A Javanese Muslim woman takes a bath on the beach as she prepares for Ramadan with padusan ritual at Parangtritis beach in Yogyakarta, Indonesia on June 27, 2014. Padusan ritual has the purpose of purifying people welcoming the holy month of Ramadan. Ramadan, observed by Muslims worldwide, is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar and is a holy month of fasting, prayer and recitation of the Quran. By Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images.
Steven Cook weighs in on the prospects for Kurdish independence. He’s less bullish than most:
For all the confidence in Erbil, the Kurds have a host of significant problems that seriously complicate the establishment of an independent Kurdistan. The Kurds have enjoyed something that looks a lot like a state for the past three decades, but they have never actually had the responsibilities of a state. Even as they railed against Baghdad for routinely bilking them out of large amounts of the 17 percent share of government revenue they were supposed to receive, they were still dependent on the central government. The answer is obviously oil revenues, which are promising, but it is clear that with legal challenges and capacity issues, it is no panacea. The Kurds will be living hand-to-mouth for quite some time.
There is a lot of oil and a fair number of Western oil guys hanging around the Divan and Rotana hotels, but beyond that there seems to be very little economic activity in Kurdistan. Erbil is notable for its half-finished construction sites, including a shell of what is slated to be a JW Marriott and some of those exclusive have-it-all-in-one-place developments that cater to expats and super wealthy locals all around the Middle East. The Kurds clearly envision Erbil to be the next Dubai, but it is not even Amman yet. There are shops and some good restaurants, but no real banks to finance development. Other than oil, the Kurds do not produce much of anything.
Responding to our post on depressed animals starring Mr G and Jellybean, a reader sends the above video:
Want to see some serious inter-species animal heroics? Check this out.
And check out our long-running coverage of swimming pigs. Update from a reader:
I’m afraid you’ve been successfully pranked. The viral video was made by comedian Nathan fielder for his show Nathan for You. See here. I can highly recommend the show!
Ikea is raising its average minimum wage for American employees to $10.76 per hour, a 17 percent increase. Jordan Weissmann is encouraged by the news:
Notably, Ikea isn’t raising prices on its furniture to pay for the raise. Instead, the company’s management says it believes the pay hike will help them compete for and keep talent, which is of course good for business. The Gap used a similar justification when it announced it would raise its own minimum to $10 by 2015.
Which I think hints at something about what would likely happen if the U.S. raised the federal minimum. The conservatives who argue that higher pay floors kill jobs also tend to assume that businesses are already running at pretty much peak efficiency. According to this logic, forcing companies to spend more on labor will lead to less hiring. But left-leaning economists see it differently. They tend to argue that increasing wages can lead to savings for business by reducing worker turnover, for instance, and forcing managers to make better use of their staff.
But Bouie is less than thrilled:
[I]t’s worth noting that there’s less than meets the eye to Ikea’s promise to hew to local and municipal minimum wage hikes.
Most Ikea stores are located in suburbs, as opposed to urban centers. The Ikea near Charlotte, North Carolina, for instance, is located on the outskirts of the area, as is the Ikea near Seattle (in Renton) and the one in Dallas (near Frisco). By virtue of geography, these stores will avoid city-mandated wage hikes. What’s more, for as much as Ikea and similar stores might be good for workers, their overwhelmingly suburban locations makes them isolated from large numbers of potential workers who lack employment opportunities in their own areas and neighborhoods.
But Danny Vinik details one way Ikea is taking geography into account in a big way:
[The company] added a smart twist: They will tie the wage level in each store to the cost-of-living in the surrounding area, meaning Ikea workers in Pittsburgh will receive a different hourly wage than those in Woodbridge, Vermont.
At first glance, this may seem unfair. Those workers in Woodbridge and Pittsburgh are doing the same jobs. Why shouldn’t they receive the same pay? But Ikea has the right idea. The minimum wage is an arbitrary interference with the free market. Most economists justify it, and most Americans support it, because they want to make sure low-wage workers have an adequate standard of living. But living standards vary widely across the country.
Much more Dish on the minimum wage here.
Julian Baggini wonders whether going abroad necessarily broadens our horizons:
Travel can yield many benefits. There is the challenge of having to deal with novel and unexpected situations, learning about the world and adapting to different
customs. It is something that is meant to forge our character and make us more flexible individuals, confronting our prejudices along the way.
Of course travel isn’t guaranteed to do any such thing. It might in reality create expense and discomfort while merely reinforcing our biases. Things back home can seem so much more civilised. The quality time with your family you were hoping for turns out to be more stressful than life at work. Instead of taking the opportunity to learn about local customs you end up getting drunk with your compatriots.
But there remains a lingering feeling that there is something wrong with being uninterested in travel. Much of this is likely to come down to cultural pressure but there is one way of making sense of it, which is that an unwillingness to travel can reflect a general lack of curiosity about the world. … [S]ome people simply feel that what drives their curiosity happens to be close to home. Far from being a problem, this can be an advantage, if it means that what thrills and stimulates them is nearer, cheaper and more in their control. But then one of the benefits of travel is to be receptive to what is unfamiliar. Taking that lesson means allowing ourselves to be open to other things that stretch our comfort zone.
(Photo of a many-stamped passport by Jesse Edwards)
Cathy Young investigates the less common kind of domestic violence:
Violence by women causes less harm due to obvious differences in size and strength, but it is by no means harmless. Women may use weapons, from knives to household objects—including highly dangerous ones such as boiling water—to neutralize their disadvantage, and men may be held back by cultural prohibitions on using force toward a woman even in self-defense.
In his 2010 review, Straus concludes that in various studies, men account for 12% to 40% of those injured in heterosexual couple violence. Men also make up about 30% of intimate homicide victims—not counting cases in which women kill in self-defense. And women are at least as likely as men to kill their children—more so if one counts killings of newborns—and account for more than half of child maltreatment perpetrators.
What about same-sex violence?
The February CDC study found that, over their lifetime, 44% of lesbians had been physically assaulted by a partner (more than two-thirds of them only by women), compared to 35% of straight women, 26% of gay men, and 29% of straight men. While these figures suggest that women are somewhat less likely than men to commit partner violence, they also show a fairly small gap. The findings are consistent with other evidence that same-sex relationships are no less violent than heterosexual ones.
And if the NRA succeeds, those convicted of domestic violence could still buy a gun:
Federal law already bars persons convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence from purchasing firearms. S. 1290, introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), would add convicted stalkers to that group of offenders and would expand the current definition of those convicted of domestic violence against “intimate partners” to include those who harmed dating partners.
Aides from two different senators’ offices confirm that the NRA sent a letter to lawmakers describing Klobuchar’s legislation as “a bill to turn disputes between family members and social acquaintances into lifetime firearm prohibitions.” The nation’s largest gun lobby wrote that it “strongly opposes” the bill because the measure “manipulates emotionally compelling issues such as ‘domestic violence’ and ‘stalking’ simply to cast as wide a net as possible for federal firearm prohibitions.”
The NRA’s letter imagines a “single shoving match” between two gay men as an example of how the domestic violence legislation could be misused. “Under S. 1290, for example, two men of equal size, strength, and economic status joined by a civil union or merely engaged (or formerly engaged) in an intimate ‘social relationship,’ could be subject to this prohibition for conviction of simple ‘assault’ arising from a single shoving match,” the letter says.
This Mr G will make you cry, but this Mr G …
The Stimson Center, a security think tank, released a report (pdf) yesterday on America’s drone policy, prepared by a ten-member task force of defense and legal experts. The co-chairs of the panel, former Army General John Abizaid and Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks, warn in a WaPo op-ed that this policy is making the world more dangerous:
The United States’ drone policies damage its credibility, undermine the rule of law and create a potentially destabilizing international precedent — one that repressive regimes around the globe will undoubtedly exploit. As lethal drones proliferate, the future imagined above is becoming all too likely.
Recent events remind us that the threat posed by terrorist organizations is very real, and U.S. drone strikes have achieved significant tactical successes in certain regions, but the scope, number and lethality of terrorist attacks worldwide suggest that these successes are not producing enduring strategic gains. On the contrary: Overreliance on targeted strikes away from so-called “hot” battlefields creates a substantial risk of backlash and reinvigorated terrorist recruiting and may create a slippery slope leading to continual or wider conflict.
Zack discusses the report’s findings in greater detail:
The Stimson task force identifies a number of specific problems within the larger problem of a future of constant drone strikes. First, ease of drone strikes makes it easy to avoid thinking strategically about whether they’re doing more harm than good. “To the best of our knowledge,” the task force concludes “the US executive branch has yet to engage in a serious cost-benefit analysis of targeted UAV strikes as a routine counterterrorism tool.”
This is hugely troubling, for a number of reasons the report raises. Do constant drone strikes help terrorist recruiting more than they degrade the groups? Do limited drone strikes risk escalating to wider wars? Can this kind of war meaningfully be regulated by Congress? The Stimson authors thinks there’s real concern in each of these areas — and that the US government isn’t paying enough attention.
Jeffrey Smith and John Bellinger, who served on the task force, stress the importance of developing a sound legal framework for drone use before other countries start emulating our bad example:
The traditional rules of war and for use of force do not address the complexities of modern conflicts between states and non-state terrorist groups. We believe the United States has acted responsibly in conducting drone strikes but unless our country clarifies the rules and practices it is following, other states with less justifiable motives can easily point to the U.S. program as grounds to conduct lethal drone strikes that are not remotely responsible. For example, on what legal grounds could we object to Russian lethal drone strikes on Ukrainian “terrorists” in Eastern Ukraine?
But Waldman isn’t sure he buys that logic:
Reading the report, I was struck by the general presumption that other nations are going to be taking their cues from us, both in positive and negative ways. For instance, members of the task force write, “US practices set a dangerous precedent that may be seized upon by other states—not all of which are likely to behave as scrupulously as US officials.” If those nations are unscrupulous, then why would they care how responsible we’re being?
This is important because pretty much every country with a military either already has drones or will be getting them soon (most of those are for surveillance and not yet weaponized, but they will be eventually). We can impose all kinds of checks and balances on our drone policy, but no matter how thoughtfully they might be developed, that doesn’t mean that China or Russia, not to mention smaller states, would do the same.
The Dish previously covered drone proliferation here. Adi Robertson, meanwhile, explores the panel’s claim that drones are not a bad tool in and of themselves:
The report, interestingly, refuted what the ACLU has called the “PlayStation mentality,” the idea that remote operation makes killing easy. “UAVs permit killing from a safe distance — but so do cruise missiles and snipers’ guns,” they wrote. “Ironically, the men and women who remotely operate lethal UAVs have a far more ‘up close and personal’ view of the damage they inflict than the pilots of manned aircraft.” They cited a 2011 study in which nearly half of drone operators reported high levels of stress, a finding that was backed up in 2013 by the Department of Defense. The report’s claim that this is because they “watch their targets for weeks or even months … before one day watching onscreen as they are obliterated,” though, may not be totally accurate. The 2011 study’s authors attributed the stress levels to long hours as drone use steadily increased; they were surprised to find that relatively little stress was a result of watching targets.
Americans will have a hard time understanding the role Jimmy Savile played in British popular culture for decades. A weird, counter-cultural host for the legendary pop music show, Top Of The Pops, he was a constant presence in the 1970s and on. Think Mr Rogers Meets Liberace Meets Ozzie Osbourne. His flamboyant strangeness then turned into something like holiness as he went on to do relentless charity work, hosting a classic show called “Jim’ll Fix It” – a “Make A Wish” format which was about fulfilling the dying wishes of terminally ill children. He was a friend to almost everyone in the British Establishment of both parties and even a confidant of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, as their marriage unraveled.
But he was also, we now know, a rapist, and molester of unimaginable proportions:
A joint statement by National Health Service executives said there had been “truly awful” episodes dating to 1960, when Mr. Savile began volunteering at the Leeds hospital in northeastern England. Research by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that, all told, he abused at least 500 victims, the youngest of them 2 years old … “For some, although the abuse took place decades ago, their experience endures as a painful and upsetting memory that still has an effect on them today,” said Sue Proctor, who headed the inquiry. She called Mr. Savile’s professed interest in the dead “pretty unwholesome,” quoting an unidentified student nurse as saying the entertainer had boasted of performing acts of a sexual nature on corpses.
Yes, he abused the dead as well, and in one of the more troubling incidents in his life, he kept his beloved mother’s corpse in his home for several days, sleeping next to her:
We hadn’t put her away yet and there she was lying around so to me they were good times, they were not the best times. I’d much rather that she hadn’t died but it was inevitable therefore it had to be. Once upon a time I had to share her with a lot of people. We had marvellous times but when she was dead she was all mine, for me. So therefore it finished up right, you understand, and then we buried her.
Savile was reared apparently with little affection by his mother; and he had no long-last relationships. If you want to watch a searing and now chilling long interview with him by Andrew Neil, it’s here. Money section: 6:00 to 9:00. Now we see it all much more plainly. His obsession with secrecy, with never “grassing” on “ladies”, clearly indicated something more than just a desire for some privacy in a man as public as any human in Britain. And then we also have a transcript from a long radio interview he did with a psychiatrist, Anthony Clare. Money quote from that:
The tough thing in life is ultimate freedom, that’s when the battle starts. Ultimate freedom is what it’s all about, because you’ve got to be very strong to stand for ultimate freedom. Ultimate freedom is the big challenge, now I’ve got it, and I can tell you there’s not many of us that have got ultimate freedom. I’ve got some considerable clout as well, all over. That is where the battle, the personal battle starts now. I’ve managed to handle complete and ultimate utter freedom. It’s marvelous but it’s dangerous. It would be easy to be corrupted by many things, when you’ve got ultimate freedom, especially when you’ve got clout. I could be corrupted.
Then you see further public near-confessions like this one:
In retrospect, it’s sitting there in plain sight. What blinded everyone to it? Two things, I’d suggest. He was such an aggressive and relentless do-gooder it seemed almost churlish to question his real intentions. That’s precisely the cover that so many priests had. A regular person who is suspected of malfeasance might be investigated more quickly than someone who has a reputation for good works or morality (Savile was a prominent and practicing Roman Catholic as well as being a charity-booster). It’s the moral authority of such people that paradoxically allows them to get away with evil. Which is why, I suspect, many pedophiles sought refuge in clerical garb.
And then there’s the unchecked cultural power of celebrity itself. It was particularly overwhelming in the era of untrammeled network dominance in television. In Britain, in the era when Savile became famous, there were only three and then four television channels. And television was a national obsession. A figure like Savile had a level of media saturation that turned him effectively into a secular god. His large-than-life persona almost demanded a jocular or fawning attitude toward him – and he garnered countless endorsements from the British Establishment – from Tory grandees to Roman Catholic bishops – that he was able to exploit mercilessly with respect to the vulnerable.
We can get depressed about the state of our fragmented culture today, the collapse of institutional authority and trust. And all these represent real losses, to be sure. But our raucous, multi-faceted de-centralized media does do something to help reduce gigantic figures like Savile down to size; and the deference has mercifully disappeared, rendering a man like him less able to hide his predations. Wider and deeper understanding of sex abuse and its horrors has also made all of us less complacent when faced with the Sanduskys and Saviles that prey on the vulnerable and intimidated.
These are all gains, as my shrink puts it. Even as they scarcely manage to counterbalance the vast and incalculable losses that Savile – and his countless enablers – perpetrated and celebrated for so long.
As the country literally falls apart, Iraq is spending $1 billion on a new complex for its parliament:
The well-known London-based, Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid has been tapped to design a 2.7-million-square-foot building on the 49-acre site, even though her proposal—which remains secret—came in third in the international architecture competition.
The secretary general of Iraq’s parliament, Ayad Namik Majid, told the Architect’s Journal that the insurgency had caused “no problems” to plans for the complex, despite the fact that many other major developments across the country—including hospitals in Basra, a master plan in Najaf, and an oncology center and a library in the capital—have been put on hold. The site of the future parliamentary complex is near the abandoned Al Muthana airport, and it still has the remains of a colossal mosque that was being constructed at the time of the 2003 US invasion.
(Image: British architecture firm Assemblage’s proposal for the Iraqi parliament, shown here, won the international competition but the parliament decided to go with Hadid’s design instead)
The Dish 