The Dish – Page 553

Drug War Fail: Afghanistan Edition

Beauchamp illustrates how little our opium eradication efforts have accomplished:

From 2008 to 2013, when the US anti-opium campaign hit its apex, the US only managed to eradicate 3.7 percent of the land devoted to poppy cultivation. The total amount of land devoted to poppy cultivation was a third higher in 2013 than in 2008 … Now, it’s true that the total amount of opium produced in Afghanistan has declined from its 2008 peak. But, according to the UN, that’s because of “plant diseases and bad weather” — not the war. There’s more land devoted to poppy cultivation, but it’s less productive because of natural conditions. Drug eradication doesn’t appear to have much to do with it.

Why has the campaign against opium failed so epically?

There are plenty of reasons, including widespread Afghan government corruption and the fact that 95 percent of poppy cultivation happens in the country’s insecure, Taliban-filled southwestern provinces. But the most important one is the most basic — Afghanistan runs on opium. Opium-related activities make up half of the country’s GDP; the legal economy depends on its proceeds to function. As Fabrice Pothier, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s European branch and an expert of the Afghan drug trade, explains in an absolutely staggering passage, opium is more than 50 times as important to Afghanistan as cocaine is to Colombia[.]

Dan Murphy concurs with Zack’s takeaway:

To be fair, trying to wipe out opium production in Afghanistan would have been a Sisyphean task no matter what strategy was deployed. It’s a lucrative business, and poppies are easily cultivated, generating far more money for poor farmers and corrupt middlemen than any feasible substitution crop. During the height of the American counterinsurgency effort, winning over the general population to the side of the government and foreign forces was a big focus. The US found that tearing up crops and impoverishing farmers wasn’t very popular.

The early eradication strategy was largely abandoned in favor of going after big opium dealers and encouragng farmers to grow other crops. But that really hasn’t worked, either. The country’s opium and heroin trade is a top earner, and with the military effort winding down, the business opportunities associated with aid and foreign military spending are set to decline.

Be A Man. Take Paternity Leave.

Joe Pinsker discusses one way to put peer pressure to good use:

A study released in this month’s issue of the American Economic Review suggests a social snowball effect that might counteract the stigma that’s attached to taking time off. It found that fathers who take paternity leave make their brothers 15 percent more likely to do the same. Similarly, dads who see their male coworkers take time off are 11 percent more likely to take leave themselves. …

As things stand now, the theory is that fathers tend to shy away from taking paternity leave because they think taking time off work might damage their professional lives. A 2012 article in Harvard Business Review highlighted research that suggested that “fathers with even a short work absence because of family obligations are recommended for fewer rewards and receive lower performance ratings,” and came to the conclusion that, just as women are being pressured away from prioritizing their professional lives, men are steered away from spending time with their families. Within this framework, the study’s findings make sense: armed with information of how an employer reacts to a peer’s paternity leave, a father will probably be a lot less worried about any unforeseen consequences at work.

Previous Dish on paternity leave here and here.

The Best Of The Dish Today

The former half-term governor has now declared herself in favor of impeachment of the president, and called on all good Republicans to do the same. Drudge, the original impeacher, went into full metal jacket mode – and an instant poll of his readers (close to 170,000 of them at time of posting) backed impeachment by 72 to 15 percent.

You can try and figure out the logic but this is the most coherent of the passages in her declaration of war:

The federal government is trillions of dollars in debt; many cities are on the verge of insolvency; our overrun healthcare system, police forces, social services, schools, and our unsustainably generous welfare-state programs are stretched to the max. We average Americans know that. So why has this issue been allowed to be turned upside down with our “leader” creating such unsafe conditions while at the same time obstructing any economic recovery by creating more dependents than he allows producers? His friendly wealthy bipartisan elite, who want cheap foreign labor and can afford for themselves the best “border security” money can buy in their own exclusive communities, do not care that Obama tapped us out.

Look: don’t ask me. Nothing she says has ever made much sense to me.

But the obviously potent issue she is referring to is illegal immigration, the issue that took down Eric Cantor, and the issue that truly riles up the Fox Nation. And here’s the critical part with respect to the November elections:

It’s time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.

And so a gauntlet has been laid. A vote for the Republicans this November is a vote for the impeachment of Obama. Any Republican Senate candidate who does not back impeachment will now face growing Tea Party backlash. And every single Senator will now be asked if they support impeachment or not. That seems to me the import of Palin’s endorsement of the most radical action that can be taken against a sitting president. The November elections have just become a vote on the question of impeachment.

Are the Republicans aware of the implications of this? There are plenty of voters who might have voted Republican this fall who will hesitate if they think it means subjecting the country to the kind of spectacle we saw the last time a Democrat dared to win a second term in office. There are many African-American voters who might have sat out this election – but now will see the president beset by the same forces that tried to take down Bill Clinton and may well show up in force. There are, for that matter, many women voters who, before Hobby Lobby, might have felt apathetic this fall and may not now. What I’m suggesting is that, not for the first time, the Republican party’s most treacherous opponent … is the Republican party. And McCain’s Frankenstein leads the way!

Today, we took note of a new study of the power of psilocybin; and the role that plankton could play in reducing atmospheric carbon. I mulled over the promise and pitfalls of “reform conservatism” as well as the “revenge doctrine’ of the state of Israel. Plus: Big Pharma takes on marijuana; and the conversion of a small but growing minority of evangelicals to marriage equality.

The most popular post of the day was “The Tears Of An Elephant“, followed by “The Challenge of Reform Conservatism.” Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish.

If you haven’t yet, but have been meaning to, please take a moment to subscribe. Without you, we have no way to keep this show on the road.

And see you in the morning.

(Photo of the former half-term governor and failed vice-presidential candidate from Runner’s World.)

Looking Back At The Great War, Ctd

John Cooper and Michael Kazin have been debating the wisdom of America entering WWI. In the latest round of argument, Kazin imagines what Germany winning might have meant:

Cooper is certainly correct about Woodrow Wilson’s motives for entering World War I. He did wager that the blood of American soldiers could make a “new world order” more likely. But if a triumphant Germany—no sure thing, even if the U.S. had stayed neutral—had been a pillar of that order, what’s the worst that would have happened? At least, it would have meant that Adolf Hitler would be remembered, if at all, as the recipient of two Iron Crosses who still failed to make it past the rank of lance corporal. It also might have given Germany’s socialist party (the SPD) – the largest in the world and one committed to democratic rule and cultural tolerance – an influential role in combatting attempts to suppress national minorities and reining in the militarist state.

But John Cooper insists that a German victory would have been disastrous:

Defeat in 1918 unquestionably poisoned the politics of the Weimar Republic, and I agree with Kazin that without it Hitler would probably never have risen from obscurity. But would either Germany or other nations have been immune to the viruses of fascism and racialist nationalism? Being on the winning side did not immunize Italy and Japan against those infections. One likely result of a German victory might have been the defeat of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but before we relish that possibility think about what a chilling effect that would have had on later anti-colonial movements. Or consider how in later decades Gandhi might have fared in a German-dominated India or Mandela in a German-reinforced Boer South Africa.

(Video: Hitch recites Wilfred Owen’s WWI poem Dulce et Decorum est.)

Who Profits From Prohibition?

Lee Fang contends that Big Pharma (and painkiller interests) are bankrolling anti-marijuana campaigns:

People in the United States, a country in which painkillers are routinely overprescribed, now consume more than 84 percent of the entire worldwide supply of oxycodone and almost 100 percent of hydrocodone opioids. In Kentucky, to take just one example, about one in fourteen people is misusing prescription painkillers, and nearly 1,000 Kentucky residents are dying every year.

So it’s more than a little odd that [the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America (CADCA)] and the other groups leading the fight against relaxing marijuana laws, including the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids (formerly the Partnership for a Drug-Free America), derive a significant portion of their budget from opioid manufacturers and other pharmaceutical companies. According to critics, this funding has shaped the organization’s policy goals: CADCA takes a softer approach toward prescription-drug abuse, limiting its advocacy to a call for more educational programs, and has failed to join the efforts to change prescription guidelines in order to curb abuse. In contrast, CADCA and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids have adopted a hard-line approach to marijuana, opposing even limited legalization and supporting increased police powers.

Jon Walker adds:

After reading this article it is worth drawing attention to the interesting correlation between medical marijuana states and prescriptions for opioid pain relievers. On average opioid prescription rates are noticeably lower in states that have medical marijuana laws. Of course correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. That said, it is also worth noting for-profit companies rarely give significant sums of money to politically active groups purely out of the goodness of their hearts.

We ran a map yesterday showing which states have the greatest dependency on prescription painkillers.

Keeping An Eye On The Ball

Charles Simic confesses his long-held World Cup addiction:

As hard as it is to comprehend, there are human beings on this planet who have no interest in the World Cup. Not just in the United States, where many sneer at this foreign import and find the global passion for the game incomprehensible, but also in countries where the fate of the national team in such a tournament is the sole topic of conversation for months.

I remember visiting the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz in Mexico City on the day his country was playing Italy in the 1994 World Cup. At first, we lolled around for a couple of hours, sipping wine and having a leisurely chat about literature and art. But to my surprise and distress, when the time came for the game, instead of turning on the TV, Paz and his wife took me and my Mexican translator to a French restaurant where we sat surrounded by empty tables, because everyone else in Mexico that evening was either at home watching the game or in one of the big plazas in the city seeing it on a huge screen. As we got into an argument about Heidegger, I recall cheers and gasps of collective disappointment reaching us from the vast crowd gathered outside. Desperate to find out the score, I kept going to the bathroom so I could peek into the kitchen where the cooks and the waiters were watching the game.

I have no memory of anything Octavio said that night, and I sincerely regret that, because he was the most learned and articulate man I ever encountered in my life. But I do remember the final score: Mexico one; Italy one.

(Photo: England fans celebrate after watching the England beat Slovenia 1-0 on a giant screen in Manchester, England on June 23, 2010. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Israel’s Other Terror Problem

Keating suspects Israel is regretting its failure to do anything about the epidemic of of violence and vandalism committed by West Bank settlers against their Palestinian neighbors and their property:

While the attacks have been widely condemned in Israel, the response by authorities can charitably described as sluggish. According to one report, between 2005 and 2013, 992 investigations of complaints of Israeli violence against Palestinians were launched but only 7.8 percent of them led to indictments.

As Daniel Byman and Natan Sachs have argued, a large part of the problem is the state of legal limbo created by the occupation of the West Bank. While Israeli police have authority over criminal disputes between Israeli citizens, “the military governs most aspects of public life, from security to construction permits,” and with the overall level of violence low until the last few weeks, the Israeli Defense Forces felt little public pressure to focus on protecting Palestinians from settler violence. Despite this, the IDF has on several occasions been the target of settler attacks.

Jonathan Schanzer profiles the settler gang known as “Price Tag”, which is responsible for many such attacks:

Price Tag is more a network than a group, because its cadres — religious, teenage Jews living in the settlements and in Israel alike — operate informally, leave no electronic trail of their activities, and seem to know how to elude detection from authorities. They are so elusive, in fact, that Israel’s vaunted internal security services has made only a handful of arrests since the acts of vandalism, usually marked by graffiti bearing the words “price tag” in Hebrew, began in 2008.

Some, including Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, have called Price Tag a terrorist movement. This is debatable, because its activities have been limited to acts of vandalism and destruction of property. But Israeli officials I spoke to this week began to speculate that if the network was responsible for the murder of Abu Khdeir, it would have graduated into the realm of terrorism. Price Tag, at least so far, has not been linked to the murder. But amid the unrest that is now spreading across East Jerusalem, the Arab areas in Israel’s northern “triangle,” and parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the network poses dangers to Israeli security.

Who Killed The RomCom?

Andrew Romano suggests the small screen is to blame:

[N]ow that Hollywood has concluded that its only remaining competitive advantage is spectacle, it’s all but ceded the fairer sex to cable TV. The only demographic adrenalized enough to reliably show up for this weekend’s latest extravaganza is men aged 18-24, or so the thinking goes, and so the industry keeps churning out dude bait. Even romantic comedies themselves have become more male-centric over the last dozen years, with the Nora Ephrons and Nancy Meyerses of the world giving way to “bromance” auteurs such as Judd Apatow (The 40-Year Old Virgin) and Jason Segel (I Love You, Man).

Girls have something to do with this shift as well – again, on both sides of the camera. Take Mindy Kaling, who has made no secret of her love for romcoms. “What I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy,” Kaling revealed in The New Yorker in 2011. “This is my favorite kind of movie.” And yet Kaling hasn’t created a big-screen romantic comedy yet; she’s been too busy making a television show (The Mindy Project). Same goes for Tina Fey (30 Rock) and Lena Dunham (Girls), two other female writers who could potentially reinvigorate the genre (but who likely see more creative freedom in TV).

Matt O’Brien ties the rise of the Chinese film market to the decline of film comedy:

[T]he death of the comedy movie has come because the world is flat — and senses of humor aren’t. What’s funny to an American audience doesn’t always translate for a Chinese one. And now that China’s box office is the world’s largest outside of North America, that’s a major consideration.

Remember, Hollywood studios aren’t in the business of making movies. Like all financiers, they’re in the business of minimizing risk. That’s why, as Derek Thompson points out, they churn out so many sequels, prequels and reboots (and unnecessary splits of the last movie of a series into two). They do this because it works, and Hollywood knows it does. And now Hollywood knows that American comedies don’t work overseas, but American action movies do — especially if, like “Transformers 4,” they suck up to the Chinese government.

Indeed, Transformers 4 is now China’s top-grossing movie of all time:

Given that critical reaction to Transformers: Age of Extinction has been almost conspiratorially negative across the board — Richard Roeper called it “relentless,” and not as a compliment; Peter Travers at Rolling Stone refused to give it even one star — much of the coverage of its success in China has been, well, pretty darn condescending: “Chinese people are dazzled by anything Hollywood, etc.”

The reality is more complex. If the bar of cinematic quality is indeed set lower in China, the tastes of its 1.3 billion people aren’t necessarily to blame. The Chinese Communist Party is exceedingly picky about the films screened in the country, especially in the case of foreign cinema; so if a movie does well, one can ultimately thank the government.

The long and the short of it: Bay made a movie set and filmed in China, starring Chinese actors, using Chinese resources and pushing Chinese products, and in exchange, the movie gets a timely premiere across the country’s 18,000-plus movie screens.

Building Blocks

Olivia Solon promotes newfangled Lego-style construction materials:

The bricks—which are patent pending—are much like Lego in that they come in a variety of forms for different purposes and can easily connect together, with rows of knobs along the top of bricks that slot into voids along the bottom of other bricks. A special adhesive—which works like a super-strong double-sided sticky tape, a bit like 3M VHB—dispenses with the need for cement. They can be delivered to building sites in a kit complete with traditional doors and windows, allowing for structures to be assembled with a minimum of debris and labor. Steel bars can be slotted through dedicated channels in the bricks to provide the same support as traditionally reinforced concrete.

The bricks feature open internal spaces for insulation, which means that buildings made with the bricks require less energy for heating and cooling. The spaces also allow for infrastructure elements—whether it’s plumbing or wiring—to run through them. Removable panels allow for easy access to these infrastructure elements so that portions of walls don’t need to be torn down for maintenance. The bricks can be used to make floors, walls, and ceilings and the company says that if it constructs the average five story building using the bricks it can save around 30 percent energy compared with traditional construction methods. Kite Bricks also claims to be able to reduce the cost of construction by as much as 50 percent.

Who Will Lead The Reformicons?

Not Paul Ryan:

The reformicons’ retreat from Ryan-style apocalypticism is not only a shrewd tonal shift, but also a welcome — albeit unacknowledged — recognition that the party’s doomsaying has not come to pass, and that the American way of life will indeed survive Obama’s reforms. Indeed, the success of Obama’s domestic agenda may create more space for a conservative counteroffensive, in the way that Reaganism opened political room for Bill Clinton. Whether or not the reformicons ever compose a workable domestic agenda, they have come to recognize that they cannot run a presidential campaign promising to rescue America from fire and rubble visible only to themselves.

Vinik takes a closer look at this split:

Term limits mean Ryan can’t keep his current chairmanship. And that’s where things get interesting. As a replacement, he’s expected to seek, and to get, chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee. That will give him direct jurisdiction over tax reform and, as the Washington Post’s Robert Costa confirmed in a tweet, Ryan hopes to keep pushing the same supply-side agenda. But that’s likely to put him in conflict with the nascent reform conservative movement. You’ve probably heard of this group. They’re the ones who were the subject of that New York Times Magazine article on Sunday – and who, prior to that, put together a new policy agenda in a compendium called “Room to Grow.” What you may not know is that the chapter on tax reform, written by Robert Stein, represents a substantial departure from agenda Ryan and other supply-siders have been pushing.

Kilgore celebrates this development:

[F]or the moment, it’s refreshing to see that Ryan looks more and more like a standard GOP business hack with an unhealthy addiction to Ayn Rand novels, and less and less like the Brains of the GOP.