Our Daily Bread

By Patrick
The NYT reported on the price of rice last week:

The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost doubled on international markets in the last three months. That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest.

The Moderate Voice and Dave Schuler commented upon the article, and Krugman devotes his column today to the rising price of grain worldwide:

Governments and private grain dealers used to hold large inventories in normal times, just in case a bad harvest created a sudden shortage. Over the years, however, these precautionary inventories were allowed to shrink, mainly because everyone came to believe that countries suffering crop failures could always import the food they needed.

This left the world food balance highly vulnerable to a crisis affecting many countries at once — in much the same way that the marketing of complex financial securities, which was supposed to diversify away risk, left world financial markets highly vulnerable to a systemwide shock.

A Bet

Bainbridge offers a deal:

I think a lot of conservatives otherwise puzzling support for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign can be explained for the most part by those conservatives’ opposition to the Iraq war. See, e.g., Andrew Sullivan and Doug Kmiec. So I’ll offer them a long bet: If Obama wins and pulls all US combat troops out of Iraq by the end of June 2010, they win. If Obama wins and there’s 50,000 or more US combat troops in Iraq at the end of December 2010, I win. Anything in the middle and bet’s off. Deal?

No deal. I certainly hope that we have fewer than 50,000 troops in Iraq by the end of 2010, but no one can predict these things. The question is a more complicated one: who will be best able to extricate the US from Iraq as prudently and as carefully as possible: McCain or Obama? What does each see as the point of the mission at this point? And how do their plans reflect those goals? We know the big difference: one was a champion of the war at the start, the other opposed it. In some ways, McCain is better poised to get us out quickly with less domestic resistance, on the Nixon/China analogy, than Obama. But will he? Right now, he’s talking like a "’white flag’ or ‘victory’" neocon.

The one thing I do know is that Clinton would be paralyzed. Unable to withdraw swiftly for fear of looking like a "weak" leader, and unable to unite the country behind staying, a president Clinton would mean the status quo in Iraq indefinitely. She is tough when resisting attacks; she has never been tough and effective in forging difficult new policy. On that score, she is merely ideological and brittle and unpersuasive. Like Bush.

Clinton And Mugabe

By Patrick
Toby Harnden writes: 

It seems that Hillary Clinton is pondering three options: seeking an amnesty deal and fleeing the country; going for an immediate run-off (on April 1st, she suggesting a bowling match with Barack Obama) or declaring a 90-day state of emergency and taking the whole thing into July. But she’s been ignoring pleas from across the civilised world to call it quits, insisting that the people have a right to vote again and again until they get the right answer.

Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s beleagured president, finds himself in a similar plight. According to one wag at Free Republic, he’s taking his inspiration from the former First Lady. The ingenious freeper quoted deputy information minister Bright Matonga as saying: “In meetings with Mr. Mugabe, we talked about how much he has in common with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party nomination process in the United States. Like Hillary, Mr. Mugabe is behind in votes. In drawing a favorable comparison, we admire her fighting spirit, her unwillingness to let go when she’s obviously behind and should quit as well as her decision to take this all the way to the Democratic Party convention in Denver.”

I don’t think the Clinton and Mugabe parallels are as stark as Harnden makes them out to be; for all her faults, Clinton’s actions are in no way equivalent to Mugabe’s crimes. That said, when even Robert Mugabe recognizes you’re "obviously behind and should quit," maybe it’s time to get out of the race.

Grammar Wars

By Patrick
France debates the fate of the ailing semi-colon:

Encouragingly, a Committee for the Defence of the Semicolon appeared on the web (only to disappear some days later, which cannot be a very good sign). Articles have been written in newspapers and magazines. The topic is being earnestly discussed on the radio. It was even the subject of an April Fool’s joke on a leading internet news site, which claimed, perfectly plausibly, that President Nicolas Sarkozy had just decreed that to preserve the poor point-virgule from an untimely end, it must henceforth be used at least three times a page in all official correspondence.

Scott Esposito:

Personally,  I can’t imagine why anyone would want to get rid of the semicolon, otherwise how do you connect two thoughts that lie somewhere between an em dash and a comma?

Quote For The Day

"The Clintons, man, they would lie on a stack of Bibles. Snipers? That’s not misspeaking; that’s some pure bullshit. I voted for Clinton twice, but that’s over with. These old black politicians say, “Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good!” Hoo! Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins—they have to understand this is a new day. People ain’t feelin’ that stuff. It’s like a tide, and the people who get in the way are just gonna get swept out into the ocean," – Spike Lee, New York Magazine. (Hat tip: Ben.)

The Definition Of Torture

No one disputes the legal definition: the infliction of

"severe mental or physical pain or suffering"

to coerce prisoners to give information. The debate has at times bogged itself down in details about which specific form of coercion is defined by this. But it surely matters less what method is used than the degree of "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" expressed by the prisoner subjected to it. In the case of al-Qahtani, we have a rare example of a government-logged account of how one prisoner responded to a series of repeated and constant techniques. Here is Philippe Sands’ collation of the responses of al-Qahtani to the "enhanced interrogation" techniques inflicted on him by interrogators authorized and monitored by the president of the United States. These are all separate responses to separate interventions:

Detainee began to cry. Visibly shaken. Very emotional. Detainee cried. Disturbed. Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning. Uncomfortable. Moaning. Began crying hard spontaneously. Crying and praying. Very agitated. Yelled. Agitated and violent. Detainee spat. Detainee proclaimed his innocence. Whining. Dizzy. Forgetting things. Angry. Upset. Yelled for Jesus …

Urinated on himself. Began to cry. Asked God for forgiveness. Cried. Cried. Became violent. Began to cry. Broke down and cried. Began to pray and openly cried. Cried out to Jesus several times. Trembled uncontrollably.

I have changed a couple of references to Allah to Jesus, the better to cut through any religious bias we may have. Now recall: this is the government’s own account. Many other reports from sources such as the Red Cross or indeed FBI officials suggest much worse. And, of course, there is a subjective gray area here. But if you heard a prisoner in a neighboring cell making these sounds, and if they went on for days, weeks, months, would it be reasonable to conclude that such a prisoner was being subjected to "severe mental or physical pain or suffering" as a speaker of plain English would understand those words? At the end of this process of interrogation, according to testimony by an FBI officer, Qahtani

"was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end)."

Has such a person in your judgment been subjected to "severe mental pain or suffering"? If he has, then he is the victim of a clear violation of the baseline protections afforded all prisoners by the Geneva Conventions, a violation that was not only authorized but monitored by the most powerful men in the Bush administration.