Year: 2013

It Was Assad

U.N. Report on Chemical Attack in Syria by Robert Mackey

This embed is invalid


The UN’s report on the use of chemical weapons in Syria is above. Fisher observes that, while “the investigation was barred from assigning blame, a number of details in the report seem to strongly suggest that the government of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was likely responsible.” Among other evidence:

The U.N. investigators analyzed 30 samples, which they found contained not just sarin but also “relevant chemicals, such as stabilizers.” That suggests that the chemical weapons were taken from a controlled storage environment, where they could have been processed for use by troops trained in their use. This would seem to downplay the possibility that the chemical weapons were, as some speculated, fired by rebels who had stolen them from government stockpiles.

Moses Brown likewise thinks the evidence points to the Assad regime:

You have claims the attacks were faked, the victims being Alawite hostages from Latakia, that were somehow driven through hundreds of miles of contested and government controlled territory to Damascus.  There’s claims that this was some sort of accident involving Saudi supplied chemical weapons, which fails to explain how one incident could effect two separate areas.  Other claims centre around the opposition having sarin, based off reports in Turkey in May, where it was reported Jabhat al-Nusra members were arrested with sarin.  The “sarin” was later reported to be anti-freeze, and only this week some of the members are being prosecuted for trying to make sarin, having only a shopping list of ingredients, rather than actual sarin.  It seems to me, that compared to the evidence of government responsibility for the attacks, the evidence of opposition responsibility seems very poor.

Peter Bouckaert is on the same page:

The various theories claiming to have “evidence” that opposition forces were responsible for the attack lack credibility. This was not an accidental explosion caused by opposition fighters who mishandled chemical weapons, as claimed by some commentators online. The attacks took place at two sites 16 kilometres apart, and involved incoming rockets, not on-the-ground explosions. This was not a chemical attack cooked up by opposition forces in some underground kitchen. It was a sophisticated attack involving military-grade Sarin.

C.J. Chivers weighs in:

Put simply, viewed through a common-sense understanding of the limits and conditions of the battlefield, the rebels could not have done this. Claims of rebel culpability are now specious; technically and tactically implausible, they are too outlandish for even a sci-fi script.

Drum adds:

Added to all the other intelligence pointing in the same direction, there’s really no longer any case to be made that this was some kind of false-flag rebel operation. It was a chemical weapons attack mounted by the Assad government.

The Difficulty Of Destroying Chemical Weapons, Ctd

In addition to being time-consuming, it’s costly:

[R]emember that chemical weapons destruction is not just a domestic pursuit. Overseas, the United States has spent $13 billion since 1992 on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR), which works with former Soviet states on securing and dismantling nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. $1 billion of this went to just one project—the Shchuch’ye Russia chemical weapons destruction facility—which has since eliminated more than 2,365 metric tons of chemical weapons.

Still, it’s cheap when compared to actual war:

We spent at one point $10 billion per month during the Iraq War, which was fought over the illusion of WMDs. And in Syria, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey said, “Thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces would be needed to assault and secure critical sites…Costs could also average well over $1 billion per month.” So destroying all of Syria’s actual chemical weapons for something in the neighborhood of a few billion dollars would be a fantastic financial bargain.

Elsewhere, Megan Garber walks through how to dismantle a chemical bomb.

Clocking Your Read

Michelle Dean disapproves of books that advertize the time it should take to read them:

[T]he purpose isn’t so much informational as it is, I think, sort of hilariously disciplining of both dish_5hourread author and reader. A slow reader will feel guilty; a fast reader will feel pride; in both cases the feelings serve no useful purpose. For a writer of any real caliber the thing is actively self-debasing. This is an author saying to you: “I have written a book. Isn’t it great? It is, but it is only worth five hours of your time. It might take you longer to read War and Peace, sure, and you might have to do a couple of re-reads. But the whole sum of human knowledge on offer in this book: it’s five hours only. I’m just efficient like that.”

(Photo of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Without Their Permission via imgur)

No Gold Star For Ron Paul

Kevin Carey tackles the elder statesman’s new book on education:

Paul’s misguided philosophy is rooted in a radically simplistic view of education. To him, education is just a matter of assigning students books to read and papers to write, using an “ideologically safe” curriculum. He deplores educators who “assume that the parents are not competent to be the sole providers of education.” But parents aren’t competent to be the sole providers of many important things. Ron Paul is an Ob-Gyn with an M.D. from DukeUniversity. Does he think babies should be delivered by people who learned everything they know from books and YouTube?

But the Ron Paul school revolution actually does make sense in one particular way.

His plan is explicitly designed to catch students on the cusp of adolescence and direct them toward an isolated learning experience focused exclusively on reading, writing, and debate, with no exposure to heterodox views. He is aiming for the Atlas Shrugged window, when young people have an excess of conviction and a deficit of experience, when they are more clever than wise. His program will shield students from the evils of liberalism and, worse, Keynesianism, and train them to argue their cause with facility and zeal. It is a plan for the mass creation of crackpot autodidacts who are impervious to any evidence that contradicts their simple worldviews.

Communing Through Art

Maria Popova revisits Tolstoy’s thoughts on the sense of unity that true art evokes:

If a man, without exercising effort and without altering his standpoint on reading, hearing, or seeing another man’s work, experiences a mental condition which unites him with that man and with other people who also partake of that work of art, then the object evoking that condition is a work of art. And however poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting a work may be, it is not a work of art if it does not evoke that feeling (quite distinct from all other feelings) of joy and of spiritual union with another (the author) and with others (those who are also infected by it). …

The chief peculiarity of this feeling is that the receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s — as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist — not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.

“Disney World Meets The Apprentice”

Adriana Valdez Young visits KidZania, an work-themed amusement park in Kuwait City:

We pass a modeling school, where a line-up of little girls are learning to sashay down the runway; a hospital, where kids in scrubs are escorting patients from the back of an ambulance; and a telemarketing center, where kids in swivel chairs are intensely working the phones. Each storefront in KidZania is backed by a real-world business, which offers 15-30 minute activities for kids to receive training or work for pay. Kids learn to swirl yogurt at Pinkberry, deliver packages at DHL, and fill gas tanks at Exxon Mobil. Each service job requires a uniform and a disposable hair net.

While KidZania was born in Mexico City and has a universal appeal in the 10 additional countries where it is located, the industrious city bears particular resonance in the small oil-rich nation of Kuwait. It is a country with extreme reliance on imported labor—85 percent of the total workforce is made of expats—and it is a social welfare state that guarantees 100 percent employment for Kuwaiti nationals. To counter the imbalance between the national and foreign labor pool and reduce pressure for more state jobs, the government recently introduced a program called ‘Kuwaitization,’ which sets hiring quotas for private companies to employ Kuwaiti nationals. But enticing Kuwaitis to work has been so challenging that many companies are left in a position of simply adding names of Kuwaitis to the payroll to avoid government fines and then scrapping any hope that those citizens will ever show up to work for their pay. Therefore, KidZania could rear a new generation itching to expand the private sector.

Writing Women Well

Ester Bloom claims it is something male authors rarely accomplish. From her list of exceptions:

Ora, To The End of the Land (David Grossman)

Perhaps the ultimate book about a mother, one that deconstructs the myth while at the same time conveying the incomparable intensity of maternal love. The Times’ review of this anti-war novel calls Grossman a “genius” and says, “Ora’s level of self-consciousness, her alertness to the emotional contours of things, her exquisite introspection, give this story the depth and privacy of an Ingmar Bergman film.”

Little Bee, The Other Hand (Chris Cleave)

Raw, vital, vivid, absolutely engrossing—the character and the book both. A necessary story about the post-colonial world as seen by a scarred Nigerian girl who refuses to accept the unfairness of life as she knows it.

Dolores Price, She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)

It takes guts to start a 20th-century novel with a pre-teen heroine named Dolores. Lamb pulls off her voice perfectly and creates around it a story that captures the lust and hunger, sadness and confusion of adolescence and its aftermath. Towards the end, when life delivered Dolores yet another setback, I remember throwing the book against my bedroom wall in fury at the unfairness of everything—and then crawling over to retrieve it because I couldn’t stop reading.

Cool Ad Watch

Copyranter proclaims that “New Zealand produces the best PSAs in the world”:

Titled “Blazed — Drug-Driving in Aotearoa” (Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand), this spot is an instant Advertising Hall of Fame Drugs PSA classic. The ad was just launched on Māori Television. These kids are so perfect, so natural — this is how you do a drugs ad, unlike all the laughably ineffective, preachy American drug PSAs. …

Back in 2011, Kiwi ad agency Clemenger BBDO created one of the best drunk-driving ads I’ve ever seen, “Legend.” Watch it [here].

When Free Speech Goes Public

Elias Groll wonders whether a publicly traded Twitter “will have to sacrifice its values, at least somewhat, on the high altar of the quarterly earnings report”:

Twitter has already run into trouble abroad, where governments, both democratic and otherwise, have not taken too kindly to a service that lets anyone and everyone broadcast thoughts onto the web. At the height of the protest movement in Egypt that brought down Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian government blocked Twitter. During a wave of rioting in Britain in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to shut the service down. (He did not.) In July of this year, French courts forced Twitter to hand over user data to help authorities identify the authors of anti-Semitic and racist tweets. In China, the service is blocked entirely.

For a young start-up with private investors, shutdowns like these pose no serious problems. But how will Wall Street react to service outages? Each time the service goes down, Twitter is effectively losing money, and that’s something investors seem unlikely to accept. Thus, there will be an incentive for the company to make concessions to governments for the sake of achieving greater market share.