Month: August 2012

Maybe not, says Ezra:

[P]erhaps Obama would be winning this in a rout if Romney didn’t have a money advantage. And perhaps the Romney campaign will dump enough money on Obama’s head in the final month or so that it will have a real and measurable impact in the polls. You can’t rerun the past, and I don’t have much information about the future. But for now, Romney’s money advantage has not yet proven decisive.

Silver, on the other hand, sees some possible movement in the swing states:

I don’t think we should totally write off the idea that Mr. Romney has made up some ground in the swing states. Apart from his selection of Mr. Ryan, there are other things going on in the campaign. For example, Mr. Romney’s advertising advantage in swing states could be starting to pay dividends.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died this week after more than 20 years in power. Armin Rosen, who writes that few "dictators have so aptly balanced as many contradictions as Zenawil," looks at his mixed legacy:

His willingness to cooperate with the United States against terrorism — epitomized by the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to dislodge Islamic Courts Union militants from power in 2006 — made him a seemingly indispensable ally in an unstable region. Yet within Ethiopia, Zenawi's rule was marked by a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy that excluded several of the country's major ethnic groups from political and economic life, and that denied humanitarian aid to supposedly disloyal sectors of the country. Zenawi was one of the most-praised leaders in Africa (although never by human rights groups), a development-minded regional power-broker whose government was largely funded through foreign aid.

Adrienne Klasa's assessment:

His rule was oppressive, yet he presided over the re-emergence of Ethiopia from a state of near collapse into the dominant regional power in the Horn of Africa. He was intimately involved in brokering agreements between the warring Sudans, having developed close ties with leaders on both sides since the 1980s, and became a dominant figure in the African Union – which is based in Addis Ababa, the country's capital.  Nevertheless, the distribution of his country's newfound wealth – Ethiopia currently has the fastest-growing non-oil dependent economy in Africa – remains highly uneven, with the majority of the population still living in poverty.

Harry Verhoeven, a professor of African politics at Oxford, claims that Ethiopia's future post-Zenawi is uncertain:

The [country's political] elite [are] at pains to stress that the death of the prime minister does not in any way imply that his vision of a strong Ethiopia in a strong Africa will be altered. Both his immediate successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, and Meles' long-time de facto deputy Seyoum Mesfin (co-designer of the security and energy policy as minister of foreign affairs for almost two decades) fully supported Zenawi's grand ambitions. Ethiopia's skilled corps of diplomats is well placed to continue working for the Pan-Africanist ideas set out by the deceased leader. However, this vision will now have to be pursued without its creator and chief implementer – a man in whom many outsiders and insiders trusted personally to deliver the quasi-impossible. Ethiopia's objectives will probably remain the same for the foreseeable future, mixing domestic priorities with international manoeuvring.

(Photo: Men walk past posters of late Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi on August 22, 2012 in Addis Ababa. Thousands of wailing Ethiopians turned out Wednesday to greet the body of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi as an official national mourning period began after his death in a Brussels hospital where he was being treated following a long illness. By Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images)

Taking issue with an article by Ginia Bellafante – and, more generally, the NYT editorial page – Heather Mac Donald frames New York's aggressive policing of housing projects in tax terms:

Violent crime is the most regressive of all taxes, since it falls heaviest on poor minorities, as University of California at Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring observes in The City That Became Safe. New York’s data-driven, proactive style of policing is government’s most progressive social program, for its benefits accrue disproportionately to those same minorities.

Tony O'Neill scoured the globe for the most lenient drug laws. The Czech Republic made the Top 5:

Since 2010, the possession of up to 15 grams (or five plants) of marijuana is an offense roughly on a par with a getting parking ticket. And while selling drugs is still very much illegal, it's pretty easy to find them, in Prague above all. The 19-year-old nation's liberal approach doesn't just apply to the green stuff. Drug users in the Czech Republic are permitted to possess—without fear of prosecution—up to five grams of hash, 40 magic mushrooms, five peyote plants, five tabs of LSD, four hits of ecstasy, two grams of speed, one and a half grams of heroin, five coca plants and a gram of coke. Or, as Hunter S. Thompson might have called it, "lunch."

Donald Carr recently blamed the flame out of cap-and-trade in 2009 on the agricultural lobby. Farmer Blake Hurst defends his industry:

Cap and trade would have had no practical effect [on preventing this year's drought], but certainly would have harmed our ability to produce food: The only way to materially cut carbon emissions in agriculture is to use less fertilizer and produce less food. Carr would have us repeat this year’s short crop as a matter of public policy.

Meanwhile, Tom Philpott makes the case that, due to its rejection of synthetic fertilizer, organic farming is more resilient to droughts and thus more productive:

[O]rganically managed soils trap more carbon in the soil—and all of that carbon allows these soils to hold in water and nutrients better. (Note that carbon stored in soil in a stable fashion is carbon that isn't in the atmosphere trapping heat and causing the planet to warm. So organically managed soils don't just help farmers adapt to climate change—they also help help mitigate climate change.)

Yes, we're trying to be more sports-friendly here at the Dish:

(Hat tip: BF)

Dan Goodin investigates the troubling state of password security:

Newer hardware and modern techniques have … helped to contribute to the rise in password cracking. Now used increasingly for computing, graphics processors allow password-cracking programs to work thousands of times faster than they did just a decade ago on similarly priced PCs that used traditional CPUs alone. A PC running a single AMD Radeon HD7970 GPU, for instance, can try on average an astounding 8.2 billion password combinations each second, depending on the algorithm used to scramble them. Only a decade ago, such speeds were possible only when using pricey supercomputers.

And all those recent, massive password hacks are helping the hackers get even better:

Most importantly, a series of leaks over the past few years containing more than 100 million real-world passwords have provided crackers with important new insights about how people in different walks of life choose passwords on different sites or in different settings. The ever-growing list of leaked passwords allows programmers to write rules that make cracking algorithms faster and more accurate; password attacks have become cut-and-paste exercises that even script kiddies can perform with ease.

The Dish has discussed good password practices before, but the password guidelines appended to article are still worth reviewing.

A reader writes:

As somebody who likes a good apple very much, one thing jumped out at me in this post.  "The fact that apple consumption has been on the decline for decades" is most likely because almost every apple in the average supermarket sucks.  Red and Golden "Delicious"?  How about flavorless and mealy in texture.  "Flavorless" is actually a good adjective for almost all of the other types of very pretty apples in the store.  Go ahead,  next time you're in the produce section, pick up one of each type of apple and sniff it.  Do they smell sweet?  Are the smells even pleasant?  Hell, if your eyes were closed could you even identify the smells as belonging to an apple?

Another is on the same page:

I strongly object to the glib reporting on the quest for unblemished fruit. I'm a scientific illustrator, and before that I spent two years doing research in a tomato genetics lab at UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, as many people have come to realize, efforts in modern American agriculture have focused on the cosmetics of fruits and vegetables, as well as qualities that might make them easier for shipping (square shapes that might make for easier packaging anyone?). This myopic perspective has unfortunately resulted in bland or flavorless fruits and vegetables. As many consumers have started to discover things like wonderfully flavorful heritage tomatoes, they have realized what has been lost. So please, let's not uncritically hail as "perfect" an apple that won't turn brown if you knock it around.

The Dish recently covered the effects of mass-production on tomatoes and watermelons. The above image, Fruit Battery Still Life (Citrus), 2012, is featured on Colossal:

Portland, Maine-based photographer Caleb Charland frequently merges art and science with his photographic experiments involving electricity, fire, and magnetism. One of his ongoing projects involves a series of alternative power sources created using fruit, coins, and even vinegar to power the lights in his long exposure photographs. … I strongly urge you to at least look at his Demonstrations gallery. He’ll also have a few prints in an upcoming group show at Brancolini Grimaldi in London this September.

To be fair to him, since his first rather defensive post on a recent Jewish attempted lynching of Arabs, he has posted context that makes clear that the rise of this kind of bigotry and hatred is real – as Peter Beinart bravely reported to Goldblog's dismissal – and that the authorities in Israel are genuinely rattled by it. The Israelis have ridden the tiger of settler racism for a long time; it's now leaping from the West Bank to Israel itself.

#MOSen: moved the race to Likely Democratic.As long as Akin is running, it’s unwinnable for Republicans. If he exits, it’s back to Toss Up

— CookPoliticalReport (@CookPolitical) August 21, 2012

Nate Cohn didn’t think Akin’s “comments alone were sufficient to ensure Akin’s defeat.” But:

[T]he concerted GOP effort to throw Akin under the bus does make McCaskill the favorite. She’ll be able to air advertisements quoting Republican leaders effectively suggesting his unfit for office—even if they meant he was unfit to campaign. And the “legitimate rape” comments are the tip of the iceberg with this guy, so I suspect the McCaskill campaign will be able to persuade enough independent voters to prevail statewide—even if the state’s politics prevent the blowout that many seem to suspect.