The Dish

A reader writes:

I’m sorry but that Yglesias “Quote For The Day” was utter bullshit. You are comparing a death cult who fires a missile and hopes it lands in a school yard to a country that makes mistakes, but venerates and celebrates life. What is it about Jews that drives people like you batshit? To object to the Gaza operation is to object to Israel’s existence. They were defending themselves.  From Goldblog to Peres at Davos, every Jew knows that. For a people that can’t agree on anything, Jews can agree for the most part on what Israel did during the Gaza operation was out of necessity, not out of malevolence.  

The question is not, it seems to me, a binary choice between necessity and malevolence. I don’t think, strictly speaking, the Gaza assault was either. I think it was a legitimate response to terrorist rocket attacks that nonetheless went too far in targeting civilian populations and infrastructure and included several deeply troubling incidents and reports of war crimes. To deploy a double standard and excuse Hamas’ war crimes would be grossly unfair. And it remains palpably true that Israel is on a plane by itself in grappling with these issues at all in the Middle East. But look: disprove the serious reports of war crimes. Then go off on critics. And there were and are, of course, many Israelis and many Jews who were appalled by the Gaza assault and its human and civil toll. The Israeli press was full of remorse only recently. There is no unanimity of Jewish opinion on this (or anything).

Yglesias is not exactly goyim. Neither is Goldstone. And the notion that objecting to the pulverization of Gaza’s already beleaguered population and infrastructure is some kind of anti-Zionist eliminationism is absurd. It is perfectly possible to believe in good faith that Israel’s actions in Gaza will hurt Israel in the long run, rather than help it, that war crimes are war crimes, whoever commits them, and that the interests of the United States and the world are not always congruent with one particular Israeli government or another.

But you will note from this email how any criticism of Israel is automatically regarded as anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism. The emailer is an intelligent, educated person. But on this subject unhinged by passion and paranoia. Yes, some of that paranoia – with respect, for example, to the UN’s grandstanding – is justified. But the defensiveness here helps no one, least of all the Israelis. You don’t have to be an anti-Semite to have been disturbed and shocked by the images and stories that came out of Gaza. You just have to be a human being.

But will use Sean as a propaganda vehicle. Like father like daughter. Cowardice is always the flip-side of bullies.

Some fascinating detail from the Jerusalem Post:

According to the taped conversation, only brief excerpts of which were provided in the 18-page affidavit, Nozette expected to be recruited by Israel since he had been working on sensitive defense information as part of his job consulting for the Israeli-owned company for the last decade.

“I knew this day would come,” he allegedly said. “I knew you guys would show up.”

The affidavit also quotes him as saying, “I thought I was working for you already. I mean that’s what I always thought, [the foreign company] was just a front.” Though the affidavit doesn’t name the business, press reports have identified it as Israel Aerospace Industries.

There is no evidence at present that the Mossad was in fact recruiting him or had recruited him – just that he hoped they would.

The FBI presumably suspected he had – and the company he worked for, IAI, was owned by the Israeli government, and another alleged spy for Israel had worked there, according to Laura Rozen. Another thing worth noting:

Another former associate wrote (in 2004) that Nozette used to write speeches for Dan Quayle (Nozette worked in the George H.W. Bush/Dan Quayle White House). Another associate who says he’s known Nozette 30 years also writes that he is shocked.

Quayle? If true, how did he get that job? Here’s his friend’s reaction:

I didn’t know he was Jewish. And maybe he’s not, but while I wouldn’t be shocked (in retrospect) to learn that he is, it seems more mercenary than ideological. I wonder if he was in financial trouble, or if something snapped after working in frustration for the government for three decades, with little progress in space. I mean, what “other foreign country”? It seems to be more anti-US than pro-Israel.

“It’s like they’re coming in and saying to you, ‘I’m going to drive my car off a cliff. Should I or should I not wear a seatbelt?’ And you say, ‘I don’t think you should drive your car off the cliff.’ And they say, ‘No, no, that bit’s already been decided – the question is whether to wear a seatbelt.’ And you say, ‘Well, you might as well wear a seatbelt.’ And then they say, ‘We’ve consulted with policy expert Rory Stewart and he says …’” – Rory Stewart, on the Af-Pak policy deliberations of the US, in the FT a while back.

As I try to figure out for myself what on earth the West should do there, his words resonate more and more. He is, it seems to me, a modern Tory. From Eton, of course. Just to give Orwell the willies.

The latest salvo from a foreign lobbyist for Turkey and Georgia, and former AIPAC staffer, Lenny Ben-David, resorts to this:

So far, only J Street’s Political Action Committee has disclosed its contributors, as mandated by federal law. But who are the donors to the main J Street organization? Make that list public, and these pesky inquiries will probably go away.

When asked about J Street’s funding by the Jerusalem Post — the newspaper that ran the original exposé — you responded “at most 3 percent” of contributors were Muslim or Arab.  Now you state that the figure may be closer to 10 percent. One tenth of J Street’s budget of $3 million, or $300,000, is a substantial sum. Why do so many Arabs contribute to an organization that purports to be “pro-Israel?”

There are many Arabs in Israel and America. Why is merely being an Arab some kind of mark against someone contributing to a lobby seeking a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian stalemate? And why is it in any way relevant what the ethnic origins of any contributor is? The racist tribalism behind this kind of argument is surely part of the problem, not the solution. Ackerman is less polite but more to the point here.

Having absorbed the details of the Vatican's surprise move to invite more disaffected Anglicans into the Catholic communion, it's clear that this is much more than merely allowing more married Anglican  clergy to become Catholic priests.

It also allows them a kind of church within the Church, and an Anglo-Catholic liturgy, including the Book of Common Prayer, inside the Roman tent. The biggest impact may well be in England and Wales, where the more traditionalist Anglicans will now have almost no pastoral or liturgical reasons not to join Rome (although the theological and doctrinal reasons remain). The move was clearly sprung on the Archbishop of Canterbury – he tried to be as graceful as possible and was almost convincing – and essentially junks an entire tradition of ecumenical dialogue in favor of a quick and sudden merger and acquisition.

Rocco's take is the best, as usual. I presume it means full inclusion within the Catholic church (papal authority and transubstantiation included), which might have raised Thomas Cranmer's eyebrow a half inch or so.

The structure has yet to be formulated. In America, I doubt this will have a huge impact on anti-gay and anti-feminist Episcopalians, who have already had their own structure within the Anglican church and now outside it. In fact, I bet you the bigger impact could be a bunch of liturgically traumatized Catholics in England and America moving en masse to those sublime Anglican liturgies, if there are sufficient bells, smells, incense, and King James.

For now, however, it seems an almost baldly political move, made at a pace more reminiscent of modern politics and public relations than the traditional ecclesiastical creaking of the wheels. That is troubling to me. Churches are supposed to be about eternal truths and freedom of conscience, not what amounts to an unfriendly take-over bid for a franchise.

And it does not seem to have occurred because of some deep resolution of the theological disputes between Anglicans and Catholics, but merely by a shared abhorrence of women priests and openly gay ones. If you want to switch churches, prejudice seems a pretty poor reason for doing so. But this is so sudden it will take some time to absorb and it's a little hard to take in. Stay tuned.

(Photo: You Know Who by Joe Klamar/Getty Images.)

He’s telling a New York Times reporter to off himself. It’s nothing new. But it’s a reminder of just how unhinged the most influential man in the GOP remains. And until someone in the Republican party stands up to him, he will become the GOP in the eyes of independents. And 20 percent may seem a ceiling not a floor for national GOP i.d.

Nathan Myhrvold defends the solar section of Superfreakonomics:

The point I was making to Dubner and Levitt is the following: when you build a solar plant it costs you energy. Lots of energy. Pacca and Horvath, in a 2002 study, found that the greenhouse gas emissions necessary to build a solar plant are about 2.75 times larger than the emissions from a coal plant of the same net power output (1.1 * 1010 kg of CO2 to build the solar plant versus 4 * 109 kg of CO2 per year for coal). The numbers vary depending on the specific technology, but there are dozens of “Life Cycle Assessment” papers on solar photovoltaic cells that document a similar effect.

So building the solar plant hurts global warming, at least during the construction period. Once you turn it on and are able to throttle back a coal plant because you get electricity from the solar cells, you gradually earn back the deficit through CO2 emissions that are saved. You need to operate the solar plant for at least 2.75 years before you break even versus the coal plant — at least versus CO2 emissions. This is very much like the old adage “you need to spend money to make money.” You need to “spend” some carbon emissions in order to create a carbon-free infrastructure which will ultimately yield a carbon emission “profit.”

Solar cells pretty much have to be “black” in the energetic side of the solar spectrum because they absorb sunlight! Of course no material is a perfect absorber, so when I say “black,” what I mean is very high absorption of light — 90 percemt [sic] or more. Solar cells often have a bluish tint to them because they reflect a tiny bit more blue light than other colors, but that is small enough that it doesn’t matter for our purposes here.

Unfortunately, solar cells are not very efficient. Efficiencies of 9 percent to 13 percent are typical for current widely deployed technology. In the future that will change, and some laboratory examples are better, but this is what people deploy now. So for every watt of electricity they generate, current solar cells throw about 10 watts into the climate as heat. Some of this heat would have occurred anyway when the light was absorbed by the ground, but the most effective solar cell installations are in deserts where the albedo is pretty high (.4 to .5) and there is little cloud cover, so the solar cells cause a bunch of heating that would not have otherwise occurred. A typical coal power plant gives off about 2 watts of thermal heat for each watt generated, so the direct thermal heating from solar plants is likely to be as large or larger than that from coal plants.

His point:

[W]e need to build out lots of renewable energy if it is going to make a difference. If we finish one plant today, it takes it three years to break even. Three years may not be the exact number, but let’s use it for simplicity…the three-year break-even times start to overlap and pile up as we build more and more plants.

The net result is that we may not get much CO2 benefit from the solar plants until we are past the rapid-growth phase of building out new plants. If we go hell-bent for leather in building solar plants for the next 50 years or so, it is entirely possible that we won’t see much small benefit for 30 to 50 years. In the long run, we still get benefit from the solar plants — lots of benefit (hence the “great carbon-free infrastructure”) — but in the near term, we may get little or no benefit. I say “may” because the details matter, and it is beyond the scope of what I can do here to calculate and explain them all; but the basic effect is that the time to get real benefit is delayed. A large part of this is due to the energy it takes to make them, and some is due to their blackness.