Month: October 2013

Class:

At the grassroots, the key divide in today’s Republican Party isn’t between downscale Tea Partiers and affluent pro-business moderates. It’s between relatively affluent Tea Partiers, who want government radically downsized, and working-class conservatives who want government to help them get ahead, the people Ross Douhat and Reihan Salam called “Sam’s Club” Republicans.

In the Obama era, these downscale whites have streamed into the GOP. In 2004, notes Pew, whites with a high school education or less leaned Republican by six points. By 2012, they leaned Republican by 16 points. In 2004, Democrats enjoyed a nine point advantage among whites who earned less than $30,000. By 2012, that margin was down to two points. You can see this shift in West Virginia, a low-education, low-income, historically Democratic state where Barack Obama in 2012 lost every single county.

Pew calls these white working class migrants into the GOP “disaffecteds.” Like Tea Partiers, they’re religious, oppose gun control, want tougher enforcement of America’s borders and take a dim view of the federal government. But unlike Tea Partiers, they’re not angry at the federal government because they see it as a leviathan crushing their economic freedom. They’re angry because it’s not an effective ally in their economic struggles. Ninety-six percent of “staunch conservatives” favor a smaller government that provides fewer services over a larger one that provides more services. But among “disaffecteds,” there’s an almost even split. Among “staunch conservatives,” the deficit represents the biggest economic worry, by far. Among “disaffecteds,” it’s rising prices and the lack of jobs.

(Photo: Coal miners look on as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign rally at American Energy Corportation on August 14, 2012 in Beallsville, Ohio, near the border of West Virginia. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Totten – seconded by Roger Cohen – warns that “American-Saudi alliance is in danger of collapsing”:

Foreign Policy 101 dictates that you reward your friends and punish your enemies. Attempts to get cute and reverse the traditional formula always lead to disaster. Yet Barack Obama thinks if he stiffs his friends, his enemies will become a little less hostile. That’s not how it works, but the Saudis have figured out what Obama is doing and are acting accordingly. …

The Saudi regime is in a dimension beyond distasteful. It’s an absolute monarchy wedded to absolute theocracy. It’s worse than merely medieval. Human rights don’t exist. The regime—and, frankly, the culture—offends every moral and political sensibility I have in my being. I’d love to live in a world where junking our “friendship” with Riyadh would be the right call.

But the United States and Saudi Arabia are—or at least were until recently—on the same page geopolitically. For decades we have provided the Saudis with security in exchange for oil and stability, and we’ve backed them and the rest of the Gulf Arabs against our mutual enemies, Iran’s Islamic Republic regime and its allies.

The alliance isn’t deep. It’s transactional.

But the possible deal with Iran would upset all that – for good reasons, from the American point of view, it seems t0 me. If the US were to develop a transactional relationship with Iran on the lines of the Saudi relationship, it would transform the regional dynamics that the Saudis have used to promote their Sunni brand of Islamism. It would give the US a more balanced relationship with both Sunni and Shiite strands of Islamism, and enlarge our spectrum of policy choices. It could also give us more leverage over Israel’s destabilizing right-wing, and potentially unleash democracy over the long run, as Iranians, many of whom despise their regime, slowly develop more of a prosperous middle class, empowered by new media and eager to join the world of the West. The Saudi temper tantrum seems to me a sign of a monarchy that views the Shi’a as inferior, and sees Persians a threat to Arabs. I can see why they see things that way. But why should we?

Kaplan, unlike Totten, doubts that the Saudis are going to walk:

First, they have nowhere else to go.

The Saudi army and air force are structured along the lines of the American military, which provides them with tremendous amounts of weaponry, support, and training. The French and Russians could offer some assistance, but not nearly as much—and their political interests and alliances wouldn’t align so neatly with the Saudis’ either.

In fact, Bandar’s stratagem may reflect a growing awareness of Saudi weakness.Figures released earlier this month reveal that the United States has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest supplier of petroleum. To put it another way: The Saudis need our arms more than we need their oil.

Walt’s perspective on America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel:

[T]he United States is not about to abandon its current allies or entirely reverse its long-standing regional commitments, and widening our circle of contacts won’t immediately force others to leap to do our bidding. Nor do I think it should. But a bit more distance from Tel Aviv and Riyadh, and an open channel of communication between Washington and Tehran would maximize U.S. influence and leverage over time. It’s also a useful hedge against unpredictable events: when you become too strongly committed to any particular ally (as the U.S. was once committed to the Shah of Iran), you suffer more damage if anything happens to them.

Because the United States is not a Middle Eastern power — a geographic reality we sometimes forget — and because its primary goal is the preservation of a regional balance of power, it has the luxury of playing “hard to get.” That’s why it’s not such a bad thing if our present regional allies are a bit miffed at U.S. these days. Remember: they are weaker than the United States is and they face more urgent threats than we do. And if they want to keep getting U.S. protection and support and they are concerned that our attention might be waning a wee bit, they might start doing more to keep U.S. happy.

J.J. Gould contends that dictionaries aren’t enough:

Dude may be the most Mandarin Chinese word in American English. In Mandarin, depending on how I intone the single syllable ma, I could be saying “mother” (mā), or I could be saying something as radically distinct as “horse” (mă). Dude has a comparable quality. Just think of the last time you did something awesome in the presence of a friend who affirmed your awesomeness with the exclamation Duuude! Or the last time you said something objectionable to someone who began setting you straight with a firm and sober Dude. There may not be any obvious difference in denotation between these cases, but the difference in connotation is, you’ll appreciate from experience, pretty major.

Update from a reader:

This may be the first instance in the history of the Internet that someone has email-forwarded the work of Rob Schneider, but he unpacked the varied meanings of dude back in the late-’80s:

And there’s this classic beer commercial:

As of October 28, the newly discovered asteroid 2013 TV135 – which now occupies the top slot on NASA’s near-earth object watch list – has a 1-in-28,000 chance of striking Earth. While Eric Holthaus assures us that “we are almost assuredly safe from this errant geological space wanderer,” he nevertheless wonders what a direct hit would look like:

According to the Earth Impacts Effects Program, a joint project of Imperial College London and Purdue University, 2013 TV135 would carry the energy of about 3,300 megatons of TNT if it were to strike. That’s roughly equivalent to 60 percent of the world’s remaining nuclear weapons detonated at the same time, in the same place. The result would surely be impressive:

The crater would be about twice the width of Manhattan, and about as deep as the newly constructed Freedom Tower in New York is tall. More than one hundred million cubic meters of rock would be instantly vaporized on impact. The shaking produced would be equivalent of a 7.0 earthquake. If you were standing about 60 miles (100 km) from the impact site, within two minutes you’d be pelted with debris up to about two inches in size. Within five minutes, the air blast generated by the heat of the impact would create hurricane force winds, shattering your windows. If you were standing within about 20 miles away (30 km) – for reference, New York City is roughly 20 miles wide – the effects would be much more serious. The average fragment size headed your way would be about the size of a dishwasher, and within 90 seconds wind speeds would top 500 miles per hour.

The good news:

Thankfully, in the very unlikely case that NASA can’t rule out this kind of a strike in 2032, we’ll have nearly two decades to deflect 2013 TV135 onto a safer course. Scientists have been investigating ramming dangerous objects with spacecraft, among other tactics. If it comes to that, let’s just hope world governments can agree more quickly about exactly what to do than they have on the much more real threat of climate change.

William Pesek reports on this weekend’s 7.3-magnitude earthquake:

As Tokyo shook early Saturday morning and loud shrieks from mobile-phone earthquake-warning alarms filled bedrooms around the city, one word immediately sprung to mind: Fukushima. Those who don’t reside 135 miles away from the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl won’t understand this reaction. But the first thing most of Tokyo’s 13 million residents do once things stop wobbling is check if all’s well at the Fukushima Daiichi plant still leaking radiation into the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean. Worse, a fresh spate of accidents there make some wonder if the Marx Brothers are in charge. …

It’s been almost three months since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged to step in to help the hapless Tokyo Electric Power Co. end the crisis. It’s been two months since his office went even further, saying it was laying out “emergency measures” to take control of the disaster recovery. It’s been seven weeks since Abe told the International Olympic Committee not to worry about that little nuclear situation up north to secure the 2020 Games. And, well, we’re still waiting for and worrying that the next quake will cause a fresh meltdown.

Update from a reader:

I just wanted to point you to this counterpoint to all the media frenzy over Fukushima.

It is worth repeating the author: while 18,500 people died from the earthquake and tsunami, not a single person has died from radiation poisoning. Of the 110,000 cleanup workers, less than 0.1% have developed cancer. Especially interesting to me (as an engineer) is the NYT use of “quadrillions of becquerels” because it sounds like an enormous quantity of radiation. If you do the conversion (I’ll spare you) this converts to a brick of radioactive material that would fit inside a 1 gallon paint can.

The most dangerous radioactive substance released from Fukushima was Iodine-115, which had a half-life of 8 days … which means it has long since become a non-issue. Nuclear reactors continue to be incredibly safe, and the media does us a disservice by over-stating the dangers; nuclear power plants should be part of a clean energy portfolio.

Another reader:

As your reader who wrote in, I’m also an engineer. I also have a friend who is getting his PhD in nuclear engineering at Purdue and have regularly picked his brain on this topic. I’ve also worked with radioactive materials in labs during the course of my undergraduate work and professional life.

All this adds up to me being continually irritated with the media when they talk about radiation. My biggest contention is that it’s phrased as general radiation and the type is not included. The type of radiation is quite important. From Health Canada: “The becquerel (Bq) is named after the French physicist A.H. Becquerel. This unit measures radioactivity in a substance. It doesn’t consider the type of radiation emitted or what its effects may be. One becquerel equals one nuclear disintegration per second. This is a very small unit, so multiples are often used.”

Telling me something has x number of becquerels is meaningless unless I know what type of radiation it is. A more useful unit is a sievert (Sv), which incorporates the effect of ionizing radiation. Further, within ionizing radiation, there are three main types of emitters: alpha, beta, and gamma.

Alpha particles cannot penetrate dead skin or clothes, so they’re most dangerous to the eyes and ingestion/inhalation. Plutonium-235 and Uranium-238 are alpha emitters. Beta particles are more dangerous and are more of a chronic problem than acute and are worst when ingested/inhaled. Carbon-14 and Iodine-131 are beta emitters. Gamma rays are generally the worst of the bunch as they can travel much further than alphas or betas. Cobalt-60 and Cesium-137 are gamma emitters.

Then we also must consider the half-life of the particle, as noted by your previous reader. A compound that has high potency but breaks down quickly is not as dangerous as a compound with half the strength but lingers for years to centuries.

So, you have to put it all together to know whether it’s bad for you. I guess that’s too difficult for the media to understand and it’s much simpler to quote a huge number that seems made up. As your previous reader said, nuclear energy is extremely safe and should be part of the green movement to cleaner energy. Also, coal plants can emit more C-14 than nuclear plants, so if you’re near a coal plant you’re getting hit with more beta particles more than someone who works in a nuclear plant.