Slick Willy aptly covers “Blurred Lines”:
Why Aren’t There More Female Pilots?
Marc Herman finds some fault with the military:
Women currently make up between three and six percent of commercial airline pilots, according to Women in Aviation, a pilot’s organization. The U.S. has about 50,000 commercial fliers, of which about 450 are women.
The reasons appear in part to be structural. CNN looked at aviation’s lack of diversity in 2011, and noted that it costs about $100,000 to train for a commercial aviation rating. To avoid that cost many would-be pilots enlist in the military, where they can exchange a few years of service for tax-funded flight school. But then the old trap returns. The military is improving its gender and ethnic balance since its first studies in the 1990s, but slowly. Women were first allowed to receive Air Force basic flight training in 1976 and as navigators the following year, but could qualify for fighter jet training starting only 20 years ago, in 1993. The Air Force Personnel Center reports that, as of June 30 of this year, of the nearly 330,000 people in the Air Force, 725 were women assigned as pilots, and 265 were navigators. Even if every one of those people retired and went into commercial aviation, they would represent less than two percent of the country’s professional pilot corps.
A History Of Hate In Burma
Juan Cole Matthew Walton looks at the backdrop behind the recent uptick of Buddhist-on-Muslim violence:
Muslims in Myanmar have faced the everyday discrimination and challenges that non-Buddhists face in an overwhelmingly Buddhist majority country, but there have also been instances of more targeted oppression. Riots in 1930 were directed more generally at the immigrant Indian population (as a stand-in for the colonial power), but the 1938 riots (although also intended as anti-colonial actions) targeted Muslims more explicitly. After the establishment of military rule in 1962, Muslims were explicitly excluded from the Burmese military. Anti-Muslim riots occurred again in Mandalay in 1997 and Taungoo in 2001. While these latter incidents involved large numbers of monks, many have speculated that the incidents were organized by the military to deflect attention from other issues or to galvanize nationalist sentiment. …
The 969 movement is the public face of the current resurgent Buddhist nationalism.
The movement derives its name from the nine great qualities of the Buddha, the six great qualities of the dhamma (his teachings), and the nine great qualities of the sangha (monkhood), the “triple gems” of Buddhism. There is also a sense in which 969 is intended as a numerological counter to the Muslim 786 symbol. 786 is a numerological representation of “Bismillah Rahmane ne Rahim” (which, interestingly, is considered haram by some branches of Islam) and is pragmatically used by Muslims in Myanmar and elsewhere in South Asia as an identifying marker, particular in the case of halal restaurants. A groundless yet widespread rumor in Myanmar is that 786—adding up to 21—is a secret Muslim code that indicates a desire to take over either Myanmar or the world (depending on the scope of the teller’s ambitions) in the 21st century.
Recent Dish on religious violence in Burma here, here and here.
(Photo: Myanmar police force stand guard near Martyrs’ Mausoleum during a ceremony as Myanmar marks the 66th anniversary of Martyrs’ Day at the Martyrs’ Mausoleum in Yangon on July 19, 2013. By Soe Than WIN/AFP/Getty Images)
Vandals And Saboteurs, Ctd
Norm Ornstein, about as moderate a figure as AEI could tolerate, tells the truth about the unprecedented nihilism behind the GOP’s current campaign to nullify a presidency and sabotage a duly-enacted law. His comparison with Medicare D under Bush is brilliant. So are these two paragraphs:
When a law is enacted, representatives who opposed it have some choices (which are not mutually exclusive). They can try to repeal it, which is perfectly acceptable—unless it becomes an effort at grandstanding so overdone that it detracts from other basic responsibilities of governing. They can try to amend it to make it
work better—not just perfectly acceptable but desirable, if the goal is to improve a cumbersome law to work better for the betterment of the society and its people. They can strive to make sure that the law does the most for Americans it is intended to serve, including their own constituents, while doing the least damage to the society and the economy. Or they can step aside and leave the burden of implementation to those who supported the law and got it enacted in the first place.
But to do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one’s breath away.
The current GOP is a threat to this country’s economy, social order and cultural moderation. There is nothing even faintly conservative about their contempt for democratic institutions or their refusal to behave as anything but political vandals.
Dolphins Have Names
We humans aren’t so special:
The evidence that dolphins use signature whistles like names has been building since they were first discovered in the 1960s. They can convey a dolphin’s identity, as well as its mood and motivation. Individuals invent their own whistles at a few months of age, possibly with some influence from their mums. They’ll keep the same call for decades, although males sometimes change theirs to resemble the whistle of a new ally.
The whistles are clearly important, since they account for half of all the calls that wild dolphins make. They can mimic each other’s signatures, but they usually call with their own, perhaps to broadcast their identity and keeping in touch while swimming.
Ask A Window-View Champ Anything
Doug Chini, who nailed the vast majority of the 42 contests he has entered so far, takes questions from readers:
What do you do professionally?
I’m a corporate lawyer in New York City, which actually gives you the discipline to fight through some of the harder searches.
How much time do you typically put in for each contest?
It varies. I typically spend 10-15 minutes just analyzing the image and on occasion, as with last week’s Mostar view, the answer pops right out. But for difficult ones, and if I have time, I can spend several hours over the course of the weekend. In those cases, as with writing, it makes sense to work in small stretches and come back with fresh eyes.
What was your all-time favorite VFYW contest?
Well, in terms of the ones I’ve found it would have to be the El Nido view in the Philippines (VFYW #153). Tracking down the actual window required plotting dozens of images from the local cliffs on a time-line. By the end of that process my computer’s desktop looked like the floor of Baker Street after Sherlock Holmes spent a night digging through a stack of old newspapers.
The most amusing contest, however, was VFYW #116, which I never found. I normally begin a search by adjusting the image’s brightness and contrast, but when I did so that week, boy was I in for a surprise. I’ll let the readers go back and, er, reflect on that one.
What are the most common red herrings?
Recently it’s been red tile roofs. Whenever we get a Mediterranean view, there’s invariably a group of readers who think it’s California because of those roofs, but it rarely is. More broadly, certain architectural characteristics, like shanty construction, are common across a wide swathe of the planet, but people tend to assume they’re specific to regions they’ve previously traveled to. Unless you’re certain, I think it’s better to cast a wide net at the beginning of the search rather than develop tunnel vision.
Do you ever reach a point with some contests when you just admit to yourself that you’re stumped and give up?
Not really, because I rarely push too hard for an extended stretch of time. Instead, I’ll plug away right up to the deadline with whatever snatches of free time are available, even if it means searching on the elliptical at the gym.
Which VFYW victory were you most proud of?
That’s a hard one. Cork (VFYW #117) comes to mind first, as I found it just as I was about to turn the computer off for the night. And the Rohrmoos view (VFYW #148) in Austria required a pure brute-force search because there were no good clues. When I found that one I felt like Rocky running up the steps of the Philly Museum of Art (except swap Stallone with a dork sitting at a computer).
But if we’re talking “pride,” I’d have to say Sarlat-la-Caneda (VFYW #158). I only had one day to work on it, which meant I had to quickly narrow down the likely area using small details until I could locate the final, critical clue. (If the Dish staff allows, I may send in a detailed visual in the next month or so that shows how that one played out.)
What are some photo clues that the average person might not think would be helpful?
The most prosaic of details, like garbage cans, traffic signs and chimneys are often fairly specific to a region or country and can narrow down the search area. Also, the position of satellite dishes and the direction of shadows can give you a sense for the compass direction of the picture, which helps when searching satellite imagery.
Our previous co-champions, who we honored for our 100th contest, also respond:
What do you do professionally?
Mike: Electrical engineer
Yoko: Nursing
How much time do you typically put in for each contest?
Mike: About eight hours, usually a few hours at a time over Saturday and Sunday. About half my time is typically spent documenting the location. (I did most of the documentation – that’s why my time is longer than Yoko’s).
Yoko: It depends… from 15 minutes to the whole weekend. We usually found the window on Saturday morning, otherwise, we couldn’t go out. Typically, 3 hours or so.
What was your all-time favorite contest?
Mike: Dhaka, Bangladesh. The part I regret is that Yoko was traveling that weekend, so I found it myself. It turned out to be a great win, because it was a solo win – nobody else got the building – but I wish Yoko had been part of it.
Yoko: My favorite was Edinburgh. It was a lovely scene. The cobblestone street in the photo helped me find the window. (Note from Mike: Yoko found this window in about fifteen minutes).
Which VFYW victory were you most proud of?
Mike: #68, Ulaanbaatar. I had found windows before that, but this was the first one Yoko and I solved together. She found the window after we talked about the clues, and I wrote up the entry.
Yoko: Dhaka. Mike found the window by himself. Usually, I helped him too much.
What are some photo clues that the average person might not think would be helpful?
Mike: Curbs and utility poles.
Yoko: Hmm… Electric utility cables (how messy, how old…) can be clues. Also, the window frames sometimes tell me many things.
What are the most common red herrings?
Mike: License plates. There are so many, and they change so quickly. It’s easy to look at a plate and think you know where it’s from (or even to look it up on a license plate site), only to discover that it hasn’t been used for years, or even worse, that the same design is used in myriad countries or states.
Yoko: Mike’s advice. He always says, “It must be China!”
Breaking Hamas
Jeffrey Goldberg offers a reliably bellicose strategy to achieve peace in the Middle East:
Engineer the ouster of Hamas from the Gaza Strip. Both the Palestinian Authority and Israel see Hamas as a bitter enemy; both sides understand that Hamas is an impediment to peace talks. The end of Hamas’s rule — the Gaza Strip constituting about half of what would be a future Palestinian state — could set the stage for actual, fruitful negotiations. …
The White House could lobby Hamas’s remaining benefactors in Turkey and Qatar to trim their funding. If such lobbying failed, Congress could “pull strings to speed up delivery of or withhold the advanced weapons systems that both countries are eagerly awaiting, depending upon how the conversation goes. Turkey, for example, is expecting Sidewinder missiles and Chinook helicopters, and it would like to purchase Predator and Reaper drones. Qatar, for its part, is expecting delivery of Large Aircraft Infrared Countermeasures (LAIRCM) Systems, and 500 Javelin-Guided Missiles.”
Just so long as nothing is done to halt the settlements, and nothing is asked of Israel, while Hamas is targeted. That’s the neoconservative idea of balance. Jonathan Schanzer likewise insists the military takeover in Egypt has given the US the chance:
Since Morsy’s ouster, the military has been unleashed: It has arrested at least 29 Brotherhood financiers, including at least one significant contributor to Hamas’s coffers, according to a senior Israeli security official. It has also reportedly deployed 30,000 troops to the Sinai and purportedly destroyed roughly 800 of the 1,000 tunnels connecting Egypt to Gaza. Ala al-Rafati, the Hamas economy minister, recently told Reuters that these operations cost Hamas $230 million — about a tenth of Gaza’s GDP.
All of this presents U.S. Secretary of State Kerry with a rare opportunity to try to hasten the group’s financial demise. And it is in his interest to do so. The group, after all, carried out suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets in the 1990s to torpedo the peace process. It’s a fair bet that Hamas will launch a new campaign of violence now that talks are ramping back up.
What Does Stop-And-Frisk Accomplish?
TNC is unimpressed by its track record:
I am not totally opposed to policies in which individuals surrender some of their rights for the betterment of the whole. The entire State is premised on such a surrendering. But at every stop that surrendering should be questioned and interrogated, to see if it actually will produce the benefits which it claims. In the case of Stop and Frisk you have a policy bearing no evidence of decreasing violence, and bearing great evidence of increasing tension between the police and the community they claim to serve. It is a policy which regularly results in the usage of physical force, but rarely results in the actual recovery of guns.
Sullum adds that “debate about the effectiveness of New York’s stop-and-frisk program is interesting, but it should not be dispositive”:
For that matter, the demograpic profile of the people who are usually hassled by the cops, while it certainly should bother anyone who claims to be concerned about racial profiling or the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, is not the most decisive argument against stop and frisk, which is the Fourth Amendment. As Mike Riggs noted yesterday, [NYPD Commissioner Ray] Kelly seems to think everyone detained by the cops must be guilty of something. “The notion anyone stopped has done absolutely nothing wrong is not really the case,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, because police “need reasonable suspicion to stop someone and question them.” Kelly not only confuses reasonable suspicion with guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; he assumes his cops really do have a sound legal basis for every stop they make and every pat-down they perform. That assumption is hard to credit, given that stops result in an arrest or summons only 12 percent of the time and pat-downs almost never discover guns. If the stop-and-frisk program is unconstitutional, as it appears to be, its putative effectiveness does not make it less so.
(Chart from a 2010 report (pdf) by the Center On Race, Crime And Justice)
Guess Which Buzzfeed Piece Is An Ad?
This one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one? There’s been an uptick lately in Pepsi stories, for some unfathomable reason. But before you look and find which one was formally paid for, ask yourself whether a copy-writer or a journalist wrote the following paragraph:
Pepsi announced second quarter earnings Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations. The company, which also owns snack company Frito-Lay and beverage brands Tropicana, Mountain Dew and Gatorade, among others, reported revenue of $16.8 billion and net income of $2 billion, both increases over the prior year’s figures.
Pepsi is currently under attack from activist investor Nelson Peltz, who wants the company to separate its soft drink and snack business. Pepsi is against such a move. Below is a pretty sweet chart that highlights some key items from Pepsi’s earnings report.
Who wrote the following headline – a copy-writer or a “journalist”?
10 Reasons Why Beyoncé, Pink And Britney Spears’ Epic Pepsi Commercial Can Never Be Topped
Or does it really matter any more? It’s all entertaining! Previous Dish on “enhanced advertorial techniques” here.
Donald Duck vs Adolf Hitler
Nathan Jolly revisits WWII-era Disney, when the company was creating war propaganda for the US government. The above cartoon, Der Fuehrer’s Face, was released in 1943:
Donald is portrayed as a slightly resistant/drone-like Nazi, living in a town where everything — clouds, trees, telegraph poles — is swastika-shaped. Donald is dragged out of bed by, oh, just Himmler, Goebbels and Mussolini, who force him to read Mein Kampf, give him piss-weak war rations, then kick him to a factory, where his job seems to be to make artillery shells and salute pictures of Hitler. This repetitive regime results in a manic episode where Donald begins twisting his body into the shape of a swastika, before flipping out and tripping balls, his world now a spinning rush of singing shells, shrieking snakes, screeching smoke whistles and untold horror. As this is a cartoon, and also 1943, it turns out Heir Duck’s army flirtation was but a dream, with the cartoon ending with a tomato thrown at Hitler’s face – as per film and television laws in the ‘40s.
Oh, and Disney won an Academy Award for the piece.
