Month: March 2013

Mark Kleiman’s consulting firm has been hired to “advise the Washington State Liquor Control Board on implementing Washington’s I-502 marijuana legalization law.” Kleiman explains why, in the above video, he won’t say whether or not he smokes pot:

The question about my own use or non-use of pot always comes up, and I always answer the same way, with a polite (I hope) “None of your business.” I don’t think there’s any ill will involved in asking the question: journalists simply want to “place” their sources culturally on the hippie-to-jock spectrum. But I want to resist the whole idea that drug policy should be a clash of cultural identities rather than a serious discussion of harms and benefits.

This embed is invalid

Many more readers sound off:

I’m to be married a month from now, and this has been a hot topic among friends. My fiancé will be taking my last name. But I’m a firm believer that we humans should take advantage of the one time that we have a little choice in what we are called. I say the new rules should go like this: best last name wins. I don’t want to name names, but our contest wasn’t even close. Her last name is British slang for penis, whereas mine is synonymous with brute Swedish strength. As the rest of my circle falls into marriage, I will be a big advocate for this new approach. Family legacy be damned.

Another:

When I started dating my wife, I let it be known that I would have no problem if she hyphenated or kept her own name. But since her maiden name was Virgin (yes, not Virginia, not Burgenie, Virgin) she was ready to ditch it as fast as she could. Virgin-Wright (or even Wright-Virgin) just wasn’t happening. So she remained a Virgin until marriage and not a moment more.

Another:

My mother’s advice: if the married name is easier to spell, go with it. It was, so I did! I’ve saved probably six and a half days of spelling my name out for people.

And another:

My daughter’s father and I are not married.  At the time when I was pregnant and after I gave birth, her father and I were planning on getting married.  That didn’t happen, and it is also probably the best thing for my daughter and me that it did not happen.  My daughter is now 20 years old.  I raised her on my own with the help of my supportive family.

My daughter also still has her father’s last name, and she’s the only one in our family that has that last name.  Why didn’t I change it when she was young and it was apparent that her father was not going to be a part of her life?  I didn’t change for a couple reasons.  The first reason is superficial – it’s a pretty last name, and it sounds beautiful with her first name.  The other reason is maybe more important – it’s the only thing her father gave her, and I want her to keep it and have something beautiful from her father.

Though I should also add that my daughter’s middle name is my last name. Even though I do love her father’s last name, I still wanted my name in there somewhere.

Another:

Within mine and my husband’s families I think we have almost every variation on this theme.  I kept mine.  Why?  My then fiancee said, “I fell in love with Susan Green, I want to be married to Susan Green.”  Twenty-odd years later he still is married to Susan Green.

Wrapping up the Vulture’s “Sitcom Smackdown,” Matt Zoller Seitz calls Cheers “a flawless pearl glinting on a beach. But The Simpsons is the beach”:

At some point in its run, the show transcended aesthetic concerns and became an institution, a juggernaut, a public utility, a monument, and (yes, really) a living document that’s probably quoted as widely and frequently as the Bible, and with a lot more enthusiasm. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Simpsons ran for another twenty years, or until one of its principals croaked of old age. (What if it’s Dan Castellaneta and it happens during taping? One last Homeric wail of anguish! They’d probably weave it into the final episode, the way John Travolta did with Nancy Allen’s dying scream at the end of Blow Out.) Plus, at a certain point, indestructibility trumps every other value — especially if the artists in question have earned a spot in the pop culture pantheon, as The Simpsons surely has.

Related coverage of South Park and Arrested Development here.

Beinart explains.

Last night, I watched “The Gatekeepers“, a devastating documentary featuring several Shin Bet leaders over the last few decades. These men – the most hardened, realist, patriots – all acknowledge that the occupation is killing Israel’s soul, security and global support. All tactics, no strategy, as one puts it.

There is, it seems to me, no neutral ground on this. Either the settlements must be stopped and reversed or the US must cut its ties to Israel. Yet neither will happen ever. Perhaps there is some moral preening in opposing the settlements, as I do, while knowing that none of this matters, that the brutality will continue, and our complicity in it will be as “unbreakable” and “eternal” as the alliance Obama is currently toasting. But what else can one do?

The alternative for a writer like me is total disengagement, an acceptance that this deliberate immiseration and humiliation of an entire people is now simply part of what it means to be an American. My fear – and it is echoed by the former leaders of the Shin Bet – is that this acceptance will not end the reckoning that will come from doing nothing. Maybe Rabin was the last chance. But it is increasingly hard to believe otherwise.

Ezra apologizes for supporting the Iraq War. His key mistake:

Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support — an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration.

Chait also accounts for his mistakes:

The biggest single conceptual failure of my argument for war is that I gave absurdly little thought to the post-invasion phase. I was aware that the Bush administration was deploying far too few troops to the front for a workable occupation while blatantly lying about the war’s likely costs. I assumed that its real plan was to decapitate the Iraqi leadership, install a more pliant and less brutal military figure in Saddam’s place, and call it democracy.

In other words, I deemed the administration’s rhetoric about democracy to be a pack of lies. Now, I could accept this, because I assumed the successor regime would be less brutal than the psychotically cruel one that was being deposed. The quality of the regime was an important predicate for my support of the war — I would not have supported it had I believed it would make life harder for Iraqis, on the whole — but not the necessary rationale. I assumed these things because at the time Bush appeared — from the 2000 campaign through Florida through his push to cut taxes — to be a dishonest but ruthlessly effective figure. A messy, undermanned occupation would be politically fatal, I reasoned, therefore Bush wouldn’t actually undertake one.

Both critiques apply to me as well. Rumsfeld and Cheney were great at projecting confidence, competence and management skills. And we were all still traumatized by 9/11 and grappling with how to respond to it. But we know now they were as terrified as we were, and their fear drove them to abandon restraint or skepticism or competent military and intelligence advice.

This feels like an academic debate. But it isn’t. I have blood on my hands. However many times I try to wash them, the blood will not come off.

(Photo: An Iraqi carries the body of his grandson out of the morgue of a hospital in Baghdad 21 November 2006. The child was killed according to his grandfather when Iraqi and US forces raided Baghdad’s Shiite district of Sadr City to hunt for a kidnapped US soldier, the second such raid in two days. A shattered Iraq limped into 2007 after a year in which a bloody insurgency escalated into brutal sectarian war, forcing Washington to contemplate a major policy shift to halt total disintegration. By Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty.)