Month: June 2012

By Bill Easterly, who captions:

Despite the recent troubles, the US economy has shown consistent, resilient growth for nearly a century and a half.  If we take the long view, the US is not in decline at all.

Democracy asked a variety of pundits to imagine American politics circa 2024. Ruy Teixeira expects demographic realities to force the GOP to come to its senses:

Republicans will eventually—and very reluctantly—bow to electoral reality. They will compete much more vigorously for minority, particularly Hispanic, votes, and they will seek to broaden their appeal to younger and more moderate white voters. This will involve not just moving away from hard-line positions on social issues like immigration and gay marriage but also jettisoning a reflexive opposition to social spending and the tax increases that will be necessary to support it. Expect more David Frum and less Grover Norquist.

David Wong breaks down six deep psychological reasons why we enjoy video games so much. He compares the above video of playing Sonic the Hedgehog to learning to play music:

Doing that aerial ballet in Sonic has nothing to do with reaction time, or decision-making, or even anticipation. It's pure rhythm, nailing the notes like hitting keys on a piano. And when you do it just right, when you fly through the level and nail all the jumps and boosts and kills, it has to feel like the first time somebody learning an instrument plays a familiar song and makes it sound like the actual song, the beautiful contours of perfection at the command of your own fingers.

Southwest has remained profitable for decades by not trying to do too much: 

Simpler operations mean fewer things that can go awry and botch up the whole process. Consider, for instance, Southwest’s fleet of jets. While other airline fleets can employ 10 or more types of aircraft, Southwest uses just one, the Boeing 737. … Southwest also doesn’t assign seat numbers. Which means that if a plane is swapped out, and a new one’s brought in with a different seat configuration (even within the world of 737s, there can be some variations), there’s no need to adjust the entire seating arrangement and issue new boarding passes. Passengers simply board and sit where they like. 

Today on the Dish, Andrew continued his debate with Greenwald on Obama's drone strikes, pinpointed double standards on Romney's Mormonism, predicted a race that would go down to the wire, and bet immigration reform wasn't dead. We set expectations for Obama's upcoming speech, explained why Romney could lie so blatantly, outlined a scenario by which Romney could outfox the GOP on taxes in 2013, and spotlighted Joe Scarborough's vote for Ron Paul. We also profiled the lives of America's poorest white citizens, picked up on an oddity in the left's approach to substances, and wondered about the impact of the web on Supreme Court jurisprudence. Ad War Update here.

Andrew also remade the social conservative case for marriage equality over civil unions, found more evidence that Piers Morgan knew all about phone hacking, pushed another argument for why opposing gay families was bigotry, tallied the thinning Catholic herd as a consequence of the Pope's theological rigidity, figured the young and secular would change America, and declared the Pet Shop Boys the soundtrack of his life. Prometheus awkwardly engaged with science and religion, soccer fixing spread, and Game of Thrones hid a controversial little Easter Egg. International law dangerously allowed fake drugs to proliferate, the War on Drugs hampered medical research, the common cold may have helped us, and kids in cities had more allergies. America needed to rethink "college," the military didn't know it all, ticketing good behavior lowered crime rates, interactive video became a possibility, social stories came full circle, and bets amused. Ask Tina Brown Anything here, Headline of the Day here, Chart of the Day here, Yglesias Alert Nominee here, Poseur Alert here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

– Z.B.

Roger Bates studies it:

How Bates would solve the problem:

What the U.S. government should be pushing for, but isn’t, is better international public health law against fake drugs. There are treaties against fake currency and against narcotics, but not against fake drugs. This should change. A treaty against fake drugs would help countries currently awash in fake drugs to create laws based on public health considerations and not intellectual property rights. … If we want safer supply chains, and fewer Avastin-type problems, we will have to help other countries improve their domestic public health laws.  

Sargent echoes the Dish's advice:

The election will be all about the status quo under Obama unless he can make it about what each respective presidency would actually mean to people. It may be the only contrast voters are willing to listen to.

A little wish-fulfillment for some hidden in a Game of Thrones episode.

Exum cautions against assuming that our military really knows its way around foreign countries:

Each semester, I teach a block of instruction on insurgency and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan to U.S. military officers who, having volunteered to serve in Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of the “Af-Pak Hands” program, are learning Urdu, Dari and Pashto. And I always conclude with a warning: If these soldiers had been immersed in two years of intensive language training and an additional four years of education in the people, tribes, history and cultures of Afghanistan, at the end of those six years, they would still have only a fraction of the local knowledge of an illiterate subsistence farmer native to the region.

A Rakhine child is pictured as he sits on his mother's laps at a monastery used as a temporary shelter for people displaced by ongoing violence in Sittwe, capital of Burma's western state of Rakhine on June 13, 2012. Security forces grappled with sectarian violence that has left dozens dead and hundreds of homes burned down. A state of emergency has been declared in Rakhine state, which has been rocked by a wave of rioting and arson, posing a major test for the reformist government which took power last year. By AFP/Getty Images.