Andrew Sullivan

Dolphins Have Names

The evidence that dolphins use signature whistles like names has been building since they were first discovered in the 1960s. They can convey a dolphin’s identity, as well as its mood and motivation. Individuals invent their own whistles at a few months of age, possibly with some influence from their mums. They’ll keep the same call for decades, although males sometimes change theirs to resemble the whistle of a new ally.

The whistles are clearly important, since they account for half of all the calls that wild dolphins make. They can mimic each other’s signatures, but they usually call with their own, perhaps to broadcast their identity and keeping in touch while swimming.

Ask A Window-View Champ Anything

Doug Chini, who nailed the vast majority of the 42 contests he has entered so far, takes questions from readers:

What do you do professionally?

I’m a corporate lawyer in New York City, which actually gives you the discipline to fight through some of the harder searches.

How much time do you typically put in for each contest?

It varies. I typically spend 10-15 minutes just analyzing the image and on occasion, as with last week’s Mostar view, the answer pops right out. But for difficult ones, and if I have time, I can spend several hours over the course of the weekend. In those cases, as with writing, it makes sense to work in small stretches and come back with fresh eyes.

What was your all-time favorite VFYW contest?

Well, in terms of the ones I’ve found it would have to be the El Nido view in the Philippines (VFYW #153). Tracking down the actual window required plotting dozens of images from the local cliffs on a time-line. By the end of that process my computer’s desktop looked like the floor of Baker Street after Sherlock Holmes spent a night digging through a stack of old newspapers.

The most amusing contest, however, was VFYW #116, which I never found. I normally begin a search by adjusting the image’s brightness and contrast, but when I did so that week, boy was I in for a surprise. I’ll let the readers go back and, er, reflect on that one.

What are the most common red herrings?

Recently it’s been red tile roofs. Whenever we get a Mediterranean view, there’s invariably a group of readers who think it’s California because of those roofs, but it rarely is. More broadly, certain architectural characteristics, like shanty construction, are common across a wide swathe of the planet, but people tend to assume they’re specific to regions they’ve previously traveled to. Unless you’re certain, I think it’s better to cast a wide net at the beginning of the search rather than develop tunnel vision.

Do you ever reach a point with some contests when you just admit to yourself that you’re stumped and give up?

Not really, because I rarely push too hard for an extended stretch of time. Instead, I’ll plug away right up to the deadline with whatever snatches of free time are available, even if it means searching on the elliptical at the gym.

Which VFYW victory were you most proud of?

That’s a hard one. Cork (VFYW #117) comes to mind first, as I found it just as I was about to turn the computer off for the night. And the Rohrmoos view (VFYW #148) in Austria required a pure brute-force search because there were no good clues. When I found that one I felt like Rocky running up the steps of the Philly Museum of Art (except swap Stallone with a dork sitting at a computer).

But if we’re talking “pride,” I’d have to say Sarlat-la-Caneda (VFYW #158). I only had one day to work on it, which meant I had to quickly narrow down the likely area using small details until I could locate the final, critical clue. (If the Dish staff allows, I may send in a detailed visual in the next month or so that shows how that one played out.)

What are some photo clues that the average person might not think would be helpful?

The most prosaic of details, like garbage cans, traffic signs and chimneys are often fairly specific to a region or country and can narrow down the search area. Also, the position of satellite dishes and the direction of shadows can give you a sense for the compass direction of the picture, which helps when searching satellite imagery.

Our previous co-champions, who we honored for our 100th contest, also respond:

What do you do professionally?

Mike: Electrical engineer

Yoko: Nursing

How much time do you typically put in for each contest?

Mike: About eight hours, usually a few hours at a time over Saturday and Sunday. About half my time is typically spent documenting the location. (I did most of the documentation – that’s why my time is longer than Yoko’s).

Yoko: It depends… from 15 minutes to the whole weekend. We usually found the window on Saturday morning, otherwise, we couldn’t go out. Typically, 3 hours or so.

What was your all-time favorite contest?

Mike: Dhaka, Bangladesh. The part I regret is that Yoko was traveling that weekend, so I found it myself. It turned out to be a great win, because it was a solo win – nobody else got the building – but I wish Yoko had been part of it.

Yoko: My favorite was Edinburgh. It was a lovely scene. The cobblestone street in the photo helped me find the window. (Note from Mike: Yoko found this window in about fifteen minutes).

Which VFYW victory were you most proud of?

Mike: #68, Ulaanbaatar. I had found windows before that, but this was the first one Yoko and I solved together. She found the window after we talked about the clues, and I wrote up the entry.

Yoko: Dhaka. Mike found the window by himself. Usually, I helped him too much.

What are some photo clues that the average person might not think would be helpful?

Mike: Curbs and utility poles.

Yoko: Hmm… Electric utility cables (how messy, how old…) can be clues. Also, the window frames sometimes tell me many things.

What are the most common red herrings?

Mike: License plates. There are so many, and they change so quickly. It’s easy to look at a plate and think you know where it’s from (or even to look it up on a license plate site), only to discover that it hasn’t been used for years, or even worse, that the same design is used in myriad countries or states.

Yoko: Mike’s advice. He always says, “It must be China!”

Breaking Hamas

Jeffrey Goldberg offers a reliably bellicose strategy to achieve peace in the Middle East:

Engineer the ouster of Hamas from the Gaza Strip. Both the Palestinian Authority and Israel see Hamas as a bitter enemy; both sides understand that Hamas is an impediment to peace talks. The end of Hamas’s rule — the Gaza Strip constituting about half of what would be a future Palestinian state — could set the stage for actual, fruitful negotiations. …

The White House could lobby Hamas’s remaining benefactors in Turkey and Qatar to trim their funding. If such lobbying failed, Congress could “pull strings to speed up delivery of or withhold the advanced weapons systems that both countries are eagerly awaiting, depending upon how the conversation goes. Turkey, for example, is expecting Sidewinder missiles and Chinook helicopters, and it would like to purchase Predator and Reaper drones. Qatar, for its part, is expecting delivery of Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures (LAIRCM) Systems, and 500 Javelin-Guided Missiles.”

Just so long as nothing is done to halt the settlements, and nothing is asked of Israel, while Hamas is targeted. That’s the neoconservative idea of balance. Jonathan Schanzer likewise insists the military takeover in Egypt has given the US the chance:

Since Morsy’s ouster, the military has been unleashed: It has arrested at least 29 Brotherhood financiers, including at least one significant contributor to Hamas’s coffers, according to a senior Israeli security official. It has also reportedly deployed 30,000 troops to the Sinai and purportedly destroyed roughly 800 of the 1,000 tunnels connecting Egypt to Gaza. Ala al-Rafati, the Hamas economy minister, recently told Reuters that these operations cost Hamas $230 million — about a tenth of Gaza’s GDP.

All of this presents U.S. Secretary of State Kerry with a rare opportunity to try to hasten the group’s financial demise. And it is in his interest to do so. The group, after all, carried out suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets in the 1990s to torpedo the peace process. It’s a fair bet that Hamas will launch a new campaign of violence now that talks are ramping back up.

More Dish on the potential of the new talks here and here.

What Does Stop-And-Frisk Accomplish?

TNC is unimpressed by its track record:

I am not totally opposed to policies in which individuals surrender some of their rights for the betterment of the whole. The entire State is premised on such a surrendering. But at every stop that surrendering should be questioned and interrogated, to see if it actually will produce the benefits which it claims. In the case of Stop and Frisk you have a policy bearing no evidence of decreasing violence, and bearing great evidence of increasing tension between the police and the community they claim to serve. It is a policy which regularly results in the usage of physical force, but rarely results in the actual recovery of guns.

Sullum adds that “debate about the effectiveness of New York’s stop-and-frisk program is interesting, but it should not be dispositive”:

For that matter, the demograpic profile of the people who are usually hassled by the cops, while it certainly should bother anyone who claims to be concerned about racial profiling or the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, is not the most decisive argument against stop and frisk, which is the Fourth Amendment. As Mike Riggs noted yesterday, [NYPD Commissioner Ray] Kelly seems to think everyone detained by the cops must be guilty of something. “The notion anyone stopped has done absolutely nothing wrong is not really the case,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, because police “need reasonable suspicion to stop someone and question them.” Kelly not only confuses reasonable suspicion with guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; he assumes his cops really do have a sound legal basis for every stop they make and every pat-down they perform. That assumption is hard to credit, given that stops result in an arrest or summons only 12 percent of the time and pat-downs almost never discover guns. If the stop-and-frisk program is unconstitutional, as it appears to be, its putative effectiveness does not make it less so.

(Chart from a 2010 report (pdf) by the Center On Race, Crime And Justice)

Guess Which Buzzfeed Piece Is An Ad?

This one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one? There’s been an uptick lately in Pepsi stories, for some unfathomable reason. But before you look and find which one was formally paid for, ask yourself whether a copy-writer or a journalist wrote the following paragraph:

Pepsi announced second quarter earnings Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations. The company, which also owns snack company Frito-Lay and beverage brands Tropicana, Mountain Dew and Gatorade, among others, reported revenue of $16.8 billion and net income of $2 billion, both increases over the prior year’s figures.

Pepsi is currently under attack from activist investor Nelson Peltz, who wants the company to separate its soft drink and snack business. Pepsi is against such a move. Below is a pretty sweet chart that highlights some key items from Pepsi’s earnings report.

Who wrote the following headline – a copy-writer or a “journalist”?

10 Reasons Why Beyoncé, Pink And Britney Spears’ Epic Pepsi Commercial Can Never Be Topped

Or does it really matter any more? It’s all entertaining! Previous Dish on “enhanced advertorial techniques” here.

Donald Duck vs Adolf Hitler

Nathan Jolly revisits WWII-era Disney, when the company was creating war propaganda for the US government. The above cartoon, Der Fuehrer’s Face, was released in 1943:

Donald is portrayed as a slightly resistant/drone-like Nazi, living in a town where everything — clouds, trees, telegraph poles — is swastika-shaped. Donald is dragged out of bed by, oh, just Himmler, Goebbels and Mussolini, who force him to read Mein Kampf, give him piss-weak war rations, then kick him to a factory, where his job seems to be to make artillery shells and salute pictures of Hitler. This repetitive regime results in a manic episode where Donald begins twisting his body into the shape of a swastika, before flipping out and tripping balls, his world now a spinning rush of singing shells, shrieking snakes, screeching smoke whistles and untold horror. As this is a cartoon, and also 1943, it turns out Heir Duck’s army flirtation was but a dream, with the cartoon ending with a tomato thrown at Hitler’s face – as per film and television laws in the ‘40s.

Oh, and Disney won an Academy Award for the piece.

Breaking: Man Gets Off Online, Ctd

A reader writes:

You really struck a chord with the operative term on this one: consent. Compare this to the issues in my hometown of San Diego, where our mayor Bob Filner seems to be engaging in a pattern of very non-consensual sexual harassment. I didn’t vote for the guy, but I supported him once he was in office. Now most of his sane supporters and I want him gone. I can’t blame them – it speaks to a serious level of disrespect for other people.

Weiner’s actions were totally consensual. All other things being equal, I’d still vote for him if I was a New Yorker. Being a 29-year-old Millennial, I’ve gotten plenty sick of watching political careers get consumed by some good old fashioned hanky panky. Kennedy (and countless others) did that shit too; he just didn’t have a mechanism to accidentally get pics of his dick exposed to the masses.

The Speech Before The Battle

Josh Barro analyzes Obama’s economic speech from yesterday, the first in a series of speeches the president has planned on the subject:

It’s likely the White House’s real goal with these speeches is one they can’t say out loud: Defend status-quo policy, and the tepid recovery it is allowing, against any future crises that Republicans might manufacture.

Andrew Sprung sharpens that point:

If an extremist GOP, drunk with its budget war victories over Obama since 2011, rivets the entire nation by shutting down the government because Obama won’t agree to defund Obamacare, or threatens the nation with default because Obama won’t agree to ruinous new spending cuts on top of sequestration — then Obama’s sane, sober, repetitive, essentially centrist calls for long-term investment and commitment to the middle class should trigger a public opinion backlash against the GOP, just as Bill Clinton’s did when the Republicans shut down the government because the president wouldn’t agree to massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare … Obama has said that he won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling. He most definitely will not agree to spending bills that defund Obamacare implementation. Will events finally drive him to hold firm in some kind of full-scale showdown with intransigent Republicans?

That’s how I saw it. Obama shows his persistent attention to the economy, which has improved on his watch, while the GOP tends to their fanatical base and moves toward shutting down the entire government because they lost the last election and cannot bear to see the winner actually govern, even from the banal center. Beutler is on a similar page:

Whether this is the White House’s true intent or not, the speeches will have the effect of reminding the country, implicitly, that of all the things the government can do to improve the economy, a debt default threat is among the worst. Addressing the issue obliquely is actually key to preserving the fragile governing coalition he’s helped to build in the Senate, and to avoid the sense that he’s the one drawing battle lines. And If voters have the question of the country’s economic future in mind through the summer, it will make picking a debt limit fight all the more dangerous for the GOP, and certainly be preferable to blindsiding the country with a new round of brinksmanship that puts the fragile recovery on the line once again.

How Jon Cohn understood the purpose of the president’s speech:

Obama mentioned Republican obstructionism in his speech, not once but several times, and not in short bursts but for extended soliloquies. There’s a reason. Major fiscal fights loom—over how to pay for government services, and under what conditions to raise the nation’s borrowing limit. House Republicans are already warning of new attempts at brinkmanship—like threatening to shut down the government if Obama won’t agree to de-funding of his health care plan.

Wednesday’s speech was the beginning of an effort to remind the American people about the stakes in those fights, and who supports what. Obama’s not going to win over the conservative base of the Republican Party, obviously, but he’s having at least some success working with less extreme members, like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Not coincidentally, Obama chose his words carefully, criticizing a “a sizable group of Republican lawmakers” who have threatened not to raise the debt limit but also praising the “growing number of Republican Senators [who] are trying to get things done.”

Chait adds:

Obama’s ultimate goal is not merely to insulate himself from blame if and when House Republicans shut down the government or threaten to default on the debt, but to build a coalition with pragmatic Republicans to negotiate around Boehner’s back. It’s not totally hopeless: Mitch McConnell is fighting back a revolt among pragmatic Republicans, like John McCain, who want to compromise on the budget.

Suderman doubts that Obama can break the gridlock:

Obama’s insistence that he would do everything he could to break congressional gridlock only underscored how little there is he can do in response. “I will not allow gridlock, inaction or willful indifference to get in our way,” he said. “Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it. Where I can’t act on my own, I’ll pick up the phone and call CEOs, and philanthropists, and college presidents – anybody who can help – and enlist them in our efforts.” That’s right: The president is willing to pick up the phone and call philanthropists and college presidents, if that’s what it takes.

There isn’t, in other words, much he can do—or at least not much he can do that he also wants to do. And in Obama’s view, that seems to be the real problem.

And Drum wishes Obama’s speech had been bolder:

In what possible universe would bold new proposals break through the brick wall of modern Republican opposition to anything that’s not a tax cut for the rich? Obama could announce that John Galt has invented a free energy machine and just needs a small federal grant to commercialize it, and Republicans would oppose it. Obama could announce anything at all, and Republicans will reflexively oppose it.

The reason Obama should be bolder is not because it might “break through the resistance.” He should be bolder precisely because it wouldn’t make any difference. If you’re going to meet an adamantine wall no matter what you do, why not shoot for the stars? At least that way you’ve made it clear whose side you’re on.

AbFab Goes Royal

Had a coffee splutter this morning over this one:

William Sitwell, editorial director of John Brown Media, which publishes the Waitrose magazine, stands by the choice of Pippa. “Sales are soaring since she started writing for us,” he said recently, estimating that the circulation on the magazine has jumped from 1.5 million to 2.2 million. “She is a good cook and writer and works very hard,” he said, adding that she comes into the office once every month or two when they “bash out a few issues” and that “she has impressed the whole team here.”

My italics.

The Capitulation Of Samantha Power, Ctd

A reader writes:

I agree that it’s disappointing that Samantha Power censored herself in her nomination hearing and adopted the Washington line on some controversial subjects. But in criticizing the system that forces candidates to do so, you came down too hard on Power herself. Yes, it would be great if she took a stand and spoke her mind, but who would it serve if she jumped on her own sword? She might have put a dent in the system, but she might have just become a footnote in history, like Bork – used to caution future presidential appointees from speaking too candidly. Probably the latter.

You can’t look at Power’s career, or read Problem From Hell, and not come away thinking that she has a goal to use American power to serve humanitarian ends. Now that she is on the cusp of having a real, direct impact of US decision-making, should she speak the truth and likely claim only a moral victory, or hunker down, make some compromises and work to effect change from within? I sure can’t blame her for choosing the second option.

Another also sticks up for Power:

I would normally agree with you that watching confirmation hearings turn into Israel Day Parades is unsettling, and only confirms the worst stereotypes about Jewish control over Washington, etc. Hagel’s dance was particularly ridiculous, as Saturday Night Live (almost) pointed out.

However, it must be acknowledged that Power is up for UN Ambassador. While criticism of Israel is healthy and deserved, the UN takes this to new heights; no other country has been as lambasted and pilloried as Israel has. It is routinely called to task by a UN Human Rights Commission comprised of Cuba, Syria, Iran, etc. It is ridiculous and unfair, and only entrenches the Israeli right’s attitude of “they are all against us, screw em” that is a large part of the problem over there.

Whereas I didn’t care much for hearing Hagel swear allegiance to the Likud, it was nice to hear Power at least commit herself to defending Israel from the hypocrisy swamp that is the UN on this issue.