Category: The Dish

Which Party Will Lead The Energy Revolution? Ctd

Jim Manzi recently repeated his belief that government-funded innovation is the best weapon we have against climate change. Chait accused Manzi and his ilk of being all talk. Samuel Thernstrom of the Energy Innovation Reform Project sticks up for Manzi:

It is true that one of the unfortunate costs of the Obama administration’s ill-advised investments in Solyndra and other bad bets in their effort to pick winners in the market of energy greenpower-SD-croptechnologies was an erosion of conservatives’ longstanding support for basic R&D. (ARPA-E is actually an outgrowth of a George W. Bush administration initiative to create “innovation hubs” at DOE.) But despite the backlash, the picture is not nearly what Chait paints: My organization works with conservatives on these issues and our experience is that there is an enormous appetite for these ideas—but the most frequent objection I hear is the widespread disbelief that liberals would ever accept them. Reading Chait, you can see why they feel that way.

If liberals want conservatives to join them in causes like climate change, they would be wise to spend some time thinking about whether there is anything that they can do to make the proposition more appealing. My organization favors funding for ARPA-E — but before we ask Americans to give the Department of Energy more money, let’s restructure it to make it an agency that’s capable of spending money effectively. Secretary Moniz has actually taken some steps in the right direction recently, which I applaud. Imagine what could be done if that work was actually the focus of the administration’s efforts rather than its quixotic charge at carbon regulations. The Department of Energy should be at the forefront of our climate response, not the Environmental Protection Agency — and Chait is wrong to think that we don’t need to recognize that.

Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd

Dov Zakheim pushes Washington to recognize the Kurdish claim to independence, but he doubts the administration will go for it:

The pro-Western, anti-Islamist Kurds are America’s natural allies. During the nineties, they were the focus of American support while Saddam Hussein was in power. Yet the 450px-Flag_of_Kurdistan.svgadministration remains reluctant to exert itself on their behalf, and, in particular, to help modernize their military equipment.

For their part, however, the Kurds, having seized Kirkuk, their historic capital, are determined both to control that city and their long-term fate. They will press for independence if the sectarian fighting continues to rage south of their border. The Obama administration, which quickly recognized a far less stable South Sudan, should recognize the new Kurdish state. Given its willingness to work even with Iran in order to prop up the central government in Baghdad, however, it is unlikely to do so, prompting Kurdish resentment that will not easily be mollified.

But the case for Kurdistan isn’t as clear-cut as Zakheim wants it to be. The Bloomberg editors make the opposing argument:

U.S. President Barack Obama [last] week explained why keeping Iraq whole and stable is a U.S. national security interest. Kurdistan’s secession would make an extended and destabilizing sectarian war to redraw the borders of the Middle East, from Jordan to Iran, more likely.

So what can officials in Baghdad and Washington do to persuade Kurds to remain part of Iraq?

They might start by noting how difficult it can be for internationally unrecognized states to thrive. Iran and — depending on the response of Turkey’s Kurdish minority — Turkey could turn on a self-proclaimed Kurdish state, making for a tough and lonely existence.

Iraq’s central government, encouraged by the U.S., should also demonstrate that it accepts the new reality that has emerged since the collapse of the army in Mosul. The Kurds will not walk away from oil-rich Kirkuk, and that should be reflected in Iraq’s internal borders. Nor should they be expected to continue to submit to an arrangement for sharing oil revenues, enshrined in the Iraqi constitution, that centralizes all control and payments in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the newly assertive Kurds seem to be doing whatever the heck they want, such as delivering oil to Israel:

In a step that cements the impression of a de facto independent Kurdistan, a million barrels of Kurdish oil were delivered to a client in Israel today, despite threats by Baghdad to sue anyone buying it. The US government, fearing another blow to embattled Baghdad, had also worked to prevent anyone from buying the oil.

Reuters broke the story in a scoop, followed a few hours later by a statement on the Kurdish government website. “We are proud of this milestone achievement, which was accomplished despite almost three weeks of intimidation and baseless interferences from Baghdad against the tanker-ship owners and the related international traders and buyers.”

Josh sounds off on the shipment:

The relationship between the Kurds and Israel is by no means new, though it has never been formal. It also appears that the oil delivered to the Israeli port of Askelon is likely not destined for use locally but rather for storage and eventual shipment elsewhere. For the Israelis, though, it is a key part of a strategy to deepen relations with the Kurds of Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as access new supplies of energy.

For the Kurds of course the implications are potentially profound. The ability to export oil at scale entirely outside the control of the Iraqi central government is a huge step toward de facto independence, whether or not the Kurds took the step of formally severing ties with Iraq.

Previous Dish on the Kurds here, here, here, and here.

(Flag of Kurdistan via Wiki)

Giving Debtors Their Due

Arguing that the United States “was built on debt,” Claude S. Fischer takes a benign view of our borrowing and spending, especially countering those who blame it for the recent financial crisis:

The Americans who couldn’t get a bailout took on loans for what they thought were the right reasons. Yes, between 1989 and 2007, with more and more businesses accepting credit cards, Americans roughly tripled their credit card debt, a $2,300 rise in outstanding balances per family. But the swell of debt is almost entirely accounted for by the cost of housing, which grew as more Americans became homeowners. In those same years, 1989 to 2007, Americans increased their mortgage debt by an average of $46,000 per family. One may protest that Americans bought “too much house,” but in an era of stagnant wages, houses stood out as good investments. And, until the bubble burst, they were. Americans were not engaged in a bacchanal of self-indulgent borrowing. The percentage of family debt incurred for “goods and services” hardly changed between 1989 and 2007. Americans were buying—or borrowing—into the smart-money strategy of real estate ownership.

After the bubble burst, between 2007 and 2010, credit card balances dropped by about $800 and mortgage debt by about $3,500 per family. The biggest change lately in the debt burden has been a rapid increase in borrowing for education, which is also investment rather than consumption, and is driven not by private habits of excess but by college and state government budgets.

Koons In The 21st Century

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Later this month, the Whitney will unveil its major retrospective on Jeff Koons. In a profile, Ingrid Sischy notes that, for an artist whose auction sales totaled $177 million in the last year, Koons seems to care little about cash:

Barbara Kruger, the artist whose unsentimental pronouncements have been cutting to the chase about the art world for decades, says “Oh boy” when I call to discuss Koons, whom she has known since they both were starting out in New York. She needed to think about it and later wrote me: “Jeff is like the man who fell to earth, who, in this grotesque time of art flippage and speculative mania, is either the icing on the cake or some kind of Piketty-esque harbinger of the return of Brecht’s ‘making strange.’ Or a glitteringly bent version of that alienated vision. He brings the cake and lets them eat it.”

Kruger’s reference to Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose book [Capital in the Twenty-First Century] on the current chasm between the very rich and the very poor has become a cultural touchstone, is part of the whole picture; this social reality is what one can’t help thinking about when one hears about the prices of contemporary art today, especially the sums that Koons’s works are fetching.

The odd thing, as many who know Koons, including Kruger, will say, is that money doesn’t interest him. … In Koons’s public life there is no showy “I am rich” stuff. Money is mostly a means to an end for him to create his art. What he does need is wealthy patrons. [Curator Scott] Rothkopf, whose retrospective is blessedly clear-eyed, puts it this way: “If it is going to cost several million dollars to produce new work, he has got to martial the resources from wealthy patrons to produce this thing. He has to convince extremely wealthy people, via art dealers, to buy into the dream of this perfect object.”

Previous Dish on the artist here.

(Photo of sculpture by Koons via dierk schaefer)

Philosophy For The Fun Of It

In an interview about his forthcoming book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy, Peter Unger sighs over the pretensions his field, arguing that “when you’re doing philosophy, you don’t have a prayer of offering even anything close to a correct or even intelligible answer” to the big questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and the like. So why pursue it? He maintains that “for lots of people there’s fun in doing philosophy”:

With a certain proviso, philosophy is an enjoyable form of literature, at least for people of a certain training and temperament.

The proviso is that a fair amount of it contains special symbols instead of words, so that it looks like some sort of scientific thing, almost like an equation. Mathematics, symbolic logic, so on and so forth. So philosophers put that in, and give themselves the impression that they’re doing things ‘ohhh, so scientifically’ that they need the math. All this makes it much less enjoyable to me. I don’t like reading that stuff. But insofar as we can get over all of that useless and pretentious writing, it’s an enjoyable sort of literature, if they take the time to make it reader-friendly.

Take Derek Parfit’s book, Reasons and Persons. It’s in four parts. The first part is not enjoyable to read, because he talks about a lot of theories which he labels with letters. You can’t keep it straight, you need a scorecard next to the page. But the other three parts don’t have that, and they’re tremendously enjoyable to read — at least for some people who have some training in philosophy, and have the temperament for it. It’s wonderful stuff, fascinating stuff.

Reasons and Persons is extremely enjoyable. But does Parfit ever discover anything? No, not at all. Does he ever make credible, interesting new statements about concrete reality? No, not even close. But it’s very enjoyable literature for very many people.

Neuroscience Made Me Do It

The authors of a forthcoming paper in Psychological Science investigated “whether learning about neuroscience can influence judgments in a real-world situation: deciding how someone who commits a crime should be punished.” Tania Lombrozo explains the experiment:

The motivating intuition is this: to hold someone responsible for her actions, she must have acted with free will. But if her actions were the result of brute, mechanical processes that fully determined their effects — a view that a neuroscientific understanding of the mind might engender — then she didn’t have free will, so she shouldn’t be held morally responsible or punished too harshly. … [I]f learning about neuroscience suggests that the world is deterministic, and if determinism is judged incompatible with free will, then learning about neuroscience could have implications for how people assign moral responsibility and dole out retributive punishment.

To test these ideas, the researchers had participants read articles that were either about neuroscience or about other topics (nuclear power, natural headache remedies). The neuroscience articles highlighted the mechanistic, neural bases for human decisions….

After the participants read the neuroscience articles and the alternatives, researchers presented them with “a seemingly distinct study for which they read about a student’s violent crime” and asked them to assign a punishment:

The researchers found that, on average, participants who read the neuroscience articles assigned shorter prison sentences to [student Jonathan] Scarrow and found Scarrow less blameworthy than those who read the other articles. Bolstered by three additional studies reported in the paper, the findings suggest that learning about neuroscience reduces belief in free will, which in turn makes people less inclined towards retributive punishment.

Galaxies In The Rough

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Danny Sanchez photographs the microscopic interiors of gems:

For all the infinite vastness of the universe we’ve seen through telescopes, the world seen under a microscope also reveals some pretty alien-looking vistas. Like the tiny cosmos hidden inside gemstones, a realm that photomicrographer Danny Sanchez captures in striking photographs.

“When I first started looking through the microscope at gemstones, it was all space to me,” says Sanchez, who’s spent the last eight years learning to examine and photograph gemological interiors. “It was all the limitless imagination of outer space.”

Sanchez’s images reflect an awe for the cosmos, and the aesthetic influence of science fiction. Shattered remnants of a doomed planet emerge from microscopic rutile embedded in sapphire; the pyramidal pyrite shell of some ancient being drifts in geological time; a mountainous horizon hidden in a nugget of quartz looks absolutely extraterrestrial. The photos recall sci-fi visionary John Berkey.

See more of Sanchez’s work, which is for sale, here.

(Photo: “Dolomite in quartz (1). Field of view = 5.2mm”)

Babysitting On The Border

On Friday, Speaker Boehner called on the president to send the National Guard to the Mexican border. Allahpundit responds:

[Boehner] wants the National Guard there not to intercept illegals coming across but to essentially babysit the younger ones who’ve already made it so that the Border Patrol can go back to intercepting people. Still, though: Sending the Guard to the border is something you’d expect to hear from Steve King circa 2007, not John Boehner circa 2014.

On the same day Boehner released his letter, the White House took action:

Obama administration officials said the government is planning to open new facilities to detain and house the influx of migrants and ease the burden on detention centers in the Rio Grande Valley where horrifying conditions have been reported. Administration officials also said the government would send more immigration judges and lawyers to the region to bolster enforcement and removal proceedings.  “We are surging our resources to increase our capacity to detain,” Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters on a conference call, emphasizing the administration’s aim was to make conditions more “humane.”

But can we please retire “surge” once and for all, especially when it comes to immigrant kids? Esther Yu-Hsi Lee downplays Obama’s role in the humanitarian crisis:

In fact, the current process of dealing with unaccompanied children from countries other than Mexico was set by the Bush administration, according to Dara Lind at Vox. Under the law, the Border Patrol agency is required to take in these children, screen and vaccinate them, then turn them over to the Department of Health of Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The ORR assigns children to shelters until the agency can identify sponsors and once children are placed with sponsors, their cases work their way through the immigration court.

Dara Lind, who’s been all over the story, notes that “the current system was built for 8,000 kids – not 50,000.” She later details the dearth of detention facilities for families crossing the border:

There’s currently only one immigration detention facility that’s suitable for families: a former nursing home in Burks County, Pennsylvania. DHS announced today that it is “actively working to secure additional space to detain adults with children apprehended crossing the border,” in the words of Deputy DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Families who aren’t being physically put in detention are going to be “monitored” using “alternatives to detention,” like ankle bracelets, to make sure that they’re showing up for their court dates.

Lind also describes the alternatives to detaining families:

[Michelle Brané of the Women’s Refugee Commission] says that these alternatives are more humane than detention. They’re also cheaper:

a report from advocacy group Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services found that the government spent $166 per inmate per day on immigration detention, but only $22 per person per day on alternative programs. (And unlike private probation companies, alternatives to detention don’t make up the profit by charging migrants themselves.) But perhaps most importantly for Central American migrant families, alternatives to detention can be successful in getting immigrants to show up to court. ISAP reports that 96 percent of the immigrants it monitors make their court dates.

Why isn’t the government using alternatives to detention? One reason is because the optics of detention are much better for “sending a message” than ankle bracelets or phone calls are. Another is simply that the Department of Homeland still sees alternatives to detention as an experimental program. It hasn’t really implemented any on a broad scale yet. Detention is still the default. But most importantly, it’s easier to process families quickly when they’re held in detention.

Meanwhile, a new NIMBY movement has begun:

The Washington Times is now reporting that, in a blow to the administration, the residents of Lawrenceville, Virginia have successfully rebuffed attempts by HHS to convince the town to house 500 older youths at a recently closed college in their town. Over 1,000 residents voiced their opposition at a town hall meeting. (This comes on the heels of Baltimore’s Democratic mayor and two Democratic senators objecting to plans to house some of the new arrivals of children at an empty office complex in Baltimore.)

Julie Terkewitz provides background on the young people pouring over the US border:

Most of the young migrants in government custody come from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Seventy percent are between the ages of 15 and 17. And three-quarters of them are male.

Over the past decade, massive efforts to root out the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico have transformed Central American countries into critical and hotly contested slices of territory for cartels funneling narcotics into the United States. The wave of child and teen émigrés, experts say, is related to the ascension of these gangs, who feed on the money and manpower that youths provide, and pursue them with an almost-religious persistence.

In 2012, the Women’s Refugee Commission, a research and advocacy group, conducted field studies to examine the causes of this unprecedented influx. Of the 151 young immigrants interviewed, nearly 80 percent said that violence was the main reason young people were fleeing their countries. “It’s push factors, not pull factors,” said Jennifer Podkul, a senior program officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

A subscriber writes:

Good GOD! Who ARE you people? My Sunday early morning reading of The Dish is beyond expectations: Led Zeppelin, “Who’s Fucking?”, Patrick Leigh Fermor (I am most grateful to you for the introduction), Tolstoy … jeez, I haven’t even got to the bottom of the page. The sheer variety is stunning. Y’all are worth SO MUCH MORE than the subscription price I paid in February. Can I marry The Dish?

Well that gives you four great posts to revisit over the past couple days – with the paean to Led Zeppelin being a big reader fave. We also ran two poems about birds (and much more than birds): sand-pipers and sand-martins, by Elizabeth Bishop and John Clare, respectively. And a post arguing that Robert Frost should be seen as a great modernist.

Tolstoy gave us our short story for Saturday and Proust gave us advice on how to live. Mary Gaitskill argued that “the more you accept the pain and fear inherent in human experience, the greater your compassion can become.” Four more: trophy wives are more myth than reality; a new evangelical movie is an excruciating piece of victimology; Presbyterians brought gay people fully into the fold; while the Southern Baptists face serious decline. Four words: Buddhist Hell Waterslide Park.

The most popular posts of the day were this hilarious Onion parody of a dating site ad (NSFW); followed by The Most Influential Rock Band Of All Time.

Many of this weekend’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 17 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month.

See you in the morning.