July 2014 – Page 12

Dish Shirts Are Here!

[Update: Premium tri-blend t-shirts no longer available. 100% cotton versions here.]

Finally – after lots of your input – we’re psyched to offer you a choice of four custom Dish shirts. If you’re dying to take a look and want to skip the descriptions below, head straight to our storefront and buy your shirt now!

We thought we’d start our store simply enough by offering two t-shirts. The first is a light blue one emblazoned with the Dish logo across the chest (see above on the left). Or if you prefer the baying beagle by herself, check out the gray Howler Tee (modeled by the dashing bear on the right). I love the lone howler myself – only other Dishheads will get it.

andrew_howler-tee We picked American Apparel t-shirts that use high-quality screen-printing and a higher quality tri-blend fabric that’s super soft, durable, and has a bit of stretch that retains its slim shape. There are sizes for both men and women – no generic “unisex” option this time around, as you insisted. We’ve also lowered the price by half compared with the t-shirts we did a few years ago.

Want something a little more formal you can wear to the office, church, or restaurant? Check out the polo shirts, which come in white (see below left) and navy blue (see above right). Both of these classic polos are made with a “Silk Touch” poly-cotton fabric and embroidered with the familiar Dish beagle on the left breast. The polos run a little large, and the high-quality fabric is shrink resistant, so keep that in mind when you pick your size. For the perfect fit, consult the sizing chart.

andrew_white-polo Because we’re doing the higher-quality screen-printing option with a bulk-ordering process, in order to keep prices down, these particular shirts will only be available for a limited time, so you need to order very soon to be part of the first printing. So if you’re interested in a shirt, don’t hesitate – buy now!

As always, we welcome your feedback in the in-tray. And send us a pic of you wearing your new shirt! You may see it appear on the blog.

But first go here to grab your new t-shirt or polo. It’s one critical way to keep the Dish independent and running for years to come. And they’re pretty sweet as well.

[Update: responses from readers here, here, and here]

Book Club: Your Near-Death Experiences

Readers continue the conversation over Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live:

Montaigne‘s near-death interval is very interesting – it makes me wonder how generalizable his description is to other peoples’ experiences. The pleasantness is an interesting surprise, because his physical behaviors manifest unpleasantness during this time. I can’t help but think of a friend of a friend, who, described the feeling accompanying beholding her newborn as “just like tripping on DMT.” There’s definitely some writing hypothesizing a connection between near death experience and DMT release; it does occur in some amounts in mammals. And it does seem that Montaigne‘s “out of body experience” allowed him to avoid the suffering associated with the experiences of the body at the time.

Another shares his own story:

What would someone 500 years ago, when people lived without indoor plumbing, have to say? And wouldn’t the writing be filled with difficult words, clumped together in long, flowery paragraph-free chunks? That’s what I thought, so before buying the book, I downloaded a sample and while reading it, remembered something I’d completely forgotten.

During sixth grade, I contracted Valley Fever. I was so sick for so long and nobody knew what was wrong with me. I found myself floating above myself, looking down, finally pain-free. I could hear the oldies (“These Boots Were Made For Walking”, “King of the Road”) playing on the radio that someone put beside my bed. But I simply let go and became more relaxed than anything I’d ever experienced in my uber-Protestant-work-ethic-running-around-in-circles-as-fast-as-you-can family. I knew I was close to death, but at eleven, what does that mean?

Montagne’s account of his own near-death experience brought this feeling back as if it were yesterday. The feeling of relief, of letting go, is beyond words, particularly when you are naturally tightly-wound. My adult kids hate it now when I tell them I look forward to death, as there is a peace you can never describe, and the opposite of competitive, hurry-hurry life trying to get ahead (of what?) in San Francisco. Fine, I tell them. They can join my parents in extreme FoxNews-like fear of death, which, when they talk about it, sounds more like they’re afraid of not controlling everything and everyone, and what will we do without that?

Think I’ll share a little Montaigne, particularly the chapter entitled, “Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted.” It’s about as far as you can get from our family’s Mission Statement (“what are you doing reading when you could be doing something?”).

The book is available here if you’d like to join in. Think of it as a blast of sixteenth century sanity for a crazy 21st century world.

Next up: was Montaigne a closet atheist? Or a very modern kind of Christian? Send your thoughts to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com. I’ll weigh in – but check out this Mark Lilla essay first.

(GIF of Dimethyltryptamine, aka DMT, via Wiki)

Small Arms, Big Problem

Apparently, we’re missing a lot of guns in Afghanistan and have no idea where they are:

“We’re not talking just handguns and M-16s and AK-47s,” [John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction] told TIME correspondents over lunch on Friday. “We’re talking some high-powered stuff — grenade launchers, RPGs, machine guns — anything that one person could use.” His new report says the U.S. recorded improperly, or simply failed to record, the serial numbers of 43% of the nearly half-million small arms the U.S. has supplied Afghanistan over the past decade. Sloppy U.S. record keeping is compounded by Afghanistan’s indifference to the congressionally mandated U.S. oversight of the weapons’ whereabouts.

Dana Liebelson has more on the inspector general’s report:

According to SIGAR, the US is also supplying Afghanistan with too many weapons.

It estimates that the Afghan security forces have a surplus of over 80,000 AK-47s, 5,800 grenade launchers, and 2,500 Russian PKM machine guns. Defense Department officials told investigators they do not currently have the authority to repossess excess weapons, but they said that “DOD will remain engaged in addressing these critical weapons accountability issues.” The Pentagon did not respond to comment for Mother Jones.

SIGAR concludes that, without confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to account for weapons, “there is a real potential for these weapons to fall into the hands of insurgents, which will pose additional risks to U.S. personnel, the ANSF, and Afghan civilians.” It’s certainly happened before—in 2009, the New York Times reported that “of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces.”

Face Of The Day

RAF Jawans stand guard during Curfew at Ambala road after violence broke out between two groups who reportedly clashed over a patch of disputed land in Saharanpur, India on July 28, 2014. Curfew has been relaxed for a few hours today in Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, where three people were killed and 24 injured in riots two days ago. 38 people have been arrested and nine first information reports or FIRs have been registered at various police stations for rioting, arson and conspiracy. Local BJP and Congress leaders have accused each other for instigating mobs. By Virendra Singh Gosain/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.

Anti-Zionism And Anti-Semitism, Ctd

While not all Jews support Israel’s actions in Gaza, some people – as previously discussed here – are holding all Jews responsible. Eli Lake spells out where he believes the line falls between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism:

The atmosphere in Europe since the beginning of the war has been so toxic that the foreign ministers of France, Italy, and Germany on Tuesday issued a rare joint statement condemning anti-Semitism at pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

All of this presents a troubling paradox for Zionism. The state of Israel was founded in 1948 as a haven for Jews. But in 2014 Europe’s anti-Semites have attacked Jews for the deeds of the Jewish state. It is a classic anti-Semitic canard to punish any Jew for the perceived crimes of all of them. There is no evidence also to suggest that if Israel did not respond to rockets fired from Hamas, the Jews of Europe would be any safer or the continent’s anti-Semites would be any more tolerant. After all, some of the worst attacks on Jews in France occurred at a time of relative quiet in Israel.

It’s disgusting and wrong. It’s worth noting, however, that Netanyahu’s blanket condemnation of all of Hamas for one lone, renegade cell – and the brutal collective punishment of Gazans – including ten dead children today – doesn’t help matters. Lake quotes a former IDF intelligence official as saying that rising anti-Semitism in Europe ends up fueling emigration and thus aiding Israel. Elliott Abrams believes this is happening in France:

In my travels to Israel over the years I have noticed what so many others have as well: the growing French presence. One hears French spoken in hotel lobbies and restaurants, and sees real estate ads more often in French than English. It was estimated a month ago that one percent of the French Jewish community, or 5,000 people, would emigrate to Israel this year. That figure will surely grow now, this year and in the coming years. French Jews simply do not feel safe, despite general denunciations of anti-Semitism from government officials. To walk in many parts of Paris wearing a kipah is to risk serious bodily harm.

Last week, Jordan Chandler Hirsch put forth a similar argument:

The case for Israel is now unfolding in the heart of Berlin. This past Friday, an imam was filmed delivering a Friday sermon beseeching Allah to destroy the Zionist Jews. “Count them and kill them to the very last one,” he prayed. A day before, an angry mob gathered to demand the same thing. “Jude, Jude feiges Schwein! Komm heraus und kampf allein!” it bellowed in unison—“Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come out and fight on your own!”

Or they can come, of course, come to America, where Jews are celebrated, integrated and free from rockets.

(Photo: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holds a placard with the symbols ‘Swastika equal to Star of David’ during a demonstration on July 17, 2014 in Madrid, Spain. By Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)

Obama’s Border Crisis Plan

Late last week, Obama rolled out a proposal to start processing refugee status applications from young, would-be migrants in Honduras before they make the treacherous northbound journey (NYT). The pilot plan, which could be expanded to El Salvador and Guatemala, envisions receiving around 5,000 refugee applications and accepting 1,750 of them over the first two years, at a cost of $47 million. Alec MacGillis applauds:

There is no shortage of questions that immediately spring to mind. Doesn’t 5,000 applicants seem awfully low, given that since October 1 more than 16,500 minors have traveled to the U.S. border from Honduras alone? How would the U.S. personnel at the embassy in Tegucigalpa decide which young applicants were so threatened by gang violence that they qualified for the coveted status and entry to the U.S.? What would this new approach mean for the young Central Americans who already made the risky journey to the U.S. in recent months?

But the proposal comes with two clear benefits, one substantive and one political. First, it is a big step toward addressing the immediate humanitarian crisis: It will deter at least some young people from making the dangerous trip, thereby reducing demand for the migrant traffickers who are profiting off the children’s desperation. … Shifting the entry point for at least some of the young Central Americans to their countries of origin will hopefully redefine the problem as what it is: a challenge to our country’s laws and policies on asylum, which as now written do not directly address the plight of young people in gang-ravaged societies; and, more broadly, a reckoning with our responsibility to our southern neighbors.

But Roberto Ferdman outlines why the proposal won’t be enough on its own and could have unintended consequences:

The current proposal, which assumes that some 5,000 children will apply in Honduras, would cost nearly $50 million over the course of two years. And Guatemala and El Salvador might see a similar program implemented if the pilot is deemed successful. But less than 2,000 children would be selected from those that apply in Honduras. That’s a mere fraction of the more than 16,000 that have been apprehended at the U.S. border this year (and the thousands more that are likely still in transit).

There’s also the potential for confusion over the definition of the word refugee. The U.S. launched similar screening programs in Vietnam in the 1970s and in Haiti in the 1990s. But those were set up in the aftermath of a war and devastating hurricane, respectively. “There’s serious worry that if the proposal is enacted it will stretch the current meaning of the word refugee,” [Columbia University political scientist Carlos] Vargas-Ramos said.

Why Honduras, any way? Well, because it’s the worst off:

Honduras has the highest murder rate of any country in the world. According to the latest report from the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, the Central American nation saw 90.4 homicides per 100,000 people in 2012. The majority of the violence in Honduras is carried out by two main gangs, Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and Barrio 18. Both were created in Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrants, between 2001 and 2010. The U.S. deported more than 100,000 convicted members of both gangs back to Central America, where corrupt law enforcement and political instability—particularly in Honduras, which underwent a coup d’état in 2009—allowed them to spread out and take control of entire cities, kidnapping, torturing, and brutally murdering anyone standing in their way. San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second largest city and a gang stronghold, is considered the most dangerous city in the world. According to the CIA World Factbook, Honduras had 17,000 refugees or people displaced within the country as a result of extortions, threats, or forced gang recruitment in 2013.

Jeremy Relph reports from the country’s Bajo Aguán region, where land disputes and government corruption are keeping the violence going:

These days Bajo Aguán is virtually off-limits to the country’s army and police. Campesinos have been the victims of private security and government forces, and the Honduran government has done little to halt it. The ruling right-wing National Party protects rich landowners. They’ve focused on maintaining security and addressing violence with force. The left paints the campesinos as victims and pacifists. At stake is fertile land, and massive profits.

Bajo Aguán is the rural center for palm oil production and land rights battles. Palm oil is in everything from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to Johnson’s baby shampoo to Pringles. During the last decade, large energy companies like BP have begun heralding palm oil as the next green biofuel. Across Africa the spread of plantations has threatened chimpanzees with extinction. In Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s leading producers, its extraction is linked to human rights abuse. Honduras is no different.

In an interview with Susan Glasser, Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández articulates his understanding of how the American drug war has contributed to his country’s crisis and what the US should do differently:

We all share responsibility, from those who produce the drug to the transit countries, but also the country that uses the drugs. And the United States is the great consumer of the drugs. The advantage that you have here—if you can call it an advantage—is that the violence has been separated from the transit of drugs. That’s why for many officials and public servants the drug problem in the United States is one of public health. In Central America, the drug problem is life or death. That’s why it’s important that the United States assume its responsibility. … A Central America at peace, with less drug violence, and with opportunities, is a great investment for the United States. On the contrary, if they are only investing in border security and not in the source of the problem, in the genesis of the problem, then we will have more of the same.

The Passion Of The Israeli Liberal

Jonathan Freedland senses “a weariness in the liberal Zionist fraternity,” as the Gaza war once again forces the Israeli left to wrestle with the dissonance of their principles and their loyalties:

But underlying this fatigue might be a deeper anxiety. For nearly three decades, the hope of an eventual two state solution provided a kind of comfort zone for liberal Zionists, if not comfort blanket. The two-state solution expressed the liberal Zionist position perfectly: Jews could have a state of their own, without depriving Palestinians of their legitimate national aspirations. Even if it was not about to be realized any time soon, it was a goal that allowed one to be both a Zionist and a liberal at the same time.

But the two-state solution does not offer much comfort if it becomes a chimera, a mythical notion as out of reach as the holy grail or Atlantis. The failure of Oslo, the failure at Camp David, the failure of Annapolis, the failure most recently of John Kerry’s indefatigable nine-month effort has prompted the unwelcome thought: what if it keeps failing not because the leaders did not try hard enough, but because the plan cannot work? What if the two-state solution is impossible? That prospect frightens liberal Zionists to their core. For the alternatives to two states are unpalatable, either for liberal reasons or for Zionist reasons.

Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin believes Netanyahu’s decision to reject the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement was a mistake:

Israel should have been more sophisticated in the way it reacted. We should have supported the Palestinians because we want to make peace with everybody, not with just two-thirds or half of the Palestinians. An agreement with the unity government would have been more sophisticated than saying Abbas is a terrorist. But this unity government must accept all the conditions of the Middle East Quartet. They have to recognize Israel, renounce terrorism and recognize all earlier agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. … But I would warn against believing that the Palestinians are peaceful due to exhaustion from the occupation. They will never accept the status quo of the Israeli occupation. When people lose hope for an improvement of their situation, they radicalize. That is the nature of human beings. The Gaza Strip is the best example of that. All the conditions are there for an explosion.

With Israel losing “on the battlefield of perception”, Goldblog restates his argument for an Israeli-led, two-state settlement:

I don’t know if the majority of Palestinians would ultimately agree to a two-state solution. But I do know that Israel, while combating the extremists, could do a great deal more to buttress the moderates. This would mean, in practical terms, working as hard as possible to build wealth and hope on the West Bank. A moderate-minded Palestinian who watches Israel expand its settlements on lands that most of the world believes should fall within the borders of a future Palestinian state might legitimately come to doubt Israel’s intentions. Reversing the settlement project, and moving the West Bank toward eventual independence, would not only give Palestinians hope, but it would convince Israel’s sometimes-ambivalent friends that it truly seeks peace, and that it treats extremists differently than it treats moderates. And yes, I know that in the chaos of the Middle East, which is currently a vast swamp of extremism, the thought of a West Bank susceptible to the predations of Islamist extremists is a frightening one. But independence—in particular security independence—can be negotiated in stages. The Palestinians must go free, because there is no other way.

(Photo: Used artillery shells litter the ground on the morning of July 28, 2014 near Kafar Azza, Israel. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

The Color Of Homeownership

Kriston Capps notes a new study indicating that recent changes in the housing market “essentially wiped out the gains made by black homeowners since the 1970s”:

The survey controlled for “trigger events” that increase the likelihood that homeowners will lose their homes, including divorce, death, or job loss. (And more mundane factors, such as when a kid leaves home for college.) [Researchers Gregory] Sharp and [Matthew] Hall also accounted for homeowners who developed disabilities. The study found that about six percent of the sample transitioned from homeowners to renters. But black homeowners experienced an exit rate 68.2 percent higher than white homeowners. Although racial differences in trigger events were “minimal,” the report said, black homeowners were nevertheless more likely to “see their households shrink, to lose their jobs, and to suffer from substantial income losses” than white homeowners. So, even accounting for events that can lead to downward life trajectories, African Americans were much more likely to lose their status as homeowners – suggesting they are more vulnerable and subject to predatory, exploitative, and racially motivated lending practices.

Jamelle Bouie elaborates:

In addition to showing the consequences of past discrimination, Sharp and Hall argue that African-Americans have been victimized by a new system of market exploitation. Banks like Wells Fargo steered blacks and other minorities into the worst subprime loans, giving them less favorable terms than whites and foreclosing on countless homes. In a 2012 lawsuit, the ACLU and National Consumer Law Center alleged that the now-defunct New Century Financial, working with Morgan Stanley, pushed thousands of black borrowers into the riskiest loans, leaving many in financial ruin. As early as 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported that blacks were twice as likely to receive subprime loans. And in a New York University study published last year, researchers found that black and Hispanic families making more than $200,000 a year were more likely to receive subprime loans than white families making less than $30,000.

Together, all of this means that – according to Sharp and Hall – African-Americans are 45 percent more likely than whites to lose their homes.

Best Cover Song Ever?

A reader recommends an extreme genre-bender:

Great contest. Let me nominate an unconventional, but brilliant, submission by Girl Talk. You want genre mixing? How about something that includes parts of Black Sabbath, Ludacris, Dorrough, the Ramones and Missy Elliot, among others (plus equally amazing video):

Is it a traditional cover song? No, but if this is the future of the cover song, we are in extremely good hands …

Previous coverage of the Dish’s favorite mashup DJ here. Another reader:

I can’t be the first to submit Cowboy Junkies covering Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane”. This version is so good Reed himself changed the way he performed the song live:

Another:

How could I forget this one?! Another example of the cover being better than the original. This time it’s Sheryl Crow covering Cat Stevens’ “The First Cut is the Deepest”:

Another:

Please consider the Fine Young Cannibal’s cover of “Suspicious Minds”. Both Elvis and FYC had a hit with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibx5-nTLIns

Check out all the nominees here. Update from a reader:

Might I advocate for keeping the covers contest limited to “clean” covers and saving mashups for, possibly, a later contest? You’ll be hard pressed to beat Girl Talk at his own game, but you’ve got stuff like Pogo (with gardyn being among my faves there, and this boosh remix) competing for the “repurposed splicing” title (though let’s be honest. Girl Talk is in a league of his own with the breadth and depth of his mashups). Hell, you could have individual Girl Talk and Pogo contests (I would put “Minute by Minute” up against “Oh No” for Girl Talk)

But then beyond that, you’ve got other more focused, less all-over-the-place mashups:

DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album (Jay-Z’s Black Album vs. the Beatles’ White Album) [probably the gold standard as an album, but individual tracks out there can at least compete]
Sham Sham’s 99 Hearts (Jay-Z’s 99 Problems v. Architecture in Helsinki’s Heart It Races)
Psycosis’ In da G4 Over the Sea (Neutral Milk Hotel vs. various rappers)
Amerigo Gazaway’s Yasiin Gaye (Mos Def [Yasiin Bey] vs. Marvin Gaye)
the Notorious XX, Wait What (Notorious B.I.G v. the XX)

I find all of these, in their own way, to be amazing examples of how someone can make something completely new out of two songs that seem wildly different. Or maybe I’m just hoping you’ll crowdsource my efforts to find more mashups like this.

More Block Than Grant?

Josh Voorhees spells out his main concern with the Ryan plan, i.e., that the block grant mechanism he proposes for assistance programs like SNAP will result in benefit cuts:

Under the current setup, any American who qualifies for SNAP benefits receives them, regardless of how much money Washington has already spent on the program that year. But switching to a block grant would effectively set a cap on SNAP spending by stopping the program from automatically increasing along with need. That, critics warn, could leave the program unprepared and underfunded when the next economic downturn sends more Americans than expected scrambling to put food on the table.

The best case for those who want to protect SNAP and other social welfare funding would be for Congress to freeze current funding levels for the foreseeable future. That technically wouldn’t be a reduction in funding, but inflation would tell a different story. That’s what happened to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program during Washington’s last attempt at major welfare reform. Since that program was block-granted in 1996, funding has remained pretty much flat at $16.6 billion per year while the program has quietly lost nearly one-third of its spending power to inflation. Under Ryan’s proposal, food stamps would risk a similar fate.

To illustrate this point, Andrew Flowers imagines that the Ryan plan had been in place during the recession that began in 2007 and calculates how big a hit the program would have taken:

At the end of 2007, the number of SNAP recipients totaled more than 26 million, with cumulative expenditures at more than $33 billion. By 2013, expenditures had more than doubled to nearly $80 billion, with recipients surging to about 47 million. If funding had remained constant, the average monthly benefit would have fallen from $133 (its actual number in 2013) to about $53.

The impact of these safety-net programs is dependent not just on how the funding is delivered — whether as separate programs or one catch-all Opportunity Grant — but also on how the programs respond to economic conditions. It’s the difference between leaning back too far in a rocking chair and on a bar stool.

Mike Konczal also looks to the 90s for historical clues as to how a block grant system would fare:

Rather than a “welfare reform — yay or nay?” conversation, it would be really useful if people arguing for the block-granting of the entire anti-poverty agenda would point out what they do and do not like about what happened in the 1990s. Especially as proponents hold up welfare reform as the model.

As Matt Bruenig notes, the work requirements and other restrictions go against the concept of subsidiarity. Greenstein writes, “the block grant would afford state and local officials tantalizing opportunities to use some block grant funds to replace state and local funds now going for similar services…That’s what happened under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant.” In retrospect, TANF didn’t survive the business cycle, and it clearly has cut spending by cutting the rolls. Is that what people want to accomplish with food stamps, which have done wonders to boost childhood life outcomes? If not, what can be done other than assert that this time will be different?

Meanwhile, Max Ehrenfreund argues that a universal basic income is a more conservative solution to poverty than what Ryan proposes:

Another reason to see why a universal basic income is more conservative than Ryan’s block grant proposal is to compare it to other aspects of his plan. The tax code offers a yearly bonus to poor people who work, called the earned-income tax credit. It is another one of Friedman’s good ideas, and liberals should support it as well because it helps the poor get by, as Matt O’Brien argues. Ryan, like President Obama, wants to expand the earned-income tax credit for adults without children.

Yet if the goal is really to reward the poor and out of work for finding jobs, then this tax credit isn’t a perfect solution. The bonus is not available for those who earn a little more money, so the working poor have less of a financial reason to aim for a raise. They’ll pay a larger share of their income in taxes when they do. A universal basic income would solve this problem. Your payment from the government doesn’t get smaller if you start making more money.