Month: April 2012

Charles Murray’s most recent book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, has been discussed on the Dish here, here, here and here. Other great links here, here and here. Video archive here.

by Patrick Appel

Fred Kaplan chides the Paul Ryan plan for leaving defense spending uncut:

In an era when we face no foes of remotely comparable military power, how could it be that we need to spend roughly as much money as we spent when the Soviet Union was still alive, the Cold War was heating up, the border between East and West Germany was an armed garrison, and the nuclear arms race was spiraling upward? Yes, we face foes today, but they don’t confront us with echelons of tanks, armadas of fighter-bombers, or giant aircraft carriers fronting vast blue-water navies—nor do the threats they pose require the deployment of such big-ticket items to the extent that they once did.

James Surowiecki is equally unforgiving:

The budget is, as many have said, an act of political theatre, a way for Republicans to demonstrate what they stand for. But that’s precisely what makes it so revealing: what Ryan is proffering here is something like the platonic ideal of a budget. And what his plans tell us is that there’s very little the federal government has done over the past hundred and fifty years, apart from fighting wars, that the House Republicans approve of. In that sense, the Ryan plan is not about fiscal responsibility. It’s about pushing a very particular, and very ideological, view of the proper relationship between government and society. The U.S. does need to get its finances in order. It just doesn’t need to repeal the twentieth century to do so.

Reihan, on the other hand, mostly defends Ryan's plan:

Critics of Ryanism see cuts in federal expenditures for programs devoted to aiding the non-elderly poor as an attack on the non-elderly poor; what they fail to understand is that maintaining or increasing current levels of spending on programs devoted to aiding the non-elderly poor isn’t necessarily the best, and is certainly not the only imaginable, strategy for encouraging upward absolute mobility. 

Will Wilkinson would welcome a Ryan-Obama face-off:

Unfortunately for Mr Obama, Mr Ryan is no Newt Gingrich. He is not a pompous, self-aggrandizing bloviator in the grand southern style. He's a likeable, hardworking, detail-oriented, Midwestern wonk who just happens to be something of a looker. Moreover, Mr Ryan's conservatism largely eschews the odious cultural politics of social conservatives and focuses instead on a pragmatic, fiscally conservative market-oriented meliorism, the appeal of which is by no means limited to the hard right. He's an attractive politician offering an attractive comprehensive alternative to the administration's approach. And that's why it is a matter of urgent political necessity for Mr Obama to try to smear Mr Ryan's budget as a recipe for brutal, devil-take-the-hindmost injustice.

Obama has called the GOP budget social Darwinism. Nice try, but they believe in social creationism.

— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) April 4, 2012

by Chris Bodenner Chait offers a counterweight to commentators such as David Boaz upset over the president’s use of the term. So does a reader:

The difference is a semantic, but important one. Obama called the Republicans’ budget “thinly-veiled social Darwinism.” He didn’t call them social Darwinists. It’s akin to the difference between calling someone a jackass and saying that they’re acting like one.

Along those lines:

If we were talking about labeling the ACA/Obamacare a “socialist experiment” vs. calling the Romney/Ryan budget “social Darwinism,” I’d be right there with Boaz. But labeling the president himself a socialist is on a different order than the same characterization on any of his various programs.

Another makes a shrewd argument:

Connecting “Darwin” to this budget is a very smart move by the president.

Where conservatives say things like “culture of life”, Obama is being very slick connecting the word “Darwin” to the GOP tax plan.  Many older people are a) already convinced Darwin was the devil, and b) are a vulnerable demographic when the budget comes up due to their dependence on entitlements.  If Obama beats the social Darwinism drum enough, Romney will have to say something like “No, we should take care of the weak” (anathema!) or even worse, “Darwin wasn’t that bad”.  Or something mealy-mouthed and middle of the road, which will reinforce impressions of him.  Check.

by Zoë Pollock

When questioned about Mormonism's stance on interracial marriage, Romney said:

This gentleman wanted to talk about the doctrines of my religion. I’ll talk about the practices of my faith.

Joanna Brooks supports Romney's explanation:

For Romney, “doctrines” versus “practices” is a perfectly workable distinction, one that reflects the pragmatic core of modern Mormonism as well as the rather fluid and uneven state of its theology.

Mormonism has no professional clergy, no theological-scholarly corps. There is no regularly recited doctrinal creed. For well over a hundred years the tradition has been conveyed by word-of-mouth in thousands of lay-taught Sunday School classes and around kitchen tables and campfires. A correlated, cradle-to-grave curriculum was developed in the 1950s, but beyond central tenets of what Mormons might call “the gospel”—faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism; the inspired origins of the LDS Church and Mormon scripture; the eternal significance of families—Mormonism remains a theological “jungle,” as one eminent LDS scholar put it.

by Patrick Appel

Tyler Cowen's advice:

After a certain age, most people have a very set supermarket routine that keeps them from trying new foods. For one month, try an ethnic or new supermarket. Even the simple act of learning a new store layout will force you to change your habits and consider alternative products–which can actually end up helping you save money.

Dalibor Rohac reviews Cowen's new book, An Economist Gets Lunch:

The book’s key piece of practical advice is that our lives can be much improved by a stronger focus on ethnic food. America’s — and arguably also Britain’s — comparative advantage does not lie in fine produce or meat, or in their terroirs. Rather, it lies in the diverse stock of immigrant human capital. As a rule of thumb, it is a mistake to seek cuisines that are ‘fresh-ingredients intensive’ (Japanese, Italian or French). Instead, you’ll do better to focus on food requiring a lot of labour and savoir faire, and ingredients and spices that travel well. In the States, that means Sichuan, Pakistani or Korean food.

Over at his own blog, Cowen offers a tip from Peter Kaminsky's new book that explains why "you get most of the value of a dessert from the first bite or two":

If I had to reduce Culinary Intelligence to one guiding principle, it would be maximizing Flavor per Calorie (FPC): the notion that if ingredients are chosen on the basis of optimum flavor, and prepared with the goal of intensifying that flavor, then you can be satisfied while eating less.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

The point of the Pink Slime ruckus is not that they fed us the stuff (when I worked in a meat plant years ago, we called it offal), but that they told us that it was hamburger when we were only getting 90% hamburger and 10%, well, something else. Do you think it's honest or honorable to sell people butter that's laced with 10% margarine?  Or 24-caret gold mixed with the metallurgical variant of Pink Slime? I like head-cheese, but I also like to pick and choose when I eat it.

Another concurs:

I believe that most Americans have no problem with all of the nasty bits included in the "pink slime".  Every year it seems there are horrific stories about what is found in hot dogs, but that doesn't stop Americans from chowing down on their favorite dog. I think all the fuss has more to do with the process of treating the concoction with ammonium hydroxide gas. The process of having ammonia included in ground beef and other food products may not be unusual to those involved in high-tech food production, but to the layperson it is somewhat shocking.

Another:

Initially I was relatively unconcerned about LFTB. After all, the process of making sausage is famously disgusting too. However, the recalling the problems with mad cow disease has made me rethink my attitude. I don't see how LFTP can avoid being contaminated with nervous system tissue. While the ammonia treatment will certainly knock down bacterial contamination, I don't know whether it will touch prions, which are incredibly hard to deactivate.

Mark Bittman, no fan of the slime, weighs the possible health hazards:

[D]espite B.P.I.’s claim that the ammonia treatment killed E. coli and salmonella, and despite the U.S.D.A.’s support for this process, those pathogens have been found in B.P.I. meat.[1] Oops. But there’s an irony: the stuff is gross, for sure, but it’s far from the most disgusting meat product out there, and at least its origins reflect an attempt to make meat safer. Some argue, correctly, that other processed meats are much worse, and that ammonia isn’t nearly the most egregious chemical that’s approved for use on meat without your knowing it.[2] Besides, pink slime could conceivably even be helping: According to the Centers for Disease Control, E. coli O157:H7 illnesses are down 48 percent over the last decade.

He argues that industrial meat production is the real culprit. Another concern from a reader:

The gross part is that meat from so many animals is combined in such great numbers that contamination is widely spread.  We're reminded of this every time there's a recall.  Tons of meat, spread across the whole country, all of it at risk because of this kind of practice. It seems the responsible way to reduce waste would be to process smaller batches and make them easier to track.

by Zoë Pollock

An excerpt from Maggie Koerth-Baker's new book on the energy crisis:

Smallpox was a scourge that humankind is better off without, but we didn’t get rid of it because individuals decided to quarantine themselves. You don’t fight a systemic problem on an individual level. Eradicating smallpox required us to make big societal investments in the research and development of vaccines and in the infrastructure to get those vaccines to every corner of the globe. … In other words, you could beat your own lifestyle into submission with a ten-foot club — you could do more to save the planet than almost anyone is willing to voluntarily do — and it still wouldn’t be enough. This isn’t about you, and it isn’t about me. It’s about the systems that we share. The answer to the question “So now what?” has to be “Now we change the systems.”

In a follow-up interview, Maggie elaborates:

If you look at the history, what you see is an interaction between bottom-up and top-down enabling one another. Individuals made a case for energy change as a practical thing, which would fit the mission and solve some serious problems. The people at the top made a few changes, and those changes ended up changing not just what the people at the bottom did, but also how they thought about energy. As more soldiers and sailors and airmen became energy conscious, they’ve pushed for more changes, and that (combined with proven results) has led to more top-down action, and more bottom-up cultural shifts.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

With regards to your post about women not running, Fox and Lawless followed up the study with a book, It Takes a Candidate.  They found that women don't run for office because they feel less qualified than men to run.  Lawless and Fox interviewed women and men from four professions that candidates tend to come from: education, medicine, non-profits, and the law.  Women were far less likely to say they felt they were qualified to run for office than men, even though they have the same credentials. 

Also, women are more likely than men to point to the invasion of their personal and family lives as reasons they don't want to run for office.  Therefore, it is the problem with gendered psyche and traditional family roles that tends to be the reason that women don't run.  The other problem they found was that men are far more likely to be asked to run by members of the political community, and as a result men tend to have better political support systems prior to declaring their candidacies.

Speaking of women in politics, below are some details about the upcoming HBO series "Veep" (trailer above):

Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice-President Selina Meyer, who is neither corrupt nor politically extreme but harried, maddened by her job’s taunting combination of power and powerlessness, and forever at risk of public embarrassment. Meyer’s dominant mood—panic blunted by exhaustion, as she attempts, cursing, to outrun a political shit storm—will be familiar to viewers of "The Thick of It," Iannucci’s fine BBC sitcom about British ministerial life, or "In the Loop," a companion film that used some of the same actors to tell a darker story of Anglo-American ineptness and bad faith in the prelude to an Iraq-style war.

"Veep" is the second attempt to bring Iannucci’s political satire to American television. The first, an ABC pilot made in 2007, transposed the action to the office of a goofily innocent U.S. congressman; Iannucci, who was not in charge of that production, says that the experience left him feeling "slightly soiled."

by Maisie Allison

According to the Mormon Church, Thomas Jefferson is the husband of Sally Hemmings, his slave and the mother of several of his children, the couple having been "proxy sealed" in a practice similar to posthumous baptism:

[T]he LDS Church, according to its Family Search registry, considers Hemings to be Thomas Jefferson’s wife. (One of two—the other of course being Jefferson’s legal wife, Martha, who happens to be Sally Hemings’s half-sister; she and Hemings were both the daughters of Virginia plantation owner John Wayles.) Jefferson is also listed as the father of Hemings’s children.  … Why does this matter? Because Mormons not only believe in baptizing non-Mormons who have died—they also believe in “sealing” families so they can spend eternity together.

Joanna Brooks grapples with the ceremony:

Mormonism uniquely emphasizes eternal marriage as a rite necessary to enter the highest levels of heaven. Viewed through this theological prism (and with a generous dose of romantic idealism about the quality of most human marriages), the practice of posthumous sealings has special warmth for LDS people. But sealing deceased slaves to their slavemasters? Thomas Jefferson to Sally Hemmings? A relationship that emblematizes slavery’s most complicated and intimate forms of exploitation?

by Zoë Pollock

What the natural world can teach us about problem-solving:

Nature teaches us that adaptation to environmental risk carries no goal of perfection. In human society, it’s politically expedient to propose top- down security initiatives that promise total risk elimination, such as “winning the global war on terror.” But trying to eliminate a threat like terrorism is like trying to eliminate predation, and trying to minimize it with a single, centralized plan is the direct opposite of adaptability. Well-adapted organisms do not try to eliminate risk—they learn to live with it.