Month: March 2014

A Nation Of Home-Wreckers

dish_ise

Japan:

It turns out that half of all homes in Japan are demolished within 38 years — compared to 100 years in the U.S.  There is virtually no market for pre-owned homes in Japan, and 60 percent of all homes were built after 1980. In [professor Jiro] Yoshida’s estimation, while land continues to hold value, physical homes become worthless within 30 years. Other studies have shown this to happen in as little as 15 years.

Does this make  sense? Not according to Alastair Townsend, a British-American architect living in Japan, who is perplexed — and awestruck — by the housing scenario there:

TOWNSEND: The houses that are built today exceed the quality of just about any other country in the world, at least for timber buildings. So there’s really no reason that they should drop in value and be demolished.

In a November blog post, Townshend shed light on the cultural logic:

Firstly, Japan fetishizes newness.

The frequent severity of earthquakes has taught its people not to take buildings for granted. And impermanence is an enshrined cultural and religious value (nowhere more so than at Ise’s Grand Shinto Shrine, which is rebuilt every 20 years). These oft-repeated truisms nonetheless fail to offer a sufficient economic rationale for Japan’s ingrained real estate depreciation. Its disposable attitude to housing seems to fly in the face of Western financial sense.

In the country’s rush to industrialize and rebuild cities decimated after WWII, housebuilders rapidly spawned many cheap, low quality wooden frame houses – shoddily built without insulation or proper seismic reinforcement. Older homes from this period are assumed to be substandard, or even toxic, and investing in their maintenance or improvement is considered futile. So, rather than maintain or upgrade them, most are simply torn down.

Listen to a podcast on the topic here.

(Photo of building at the Ise Shrine in Naikū by Flickr user pelican)

Liking “Like”

Sociolinguist Alexandra D’Arcy explains how using “like” as a form of quotation opens up new avenues for storytelling:

There used to be a time when my story might have been: ‘I saw her enter the room and I was terrified that she would recognize me and so I crouched down.’ Which is actually sort of boring. But now you can tell that as: ‘I saw her, and I was like, oh my god! I was like, what if she sees me? I was like, oh my god, I’ve gotta hide. I was like, what am I supposed to say to her?’ And it can go on. I’ve seen it where you have eight quotes in a row of strictly first-person internal monologue where that monologue becomes action. That’s new.

Michael Bourne elaborates on the history of the linguistic usage (followed by a few reader updates):

D’Arcy traces the expanded use of “like” to speakers born in the 1960s, but says the language feature came into its own with speakers born in the 1970s, “so that by the time you get to speakers born in the 1980s, you get these entire sequences of quotations that recreate an internal thought process.” This accords with the pop cultural history of the usage, which first became famous when Moon Unit Zappa (born 1967) accompanied her father Frank Zappa’s 1982 hit song “Valley Girl,” with an improvised monologue taken from slang she’d overheard at parties and at the Sherman Oaks Galleria in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. The same year, Sean Penn starred in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, partly filmed at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and the rest is, like, history.

A reader chimes in:

Ummm, seems to me that the addition of so many likes to story telling is also “sort of boring”. Why not:

She walked into the room and I thought, ‘Oh, my god! What if she sees me? What am I supposed to say to her? Oh, my God!  I’ve got to hide!’  So, I dumped into a crouch.

I, like, sorta like that better.

Another:

Twenty or so years ago I was standing in a hallway at the university where I taught when two female students walked by.  One was earnestly recounting a story to her friend. The part of her story that I overheard, in full:

“I was like ‘Yeah’, and he was like ‘No.’ And I was like ‘Yeah’, and he was like ‘No’. And I was like ‘Ye-ah’, and he was like …”

When A Census Could Kill

Burma is set to hold one next month, but observers are worried it will inflame ethnic tensions:

The census, supported by several UN agencies, is deemed important because it has been more than 30 years since a nationwide census was conducted. Through the census, Myanmar’s demographic profile can be objectively determined, which would prove useful for policymakers and potential investors in planning for Myanmar’s development needs.

But the census question on ethnic or tribal identification threatens to ignite more conflicts in the country. The census form requires citizens to choose from the 135 ethnic groups identified by the government. This listing, according to some scholars, is a colonial legacy that should have been revamped a long time ago. Several ethnic groups have complained about being lumped with other minorities while others claimed they were dropped from the listing.

Thin Lei Win has more:

[T]he last census in 1983 reported the national population to be 89.4 percent Buddhist, 4.9 percent Christian, and 4.4 percent Muslim. Although it is widely believed Muslims were undercounted for political reasons, any divergence from the 1983 figures could inflame communal tensions, especially against the Rohingya. Since June 2012, religious conflict across Myanmar has killed at least 240 people and displaced more than 140,000 – most of them Rohingya whom Myanmar does not recognize as citizens.

“Many Rohingya fear the census will become a tool to further deny their access to citizenship rights and to further alienate them from the country’s diverse population. We share those concerns,” said [Matthew] Smith of Fortify Rights, which on Tuesday released a 79-page report on government abuses against the Rohingya using leaked government documents. “There’s a risk the census will contribute to statelessness rather than help end it, which is patently unacceptable.”

Previous Dish on strife in Burma here, here, and here. (Dish on “Burma” vs “Myanmar” here.)

How Should The West Respond?

Russian Anti-War Protesters Detained In Moscow

I’m still absorbing all the information I can, and hope to post something at length tomorrow. But this much seems clear to me: Putin has panicked. To initiate a full-scale war with Ukraine, after effectively losing it because of the over-reach and corruption of Yanukovych, opens up scenario after scenario that  no prudent Russian statesman would want to even consider, let alone embrace. That doesn’t mean he won’t continue to over-reach or that we should be irresolute in confronting this aggression; just that we should be clear that the consequences of further escalation will be deeply damaging for his regime – and certainly far graver for him than for the West.

Obama and Putin spoke on the phone last night. Here’s what Leon Aron wishes Obama had said:

Ideally, the conversation would have been one in which the American president was speaking not only for the U.S., but also for NATO and the EU. The president is likely to have pointed out that the risks would involve Russia’s membership in the G-8, the safety of financial and other assets of the Russian elite which are located outside of Russia, as well as the ability of the members of this elite and their families to visit, live or study in the U.S. and the EU. In addition, Moscow’s behavior could trigger new export controls, which given its dependence on Western technology, particularly in the oil and gas sector as well as in the food industry, could have a very negative impact on the Russian economy.​

Alongside these measures, the U.S. and its allies might also provide – publicly and in private – a few face-saving devices for Russia, such as guarantees that the Russian-speaking Ukrainians will be free from harassment or discrimination of any kind; an introduction of U.N.  peacemaking forces in Crimea to protect the political rights of all Crimeans, and the reaffirmation of the pre-existing “special status” of Crimea within Ukraine, as well as the continuation of the pre-existing Russian sovereignty of the leased naval base in Sevastopol.

It seems to me that the Western-based financial assets of the Russian oligarchy should be the first targets for potential retaliation. Timothy Snyder explains why:

Russian propaganda about depraved Europe conceals an intimate relationship. Tourism in the European Union is a safety valve for a large Russian middle class that takes its cues in fashion and pretty much everything else from European culture. Much of the Russian elite has sent its children to private schools in the European Union or Switzerland. Beyond that, since no Russian of any serious means trusts the Russian financial system, wealthy Russians park their wealth in European banks. In other words, the Russian social order depends upon the Europe that Russian propaganda mocks. And beneath hypocrisy, as usual, lies vulnerability.

Soft power can hurt. General restrictions on tourist visas, a few thousand travel bans, and a few dozen frozen accounts might make a real difference. If millions of urban Russians understood that invading Ukraine meant no summer vacation, they might have second thoughts.

Ben Judah disagrees, noting that Europeans have become more and more dependent on Russia’s money:

Moscow is not nervous. Russia’s elites have exposed themselves in a gigantic manner – everything they hold dear is now locked up in European properties and bank accounts. Theoretically, this makes them vulnerable. … But, time and time again, [Russia’s elites] have watched European governments balk at passing anything remotely similar to the U.S. Magnitsky Act, which bars a handful of criminal-officials from entering the United States.

All this has made Putin [very] confident that European elites are more concerned about making money than standing up to him. The evidence is there. After Russia’s strike force reached the outskirts of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, in 2008, there were statements and bluster, but not a squeak about Russia’s billions. After Russia’s opposition were thrown into show trials, there were concerned letters from the European Union, but again silence about Russia’s billions.

But messing with Ukraine is different. Europe will feel – does feel – far more threatened by an attack on Ukraine than on Georgia. And Putin has frittered away any benefit of the doubt he once might have had. We have many cards to play. Putin has one: military force. But if he uses it, he will be in a full-scale war within his own region of influence. Whatever else that is, it is not a demonstration of strength. It’s a sign of profound weakness.

(Photo: An elderly woman wearing a sign that reads “War against Ukraine is madness” is detained by riot police during an unsanctioned anti-war rally close to the Kremlin at Manezhnaya Square on March 2, 2014. Dozens of protesters were detained by police on Sunday during a rally against the military intervention in the Ukraine, after the parliament in Moscow gave President Vladimir Putin approval to use Russian military forces in Ukraine. By Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images.)

Ukraine On The Brink

https://twitter.com/shaunwalker7/statuses/440152242570924032

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/440200687784189952

https://twitter.com/PzFeed/statuses/440181042180534272

If Putin’s forces continue to occupy Crimea, Mary Mycio warns that the mini-state won’t be so easy for Russia to govern:

Most of the Crimea is basically a desert, with less annual rainfall than Los Angeles. It is impossible to sustain its 2 million people—including agriculture and the substantial tourist industry—without Ukrainian water. Current supplies aren’t even enough. In Sevastopol, home of the Black Sea Fleet, households get water only on certain days. In fact, on Feb. 19, when snipers were shooting protesters on the streets of Kiev, Sevastopol applied for $34 million in Western aid (note the irony) to improve its water and sewer systems.

The Crimea’s dependence on Ukraine for nearly all of it electricity makes it equally vulnerable to nonviolent retaliation. One suggestion making the rounds of the Ukrainian Internet is that the mainland, with warning, shut off the power for 15 minutes. It may not normalize the situation, but it could give Moscow pause. Of course, Russia could retaliate by cutting off Ukrainian gas supplies, but that would mean cutting off much of Europe as well. Besides, Ukrainians proved this winter that they aren’t afraid of the cold, and spring is coming.

And Russian occupiers would have to face down the dogged Tatars. Oleg Kashin describes how ordinary Russians view the Ukraine:

Russia and Ukraine split up 23 years ago. A whole generation has grown up in each country since then. … The Russian public views the Ukrainian state with a sense of irony and even contempt. This attitude is often unfair, but it [sees] Ukraine as a culturally heterogeneous patchwork. Travelling from a place like Lviv or Lutsk to a place like Kharkiv or Odessa, it is often hard to believe that these cities are part of the same country: Post-Soviet Ukraine is like Austria-Hungary—an empire made up of incongruous parts. In the mind of the Russian public, the justification for a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine settled into place many years ago: Russia has been unable to shake off the view that eastern Ukraine is Russian territory.

Matt Ford adds that other former Soviet states are now watching nervously:

Fifteen independent countries, including Russia, emerged from the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Six of them—Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—are in Europe, and all of them have a complicated relationship with modern Russia. Seven other countries once belonged to the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union’s military alliance in Eastern Europe. With the Cold War’s end, none of them had faced the threat of military intervention by the communist superpower’s successor state—until now.

Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss outline the potential impact for neighboring countries:

Any invasion—which is what it would be—of a vast country of 46 million in the heart of Europe, sharing borders with NATO allies Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, would pose a major security challenge for the United States and other key European powers.

Even without further Russian action, allies such as the Baltic countries will be seeking U.S. reassurance. Lithuania has already asked for Article IV consultations under the NATO Treaty in response to a clear threat to its security. These countries likely will also ask for hard reassurances—such as deployments of U.S. and other allied troops and equipment on their territory—as Turkey did in 2012 when Syria shot down a Turkish jet. They will also need help to shore up their eastern borders and prepare for possible flows of refugees from Ukraine. The Baltic states will probably ask for similar reassurances.

But Zack Beauchamp isn’t worried about Cold War II:

Russia’s turn to blunt military force in Ukraine is emblematic of the basic flaws behind its push to regain its global and regional standing. The reality is that Russia is a middling power with nuclear weapons; it can frustrate America in Syria, but it can’t make progress towards bending the world to its will using the sort of strategies it has tried to date.

Military power alone can’t do the trick. In a world of free trade and highly globalized markets, territorial conquest simply isn’t a good way to make your country stronger. In fact, it’s harmful. “War has lost its evident appeal,” political scientist John Mueller correctly notes, “because substantial agreement has risen around the twin propositions that that prosperity and economic growth should be central national goals and that war is a particularly counterproductive device for achieving these goals.” War won’t bring Ukraine into Russia’s fold, let alone a broader swath of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Drum believes Putin is acting out of desperation:

The reason Putin has sent troops into Crimea is because everything he’s done over the past year has blown up in his face. This was a last-ditch effort to avoid a fool’s mate, not some deeply-calculated bit of geopolitical stategery.

Make no mistake. All the sanctions and NATO meetings and condemnations from foreign offices in the West won’t have much material effect on Putin’s immediate conduct. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about this stuff: he does, and he’s been bullying and blustering for a long time in a frantic effort to avoid it. Now, however, having failed utterly thanks to ham-handed tactics on his part, he’s finally decided on one last desperation move. Not because the West is helpless to retaliate, but because he’s simply decided he’s willing to bear the cost. It’s a sign of weakness, not a show of strength.

Mark Adomanis predicts that the economic impact on Russia will be devastating:

The Moscow stock market is going to get absolutely clobbered when it opens tomorrow, and many foreign investors are going to bolt for the exits as quickly as they can. Depending on the severity of the situation in Ukraine, the Russian financial system could come screeching to a halt. It’s a given that many of these decisions impacting Russia’s economy will be made in haste and without a sober calculation of costs and befits, but that’s the way the world works: investors often overreact to political events and they will certainly overreact to a military invasion of a neighboring country.

David Satter claims that the invasion has more to do with Russia’s internal worries than external:

Russia and Ukraine under Yanukovych shared a single form of government – rule by a criminal oligarchy. This is why the anti-criminal revolution that overthrew Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is a precedent that is perfectly applicable to Putin’s Russia. It is also the reason why, from the Russian regime’s point of view, the Ukrainian revolution must be stopped at all costs. …

In 2011 and 2012, Moscow witnessed the biggest protests since the fall of the Soviet Union over the falsification of elections and Putin’s decision to run for a third term as president. The protests eventually fizzled but, given the worsening economic situation, they could be reignited.

Remnick highlights the expanding crackdown within Russia:

At the same time that he is planning his vengeful military operation against the new Ukrainian leadership, he has been cracking down harder on his opponents in Moscow. Alexey Navalny, who is best known for his well-publicized investigations into state corruption and for his role in anti-Kremlin demonstrations two years ago, has now been placed under house arrest. Navalny, who won twenty-seven per cent of the vote in a recent Moscow mayoral ballot, is barred from using the Internet, his principal means of communication and dissidence. The period of Olympic mercy has come to an end.

He sees a grim future for Ukraine:

These next days and weeks in Ukraine are bound to be frightening, and worse. There is not only the threat of widening Russian military force. The new Ukrainian leadership is worse than weak. It is unstable. It faces the burden of legitimacy. Yanukovych was spectacularly corrupt, and he opened fire on his own people. He was also elected to his office and brought low by an uprising, not the ballot; he made that point on Friday, in a press conference in Rostov on Don, in Russia, saying that he had never really been deposed. Ukraine has already experienced revolutionary disappointment. The Orange Revolution, in 2004, failed to establish stable democratic institutions and economic justice. This is one reason that Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Prime Minister, newly released from prison, is not likely the future of Ukraine. How can Ukraine possibly move quickly to national elections, as it must to resolve the issue of legitimacy, while another country has troops on its territory?

The Academy Award For Grotesquerie

Daniel D’Addario is looking forward to tonight’s “Best Makeup and Hairstyling” award – “the place where Oscar honors those films unlikely to get love anywhere else” and “a great reminder that Hollywood isn’t solely defined by its most tasteful work”:

To their credit, the makeup branch of the academy finds great work in movies that the rest of the academy, to its own credit, overlooks. The Wolfman certainly deserved no Oscars for acting, directing or writing. But the moment at the 2011 Oscars during which presenter Cate Blanchett couldn’t bear to look at the footage and announced, “That’s gross,” was revelatory. How many performances are so viscerally affecting that an awards presenter would look away and say, “That’s moving”?

We’d really lose something if the best makeup category were filled out, each year, by whichever of the three best picture nominees had the most good-looking hairdos and foundation. Best makeup is a valuable reminder not merely that Hollywood, which brings out its marquee biopics and historical dramas at year’s end for awards time, is founded on cheap and visceral thrills. It’s a reminder, too, that those projects we’re inclined to dismiss out-of-hand employed people who didn’t know the movie was destined to be dismissed by the blogging class. They wanted not necessarily be the best but to scare, to delight, and to convince.

Update from a reader:

The nominees for Best Makeup for Dallas Buyers Club had a makeup budget of only $250. The film is remarkable in its technical quality on a budget. It took years to get this film made and the dedication and skill by the filmmakers to shoot on the cheap has much to do with the accomplishment.

A Poem For Sunday

frontporch

“Glutton” by Frank Bidart:

Ropes of my dead
Grandmother’s unreproducible

sausage, curing for weeks

on the front porch. My mother,
thoroughly

Americanized, found them

vaguely shameful.
Now though I

taste and taste

I can’t find that
taste I so loved as a kid.

Each thing generates the Idea

of itself, the perfect thing that it
is, of course, not—

once, a pear so breathtakingly

succulent I couldn’t
breathe.  I take back that

“of course.”

It’s got to be out there again,–
. . . I have tasted it.

(From Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart © 2013 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by kind permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Photo by Tim Samoff)

Is Breast Still Best?

Jessica Grose flags a new study questioning the long-term benefits of breastfeeding:

[Ohio State University professor Cynthia Colen] looked at more than 8,000 children total, about 25 percent of whom were in “discordant sibling pairs,” which means one was bottle-fed and the other was breast-fed. The study then measured those siblings for 11 outcomes, including BMI, obesity, asthma, different measures of intelligence, hyperactivity, and parental attachment.

When children from different families were compared, the kids who were breast-fed did better on those 11 measures than kids who were not breast-fed. But, as Colen points out, mothers who breast-feed their kids are disproportionately advantaged—they tend to be wealthier and better educated. When children fed differently within the same family were compared—those discordant sibling pairs—there was no statistically significant difference in any of the measures, except for asthma. Children who were breast-fed were at a higher risk for asthma than children who drank formula.

But the study does not dispute the other benefits of breastfeeding:

Colen and [co-author David] Ramey did not examine the short-term protection against chest and gut infections, because these have been most clearly demonstrated by previous research. Breast is still best, says Colen, but the findings suggest that health systems should put less effort into promoting breastfeeding and more into other ways to help poorer households, she says.

Another recent study attributes the higher IQs commonly associated with breastfeeding to other factors:

[A] new study by sociologists at Brigham Young University pinpoints two parenting skills as the real source of this cognitive boost: Responding to children’s emotional cues and reading to children starting at 9 months of age. Breastfeeding mothers tend to do both of those things, said lead study author Ben Gibbs. “It’s really the parenting that makes the difference,” said Gibbs. “Breastfeeding matters in others ways, but this actually gives us a better mechanism and can shape our confidence about interventions that promote school readiness.”