Category: The Dish

A Hail Mary Pass From The Iran Hawks

With the July 20 deadline for a final agreement looming, John Kerry returned to Vienna yesterday for another round of nuclear negotiations with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif, saying “very significant gaps” still remain between Washington and Tehran’s positions. Opponents of a deal have already moved to preempt any possible success in Vienna, with House Foreign Relations Committee chair Ed Royce and ranking Democrat Eliot Engel circulating a letter

demanding that Obama consult Congress more closely on the ongoing negotiations and suggesting that Iran will have to satisfy Congressional demands on human rights, terrorism, ballistic missile development, and other issues unrelated to the ongoing nuclear negotiations before it will approve major sanctions relief. …

Of course, President Barack Obama himself can provide a certain degree of sanctions relief under executive order as he no doubt intends to if a deal is struck. And there is no doubt that Congress has a role to play in lifting sanctions. But the letter’s assertion that there is no exclusively defined “nuclear-related” sanction against Iran under US law and that any relief can only be extended by addressing a host of non-nuclear-related issues appears calculated to sow doubts about Obama’s ability to deliver among Iran’s leadership, thus strengthening hard-liners in Tehran who argue that Washington simply cannot be trusted.

The messaging continued on the Sunday talk show circuit. After Zarif went on “Meet the Press” to reiterate that Iran sees no benefit in developing a nuclear weapon, hawk-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu, on “Fox News Sunday”, called that “a joke.” Speaking of the Iran hawks, James Traub urges Obama to “tell them — politely of course — to go to hell”:

After years of inaction and thunderous polemic, the negotiations of the past year have been remarkably professional. A report by the Arms Control Association lists 31 obligations that Iran undertook when it signed the so-called Joint Plan of Action; all but two are completed or in full compliance. Critically, Iran has agreed to stop enriching uranium at 20 percent, to dilute its existing stock of highly enriched uranium, and to allow regular inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The West, for its part, has made good on its promises of sanctions relief. …

Failure is still as likely as not. Very powerful forces in Iran are ideologically committed to an adversarial relationship with the West; others have earned a fortune in Iran’s isolated economy, and would lose out were the country to open up. Iranian negotiators continue to speak as if both sides must make equal compromises, when in fact the onus is on Tehran to comply with the NPT. Yet the Iranian people elected Rouhani to bring an end to their isolation and deprivation, and he knows — and presumably the supreme leader knows, too — that failure to reach a deal threatens Iran’s future, and perhaps the revolution as well.

Previous Dish on the latest round of Iran talks here and here.

Gaza Gets Worse

The conflict continues to escalate, with Israel launching a ground offensive and warning tens of thousands of northern Gazans to flee in advance of a major assault:

An estimated quarter of the 70,000 residents of the town of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza fled their homes early Sunday after Israel dropped fliers and made phone calls warning residents of upcoming attacks. The United Nations reported 17,000 Palestinians have registered in shelters. The warnings came after Israeli special forces briefly raided Gaza to destroy a suspected long-range rocket launch site. Meanwhile, rockets were fired from Syria and Lebanon into northern Israel. The rocket attack from Lebanon was the third such incident since Friday. No one has claimed responsibility for the rocket fire Monday morning, and no injuries were reported.

The death toll in Gaza, according to Hamas officials, stands at 172, with over 1,100 injured. Gregg Carlstrom believes the Israelis when they say they are out to destroy Hamas for good:

The Palestinian militant group is, in the estimation of Israeli officials, weaker than it has been in memory, and Israel senses the best opportunity it has had in a long time to permanently degrade or even eliminate Hamas as a political factor.

It’s not just that the Israelis are pounding Hamas from the air and rounding up senior Hamas officials; with help from their de facto ally across the border—Egyptian general-cum-dictator-cum-president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—they have managed to keep Hamas’ supply tunnels to Gaza virtually shut down. Analysts estimate that the roughly $20 million per month that Hamas collected in tax revenues from the tunnels has been reduced almost to zero.

Based on their public statements, it’s clear that at least some Israeli hawks would like to do to Hamas what Sisi has done to the Muslim Brotherhood group from which Hamas once sprung: batter it into submission. Officials in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet have gone further, talking openly of a campaign to eradicate the group. Even Hamas officials admit they are worried. “I would say that, yes, the situation is not ideal,” Osama Hamdan, the head of Hamas’ foreign relations bureau, told me. “It’s certainly not as it was a few years ago.”

But as Juan Cole is quick to point out, it won’t work:

With leaders killed and rockets depleted, the Israeli hard liners probably believe, Hamas may be fatally weakened. At the very least, it will be less able to resist future episodes of lawn mowing in Gaza. The theory behind this campaign, however, is incorrect. Hamas is perfectly capable of building more rockets, even if they are smaller and have less range than the imported ones. And killed leaders can be replaced by their cousins.

Natan Sachs, however, doubts Israel actually wants to eradicate Hamas:

Even if Israel were to enter Gaza with ground forces, it’s unlikely to try and topple the Hamas regime, for fear of the immense cost of such an operation to the local population and to Israeli troops. Instead, Israel prefers a weakened, deterred, but effective Hamas. With the tunnels from Sinai now closed, a hit to the Hamas stockpile stands some chance of lasting longer than previous attempts, since it would be harder for Islamists to replace the lost weaponry.

But even if its weaponry were degraded, Hamas’s motivation to prove “resistance” to Israel will remain. Most acutely, this round of violence has the potential to reinforce the unrest — which had subsided — in the West Bank and in Jerusalem. A full blown Intifada, possibly coupled with attacks from Lebanon or elsewhere, could make this round of violence seem tame by comparison.

Previous Dish on the crisis in Israel and Palestine here, here, and here.

Is There Still A Chance To #BringBackOurGirls?

Marking the three-month anniversary of the mass kidnapping in Nigeria, Naunihal Singh considers the world’s options:

Foreign troops cannot swoop in and rescue the girls. Even if they are all in one place and can be located (Nigeria claims to know their location, but there are reasons to be skeptical), there is widespread agreement that it would be close to impossible to free them without a high number of casualties. Instead, concerned global citizens have to work for the release of the girls with Nigerian groups. They have to shield local activists from government harassment, and battle the news cycle and compassion fatigue to keep the spotlight on the abductees (perhaps with monthly, coördinated bursts of grassroots efforts).

Last, and more controversially, international activists should support local calls for the government to negotiate the release of the hostages. The armed conflict is already so bad; it is hard to see how a deal could create incentives that would make things worse. In addition, Boko Haram has always wanted to exchange the girls for some of their jailed comrades. What is less clear is whether the Nigerian government is interested in doing so.

Why Undertipping Makes You A Real Jackass

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The minimum wage for tipped workers has remained stagnant for 23 years:

Tipped workers have been getting short-changed for years. At least that’s what the gap between the federally mandated regular minimum wage and federally mandated tipped minimum wage would suggest.

When the tip credit, as that difference is often called, was created in 1966, it split hotel, restaurant and other service industry salaries up so part was paid by their employers and another part was paid by their customers. The legislation was intended to protect service industry workers who had previously been unprotected under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). And the split was originally 50-50 – meaning employers and customers shared the cost of each tipped worker’s minimum salary.

But the burden is increasingly falling on America’s restaurant goers and other service industry customers. “Today this two-tiered wage system continues to exist, yet the subsidy provided by customers in restaurants, salons, casinos and other businesses that employ tipped workers is larger than it has ever been,” a new report (pdf) by the Economic Policy Institute says. The tip credit has surged from fewer than $3 in the late 1980s to more than $5 today, largely because the tipped minimum wage hasn’t increased in 23 years.

Plugging The Leaks In Our Water Supply

David Bornstein hopes it will become a higher priority:

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates (pdf) that public water systems lose, on average, one-sixth of their water — mainly from leaks in pipes. The E.P.A. asserts that 75 percent of that water is recoverable. (In truth, the volume of leakage in the nation’s 55,000 drinking-water systems is unknown, because few conduct water audits using the standards established by the International Water Association and the American Water Works Association.)

It’s been widely reported that California is experiencing its worst drought in history. But take a look at the United States Drought Monitor: much of the country is abnormally dry or in drought. Internationally, the problem is even more serious. The World Bank reports that, over the next decade and a half, water availability may fall 40 percent short of global need (pdf). Meanwhile, utilities in the developing world are hemorrhaging water. The World Bank estimates that water systems have real losses (leakages) of 8.6 trillion gallons per year, about half in developing countries (pdf, 11MB, p.6). That’s enough to serve 150 million Americans (and we use a lot of water!)

Typefacing The World Together

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Font nerds, rejoice: the Universal Typeface Experiment, launched by the pen company BIC, collects data around the world for “a constantly evolving, algorithmically produced font created by averaging hundreds of thousands of handwriting samples”:

Anyone with a touchscreen can help shape the Universal Typeface by linking their phone or tablet to the website and writing directly on the touchscreen – the lettering is quickly transferred to the Universal Typeface algorithm. As of this writing, more than 400,000 samples have been collected from around the world, and the resulting alphabet is … well, sort of boring. It turns out that averaging thousands of authentic expressions of individuality yields something that looks like a grade school writing sample. Contrasting the left-handed average with the right-handed average and gender averages and comparing industry averages—what’s a broker’s “B” look like compared to an artist’s?—reveals disappointingly similar results.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that we’re not so different after all. That said, the collected samples allow for some fun comparisons. A more dramatic variance can be seen, for example, when the averages are broken down by nationality, because there are many fewer samples per country. It’s interesting to see the narrow “B” of Saudi Arabia versus the wide, curvy “B” of Romania.

(Image via Smithsonian and BIC)

When Your Heart Goes Out

Kirsten Weir looks at the very real phenomenon of deadly grief:

Studies from around the world have confirmed that people have an increased risk of dying in the weeks and months after their spouses pass away. In 2011, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Yamanashi, Tokyo pooled the results of 15 different studies, with data on more than 2.2 million people. They estimated a 41 percent increase in the risk of death in the first six months after losing a spouse.

The effect didn’t just apply to the elderly. People under 65 were as likely to die in the months following a spouse’s death as those over 65. The magnitude of the “widowhood effect” was much stronger for men than it was for women. … While women might be more resilient to losing a spouse, however, they aren’t immune to the deadly effects of grief. A 2013 study of more than 69,000 women in the United States found that a mother’s risk of dying increased 133 percent in the two years following the death of a child.

Weir goes on to describe “broken heart syndrome,” also known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy:

It appears to be brought on by a sudden surge in stress hormones including epinephrine (more commonly known as adrenaline) and its chemical cousin norepinephrine. That rush of hormones is a normal, healthy response to extreme stress. It fuels the body’s famed “fight or flight” response that prepares you for dealing with major threats. But in some cases the sudden flood of hormones essentially shocks the heart, preventing it from pumping normally. On an X-ray or ultrasound, the heart’s left ventricle appears enlarged and misshapen. The unusual shape is said to resemble a Japanese octopus trap called a tako-tsubo, hence the syndrome’s other alias: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. The syndrome doesn’t permanently damage the heart’s muscle tissue, and patients often make a full recovery. …  Still, the condition can be deadly if the misshapen heart can’t pump enough blood to the rest of the body.

Earlier this year, a study identified over 20,000 cases of the syndrome across the US. The results found that they were most common in areas affected by natural disasters:

Missouri and Vermont possessed the highest number of reported cases, and the latter, with 380 cases per million residents, had more than double most other states. The data came from the same year Hurricane Irene wreaked the worst havoc Vermont had seen in decades. Similarly, the “cluster” in Missouri occurred near the site of 2011’s massive Joplin tornado. And while there might have been a number of other factors affecting these results, the general research takeaway suggests natural disasters can strongly contribute to cardiomyopathy.

A Deep Sea Delicacy

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Food trendsetters, Franz Lidz observes, are looking past sea urchins’ spiny exterior:

In the brave new world of fine dining, the roe of the humble urchin—a shellfish once cursed as a pest to lobstermen, mocked as “whore’s eggs” and routinely smashed with hammers or tossed overboard as unsalable “bycatch”—is a prized and slurpily lascivious delicacy. Unlike caviar, which is the eggs of fish, the roe of the urchin is its wobbly gonads. Every year more than 100,000 tons of them slide down discerning throats, mainly in France and Japan, where the chunks of salty, grainy custard are known as uni and believed to be an uplifting tonic, if not an aphrodisiac. The Japanese exchange urchins as gifts during New Year celebrations.

Lidz profiles Roderick Sloan, who harvests the creatures off the coast of Norway. According to one chef, Sloan’s plunder tastes “like you’re making out with the sea.” Updates from several readers:

My wife eats sea urchins every year when we go to Greece.  Her uncle collects them from the ocean in front of her father’s house there.  Just a little lemon and olive oil goes into the sea urchin and then you scoop it out with fresh bread.

But my sea urchin story has nothing to do with eating them.  My wife used to have warts on the bottom of her foot.

She didn’t deal with them quickly and picked at them (which you are not supposed to do) and when she finally did nothing worked to get rid of them.  She tried the acid pads, she greecewent to the doctor and got them frozen she even tried something where they infected her foot with yeast.  I wanted her to deal with it because I got them a couple of time on my foot from her.  (I dealt with them quickly using the acid pads from the drug store and got rid of them).  Her doctor told her that surgery would be the only way to get rid of them and that she would be on crutches for months they were in so deep.

Well, one day in Greece she stepped on a sea urchin.  Like I said, they live in the ocean right below the house in Greece where we swim in the afternoons.  It was painful and many a spike had to be tweezed out of her foot. Still, we couldn’t get all of them out (they break off when you try to pull them out with the tweezers). A month later she noticed that the warts were gone.  She told her doctor who was equally amazed. I don’t know how or why but stepping on a sea urchin killed off the warts on her foot!

The attached photo is of the cove were we swim in the afternoons where my wife stepped on the sea urchin.  Look for the house that is closest to where I took the photo – a white blob with a red door facing the camera – then look to the left and slightly up the hill: that’s my father-in-law’s house.  It’s our P-town.

A less happy story:

Years ago I spent six months in Cairo, Egypt, having been hired by an Egyptian family to help with the rehabilitation of their brain-injured son. We spent the hot month of August  at a villa on the Mediterranean coast just west of Alexandria. They knew my fondness for seafood (I’m from North Carolina), so one morning they brought me a tray of freshly caught sea urchins with some cut lemons. After they showed me which part of the strange interior to eat, I consumed the entire tray.

Almost exactly one month later, I came down with a raging case of hepatitis A and spent the next month in bed. My employer (my Egyptian patient’s father) told me that I must have eaten some bad street food in Cairo. I quickly thought back and remembered the sea urchins. I later learned that raw sewage was being released into the sea at Alexandria. I never told the family that in their effort to give me a treat, they had unwittingly fed me the contaminated urchins and nearly destroyed my liver!

Meanwhile, another recommends for stepping on urchins:

Have someone urinate on the wound. No really. It softens the spines and allows you to pull them out. I guess you can use vinegar if you’re not into golden showers, but on a beach far from civilization, it might be the only option.

(Top photo of sea urchin served at the Hungry Cat, a restaurant in Santa Barbara, via Roger Braunstein)

Employed At The Hip

Kate Losse worries about what lurks behind the cool amenities of Silicon Valley workplaces, like cafeterias, craft beer on tap, log cabin-style offices, and more:

Of course, the remaking of the contemporary tech office into a mixed work-cum-leisure space is not actually meant to promote leisure. Instead, the work/leisure mixing that takes place in the office mirrors what happens across digital, social and professional spaces. Work has seeped into our leisure hours, making the two tough to distinguish.

And so, the white-collar work-life blend reaches its logical conclusion with the transformation of modern luxury spaces such as airport lounges into spaces that look much like the offices from which the technocrat has arrived. Perhaps to secure the business of the new moneyed tech class, the design of the new Centurion Lounge for American Express card members draws from the same design palette as today’s tech office: reclaimed-wood panels, tree-stump stools, copious couches and a cafeteria serving kale salad on bespoke ceramic plates. In these lounges, the blurring of recreation and work becomes doubly disconcerting for the tech employee. Is one headed out on vacation or still at the office – and is there a difference?