Author: Andrew Sullivan

"The infantile optimism of post-JFK America may have met its match down there in the Gulf. Nature is not mocked," – John Derbyshire.

"Why should Barton apologize? I mean “why” not in the prudential, career-saving, ass-covering sense. From that point of view, his retraction makes perfect sense. But if you ask “why” in the larger sense of disinterested inquiry, it’s hard to know what to say. Joe Barton was right. The White House was, and still is, engaged in a shakedown, “a piece of extortion,” exacting as high a price as possible from a private company in an effort to garner some PR brownie points (and a lost of cash). It is a disgusting spectacle, reminiscent of the administration’s criminal defrauding of Chrysler secured bondholders last year.

Oh, well. It was a pleasant fifteen minutes. Imagine!  A U.S. Congressman who actually had the courage to speak the truth.  What a novelty!  I should have known it couldn’t last.

If you happen to find Joe Barton’s testicles, you can return them to him here," – Roger Kimball, PajamasMedia.

We could get a real split here between the base and the establishment GOP.

DiA counters Yglesias over gerrymandering:

Perhaps the clearest way the Senate is "better than" the House? Senators can actually lose their seats.

Steven Taylor tosses the metaphor in the rubbish bin:

Fossil fuels, for all their problems, produce a huge amount of benefit in ways that dependence on drugs or alcohol do not. Our dependence on oil is not like an addiction to a drug, but rather it is more like our need for blood in our circulatory systems or oxygen in our respiratory systems.  We aren’t giving up either unless something just as efficacious is going to take their places.

…I do understand what the shorthand being deployed here by multiple persons is supposed to be.  However, it is a turn of phrase that has continually bothered me, as I think it inaccurately diagnoses the problem that we face.  Curing an addiction, difficult as it undoubtedly is, can be done.  Indeed, it is done all the time.  However, we are not going to simply stop using oil, either cold turkey or through a twelve step program.

Laura Freschi won't be jumping on the charter cities bandwagon:

These ideas share an overly-optimistic belief in a neutral, benevolent international community and its power to peacefully oversee imposed changes. All are tone-deaf to the very real degree of nationalism that does exist in basically all countries by now, regardless of whether they were misbegotten colonial creations or not. They also violate sovereignty as conventionally defined, which may be good or bad but is sure to provoke a nationalist reaction.

Early development economists working at the hopeful dawn of colonial independence believed that they really were starting from scratch. The last fifty years have shown us that they weren’t, and this has been—and remains—one of development’s biggest blind spots.

Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine. A taste:

The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals. Worse, the fear is that the knowledge has grown beyond our capacity as a society. When we talk about the uncontrollable explosion in the costs of health care in America, for instance—about the reality that we in medicine are gradually bankrupting the country—we’re not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We’re talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.

Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.

Keith Hennesy isn't a fan of the term "fossil fuels":

Someday when battery technologies improve, the fuel and power worlds will blend in the U.S., and there will be strong and direct economic relationships between the production of electric power and the use of oil.  Until that day, from an energy perspective, “fossil fuels” conflates oil with coal and natural gas in a way that is at best confusing and at worst misleading.  Substituting biofuels for oil or making vehicles more fuel efficient has almost no effect on the amount of coal or natural gas we use.  “Produc[ing] wind turbines,” “installing energy-efficient windows, and small businesses making solar panels” are quantitatively irrelevant to our use and production of oil.  All the windmills and solar panels you could imagine will not reduce our dependence on oil as a transportation fuel.

Ezra Klein calls the above graph "the clearest visualization of our energy economy that I've seen." (Click the image to enlarge it.)

Seth Godin gives the last rites:

If we were starting this whole office thing today, it's inconceivable we'd pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show 'the Office' will be seen as a quaint antique.

When you need to have a meeting, have a meeting. When you need to collaborate, collaborate. The rest of the time, do the work, wherever you like.

The gain in speed, productivity and happiness is massive.

Today on the Dish, Andrew took a long look at Obama's competence in the face of the media and partisan critics on both sides. Amen from a reader. Boehner distanced himself from Barton's "shakedown" comments while NRO backed the charge. The employment forecast didn't look good. More on Britain's war crimes here. Palin blurred the truth again, Julian Sanchez addressed her views on pot, readers piled on her O'Reilly appearance, and E.D. cheered the Dish's efforts.

In other coverage, Tom Gross collected cartoons of anti-Israel ugliness, Diego Valle Jones illustrated the resurgence of drug killings in Mexico, Pareene profiled Canada's version of Fox News, Bruce Bawer was hounded for his "hate speech" about Islam, and Liz Mair exposed FGM at Cornell. Female Viagra fell flat and Eminem stood up for the gays. World Cup crack here.

In assorted commentary, Joe Klein was bummed about Afghanistan, Josh Green challenged Obama on defense spending, John Michael Greer tackled tea-partiers and peak oil, Lee Harris defended the partiers, Friedersdorf called out Steyn for his epistemic closure, Bernstein marveled at McCarthy, and Dan Ariely shared some insight on email. Tara Parker-Pope showed how marriage and children are increasingly decoupled and Andrew offered his take on the institution.

A reader served up a creepy ad, another added to the celebrity thread, others broadened the recognition of gay rights pioneers, others continued the discussion of soccer in the US, and others gave feedback on the window contest. Ralph Maccio made his comeback, Comic Sans put the smack down, and Gaga emulated another pop group. Great videos of bears (the literal kind) here and here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. 

— C.B.

 

Julian Sanchez is "surprised and pleased to discover that Sarah Palin is willing to publicly declare recreational marijuana use a 'minimal problem' that ought to be low on police priority lists," but he challenges her rationale for keeping marijuana illegal. She thinks "that [legalization] would just encourage our young people to think that it was OK to go ahead and use it." Julian:

There are all sorts of things that are legal for adults but not children, and it seems perverse to suggest that the failure to universally prohibit something counts as any kind of endorsement. But that's how the snowballing logic of paternalism works: The more we take it as given that the government will endeavor to prohibit harmful substances or behaviors, the more a failure to prohibit will come to be seen as a tacit certification of relative safety. To legalize what had previously been banned, then, may indeed seem like an affirmative endorsement. As people start outsourcing their safety assessments to the law, a vicious cycle kicks in: The more we prohibit, the more it seems we must prohibit. Maybe the better message to send "our young people" would be that many things they'll be legally able to do when they reach adulthood aren't necessarily wise or safe–and that they'll have to take responsibility for determining which are which.

Of course, one assumption here is that Palin in any way actually cares about what teenagers get up to. She doesn't. She pretends to. In this, as in so many things, Palin is simply a phony of vast proportions. But we all have to pretend to take this joke in some way seriously.