Year: 2013

Josh Barro points out that, as “of 2008, we were spending more per pupil on primary and secondary education than every Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country except Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway”:

When the subject is health care, liberals have drawn the right lessons from the last 40 years of cost growth, understanding that more money doesn’t necessarily mean better outcomes. They should apply that same lesson to education: In a cost-bloated sector with poor quality improvement, we should be figuring out how to spend money better, instead of spending more of it.

Today on the Dish, Andrew drew attention to the state of America’s veterans, sunk his teeth into the new budget offer, and gave Rand Paul some credit for attempting outreach to black Americans. He extolled Maggie’s sensible position on Israel, described Thatcherite counterculture from his youth (underlining the vitriol of her enemies) and yet noted that critique of her relationship with Augusto Pinochet is totally valid. Later, Andrew saw the end of gay culture watch and explored the possibilities of monetizing blogs.

In political coverage, we checked in with the upcoming consequences of the sequester, gathered reax to the trials of the bitcoin, and pointed to the next possible push for marriage equality. Waldman was skeptical of the gun control bill in the Senate, readers continued to hash out the right to bear arms, and pushed back against Goldblog on silencers. Nate Cohn remained positive that the Republicans are facing demographic trouble as we revisited Brown Vs. Board of Ed and heard an anecdote on Thatcher’s modern attitude toward same sex couples. Readers countered the idea that only women are objectified in politics and the New York Times made a Freudian slip.

In miscellanea, Chris Oates spotted a reflection of the British Empire in Doctor Who, Noah Berlatsky rebutted Alyssa’s critique of Romeo and Juliet, and Jeffery Overstreet pondered the Cohen brothers’ theological streak. We found more tributes to David Kuo, awed at the reality TV flooding over Alaska, and readers sounded off on the novelization of the small screen.

Later we saw a super secret social network, readers weighed the nutritional value of guinea pig and Seth Rogen went Breaking Bad for a Cool Ad Watch. Finally, we got a taste of summer movies in the MHB, visited Banner Creek, Alaska for the VFYW and recognized a chubby control freak in the Face of the Day.

­B.J.

A recent 60 Minutes profile of an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who committed suicide after suffering years of PTSD:

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Some more context on the crisis:

About 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are thought to suffer from PTSD, though many do not report their problems. Instead they try to dose themselves. A VA study found that veterans suffering from PTSD or depression were about four times more likely to have drug or drink problems. Too many end up in the same desperate place as Eiswert. The VA reported that, on average, 22 veterans committed suicide each day in 2010. Last year more active-duty soldiers took their own lives than were killed in combat. …

In war, it is said, there are no unwounded soldiers. Bombs that shatter bones also batter brains. Even on the periphery, war afflicts men with aching joints, ringing ears and psychological damage. Imagine, then, the human damage wrought by over a decade of battle.

Jeffrey Overstreet contemplates the role of religion in the Coen brothers’ films:

I think the Coens’ work disturbs audiences because it reminds us that, contrary to so many Hollywood messages, “being good” isn’t the answer. Being good is good, but—as Bill Murray says in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom—it isn’t enough to fix things. Their movies “ring true” when they remind us that there is a “wrath that’s about to set down,” as Rooster Cogburn says. If that wasn’t true, it wouldn’t strike such a resonant chord in audiences. The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona is coming, and there’s something elemental and true about him. We ourselves have unleashed him, as H.I. declares. In No Country, we’re warned that we “can’t stop what’s comin’.” There is a moral code, yes, and we violate it in countless ways. We’re screwed.

But their work doesn’t stop there. It engages and encourages us by leaving us with moments that transcend all of that doom, all of that destruction. Their suggestion of the possibility of grace is not so much a sermon proclamation as a desperate hope. And it wouldn’t move us so deeply if the anticipation of grace weren’t built into us somehow. It moves us because, on some level, we know it’s true.

Robert Beckhausen reports on a 007-worthy addition to the popular photo-sharing platform:

Facebook is a place where you can share pictures of cute animals and fun activities. Now there’s a browser extension that lets you encode those images with secret, hard-to-detect messages. That’s the idea behind Secretbook, a browser extension released this week by 21-year-old Oxford University computer science student and former Google intern Owen-Campbell Moore. With the extension, anyone — you, your sister, a terrorist — could share messages hidden in JPEG images uploaded to Facebook without the prying eyes of the company, the government or anyone else noticing or figuring out what the messages say. The only way to unlock them is through a password you create. …

[It’s] the first time anyone’s managed to figure out how to automate digital steganography — the practice of concealing messages inside computer files — through Facebook, the world’s biggest social media platform. Unlike cryptography, which uses ciphertext to encrypt messages, steganographic messages are simply hidden where no one would think to look.

Here’s a wonderful little tidbit from Alexander Chancellor in the Spectator’s symposium:

In the middle of dinner on Easter Sunday, she demanded that we all go and stand outside in the cold to see the Hale-Bopp comet as it passed overhead. ‘It reminds me of pheasant,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t it you, Mr Chancellor?’ (It didn’t at all, actually.)

On Easter Monday, a beautiful spring day, Alexander Hesketh brought Margaret and Denis Thatcher over to my house at Stoke Park, where she said another surprising thing to me. Staying there with my late uncle Robin was Jacqueline Hope-Wallace, a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher, having once served under her as a civil servant in the Ministry of Pensions in the early 1960s, who was feeling bereft after the death of her long-term friend C.V. (Veronica) Wedgwood, the historian. I didn’t mention that they had been lovers but must have somehow implied it, for Lady Thatcher grasped the point immediately and said, as a very modern person might, ‘I didn’t realise they were partners.’

When they eventually crossed paths on the lawn, Hope-Wallace started to say, ‘You won’t remember me, but…’ when Lady Thatcher briskly interrupted her: ‘Of course I remember you — you wrote that marvellous report on pension reform…’. She went on to recall the names and personalities of all the other civil servants in that department. She thus made a forlorn old lady very happy.

Chris Oates examines the show’s genesis in 1960s England, when the “British empire, like other European empires, was ending”:

In many ways, the show carried on the themes of Victorian youth literature: the Doctor is a fearless traveler; he encounters strange cultures and lands; he is stoic, sophisticated, and not without a few eccentricities. Give him a pith helmet and he could fit in perfectly with the entertainment of the past. Episodic adventure still sold, was still compelling, but with Doctor Who, the creators were confronted with the question of what happens to an empire-builder post-imperially? The question for the show’s creators was how to maintain the lucrative adventure structure of the past without the geopolitical foundation that it had required.

Their answer was to use the traits that were appealing about adventurers and were still permissible in a world where countries are not apportioned on a first-European-come, first-European-served basis. When inviting his companions to join him, he almost always asks if they want to see the universe. The stated mission is travel for its own sake. The Doctor is a tourist.

Nate Cohn rebuts various pundits who argue otherwise:

It was frequently observed that a Romney victory would have required a historic performance among white voters, provided that Obama could match his ’08 performance among non-white voters. Bush’s 2004 performance among white voters wouldn’t get it done anymore. In 2016, the math gets even more challenging. If the white share of the electorate declines further, Republicans won’t just need to match their best performance of the last 24 years among white voters, they’ll also need to match their best performance of the last 24 years among non-white voters. If they can’t make the requisite 16-point gain among non-white voters—a tall order, to say the least—then the next Republican candidate will enter truly uncharted territory, potentially needing to win up to 64 percent of the white vote just to break 50 percent of the popular vote.