Month: May 2013

Dissents Of The Day

A reader writes:

I am a leader in the Jewish community who regularly influences the thinking of American Jews. I consider myself a loving critic of the state of Israel in the sense that I have been there enough to understand its imperfections and am committed enough to have credibility amongst people Israel takes seriously. I see it as my responsibility to regularly speak out when I think Israeli government policy undermines its long term strategic interests and moral standing. I think settlement expansion is a fool’s errand.

And Stephen Hawking’s boycott is making my job immeasurably harder. The people I most need to listen to my loving criticism become hardened by what they see as a global double standard when it comes to Israel and a convenient self righteousness expressed towards the only democracy in the Middle East that would even register such protests.

Yes, the Netanyahu policies have been corrosive to the vision of a Jewish and democratic state. And yes, the historically earned instinct among Jews not to trust the world is emboldened by overtures like Hawking’s. Please Andrew, stop supporting the grandstanding and start partnering with the people most likely to move the needle. Boycotts, divestment and sanctions make it too easy for Israel supporters to point the finger at Palestinian acts of terror and not the internal changes that the Israeli government must make.

I take my reader’s points, but I see no way to end and reverse the settlements if we stay on our current track. Imploring Israel to reverse the de facto annxation under Netanyahu is like spitting into a hurricane. If I saw any sign that the American Jewish establishment or the US Congress or the Christianist right were prepared to put a scintilla of pressure on Israel to reverse the settlements, I’d “start partnering with the people most likely to move the needle.” But the people most capable of moving the needle refuse to, and have been actively complicit in Israel’s democratic death-wish, and actively McCarthyite in their smearing of those who resist. At some point, you either look away or look for alternative strategies.

Another upset reader points to this item:

“Hawking’s decision to join the boycott of Israel is quite hypocritical for an individual who prides himself on his whole intellectual accomplishment. His whole computer-based communications system [he needs because of his motor-neuron disease] runs on a chip designed by Israel’s Intel team. I suggest if he truly wants to pull out of Israel he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet,” said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of Shurat HaDin.

A chip is a chip, for goodness’ sake. There’s no hypocrisy there, unless your mindset is irretrievably tribal. Another dissent:

I generally agree with your criticisms of the Netanyahu government, and your justified disdain for the hardening of Israel towards the Palestinians and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. But “David has become Goliath”?

Not when Israel is surrounded by extremely well-funded, well-armed and well-populated Arab and Muslim states that still deny its existence, actively talk about wiping it off of the face of the earth, either have or are developing nuclear capability, who encourage the use of violence as the exclusive means to Screen shot 2013-05-09 at 11.22.09 AMsolve the current problems, and who also indulge in some of the most offensive racial stereotyping derogatory to Jews in the primary school education of their children. Israel’s enemies were equally opposed to pre-1967 Israel and post-1967 Israel, to Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, to Menachim Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, and now to Netanyahu. But we tend to forget or overlook the Arab world’s hatred of pre-1967 Israel because Netanyahu has made it so easy to be critical of post-1967 Israel’s conduct as a state.

I think it would be more appropriate to say that David (i.e., Israel) is a more complex and ambiguous figure than the Bible would have us believe, at times acting in ways we don’t like because of its conviction that it knows more than we do about what it needs to do to survive given the reality on the ground, the reality that it confronts on a daily basis, and the reality that you and I can discuss in the abstract from our safe perch across the Atlantic. And make no mistake about it, while this guy David is a remarkable and worthwhile character, he is at times selfish, inconsiderate, arrogant, narcissistic, impulsive and more than a little dickish, and you just want to hit him upside the head and tell him to straighten out before it’s too late. But he doesn’t chop off peoples arms for stealing, he doesn’t seek the complete and permanent destruction of his neighbors, he lives in fear of Boston Marathon-style terrorist attacks in public places on a daily basis, and he is a democracy, where there is almost even division between those who support the right wing government’s hard line on settlements and border settlements, and those who oppose with the same passion and intensity as you do.

There is no David, and there is no Goliath. That is media oversimplification at its laziest.

(Chart of relative military power in the Middle East compiled by Global Firepower)

The Benghazi Hearing: Reax

Michael Hirsh has a must-read on yesterday’s hearing. At the center of it was Gregory Hicks, the deputy to Ambassador Stevens located in Tripoli at the time of the attack:

The most moving — if still-not-quite scandalous — testimony came from Hicks, who described how he virtually begged for help as Stevens and his colleagues were being killed that night of Sept. 11, 2012. The help never came. The administration’s response has been that Hicks, a diplomat, is no expert in military capabilities, and his allegations have already been directly rebutted by both Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and former Defense Sec. Leon Panetta. Dempsey testified in February that it would have taken “up to 20 hours or so” to get F-16s to the site, and he called them “the wrong tool for the job.”

And what about ground forces?

Hicks had already told Republican investigators about the seven-person rescue team, including four U.S. Special Forces, that was delayed in heading from Tripoli (where Hicks was) to the consulate, after it was under attack. “How did the personnel react,” asked Chaffetz, “at being told to stand down?” Hicks remembered them being furious. “I will quote Lt. Col. Gibson,” said Hicks, referring to the commander at the Special Operations Command Africa who’d expected to join the mission. “He said, ‘This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than someone in the military.’ ” …

On May 1, 2013, the Pentagon sent a timeline of its actions to the House Armed Services Committee. And according to that, Panetta had OK’d the movement of FAST platoons and a special operations force before 3 a.m. local time, but no aid arrived before the mortar attack that killed Woods and Doherty. According to Hicks, the team wanted to get to Benghazi as quickly as possible. According to Panetta, if it had, it wouldn’t have helped.

The hearing’s key moment for Ed Krayewski:

[Hicks] testified that the ambassador made no mention of a demonstration at the mission in Benghazi, only an attack, and that “[t]he YouTube video was a non-event in Libya,” despite the Obama Administration’s attempts to pin the violence in Libya to protests over a trailer for an anti-Muslim film that had been on YouTube for months. It was all about the video Obama apologists cried in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack (and the run-up to November’s presidential election). That position does not appear to be connected to reality at all.

Kevin Drum sighs:

Rice’s interviews were litigated to death long ago. If you actually review the evidence, it turns out that her language was careful; it was based on CIA talking points; there was (and still is) evidence that the “Innocence of Muslims” video played a role in the attacks; and al-Magariaf was almost certainly wrong about whether the attacks were a long-planned operation. Details here.

But Stephen Hayes points out that “the Weekly Standard reported this week that early versions of those C.I.A. talking points prominently noted that extremists with ties to Al Qaeda were involved in the attacks and that Ansar al-Shariah had claimed responsibility on social media.” Joe Klein’s view:

It does seem that the Administration’s talking points were massaged a bit after the President’s candor [that the attack was an “act of terror”]. This may have been attributable to the presidential campaign and the Administration’s desire to low-ball the Al Qaeda threat. If so, this was a venial, not a mortal, sin. It affected not one life. More likely, though, the wording was scrubbed as a result of the nature of the investigation going on at the time–it may have been deemed premature to announce that it was a pre-meditated act of terror. Perhaps the local militia lucked into a situation where they showed up at the consulate and found very little security protection. Hard to say. There were protests all over the middle east that night, ginned up by jihadis using the excuse of a near-unseen anti-Muslim You Tube video.

But let’s say the street gang had been casing the joint in advance. Who’s to blame for the lax security? This is the real substance of the case. Could it have been the Secretary of State? Undoubtedly, no. This sort of question is well below her pay grade. Could it have been the person in charge of embassy security issues? More likely, and that person resigned after the subsequent investigations…and even that might have been unfair for two reasons. Security was up to the Ambassador and Chris Stevens was well known for erring on the side of greater public access to U.S. facilities. Or, more plausibly, reason number two…

Could it have been the Republicans who consistently voted against funds for increased embassy security? Hmmm…that makes their current carping seem awfully political, doesn’t it?

Hirsh’s bottom line:

There was tragic incompetence, plainly, in the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks, and even possibly some political calculation. It is a record that may well come to haunt Hillary Clinton, the first Secretary of State to lose an ambassador in the field in more than three decades, if she runs for president in 2016. But the obvious Republican effort to turn this inquiry into the Democratic (Obama) version of the Iraq intelligence scandal that has tarred the GOP since the George W. Bush years — led by that least-credible of champions, the almost-always-wrong Darrell Issa — is just not going to amount to much.

Which is the only reason we haven’t covered this much. Because what is worth covering has largely been covered; because some in government have already lost their jobs for the incompetence; because we have had nine separate Congressional investigations, while attacks on embassies and consulates in the past have been far less likely to be controversial. In other words: this is now a function entirely of factionalism. It’s a test of how far one cable news channel can go in creating something big out of something tragic, regrettable, well worth looking into, but in the end scarcely scandalous.

Commuter Marriages

Meher Ahmad highlights a growing trend:

Married couples who live apart for reasons other than legal separation [has] nearly doubled since 1990, when roughly 1.7 million American couples did it.

How much of that is for financial reasons, however, isn’t clear. Whereas couples like [Allen] Shainman and [Collette] Stallone live in the same city but in two different apartments, Candice and David Knox live and work in different states. “People think that we’re weird,” said David Knox. “When you’re married, you’re supposed to live together. It just freaks them out.”

But the perks may outweigh the “weirdness.” Considering you wouldn’t get in fights with your significant other about petty things like dishes or walking the dog, living by yourself also means that you can effectively “do you” but file for joint taxes. Professor Aaron Ben-Zeev of the University of Haifa argues that couples who live apart, while lacking daily intimacy and interaction, gain in other aspects of their relationship:

Distance may focus the partners’ attention on the profound aspects of their relationships and hep them disregard the superficial ones. And if the profound aspects are perceived to be positive, then the whole relationship is seen this way. Like other incomplete romantic experiences, commuter marriages are also typically romantically intense.

Monsters In Motion

Brendon Connely eulogizes Ray Harryhausen, the legendary guru of stop-motion animation:

I visited the set of Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie a couple of years back, where more than 20 little stages were in use at once, its scenes being animated and filmed in parallel. I saw characters frozen in motion as they made their way about the scaled-down suburbs slower than the eye could see. Only the camera shutter and the animator’s imaginations could move with the right patience to perceive the motion and not just the stop.

Ray Harryhausen was a master of stop-motion because of his command of this time-bending imagination. And Harryhausen was an actor, performing in super slow motion, one frame at a time and through tiny proxy bodies, often several of them, simultaneously as they interact with one another. The lives of the characters start in the animator and dribble out, drip by drip, through his or her fingertips. A stop-motion animator in the Sistine Chapel might look up, see God giving life to Adam in a single, all-at-once bolt, and wonder why they don’t get it so easy.

A compilation of Harryhausen’s work is seen above.

The Climate Court

With Congress gridlocked, Simon Lazarus and Doug Kendall look to the next battlefield for environmentalists:

On any given day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has the power to throw the environmental movement into complete disarray. Tucked into a nondescript neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the court isn’t well known to the public, but it’s often called the second most important court in the United States. It has particular significance to the environmental movement because of its exclusive jurisdiction over regulations involving vital environmental laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. …

Indeed, in the first two weeks of this month alone, the court is hearing cases involving emissions standards on sewage sludge incinerators, challenges to EPA rules requiring states to address greenhouse emissions in their permitting requirements, emissions standards for hazardous pollutants resulting from lead processing, and even a pair of cases regarding the importation of polar bear hunting trophies.

Lazarus and Kendall implore the environmental movement to “involve itself more in the conversation about nominations.”

A Plant That Forgets

Nautilus peers into the Venus flytrap:

Each stimulation [of the plant’s “trigger” hairs] generates an electrical charge, but it generally takes two charges to spark the electrochemical signal that triggers the closure, so the plant must “remember” the first charge as it waits for the second. It has only enough energy to remember for about 30 seconds, so its survival depends on short-term memory and the ability to forget. Similarly, in a human brain, a neuron builds up an electrical charge when stimulated by other nerves, approaching a threshold above which it will fire an electrical signal—the basis of everything from recognizing a plant, like a Venus flytrap, to contemplating the meaning of life.

“Sensory Islands”

For a select few, the molecule androstenone, which can show up in pork, smells like urine. Veronique Greenwood ponders this curiosity:

Unlike color blindness—which, for instance, can get you disqualified from being a fighter pilot—this kind of sensory variation does not tend to get to put on the spot in our culture. But to read these studies is to be reminded that individual human experience is ultimately private. We are all feeling the world through a wall peppered with tiny holes, whose shape and size are defined by complicated interactions of genetics and experience. We’re sensory islands, each unique, and though we may forget it most of the time, it’s with a sense of wonder that we rediscover it in something as mundane as wondering if pork chops have a faint odor of pee about them.

Related Dish on the smell of asparagus-tainted pee here.

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew processed Stephen Hawking’s announced boycott of Israel, speculated about the reasons for its strike in Syria last week, and Butters called for a bigger footprint in the Mideast. He unpacked what we know about the Internet’s role in the Tsnarnaevs’ radicalization, shook his head at Cheney’s latest demagoguery over Benghazi, rationalized the latest Kinsley photobomb, and acknowledged the latest victory for marriage equality in Delaware.

In political coverage, we collected more shocking footage and photography of the plight of workers in Banglaldesh, Mike Crowley shot straight about the threat of al-Qaeda getting chemical weapons in Syria, and Max Fisher tracked South Korea’s 180 on relations with the US. We found that Independents are faulting the GOP for gridlock, Krugman beard-shamed his fellow economists, and Sean Trende emailed in after reader pushback on his take on the Republican South.

We crossed our fingers over some encouraging news about the slowdown in health care spending, Yglesias rolled his eyes at the Heritage’s new report on the costs of immigration reform and we corrected a faulty study on our trusty bus companies. Later we reviewed disturbing evidence of the military’s problem with sexual assault, and later heard from readers with experience. Readers asked Josh Fox about the property rights involved in the fracking game and ruminated on the news of Chris Christie’s operation while Washington’s flower thief pissed off one committed gardener.

In assorted coverage , Brett McKay leafed through the first guy’s mag, Theodore Dalrymple took a life lesson from Pooh’s friend Owl and said a word for our meme-ified heroes. S Abbas Raza pondered how consuming food is time consuming, Darwin Hamblin dug up Cold War-era concerns about man-made global warming, Gary Kelly presented Mary Wollstonecraft as a trailblazer for women in modernity. We provided a meme-based map of the US, readers kept up the debate over teaching cursive and reacted to unorthodox addiction treatment. Li Bingbing starred in the Face of the Day, we watched a sketchy kind of Street Fighter in the MHB and spent the afternoon in Juneau, Alaska for the VFYW.

–B.J.