Copyranter gives it a hand:
Vancouver’s Science World continues with the best museum ad effort currently running, this time promoting their new exhibition, “The Science of Sexuality.” The “Ejaculation” execution is the best: simple, smart advertising.
It depends on your state:
In 26 states, a plug-in hybrid is the most climate-friendly option (narrowly outperforming all-electrics in 11 states, assuming 50:50 split between between driving on gas and electric for the plug-in hybrids), and in the other 24 states, a gas-powered car is the best.
Drum explains the variation:
If you live in, say, Washington or Vermont, where most of your electricity comes from hydropower or nuclear, an electric car is pretty carbon friendly. If you live in Kentucky, where your power mostly comes from coal, an electric car isn’t such a good choice. But there’s more. You also need to account for the carbon emissions it takes to build the car in the first place. And since battery manufacturing is pretty carbon intensive, a car with a big battery starts out with a big carbon deficit to make up.
While discussing his new book, The Rise Of The Warrior Cop, Balko explains how SWAT became ubiquitous:
Sarah Stillman reviews the numbers:
In 1972, America conducted only several hundred paramilitary drug raids a year, according to Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” By the early nineteen-eighties, there were three thousand a year; by 2001, Alexander notes, the annual count had skyrocketed to forty thousand. Today, even that number seems impossibly low, with one annual count of combat-style home raids hovering around eighty thousand.
The ACLU has requested “information from law-enforcement agencies and National Guard offices on how federal funding has helped to drive the militarization of local and state police departments”:
Kara Dansky, the senior counsel of the A.C.L.U.’s Center for Justice, told me that the resulting data has just begun to pour in, and many agencies have proven to be coöperative. The biggest surprise thus far, Dansky says, is how little uniformity and clarity there is about when officers are advised to use extreme SWAT tactics, particularly in cases where mentally-ill or suicidal individuals are their targets. “One major trend that we’re seeing is that police departments across the country vary tremendously in terms of how, if at all, they document information pertaining to their SWAT deployments,” Dansky said. “We have very little doubt that there are circumstances where the use of military tactics or equipment would be an appropriate response to a domestic law-enforcement situation.… But there aren’t always clear standards in place for when certain tactics are appropriate.”
Last month, Douthat argued that “the European experience suggests that at least some abortion restrictions are compatible with equality and female advancement.” Katha Pollitt fired back:
Abortion is complicated, like everything that has to do with sex. Germany’s abortion rate is much lower than ours, but Sweden’s is almost the same. The Netherlands is almost as low as Germany, despite permitting abortion much later. In much of Italy, it’s hard to find an abortion because so many doctors refuse to perform them—and yet Italy, like Germany, has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. One thing seems pretty clear, though: all these countries have plenty of abortions. But in the Western European countries with time limits, there is less need for second trimester abortion because there is far better access to abortion earlier.
I somehow don’t think that is a trade-off conservative pundits are willing to make.
Douthat goes another round:
[I]t is an oversimplification to suggest that France or Germany are somehow obviously more “pro-life” overall than the United States, given the multiplicity of differences between our system and theirs. But it’s also an oversimplification to say that the U.S. is unique among developed nations in having significant variations in abortion access, or robust political debate on the issue. And the reason to look at the European experience is not because the continent is somehow an exemplar of exactly the policies that pro-life American conservatives are pushing now, or would put in place if given constitutional license. Rather, it’s because it provides examples of many different approaches to the issue — stringently pro-life with a stronger welfare state (Ireland), expansively pro-choice with a much stronger welfare state (Sweden), more pro-life in law but relatively pro-choice in practice (Spain, until recently), relatively pro-choice in law but more culturally pro-life (Italy, arguably), and so on — that don’t necessarily map on to America’s right vs. left debate at all.
This variation, in turn, gives us more data on the original question that my column asked: What happens to a modern society when abortion is restricted?
Dana Stevens gives Elysium – not to be confused with the brilliant PSB album – low marks:
Like District 9, Elysium takes on contemporary problems of economic and social injustice—this time not racial prejudice but the vast worldwide gulf between haves and have-nots. But after taking some pains to imagine and present a mid-22nd-century world that’s a plausibly grim extrapolation of the one we live in, Blomkamp proceeds to spend the last two-thirds of his film crashing spaceships into lawns, or staging high-tech fistfights between Elysium’s stolid hero and his even duller arch-nemesis. It’s a waste of a perfectly good dystopia.
Wesley Morris also pans the movie:
Blomkamp is a talented, loosely visionary director, but, after two movies, it appears to be a limited vision. He’s stuck between real rebellion and real marketability.
So the new movie is a mess of violence and parental devotional, but rarely at the same time. Depending on the audience, one is meant to make the other palatable. And Damon is here to make Elysium palatable to everyone.
Orr agrees that the film has issues:
Blomkamp is a holder of strong political convictions (in interviews, he has said of his film, “This isn’t science fiction. This is today. This is now.”) and as his issue horizon has expanded from apartheid to immigration, health-care access, and the general divide between haves and have-nots, his narrative focus seems to have gotten hazier.
There’s still much to recommend Elysium. Damon gives a characteristically appealing performance. Blomkamp generously spares us the kind of tedious exposition—how Elysium works, why its atmosphere doesn’t float away, etc.—that so often clogs up science-fiction fare. And the visuals are terrific enough to merit the price of a ticket all on their own. For a while, they enable Blomkamp to create a world so physically persuasive as to keep disbelief suspended. But eventually the accumulation of illogic is too heavy, and Elysium crashes back to Earth.
Update from a reader:
Why are you bashing a filmmaker who is trying to create something different within the confines of Hollywood? Read my other favorite Andrew (O’Hehir) on Elysium, or at least offer a link to him.
Eyal Press suggests that Americans are unlikely to rally behind whistleblowers risking their lives and livelihoods:
In view of America’s deep tradition of individual liberty and distrust of government, one might suspect that whistleblowers like Snowden are more likely to win sympathy in the US than in other countries. But the evidence suggests the opposite. In answer to the question of whether “people should support their country even if the country is in the wrong,” more Americans said yes than citizens of eight European countries, the International Social Survey Programme found in 2003. Asked whether “right or wrong should be a matter of personal conscience,” Americans came in next-to-last. According to the sociologist Claude Fischer, comparative surveys in subsequent years have consistently shown that US citizens are “much more likely than Europeans to say that employees should follow a boss’s orders even if the boss is wrong”; more likely “to defer to church leaders and to insist on abiding by the law”; and more likely “to believe that individuals should go along and get along.”
The inhabitants of Bucharest are tired of tourists confusing their city with the Hungarian capital:
Following a trend started back in 1992 by Michael Jackson, so many musicians playing Romania’s capital have mistaken it for Hungary’s and come on stage shouting “how are you doing, Budapest?” that locals have moved on from amused indulgence to being seriously pissed off. …
To fight back, Romania’s capital has launched a “Bucharest not Budapest” campaign this summer, to encourage visitors to learn the difference between the two cities. Bankrolled by a Romanian chocolate manufacturer, the campaign features videos, T-shirts, airport billboards and a newly customized airport shuttle – the campaign has even installed a “Welcome to Not Bucharest” sign at Budapest airport.
It’s not hard to see why Bucharestians find the confusion irksome. Their city is the European Union’s 6th largest, a national capital with over 2 million inhabitants, a fine cultural scene and a remarkable if mixed-up cityscape of historic buildings. While it doesn’t come close to matching Budapest’s grand opulence or tourist numbers, Bucharest is a fascinating place that doesn’t deserve to play second fiddle to its distant neighbor just because its name is similar.
Douthat complains about Pinker’s “impressively swift march from allowing, grudgingly, that scientific discoveries do not ‘dictate’ values to asserting that they ‘militate’ very strongly in favor of … why, of Steven Pinker’s very own moral worldview!”:
His argument seems vaguely plausible only if you regard the paradigmatic shaped-by-science era as the post-Cold War Pax Americana rather than, say, the chaos of 1914-45, when instead of a humanist consensus the scientifically-advanced West featured radically-incommensurate moral worldviews basically settling their differences by force of arms.
Like Sam Harris, who wrote an entire book claiming that “science” somehow vindicates his preferred form of philosophical utilitarianism (when what he really meant was that if you assume utilitarian goals, science can help you pursue them), Pinker seems to have trouble imagining any reasoning person disagreeing about either the moral necessity of “maximizing human flourishing” or the content of what “flourishing” actually means — even though recent history furnishes plenty of examples and a decent imagination can furnish many more.
Like his whiggish antecedents, he mistakes a real-but-complicated historical relationship between science and humanism for a necessary intellectual line in which the latter vindicates the former, or at least militates strongly in its favor. And his invocation of “the scientific facts” to justify what is, at bottom, a philosophical preference for Mill over Nietzsche is the pretty much the essence of what critics mean by scientism: Empirically overconfident, intellectually unsubtle, and deeply incurious about the ways in which human beings can rationally disagree.
Noah Millman takes both Pinker and Douthat to task. From his conclusion:
Modern science is an extraordinary achievement of human civilization. I am even willing to agree that the knowledge science is capable of producing is genuinely of a different kind from all other forms of knowledge, and that it is the only method that can reliably build suspension bridges of reason across the vast voids of ignorance. It does not follow, therefore, that we can’t learn anything useful any other way. And it certainly doesn’t follow that people following a strictly scientific approach will necessarily learn usefully-applicable things more swiftly than those following other, more traditional or more humanistic approaches. That’s all critics of scientism really need to argue.
Zealot author Reza Aslan shares the passage from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov that shaped his understanding of religion:
It’s from the section in the book that’s sometimes referred to as “The Grand Inquisitor.” Ivan, the atheist brother, tells Alyosha, the believer, a story about Jesus coming back to earth during the time of the Inquisition. Jesus begins performing miracles, and people recognize him for who he is—and he’s arrested, of course, by the Inquisitors, who sentence him to be burned to death.
The night before his sentence, the Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus in his cell. Jesus doesn’t speak, but the Grand Inquisitor speaks to him at length about how the church doesn’t really need Jesus anymore. And that, frankly, his return at this point is just disruptive to the overall meaning of the church. In other words, the Grand Inquisitor says that the church’s mission in preaching Jesus has become more important than Jesus himself. And the great line, the quote that I really gravitated towards is this one here:
“Anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him.”
What I love about the story is that it’s become a kind of atheist manifesto, if you will. Many non-believers cite this passage as the reason why they do not believe—forgetting, by the way, that Dostoevsky himself was quite a fervent believer. But they also forget the end of the story: what happens after the Grand Inquisitor makes this huge statement, and lambastes Jesus for not speaking up for himself. Jesus simply stands up, walks up to the Grand Inquisitor, and gives him a kiss.
Recent Dish on Aslan’s new book on Jesus here, here, and here. Update from a reader:
I am well into Part III of the book, and it discusses what happened after Jesus died and goes into why his message caught on so well, so you should definitely read the book. Paul took Jesus’ message and detached it from its very Jewish foundations. I am sure that one could argue about that, but the book really does put the time before Jesus’ birth, during his life, and after his death and resurrection into a historical context that I was completely unaware of. Devout evangelical or fundamentalist Christians will find the book troubling, but someone like you might get quite a lot out of it unless you are much better versed in 1st century history than I was.
Joel Kotkin and Ali Modarres worry about the lack of kids in urban areas:
Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich, traps for the poor, and way stations for the ambitious young en route eventually to less congested places. The middle-class family has been pushed to the margins, breaking dramatically with urban history. The development raises at least two important questions: Are cities without children sustainable? And are they desirable?
The trend they find troubling:
Over the past two decades, the percentage of families that have children has fallen in most of the country, but nowhere more dramatically than in our largest, densest urban areas. In cities with populations greater than 500,000, the population of children aged 14 and younger actually declined between 2000 and 2010, according to U.S. Census data, with New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit experiencing the largest numerical drop. Many urban school districts—such as Chicago, which has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had a decade ago—have seen enrollments plummet and are busily closing schools. The 14-and-younger population increased in only about one-third of all census-designated places, with the greatest rate of growth occurring in smaller urban areas with fewer than 250,000 residents.
The Dish 