The Fraudulent Freshman Fifteen

As the class of 2018 adjusts to dining-hall cuisine, Olga Khazan debunks a common myth:

A 2011 study found that having six or more drinks on at least four days per month was the only thing that made a significant difference when it came to keeping one’s high-school figure. Even then, the drinkers gained just a pound more than non-drinkers did. That same study found that in reality, just 10 percent of college freshmen gained 15 or more pounds, and a quarter of them actually lost weight. Instead, college students gain weight steadily throughout their time in school – women gain between seven and nine pounds total, and men gain 12 or 13. Furthermore, the increase seems to be a natural part of adulthood, not something unique to dorms and dining halls. College freshmen gain just half a pound more than people their age who don’t attend college.

Quote For The Day

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is,” – T.E. Lawrence.

Does Rebel Brutality Work?

UKRAINE-RUSSIA-CRISIS-POLITICS

Up to a point:

Beyond a certain point, however, brutality undermines the bargaining process. Attacks on civilians can effectively shift bargaining power away from the government and toward insurgents. Initially, positive shifts in rebel bargaining power increase the likelihood that the group achieves policy concessions from the state. However, beyond a certain point, these shifts may embolden the rebels, encouraging them to reject government concessions as their belief in their own future victory increases. Our results thus imply a curvilinear relationship between civilian targeting and the probability of a negotiated settlement wherein violence initially increases and then diminishes the odds of successful settlement.

The inflection point appears to be at the rate of approximately 400 deaths per month. Below that point, civilian victimization increases the likelihood that the conflict ends in formal government concessions to the rebel group. Beyond that point, however, the likelihood of significant concessions declines.

(Photo: A woman reacts after shelling in the town of Yasynuvata near the rebel stronghold of Donetsk on August 12, 2014. By Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)

The Case For Microwave Dinners, Ctd

Joel Salatin balks at Marcotte’s feminist defense of microwaved meals:

[S]ince when are women the only ones who are supposed to shoulder the burden for integrity food? … Here’s the question I would like to ask these families: “Are you spending time or money on anything unnecessary?” Cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, soft drinks, lottery tickets, People Magazine, TV, cell phone, soccer games, potato chips . . . ?  Show me the household devoid of any of these luxuries, then let’s talk. Otherwise, you’re just unwilling to do what’s more important, which is provide for the health of your family and your environment. That’s a personal choice, and one that’s entirely within your control.

I’m amazed at the difficult situations I hear about in which people do indeed rise to the occasion. Whether it’s sprouting mung beans or alfalfa seeds in a quart jar on the windowsill or buying grain by the bushel, resourceful, can-do people committed to changing their situation figure out a way to do it. For Marcotte to accept irresponsibility this easily underscores a profound courage deficiency. Turn off the TV, get out of the car, get off the phone and get in the kitchen — men, women and children.

Mollie Hemingway also pushes back on Marcotte:

The big elephant in the room of the Slate piece is, of course, how family breakdown and the pressure to leave homemaking have put women in a serious bind. Women are having to work horrible hours to get by and raise their kids, frequently alone, and then come home and manage meal preparation with homework and all the other responsibilities of family life. It’s almost like the breakdown of the family has hurt poor women disproportionately.

And as for those blessed to have greater material wealth, many women were told that careers should never suffer because of the demands of family and so they have to work long hours and then rush home to get kids from the daycare and then figure out meals. It’s utterly exhausting. A feminism that didn’t advocate policies and practices that weaken families would seriously help out here. As would a feminism that didn’t make women feel so terrible for being home with their children.

We Are Already Sort Of Allied With Iran

Flagging the above tweet, Jacob Siegel points to Iran’s deepening involvement in the ISIS conflict:

The photo reportedly shows the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Qods force, Tehran’s chief military strategist, and the man many American officials consider to be America’s most dangerous foe on the planet. His visit to the site underscores the convergence of U.S. and Iranian interests in Iraq, and Iran’s desire to be seen as orchestrating the efforts. Amerli was clearly a defeat for ISIS and a relief for the townspeople who had held off the group for six weeks. But it’s less clear what the alliance between U.S. airpower and Iranian-backed militias says about the vision guiding the mission in Iraq. Even leaving aside questions of a grand regional strategy for the Middle East—and how our track record suggests that U.S. led wars in Iraq can benefit Iran—its not clear how the precedent set in Amerli will serve the President’s more immediate goals for resolving the war in Iraq.

Juan Cole suspects Washington and Tehran are already coordinating their efforts to some extent:

US air strikes on ISIL in Iraq have alternated with Iranian air strikes on ISIL positions. It seems likely to me that the two air forces are coordinating in at least a minimal way, otherwise there would be a danger of them hitting each other rather than ISIL. … Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is alleged to have just authorized Iranian forces to coordinate with American ones. The denials from other Iranian politicians are likely merely camouflage for a policy that would dismay Iran hardliners.

But Keating doubts anyone will acknowledge that partnership:

There are obviously key points of conflict between Iran and the United States, not least of which is the country’s controversial nuclear program. A new round of talks about that issue are set to begin in New York this month. Any open acknowledgment of cooperation between the countries with regards to ISIS would likely make the U.S. Congress, hardliners in Tehran, and the Israeli government go absolutely berserk. But if the two nations continue to escalate the fight against a common enemy, it’s going to require some level of coordination. I don’t see Iran being formally invited into Obama’s “coalition of the willing.”

Nor is Russia likely to be a formal partner. But it too may become a de facto ally in the fight against ISIS. Ishaan Tharoor highlights how ISIS, which is believed to include some 200 Chechen fighters, is now lobbing threats at Putin as well:

Here’s a slightly new geopolitical wrinkle. Earlier this week, the Islamic State issued a video challenging a powerful global leader. But this time, it was not President Obama or one of his counterparts in Europe. It was Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the video, fighters pose atop Russian military equipment, including a fighter jet, captured from the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. This is Agence France-Presse‘s transcription of what follows:

“This is a message to you, oh Vladimir Putin, these are the jets that you have sent to Bashar, we will send them to you, God willing, remember that,” said one fighter in Arabic, according to Russian-language captions provided in the video. “And we will liberate Chechnya and the entire Caucasus, God willing,” said the militant. “The Islamic State is and will be and it is expanding God willing.”

Itchy Taser Trigger Fingers

Dara Lind takes a broad look at how cops are trained to use force. A smart point about Tasers:

Thomas Nolan, a criminologist at Merrimack College of Massachusetts, was a police union official in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Tasers and similar weapons were first being marketed to police officers. He remembers that they were initially sold as an alternative to lethal force — something that could be used in the same situations as lethal force would be, but with a better result. “What vendors were saying, and what policymakers accepted as truth, was ‘You’re going to avoid wrongful-death lawsuits because you don’t have to use deadly force anymore to incapacitate someone, you can use Tasers.'”

That’s not how Tasers are actually used by departments. They’re now, says Nolan, “the default option. Cops are not considering that this is an escalation of force. The Tasers are coming out pretty quickly. Instead of ratcheting down the instances of deadly force, they’re ratcheting up instances of nonlethal force.”

Why Are So Many Russians Dying?

Masha Gessen is perplexed why they are “dying in numbers, and at ages, and of causes never seen in any other country that is not, by any standard definition, at war”:

Sometime in 1993, after several trips to Russia, I noticed something bizarre and disturbing: people kept dying. I was used to losing friends to AIDS in the United States, but this was different. People in Russia were dying suddenly and violently, and their own friends and colleagues did not find these deaths shocking. Upon arriving in Moscow I called a friend with whom I had become close over the course of a year. “Vadim is no more,” said his father, who picked up the phone. “He drowned.” I showed up for a meeting with a newspaper reporter to have the receptionist say, “But he is dead, don’t you know?” I didn’t. I’d seen the man a week earlier; he was thirty and apparently healthy. The receptionist seemed to think I was being dense. “A helicopter accident,” she finally said, in a tone that seemed to indicate I had no business being surprised.

The deaths kept piling up. People—men and women—were falling, or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartments with jammed front-door locks; getting hit by cars that sped through quiet courtyards or plowed down groups of people on a sidewalk; drowning as a result of diving drunk into a lake or ignoring sea-storm warnings or for no apparent reason; poisoning themselves with too much alcohol, counterfeit alcohol, alcohol substitutes, or drugs; and, finally, dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes.

After running down a variety of possible explanations, she draws on the work of economist Nicholas Eberstadt to suggest the answer might be a lack of hope:

While he suggests that more research is needed to prove the link, he finds that “a relationship does exist” between the mortality mystery and the psychological well-being of Russians:

Suffice it to say we would never expect to find premature mortality on the Russian scale in a society with Russia’s present income and educational profiles and typically Western readings on trust, happiness, radius of voluntary association, and other factors adduced to represent social capital.

Another major clue to the psychological nature of the Russian disease is the fact that the two brief breaks in the downward spiral coincided not with periods of greater prosperity but with periods, for lack of a more data-driven description, of greater hope. The Khrushchev era, with its post-Stalin political liberalization and intensive housing construction, inspired Russians to go on living. The Gorbachev period of glasnost and revival inspired them to have babies as well. The hope might have persisted after the Soviet Union collapsed—for a brief moment it seemed that this was when the truly glorious future would materialize—but the upheaval of the 1990s dashed it so quickly and so decisively that death and birth statistics appear to reflect nothing but despair during that decade.

Update from a reader:

I wanted to point out that the Masha Gessen article you posted on Russia’s population is rife with errors. Please see this link that outlines many of them. Frankly, that article from Gessen should have been much better, as she is a very capable writer who has always written from unique viewpoints. That piece though was simply a bucket list of all the tired and false cliches that have consistently colored Western perceptions of recent Russian history. We cannot imagine that Russian’s have higher life expectancies than under that ardent democrat Yeltsin, because Putin is a bad bad man who is corrupt! But the reality is different.

The Lessons Of Ferguson

Joel Kotkin argues that despite what Ferguson has led many to believe, class matters more than race at this point in the US:

[R]ace will not define the 2014 election, or likely those that follow. Instead the real defining issue—class—does not fit so easily into the current political calculus. In terms of racial justice, we have made real progress since the ’60s, when even successful educated minorities were discriminated against and the brightest minority students were often discouraged from attending college. Today an African-American holds the highest office in the land, and African Americans also fill the offices of U.S. attorney general and national security advisor. This makes the notion that race thwarts success increasingly outdated.

But at the same time that formal racial barriers have been demolished, the class divide continues to grow steeper than in at any time in the nation’s recent history. Today America’s class structure is increasingly ossified, and this affects not only minorities, who are hit disproportionately, but also many whites, who constitute more than 40 percent of the nation’s poor. Upward mobility has stalled under both Bush and Obama, not only for minorities but for vast swaths of working class and middle class Americans. Increasingly, it’s not the color of one’s skin that determines one’s place in society, but access to education and capital, often the inherited variety.

In the wake of Ferguson, which the Dish covered extensively here, Jamelle Bouie takes stock of the myths to come out of the fetid corners of right-wing blogs and social media:

Did you know Michael Brown was a killer? Did you know he was a devoted gang member with an extensive juvenile record who routinely robbed convenience stores and committed acts of mayhem? And did you know that when Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown, he wasn’t using unjustified force, he was defending his life? The 6-foot-4, 300-pound 18-year-old fractured Wilson’s eye socket while reaching for his gun, and was killed while charging at Wilson to land another blow.

If this sounds suspect—if it sounds almost unbelievable—then your head is in the right place. Nothing in this narrative is true. Racist innuendo aside, there’s no evidence Brown was a violent gang member, nor is there evidence of any serious wrongdoing—as a juvenile, Brown was never convicted of a felony nor was he facing charges as an adult. And while Wilson was taken to the hospital after his encounter with Brown, he didn’t suffer serious injuries—the fractured eye socket is a myth.

But if you read websites like the Independent Journal Review, dive into far-right media, or explore the world of Darren Wilson support pages, you’ll find plenty of people who buy the fantasy. They reject the mainstream picture of Brown: A typical teenager, struggling to carve an identity and a life out of his beliefs, actions, and missteps. In their minds Brown was a budding criminal, and Wilson a hero. Or, as one Wilson supporter said during a demonstration for the officer, “We’ll all see this in the end that it was a good shooting. You know, it was a good kill.”

Al-Qaeda’s Newest Franchise, Ctd

Tunku Varadarajan underlines the link between ISIS and al-Qaeda’s new South Asian branch:

What should we make of this call by Zawahiri, of this loveless jihad? Why has he made this declaration, and why now? After all, al Qaeda has been in Afghanistan for years; and therefore in Pakistan; and therefore available, already, for anti-India jihad. Counterterrorism experts I spoke to were as one in pointing to the rise of ISIS in the Syria-Iraq theater as the main propulsion. ISIS has not merely stolen al Qaeda’s thunder; it is siphoning recruits away from the older organization, which has yet to recover from the catastrophic loss (in terms of charisma, and as a species of jihadi Lord Kitchener) of bin Laden. “Zawahiri wants you” doesn’t have quite the same impact on potential recruits as “Osama wants you.”

Gen. Ata Hasnain, a former Kashmir Corps commander in the Indian army, told me that before ISIS emerged as a jihadi force, al Qaeda “never felt the need to expand its ambit into South Asia. The anti-India terrorist groups in Pakistan were considered adequately motivated and organized, and al Qaeda preferred to remain only an inspiration for them, instead of overextending itself. Its prime battle was with Saudi Arabia and the U.S.” With the rise of ISIS, he said, al Qaeda has effectively been dwarfed. The avowal of jihad against India is its attempt to aggrandize itself anew.

The dwindling numbers of the Pakistani Taliban, partly thanks to the Syrian jihad drawing them away, could be another factor in the announcement of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent:

Just a few years ago, the Taliban was one of the two prime Islamist militant groups—the other being Al Qaida-aligned insurgents in Iraq—for foreign fighters around the world to enlist with. But with the self-proclaimed Islamic State on the warpath and new conflicts in North Africa, the Taliban has become less attractive. Specifically, the Pakistani Taliban. That’s the subject of a new report in CTC Sentinel, West Point’s counter-terrorism newsletter. As of July 2008, the Pakistani Taliban included around 8,000 foreign fighters, notes Raza Khan, a political analyst who authored the report. These fighters came from western Europe, the Middle East, China, Russia, India, and central Asian countries, particularly Uzbekistan. But today, only a few hundred remain.

But Arif Rafiq counsels against overstating the connection between ISIS and AQIS:

For the past few years, Al Qaeda has stepped up its outreach to Pakistanis. Its Urdu-language service is among its most active. Al-Zawahiri has also made a handful of statements addressing the plight of Muslims in Burma and India, and Islamic activists targeted by the state in Bangladesh. It’s been laying the groundwork for AQIS for some time. Indeed, more than beating out competition from IS, Al Qaeda is trying to fill a void in the South Asian jihadist community—the absence of a grand patron. While Pakistan’s intelligence services continue to support militant groups in the region, such as Lashkar-e Taiba, its support for militants in Indian-controlled Kashmir has remained low for much of the past decade. That’s why Umar, the AQIS chief, in another video released this summer, asked Kashmiri Muslims to join Al Qaeda’s ranks and accused Pakistan of selling them out.

“The success or failure of Zawahiri’s new initiative,” Nisid Hajari writes, “may rest on one man: India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi”:

The fastest way to increase Al Qaeda’s limited appeal in India would be for the authorities to overreact, as China has done with Uighurs in its restive Xinjiang province. This would not only alienate the best source of intelligence on homegrown radicals — the local Muslim community — it would rapidly burnish the appeal of radicals over more moderate voices. Any government scapegoating of Indian Muslims would be equally damaging. Modi’s association with the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat and the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh make him a lightning rod for many Muslims. He bears a special responsibility to endorse the loyalty of Indian Muslims and assure them they will not be targeted unfairly.

Probably the best way to ensure Zawahiri’s grand designs never come to fruition would be for Modi to push forward the stalled India-Pakistan peace process. As long as the wounds that divide the South Asian nations continue to fester, leaders on both sides will remain hostage to the actions of a few radicals: Any post-Mumbai terrorist plot in India that is traced back to Pakistan bears a high risk of setting off a wider conflagration.