Morgan Clendaniel is ambivalent about Coca-Cola’s new commercial:
The ad makes the point that the only thing that matters is that you burn more calories than you take in. And while this is fundamentally true (you won’t gain weight if you are at a calorie deficit), a liquid, high-fructose corn syrup calorie is not the same–health-wise–as, say, a calorie from an organic vegetable.
The video—how much do these things cost?—argues that the company is producing lower-calorie products in smaller sizes and promoting community activity, that all calories count, and that it’s up to you to fit Coke into your healthy active lifestyle. The ad is an astonishing act of chutzpah, explainable only as an act of desperation to do something about the company’s declining sales in the U.S.
Update from a reader:
This isn’t your mistake, but the quote from Marion Nestle talks about “declining sales in the US” and links to a Reuters article that says no such thing, only non-US declining sales. It’s the emotional high-point of her piece (“astonishing act of chutzpah”), and so of course it falls flat.
A new drug could potentially allow individuals to “cut their sleep requirements to as few as 2.5 hours a night without a decrease in mental acuity.” Yglesias ponders the implications of widespread use:
The most important place to start is probably just to remember that the world is a great big place full of enormous diversity. People in certain kinds of high-status professions—CEOs and Ezra Klein and such—will presumably be de facto required to work 18 hour days if they can get by on two hours of sleep. All the way at the other end of the spectrum, people like migrant factory workers in China (or whatever the new China is in terms of sweatshop work) will probably do the same, working super-long workweeks in order to save up money and go back home.
According to a report from Greenpeace and Peking University’s School of Public Health released in mid-December, deaths attributable to high levels of PM2.5 pollution totaled an estimated 8,572 in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi’an and Beijing in 2012. The total economic losses in those cities during that span was estimated to be $1.08 billion.
That cost is nothing to blink at, and it’s one that’s will only get worse of air quality doesn’t improve. So while leaving construction sites and factories idle is a blunt short-term solution, Beijing needs to look at healthier long-term growth drivers–giving up coal, developing cleaner facets of China’s economy to counter its heavy reliance on manufacturing, construction, and infrastructure development–if it wants to develop a more sustainable economy.
Alexis Madrigal compares modern-day Beijing to 19th century Pittsburgh:
[N]ext time you see one of the photos of Beijing’s pollution and say, “Geez! The Chinese should do something about this!” Just know that it took American activists over a century to win the precise same battle, and that they’re losing a similar one over climate change right this minute.
The screenshot above is from NASA’s comparison of Beijing satellite images from January 14th (on the left) and January 3rd (on the right). Interactive version here. Earlier Dish on China’s smog here.
Brendan Greeley argues that the ban on earmarks is partially responsible for stagnation in Washington:
In the two years since [the ban, Congress has] done nothing but tie itself up with a supercommittee, a sequester, and continued promises to fix things in the future. Political hacks used to say pork was the political grease that lubricated legislative deals. Only now do we see how true that was. Would it really be so terrible to reintroduce some congressionally sanctioned bribery? That would let members lay claim to the odd million in the interest of striking a deal worth much more.
If Congress is ever going to pass a grand bargain that trims entitlements and raises taxes (pain for everyone), shouldn’t we give lawmakers something positive to vote for?
Of course we don’t want to return to the days of outright bribery and graft. As Matthew Yglasias writes in Slate, however, the current dysfunctional Congress makes it “hard not to miss a little old-fashioned earmarking and pork.” Sure it would be nice if lawmakers didn’t need to be given side payments to vote for general-interest legislation, but that’s not the American way. As John W. Ellwood and I wrote in our 1993 essay In Praise of Pork, “Favoring legislators with small gifts for their districts in order to achieve great things for the nation is an act not of sin but of statesmanship.”
Tomasky is wrong. The NRA is not talking about Secret Service agents; they’re talking about the armed guards, which is why the ad says “armed guards”. St. Alban’s and other DC private schools would have armed guards at the gates regardless of the President’s daughters. The kids of the rich always are better protected.
Another is on the same page:
The point of the ad is that the private school the first daughters attend, Sidwell Friends School, has a substantial security department composed of “Special Police Officers” and other security personnel. The NRA’s proposal has been met with widespread scorn, as if armed security in schools is nigh atrocious. The obvious question is, if a school for the rich can have it without atrocity, why not my local public school?
Liam Hoare assesses the renewed tensions between the UK and Argentina over the Falkland Islands:
[Argetine President] Kirchner’s latest dig came via an open letterpublished in two British newspapers, which called on London to “abide by the resolutions of the United Nations” and “negotiate a solution to the sovereignty dispute” between them — in other words, negotiate a way to hand the islands over to Argentina.
One reason why things have heated up:
The rancor on both sides, and more importantly, the bold urgency of Kirchner’s claims, speaks not only to past grievances — the old wounds of 1982 — and the economic challenges facing Argentina in the present, but also to the petrodollar future the Falklands might enjoy. For within the islands’ exclusive economic zone are oil reserves equivalent to 60 billion barrels. A sudden increase in the price of crude has finally made the extraction of this resource a profitable venture.
(Photo: Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner listens during a meeting at the United Nations headquarters in New York on the disputed Falkland Islands on the 30th anniversary of the end of war between the Britain and Argentina, on June 14, 2012. By Mehdi Taamallah/AFP/Getty Images)
Silver suspects that “the aim of seeking re-election may have colored Mr. Obama’s priorities during the prior debt ceiling negotiation”:
Economists differ on exactly how severe the economic costs of a United States debt default would be. But the most severe recessions, like the one that officially began in December 2007, can persist for about a year and a half. When added to an economic recovery that was already very feeble, a new economic shock could easily have produced a new recession that lasted through the November 2012 elections. Even if the economy had technically exited recession by then, growth in jobs tends to lag other economic indicators, so labor-market conditions would almost certainly have remained very poor.
He adds that, this time, “it is only members of Congress who will come before voters again.” Meanwhile, Keith Hennessey sees debt ceiling brinkmanship as counterproductive for the GOP:
[Obama] will start warning politically powerful constituencies: seniors, veterans, and troops, that they are at risk of not being paid on time, and their Republican Congressman is responsible for it, and his or her phone number is 225-XXXX. I have no idea why some conservatives think it’s smart strategy to hand the President this kind of political club.
“As for what I personally believe, which has been the subject of inquiries, accusations and speculation, I think Osama bin Laden was found due to ingenious detective work. Torture was, however, as we all know, employed in the early years of the hunt. That doesn’t mean it was the key to finding Bin Laden. It means it is a part of the story we couldn’t ignore … Bin Laden wasn’t defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation,” – Kathryn Bigelow.
I wish I could say this clears things up. On the one hand, torture wasn’t “the key” to finding bin Laden. On the other, “ordinary Americans fought bravely andsometimes crossed moral lines”. I don’t think you can describe the main torturer in the movie as sometimes crossing moral lines. He was a brutal, sadistic torturer all the time. He never stopped until he was exhausted and broken by the human souls and bodies he broke. But Bigelow does repeat my own partial defense of the film. Artists do not have to produce clarity; their murkiness can be itself an invitation for more involvement in the subject, not less. It also removes any doubt from any rational viewer that the US tortured prisoners – in violation of the Geneva Conventions, domestic law and American values. President Bush lied directly about this and repeatedly. Then this:
As a lifelong pacifist, I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind. But I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these U.S. policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen.
Does she think that someone like Jane Mayer hasn’t been doing that for years as well? Or the Dish, for that matter? That’s a straw man. And if that’s so vital, why hasn’t Bigelow named names and called Cheney and Bush the war criminals they are. That would help a great deal. Her movie proves it, after all.
I don’t think the movie backs torture, although I have vowed to see it again soon. But I do think Steve Coll’s piece in the NYRB is the best thing I’ve yet read on the subject and shook me to the core. So much so that I reserve the right to change my mind a little if his critique holds up on my second viewing. Read the whole thing.
A few years ago, when I spent the summers living in a 200 square foot room at the end of a wharf in Provincetown, I came across a somewhat cantankerous older lady – she was in her late 80s – who had taken up residence in an even smaller room at the other end of the wharf. I tend to be English in my neighborly interactions – a polite nod, not imposing – but something about her intrigued me and I had to walk right past her to get to solid ground, so one day, I introduced myself.
We immediately hit it off and soon enough I was corralled, along with countless others in her always expanding – and often young – entourage, into helping her out in small ways, or just chatting, but also as a daily ritual, if I couldn’t pass it off to someone else, holding her hand as she slowly made her way off the wharf onto the sand and into the water. She baptized herself daily – although she is an atheist who simply cannot fathom the kind of faith I am blessed to have – in the bay. It was always a full body dunk – however freezing the water was (you knew it was ice-cold whenever a swimming lesbian told you it was like bathwater). I don’t like cold water, but that just made Norma all the more determined to drag me in. And don’t try to resist. She will simply persist.
I came to love Norma, as did Aaron. She never lies. She never filters. She can be incredibly rude. And ornery. But she was always Norma – and she still is. We just celebrated her 94th birthday.
What you eventually found out was that she was a proud former communist in the 1920s and 1930s (I never let her forget it), sexually liberated long before the 1960s, and a brilliant photographic portraitist, with a particular gift for capturing the faces of women around the world. She just had an exhibit here. Recently, another truly gifted photographer, Jane Paradise, captured Norma’s nineties in a luminescent booklet, “When I Was Young I Was Considered Beautiful”, which you can buy here.
If you come into Provincetown Harbor, you’ll also see vast, canvas portraits of older Portuguese women who once were the backbone of this former fishing village. Norma took those photos.
Aaron turned some of her more haunting work into a slideshow above and I am proud to show it – almost as proud as I am to know this remarkable human being, and the passion and anger and boundless curiosity that make her, in her mid-90s, as alive as anyone I know. And in ways I never truly told her, as HIV haunted me, she helped me learn how to live as well.
The Dish 