Month: May 2012

Now Remnick Is Anti-Israel?

The Jerusalem Post runs an op-ed calling the New Yorker editor "unabashedly anti-Israel" and, for good measure, someone whose "only previous editorial experience was at his high school newspaper." More here. It contains the usual ad hominem:

One can only surmise that Remnick is working out his own conflicted identity issues (Remnick was born of Jewish parents in Hackensack, New Jersey) on the company dime.

It trots out all the usual exhausted tropes about why anyone would ever care about Israel when there is so much worse in the world. This is the same paper that runs a columnist recently arguing for the vision of the Netanyahus for Greater Israel:

Caroline B. Glick, Post senior contributing editor, drew cheers from the crowd when she called for permanent Israeli control of Judea and Samaria, saying it was better to keep the Palestinians inside Israel rather than allow them to establish a “terror state.”

Meanwhile, the International Writers Festival in Israel is, for the first time, asking participants to provide their remarks ahead of time to prevent any criticism of the current Israeli government. This is after last year's comments by Israeli novelist Nir Baram. His outrageous offense? Saying this:

In his widely denounced comments, Israeli novelist Nir Baram wondered aloud whether it was possible to speak about literature without discussing the social and political conditions in which it was written, then added, "Under cover of the victim's cloak that history has admittedly sewn for us Jews, we are witness to the systematic violation of the rights of non-Jews in the State of Israel and the occupied territories." What Israel needs, he continued, is "a frank and pointed dialogue. Perhaps a sympathetic but critical look from abroad can illuminate the hollows hidden from our eyes."

Perhaps. But Netanyahu's government isn't going to risk it.

The Not-So-Radical Susan Sontag

On the crucial question of confronting homophobia, where her own comfort level would have been threatened, she never had the nerve:

In life, she remained closeted, only begrudgingly admitting to bisexuality shortly before her death. The closet represents the great irony of Sontag's life, which was full of public courage on political issues, and yet virtually no disclosure when it came to her same-sex relationships. The diary opens with Sontag's 1964 breakup with Cuban American playwright Maria Irene Fornes, details the relationship with her friend and sometime lover Eva Kollisch and continues through Sontag's years with French actress and film producer Nicole Stéphane. Above all is what she once called "the maelstrom of C." – Sontag's stormy late '60s relationship with Italian aristocrat Carlotta Del Pezzo.

(Via Petrelis)

The Bin Laden Freakout

I can see no problem with the ad run by Obama on his extraordinarily ballsy decision to choose the riskiest path to get bin Laden and all the intelligence his compound contained. It is the kind of ad that would be a no-brainer for any Republican president, seeking re-election. If Bush had done it, he would have jumped out of a helicopter in a jump-suit with fireworks. And it is simply true that both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney downplayed the importance of finding and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Here is the last president, after his bungling of the battle at Tora Bora, in March 2002:

I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority… I am truly not that concerned about him.

And here is Mitt Romney who still seems to believe that the "Soviets" are our number one geopolitical foe:

It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.

And this was a key issue in the 2008 election. You may remember the debate in which Obama pledged that he would launch a unilateral attack within Pakistan if necessary to get the mass murdering religious fanatic. McCain cited this as evidence of Obama's insufficient experience in foreign policy and general jejuneness. So this was a hugely successful policy opposed by McCain, opposed by Bush and opposed by Romney. No wonder they're so upset at reality. It's the same reaction they have when it becomes clear that Osama bin Laden was captured and killed by a president smart enough not to deploy torture, years after a bunch of thugs took over US intelligence on the orders of the panicked incompetent, Dick Cheney.

And one thing about John McCain. He actually said: "And, you know the thing about heroes, they don't brag.” For his entire political career, McCain has done nothing but brag about his own military service, milking every last, disgusting drop for his own interests, making it the center-piece of his campaign. And he didn't kill anyone – just crashed his plane, was tortured, and cracked under tortured interrogation. He has spent decades making this a reason for him to be elected to various offices, from the very first first=person account in US News, which launched his political career. Heroes don't brag, Senator? How else would you describe your entire career?

I'm with Jon Meacham, who plays a tiny violin for the upset Republicans:

Republicans are — forgive the cliché — shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is "politicizing" an important national event. In this sense, "politicizing" might be best translated as "beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it." The ad itself raises intriguing, substantive, legitimate questions — and the ferocious, sputtering Republican reaction is proof positive that they know it, or at least suspect it.

Tomasky echoes:

It couldn’t be more hilarious, watching these Republicans rend their garments over the Obama administration’s bin Laden video. Imaging the paroxysms we’d have been forced to endure if George W. Bush had iced the dreaded one is all we need to do to understand how hypocritical it all is. But what obviously gets under Republicans’ skin is not the fact of this video’s existence, but the fact that Barack Obama got him and they didn’t, which destroys their assumption of the past decade that they are "the 9/11 party." And more than that—and this is the real story here—it’s the fact that the Democrats don’t appear to be afraid of the Republicans anymore. That, to Republicans, is what’s truly unacceptable.

I think the Obamaites need to be more aggressive in foreign policy arguments. Obama ended one war in Iraq, dispatched Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi without a single US casualty, re-set relations with Russia, brought unprecedentedly united international pressure against Iran's nuclear bomb potential, wiped out much of al Qaeda's mid-level leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and presided over democratic revolutions in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain. He restored this country's moral credibility after the dark period of Nazi-style interrogation under Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld.

Namesakes

NPR explores the benefits and burdens of sharing a name with a celebrity:  

The Howard Johnson hotel chain is offering free one-night stays to people named Don Draper. ESPN is running a commercial showing how the appearance of a white Michael Jordan is endlessly disappointing to waiters and limo drivers. "Why should I change? He's the one who sucks," complains a character named Michael Bolton in the 1999 film Office Space. … "I always have to explain to someone who Googles my name — I'm not the linebacker for the Steelers, I'm not the inmate in Texas convicted of aggravated robbery, or the teen rapist charged in Wisconsin, or the guy in the mug shot in North Carolina for possession of drug paraphernalia," says Andre Frazier of Wellington, Fla. "I'm thinking about changing my name."

The Syntax Of Violence

TNC compares learning French to surviving a rough neighborhood:

Violence was a language in the crack era. I have never, in my life, been as scared as I was on the first day of middle school. What petrified me was that the boys–most of whom were older–spoke the language of violence. Violence shaped how they walked. Violence shaped who they walked with. Violence shaped when they laughed and what they laughed at. Violence shaped how they wore their Starter caps. Violence told them when to give dap and when to give the ice-grill. It was an entire range of cues, an intricate dance, all designed to either protect your person, or dramatize the effort. 

Where Does Your Trash Go?

A journey through LA: 

Mexico City is trying something different:

The government’s environmental agency recently launched the Mercado de Trueque, a barter market where recyclable materials are exchanged for fresh food to support the city’s farmlands. "This innovative program is designed to show citizens directly and tangibly how what we call trash becomes raw materials. If solid waste is properly separated, it still has value," writes the Ministry of Environment (in Spanish). The market accepts glass, paper and cardboard, aluminum beverage cans, PET plastic bottles, and returns "green points" redeemable for agricultural products grown in and around Mexico City, including lettuce, prickly pears, spinach, tomatoes, plants, and flowers.

If you think that's innovative, get a load of Poo Wi-Fi:

When dog owners [in Mexico City] throw away their excrement in a special box, the device calculates the weight and then gives everyone in the park free Wi-Fi for a period (usually a few minutes.) Of course, there’s a way to rig the program by tossing garbage in the box instead of poo, but the ad agency behind the effort, DDB Mexico, told Creativity Online that it’s fine if people are cleaning trash from the park to access the service. However, during the day, hostesses stand by the boxes handing out poop bags to ensure that the device is being used as promised.

Will Unemployment Ever Go Down?

Surowiecki warns about a long-term rut:

The phenomenon in which a sizable chunk of the workforce gets stuck in place, and in effect becomes permanently unemployed, is known by economists as hysteresis in the job market. This is, arguably, what happened to many European countries in the nineteen-eighties—policymakers did little when joblessness soared, and their economies got stuck, leaving them with seemingly permanent unemployment rates of eight or nine per cent.

The good news is that there’s not much evidence that hysteresis has set in here yet. The bad news is that we can ride our luck only for so long. If the ranks of America’s long-term jobless don’t start shrinking soon, it’s less likely that they ever will, and we’ll be looking at a new "natural" unemployment rate for the U.S. economy. This economy would be less productive as a whole (since there would be fewer workers), meaning that everyone would be less well off.

Urban Carnivores

They're on the rise:

In some areas, urban raccoons and coyotes have higher survival rates than their rural counterparts. One team found seven times more coyotes per square kilometer in urban parts of southern California than rural areas, and raccoons have reached an "astonishing" 333 animals per square kilometer in one Fort Lauderdale, Florida park, about four to 400 times their density in the countryside. … The recent rise in urban carnivores "may mark the future for the coexistence of carnivores with man," the authors write.

Buying Better Schools

Dana Goldstein counters the conventional wisdom:

There is a mantra in education reform: "money doesn’t matter." … While not every dollar a school spends directly improves academic outcomes, a new report from Rutgers school-finance expert Bruce Baker finds certain kinds of money very much do matter: extra funding for higher teacher salaries and more equitable distribution of resources between rich and poor districts, for example, are correlated with higher student achievement, especially for the neediest kids.