Category: The Dish

Quote For The Day II

“‘Social justice’ is an awkward term for an immensely important project, perhaps the most important project, which is to make the world a more equitable, fair, and compassionate place. But the project for social justice has been captured by an elite strata of post-collegiate, digitally-enabled children of privilege, who do not pursue that project as an end, but rather use it as a means with which to compete, socially and professionally, with each other. In that use, they value not speech or actions that actually result in a better world, but rather those that result in greater social reward, which in the digital world is obvious and explicit. That means that they prefer engagement that creates a) outrage and b) jokes, rather than engagement that leads to positive change. In this disregard for actual political success, they reveal their own privilege, as it’s only the privileged who could ever have so little regard for actual, material progress. As long as they are allowed to co-opt the movement for social justice for their own personal aggrandizement, the world will not improve, not for women, people of color, gay and transgender people, or the poor,” – Freddie DeBoer.

It’s an interesting complement to this.

Quote For The Day

“The suggestion that any feature of this ruthless business is designed to afford “protection” to the pigs, much less to the babies, is perverse. Normal, healthy mother pigs, for example, do not after birth fall over and crush their young — as if they were all just naturally clumsy. These pigs.jpgare not exactly normal, healthy animals we’re talking about, however, after their interminable, pain-inflicting confinement in the gestation crates, among many other travails. Subject a sow to hyper-intensive breeding so that she is grossly larger than nature intended, fill her with steroids to accelerate growth still more, withhold anything resembling humane veterinary care, and through it all deny the creature her every natural need and desire, even the need to move and turn around — and, yes, she is not going to be quite herself. Just spare us this talk of how factory farmers are “protecting” the young from their mothers, when what’s needed here is protection of all these creatures from the whole wretched system.

Being immobilized for all of their existence, lying and living in their own urine and excrement, the sows are sick, sore, atrophied, usually lame, crazed or broken in spirit, and kept alive in these torments only by a massive and reckless use of steroids. The confinement of the sows, presented in terms of solicitude for the piglets, is among the causes of the welfare problem it purports to solve. And the piglets in any case are taken from their mothers in short order to begin their own lives of merciless confinement, mutilation, privation, and fear, in a process, from birth to slaughter, utterly devoid of human compassion,” – Matthew Scully, speaking truth to power, and putting governor Christie on the spot. Scully’s book, Dominion, remains a must-read on this vital moral issue.

 

Skilled But Excluded

Leonid Bershidsky regrets that that Obama’s executive order did little for skilled immigrants:

On the surface, there is little the president, without Congress’s help, can do for skilled migrants. The Immigration and Nationality Act allows only 65,000 people a year to receive H1B temporary skilled worker visas. (Exempt from this quota are 20,000 U.S. graduates of master’s degree programs, as well as an unlimited number of potential government and nonprofit employees.) Just 140,000 skilled workers and their family members are eligible for employment-based green cards each year. …

Perhaps the story of the lottery-losing programmer isn’t as poignant as that of Astrid Silva, who, according to Obama, came to America with just “a cross, her doll and the frilly dress she had on.” The programmer would, however, be more immediately useful to the U.S. economy than Silva, “a college student working on her third degree.” Not letting him in is at least as wrong as kicking out Silva would be.

Jim Manzi argues for more high-skilled immigrants generally:

All of the major Anglophone democracies have done a far better job of this than America and have reaped the benefits.

Australia, Canada, and New Zealand all have a higher foreign-born population than the U.S., and all three plus Britain have more new immigrants each year per capita than the U.S. They have all used some kind of points system to select for immigrants with relevant skills, such as English proficiency and educational attainment, and extra points for degrees or expertise in such fields as science, technology, and medicine. They are generally moving to a two-stage system in which foreign applicants who achieve at least some specificed target score under such a points system are put into a pool which prospective employers can browse, and are granted visas when specific employers offer them jobs. America should implement such a system.

Along the same lines, Philip Sopher thinks it should be easier for physicians to immigrate to the US:

The United States… has strict policies regarding medical licensing—a doctor is only allowed to practice in the U.S. once he has obtained a license in the state in which he intends to work. The person must acquire a visa, pass the first two steps of the United States Medical-Licensing Exam (USMLE), then become certified by the Education Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG), get into an accredited U.S. or Canadian residency program, and finally, go back and pass step three of the USMLE. Each of these steps could take multiple years, repelling doctors who are already able to practice in the country in which they were trained.

But is it really a good idea to deter them? By 2020, America’s doctor shortage is projected to reach 91,500 too few doctors, with nearly half of the burden falling on primary care. This means doctors will be overworked and citizens may have to wait longer and pay higher fees for an appointment. Without all of these barriers, many foreign doctors would find the prospect of migrating to the United States appealing.

Recent Dish on STEM-oriented immigration here.

Yes, Obama Is A Phony On Torture

The Obama administration, it is now beyond dispute, is in thrall to the CIA. The president, through his chief-of-staff, Denis McDonough, has been doing all he can to render the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on torture unintelligible, if he cannot prevent its publication entirely. And he is not giving an inch in his now two-years’ war against the transparency and accountability he once said he favored. Readers know I’ve almost given up on them, and am deeply concerned that next year, a Republican-run Senate will bury the report for ever. That’s clearly John Brennan’s strategy, as it has been from the start. It’s also, clearly, Obama’s.

I once saw Obama as a way out of our torture shame. If he was never going to investigate and prosecute, as is demanded of any signatory to Geneva, I never thought he would actively prevent even some small measure of accountability. How wrong I was.

Senator Rockefeller calls it like it is after yet another meeting with John Brennan’s best friend, Denis McDonough, a Catholic for some reason dedicated to ensuring that torturers not only face no punishment or reproach, but that their crimes are protected from public accountability for ever:

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who served as intelligence committee chair before Feinstein, was furious after the meeting, and accused the administration of deliberately stalling the report. “It’s being slow-walked to death. They’re doing everything they can not to release it,” Rockefeller told HuffPost. “It makes a lot of people who did really bad things look really bad, which is the only way not to repeat those mistakes in the future,” he continued. “The public has to know about it. They don’t want the public to know about it.”

As negotiations continue, Rockefeller said Democrats were thinking creatively about how to resolve the dispute. “We have ideas,” he said, adding that reading the report’s executive summary into the record on the Senate floor would probably meet with only limited success. “The question would be how much you could read before they grabbed you and hauled you off.”

In this game of brinksmanship, it’s clear that Obama is prepared to risk the burial of the entire report. The Senators therefore need to come up with a way to bypass him and the rogue agency he refuses to hold to account. If they can’t read the report into the Congressional Record, there must be another way. To leave this rogue agency with the knowledge that it can do anything, commit any crime, violate any treaty, spy on its overseers, and never even face a public accounting, let alone punishment, of its crimes, is an invitation for these lawless agents to do anything they want in the future. And under a pro-torture, pro-war, pro-secrecy future Republican administration, we can only begin to wonder what they will get away with next.

“Everything Is One. Can’t You See It?”

In the wake of yesterday’s video of weed-smoking grandmas, a reader associates to this remarkable video from the 1950s:

It’s hard to imagine seeing something like this on our screens today, isn’t it? But fascinating nonetheless, as our reader explains:

It was during the days when everyone was trying to figure out the range of psychotropic effects of this drug. It is quite moving. She is obviously a very nice person contentedly attached to the era. Once high, however, she says repeatedly to the doctor in attendance: “Everything is one. Can’t you see it? Can’t you feel it?” This, with a bobbed hairdo and wearing a smart cocktail dress. A prophetic peek into the near future.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“No person, or presidential administration, is perfect. Mistakes happen. But this steady stream of screw-ups means that “people are going to be more skeptical of HHS figures in the future, for understandable reasons,” Cohn writes. When the White House releases monthly enrollment numbers — figures that are expected to be higher than last year — the public will doubt them. And it’s just at the moment that Obamacare’s marketplaces are running better than ever that this series of sloppy mistakes make it look like worse than anyone thought,” – Sarah Kliff, Vox.

The Power Of Shit

https://twitter.com/transolutions/statuses/535830626755039233

As of yesterday, residents of Bath in southwest England have the exciting opportunity to ride a bus powered entirely by their own garbage and excrement:

The 40-seat “Bio-Bus” runs on biomethane gas, generated through the treatment of sewage and food waste. It can travel up to 186 miles on one tank of gas, which takes the annual waste of around five people to produce. The bus is run by Bath Bus Company and will transport passengers between Bath and Bristol Airport. Engineers believe the bus could provide a sustainable way of fuelling public transport while improving urban air quality.

The gas is generated at Bristol sewage treatment works, run by GENeco, a subsidiary of Wessex Water. It produces fewer emissions than traditional diesel engines and is both renewable and sustainable. This week, the company also became the first in the UK to inject gas generated from human and food waste into the national gas grid network.

Fittingly, the Bio-Bus rolled out on the heels of World Toilet Day. But this is not the only poo-based technology to come out recently. As Becky Ferreira points out, we are in the midst of a veritable golden age of human-waste recycling:

True to its rich history, poop-based energy has now evolved into a multifaceted and diverse set of industries. In 2004, a waste management facility in Renton, Washington received a $22,000,000 gr​ant to build a power plant that could turn sewage into electricity. The same year, a rancher figured out how to power his dairy far​m with cow patties and an engineering professor turned pig crap into​ crude oil.

These examples illustrate that by the 21st century, sophisticated poop-based power had been accepted as a real possibility by the public, business, and academic spheres. It was further launched to new heights in 2011, when the Gates Foundation launched the ReInvent the ​Toilet Challenge in 2011. … And it’s not just human poop, either. Manure-fueled biogas facilities are becoming more common, and one mas​sive new project in Missouri points to the future. The $80 million facility involves covering some 88 hog waste lagoons—poop lagoons, yeah—and capturing waste gas for processing in biogas digesters.

Faces Of The Day

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Like some Doctor Who re-union, here’s Frank Foer, Mike Kinsley, Rick Hertzberg, and yours truly at Wednesday night’s 100th Anniversary dinner in honor of The New Republic. The NYT has a write-up of the event here. It was wonderful to see some old friend and former-friends and also a little unsettling to see so many once-deemed-eternal magazines and newspapers figuring out a way to survive in this new and unforgiving media economy. I really hope TNR endures. These institutions matter. And the web has yet to create their equivalents.