Exploding Caskets

Lex Berko explains the dangers of trying too hard to preserve a loved one’s body:

Exploding casket syndrome, as it is known in the death industry, occurs when these decomposition processes are not given adequate space to perform. In her awesome “Ask a Mortician” series, mortician Caitlin Doughty says, “You really want a decomposing body to have access to some sort of air so it can then dehydrate. But if it’s one of those super sealed protective caskets, there’s really no place for all of that gas and fluid to go and so the body can kind of turn into sort of a bog.” Eventually, when the pressure builds high enough in that boggy tank of a casket, pop!

Taking Russia Seriously

Julia Ioffe cautions against dismissing the Russians out of hand:

If Russia cautions against arming rebels that are increasingly dominated by extremists, there’s a sort of knee-jerk reaction in certain quarters of Washington: those fucking Russians. And, yes, that’s fair. Those fucking Russians are part of the reason the conflict has gotten so bad to begin with, and why the forces fighting Assad have become increasingly radicalized: Had the Russians not defended Assad so staunchly back when it was just peaceful protests in Damascus, maybe Syria would have 93,000 more people walking undemolished streets today.

But by dismissing Russian concerns out of hand, we risk doing what the Russians do—if the Americans are for it, we must be against it—and turning the whole thing into a kind of Cold War mobius strip. … We also risk overlooking the merits of their arguments, however much they’re buried in their own Cold War shadowboxing mumbo jumbo. They have been right before, you know. Like, on Iraq.

2016 Tea Leaves

Allahpundit reviews Marco Rubio’s favorable polling numbers:

If you want to know why Rubio hasn’t walked away from the Gang of Eight bill yet, that’s why. He has no political incentive to do so. If he hangs in there and the bill passes, he’ll get all sorts of media love as the “new leader of the GOP,” a man who “makes things happen in Washington,” blah blah. You and I will pound the table and swear that we’ll never, ever vote for him in 2016, and that might be true— for awhile. But strange things happen.

Harry Enten believes that appearing moderate and cozying up to GOP elites will improve Rubio’s chances in 2016. Why he needs some moderate cred:

Rubio’s Senate record paints him as one of the most conservative senators. He was the seventh most conservative senator in the 112th Congress, sandwiched between Jim Inhofe and Ron Johnson. As I wrote before, it’s unlikely the Republican party will nominate a very conservative candidate in 2016. When it liked Barry Goldwater in 1964, and Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party had recently controlled the presidency. But when the party hasn’t been in the White House for eight years or more, it goes for a more centrist pick in order to win.

Meanwhile, Noah Rothman focuses on the “inevitability” of Chris Christie:

[He] is America’s favorite Republican. Unfortunately for Christie, he is also Republicans least favorite Republican.

But while some are ready to dismiss the governor’s presidential prospects on these grounds, don’t be so sure. Appeals to inevitability and electability have historically gone a long way towards getting a reluctant GOP primary electorate to hold their nose and vote for the candidate they do not love but think can win. … Polls like these help Christie to create and manage an image as the GOP’s most electable candidate. At a certain point in both the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, when the chips were down for both Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Romney, they appealed to the Republican electorate to support them on these very grounds. Ultimately, it was an effective argument. Christie can, and probably will, do the same.

Barro looks at how Christie has remained popular in New Jersey. Bottom line:

[H]is overall record is good because it’s built on skepticism, not cynicism, about government spending. If other Republicans started copying that approach, they might start copying his broad popularity, too.

Reihan, meanwhile, considers reports that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker will throw his hat in the ring:

The Republican 2016 contest already has a rough shape: several would-be candidates are crowding the rightward end of the spectrum (let’s say Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker), one or two are presenting themselves as problem-solving pragmatists with establishment support (Chris Christie and possibly Jeb Bush), and one or two are hovering in-between (this is where I suspect Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan would wind up, though I suspect Ryan is too wise to run). My gut sense is that Walker and Christie are the ones to watch.

Recent Dish on Rand Paul speculation here.

Where Does Performance Enhancement End?

Jacob Beck, who dismisses most of the arguments against legalized performance enhancers in sports, fears that ending the ban would “generate a vicious arms race”:

Even players who wanted to compete drug free would be coerced into taking [performance‐enhancing drugs (PEDs)] to keep up with their peers. And there is no stable stopping point. If two players are competing for a starting spot on the Yankees, neither player can rest content with yesterday’s pharmaceutical technology. Each one needs to get the latest and greatest PEDs or risk losing his job to the other. And so they’re off to the races, with the finish line set only by the ingenuity of bioengineers.

Increasing the number of home runs is not in itself a good thing. If it were, Bud Selig would order the outfield walls moved in. Moreover, PEDs carry health risks, particularly when there is pressure to adopt the newest and strongest drugs even before they have been properly tested. As I wrote above, a concern about safety is ordinarily not a sufficient reason to ban something from a sport. But in the context of an arms race–in which the only benefit the “arms” provide is relative to one’s competitors–it is.

What The NSA Can Do

Obama spelled it out in his interview with Charlie Rose:

Michael Crowley thinks the administration has finally found its voice on the surveillance leaks:

Speaking with Charlie Rose, Obama portrayed himself–as he did in his recent address on his drone and detention policies–as copiously working to strike a balance. “[W]e don’t have to sacrifice our freedom in order to achieve security. That’s a false choice,” Obama told Rose. “And so every program that we engage in, what I’ve said is, ‘Let’s examine and make sure that we’re making the right tradeoffs.’” Obama also clarified key points that may be lost on people who only follow the surveillance debate casually–namely that “if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails,” as he put it. A longtime critic of fear-mongering about terrorism, Obama was tonally measured about the threat.

Michael Tomasky found the interview “fascinating” but argues that Obama was too equivocating in his defense of NSA surveillance:

He supports these programs, and he ordered them, and he ought to just come out with a guns-blazing, f–k you ACLU, smackdown defense of the whole thing. Maybe an interview isn’t the place for that, and a speech or address is. He owns the program, so he might as well really own it.

More than that, I’d imagine he has interesting thoughts on national security and civil liberties, and it would be nice if we could hear our president go into some detail on questions like this instead of speaking in guarded and defensive soundbites. Even so, the comments were illuminating in that they show that Obama is of no frame of mind to change the current policy a whit.

Frank James reminds us that as much as Obama would like to make it seem otherwise, this conversation was forced upon him:

From the reasonable, matter-of-fact way the president put it, you would have thought that such a discussion had been part of Obama’s plan for his second term all along. But, of course, it wasn’t. The Obama administration didn’t exactly initiate this discussion. Instead, it was thrust upon him. Indeed, whether you view Edward Snowden, the leaker of the NSA surveillance programs, as a hero or traitor, he’s likely the only reason Obama is now forced to call for such a discussion about NSA surveillance. …

Presidents often see national security as requiring aggressive actions — frequently at odds with civil liberties — which they, of course, would rather not discuss openly. Once leaks force a public debate, presidents are compelled to speak to the nation’s concerns and sometimes to the global public beyond the U.S. But it certainly isn’t part of their plan.

Behind Every Man Of Steel

Matt Zoller Seitz picks up on the “striking and curious” absence of fleshed-out female characters in the new movie:

Lois is an important character, but only for how she furthers Clark/Superman’s attempts to understand himself and claim his destiny; she’s ultimately much less of a fully-realized, freestanding human being than the kooky, narcissistic Lois Lane played by Margot Kidder in the Reeve films, or even Kate Bosworth’s Lois in “Superman Returns,” a melancholy figure defined by her capacity to move on after the hero’s abrupt departure from Earth. Adams’ Lois is tough and smart but has no personality, only drive, and she’s not as integral to the action as she seems to be on first glance … females exist, for the most part, to be saved, or to have things explained to them.

Alyssa confesses she’s had enough of the standard superhero romance:

If we’re going to be clobbered with two or three superhero movies a year into infinity, as seems to be the case, we are desperately in need of new narrative frameworks for stories about these characters. Just as it’s gotten exhausting and poisonous for superheroes and their antagonists to destroy enormous swaths of cities without facing any apparent moral or legal consequences for the mass death and property damage they’re causing, it’s exhausting to see their interactions with women be essentially the same time after time, without any growth or sense of what a settled relationship between a superhero and a human with her own interests might look like. It was what made Tony and Pepper’s argument over the hideous giant rabbit he got her for Christmas in Iron Man 3 simultaneously so appealing and sad: it was an actual conversation about their relationship, and one that revealed that Tony knows precisely nothing about the live-in girlfriend who is running his company.

Recent Dish on Man Of Steel here. Recent Dish on the Hollywood’s problems with female protagonists here, here, and here.

Ask Josh Barro Anything: How Can We Solve Climate Change?

A good question, hence the, well, watch for yourself:

Relatedly, John Kerry writes today that he is committed to keeping climate change in the foreground “because it’s critical to the survival of our civilization, and that means it’s a critical mission for [him] as our country’s top diplomat”:

By keeping the pressure on each other to take ambitious action and replicating this effort around the world, [China and America] will create a virtuous cycle to address the climate challenge the right way: together. In a more collaborative environment, I am absolutely confident we will find the solutions and push the curve of discovery. We can do it without jeopardizing our economies — in fact, we will grow them. And the United States will be working not just with China, but around the globe. Next I will be traveling to India, where once again climate change and energy will be vital to the conversation.

Josh Barro is currently the Politics Editor at Business Insider. He has previously written for Bloomberg View, and before that was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Previous Dish on Chait’s recent profile of Barro here and here. Watch Josh’s previous answers here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.