Month: August 2013

The Worst Chemical Weapon Attack In Decades?

by Chas Danner

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/370216269804367872

https://twitter.com/lizobagy/status/370209257569804288

Syrian rebel groups claim that hundreds have been killed in what may have been a chemical weapon attack by Assad on the suburbs east of Damascus. The attack may be the beginning of a larger offensive by regime forces. David Kenner gives his summary:

The information coming out of the Ghouta region, where the rebels enjoy significant support, is still unconfirmed by independent observers. But videos allegedly taken Wednesday in the area showed Syrians lying on the floor gasping for breath, medics struggling to save infants, and rows of bodies of those who had reportedly died in the attack (warning: the footage above is graphic). Syrian state media denied that chemical weapons had been used, attributing such stories to media channels that “are involved in the shedding of the Syrians’ blood and supporting terrorism.”

The opposition Local Coordination Committee, however, reported that at least 755 people had been killed in the attack. If that figure is true, what is happening on the outskirts of Damascus today is the worst chemical weapons attack since then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein unleashed poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing an estimated 5,000 people.

One report even says the death total could be over 1,300. Chemical weapon expert Ralph Trapp compares this attack to previous ones:

It is possible a gas was involved, but the images I’ve seen were not clear enough to see other symptoms beyond difficulty in breathing and suffocation. It certainly looks like some sort of poisoning. … [But] this is one of the first videos I’ve seen from Syria where the numbers start to make sense. If you have a gas attack you would expect large numbers of people, children and adults, to be affected, particularly if it’s in a built up area.

Jean Pascal Zanders’ analysis:

I am not sure whether the claims of nerve agent use accompanying the footage and images are correct. The people are not convulsing (except for one man shaking his legs while shouting out, but the remainder of his body does not suffer from involuntary contractions) and I have not seen anybody applying nerve agent antidotes. Nor do medical staff and other people appear to suffer from secondary exposure while carrying or treating victims.

It is clear that something terrible has happened. The scenes could not have been stage managed.

Jeffrey Goldberg weighs in:

Two questions are raised by reports of this attack. The first, of course, is whether or not it happened the way Syrian rebels said it happened. That is why immediately dispatching the UN team, already in-country, to the affected areas is so vital. If this process worked the way it should, they would be there already. If the Syrian regime denies the UN inspectors permission to visit these areas, well, that is kind of an answer in itself.

The second question is, why would the Assad regime launch its biggest chemical attack on rebels and civilians precisely at the moment when a UN inspection team was parked in Damascus? The answer to that question is easy: Because Assad believes that no one – not the UN, not President Obama, not other Western powers, not the Arab League – will do a damn thing to stop him.

There is a good chance he is correct.

Guardian live-blog here. A Reddit page is collecting information and videos here.

The Resistance To Republican Rebranding

by Patrick Appel

Chait wonders whether House Republicans will prevent the GOP from nominating a candidate who can rebrand the party:

Republicans can escape the damage inflicted by its Congressional wing by nominating a candidate who runs against it in 2016. That’s what the party did in 2000: George W. Bush made a few comments distancing himself from Congress, and that was enough to clear him of all the branding damage the Republicans Revolutionaries had done for a half dozen years and position himself as a moderate. It didn’t stop Bush from governing hand-in-glove with the selfsame Republican Congress once in office.

So the danger for Republicans isn’t that they’ll lose the House. It isn’t even that they’ll irrevocably poison their own brand. It’s that they’ll create an intra-party orthodoxy so strong it will prevent them from nominating a candidate who can distance himself from Steve King’s racial ideology and Paul Ryan’s economic ideology. In the meantime, they can inflict an awful lot of damage to the country at very little cost to themselves.

Humphreys thinks that the GOP has stopped listening:

As Mark Kleiman has noted, the American left lost on the crime issue starting in the 1960s and 1970s because it stopped listening to the public (not unlike how the left later lost the public education issue).

The extraordinary surge of crime that began in the 1960s caused enormous suffering. And when Americans are suffering, they get very angry when politicians tell them their suffering is no big deal (“Many neighborhoods are as safe as ever!”), or is really due to something else (“We don’t have a crime problem, we have a poverty problem!”), or that the public should apologize for being upset (“Complaining about crime is just coded racism”). Americans who feel unheard often express their anger by voting for some politician — any politician — who seems to be listening. And when it came to crime, for many years most of those politicians were conservative.

Liberals were in shock on crime policy for a long time afterwards. They had been talking amongst themselves when they should have been listening to people outside the bubble. California Republicans made the same mistake when they decided to go anti-immigrant in the 1980s. The Tea Party is committing the same blunder right now as they plan out where they will store all the roses the public will supposedly buy them if the federal government is shut down on October 1. Failure to listen isn’t a left or right thing. Rather, it’s a thoroughly human weakness about which political parties should be constantly vigilant.

Ask Kate Bolick Anything: The Porn Effect

by Chas Danner

In today’s video, Kate shares her perspective on how the widespread availability and consumption of pornography has affected gender relations:

Kate is currently working on her first book, Among the Suitors: On Being a Woman, Alone, to be published next year by Crown/Random House. She is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and writes regularly for Elle, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate. Her 2011 Atlantic cover story, “All the Single Ladies”, addressed why more and more women are choosing, as she has, not to get married. The Dish debated the piece here and here. Kate’s previous videos are here and readers have been debating the fate of sick singles here and here. Our full AA archive is here.

Not From The Onion

by Chris Bodenner

Wow:

The latest survey from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, provided exclusively to TPM, showed an eye-popping divide among Republicans in the Bayou State when it comes to accountability for the government’s post-Katrina blunders. Twenty-eight percent said they think former President George W. Bush, who was in office at the time, was more responsible for the poor federal response while 29 percent said Obama, who was still a freshman U.S. Senator when the storm battered the Gulf Coast in 2005, was more responsible. Nearly half of Louisiana Republicans — 44 percent — said they aren’t sure who to blame.

Update from a reader:

This is clearly an opinion poll designed by liberals to generate headlines. If the poll question was written in good faith, there would have been more than two options and those options would have only included people who were directly involved with the response to Katrina, including the governor and the mayor. As stated, the question amounts to “Whose fault is it that New Orleans was devastated: A guy you like or a guy you don’t like?” I would assume that most of the people who answered “Obama” either meant “Democrats in general” or “screw you for asking such a slanted question.”

It still shows how partisan hatred trumps everything else.

Antiheroes Everywhere, Ctd

by Brendan James

A reader challenges this post:

Walter White may be cut-throat, he may be a murdering, lying, cheating asshole, but he is the show, and we very much care what happens to him. Personally, I’d love to see him beat cancer, ditch that wife of his and unearth the millions in the desert to retire peacefully in Belize, or Russia, leaving Hank to fume and foment. Walter set out on a course that was rooted in good intentions. He wanted to care for his family. The road to hell, as they say… so in the process he lost his soul.

Take it all the way, Walt. You are the devil now. Live like it. We’ll have sympathy for the devil.

Another reader agrees that the antihero market is overcrowded but that the good finds are worth it:

Your post reminded me of how good and sick I got of movies featuring anti-heroes when I was young. Butch Cassidy, Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider – you could go on and on. But then came the ultimate anti-hero film: The Godfather.

That one I loved! I can still remember how delightfully shocked I was to find myself admiring Don Corleone, and, even more astonishing, rooting for Michael to follow in his father’s footsteps, instead of becoming the “good” Corleone that his father wanted him to be. The last scene, where we see the various capi kissing Michael’s hand through the horrified eyes of Michael’s wife, and were pleased for Michael, was glorious. I have never even bothered to watch The Sopranos – from what I hear, it is a latter-day attempt to equal the Godfather, and that is impossible.

Todd VanDerWerff put it well when he wrote “where The Godfather succeeds in (relative) succinctness, The Sopranos succeeds in accumulation.” There’s an argument that the serialized format of TV is better geared toward winning our sympathy for the bad guys. I wonder if the first reader above would be so supportive of Walter White if we only got to know him over two hours. (Incidentally, Sopranos showrunner David Chase actually wanted his pilot to be spun into film, now an odd and unappealing thought.)

What Happens If We Cut Off Egypt?

by Patrick Appel

Noah Millman is unsure:

America already has had the experience multiple times of cutting off clients who have crossed a red line of one sort or another. For example, we abandoned the Shah when he had plainly lost the support of his people. This did not win us any goodwill once the Iranian revolution brought to power a profoundly anti-American regime – because the Iranians had not forgotten America’s longstanding support of the Shah, and because the Ayatollahs had their own reasons for setting themselves up in opposition to America.

For another example, in response to Pakistan’s escalating program of nuclear weapons acquisition – and, not incidentally, in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union – beginning in 1990 the United States increasingly distanced itself from Pakistan. Over the course of the next decade, Pakistan still developed a nuclear arsenal, a generation of Pakistani officers grew up without relationships with the United States, and Pakistan became deeply involved in the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. We all know what happened next.

His larger point:

On a relative basis, Egypt is much less-influential than it was fifty years ago. On an absolute basis, though, it’s a much, much bigger country. If we decide that Egypt doesn’t much matter to us, I think we can safely say that we’ve decided that the Middle East doesn’t much matter to us.

Which it well might not. But I am not shocked that the American government is reluctant to decide on the fly and under the pressure of rapidly-changing circumstances in one country to significantly reorder its priorities in this part of the world.

Does Birth Order Matter? Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

freya-readingto-henry

A reader responds to a recent post:

I can’t cite a source, but during my pediatric residency, I was taught that younger siblings learn a lot from their older sibs.  For example, a 12-month-old girl watches her 3-year-old brother walking and figures out how to walk. Oldest children don’t have anyone to pattern that behavior (adults don’t count), so they have to figure everything out on their own.  This makes for enhanced brain development and thus higher intelligence.

Another reader:

I recently read in Jena Pincott’s Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies? about a nature, rather than nurture, explanation for why first-borns tend to be more intelligent. Apparently, women store omega 3 fats in their hips and ass throughout their lives. When their first baby is gestating, the baby absorbs a lot of these stored fats to help make their brains plump and active. The first baby gets the most, as the mother usually doesn’t have enough time to accumulate that much more in omega-3s between children. (This also may be one explanation for why “mom butts” tend to be a little flatter).

I relay all this as a second-born sibling (whose older brother is certainly smarter in many ways) and a pregnant woman (who is eating her weight in omega-3-rich fish during pregnancy).

(Photo of my niece and nephew by Betsy Bodenner)

Architecture At Play

by Jessie Roberts

dish_toy

Edwin Heathcote asks renowned architect Lord Foster how he’s been influenced by childhood construction sets like Meccano:

“We’ve found,” says Foster, “that parallel to the rapid rise of computing power is an exponential growth in model-making. Even here in Silicon Valley, the home of the digital, our presentations are analogue. The people we deal with out here, mostly in their twenties, the most computer numerate in the world, still often only understand the building as a model. The change is not as dramatic as you’d think.”

As Foster suggests, the need to create models to explain imagined worlds is a residual survival of the childhood model-making urge. Computer games from SimCity to Medieval Mayor allow you to build entire cities in seconds, to destroy them and build again with no physical effort; they remove the sense of labour from the process. On screen, you become a kind of god, an omnipotent being in control of the worlds you construct. It encourages a distance which I think is a dangerous thing for designers.

With construction toys, you are grounded on the floor, mired in the shortage of pieces, the necessity to improvise, up against the frustrations of gravity, imperfect joints and commercial compromise. The perfect start for an architect.

Relatedly, Kyle Vanhemert reports on a Lego set designed especially for fledgling architects. More here.

(Photo by Flickr user lonoak)

Your Characters Shouldn’t Be Lonely

by Matt Sitman

That’s Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk’s writing advice. He advocates avoiding “thought” verbs in your prose, such as “Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use”:

One of the most-common mistakes that beginning writers make is leaving their characters alone. Writing, you may be alone. Reading, your audience may be alone. But your character should spend very, very little time alone. Because a solitary character starts thinking or worrying or wondering.

For example: Waiting for the bus, Mark started to worry about how long the trip would take..”

A better break-down might be: “The schedule said the bus would come by at noon, but Mark’s watch said it was already 11:57. You could see all the way down the road, as far as the Mall, and not see a bus. No doubt, the driver was parked at the turn-around, the far end of the line, taking a nap. The driver was kicked back, asleep, and Mark was going to be late. Or worse, the driver was drinking, and he’d pull up drunk and charge Mark seventy-five cents for death in a fiery traffic accident…”

A character alone must lapse into fantasy or memory, but even then you can’t use “thought” verbs or any of their abstract relatives.

Oh, and you can just forget about using the verbs forget and remember.

Happy Trees

By Tracy R. Walsh

Old oak tree

Visiting Charleston’s 500-year-old Angel Oak, Alicia Puglionesi mulls over the irony of eco-tourism–namely, “we don’t like to see nature having a rough time”:

It’s no fun to see adorable deer starving to death, or baby birds falling out of trees, or a pristine forest consumed by flames. The temptation to meddle is strong when we believe our intentions are pure. [City official Daniel] Burbage told a story about the Angel Oak. About 10 years ago, the park managers called him because of a large cavity on the side of the tree. They were worried that the limb below the cavity was falling. … The cavity looked bad; it made people think about rot and weakness. Burbage knew that everything was fine. But people don’t like to see such blemishes on symbolic old things, so Burbage put a screen over the cavity and covered it with putty and painted it to look like the tree’s bark. He never received another call about the falling limb. Like all of his interventions, the screen would have little impact on the centuries-long processes of growth and decay taking place slowly inside the tree.

(Photo of Angel Oak by Via Tsuji)