Month: March 2013

Abby Rapoport examines the efforts of marijuana reformers:

The next big question for activists will be whether to start more initiative campaigns for 2014 or whether to wait until the next presidential election. [Mason] Tvert [co-director of the initiative campaign in Colorado] advocates focusing on the legislative level for now, and says the initiative process shouldn’t be tried again until the next presidential election—when turnout is higher across the political spectrum. Midterm elections tend to rev up groups out of power—currently the conservative base. Not everyone is willing to wait, though. In Florida, two big Democratic fundraisers have announced their intention to help get a medical-marijuana initiative on the ballot in 2014. According to [Allen] St. Pierre [executive director of NORML], legalization efforts—like the ones that passed in Washington and Colorado—are in full swing in California, Massachusetts, Maine, and Oregon, where a similar measure failed in 2012. “We already have lots of grassroots on the ground and all of those states ready to rock,” he says.

(Screenshot from (pdf) a recent California field poll.)

Emily Nussbaum is intrigued by the conceit of FX’s The Americans, in which KGB agents Philip and Elizabeth Jennings attempt to pass as a typical American family:

As with [“Homeland”], many scenes in “The Americans” are meditations on espionage, which requires its disciples to sublimate human decency to larger moral imperatives. Yet despite the sleek surface and fun retro aspects (Jordache jeans, VCRs, landlines), setting the show in the Reagan era is more than a gimmick. With historical distance, “The Americans” has the freedom to sympathetically portray characters who, on a different show, would be hissing terrorists.

Jesse Damiani recently called it the most compelling romance on television:

What separates The Americans [from other anti-hero dramas] is its foregrounding of the simplest device in the history of narrative: love. In effect, The Americans is an extended remarriage plot. Sure, it’s replete with the trappings of espionage, but all the mad chases, brutality, and political intrigue function in service of its romantic core. What leaves viewers clinging to their armrests in these moments of pulpy thrill is the underlying terror that, at any moment, the fledgling relationship between protagonists Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), will suffer a blow—whether physically, emotionally, or both—that it cannot survive.

Though sweatshops remain a fact of the global garment industry, Jake Blumgart notes that there is one market where the anti-sweatshop movement has been making progress – college apparel:

Universities contract with garment companies to produce their branded apparel and students have points of leverage that are unavailable to most consumers, allowing them to more easily hold companies accountable for abuses that take place within their supply chains. Student groups like the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) have been able to pressure universities and colleges to force their suppliers to accept independent inspections from organizations like the Workers Rights Consortium, and make the necessary improvements (or else lose a highly lucrative dedicated market).

In 2009, for example, Russell Athletic rehired 1,200 Honduran workers who had been fired after organizing a union and agreed to allow unionization in other factories after a sustained student campaign that resulted in many university and college administrations suspending contracts with the company. No comparative arrangement exists for consumers outside the higher education sector, because they lack a direct relationship to the retail institutions where they purchase apparel and because it is much harder to organize consumers outside of a small geographic area like, say, a campus.

Natalie Shapero explains the original purpose of butter sculptures:

[Pamela Simpson, author of Corn Palaces and Butter Queens] does a nice job of tracing these installations back to a period in the 1870s when Kansas, then recently plagued by drought, was desperate to prove the vitality of its crops to the rest of the country by embracing what now seems crass and misguided. Enormous and enormously wasteful displays–the U.S. Capitol rendered in apples, a multigrain Liberty Bell with a gourd for a clapper–seemed the best way to say to the country, “Buy some land in Kansas, and you’ll have more crops than you know what to do with.”

(Photo of a butter sculpture by Flickr user pwbaker)

Reuven Brenner claims that shortening college would have major economic benefits:

There are at least 16 million youngsters enrolled in post-secondary education, with approximately 4 million graduating every year. Assume that from now on, each year, 4 million students join the labor force a year earlier. Each generation would stay one year longer in the labor force. How much annual income and how much wealth would this generate?

Assume that after graduation the average salary would be just $20,000 and remain there. With 4 million students finishing one year earlier, this would add $80 billion to the national income during that year. Or at an average annual income of $40,000, it would add $160 billion. Assume now that the additional $80 billion in national income would be compounding at 7 percent over the next 40 years. This would then amount to an additional $1.2 trillion of wealth – for just one generation of 4 million students joining the labor force a year earlier at a $20,000 salary. At $40,000, this would amount to $2.4 trillion by the fortieth year – again, for just one generation of 4 million people joining the labor force a year earlier. The added wealth depends on how rosy one makes the assumptions about salaries or compounding rates. Add 10, 20, or 30 generations, each starting to work a year earlier, and the numbers run into the tens of trillions of dollars.

John Jeremiah Sullivan surveys how our understanding of animal consciousness has evolved:

If we put aside the self-awareness standard—and really, how arbitrary and arrogant is that, to take the attribute of consciousness we happen to possess over all creatures and set it atop the hierarchy, proclaiming it the very definition of consciousness (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote something wise in his notebooks, to the effect of: only a man can draw a self-portrait, but only a man wants to)—it becomes possible to say at least the following: the overwhelming tendency of all this scientific work, of its results, has been toward more consciousness. More species having it, and species having more of it than assumed. This was made boldly clear when the “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” pointed out that those “neurological substrates” necessary for consciousness (whatever “consciousness” is) belong to “all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses.” The animal kingdom is symphonic with mental activity, and of its millions of wavelengths, we’re born able to understand the minutest sliver. The least we can do is have a proper respect for our ignorance.

Maybe not:

[Toby Dodge, author of Iraq: From War to a New Authoritarianism] puts quickly to rest the notion that Iraq’s unique ethnic and sectarian mix—about 60% Shia Muslim, 20% Sunni Muslim and 15% Kurdish, along with many smaller minorities—predestined the country to strife. He argues persuasively that the underlying cause of the bloodletting, which still continues on a reduced scale, was the collapse of the Iraqi state. This created the social stress and acceptance of violence that allowed what he calls “ethnic entrepreneurs”—political manipulators of sectarians fears—to flourish.