The Dish

Paul Fairchild applauds Zack Snyder’s new film for forgoing the glowing green rock, calling it a lame trope and reviewing its increased abuse in the comic series:

Red kryptonite was a lump of the good, old-fashioned green stuff that passed through a radioactive cloud of some sort on its journey to earth. Every piece was different. In one issue it caused Superman to endure psychedelic, mind-bending hallucinations. In another it morphed the hero into embarrassing shapes. Each piece of red kryptonite affected Superman for only a day, at which point he returned to his normal state (no doubt because his writers couldn’t find a graceful exit from these crappy plots). … Author and comic writer Peter David put the nail in the lead coffin of kryptonite’s absurdity with his invented send-up in Supergirl #79: pink kryptonite, which makes Superman gay. …

For us mortals, “kryptonite” works without the cape and the big red “S.” It’s a moral weakness, a character flaw. It’s the idea that we’re powerless in the face of this vice or that guilty pleasure. It sounds cool when we describe our shortcomings this way, appropriating Superman’s virtue for ourselves: “cigarettes are my kryptonite.” This kryptonite is metaphorical, a weaker, abstracted copy of a space rock that serves as a totem. But it makes more sense as a metaphor than as an object that’s just a cheap, flimsy deus ex machina.

Recent Dish on Man Of Steel here and here.

Corby Kummer praises the business practices of Tcho, a chocolate company:

What sets Tcho apart from other chocolate makers is that it doesn’t just scout the equator looking for cacao farmers it can admire, hoping they’ll grow great beans that might make wonderful chocolate. The company does something new: it provides growers with all the tools they need to have chocolate tastings during harvesting and processing, the crucial period that determines the price a cacao farmer’s crop will command. Tcho combines coffee roasters, spice grinders, and modified hair dryers to equip “sample labs”—pilot plants that produce tiny lots of chocolate right where cacao is grown. The company gives cacao farmers customized groupware so that they can share tasting notes and samples with chocolate makers. In this way, the farmers can bring entire harvests up to the standards of Tcho or any other buyer.

This is a huge change. Just as some coffee growers have never drunk coffee made from their beans, some cacao growers in remote areas have never tasted chocolate made with theirs. (Since chocolate is much harder to make than coffee, some may have never tasted chocolate at all.)

James Wimberley zooms out:

We often underestimate the importance and the difficulty of ensuring that markets have good information about quality as well as price. A price has one dimension; even a simple product like a carrot has at least six dimensions of quality – weight, size, shape, colour, crunchiness, sweetness, acidity. (Carrot connoisseurs will add some more dimensions of flavour.) A complex product like a car or wine has dozens of qualitative dimensions. Some of these can be assessed intuitively with sufficient accuracy, like the carrot’s crunchiness; others measured, like the car’s turning circle. But in many cases we have poor intuitive judgement, like the comparative weight of bags of staple foods; and in others measurement is problematic, like the bouquet of a wine.

A well-functioning market has to address these problems, and they are not easy – and only some are reliably self-regulating.

Tom Laskawy relays the latest development in the battle over beverages:

[The American Medical Association] began an aggressive turn against soda last year when it passed a resolution at its annual meeting that singled out soda for its role in obesity, and included tepid support for a soda tax to fund anti-obesity efforts. And this year, the group announced its support for restricting the use of food stamps (aka SNAP benefits) on sugar-sweetened drinks. Those past actions pale in comparison to the group’s new demand for a ban on marketing energy drinks to young people, however.

It’s a bold move, given that junk-food marketing is such treacherous political territory. Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move anti-obesity effort famously foundered in that area. Consider, too, that energy drink companies have built their brands on testosterone fueled extreme sports that have great appeal for teens and adolescents. …

The question is whether the [Federal Trade Commission] will listen to the doctors. I suppose the better question is whether the FTC can hear anyone other than the food companies that have shouted down every mention of the words “restrict junk food advertising to children.” So far the answer has been no. Perhaps doctors’ efforts combined with the possible acute health risk from high-caffeine energy drinks — the suggestion that someone with a pre-existing heart condition, diagnosed or not, can actually drop dead from drinking them — will be enough to get the government’s attention.

Ryan Gallagher summarizes the latest revelations from Snowden and Greenwald:

The documents confirm beyond all doubt that the NSA can and does incidentally sweep up domestic communications while targeting foreigners, and it has the authority to retain such communications for up to five years. The NSA has to destroy communications concerning “U.S. persons,” except for cases in which the communication intercepted is deemed to contain “foreign intelligence information”; shows evidence of a crime; relates to a security vulnerability; or contains information pertaining to harm of life or property. In some cases, the NSA can incidentally grab Americans’ communications—without any specific search warrant under the broad authority it has under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—and pass them on to the FBI or other agencies.

Drum examines the new documents:

It’s genuinely unclear how big a problem this stuff is. It’s plainly true that determining whether someone is a U.S. person is sometimes a judgment call, and it’s possible that mistakes are rare. What’s more, if collection of domestic content genuinely is inadvertent, and is only occasionally turned over to other agencies when there’s evidence of serious crime, we should all feel better about this. But we really have no way of knowing. That would require, say, an inspector general to gather this kind of information, and the IG has specifically declined to do this.

He follows up here. Friedersdorf thinks “this makes President Obama’s recent public statements look highly misleading, if not outright lies.” He also asks why this information was classified:

Why are these particular details highly classified state secrets? It’s an abuse of the system — a scandal in itself. What the NSA does with information it collects but isn’t allowed to have isn’t something that needs to be decided secretly and kept secret by self-interested national-security bureaucrats.

Cory Doctorow takes Clapper to task:

[The memos] expose the “truth” behind NSA director James Clapper’s assertion that “The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress.” This turns out to be technically, narrowly true, but false in its implication … As the Guardian’s publications make clear, the NSA operates under a baroque and carefully engineered set of guidelines that allow it to spy on Americans while insisting that it’s not spying on Americans.

And Dan Goodin focuses on the policies that specifically target people using online anonymity services:

[The leeway afforded to analysts] seems to work to the disadvantage of people who take steps to protect their Internet communications from prying eyes. For instance, a person whose physical location is unknown—which more often than not is the case when someone uses anonymity software from the Tor Project—”will not be treated as a United States person, unless such person can be positively identified as such, or the nature or circumstances of the person’s communications give rise to a reasonable belief that such person is a United States person,” the secret document stated.

And in the event that an intercepted communication is later deemed to be from a US person, the requirement to promptly destroy the material may be suspended in a variety of circumstances. Among the exceptions are “communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time during which encrypted material is subject to, or of use in, cryptanalysis.”

Jordan Weissman responds to claims that unpaid internships uniquely advantage the rich:

If anything, poor and middle class students are extra likely to get stuck in unpaid internships. Rich kids, by and large, seem to prefer collecting a paycheck. Such were the findings of a fascinating 2010 study conducted for Intern Bridge, a consulting firm that specializes in college recruiting, and one of the few major sources of data on the internship market. After analyzing survey responses from thousands of college students, the paper concluded: “Our findings do not support the common contention that students from the wealthiest families have greater access to unpaid internships, even among most for profit companies. Low income students have a much higher level of participation in unpaid internships than students from high income families.” …

There were a few important exceptions to these trends:

namely, Hollywood, Wall Street and, probably, a good chunk of New York Media. Wealthy unpaid interns, the study reported, tended to cluster in finance, the arts and entertainment. Less wealthy ones tended to work in transportation, health, and manufacturing. So glamour industries may indeed be shutting out the poor. But it’s an open question whether that’s because the opportunities often require working unpaid full time, or if it’s because wealthier students are just more likely to compete for them.

In a separate piece, Weissman picks apart the myth that internships are justified because they lead to better jobs:

For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked graduating seniors if they’ve received a job offer and if they’ve ever had either a paid or unpaid internship. And for three years, it’s reached the same conclusion: Unpaid internships don’t seem to give college kids much of a leg up when it comes time to look for employment.

As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg (fought July 1-3, 1863), Tony Horwitz calls for Americans to revisit their views of the War Between The States:

[I]n recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs? “We’ve decided the Civil War is a ‘good war’ because it destroyed slavery,” says Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina. “I think it’s an indictment of 19th century Americans that they had to slaughter each other to do that.”

Dan Trombly responds that “[i]f we should question [whether the war was justified], we should do so only quickly, because the answer is most obviously yes”:

I am sympathetic to the case that there is no such thing as a “good war,” and readers here probably recall some of my arguments against the unnecessary romanticizing and appropriation of World War II history. Yet to question the worth of [World War II] because it did not originally intend, and could not fully resolve, the worst excesses of totalitarianism or genocide in Europe or Asia does not invalidate the causes for which the war launched. Even more than abolition, ending the Holocaust was not the primary and unifying cause for which the Allies fought, and the moral compromises the United States made in building a coalition to defeat the Nazis were even more uncomfortable than those it made in prosecuting war against the South. But as we can discuss the validity of fighting World War II while still acknowledging its decision to go to war was about far more than the Holocaust and the merits behind that decision, we can discuss the Civil War and acknowledge that before abolition validated it, the cause of Union was worth fighting for.

TNC nods:

The fact is that the Civil War didn’t represent a failure of 19th-century Americans, but that the American slave society — which was itself war — represented a failure of humanity. That failure was the price America paid for its conception. …

I am very sorry that white people began experiencing great violence in 1860. But for some of us, war did not begin 1860, but in 1660. The brutal culmination of that war may not have allowed us to ascend into a post-racial heaven. But here is something I always come back to: In 1859 legally selling someone’s five-year-old child was big business. In 1866, it was not. American Slavery was a system of perpetual existential violence. The idea that it could have been — or should have been — ended, after two and a half centuries of practice, with a handshake and an ice-cream social strikes me as really wrong.

In a later post, TNC emphasizes the infeasibility of the US government simply buying the slaves their freedom. Meanwhile, Esquire is recreating the Battle of Gettysburg through a series of blog posts:

In keeping with the anniversary, we have invited serving Army officer, military historian, keen observer, and longtime friend of the blog Bob Bateman, to contribute regular dispatches about the the Gettysburg campaign, the long series of maneuvers, counter-maneuvers, blind chances and lucky breaks that led up to the epic (and largely accidental) collision of the two armies in a small Pennsylvania college town. Knowing my friend, you will find your assumptions challenged, and some modern parallel drawn, and you will come away from this project knowing a little more about the battle, the people who fought it, and the country that it produced.