Author: Andrew Sullivan

Alice Robb takes note of a remote village in Papua New Guinea where locals call the deceased on their cellphones:

[The villagers] have long been confident in their ability to talk to the dead, believing they can communicate with the world of spirits in dreams, visions, and trances induced by special rituals. The introduction of mobile phones has opened up new possibilities: The Ambonwari believe they can use them to contact their dead relatives, whose numbers they obtain from healers. And once they reach them, they can ask for anything. “It is a general conviction,” write [anthropologists Borut] Telban and [Daniela] Vavrova, “that once people know the phone numbers of their deceased relatives they can ring and ask the spirits to put money in their bank accounts.”

I asked Telban if the villagers are discouraged that they never get through to the spirit world; he assured me that they’re not. They might assume the spirits aren’t available. And they ring random numbers so often that occasionally they do reach someone, whose voice they attribute to a spirit.

Meanwhile, in the US, hardly anyone seems to use their cellphones to call the living:

In fact, the use of voice calls – which has been dropping since 2007, the year Apple introduced the original iPhone – has fallen off a cliff lately. As of last year, cell providers in the U.S. are now making more money per user from data use than voice calling. (The U.S. is only the seventh nation to reach the data-voice tipping point — it happened in countries like Japan as early as 2011.) A recent survey of 7,000 U.S. high-school seniors found that only 34 percent made phone calls every day — far fewer than the number who texted or used apps like Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. And companies like AT&T and Verizon, which saw the data boom coming years ago, have been spending more and more on new, bigger LTE data networks, while essentially giving away their voice plans for free.

Matt Lewis sums up “perhaps the biggest thing we can all learn” from Thad Cochran’s victory:

Adapt, and you will overcome. … Essentially, [GOP strategists] conceded that if the election were about who can be the most conservative, Cochran couldn’t beat McDaniel. So rather than playing a losing hand, they changed the game. Cochran appealed to African Americans and other Democratic base voters — who can vote in GOP races in Mississippi’s open primary system, and who would prefer to be represented by the relatively pro-government Cochran than by the anti-government McDaniel. Basically, Cochran’s plan B was to woo Democrats. And it worked. (I realize this was a unique case, but what if Republicans always hustled this hard to win over African American voters…)

Serwer addresses the backlash from the base:

Conservatives may cry foul over McDaniel’s loss, whether or not it’s proven that Democrats made the difference. But there’s nothing wrong with crossing over to vote for the lesser of two evils in a primary in a place like Mississippi, where the result of the Republican primary for statewide office usually determines the outcome of the general election. It’s not even unique to Mississippi or this election – those of us who live in Washington, D.C. are quite familiar with the concept. The Democratic Primary almost always determines who will win the general election of citywide office in D.C., people who would be Republicans anywhere else register as Democrats so as to have a voice in the process. McDaniel himself voted Democratic a decade ago.

Alec MacGillis adds, “It is hard to overstate the significance and historical ironies of black Mississippians crossing party lines to rescue a senior member of the state’s Republican establishment.” Amy Davidson challenges McDaniel for crying “irregularities” in the face of those ironies:

What does he consider “regular” at a polling place in Mississippi? Whom would he like to see there?

Perhaps it might have occurred to him to appeal to black voters, who do make up more than a third of the state. Strategic voting, of the winking kind, is when you vote for the other party’s weaker or more marginal candidate, hoping that it will help your side further along. If Mississippi’s black voters were really the pawns of national machine-politics operatives, they might have been directed to get McDaniel in. His nomination would maybe give the Democratic candidate a chance that he wouldn’t usually have in Mississippi, or maybe McDaniel would have just embarrassed the G.O.P. nationally, as he had shown every indication he might do. (In addition to the break-ins, there was “Mamacita”-gate.)

But, in the past few weeks, Cochran, a deep conservative himself, made a real, targeted pitch to black Mississippians that, given the choice, he would be a better senator, and enough black voters and community leaders bought it. That’s how elections work, though not how they worked for generations in Mississippi, where people were killed in living memory just for the right to register to vote.

Jaime Fuller also responds to McDaniel contesting the results:

There is one section of Mississippi election law that the McDaniel team seems to think could work to their advantage. That section reads: “No person shall be eligible to participate in any primary election unless he intends to support the nominations made in which he participates.” In other words, if the Democratic voters who helped Cochran win plan to vote for his opponent, former Rep. Travis Childers, in the fall, that would, theoretically, be against Mississippi law.

“I wouldn’t be too optimistic if I were [McDaniel]” says John M. Bruce, head of the University of Mississippi political science department. “This issue has already been adjudicated.” A 2008 decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals said that in order for a ballot to be thrown out, poll workers would need to ascertain that the voters already were planning on supporting a different candidate a few months down the road. As Bruce says, “that’s not enforceable”. Bruce — who has lived in Mississippi for over 20 years, says that he can’t remember anyone ever discussing this section of the state’s election law at such length. The 2008 case was mostly unnoticed. “No one even thought about this law,” he noted.

Sabato et al. look beyond those sour grapes:

The national Republican Party is the big winner. … Nowhere was the jubilation greater, once Cochran had won, than in the D.C. halls of GOP power. Now they don’t have to spend a dime this fall in Mississippi, and they don’t have to waste a breath defending McDaniel elsewhere.

Zeke Miller questions the conventional wisdom of the runoff coverage:

Conservative political consultant Keith Appell cautioned against interpreting Tuesday’s results as a knockout punch against the Tea Party, blaming McDaniel’s failure to win the required 50% of the vote in the initial primary on a blogger who incited outrage—and sympathy for the incumbent—by strangely filming inside the nursing home housing Cochran’s ailing wife. “Interpreting this as some kind of ‘Empire Strikes Back’ moment is an overreach,” Appell told TIME. … Conservatives and Tea Party activists have to take the long view, the big picture is that they’re really winning,” Appell added.

(Map by Philip Bump)

Yglesias voxsplains:

There is an influential current of thought in right-of-center America flying under the banner of libertarian populism, which holds that a free market agenda can be framed as a fight for the interests of the little guy. The Export-Import Bank is a great example of the kind of thing a libertarian populist might oppose. That’s because the bank is a pretty textbook example of the government stepping in to arbitrarily help certain business owners.

The way it works is that the Ex-Im Bank guarantees loans extended by private financial firms to foreign companies that want to buy certain US-made products. The main beneficiaries of this scheme are a handful of large American manufacturing companies — Boeing, GE, and Caterpillar prominent among them — who are in effect receiving a subsidy. Secondary beneficiaries include the private financial firms whose loans are guaranteed and the foreign customers who get access to discount loans via the Ex-Im Bank.

If you want an example of big government stepping in to help out some favored businesses, you’re not going to find a much better example.

Alex Rogers adds:

The bank [is] supported by the White House, the Democratic-controlled Senate, the business community and at least 41 House Republicans… . Its supporters credit it with supporting about 205,000 American jobs, while opponents say it could easily be replaced by the private sector. Congress must renew the Ex-Im bank’s charter by Sept. 30 or it will be unable to back new loans.

How Rebecca Robins distills the dilemma for both parties:

The Ex-Im Bank debate has splintered the Republican Party between those concerned about corporate welfare and those committed to upholding traditional allegiances to big business. Meanwhile, Democrats have found themselves allied with large corporations in the fight to keep the Ex-Im Bank alive.

Danny Vinik wants it dead:

Already liberals are unsure about whether to support the bank or not. In the New York Times, Joe Nocera professed his support for the bank. But Jared Bernstein, the former chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden, was less sure. At his blog, he noted the benefits of the bank, but also explained that “the Brat’s of the world [sic] have a point in that for politicians to pretend otherwise, invoking red-meat slogans like ‘free trade,’ ‘the government doesn’t create jobs,’ ‘the government doesn’t pick winners,’ and then support institutions like the XMB is nonsensical.” Ultimately, the Ex-Im bank does pick winners and losers.

That’s where the investigations reported by the Wall Street Journal become so damaging: If they prove true, then officials are choosing winners and losers based on kickbacks. And that should make the decision easy for liberals: Join with conservatives and oppose the reauthorization of the Export-Import bank.

Drum disagrees:

Killing Ex-Im is basically a conservative hobbyhorse, but plenty of lefties have weighed in too. Dean Baker points out that an interest rate subsidy is basically the same as a tariff, so if you’re in favor of free trade you should be opposed to Ex-Im. Paul Krugman admits that Ex-Im is mercantilist and therefore a bad idea—except when the economy is weak and monetary policy is up against the zero lower bound. Which it is, so Ex-Im acts as an economic stimulus, more or less, and we should probably keep it around for now.

Edward Alden is aligned with Drum:

The Export-Import Bank’s role is a small one, helping less than two percent of all U.S. exports. For a certain class of exports to developing countries–mostly aircraft and large infrastructure projects such as mining, telecommunications and oil and gas development–the bank offers various kinds of loans, insurance and loan guarantees to ensure that U.S. companies get paid. These are transactions that private sector banks are reluctant to finance completely because of the risks involved. Yet the Export-Import Bank, because it is backed by the full credit of the U.S. government, is able to do so. And its track record is impeccable–in the past five years it has actually earned $2 billion for the U.S. Treasury.

If the bank is shuttered, it’s not like those projects will disappear. Instead the contracts will go to European or Canadian or Chinese companies that are getting the same sort of export credit support from their governments (indeed, often more generous) that the Export-Import Bank currently offers. If American companies want to compete they will likely move production to other countries to become eligible for that financial support. Jobs will move with them.

Last week, the Pakistani military launched a major operation to clear Taliban extremists from the lawless region of North Waziristan, after five years of prodding from the United States. Shuja Nawaz expects it to fail:

Pakistan still lacks any national strategy in which the government and armed forces together fight Islamist militancy and terrorism. In North Waziristan, the army is re-using the blunt force approach it has used before: clear out the local population, then use air strikes, artillery, and ground forces to clean out any insurgents that remain. This tactical, rather than strategic, approach means that the North Waziristan battle will not be definitive, but rather just another fight in Pakistan’s inconclusive long war.

To build a national strategy, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government needs to bring the military out of what has been a long silence to share with the Pakistani public its vision of what will work. The government must then include the military’s view in a way it has not so far. In February, for example, Sharif’s administration released an embryonic National Internal Security Policy that had been prepared with no visible participation by the military and that has already hit snags in its implementation.

Hassan Abbas fears that Pakistan is underestimating the sophistication of its enemies:

Only recently, Pakistan’s security ‘wizards’ have started realizing that Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) (the really ‘bad Taliban’) benefits in many ways from logistics, infrastructure and even funding sources of ‘good Taliban.’ What Pakistan still avoids to fully acknowledge is that TTP today is a far more dangerous group than it was when it emerged in late 2007.  Now, its tentacles are reaching deep into Pakistan and it has close links with the remnants of al Qaeda as well as organized crime. …

Pakistan will not be able to defeat, dismantle, and discredit the TTP through military means alone in [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas]. It should be ready to deal with them through civilian law enforcement methods inside the mainstream Pakistan, especially Punjab and Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province. Pakistan’s recent security policy brief shows little indication that it has any plans to invest in reform and modernization of its police and broader criminal justice system. Change in this arena will be the most potent sign of real shift in Pakistan’s counterterrorism policy.

And Muqtedar Khan argues that securing Waziristan should be a regional initiative, not a solo project by Karachi:

The Waziristan region in Pakistan has become a watering hole for extremists who threaten many countries. Besides Pakistan, India, Iran, and Afghanistan have strong interests in eliminating threats that emanate from this area. The problem is that most countries in the region feel that Pakistan is hunting with the hound and running with the hare at the same time. Pakistan’s intelligence is suspected of nurturing many of the same groups for geopolitical reasons even as they threaten its own stability. This perception prevents Pakistan from developing closer relations with its neighbors who have the resources, the will, and the interest to help Pakistan become terror free.

A regional coalition will make the struggle against extremism more potent, more durable and less expensive, but it will take more than deft diplomacy to achieve. Pakistan must convince its neighbors that the alleged ties between the Pakistani state and the Taliban have been severed irreparably.

Sullum says Washington’s blood-THC limit effectively prohibits medical marijuana users from driving at all:

Washington’s five-nanogram rule, modeled after the per se standard for alcohol, was meant to reassure voters worried about the threat posed by stoned drivers. But like all per se standards, it treats some people as unsafe to drive even when they’re not.

Last year experiments by KIRO, the CBS station in Seattle, and KDVR, the Fox affiliate in Denver, showed that regular cannabis consumers can perform competently on driving courses and simulators at THC levels far above five nanograms. The lack of correspondence between the new standard and impairment is especially unfair to medical marijuana users, some of whom may be above the five-nanogram limit all the time, meaning they are never legally allowed to drive in Washington. …

“The five-nanogram rule doesn’t make sense,” says Mark Kleiman, a University of California at Los Angeles drug policy expert who was hired to advise Washington’s cannabis regulators. “It doesn’t correspond to impairment, and for regular users, they’re always going to be over the limit. It would be absurd to say you can smoke pot but then you can never drive.”

Along with Kleiman, Amy Weiss-Meyer reviews research on driving under the influence:

In 2000, researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands gave driving tests to subjects who had consumed various amounts of alcohol and/or marijuana. While all subjects both drank and smoked in each round of the study, some were given placebos, so that the researchers were able to test the effects of each substance on its own as well as their combined effect. They measured drivers’ “standard deviation of lateral position” (SDLP), or the distance they drifted out of their lane, and also the time out of lane (TOL).

The study found that alcohol on its own increased SDLP by 2.2 centimeters (as compared to double-placebo conditions). Marijuana, depending on the dosage of THC (100 or 200 micrograms per kilogram of body weight), increased SDLP from placebo conditions by 2.7 and 3.5 centimeters respectively. In other words, drivers who had smoked pot were less able to drive in a straight line than drivers with an elevated BAC. (Most drivers’ BACs fluctuated around 0.04 grams per deciliter, below the legal limit of 0.08.)

The researchers concluded that the percentage of TOL was not significantly affected by either alcohol or marijuana alone, but that it was much higher when both substances were used together.

Abby Haglage joins the conversation:

The truth is, after decades of analysis, we still don’t have a firm grasp on how THC impairs driving. Laboratory studies have confirmed that THC (officially, Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol) impairs many motor skills necessary for driving. But actual driving simulation studies have not mimicked these results. One sound example is a 2004 study in which three researchers found THC to inhibit attention, reaction time, hand-eye coordination, short-term memory, time and distance perception, and concentration.

But when tested in actual driving simulation, the authors found the results did not “replicate” their laboratory evidence. In other words, researchers were able to prove that THC should, technically, impair driving, but not that it does. Their explanation for the discrepancy: Drivers with THC are likely cognizant of their impairment and are thus able to “compensate…by driving more slowly and avoiding risky driving maneuvers.”