Author: Andrew Sullivan

It’s been the most powerful narrative in the region for quite some time – exacerbated a million times by the US invasion, and then inflamed by the Arab Spring in Syria. Simon Henderson believes that the Saudis now want Iraq to host a proxy fight against Iran:

ISIS is a ruthless killing machine, taking Sunni contempt for Shiites to its logical, and bloody, extreme. The Saudi monarch may be more careful to avoid direct religious insults than many other of his brethren, but contempt for Shiites no doubt underpinned his Wikileaked comment about “cutting off the head of the snake,” meaning the clerical regime in Tehran. (Prejudice is an equal opportunity avocation in the Middle East: Iraqi government officials have been known to ask Iraqis whether they are Sunni or Shiite before deciding how to treat them.) …

There is an additional and often confusing dimension, although one that’s historically central to Saudi policy: A willingness to support radical Sunnis abroad while containing their activities at home. Hence Riyadh’s arms-length support for Osama bin Laden when he was leading jihadists in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, and tolerance for jihadists in Chechnya, Bosnia, and Syria.

Tom Ricks tries to make sense of Iraq’s sectarian future:

It boils down to this: The Shiites act like they are a majority in Iraq, or at least the single biggest group. The Sunnis act like they are a majority in the Arab world. Both are right. The question is: Which is more important inside Iraq?

It boils down to this: The Shiites act like they are a majority in Iraq, or at least the single biggest group. The Sunnis act like they are a majority in the Arab world. Both are right. The question is: Which is more important inside Iraq? Unfortunately, the answer likely will come from Iran, in how it supports Maliki in the coming days. I don’t think the U.S. government will conduct air strikes. I don’t even know how it would be done-the big base at Balad will be a juicy target for ISIS, so you can’t use that. So B-1s out of Diego Garcia? Still hard to do and coordinate with someone on the ground.

My guess: We wind up with a de facto partition of Iraq-a Shiite south extending up to the east bank of the Tigris in Baghdad, a Sunni north and west that begins in the western side of Baghdad, and a Kurdish northeast. The Kurds have played this especially well, hanging back and letting Maliki screw up and also cutting a peace deal with the Turks so they can focus on Iraq.

Allahpundit doesn’t think other Sunni states will join the fray:

One obvious possible response [for containing ISIS] is for Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and maybe even Egypt to send troops to Iraq to crush [them]. The jihadis are hugely outnumbered: Combined, the Iraqi army and the Kurdish peshmerga in the country top them more than 30 to one. Add multinational Sunni troops and the ratio would skyrocket. I assume it won’t happen, though, partly because the Sunnis would rather let Iran bleed some more in handling this and partly because they may be nervous about being thin on troops at home at a moment when Islamists are running wild in Iraq.

The local Islamists might seize on the security vacuum as an opportunity for mass protests or worse, which could destabilize the country. In the eternal game of Middle Eastern jihadi whack-a-mole, there are always more moles. And even if the Sunni states managed to keep order at home, what happens once they’re done with ISIS in Iraq? Do they go home, or push on into Syria to fight ISIS there — which could eventually lead to a direct confrontation between Iran, on Assad’s side, and the multinational Sunnis on the other?

I’m not going to pretend I have the expertise to know what’s ahead. But the question to me seems merely at what level of heat the Sunni-Shia war will continue. And continue. And continue. And these fights can go on for ever, especially where order and security are imperiled. Look at how long the Catholic-Protestant fight defined Europe. People were dying over it only a few decades ago in Ireland.

(Photo: Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Iraqi special forces deploy their troops outside of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, Iraq on June 12, 2014. By Feriq Ferec/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

The potency of  marijuana edibles varies dramatically:

Colorado lawmakers made allowances for serious marijuana users by allowing recreational edibles to contain up to 100 milligrams of the psychoactive component THC, roughly equivalent to smoking three joints filled with a gram each of 15 percent THC cannabis.

At the same time, however, the law seemed to have pot novices in mind when it defined each serving size of edible marijuana to be just 10 milligrams of THC. So if you’re following serving directions on each edible, a 75-milligram-THC Mile High Mint bar weighing 45 grams should be consumed in 6-gram chunks, not all at once. And an 8.5-ounce bottle of one of Dixie’s 75-milligram-THC elixirs (just over half the size of a grande Starbucks coffee) should be divvied up into 7½ servings. Even if you abide by these directions, it’s hard to know exactly how much—or how little—THC you’re getting in each bite or gulp.

In March, a Denver Post investigation found that some edibles had just a fraction of the THC listed on their labels (a package of 100-milligram-THC Dr. J’s Jelly Stones contained 0.2 milligrams of THC), while others were considerably more potent than advertised (a 100-milligram-THC Mile High Mint bar boasted 146 milligrams of THC).

Steven Wishnia’s primer on edibles is also worth a read:

“In a nutshell, eaten cannabis gets metabolized by the liver, so delta-9 THC becomes 11-hydroxy-THC, which passes the blood-brain barrier more rapidly and has more of a psychedelic effect than standard THC,” says Understanding Marijuana author Mitch Earleywine, a professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany. “Smoked or vaporized cannabis bypasses the liver and doesn’t create the same 11-hydroxy-THC.”

Smoking marijuana gets THC into the body much faster and at higher concentrations, but it stays there much longer after eating. With smoking, as much as 50 to 60 percent of the THC in a joint can get into the blood plasma, and peak concentrations come in 5 to 10 minutes. It “very quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier,” explains Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. With orally administered cannabis, only 10 to 20 percent of the cannabinoids reach the blood plasma, and they do so 60 to 120 minutes later, says Dr. Mark A. Ware, an associate professor of family health at McGill University in Montreal.

Recent Dish on edibles here and here.

Fox News is blaming Obama for the massive influx of migrant kids into the US:

Among the policies that allegedly are creating a magnet for illegal immigrants is what’s known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The unilateral policy in 2012 allowed some illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to defer deportation — among other criteria, they must have come to the U.S. before they were 16 years old, be younger than 31 on June 15, 2012, and have been in the country since at least June 15, 2007, and have no criminal history.

The administration extended that program earlier this month, allowing the immigrants to apply for protection from deportation for another two years.

Ian Gordon’s reporting tells a very different story:

Many of the kids are coming to help a family in crushing poverty. Some are trying to join a parent who left years ago, before the recession and increased border enforcement slowed down adult immigration. Still others are leaving because of violence from family members and gangs. According to a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 58 percent of the 400 youth the agency interviewed “had suffered, been threatened, or feared serious harm” that might merit international protection. “This is becoming less like an immigration issue and much more like a refugee issue,” says Wendy Young, executive director of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), a DC-based nonprofit that helps unaccompanied immigrant kids find pro bono legal services. “Because this really is a forced migration. This is not kids choosing voluntarily to leave.”

Bob Ortega hears the same thing:

Gang violence in El Salvador and in urban areas of Guatemala has escalated dramatically in recent months since a weak truce among rival gangs has evaporated, said Elizabeth G. Kennedy, a Fulbright scholar reached Monday in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. “Half of them are fleeing for their lives,” she said.

Kids from Mexico are returned across the border, while others are placed in one of eighty temporary shelters, sometimes at military bases, for the duration of their deportation proceedings. Caitlin Dickson parses new allegations by immigrants rights groups that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) agents have been persistently abusing migrant children under their care:

In addition to the descriptions of freezing cold, overcrowded and unsanitary holding cells, one in four children referenced by Wednesday’s complaint said they were subjected to physical abuse—sexual, beatings, and even torture-style stress positions—by CBP officials. More than half of them reported sexual harassment, death threats, and other forms of verbal abuse. More than half said they were denied medical care and about 70 percent of them say they were detained beyond the 72-hour limit—though many report that it was hard to tell what time of day it was or how many days had passed because fluorescent lights were kept on at all hours.

Over 80 percent of the kids interviewed said they were denied adequate food and water. Many say they became sick after eating the frozen or moldy food the CBP officials gave them. One child said that while he was in custody, the drinking water came from a toilet tank. Many of the children reported being shackled while transported to and from CBP facilities, and 30 percent said that, when they were finally released, money and personal belongings that had been confiscated by CBP officials were not returned to them.

Karen McVeigh adds:

Reports of such abuses have been documented for at least a decade, the groups said, but no reforms have been implemented and agents are rarely held to account. For instance, the AIC found recently that 97% of the 809 abuse complaints – 60% of which involved abuse of migrant children – filed against Border Patrol agents between January 2009 and January 2012 resulted in the classification “no action taken”.

The head of the CBP’s internal affairs unit was removed from his post on Monday. The Obama administration is working on a program offering legal aid to the migrant children.

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel refines his earlier “theory of jerks”:

I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or idiots to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. The bumpkin ignorance captured in the earlier use of ‘jerk’ has changed into a type of moral ignorance.

One of the jerk’s defining features is hypocrisy:

He might rage against the smallest typo in a student’s or secretary’s document, while producing a torrent of errors himself; it just wouldn’t occur to him to apply the same standards to himself. He might insist on promptness, while always running late. He might freely reprimand other people, expecting them to take it with good grace, while any complaints directed against him earn his eternal enmity. Such failures of parity typify the jerk’s moral short-sightedness, flowing naturally from his disregard of others’ perspectives. These hypocrisies are immediately obvious if one genuinely imagines oneself in a subordinate’s shoes for anything other than selfish and self-rationalising ends, but this is exactly what the jerk habitually fails to do.

Reviewing a new memoir by Rob Lowe, Heather Havrilesky finds that the actor has pulled off the near-impossible – a celebrity book with some humility:

[H]e makes up for … egocentric passages with lovable Diary of an Emo Kid interludes in which our hero is overcome by his surging emotions. On a flight to visit his son during his freshman year at college, for example, Lowe is forced to wear sunglasses and hide behind his newspaper to mask his copious tears. “I am amazed that so much water can come out of the eyes of someone who dehydrates himself with so much caffeine,” he writes, wryly deprecating his sentimental foolishness while also indulging a telltale celebrity Angeleno focus on maximal body maintenance.

Throughout Love Life, Lowe seems attracted to his most demeaning stories:

Jewel wipes her mouth with the back of her hand after she’s forced to kiss him while shooting the short-lived drama The Lyon’s Den. He dresses up as Bigfoot to scare his kids while camping, and ends up getting kicked in the balls. He visits Warren Beatty’s house with his girlfriend; Beatty lightly informs him that he’s been sleeping with her.

Mostly, though, Lowe’s books are a great example of the power of confounding expectations. You wouldn’t think a face off the pages of Tiger Beat magazine would revel in his own humiliation as much as Lowe does. When, in Stories I Only Tell My Friends, a young Lowe goes to a screening of The Outsiders and discovers that his central role in the film has been reduced to an afterthought, it’s impossible not to feel sad for this needy teenager, who desperately hopes for some proof that his big dream hasn’t been a waste of time. Instead, he is humbled, truly.

A new survey indicates that out-of-work Americans are twice as likely to suffer from depression as their employed peers. And the long-term unemployed appear to be the worst off:

Gallup also finds that the long-term unemployed spend less time with their family and friends, potentially contributing to those higher rates of depression. The survey notes that we cannot identify causality: “These results don’t necessarily imply unemployment itself causes these differences. It may be that unhappy or less positive job seekers are less likely to be able to get jobs in the first place.” That’s true, but these findings are also consistent previous academic evidence.

Rebecca Rosen mulls over the findings:

[Gallup’s Steve] Crabtree cites a 2011 study by the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University which found that long-term unemployed people were much more likely to report that they had spent two hours or less being social the previous day.

“Again,” Crabtree writes, “these results don’t necessarily imply unemployment itself causes these differences. It may be that unhappy or less positive job seekers are less likely to be able to get jobs in the first place—if, for example, employers are looking for more upbeat workers. It is also possible that those who spend less time with family and friends are therefore less able to draw on their social networks for employment leads.”

Surely there are people out there who are accurately described by one of those possibilities. But it’s all too easy to imagine a scenario in which all of these act together in a vicious cycle that mires a person in unemployment. That same Rutgers study found much higher rates of reporting “feeling ashamed or embarrassed” or “strain in family relations” for those for whom a loss of a job had had devastating financial consequences. As one reader wrote to The Atlantic in 2011, “I look at my peers who are getting married and having children and generally living life and it’s depressing.  They’ve got jobs, health insurance, relationships, homes; I don’t even have a real bed to sleep on.” Would hanging out with friends and family be very appealing under such circumstances? Not to me, at least. From there, it’s a pretty direct line to isolation, depression, the toll those will have on a job search, to more isolation, more depression, and on and on and on.