Shooting a Koran

These things can happen with some soldiers letting off steam or misbehaving. But the symbolism is awful.

One major issue with John McCain’s belief that the US can stay in Iraq indefinitely in a non-combat role is that occupying Muslim countries – with extreme religious and social sensitivity – is fraught with potential for offense. These offenses – in a religiously polarized world – can have very serious consequences, strategically, militarily and politically. When trying to counteract Islamist extremism, we have to find a balance between enabling it by too much distance and empowering it through too much proximity. This requires a delicate touch, and as light a footprint as possible. Alas, a delicate touch is not what McCain is now for. Of course, compared with Bush and Cheney …

Green Meat: Medium Rare

Brendan Koerner questions whether lab-grown meat would be environmentally friendly. The prognosis? Maybe, but not anytime soon:

…don’t hold your breath while waiting for your first lab-grown roast. Despite considerable hubbub over the technology in recent months, we’re still years—or, more likely, decades—away from affordable lab-grown meat. The current experiments are taking place in bioreactors that measure only a few hundred milliliters in volume, and the longest complete muscle tissues are just 2 centimeters long. Researchers are nowhere close to scaling up their production to market-ready levels, to say nothing of market-ready prices. A Dutch team’s lab-grown pork, for example, would cost around $45,000 per pound—assuming they could make an entire pound of the stuff. Bioreactors may be energy-efficient when compared with cattle, but they’re also expensive to design, build, and maintain. They also require highly skilled personnel to manage, in order to preserve aseptic conditions.

Obama’s Catholics

Archbishop Chaput criticizes in theocon journal First Things. But he doesn’t urge denial of communion, mercifully. This passage is a little metaphorically weird:

Catholics [who support pro-choice candidates] also need a compelling proportionate reason to justify it. What is a “proportionate” reason when it comes to the abortion issue? It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life—which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.