Month: July 2014

The Grey Lady Endorses Legal Weed

Over the weekend, the NYT editorial board declared that the “federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana”:

There are no perfect answers to people’s legitimate concerns about marijuana use. But neither are there such answers about tobacco or alcohol, and we believe that on every level — health effects, the impact on society and law-and-order issues — the balance falls squarely on the side of national legalization. That will put decisions on whether to allow recreational or medicinal production and use where it belongs — at the state level.

Well, now that Sarah Palin has picked the online subscription route and the NYT has embraced marijuana legalization, our work here at the Dish is nearly done. But sheesh, the whole hoop-la over there about it almost makes you think they’re ahead of the curve, as opposed to about twenty years too late. Almost twenty years since National Review endorsed it! Nonetheless, it’s not nothing:

It is worth noting this is the exact same way alcohol prohibition ended. The 21st amendment gave states the power to decide how alcohol is treated within their borders. While many states ended their own alcohol prohibitions right after some states keep their bans on alcohol going for years and even decades later. It wasn’t until 1966 when Mississippi become the last state to end its prohibition.

Hamilton Nolan needles the Times for being behind the times:

The only reason the Times gets attention for expressing this opinion is because it is the Times. This is not thought leadership. It is thought following. The Times’ endorsement of legal weed is remarkable not because we look to the Times for new or thought-provoking opinions, but because the Times is such a self-conscious, careerist, and cautious institution that if they want to legalize drugs, you know that shit is really mainstream now. It is the same sort of importance that you would attach to the Republican Party endorsing the legalization of marijuana.

Yep, there has been a sea change:

There is a shift going on in this debate, and it isn’t just that mainstream politicians and newspapers can now support legalization. It’s also that the central question of the debate has changed, and changed to what legalization advocates have been asking for a long time. Instead of asking “Is smoking marijuana good or bad?”, we’re now asking “Is marijuana prohibition better or worse than the alternative?”

The latter question doesn’t lend itself as easily to scare tactics or “This is your brain on drugs” rhetoric. And don’t get me wrong—the effect of marijuana on individuals is something we should keep talking about and researching. … But the policy debate should be about, well, policy. And policy is always about choices.

Mark Kleiman, as is his wont, wishes for a different sort of cannabis legalization:

As a matter of practical politics, our only choices may be a badly-implemented prohibition or a badly-implemented legalization.  (If so, I’m inclined to try the Devil I don’t know.)  So far, my attempts to put political and organizational muscle behind the idea of smart legalization have merely illustrated the wisdom of Ralph Yarborough’s maxim, “They ain’t nuthin’ in the middle of the road but yaller lines and dead armadillas.”  I don’t find life as political roadkill especially uncomfortable, but it does get frustrating. It’s not just that continued prohibition and commercial legalization are both bad ideas; it’s that the arguments for those two bad ideas leave no media space, or mindspace, for discussion of the good ideas that might lie between them.

The Fruits Of Liberal Interventionism

The US embassy in Libya was evacuated over the weekend:

The U.S. Embassy in Libya evacuated its personnel on Saturday because of heavy militia violence raging in the capital, Tripoli, the State Department said. About 150 personnel, including 80 U.S. Marines were evacuated from the embassy in the early hours of Saturday morning and were driven across the border into Tunisia, U.S. officials confirm to CNN.

Jamie Dettmer sees reason to believe the the embassy won’t be back to its usual operations anytime soon:

Classified documents, databases and sensitive equipment were either destroyed or taken along to Tunisia, which suggests that despite U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’ insistence that the closing of the embassy is only temporary, Libya could be without U.S. diplomatic representation for weeks and even months.

Freddie uses the upheaval in Libya to condemn liberals who supported the Libyan intervention:

When it comes to foreign policy, American political journalists and analysts fall into two camps: those who support every conceivable military operation imaginable, and those who take a kind of tick-tock approach to warmaking, being sure to balance their rejection of one conflict with the aggressive embrace of another, in order to prove how Very Serious they are in the village that is elite political media. A potential third alternative– a profoundly necessary alternative, given the last decade and a half of American failure– is a set of pundits and journalists who recognize that military intervention is almost always a disaster for both America and the people on whose behalf our military supposedly intervenes, and who therefore oppose military adventurism and aggressive foreign policy as a matter of principle. This third alternative essentially does not exist within connected, elite media. …

Libya is in chaos. Nothing was finished. Nothing was successful. The country is broken, utterly broken. The political apparatus is in shambles. Basic governance has failed. Militias vie for control. Ordinary citizens lack any control of their country and suffer without basic services. All of this was predictable. Some of us warned as much at the time. Like me!

Hayes Brown brings us the latest developments:

A massive oil complex in Libya was set ablaze this weekend due to a stray missile, with the resulting fire quickly raging out of control. The inferno serves as a perfect metaphor for a country in which militants and militias vie with the government for dominance in a system that hasn’t managed to rebuild after years of a dictator’s rule.

For more than two weeks now, rival militias have struggled for control of Tripoli International Airport in Libya’s capital. It was in the midst of that fighting that a tanker containing more than six million liters of petroleum caught fire when a missile one of the groups launched hit it directly, according to Libya’s state-owned National Oil Corporation (NOC). Making matters all the worse, the tanker is located near an area that “contains 90 million liters of fuel and cooking gas, hence there is a risk of a huge explosion should the fire spread,” the Wall Street Journal reports an oil official as saying.

Recent Dish on the battle for Libya’s airport here.

 

 

 

 

The Lie Behind The War, Ctd

After the Israeli police spokesman gaffed to the BBC that the casus belli of Netanyahu’s latest war on Gaza was a lie – that Hamas orchestrated the murders of three teens – Eli Lake sprang into action. You can tell where Eli is coming from by his opening sentence:

Over the weekend it appeared that an Israeli official conceded something very valuable to Hamas.

Actually something very valuable to anyone trying to figure out the truth. And the worries come from people of good faith around the world not just “pro-Palestinian activists,” as Lake describes all those outraged by the Netanyahu government’s collective punishment. So Lake re-reported the news. He couldn’t get the spokesman to repeat what he had told the BBC, but then concedes:

At issue is whether or not the two Hamas suspects were acting on orders from the group’s Gaza leadership. To date no Israeli officials have asserted that.

That’s the defense?

So, to recap: an Israeli spokesman said that the teen murders were done by a lone cell without authorization from Hamas in Gaza, and with no proof of any official Hamas involvement – indeed they denied having given the go-ahead. Yet Netanyahu simply declared “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay,” withheld critical information about the murder, whipped up public support, and used it to sweep across the West Bank, imprisoning hundreds of Hamas suspects – and all with no smoking gun at all. I mean you might be forgiven for thinking that Netanyahu, stung by a reconciliation between the PA and Hamas, decided to use the incident for yet another assault on the West Bank, to teach the PA a lesson, and then provoke a Hamas response from Gaza allowing him to blow the place to smithereens. None of this excuses Hamas’ war crimes against Israeli citizens. But it sure casts a darker hue to the motives in Jerusalem.

Banking On Change

The BRICS countries recently established $100-billion development bank that some say could rival the World Bank. Ali Burak Güven believes it could shake up the world of development financing:

[I]f its evolution even remotely parallels that of the World Bank, it might end up having a formative impact on economic policy-making and overall development strategy in the Global South.

To begin, while there is no shortage of national and regional development banks as well as private financiers of infrastructure projects, there is still a massive gap in development finance, estimated to be as high as $1 trillion per year. Many developing countries encountered significant financing problems during the global crisis of the late 2000s. This shortfall necessitated a surge in World Bank commitments, from an annual $25 billion in 2007 to about $60 billion in 2010. But commitments declined just as swiftly over the past few years, and as of 2013 stood at about $30 billion. Given these figures, the New Development Bank’s readily available $10 billion in paid-up capital and the extra $40 billion available upon request are not exactly pocket money for development financing.

Yet just as the World Bank was never simply a money lender, so too will the new bank represent far more than a mere pool of funds. The existing geostrategic and policy inclinations of its founding stakeholders imply a bigger role to play for the institution. In the process, it is bound to offer a formidable challenge to the World Bank’s financial prominence and so influence policy in the developing world.

Dingding Chen describes the BRICS bank as “a direct challenge” – though not a threat – to the IMF and World Bank:

Many view (here and here) the new BRICS bank as a response to the failed reforms at the IMF and World Bank as developing countries like China and India cannot increase their influence within those institutions. However, it should be kept in mind that the BRICS bank is not currently challenging the international liberal economic order. China and India are perhaps the two greatest beneficiaries of an open liberal economic order; and thus the BRICS bank should try to push the IMF and World Bank to be more open and transparent. Ultimately the competition between the BRICS bank and the IMF and World Bank should be about efficiency rather than a struggle between liberal vs. alternative economic philosophies. In this sense, there is a strong complementary relationship between the BRICS bank, the IMF and the World Bank.

Branko Milanovic wonders whether the bank can develop a “coherent ideological package to rival the Washington consensus policies”:

In their new bank, the BRICS will have a similarly cheap and useful instrument with which to wean former Third World countries off their dependence on Washington and impose their own agenda instead. The challenge will be to provide a similarly coherent ideological package to rival the Washington consensus policies of balanced budgets, currency convertibility and privatization. A shared economic and political ideology, very much present among the Western countries, from Bretton Woods in 1944 to the euro crisis now, is totally lacking among the BRICS. It is not even present in an embryonic form. Chinese economic policies and Chinese development precepts for the rest of the world (if they exist at all) have little in common with Brazilian or South African policies. In order to be really useful to its founders, the BRICS bank will have to not only learn to practice multilateralism but also define its own approach to development.

This likely lack of either procedural or economic rules for lending is the biggest threat to the BRICS bank. If its only ideology is to be anti-Washington and to do things by pure pragmatism – that is, to lend to whomever the sufficiently important members decide to support – it will fail ignominiously.

Meanwhile, Benn Steil and Dinah Walker are skeptical of the venture:

The irony is that India and China are the biggest beneficiaries of the current development bank architecture. They are the World Bank’s largest borrowers. And Brazil is number 9. … [T]hese three nations have $66 billion in World Bank loans outstanding, 32 percent more than the new BRICS bank’s entire initial subscribed capital of $50 billion. So it would appear that for the foreseeable future the World Bank will remain a considerably more important source of development financing for the BRICS than their own development bank.

Taking In The Theater Of War

ISRAEL-PALESTINIANS-CONFLICT-GAZA

Jan Mieszkowski suggests there’s little to be gained by watching conflicts unfold in real time:

As movie and television-news producers have lamented for the past decade, people aren’t particularly enthralled by battlefield scenes – at least not for very long. Modern militarism, billed as the greatest show on earth, consistently fails to live up to our expectations. Audiences are beset by indifference and even boredom, quickly moving on to the next story.

No matter how carefully we scrutinize the battlefield, it never has enough to tell us about what makes war right or wrong, avoidable or inevitable. Far from offering insights into the mysteries of history and politics, these spectacles give us a sense that we are further away than ever from understanding their causes, their implications, and their consequences. Combat makes for a disappointing program – we approach it with great expectations, prepared to encounter essential truths of human existence, but we leave empty-handed. Whatever controversy may arise from the scenes of Israelis eating popcorn as they watch the bombing of Gaza, the most striking fact is just how unenlightening the show is likely to have been.

(Photo: Israeli residents, mostly from the southern Israeli city of Sderot, sit on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, on July 12, 2014, to watch the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants. Sderot has suffered rocket attacks from Gaza for years. By Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

Hathos Red Alert

Yes, there is now an online video channel for the former half-term governor. (Conor watches so you don’t have to.) The subscription costs ten five times the Dish’s. Not even Roger Ailes can cramp her style now. Twitter? Well … #PalinTVShows is going strong:

Update from Rob Tisinai’s Facebook page:

“The Sarah Palin Channel, which costs $9.95 per month or $99.95 for a one-year subscription…” Which will actually be 6-month subscription when she quits halfway through.

Update from the math department: I screwed up yet again on a very basic math calculation. I’m like Montaigne …

Doing Right By Dairy

Josh Harkinson considers the environmental costs of no-kill dairies:

If all dairies became slaughter-free, we’d need three to four times as many dairy cows to produce the same amount of milk, which would mean adding at least 27 million additional cows to our herds. Those added cows would each year produce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to four large coal-fired power plants. We’d also need more meat cows to keep up with the demand for products such as veal and dog food. Pasturing all of these cows would displace wildlife or agricultural crops, straining biodiversity and increasing food prices.

Perhaps bioengineered vegan gouda is the answer?

The journey towards vegan cheese began a few years ago, when synthetic biologist Marc Juul started thinking about the genetic engineering possibilities. Now, Juul and a group of people from two Bay Area biohacker spaces, Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious, are trying to create a finished product in time for the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition – a global synthetic biology competition–in October. … In order to get baker’s yeast to produce milk proteins, the team scoured animal genomes to come up with milk-protein genetic sequences. Those sequences are then inserted into yeast, where they can produce milk protein. Once the protein is purified, it needs to be mixed with a vegan milk-fat replacement, sugar (not lactose, so that the cheese will be edible by the lactose intolerant among us), and water to create vegan milk. Then the normal cheese-making process can commence. The team wants to start with a cheddar or gouda to satisfy vegan cravings for hard cheese.

The Rise Of Agriculture

dish_verticalfarm

Tim Heath and Yiming Shao see it in vertical farming:

It has been suggested that a 30-story, 27,800,000-square-meter vertical farm could be achieved within one New York City block. That farm could feed 50,000 people, providing 2,000 calories for every person each day. With results like that as a prospect, it’s easy to see why enthusiasts see vertical farms as the future. … Vertical farms do indeed have many advantages. They would enable us to produce crops all year round using 70 percent less water. We wouldn’t need to use agro-chemicals and could avoid the adverse environmental factors that affect yield and quality in more traditional farming. And if food were grown in urban areas in the first place, we could eliminate the financial and environmental costs of importing food into towns and cities.

And in fact, we have the technology to do it:

We can already cultivate plants without soil and recycle the water used to deliver clean indoor farming, for example. Hydroponics, where plant roots are grown in nutrients dissolved in water, is one option. This plant-growing technique can be combined with traditional aquaculture to raise fish or prawns – a farming technique known as aquaponics. Another way to grow plants is aeroponics, which involves growing suspended plants by spraying the roots with a nutrient-rich water solution.

But even though it has been more than than 20 years since the concept was first proposed and the pressure of climate change continues to mount, vertical farming is still not a reality. The two biggest problems have been financial and technological viability, particularly when it comes to actually building these high-rise spaces.

Previous Dish on vertical farming here.

(Image of 4 vertical farms surrounding a couryard in a Shanghai Sustainable Masterplan model via Except Integrated Sustainability)

Best-Selling Out?

What’s the real measure of a book’s success? Tim Parks considers how big sales numbers affect the literary landscape:

Would J. K. Rowling have written seven Harry Potters if the first hadn’t sold so well? Would Knausgaard have written six volumes of My Struggle, if the first had not been infinitely more successful (in Norway) than his previous novels? Sales influence both reader and writer—certainly far more than the critics do.

In general I see nothing “wrong” with this blurring of lines between literary and genre fiction. In the end it’s rather exciting to have to figure out what is really on offer when a novel wins the Pulitzer, rather than taking it for granted that we are talking about literary achievement. But it does alert us to the fact that as any consensus on aesthetics breaks down, bestsellerdom is rapidly becoming the only measure of achievement that is undeniable.

Or put it another way: a critic who likes a book, and goes out on a limb to praise it, may begin to feel anxious these days if the book is not then rewarded by at least decent sales, as if it were unimaginable that one could continue to support a book’s quality without some sort of confirmation from the market. So while in the past one might have grumbled that some novels were successful only because they had been extravagantly hyped by the press, now one discovers the opposite phenomenon. Books are being spoken of as extraordinarily successful in denial of the fact that they are not.