Month: April 2013

Farewell, Fayyad

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, known for his moderation and efforts at state-building, retired over the weekend. Matt Duss sums up his legacy to date:

He attempted to reform and develop the Palestinian economy, with a particular focus on greater transparency and accountability, in order create a sense of momentum among Palestinians toward statehood. In one of the surest signs of the Western intelligentsia’s blessing, the doctrine was endowed by The New York Times’ Tom Friedman with its own special title: “Fayyadism … the simple but all-too-rare notion that an Arab leader’s legitimacy should be based not on slogans or rejectionism or personality cults or security services, but on delivering transparent, accountable administration and services.”

Four years later, Fayyadism has foundered on the reality that economic development—genuine, sustainable economic development—is all but impossible amid the conditions of a hostile military occupation that the West Bank continues to experience under Israeli rule.

Beinart argues America and Israel blew their chance to work with a committed moderate leader:

In 2011, after Obama failed to convince Netanyahu to enter peace talks based upon the 1967 lines, Abbas bypassed the U.S.-led peace process and took his case for statehood to the U.N. instead. In 2012, he went there again, and won, in a vote in which America was abandoned by its key allies. Now Fayyad, who for more than a decade has been the most pro-American Palestinian official, is leaving the scene. Unless John Kerry can restart meaningful peace talks—which seems unlikely given Netanyahu’s continued hostility to using the 1967 lines as a benchmark—it’s likely that Abbas will take his case to the International Criminal Court, thus bypassing the United States yet again.

Gold Loses Its Luster

Felix Salmon welcomes the bursting of the gold bubble:

What the system needs … is a stark reminder that fear-based assets can be just as risky as greed-based assets. Rising interest rates can eat away the value of your bond portfolio, inflation can erode your cash, and as for gold (or bitcoins, for that matter), well, it can plunge in value literally overnight. My hope is that the price of gold will continue to fall, that goldbugs will look increasingly silly, and that as a result Americans with savings will conclude that the best thing to do with those savings is to put them to work in a productive manner, rather than self-defeatingly trying to protect what they have.

Why Are Bombings So Rare In America?

Joyner asks:

[W]hile these attacks are thankfully rare, I can’t for the life of me figure out why. The Boston Marathon and the Super Bowl are comparatively easy to secure, because they’re one-offs, generate sufficient revenue to make a security investment reasonable, and obvious targets. It’s simply impossible to protect all of our schools, shopping malls, movie theaters, airports, and other places where hundreds and even thousands of people gather on a daily basis.

McArdle responds:

So why don’t they happen more? The most convincing answer I’ve gotten to that question is that fostering terror is only one of the aims of a terrorist attack. These attacks also function as recruiting, and as fundraising promotions for your terrorist organization. There are what you might call business considerations, in other words, and those business considerations dictate the kinds of attacks that terrorists want to carry out.

Peter Bergen provides another answer:

After 9/11 there was a rapid increase in the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country, which are made up of multiple law enforcement agencies working together to ferret out suspected terrorist activity. And following the 9/11 attacks, far more businesses started reporting to law enforcement suspicious purchases of any kind of material that could be used for bomb-making. As a result, since 9/11 bomb plots that have simply fizzled out have overwhelmingly been the rule.

Does Your Backyard Smell Like Semen? Ctd

Evidently the linden tree also has that seminal smell:

A reader expands on yesterday’s popular post:

I used to do chemical analyses of the fragrances of plants, especially orchids.  Flowers that smell like semen are not uncommon. Basic amines such as putrescine, spermine, spermidine and cadaverine are probably components of such floral fragrances. Chestnut flowers (Castanea sativa) are notoriously semen-like, and I once saw a pressed museum specimen of a Trillium that stated the flower smelled “like freshly-collected bull semen”.  Several species of the Asian orchid genus Coelogyne are powerfully fragrant of fresh semen.

Years ago, a gay friend in Atlanta with a diverse orchid collection was giving a greenhouse tour to an elderly woman in her early nineties.  Moving unsteadily through the greenhouse, she paused in front of a large basket of blooming Coelogyne trinervis that filled the whole house with its odor.  She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, and exclaimed “Oh, my, my…. I know I’ve smelled that fragrance somewhere before…. I just can’t put my finger on it…. Somethin’ about it reminds me of my first husband…”.  Unlike the fragrance of Proust’s madeleines, the orchid fragrance was not successful in triggering her old memories, even though she returned to the topic throughout the afternoon.

Tax-Deductible Crimes

Jack Shakely reviews a new book, With Charity for All, written by former NPR president Ken Stern about the dark side of nonprofits:

His blood-boiling chapter on nonprofit fraud will make you wonder if the IRS ever checks on these miscreants, especially those with the word “veteran” in the title. Well actually, Stern says, it doesn’t. It is the very rare and very unlucky nonprofit thief who gets caught. Less than one percent of all nonprofit tax returns are even reviewed. And nonprofit theft is pervasive, we learn:

The average charitable theft is estimated to be $100,000, meaning that money is walking out in large chunks. Given that the average bank robber in the United States gets away with only about $4,000 and runs a far higher risk of apprehension, one might expect that in a sensible theft marketplace, more people would be attracted to the soft targets of charities.

Previous Dish on Stern’s book here.

Why We Fear Terrorism

Ross Pomeroy reviews research on the subject:

In 1987, psychologist and risk perception expert Paul Slovic skillfully summarized in the journal Science how we calculate risk. In general, humans tend to be wary and apprehensive of risks that are uncontrollable, potentially fatal, possibly catastrophic, and relatively unknown.

The danger of terrorism put in perspective:

In the last decade, you’d be hard-pressed to go one day without hearing about [terrorism]. However, as Reason‘s Ronald Bailey wrote in 2011, an American’s chances of being killed by a terrorist are approximately one in 20 million. Heck, even if all of the thwarted terrorist attacks over the last 10 years were carried out, that still would translate to a risk of one in 1.7 million. Compare that to an infinitely more dangerous activity you may undertake every morning: climbing into a car. The annual risk of dying in a motor vehicle crash is one in 19,000.