Month: May 2013

Transparency In The Weed Market

Mark Kleiman illustrates the need for it:

It appears that one local grower developed a strain sold under the “Purple Urkle” label. It was widely held, by producers and consumers alike, to be truly righteous weed, and it flew off the shelves.

Then the fashion for chemical testing came in. Purple Urkle tested at a mere 7% THC – perhaps twice the THC content of what was called “marijuana” when I was in college, but well below the 12-18% that current products claim (more accurately in some cases than in others). Result: even the consumers who had already experienced and enjoyed Purple Urkle, and had been asking for it by name, wouldn’t touch it. They were so used to the idea that quality is defined by THC content that they didn’t want to smoke what they now “knew” to be weak weed. So the brand more or less died.

In principle, a legal cannabis market could improve consumer satisfaction and safety by delivering products of known chemical composition. But if the heavy users who dominate the market in terms of volume have a prejudice in favor of maximum THC content, the practical outcome could fall well short of the promise.

McArdle lists other areas in which transparency hasn’t helped the market.

Maligning Millennials, Ctd

Elspeth Reeve is also peeved at Joel Stein’s piece:

Sometimes you get the sense that these magazines’ cultural writers have very little experience with the entire American culture, and prefer to make their grand analyses based on what people they know in the gentrified parts of cities like New York and Los Angeles were talking about at brunch last weekend. The type of young person that magazine writers come across most frequently are magazine interns. Because the media industry is high-status, but, at least early on, very low pay in a very expensive city, it attracts a lot of rich kids. Entitled, arrogant, spoiled, preening — those are the alleged signature traits of Millennials, as diagnosed by countless magazine writers. Those traits curiously align perfectly with the signature traits of a rich kid. Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of Instagram? If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to crafting the composite personality of a generation that fought three wars for you.

Reeve goes on to feature a series of magazine covers representing “a century or so of culture writers declaring the youth to be self-obsessed little monsters.” For what it’s worth, my own impression of the next generation – derived indeed from working with the non-rich ones – is that they are the best I’ve yet seen: pragmatic, unillusioned, often well-intentioned and extremely hardworking. I get gloomy about our culture at times, about the collision of more and more powerful technology with our primate impulses, but the one bright thing I see are the twentysomethings.

They seem sane before their time. Because, perhaps, they have had to confront a far harder world than their parents and simply have to get on with it. I have to say I prefer their generation to my own.

The Tea Party Audit

The AP reports that the IRS “inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election” to verify that they were eligible for tax-exempt status. Doug Mataconis questions the claim that it was “not motivated by political bias”:

Targeting groups or people based on their political beliefs is, of course, strictly forbidden and completely unacceptable. It is one of the things that Richard Nixon and his cronies were accused of doing during the Watergate scandal, and ever since then there were supposed to have been strict rules in place to prevent outside pressure from effecting IRS investigations. … Even if this was all the work of low-level workers in one IRS office, the fact that the investigation targeted only groups of a specific political nature suggests pretty strongly that it was motivated by political bias even if it was just the political bias of these “low-lever workers.”

Kevin Williamson is outraged:

Using the IRS to target political opponents is banana-republic stuff, a clear and intolerable violation of the public trust, not to mention relevant criminal statutes. This is not the sort of offense that should get these IRS workers fired from their jobs — it is the sort of offense that should get them five years in prison.

Drum finally sees a “real scandal” for Republicans to pursue.

Birds, Bees, Sperm Donors

Mark Oppenheimer expresses anxiety over talking to his children about artificial insemination – “to be more precise, I don’t want to talk about sperm donation.” He thinks through his “very specific revulsions toward what I perceive to be the misuse, or over-use, of science” and ultimately chills out:

My anxiety about lesbian mothers with strollers is silly. I know that. It scapegoats the lesbian for the choices of the straight couple: Plenty of sperm donation leads to non-lesbian parenting, after all. And I am obviously relying on an incoherent distinction between what is “artificial” and what is “natural,” in an age when the technologies everyone likes—the ultrasound, the prenatal vitamin, the autoclave to sanitize surgical instruments, Purell—are seen as beneficial, and are granted honorary “natural” status. No doubt I am also engaging in the sacred parental rite of judging other parents for anything I can find, assuring myself that whatever deviates from what my wife and I do, including different means of conception, is at least a little bit worse. That, too, is silly. But what’s really silly is worrying about the conversations sperm-donor mothers will provoke with my children. Because, as any parent knows, conversations with young people about sex never go as badly as you fear. In fact, they don’t go anywhere you could possibly predict.

My wife tells this story.

About a year and a half ago, she was returning from dropping our eldest daughter off at kindergarten; the baby was strapped to her chest, and she was pushing our middle daughter, Ellie, then almost three years old, in the stroller. Out of nowhere, Ellie asked that question, the one that all children ask at some point in their toddling years: “Mommy, how do you make a baby?” My wife was a bit surprised to get this question—why now? so early in the day?—but it didn’t matter, for there was only one possible answer, the straightforward, clinical, correct answer. “Well,” she said, “the man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina, seed comes out, and the baby begins to grow.” At this point Ellie turned around in the stroller and squinted at my wife with skepticism, her eyes narrowed and her lips puckered. “Mommy,” she said, “if the man puts his penis in the woman, how does he put it back on?”

After stifling a laugh, my wife explained the situation to Ellie’s satisfaction, at which point the topic was dropped—presumably in favor of more important questions, like whether she had earned back the dessert she had lost in that morning’s tantrum.

Intervention In Syria? Just Say No, Ctd

Leon Wieseltier jumps into the debate. There is nothing there but moral preening and a refusal to engage in the actual arguments of the opponents of intervention. More to the point, a public intellectual who backed the Iraq War actually writes the following sentences:

A “senior American official who is involved in Syria policy” plaintively said this to Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker: “People on the Hill ask me, ‘Why can’t we do a no-fly zone? Why can’t we do military strikes?’ Of course we can do these things. The issue is, where will it stop?” The answer is, we don’t know. But is the gift of prophecy really a requirement for historical action? Must we know the ending at the beginning? If so, then nobody would start a business, or a book, or a medical treatment, or a love affair, let alone an invasion of Omaha Beach.

Or the Iraq war. Perhaps he has some way of relating his previous massive error of judgment to his current position. But no: the word “Iraq” appears nowhere in the piece. It is as if it never happened. How about the massive problem of how to find the right insurgents to arm? Easy as pie:

We can still create pro-Western elements in the struggle for Syria after Assad, and deny Al Qaeda a government in Damascus, and stem the tide of the refugees that is shaking the entire region.

Notice how Wieseltier echoes the worst hubris of neoconservatism here: we can “create” pro-Western elements. Just like the Bushies told us we could “create” reality. How do you prevent those pro-Western elements from being outclassed by al Qaeda elements who are now the most effective fighting force in the country? Wieseltier doesn’t say. Why does he have to? Why indeed does he need to think at all about where jumping into a war we cannot control might lead?

All this talk of exiting is designed only to inhibit us from entering. Like its cousin “the slippery slope,” “the exit strategy” is demagoguery masquerading as prudence.

Actually, it’s the exact opposite. It’s prudence against the kind of self-righteous recklessness that gave us the Iraq catastrophe. Then this further act of amnesia:

Seventy thousand people have died in the Syrian war, most of them at the hands of their ruler. Since this number has appeared in the papers for many months, the actual number must be much higher.

Does he recall how many Iraqis died in a sectarian civil war, while the US was nominally occupying the entire country? Over to Fareed Zakaria:

From 2003 to 2012, despite there being as many as 180,000 American and allied troops in Iraq, somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 Iraqi civilians died and about 1.5 million fled the country. Jihadi groups flourished in Iraq, and al-Qaeda had a huge presence there. The U.S. was about as actively engaged in Iraq as is possible, and yet more terrible things happened there than in Syria.

But never mind. Let’s do it all over again! This infantile column would simply be simply another dumb, shallow piece if it weren’t for the moral superciliousness:

The moral dimension must be restored to our deliberations, the moral sting, or else Obama, for all his talk about conscience, will have presided over a terrible mutilation of American discourse: the severance of conscience from action.

Again, note the absolute amnesia. Because of prudent reluctance to enter a sectarian civil war in a failed Middle Eastern state, Obama has suddenly severed “conscience from action” in American government. Not the authorization of torture by Cheney (I have been unable to find a single sentence Wieseltier has written about torture or enhanced interrogations and you can see his basic acquiescence to it in this soft-ball exchange with Condi Rice, where Wieseltier echoes Rice in saying that torturing prisoners is “never a morally easy question,” when obviously it was); and not the criminal lack of preparation in occupying Iraq: these did not sever conscience from action. The only sentences I can find tackling American torture were these in his foul, McCarthyite attack on yours truly:

As far as I can tell, Krauthammer’s position on torture is owed to a deep and sometimes frantic concern for American security, and his position on the war in Gaza to a deep and sometimes frantic concern for Israeli security, and his position on Iran to a deep and sometime frantic concern for American and Israeli security. Whatever the merits of his views, I do not see that his motives are despicable.

My italics. But my essay tackling Krauthammer’s support for a new torture elite corps for the US did not question the sincerity of Krauthammer’s motives either. It merely argued passionately against his case. But notice Wieseltier’s refusal to address the substantive question of the morality of the Gestapo’s “enhanced interrogations.” A public intellectual so constantly vigilant about breaches of morality by the American government never got around to that subject, but is now claiming a moral Rubicon may be crossed because we don’t invade Syria?

I can only echo David Rieff:

Is it really too much to ask that those who supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq so enthusiastically at the time, and whose second thoughts have been far less fierce and full-throated than their initial enthusiasm, not deploy virtually the exact same crusading rhetoric about the necessity of the use of U.S. power in the name of overthrowing tyrants, and of America serving as an armed midwife to the birth of democracy in the Middle East, with regard to Syria as they did a decade ago with regard to Iraq?

Yes, apparently, it is far too much to ask.

Is The Hot Streak Real?

A huge new study – consisting of an entire NBA season of free throws and 50,000 professional bowling games – sought to prove the existence of hot hands. Gretchen Reynolds summarizes the findings:

Basketball players experienced statistically significant and recognizable hot periods over an entire game or two, during which they would hit more free throws than random chance would suggest. But they would not necessarily hit one free throw immediately after the last. Similarly, bowlers who completed a high-scoring game were more likely to roll strikes in the next game. But a strike in one frame of each game was not statistically likely to lead to a strike in the next frame.

And the streak raises expectations:

[Yigal Attali, who analyzed all available shooting statistics from the 2010-11 NBA season,] found that a player who drained one shot was more likely than chance would suggest to take the team’s next shot — and also more likely than chance would suggest to miss it. Essentially, he found that in real games, players developed anti-hot hands. A momentary success bred immediate subsequent failure.

Old Koch In A New Bottle

You guessed it – sponsored content leads to the Koch brothers’ subsidizing a Buzzfeed night of debates on immigration reform. Like many libertarians, the Kochs are in favor of reform, and are now feeding Buzzfeed’s bottom line in a slightly more enmeshed way than simple advertizing. Event sponsorship is an old and perfectly legitimate, if slightly compromising, source of revenue for journalism. What’s a little worrying is that the Kochs came to Buzzfeed with the idea first. From Buzzfeed’s spokesperson:

We were looking to expand our BuzzFeed Brews series and wanted to do something like this summit for a while. The Koch Institute came to us and were thinking on the same wavelength about doing an event which felt serendipitous. Immigration was the right topic at the right time and we’re just happy it all came together.

The serendipity of it all!