The Dish

by Jonah Shepp

In case you missed the meme, young people around the world have taken to making videos of themselves dancing around their cities and countries to the tune of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” and posting them on YouTube. Anyone who isn’t already sick of the song can watch kids dance and lip-sync to it in Paris, in Okinawa, in Amman… Cute and eminently harmless, right? But apparently not in Tehran, where some kids got arrested for it:

Iran‘s state-run national TV on Tuesday broadcast a programme showing men and women, apparently Pharrell fans from Tehran, confessing on camera. They were supposedly involved in a video clip based on Pharrell’s song. The original has been viewed almost 250m times on YouTube and has inspired people from all over the world to make their own version of the video, which shows people dancing in the street to the song.

Human rights activists have repeatedly condemned what they see as the state TV’s common fashion of airing confessions made under duress, usually misrepresented as interviews. It was not clear if Pharrell’s fans in jail in Iran had access to their lawyer before appearing on television. They have not yet been tried. In recent years, many activists and political prisoners have appeared on the Iranian national TV making confessions.

John Allen Gay notes that the reaction to the video is part and parcel of Iran’s culture war:

Many had noted the risks taken in the original video—women without veils (though wearing wigs), men and women dancing together. And while the Rouhani administration has tried to strike a conciliatory tone on the culture front, full openness has not been forthcoming. A very active band of conservative agitators has been busy pushing against any sign of change. Just this week, Iranian actress Leila Hatami (star of the Oscar-winning A Separation) was in hot water after she shook hands with, and then was kissed on the cheek by, the president of the Cannes Film Festival. Senior Iranian leaders regularly speak of the central importance of culture in the Islamic Republic’s survival. That’s a perpetual source of friction in a country with thousands of years of rich civilizational history (stretching back long before the arrival of Islam) and a strong literary tradition. Iranian art once plumbed the depths of the mind and the soul. Now it’s risky to make a music video whose message is simple, almost childish: that joy is still possible in Iran.

Jason Rezaian examines how this squares with Rouhani’s professed desire to give a little on freedom of expression:

By making these arrests, other centers of power could be sending a reminder to Rouhani that controls on media are likely to stay in place and are not under the executive’s power. According to his own words, if it were up to Rouhani, social media and other communication outlets that are currently blocked would be opened up. But it is not up to him. While many think of Iran’s power structure as a monolith, it is anything but, with many checks and balances, some of them official and some blurrier.

While the video seems innocuous enough, several laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran were apparently broken. Among them: women appearing without hijab head coverings, dancing to Western pop music, and using an illegal Web site to disseminate an unlicensed video. All of these offenses regularly go ignored in Iran. But this time around, it could be the fact that the video is part of a global pop culture trend and it that it had taken off, with tens of thousands of views, that prompted Iranian authorities to take action.

Recent Dish on censorship in Iran here.

by Matthew Sitman

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are Vladimir Putin’s two favorite writers – but the wrong one has influenced his understanding of Russia’s role in world affairs:

Dostoevsky believed that Russia’s special mission in the world is to create a pan-Slavic Christian empire with Russia at its helm. This messianic vision stemmed from the fact that Dostoevsky thought Russia was the most spiritually developed of all the nations, a nation destined to unite and lead the others. Russia’s mission, he said in 1881, was “the general unification of all the people of all tribes of the great Aryan race.”

This sort of triumphalist thinking was anathema to Tolstoy, who believed that every nation had its own unique traditions, none better or worse than the others.

Tolstoy was a patriot—he loved his people, as is so clearly demonstrated in War and Peace, for example—but he was not a nationalist. He believed in the unique genius and dignity of every culture. One of the hallmarks of his writing from the beginning was his capacity to uncover the full-blooded truth of each one of his characters, no matter their nationality. In his Sevastopol Tales, which were inspired by his own experiences as a Russian soldier fighting against the combined forces of the Turks, French, and British in the Crimean War of the 1850’s—in the very region recently re-annexed by Russia—Tolstoy celebrates the humanity of all his characters, whether Russian, British, or French.

Unfortunately, amid all the spiritual turmoil following the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians have tended to cling more to the starker, messianic vision of Dostoevsky than the calmer vision of universal humanity Tolstoy espoused, finding the latter perhaps a tad too democratic, humanistic, and soft for their hardened tastes. After all the tragedies of 20th century Russian history, and the humiliations of the past 20 years in particular, many ordinary Russians are seeking unequivocal proof of their national worthiness—indeed superiority—among the family of nations.

by Jonah Shepp

Jordain Carney and Stacy Kaper call the broken veterans’ health system “a failure with many silent fathers,” including Congress, the VA leadership, and the past ten presidential administrations:

In many ways, the Obama administration is paying for the negligence of past administrations, dating all the way back to President John F. Kennedy, who authorized the decade-long use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But it wasn’t just Kennedy. Under President Johnson, Agent Orange was the dominant chemical used during the war. President Nixon halted its use, but a long line of presidents either refused to acknowledge the damage done or failed to address it.

President Carter’s VA created the Agent Orange registry, where veterans who were worried about potential side effects could be examined. But four years later, a GAO report found that 55 percent of respondents felt that the VA’s Agent Orange examinations either weren’t thorough or they received little or no information on what long-term health impacts exposure could cause. … The government’s long-standing failure to address the damage done to veterans by Agent Orange mirrors the larger failure of the VA. It spans generations and party affiliations, and every effort to fix it comes with unintended consequences.

But Tuccille claims that the VA hospitals’ wait list problem is just what happens when you have socialized medicine:

This should surprise nobody. Canada’s government-run single-payer health system has long suffered waiting times for care. The country’s Fraser Institute estimates “the national median waiting time from specialist appointment to treatment increased from 9.3 weeks in 2010 to 9.5 weeks in 2011.”

Likewise, once famously social democratic Sweden has seen a rise in private health coverage in parallel to the state system because of long delays to receive care. “It’s quicker to get a colleague back to work if you have an operation in two weeks’ time rather than having to wait for a year,” privately insured Anna Norlander told Sveriges Radio[.] An article in The Local noted that “visitors are sometimes surprised to learn about year-long waiting times for cancer patients.”

Joan Walsh finds it pretty rich that Republicans in Congress are trying to make political hay out of the VA’s problems while doing nothing to fix them:

There’s real trouble at the VA, but there’s bigger trouble for the Republican Party, which purports to love veterans but does little to help them. Thom Hartman recently ran down the list of pro-veteran measures the GOP has blocked. Earlier this year Senate Republicans filibustered a bill to boost VA funding by $21 billion and restore military pensions cut in the Murray-Ryan budget deal. They opposed President Obama’s $1 billion jobs bill to put unemployed vets to work in 2012. They’ve killed bills to help homeless veterans and promote vets’ entrepreneurship.

And in the current crisis, there’s yet to be a genuine GOP answer to the problems at the VA, beyond anti-Obama grandstanding. Do they want to voucherize veterans’ health care, like they do Medicare? Abolish the VA entirely? “Privatize” it, whatever that would mean?

John Dickerson also asks, “Does anyone have faith that this outrage will be answered by serious action?”

by Patrick Appel

Jonnelle Marte examines a new study that uses GPA to predict future earnings:

A report published Monday in the Eastern Economic Journal by researchers from the University of Miami found that a person’s grade-point average in high school not only indicates the person’s chances of getting into college and whether he or she will finish college or graduate school. It could also be an indicator of how much that person will earn later in life.

Indeed, for a one-point increase in a person’s high school GPA, average annual earnings in adulthood increased by about 12 percent for men and about 14 percent for women, the report found. (Men and women were looked at separately since women have lower average earnings than men, making about $30,000 on average in adulthood compared with the average of $43,000 for men.)

Bryce Covert focuses on the gender gap:

The team of University of Miami researchers found that a one-point increase in GPA means a 12 percent boost in earnings for men and a 14 percent boost for women. Even so, there’s a big gender gap in total earnings. A woman who got a 4.0 GPA in high school will only be worth about as much, income-wise, as a man who got a 2.0. A woman with a 2.0 average will make about as much as a man with a 0 GPA. The data also show that average high school GPAs are significantly higher for women, but men will still end up having significantly higher income later on.

It also found that high school grades can indicate the likelihood of going to college, and that a one-point increase doubles the chances of completing a degree for both genders.

Last week, Philip N. Cohen put these kinds of studies in context. He used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to compare the “Armed Forces Qualifying Test scores, taken in 1999, when the respondents were ages 15-19 with their household income in 2011, when they were 27-31.” He found “a very strong relationship—that correlation of 0.35 means AFQT explains 12 percent of the variation in household income”:

But take heart, ye parents in the age of uncertainty: 12 percent of the variation leaves a lot left over. This variable can’t account for how creative your children are, how sociable, how attractive, how driven, how entitled, how connected, or how white they may be. To get a sense of all the other things that matter, here is the same data, with the same regression line, but now with all 5,248 individual points plotted as well (which means we have to rescale the y-axis):

Each dot is a person’s life—or two aspects of it, anyway—with the virtually infinite sources of variability that make up the wonder of social existence. All of a sudden that strong relationship doesn’t feel like something you can bank on with any given individual.

by Chris Bodenner

In case you have the song stuck in your head too:

A reader is worried about TMI:

There is a reason you leave out the discussion of sexual pleasure in the sex talk with your kids: they are KIDS!  They still think the other gender is yucky.  Even when people kiss, kids are grossed out.  You should get a jump on the game and tell them the facts of life BEFORE they are interested in sex.  After I told my son the facts he stated “I’m NEVER doing that!”  My daughter’s response was “That sounds really uncomfortable.”  The basic facts are so preposterous to them they would never believe that people do it for fun!

Another reader notes:

Several year ago, the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ developed a series of sexuality programs that provide age-appropriate information for children, adolescents, and adults called “Our Whole Lives”. For example, the 27-session program for grades 7 thru 9 dedicates a class session to lovemaking and pleasure.  This curriculum also dedicates a class session to masturbation, including the myths and facts about masturbation (e.g. the fact that masturbation is one of the safest sexual activities that a younger adolescent can engage in).

Another:

Three quick anecdotes:

1) Mom told me flat out, “Well, it feels really, really good. Of course God made it feel really really good! If it was boring like brushing your teeth, no one would ever get around to making babies!”

2) The first non-parental person whose opinion on the subject made me TRUST them was my Sunday school teacher in high school, who also said flat-out, “Sex is FANTASTIC. You’re going to love it, trust me!” (And then went on to explain how we should be married first, but still … it was so refreshing to hear someone tell the truth!)

3) As a kid, I knew my dad had a vasectomy because it was all part and parcel of my adoption story – Mom and Dad had children before me who died stillborn, and that was apparently going to keep happening (this was the 1960s), so dad got “fixed” and they adopted. Then when I was about nine, we had a male cat who got “fixed”, and while petting him, I discovered he had an erection. I went to Mom: “Hey, I thought when we ‘fixed’ him, he couldn’t do that anymore.” And Mom laughed really hard and turned a bit red, and said, “Well, no, what man would sign up for THAT?!” – which is when I realized we weren’t talking about the cat anymore …

Another anecdote from a reader:

My middle school science teacher (at my Catholic school) always made it a point, when we got to intercourse and reproduction, to tell us that “God made sex fun for a reason.” Whether you replace that with “nature,” “evolution,” “spaghetti monster,” or “Allah,” the point stands. I never really appreciated how progressive that was, much less in a Catholic school in the South, but the more time goes on the more I respect what she did. She was a phenomenal teacher all-around, and a big part of that was complete honesty with her students. What’s the best way to make humans reproduce? Make the method of doing so a complete blast!

Keep up the good work. I’m on my second year of subscription and have no regrets!

by Jonah Shepp

David Dayen is livid at how easy Credit Suisse is getting off after it became the first bank in 25 years to plead guilty to a felony in US court:

In the agreement, Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to one count of aiding tax evasion. The Justice Department made sure to check with New York’s banking regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve to eliminate any unwanted consequences from the guilty plea, like the revocation of Credit Suisse’s banking charter or investment-adviser license. (Incidentally, there are fewer of these collateral consequences with foreign banks, which gives away why Credit Suisse, and not JPMorgan Chase or Bank of America, was forced to plead guilty.) Instead of a corporate death penalty, Credit Suisse will pay $1.8 billion in fines to DOJ, $715 million to New York’s Department of Financial Services, and $100 million to the Fed. In addition, the bank will have an independent monitor overseeing its activities for two years.

This makes any fallout from the scandal mostly one of reputation, which means not much fallout at all.

Matt Levine finds something for everyone to hate:

If you’re a critic of bank impunity, you think this is dumb because no top executives will go to jail, or even be fired, and really there are no negative consequences beyond what you’d get from civil charges or a deferred prosecution agreement. If you’re a defender of banks, you worry that the Justice Department has missed some unintended consequences, and that Credit Suisse’s guilty plea will cause a colossal and accidental financial crisis.

Either way, the point is that the only consequences of the guilty plea — as opposed to a deferred prosecution, etc. — are the ones prosecutors forgot. Those consequences might be catastrophic, or they might be nonexistent, but if they exist, they exist because no one thought of them. It’s deterrence by accident: Prosecutors did their best to avert everything bad that might come from a guilty plea, but the deterrence value comes from the fact that their best might not be enough.

James Kwak thinks a more appropriate punishment would be to shut down Credit Suisse’s US operations entirely:

There are two main ways to really punish criminals and deter wrongdoing in the future. One is criminal prosecutions of the individuals involved, ideally getting lower-level employees to cooperate and gathering evidence as far up the management hierarchy as possible. (There are ongoing prosecutions against several Credit Suisse employees.) The other is putting a bank out of business by revoking its license. Even if he escapes jail, no CEO wants that on his résumé. And it seems entirely appropriate for a bank that engages in a decades-long criminal conspiracy that costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars.

The conventional wisdom, however, is that you can’t revoke a large bank’s license because of potential systemic consequences. (That’s why prosecutors only pressed for the guilty plea after receiving assurances that regulators would not revoke Credit Suisse’s licenses.) If this is true, of course, that’s an overwhelming argument that such “too big to jail” banks shouldn’t exist in the first place. We don’t want a financial system dominated by banks that can willfully flout the law.

Kevin Roose doubts the guilty plea will mollify those who are still angry that nobody went to jail for causing the financial crisis:

What we’ve learned since 2009 is that the prosecution of complex financial crimes is a zero-sum game. With limited resources and a ticking clock, every case you choose to prosecute fully has to be carefully selected, with the most important determinant questions being “will I win this?” and “how long will it take?” Insider trading cases are easier to convict on than mortgage fraud cases; accordingly, they get more attention. Tax evasion is lower-hanging fruit than CEO misbehavior, so it’s naturally where prosecutors want to direct their attention.

That’s understandable, and forcing guilty pleas on lesser charges is perhaps better than the alternative. But let’s not conflate issues here. “Too big to jail” isn’t a controversy about how banks will be treated in the future. It’s a scandal about how they’ve been treated in the recent past. And no number of guilty pleas is likely to calm the public down, especially when the pleas seem to have so few real-world consequences.

by Jonah Shepp

Putin closed a huge natural gas agreement with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping today:

The contract is worth $400 billion in total over the 30-year period, during which Gazprom will supply 38 billion cubic feet of gas per year. The details are still hazy at this point, including the most important fact of all: the price at which Russia is selling its eastern neighbor the vast supply of natural gas. Sources close to the deal seem to think the lowest the Russians would go would be around $350 per thousand cubic feet of gas, which is on the low end of the $350-$380 price range paid by their European customers.

But if that’s the lowest the Russians would go, it was likely the agreed-upon price; China was holding most of the leverage in this discussion, if only because Putin needed this more than Xi did. Negotiations reportedly went on until four in the morning, and Putin admitted that “our Chinese friends are difficult, hard negotiators.”

Mark Adomanis, however, is reluctant to read too much into this:

Although I think that Russia-China partnership is a very important story, I would advocate extreme caution in analyzing the significance of this particular natural gas deal. Why? Well when dealing with “state capitalist” entities a contract is never really a contract:

if, 10 years from now, Gazprom realizes that it is subsidizing Chinese gas imports it will do what it has always done and threaten to cut off the flow unless it gets more money. The Chinese side will act similarly: if the leadership at CNPC realizes that they are paying a significant premium for Russia gas, they will switch to other suppliers as quickly as possible. The ability to quickly enter into or revoke contracts is simultaneously state capitalism’s greatest strength and its most glaring weakness. When necessary, companies like Gazprom and CNPC can move extremely quickly and enter into agreements without the need for shareholder meetings or discussions with boards of directors. They can take advantage of opportunities ruthlessly and with little warning. And, when they feel the need to exit a contract, they do not need to worry themselves with legal niceties: they simply do what they need to.

Richard Connolly also discourages over-interpreting Putin’s “pivot to Asia”:

Even after a number of high profile energy and infrastructure deals, China, South Korea and Japan account for just over 1% of foreign investment in Russia. So while Russia may be importing a growing volume of goods from Asia, it still turns overwhelmingly to Europe for capital.

Such dense trade links between Russia and Europe took decades to form, dating in many cases back to the height of the Cold War. If the two managed to trade amicably during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they shouldn’t have a problem now. So Europe will most likely remain Russia’s key economic partner for years to come as it continues to provide capital, technology and demand for Russian energy. While the economic pivot to Asia is real, this is Russia looking for some more friends, not an entirely new set of friends.

But Dmitri Trenin picks up on another sign that may point to growing military cooperation with China:

Putin’s visit to China will coincide with the joint Sino-Russian naval exercises. These are held regularly, with the last being in the Sea of Japan off Vladivostok. This time, the venue is the East China Sea, where the territorial dispute between Beijing and Tokyo over the Diaoyu Islands (Senkaku Islands in Japanese) has heated up.

The Russians, by not objecting to the area where the maneuvers will be held, are sending a message to Japan that signing up for US-ordered sanctions against Russia would entail a cost. In a public statement in March, Putin made it clear that Moscow does not intend to conclude a military alliance with Beijing, but the mere invocation of that possibility is a signal that the vector of Russian foreign policy has changed dramatically. Only four years ago, then president Dmitry Medvedev – with then prime minister Putin squarely behind him – were offering a “joint defense perimeter” to NATO. Today, NATO again considers Russia an adversary, and vice-versa.

And Simon Denyer notices that Xi and Putin seem pretty simpatico:

The two men have a few things in common: both are strong, authoritarian leaders, fiercely nationalistic and keen to counter Washington’s influence in the region, albeit in different ways: but they also found something else they shared this week, a desire to commemorate World War II. In their joint statement, the two men talked about celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, an anniversary that does not even fall until next year. A strange priority you might think, except that both men have been intent for some time on making as much political capital as possible about their respective country’s roles in defeating fascism. …

But Xi was reported as having told Putin the two men had similar personalities last year, and the pair seem to have found common ground on at least one other pressing issue. In Russia, Putin has been ramping up censorship of the Internet to muzzle his critics, something that Xi already knows an awful lot about. In their joint statement, the two leaders expressed concern that information and communication technology was being used in ways that “go against the goal of maintaining international stability and security, and violate national sovereignty and individual privacy.”