Author: Patrick Appel

Christie Threads The Needle

by Patrick Appel

Allahpundit sees through Christie’s recent actions:

Last week he signed a bunch of minor gun-control bills, then vetoed one that would have banned .50-caliber rifles. He vetoed the Democratic bill easing access to medical marijuana for sick kids, but promised he’d sign a new one if they made a few tweaks. Today he’s signing a bill that’ll ban “gay conversion therapy” from being administered to people under 18, but he’s also committing to supporting NJ’s Republican candidate for Senate despite expectations that he’d stay out of the race. Expect three more months of this from Christie — a little for the left to protect his gubernatorial bid and a little for the right to protect his presidential ambitions — and then a tilt towards conservatism once he’s reelected.

Chris Cillizza tries to compare Christie to past presidential candidates and comes up short:

The truth of the matter is that Christie is surprisingly hard to pin down in terms of who he most resembles from the past of the Republican party. He is a northeastern Republican but not nearly the moderate (or liberal) that Giuliani is. He is a pragmatist but not in the vein of a former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman who wanted the party to overhaul itself in the midst of the 2012 race. He’s a real populist, not someone trying to act like regular people ala Mitt Romney in 2012. Here’s how one Christie ally described the governor: “Christie’s a conservative, but he’s not angry about it.”

The struggle to create a Christie analog worries Democrats since there’s no blueprint for how to run against him if he does wind up as the Republican nominee in 2016.

Marijuana Is Going Mainstream

by Patrick Appel

At Hempfest, the Seattle Police Department handed out Doritos with a special educational message:

Reihan thinks the stigma against marijuana is fading:

[T]he deeper shift is not so much political as cultural. Pew has found that the stigma against marijuana use is quickly evaporating. In 2006, 50 percent of Americans maintained that smoking marijuana was “morally wrong,” a share that has fallen to 32 percent as of 2013. Not surprisingly, marijuana use has increased as the stigma against it has faded. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime reports that the annual prevalence of cannabis use has increased from 10 percent of the general population (persons 15-64 years of age) in 2007 to 14.1 percent in 2010. By way of comparison, the annual prevalence of cannabis use is less than half as high in Uruguay. Marijuana is no longer seen as a drug for people on society’s fringes, or the exclusive preserve of hippies and hip-hop devotees. It is used by an impressively wide range of Americans, many of whom use it for banal purposes like reducing stress.

For better or for worse, voters are far more likely to favor marijuana legalization if they think of marijuana users as “people like us” and not “people like them.” So I’d guess that marijuana legalization in some form is all but inevitable.

How To Get More Egyptian Blood On Our Hands

by Patrick Appel

A National Review editorial urges America to “back Egypt’s military.” It claims that the “military’s horrific violence … does not alter the U.S.’s calculus”:

The Muslim Brotherhood and the military government are now at war, and the latter remains the best hope for securing American interests and, ultimately, a free Egypt. We should therefore continue our financial and matériel support for the Egyptian military and maintain as close a relationship as possible to push the government toward our objectives.

In Commentary, Michael Rubin is more unhinged:

So long as the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to turn back the clock, impose its hateful and intolerant ideology upon Egyptians of all religiosities and religions, and refuses to abide by the pathway to transitional elections, and so long as it continues to fight in the streets, then it should suffer the consequences of its actions. And if those consequences result in exponentially higher Brotherhood casualties than army casualties, then so be it. That is the truest path to peace.

Ali Gharib pushes back:

The Muslim Brotherhood is a retrograde, conservative religious movement. In their ham-handed year-long reign over Egypt, they exposed themselves as lacking a serious commitment to democratic principles, such as inclusion and protection of minority rights. But it’s also the largest and best organized political force in Egypt. Rubin’s notion that the Brotherhood should be bloodied into submission represents exactly the same foundational flaw seen in the Brotherhood’s brief rule. Rubin demands, in fashion of old, hard-nosed Republican realists, that the U.S. continue its partnership with the Egyptian military, even amid its massacre of its own citizens. He’s their perfect, and willing, partner.

Larison counters National Review:

The NR editors find the violence earlier this week to be “horrific,” but their preferred policy ensures not only that there will be more of it, but that the U.S. will be actively supporting the most heavily-armed side as it commits new outrages. Instead of distancing the U.S. from the crackdown in Egypt, they would like Washington to be a full partner in it. That means having “as close a relationship as possible” with the government that just committed what is by some accounts the worst one-day massacre of civilian protesters by government forces since Tiananmen.

Screwing College Kids Has Bipartisan Support

by Patrick Appel

types of debt[1]

Matt Taibbi tackles the college loan industry and the political machinations that enable it:

Democrats – who, incidentally, receive at least twice as much money from the education lobby as Republicans – like to see the raging river of free-flowing student loans as a triumph of educational access. Any suggestion that saddling befuddled youngsters with tens of thousands of dollars in school debts is somehow harmful or counterproductive to society is often swiftly shot down by politicians or industry insiders as an anti-student position. The idea that limitless government credit might be at least enabling high education costs tends to be derisively described as the “Bennett hypothesis,” since right-wing moralist and notorious gambler/dick/hypocrite Bill Bennett once touted the same idea. …

Conservatives, meanwhile, with their usual “Fuck everybody who complains about anything unless it’s us” mentality, tend to portray the student-loan “problem” as a bunch of spoiled, irresponsible losers who are simply whining about having to pay back money they borrowed with their eyes wide open. When Yale and Penn recently began suing students who were defaulting on their federal Perkins loans, a Cato Institute analyst named Neal McCluskey pretty much summed up the conservative take. “You could take a job at Subway or wherever to pay the bills,” he said. “It seems like basic responsibility to me.”

Paul Campos recommends the article:

The most interesting revelation in this important and disturbing piece is that, by its own estimates, the government ends up collecting close to or even more than the original principal balance on student loans that default.

(Chart from Mother Jones)

Greatness Isn’t Graded On A Curve

by Patrick Appel

Gregory Djerejian is disappointed with Obama’s foreign policy:

[T]he President does have one thing going in his favor. The opposition party would have mounted an even more disastrous foreign policy, I suspect, proactively blundering about saber-rattling with the usual recycled neo-con nostrums, bogging us down in even more theaters than at present. Obama at least has spared us these indignities, ‘leading from behind’ adventures like Libya (and its ugly hangovers) apart. But it is not a particularly proud legacy to say ‘at least I was better than the other guy would have been’. This is not the stuff of a great Presidency, at least when it comes to foreign policy.

Of course, there has been and is much work to accomplish at home, and while not the topic here, whether jobs, infrastructure, Wall Street reform, and more; we should not conclude the Administration necessarily covered itself in glory there either, beyond the easy myths that ‘but for’ pork-infested stimulus, QE-infinity and serial bailouts Great Depression II beckoned (this is not to take away from the gravity of the economic situation we faced in late ’08 and early ’09, nor some of the Administration’s crisis management at the time, or indeed, the prior Administration’s). But while I understand a great power can only remain so from a base of strongly rooted strength at home, and Obama’s apparent focus on domestic politics therefore is not ill-advised, it is another thing to look alternatively peeved, bored, listless and simply largely adrift on foreign policy. Leaders, whether Sisi or Putin, have noticed. We simply must do better, and please, this does not mean better, or more, speeches. It means strategic execution of statecraft in a turbulent, unsettled age of great geopolitical transition, one of the Presidency’s most solemn responsibilities, or at least one might hope, a solemn aspiration. And its manifest absence represents a season of disappointments the international community can ill afford at this juncture.

The Smell Of Rain

by Patrick Appel

Explained:

[O]ne of the main causes of this distinctive smell is a blend of oils secreted by some plants during arid periods. When a rainstorm comes after a drought, compounds from the oils—which accumulate over time in dry rocks and soil—are mixed and released into the air. The duo also observed that the oils inhibit seed germination, and speculated that plants produce them to limit competition for scarce water supplies during dry times.

How Do You Outlaw Evil?

by Patrick Appel

California Lawmakers Push To Tax And Regulate Ammunition Sales

Even though he admits that gun massacres are “statistically rare,” Gopnik wants to do much more to prevent them. Money quote:

Though, from a cold-blooded accounting point of view, we might be able to survive many more 9/11s, the shiver that one feels writing that sentence reveals its falseness. The nation might survive it, but we would not, in the sense that our belief in ourselves, our feeling for our country, our core sense of optimism about the future, would collapse with repeated terrorist attacks. And so it is with gun massacres, whether in Aurora or Newtown or the next place. Our sense of what is an acceptable and unacceptable risk for any citizen, let alone child, to endure, our sense of possible futures to consider—above all, our sense, to borrow a phrase from the President, of who we are, what we stand for, the picture of our civilization we want to look at ourselves and present to the world—all of that is very much at stake even if the odds of any given child being killed are, blessedly, small. Laws should be designed to stop likely evils; it’s true, not every possible evil. But some possible evils are evil enough to call for laws just by their demonstrated possibility. There are a few things a society just can’t bear, and watching its own kids killed in the classroom, even every once in a while, is one of them.

(Photo: Rounds of .223 rifle ammuntion sits on the counter at Sportsmans Arms on April 2, 2013 in Petaluma, California. In the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut school massacare, California State lawmakers are introducing several bills that propose taxing and regulating sales of ammunition. Another bill is aimed to require a background check and annual permit fee to purchase any ammunition. By Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Marriage Equality Strengthens Marriage

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

All of the responses to your post about the stigma of cheap weddings pretty much underline the point Noah Millman was making in his response to Ross Douthat’s column. Douthat asked proponents of marriage equality to own up to the fact that the rise in interest in same-sex marriage has coincided on a timeline with the “decline” of marriage in our society and to admit that there might be some connection, whether it is apparent or not.

I believe the exact opposite. At a time when so many societal factors, including economics are making marriage less and less popular, the fight for marriage equality is one of the few things that actually promotes the benefits of marital bliss.

Two of your commenters point out that the typical wedding doesn’t cost $27,000, but actually costs $15,000. And what does that say to the larger point? That marriage is so inconsequential to so many heterosexuals that a price tag of $15,000 (not $27,000) is enough to dissuade them from tying the knot. And keep in mind that’s not the minimum cost of getting married… that’s just the cost of having a wedding that keeps up with the Joneses. And again, that price tag isn’t just dissuading people from having a big wedding… it’s keeping them from getting married altogether, something you could do at City Hall for a minimal cost.

That’s part of the bigger point. For a lot of people, getting married is as much about the wedding as it is about declaring your eternal love. It’s about dieting down to your best weight ever, buying an expensive outfit you’ll never wear again and inviting all your friends to witness it in the hopes they’ll talk about, tweet about it, envy you for it and shower you with enough gifts to offset the cost of throwing the party in the first place.

Weddings and marriage are all about stigmas, and once large parts of society removed the stigma of living together and raising children without the party and without the paper, similarly large segments of society just opted out of the whole thing. Once we stopped stigmatizing divorce and went from a society that wouldn’t elect a divorced President to one that doesn’t blink at having morality preached to it by a thrice-divorced man, divorce rates shot up too.

At a time when the sanctity and status of marriage appear to be at an all time low, the fight for marriage equality is reminding us that marriage can still be a beautiful and treasured institution. Suggesting that it is part of the problem is akin to noting that every time there is a fire, fire trucks show up and maybe if we got rid of the trucks, we’d have a lot fewer fires.

Andrew Sprung recently made related points:

Gay activists, or simply the rising visibility of gay couples, have made marriage cool again. They’ve raised its value in my eyes, or rather made me a little more conscious of its value, which is pretty much the same thing.  And I think that the drive for gay marriage has raised the institution’s value materially by making the whole society think hard about what it’s really about.

The west has valorized marriage for true love, as the free choice of two people who decide they’re right for each other, for more than a century. That ideal was getting a little worn around the edges, pecked at by perspectives from biology, and psychology, and probability, and economics, and political ideology — and by postmodern skepticism generally. In real terms, too, the institution as we knew it has eroded, thanks first to divorce and then by advancing tide of out-of-wedlock births.

Gay marriage is not going to change that, or arrest change in this ever-changing but indestructible human institution. But it has made the enduring reality of individual choice and the eternal viability of lifelong commitment and the value and utility of two-parent families a bit clearer.

Map Of The Day

by Patrick Appel

Female Morality Rates

Bill Gardner flags an article [paywalled] that found “female mortality rates increased in 42.8% of counties (male mortality rates increased in only 3.4%).” The geographic breakdown of female mortality rates is mapped above:

This trend is amazing in a historical context. Overall US life expectancy had been increasing steadily over the decades. Before seeing data like these, I had the simple view that increasing life expectancy was part of a general increase in human well-being, powered by the steady growth in economic well-being. In fact, US GDP per capita increased from $24,400 in 1992 to $44,600 in 2006 (in current US $). This is a huge shot for the average American (although it was less for the median American). But a large subgroup of women was apparently left behind.

Does Stretching Do You Any Good?

by Patrick Appel

Maybe not:

Just why stretching hampers performance is not fully understood, although the authors of both of the new studies write that they suspect the problem is in part that stretching does exactly what we expect it to do. It loosens muscles and their accompanying tendons. But in the process, it makes them less able to store energy and spring into action … Of course, the new studies’ findings primarily apply to people participating in events that require strength and explosive power, more so than endurance. But “some research speaks in favor” of static stretching impairing performance in distance running and cycling, [Dr. Goran Markovic, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Zagreb] said.