something very different." Peter responds:
In his 2009 book, Saving Israel, he calls on Israeli Jews to seriously consider “population transfers” of their Arab neighbors. Perhaps, he muses, Arab countries might take in those Israeli Arab citizens that Israel expels. “Alternatively, perhaps the international community could raise sufficient funds and offer massive cash settlements to those Israeli Arabs willing to relocate.” Unlike Rabin, Gordis is not seeking to reconcile Jewish tribalism with democratic principle.
He is using the former as license to trample the latter in ways that should send chills down the spine of any morally sentient Jew.
Gordis's book won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award. For my part, my own explanation for the explosion of the American and Israeli Jewish Establishment is simple. Peter has exposed their moral and intellectual negligence – and their profound illiberalism. When such a grand emperor is revealed as naked, he tends to strike back.
Popular history gets fact-checked:
A reader writes:
That for me was the most spot on relevant discussion of my experience with religion that I have ever watched or read.
As a raised Lutheran, now 36-year-old agnostic, it tackled the fundamental problem I have with religion in a way I have never seen before. If I embrace the construct of God, of Heaven, and most importantly the suffering of this Earth – I find it very hard to think of some place where the person I am today is transferred in whole to some other place for obeying a set of rules (or being very sorry right before I died).
How criminal is it that I attended Church for 20 years of my life, attended Bible school, Confirmation class, countless Sermons, and never seen a honest discussion about the Resurrection. I wish our churches embraced doubt (and smart debate). Instead, if you have doubt then the problem is with you. It's not seen as a part of faith and every day I become more convinced it is a conduit to a greater understanding of God (which is the route I'm working on – wish me luck). At any rate, thanks for showing me a church I would love to go to, except it does not exist.
And thank you so much for having this conversation. Maybe there are places having such a talk like you just had with Ross, but hell if I've found them before today.
Electionate ponders the education gap:
While the “gender gap” has received considerable attention, the “education gap” might be getting short-changed. If the Pew numbers are accurate, then college and non-college whites appear to be participating in different elections; college educated whites are offering 2008-levels of support to Obama, while non-college whites are as reluctant to endorse Obama as they were to support House Democrats in the 2010 midterms.
John Sides asks journalists to read polls responsibly:
Compare the trends among the group in focus to the trends among other groups. It doesn’t mean much if Obama is down among young voters if he’s down among middle-aged voters and seniors too. Often, swings among demographic groups are fairly uniform, which suggests that a candidate may not have a unique problem with one group but a systemic problem with many groups. You have to compare multiple groups at once. I discussed this before with regard to Jewish voters and Obama.
A reader writes:
CJ Chivers wrote: "Technical limits restrict the missions that unmanned aircraft can perform, and drones, for all their abilities, are very vulnerable machines. Whatever futurists predict, in the arena of air-to-air warfare, drones can neither reliably defend themselves nor consistently elude a determined attack." Chivers forgets: money and miniaturization. Some day soon, the military will realize that for the price of one human-piloted fighter jet like the F-22 Raptor (62 feet long, 44-foot wingspan) it can build a dozen drones that are each six-feet long and have a four-foot wingspan – essentially guided missiles with the ability to guide themselves. Sure, when that swarm of a dozen drones attacks an enemy fighter, the enemy might shoot down 10 or 11 of them. But one or two will get through, and the enemy will be just as dead, at a cost of zero American lives.
How will you fight a dozen six-foot drones? With 100 two-foot drones. How will you fight 100 two-foot drones? With 500 three-inch drones. Nanowarfare, here we come.
An expert weighs in:
I am an aeronautical engineer who has been thinking about this issue for the last 15 years, give or take. And while CJ Chivers gets a lot right, he kind of misses the point. The manned tactical fighter is at the same place on the technological curve that the battleship was in 1940.
Manned tactical fighters, at least the most modern, are incredibly expensive. Survivability drives the price up. It's not so much that you want the airplane back, as you want the pilot. Aside from the basic humanitarian concern, you've sunk a lot into training that officer, and want a return on that investment. So, we sink a lot of cash into things that make the fighter harder to spot and more resistant to damage. So far, so good. But there's a huge change coming that will revolutionize air combat when it happens.
In 2010, a high-energy laser installed within a modified 747's fuselage engaged and destroyed an airborne test target. Today, a program is underway to fit a smaller version into a C-130. It's no stretch to see a future version not too far off that can fit in an F-22's weapon bays. At which point, Game Over.
A missile launch can be detected and its guidance can be jammed. You have no such defense against a tactical laser. The first indication you have that you've even been spotted is when your airplane sprouts a few new holes. And all you have to do to ruin a pilot's whole day is to put a hole in his fuel tank and ignite the contents. A high-power laser would do this nicely.
So, survivability changes from robustness to just NOT BEING SEEN. Ever. THIS is what will make manned tactical fighters prohibitively expensive, and sooner than a lot of people realize.
So that's what's driving the move to drones. That, and no one ever had to write a "deeply regret" letter to the family of a robot. Their relative frailty is a feature, not a bug, since they can be bought in quantity and can be semi-expendable.
Dana Goldstein examines Schooling in the Workplace by Nancy Hoffman:
[Hoffman] argues the United States should adopt a Swiss-style vocational education system, in which students in their last two years of high school have the option of participating in highly structured workplace apprenticeships, working for pay several days per week and spending the rest of the time in the classroom.
Dana asked Hoffman if she found it disturbing that the apprenticeships would be mostly for the working class. Her answer:
I would much rather have a 3 percent youth unemployment rate and most young people having a job, than have the bifurcated system we have in the United States, [in which some kids go to four-year college, and the rest face a 22 percent unemployment rate].
Possibly longer than most people are planning for:
The IMF asks what would happen if life expectancy by 2050 turns out to be three years longer than current projected in government and private retirement plans: "[I]f individuals live three years longer than expected–in line with underestimations in the past–the already large costs of aging could increase by another 50 percent, representing an additional cost of 50 percent of 2010 GDP in advanced economies and 25 percent of 2010 GDP in emerging economies.
A new study (pdf) suggests that servicemembers are significantly more likely to be married, but not more likely to be divorced, than civilians with matched characteristics. The researchers speculate why:
[T]he decision to serve in the military may be associated with specific attitudes (e.g., traditionalism, commitment to institutions) that, in addition to motivating service, might also motivate remaining married even when facing lengthy and frequent deployments. … Another possibility is that the package of benefits and compensation that the military offers to service members, and to married service members in particular, act as incentives to marrying and barriers to divorcing that comparable civilian marriages lack.
(Hat tip: Mark Thompson)
The Dish 