Back To Iraq? Tweet Reax

https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/497557187045359616

https://twitter.com/EvanMcSan/status/497556546000130048

 

https://twitter.com/BrettLoGiurato/status/497575078406520832

https://twitter.com/BrettLoGiurato/status/497565983482335232

https://twitter.com/nickrobinsearly/status/497561187656429569

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/497557726105698305

https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/497580465696423936

https://twitter.com/JeffreyGoldberg/status/497574852799496193

https://twitter.com/CrowleyTIME/status/497564436325216256

 

The Best Of The Dish Today

"Doctor Who" - Cardiff Premiere

Today, we noted yet another atrocity in the Middle East – ISIS’ campaign against the Yazidis near Mosul. The cannabis revolution gathered pace – with traffic deaths down in Colorado – and DC may soon legalize the weed entirely. Back hair got more defenses; gay culture seemed lost in the eddies of integration; a woman became an NBA assistant coach; and the New York Times finally stopped caving to government pressure on the word “torture.”

The most popular post of the day remained The Last And First Temptation Of Israel; followed by a very Matt and Trey Quote For The Day.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. One writes:

Thanks for the great blogging. Just a quick comment that I just re-subscribed to pay $10 per month rather than $5.  To do that, Tinypass directed to let my original (founding) subscription lapse and then re-subscribe.  I hope I still get to keep Founding Member status. It’s cool thing and I’d prefer to keep it.

It was never lost. See you in the morning.

(Photo: The TARDIS appears on the top of Cardiff Castle ahead of the “Doctor Who” premiere at St David’s Hall on August 7, 2014 in Cardiff, Wales. By Adam Gasson/Getty Images.)

Faces Of The Day

UKRAINE-RUSSIA-CRISIS

A boy and a dog look out from a bus stopped to be checked at a checkpoint on a road between Kramatorsk and Slavyansk on August 7, 2014. Fighting raged on in Ukraine’s industrial east, where local authorities have warned of a looming humanitarian catastrophe. Certain areas have been left without water or power and hundreds of thousands have already fled. NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen urged Russia to “step back from the brink” during a visit to Kiev on Thursday and vowed support for Ukraine as fears mounted that Moscow was preparing to send troops into the conflict-torn east of the country. By Anatolii Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images.

Science, Scandal, Suicide

Stem-cell biologist Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, saw his career go off the rails last month when two papers he co-authored with visiting researcher Haruko Obokata were retracted by the journal Nature. The retractions were issued after it came to light that Obokata had manipulated data and plagiarized some of the research. On Tuesday, Sasai hanged himself:

Yoshiki Sasai, 52, was found in a research institution next to his workplace by a security guard on Tuesday morning and was pronounced dead at a hospital two hours later.

Sasai might not have been responsible for Obokata’s misdeeds, but the scandal ruined him nonetheless. To Michael Eisen, Sasai’s tragic end illustrates some big problems with how the scientific community handles misconduct:

Obviously, fraud is a terrible thing. Nothing provides as deep an existential threat to the scientific enterprise than making up data. But as bad as it is, there is something deeply ugly about the way the responds to misconduct. We need to deal swiftly with fraud when it is identified. But time after time I have watched not only the accused, but everyone around them, be treated with such sanctimonious disdain.

Imagine what it must be like to have devoted your life to science, and then to discover that someone in your midst – someone you have some role in supervising – has committed the ultimate scientific sin. That itself must be disturbing enough. Indeed I remember how upset my father was as he was trying to prove that fraud had taken place. But then imagine what it must feel like to all of a sudden become the focal point for scrutiny – to experience your colleagues and your field casting you aside. It must feel like your whole world is collapsing around you, and not everybody has the mental strength to deal with that.

Jane Hu blames this on a warped academic culture that pushes scientists to publish too quickly and, in some ways, incentivizes fraud:

Overall, academic fraud is rare, which makes it all the more shocking when a major case is uncovered. To the public, it may seem mind-boggling that scientists would go to such lengths to deceive. In an ideal world, scientists work together to make incremental discoveries that add to the body of knowledge in a field and are recognized for quality work. In reality, the world of science can be cutthroat and isolating, with little oversight. Stem cell research is certainly not the only research field with a fraud problem, but it has all the right elements to motivate dishonesty: It’s a cutting-edge field with the potential to discover treatments for human diseases; it attracts highly competitive people who are all scrambling to make the next big discovery; and that discovery must be made, written, and published before any competitors can catch up. Add to that an academic culture that places ever-rising pressure on researchers to churn out publications in order to land jobs or tenure—especially publications in high-impact journals like Nature and Science—and you begin to see why researchers resort to cutting corners or massaging their data.

Did We Just Bomb Iraq?

https://twitter.com/PentagonPresSec/statuses/497488631599464448

Kurdish and Iraqi officials are attributing airstrikes on ISIS targets in northern Iraq to the US, but the Pentagon is denying everything:

The New York Times, citing Kurdish officials, reported that U.S. forces bombed at least two targets in northern Iraq. The McClatchy news agency also reported aerial bombings outside the town of Kalak in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, stating that Kurdish media had described jets as American bombers. But the Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John Kirby, said on Twitter that the press reports were “completely false.” The Pentagon also denied a report, by ABC News, that the U.S. had begun humanitarian air drops to people in need in northern Iraq.

Earlier on Thursday, a defense official told TIME that the Iraqi government had begun airdrops in northern Iraq and that it was considering providing “direct assistance wherever possible.” Multiple news outlets, including CBS News and the New York Times, reported Thursday that airdrops or airstrikes were among the options under consideration.

But even if they haven’t gone ahead with them yet, the Obama administration is definitely thinking about both as the situation rapidly deteriorates:

For months, hundreds of US military advisers sent to Iraq have compiled assessments of Iraqi military strength against Isis, a process that the Obama administration has portrayed as a prerequisite for any airstrikes. But with no offensive action taken, the Pentagon has faced criticism for dragging its feet on a deepening crisis.

Now Kurdish peshmerga irregulars have fallen back to positions closer to the regional capitol of the autonomous region, Irbil, following days of Isis gains in nearby towns in and near Iraqi Kurdistan. Tens of thousands of civilians are said to be crossing into Kurdistan for shelter. As much as the dire persecution of Iraqi religious minorities has prompted Obama administration discussions of food, water and medicinal air drops, the threat to the pro-US Kurds has contributed to the reengaged debate over air strikes.

Robert Farley explains why flying aid to the Yazidi refugees is easier said than done:

Unless the drops are very careful, militants might end up with the food and water. That’s not such a disaster, except that groups searching for aid packages can come into contact with armed militants searching for the same thing. The Pentagon has worked hard over the past decade to develop a system that allows precision delivery of large amounts of material, but the system remains geared toward getting supplies to experienced soldiers, not to groups of untrained civilians.

Moreover, airdrops of food, and especially water, are time- and resource-intensive. One off-the-cuff analysis suggested that 24 C-130 transport aircraft flying round trips every day would be necessary to keep the Yazidi supplied with water. Iraqi capacity is limited by the lack of available aircraft and by the need to devote resources to areas in direct combat. Iraq has a handful of C-130s, and a handful of smaller Antonov An-32s, but these aren’t nearly enough to meet the needs of such a large population, even under the best of circumstances. Thus, any operation would require the deployment of American, Turkish, or NATO transport aircraft to the area.

Gordon Lubold sums up the desperation in Iraq right now:

The situation has quickly grown dire. Humanitarian groups said earlier this week that as many as 40,000 civilians, many of whom are Yazidi, were trapped as vaunted Kurdish peshmerga forces defending the area lost ground to the Islamic State. Although the United States has supported Iraqi forces, including providing hundreds of Hellfire missiles, the peshmerga say they are poorly equipped to counter the Islamic State, previously known as ISIS. [White House spokesman Josh] Earnest on Thursday called the situation a humanitarian catastrophe. He also said the administration is deeply concerned about reports that several hundred girls had been abducted from the area.

Compounding the deteriorating situation is the Islamic State’s capture of Iraq’s largest dam, the Mosul. What that spells for civilians if, say, the militants blow it up, sending a 65-foot wall of water downriver, has been a concern since the Islamic State began its offensive across northern Iraq in the spring.

So Allahpundit figures if there’s a time to act, it’s the present:

The Yazidis starving on Mount Sinjar is bad, ISIS seizing the Mosul Dam is worse, and ISIS overrunning the one solid ally America has in the region is probably worst of all. Maybe the threat to Irbil finally convinced Obama to act. I’m honestly shocked that the jihadis could have the peshmerga so far back on their heels that the capital of Kurdistan could be under threat, but maybe that’s my own ignorance showing. If the Kurds aren’t going to push ISIS back, though, who is? Turkey? The Saudis?

The Formula For Happiness

Researchers have developed one, and it’s as complex as you’d expect:

In a study published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of British neuroscientists created an equation that they say accurately predicted the short-term happiness of more than 18,000 people by comparing their expectations of an event to its real-life outcomes. Here’s what that looks like:

6c55d8b41

And, in case the sight of alarmingly long equations doesn’t make you happy, here’s what it boils down to: Happiness “doesn’t depend on how things are going,” says lead study author Robb Rutledge of University College London. “It depends on whether things are going better or worse than you had expected they would.”

Victory!

The NYT will, from now on, use the English language to describe the torture that the CIA inflicted on terror suspects. There was never any justification for the euphemisms but cowardice in the face of Republican intimidation and Bush administration spin. Executive editor Dean Baquet writes:

Over time, the landscape has shifted. Far more is now understood, such as that the C.I.A. inflicted the suffocation technique called waterboarding 183 times on a single detainee and that other techniques, such as locking a prisoner in a claustrophobic box, prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling people’s bodies into painful positions, were routinely employed in an effort to break their wills to resist interrogation.

Hooey. We knew all this beyond any doubt almost a decade ago. See my own review of several torture books for the New York Times Book Review in 2005 here. I used the word torture in that review to describe things that any sane person would call torture – based on the overwhelming evidence in front of us at the time. You can also read the Dish’s full and long history of campaigning for this change at the NYT here. Bill Keller should be forever ashamed of his caving in to government pressure for so long.

But now is not the time to cavil at the NYT for so long refusing to write in English. It’s time to celebrate that the newspaper of record is no longer covering for war criminals.

Trophy Children, Ctd

Molly Knefel, the writer whose essay kicked off the popular thread, writes the Dish:

Thanks very much for the link, it’s been quite interesting to follow the discussion. Your characterization of my argument as simply pro-participation trophy, however, is incomplete. My essay is about recognizing children for what they’re good at, because every child is good at something. My argument isn’t about literal trophies, or not recognizing excellence, or mandatory participation awards. It’s about critiquing the idea that making all kids feel appreciated will somehow make them weak. So many children never get recognized for what they’re good at if they’re not the best at the predetermined categories.

A reader nods:

As someone who spent 23 years in the Navy, I find it odd that we think society will fall if we recognize collective achievement by children.

Such presentations are a sacred tradition in the military, where anytime you depart a command you are awarded a plaque, framed photo, or other memento recognizing your contribution to that unit – for simply having been on the team. Yes, if you do good work you are also rewarded with a medal or a letter of commendation, usually presented at a different ceremony. But what I have on my wall are the plaques, the “crossing-the-line” certificate, and the photos signed by my comrades. Those are what bring back great memories for me and make me glad I served. If this system is good enough for the warriors, it’s good enough for the wee ones.

Another argues that awarding individual trophies for kids’ team sports is “a totally misguided concept”:

For sports like soccer, football and basketball, the children who are awarded individual trophies are often those who play most selfishly. Even at very high levels of basketball, the perception is that players who score the most points are the most skilled. However, the players who score the most are usually just those that take the most shots, which in the case of basketball means literally taking them from your teammates. Sports statisticians like Dave Berri and Andres Alvarez have shown that a player who scores a lot but does so inefficiently actually has a negative impact on his teams’ chances to win but will still be perceived as more valuable than his teammates.

Other sports are less extreme examples, but the point is that it’s very hard to tease out individual performance from team results. Having individual awards in team sports for children often ends up with the kids watching their most selfish teammate congratulated by adults for his selfish play.

Another gives us pause:

My child is a trophy child. She had a brain tumor at birth that we discovered when she was three months old, thanks to some all-night seizures. Three surgeries and four months later, almost the entire tumor had been removed. What remains will hopefully not cause additional seizures, hormone imbalances, or other problems. The stroke during her second surgery (at six months of age) meant she had to spend two weeks in a neurorehabilitation hospital once she recovered enough from surgeries to remain conscious. Now almost four years old and three years later, she has had roughly 8 OT, PT and speech therapy appointments per week since being released from the hospital.

I know that perhaps this all sounds whiny or like I’m trying to shame those who worry about their children’s or other children’s medals, but I don’t mean it that way. I mean no offense to anyone; I’m just reflecting on how my daughter and maybe other kids with special needs are so often not included in societal hand-wringing about “kids today.”

Has Erdogan Lost The Plot?

Not necessarily, Steven Cook argues, though his “Hitler fetish” and cult-of-personality stunts like the bizarre soccer match in the video above might suggest otherwise. Rather, Cook writes that what looks like erratic, blustery illiberalism to us is pitch-perfect politics in Turkey, where Erdogan is vying to become the first popularly elected president:

When it comes to anti-Semitism, Erdogan is guilty as charged, but sadly so are large numbers of Turks. It is true that Jews found refuge in Turkey during the Inquisition and have lived and prospered there ever since, but that does not mean that anti-Semitism is alien to Turkish culture. Recent events in which blood curdling hatred of Jews appeared in the pro-Erdogan press (is there any other kind these days?) and among Turkish users of social media in response to Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip demonstrate that it is decidedly not, particularly among Erdogan’s core constituency. Yet even beyond the particular strand of Turkish Islamism from which Erdogan’s worldview comes, anti-Semitism is widespread in Turkey. For Turks, Erdogan is not even necessarily an anti-Semite; more important, by calling out the Israelis for killing Palestinian innocents on a large scale, he is acting as the conscience of the Muslim world.

It would be unfair to a political talent like Erdogan, however, to suggest that he has been successful because of Turks’ dislike of the United States, Israel and Jews, let alone his ability to move around a soccer field relatively well. Erdogan’s repeated electoral victories are attributable to his many achievements.

Since he became prime minister in March 2003, Turkey has made important strides in health care, redeveloped significant portions of its transportation infrastructure, put money in the pockets of the middle class, and become a regional power. … For many Turks, only Erdogan—the strong, unapologetic, tough guy—could have transformed Turkey in the way the prime minister has, even if from the perspective of outside observers these achievements have come at the cost of what was once promising political reform. Erdogan’s rule has become fundamentally illiberal, which seems just fine with his constituents.

But maybe not with Turkey’s ethnic and religious minorities, who find some of Erdogan’s campaign rhetoric discomfiting:

Erdogan has been criticized for repeatedly talking about ethnic and religious differences in what appears to be a bid to shore up his support among his Sunni Islam base. Earlier this week, he had called on his rivals to be clear about their backgrounds. “I am a Sunni, Kemal [Kılıcdaroglu of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP] is an Alevi [a branch of Shiite Islam], Selahattin [Demirtas, presidential candidate of the Peoples’ Democratic Party] is Zaza [a type of Kurdish people],” he said, according to Hurriyet Daily News, later adding. “I respect Alevis. Just as I make my sect public, so should he.” 70,000 or so Armenians still call Turkey home, and many in that community felt marginalized or even threatened before the comments. Erdogan often uses “extremely aggressive and bellicose language when referring to the Armenians or Armenian issue,” Richard Giragosian, an American-born Armenian analyst, told Today’s Zaman in July.

And as for anti-Semitism, he maintains that Israel is to blame for it:

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has some advice for his strongest supporters in the U.S. Congress: If you don’t like the rise of anti-Semitism that has accompanied Israel’s latest war, then you should pressure Israel to stop killing Palestinians. An August 5 letter written by one of Erdogan’s top advisers on behalf of the prime minister and obtained by The Daily Beast disputes accusations that his recent statements about Israel were anti-Semitic. Those statements include an assertion on July 19 that Israel’s actions in Gaza “surpassed what Hitler did to them.” A few days earlier, a top newspaper in Turkey affiliated with Erdogan called on Turkish Jews to apologize for the actions of Israel’s military in Gaza.

“Each Israeli attack undermines the peace and tranquility of Jews living all around the world and turns them into targets of hate speech,” wrote Volkan Bozkir, a former Turkish ambassador to the European Union and now an Erdogan adviser and legislator who serves as the chairman of the Turkey-USA Inter-Parliamentary Friendship Caucus and the Turkish parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.