Tag: Premium

Can Israel “Win” This War? Ctd

Brent Sasley says yes to that question:

When the dust settles, Israel will also have restored some of its deterrence against its enemies. Against Hamas specifically, it demonstrated it’s gotten over what we might call Cast Lead Syndrome: recoiling from the type of international opprobrium that war generated against Israel because of the scale of Palestinian deaths. In that conflict, between approximately 1,100 and 1,400 Gazans were killed, depending on what source one looks to for casualty figures. Yet already in Operation Protective Edge, more than 1,000 Palestinians may have been killed. Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become a cautious administrator since his first term in office, the temptation to keep going to destroy Hamas’ tunnel infrastructure has overcome his reluctance to use large-scale force. And the Israeli public has rallied behind him.

In a debate among Brookings experts, Michael Doran contends that whether or not Israel is “winning”, Hamas is definitely losing:

Six months from now, many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, will ask themselves what all the pain and destruction that Hamas brought down on them was worth. Their disgruntlement will not weaken Hamas’s grip on power, because it is a dictatorship supported by foreign money. But the organization, as it stands before its people and lectures them on the need for more sacrifice, will surely clock the sullen faces that stare blankly back. As for the “support” that Hamas gets from public opinion in other parts of the Arab world that will certainly dissipate. Of course, it’s never been worth much anyway, throughout modern Arab history, because it never translates into lasting change in the behavior of states, the true power brokers in the region. Meanwhile, Hamas will have lost considerably on the battlefield.

But Shadi Hamid is not so sure:

Even if Hamas “loses” in the ways that you describe, it seems to me that they’re likely to at least be better off than they were before the conflict started.

It’s hard to envision any ceasefire arrangement that won’t include easing the blockade in some way (Hamas has little incentive to agree to a ceasefire that doesn’t alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza). The West Bank surge in pro-Hamas sentiment isn’t just about public opinion; it’s about closing the gap between Hamas and Fatah. If the developments in the West Bank underscore anything, it’s the real, and growing, desire for Palestinian unity. Last week on MSNBC, Mustafa Barghouti said that a new uprising had started. He may be getting ahead of himself, but if a ceasefire doesn’t hold in the coming days, there will be more instability in the West Bank (and corresponding anti-Palestinian sentiment) and that can only strengthen Hamas hand during post-ceasefire negotiations over contours of unity government. Also, the expectation, which I suppose is implicit in these Israeli deterrence operations, is that at some point Palestinians will blame Hamas more than they blame Israel. But, there’s little to suggest this is how most Palestinians process the results of Israeli military operations.

Aaron David Miller considers Hamas the winner, so far:

It’s impossible to predict a winner or loser at this stage. Israel is determined to prevent a Hamas victory or even a stalemated outcome that might appear to represent one. The situation is, as they say, remarkably fluid. But three weeks in, if I had to do a tally now, I’d say Hamas has taken round one in what is likely to be an ongoing struggle. And here’s why:

Survival counts as a win: As in previous confrontations, the organizational imperative dominates Hamas’s tactics and strategy. Against a militarily and technologically superior Israel, Hamas can afford to waste a couple of thousand rockets and lose a few dozen tunnels, but the main goal is keeping both its military and political leadership intact, and not giving into Israel’s superior firepower. Indeed, in a way Hamas wins just by not losing.

And even if Hamas is utterly destroyed in this war, Scott McConnell worries about what would come next:

Suppose Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas. How many terror cells will it have created thoughout the Middle East? Will those cells content themselves in mounting operations against Israel? Or would they also seek vengeance against the superpower which enables, and could even be seen as encouraging, Israel’s annihilation of them. In 2002, a not-very-sophisticated home-grown sniper traumatized the Washington metropolitan area for weeks. If the predictions of one of America’s leading anti-terror officials are correct, Israel is setting the table for much more complex terror operations, in which American civilians will become targets. Sad as it is to contemplate, if that happens, people all over the Mideast will believe we are only getting what we deserve.

Previous Dish on what an Israeli “victory” would entail in the Gaza war here.

The Worst Ebola Outbreak In History, Ctd

Keating looks at why the current epidemic has been so severe:

As political scientist Kim Yi Dionne notes, a number of factors have combined to make this the most deadly Ebola outbreak in history, and most of them are political rather than biological.

For one thing, none of these countries has experienced an outbreak of the disease before, so knowledge of it is low. For another, the fact that it’s spread to multiple countries makes a coordinated response more difficult. (Liberia has now shut almost all of its borders.) As Dionne notes, all three countries have poor health infrastructure, due in part to years of civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Liberia has just .014 doctors per 1,000 people, and a common joke is that JFK Medical Center, Monrovia’s main hospital, has long had the unflattering nickname “Just For Killing.”

Which is why a major Ebola outbreak in America is unlikely. Olga Khazan tries to determine how this outbreak started:

Researchers still don’t know the exact cause of this particular outbreak, but it might have to do with the local practice of eating bats for food, according to Jonathan Epstein, an epidemiologist at EcoHealth Alliance. “It’s unclear whether it occurred due to butchering a bat, exposure to bat bodily fluids, or eating some food or fruit that was contaminated by saliva, urine, or feces from the bat, which may contain Ebola virus,” he said. Pig farms in Africa also often attract bats, which also may have been a cause.

Once the infected person begins to show symptoms—flu-like aches, nausea, and vomiting—local customs continue to play a big role. There aren’t enough doctors or supplies available to treat all the Ebola patients in the area, but even if there were, many locals are suspicious of Western medicine.

John Herrman reflects on the West’s detachment from these kinds of diseases:

I’ll read almost anything about infectious diseases, and in retrospect, most of this reading was cold and sociopathic. Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone was an escapist thriller; The Great Influenza was an apocalyptic period piece; The Coming Plague was an engrossing feat of science fiction world-building, about a planet that contrives, almost at random, new and hideous microscopic monsters to destroy sophisticated life, and that will not give up until it has succeeded. Nature finds a way, a narrator intones, except that this narrator is a doctor who has spent her whole life watching people die in pain and confusion, and I’m just sort of dozing off, because I’ve been reading too long and it’s time for bed.

This is of course an insane way to read about deadly diseases. It is also standard in areas of the world where these rare viruses feel utterly remote. It provides comfort that your incidental version of civilization at least shields you from the most vividly horrific diseases.

An Ebola vaccine is still at least a few years away:

There are quite a few preventative vaccines in development, with three to five that have been shown to completely protect nonhuman primates against Ebola. Some of these vaccines require three injections or more and some require just a single injection. Most of them are being funded by the U.S. government, so they’re in various stages of development, but none of them are ready to be licensed.

The hang-up point with these vaccines is the phase I trials in humans. That’s where scientists get frustrated because we know these vaccines protect animals and we don’t quite understand the regulatory process of why things can’t move faster. I can’t give you an answer as to why it’s taking so long.

The Economist maps current and former Ebola hot-spots. All the Dish’s coverage of the latest epidemic is here.

We Won’t Make Israel Make Peace

After John Kerry’s efforts to broker a ceasefire in the Gaza war crashed and burned, Zack Beauchamp asks why the $3 billion in aid we give Israel every year doesn’t seem to buy us any leverage:

Talk to Middle East analysts, and you get a clear sense that the US really could box Israel in a corner if it wanted to. “In theory, of course the US has enormous leverage over Israel,” says Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. But in “the very unlikely event” that “the US were to threaten the very alliance with Israel,” he says, it’d put immense pressure on an Israeli Prime Minister to bend.

Clearly, the United States doesn’t want to do that. But it has successfully pressured Israel before. For instance, the Bush administration forced Israel to back off an arms deal with China in 2005 by threatening to cut off military cooperation on certain projects. The US refused to give Israeli aircraft friend-or-foe codes during the Gulf War, effectively keeping Israel out. It refused to give American support for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program, which amounted to vetoing it.

So it’s not that the US can’t ever push Israel. It’s that American policymakers aren’t willing to threaten the foundations of the US-Israeli relationship — aid, diplomatic support, and the like — over a ceasefire in Gaza or even a final status peace agreement.

Drum, on the other hand, is skeptical that the US could do anything to make peace between parties whose objectives are fundamentally incompatible. As long as that’s the case, he argues, we should just stop trying:

Quite famously, we all “know” what a deal between Israel and the Palestinians needs to look like. It’s obvious. Everyone says so. The only wee obstacle is that neither side is willing to accept this obvious deal. They just aren’t. The problem isn’t agreeing on a line on a map, or a particular circumlocution in a particular document. The problem is much simpler than that, so simple that sophisticated people are embarrassed to say it outright: Two groups of people want the same piece of land. Both of them feel they have a right to it. Both of them are, for the time being, willing to fight for it. Neither is inclined to give up anything for a peace that neither side believes in.

That’s it. That’s all there is. All the myriad details don’t matter. Someday that may change, and when it does the United States may have a constructive role to play in brokering a peace deal. But that day is nowhere in the near future.

I can see Kevin’s grim point. But as long as we are financing and subsidizing Israel’s wars, we are not neutral. Only if we cut off our aid can we afford the luxury of viewing the entire conflict as irresolvable. Everything else is complicity.

Best Cover Song Ever?

From the latest round of nominees:

Faith No More’s “Easy”, a Lionel Richie cover. The deadpan, the guitar solo, the bored drag queens … Love it:

Another adds:

The ironic thing about this cover? It’s not really that ironic. A little tongue-in-cheek perhaps, but it really is a tribute from a band as far removed from the R&B/soul genre as could possibly be.

The next nominee also avoids irony:

If you’ve never heard this before, prepare yourself. Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is so beautiful that it gives me chills. I’m not a fan of re-imagined versions of childhood favorites, but this is transcendent:

Another adds, “There’s no way a 500 pound Hawaiian dude should have the voice of an angel.” Another elaborates a bit:

It may certainly seem cliche’ at this point to put in this entry, especially nearly a decade after his death and this song’s exposure in a few Hollywood films, but the song still resonates something very beautiful. First off, Bruddah Iz was not exactly your typical “American Idol” wannabe pop icon.  He lacked the looks – indeed, he had an untimely death due to his health problems related to his obesity – YET he remained true to his very smooth and mellow style, that was still able to capture the hearts and minds of so many people in the world … and in turn introducing much of us to a then largely unknown and small aspect of local/regional music in our country.

How?  Not by any real big commercial push from the local Hawaiian music producers, but rather appearing in a few popular films and TV shows during some of their most memorable moments. Who does not remember hearing this song during Dr. Mark Greene’s final moments in “ER?”  The song hit the top 40 in 10 countries around the world, and the album itself went double to triple platinum in 3 – not through any creative use of an autotune, a sexy/controversial music video, nor even by showing any cool/slick dance moves.  All it took was a very humble man, with a voice and heart that was bigger than the island from which he was raised, and accompanying himself with an instrument that was shorter than one of his upper limbs.

Finally, his message still has a lot of meaning for us today, especially in light of the recent international crises we are facing; It helps us believe that despite all this, there are still many people and aspects about our world that will always be “wonderful.”

One more fan concedes:

Yes, it’s overly sentimental, but, in times like these, I need this.

So It Really Is All About Sex Then, Rod?

The compulsively readable and admirably honest blogger, Rod Dreher, had an epiphany the other day. He was trying to define what he means by “traditional Christianity.” And what he means by the term is the following:

It seems to me that “traditional Christian” is political code for “Christians who adhere to traditional teaching about sex and sexuality.”

That is a really striking statement – though not one that exactly comes as a surprise to those familiar with Rod’s evolution over the years. It’s striking because it doesn’t actually concern itself with doctrine, the critical content of a faith tradition, like, say, the Resurrection of Jesus or the doctrine of the Trinity. It is not about a literal reading of Scripture as the only avenue to truth; it is not about whether doctrine can evolve; it is not about a belief in a personal, intervening God as opposed to a more distant and absent one. It is entirely about how one manages one’s private parts. Rod is pretty frank about that:

When I deploy the phrase “traditional Christians” in my writing, I’m not thinking about ecclesiology, sacramental theology, or any other thing that separates Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy. What I’m thinking about — what we are all thinking about — is this: what separates “traditional Christians” from “modern Christians” (or “progressive Christians”) in our common discourse is their beliefs about sex. Nothing else, or at least nothing else meaningful.

He later clarified that he was talking about Christianity as it relates to the public square. And I can certainly see how, as an empirical matter, the sex issue has become central to public debates over abortion, homosexuality, marriage and so on. But the difference between me and Rod – and what I’d argue is the actual dividing line between modern and traditional Christians in the public square – is that I do not regard sexual jesus.jpgmatters to be that important in the context of what Christianity teaches about our obligations as human beings in the polity and the world. The difference between moderns and trads is that the trads see sex as the critical issue, and we moderns see a whole host of other issues.

My mum once told me as a kid that “sex outside marriage is a sin, but not that big a sin.” That remains my position. It’s up there with over-eating, excessive consumerism, the idolatry of money and profit, and spoliation of our environment – except the powerful sex drive in humans and the absence of any direct harm to another, gives sexual sin, I’d argue, a little more lee-way. The sexual obsession among trads, in other words, can be deeply distortive. It elides and displaces other vital issues. Access to universal healthcare and asylum for children escaping terror, for example, matter far more in traditional Christianity than whether my long-term relationship is deemed a civil marriage or a civil union. Torture is exponentially more sinful than a pre-marital fling – and yet it is embraced by evangelical “traditional” Christians most of all. The Catholic hierarchy has devoted far far less time and effort to combating torture than to preventing birth control as part of the ACA – to its eternal shame. And the centrality of sex to celibate traditional Christians has a lot to do with it.

I’d go further and argue that placing sex as the critical, core rampart of traditional Christianity is a very dangerous game. It’s dangerous because sexual repression is a very potent psychological tool. A key part of traditional religion’s success in luring and keeping adherents can be by leveraging sexual sacrifice into a greater collective sense of belonging and meaning. If people have to give up sex to be a faithful adherent to religion, they are much more likely to attach themselves strongly to that faith, if only to justify their sacrifice. They are also more likely to want others to join in – to help buttress their commitment. I think that’s where Rod’s point is strongest.

But it’s also where it’s weakest. Faith should surely not be a function of sexual repression. And sexual repression should not be a tool for religious faith.

Introduce that element as the critical one, and you are using social and personal pressure to buttress religious claims that should stand or fall on their own merits. And when sexual restraint or repression is what defines your religious experience, you’ve lost your way. Within religious institutions the sexual repression can also have terrible effects. It is not an accident that cults use sexual control as ramparts of their enterprise. The mind plays games with us on this subject – so powerful and so close to home.

That doesn’t mean that traditional arguments about sexuality should be dismissed. The glibness with which some gay activists now scorn traditional sexual moral codes as mere bigotry is deeply depressing. Damon Linker makes a good point about the scale and novelty of the West’s experiment in sexual freedom over the last half a century or so. And there are obvious developments – like the rise of single parenthood and children outside marriage – that can be shown to harm people’s prospects in life.

But is it a harbinger of social collapse? I look around me and see a sexually liberated society with much lower crimes rates, boundless cultural innovation, declining divorce rates and more stable gay couples. I do not see catastrophe. This “Family Week” in Provincetown I see some of the worst excesses of sexual novelty, as far as trads are concerned – gay couples with children everywhere. But I fail to see the ominous social implications of happy children playing on the beach, or of their two dads’ often super-vigilant parenting. I see a pretty healthy model of family life. And when I look back on the great era of sexual repression, I see evidence of horrifying sexual abuse of children by priests and many others, women treated as prisoners of their husbands, and homes for illegitimate children with mortality rates far higher than average. What I see today, in contrast, is a society not less open to Jesus’ core commandments to love one another, but rather a society less willing to excuse the abuse, distortion and repression of the deepest human longings in inhuman and cruel ways.

I see, actually, in the demise of what Rod calls traditional Christianity the emergence of a calmer, gentler Christianity less obsessed with social control and more open to divine truth. I see hope where Rod only sees calamity. Well, I guess we’ll both find out soon enough.

Gaza Goes Dark

How can you punish a people more than bombing their schools, hospitals and playgrounds? Knock out their only power plant:

The plant’s general manager, Jamal Dersawi, told NBC News that the loss of the structure is a “major disaster” for Gaza’s 1.8 million residents, whose electricity has already been limited by damage to power lines from Israel. According to Reuters, the plant provides two thirds of the energy in Gaza, including the area’s water sanitation facilities and pumps. (Residents are now being told to be careful with their water consumption.) The structure could be out of operation for up to a year.

Jesse Rosenfeld doubts it was an accident:

This is not the first time Israel has knocked out Gaza’s power plant and targeted essential infrastructure. Indeed, this is almost part of a standard playbook. Following Hamas’ kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006, Israel plunged Gaza into darkness with a retaliatory strike on the power plant.  The bombing and escalation in Gaza set off a series of events that led to a full-on war in Lebanon as well as Gaza. …

It is people like the al Wakeel family who pay the harshest price for this military duel. They fled the Al Shajaya neighborhood under intense shelling last week, and 55 family member are now crammed into a three bedroom apartment in Gaza City. With little water and only a few hours of electricity a day they were unable to shower or bathe the 25 children in the apartment. Now that the power plant has been hit, they have no water and no electricity.

Noting that the power outage also curtails the flow of information out of the strip, Juan Cole attempts a tally of the destruction:

Israel has completely reduced to rubble some 5,000 homes and damaged 26,000. If you figure that Palestinians in Gaza live on average 5 in a dwelling, there would be roughly 340,000 domiciles in Gaza. Israel has therefore destroyed or damaged about ten percent of the housing stock. This is on top of past campaigns of indiscriminate and wanton bombing campaigns. Since Israel keeps Gaza under blockade, it won’t receive the necessary materials to rebuild. The Israelis, having bald-facedly stolen the homes and farms of the people of Gaza, won’t be satisfied until they are forced to sleep in open fields.

Israel has forced some 200,000 Palestinians to flee their homes. But since the Gaza Strip is so small, they have no place to go. Israel won’t let them leave the Strip, but is intensively bombarding it. Some of the places they have taken shelter, including schools and UN refugee shelters, have themselves been bombed by the Israelis.

Another UNRWA school in the Jabaliya refugee camp was bombed this morning. Hayes Brown passes along the news:

For the second time in as many weeks, a United Nations-run school in the Gaza Strip was hit with with artillery fire, with reports that as many 90 Palestinians were wounded in the attack that killed an estimated 19 people. The shelling that struck in Jabaliya landed around 5 a.m. early Wednesday morning, reportedly falling in rapid succession. Around 3,300 Palestinians had been using the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) school for shelter from the Israeli campaign to root out Hamas and other militant groups in the strip when the explosions began. “One hit the street in front of the entrance, according to several witnesses,” the New York Times reported. “Two others hit classrooms where people were sleeping.” …

Meanwhile, the death toll continues to escalate, according to the latest report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA). So far in the three week war, 1,118 Palestinians have been killed — including “at least 827 civilians, of whom 243 are children and 131 are women” — and 56 Israelis. More than 240,000 Palestinians are currently displaced, or more than ten percent of the Gaza Strip’s population of 1.8 million. “UNRWA has exhausted its absorption capacity in Gaza City and northern Gaza, while overcrowding at its shelters raises concerns about the outbreak of epidemics,” OCHA wrote.

Ringing In The Post-Peace Process Era?

This time-lapse video purports to show the Israeli military flattening a Gaza neighborhood over the course of an hour. In Rashid Khalidi’s take, Israeli leaders have done the same to the peace process:

What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of ceasefires and truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted.

As Netanyahu’s own words show, however, Israel will accept nothing short of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will accept only a Palestinian “state” that is stripped of all the attributes of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year charade of the “peace process” has shown that this is all Israel is offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence. This is not new.

Contrary to Netanyahu’s purposes, Khaled Elgindy argues, the war has united the Palestinian factions and made a third intifada more likely:

Hamas’ relative success on the battlefield has boosted the group’s popularity while highlighting Abbas’ perceived impotence. According to one recent poll, since the Gaza crisis began, popular support for Hamas has outstripped support for Fatah for the first time in several years. Even so, most Palestinians understand the limitations of engaging in armed struggle against a formidable military power like Israel. As a result, despite the recent collapse of U.S.-led peace talks, Abbas’ negotiations agenda remains relevant.

More significantly, the ongoing devastation in Gaza has forced all Palestinian factions for the first time in many years to close ranks on a major political issue (as opposed to procedural or administrative matters, which were at the heart of the recent reconciliation agreement). Indeed, one of Hamas’ chief demands was that Israel respect its reconciliation agreement with Fatah. During previous conflicts in Gaza, the leadership in the West Bank had been reluctant to side openly with Hamas. Those calculations clearly no longer apply.

But Steven Cook is not optimistic about the prospect of rescuing Abbas from irrelevance:

Almost from the start of the conflict in the Gaza Strip, the commentariat has been seized with the idea of “empowering [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas” as the only way out of the recurrent violence between Israel and Hamas. The discovery of this idea in Washington (and Jerusalem for that matter) is rather odd, not because it does not make sense, but rather because the idea is so reasonable and obvious that one wonders why — ten years after he became the Palestinian leader — it took so long to recognize it. Almost from the moment of Yasser Arafat’s death, Egypt sent high-level emissaries to the United States, warning that the new Palestinian president needed help lest he gradually cede the political arena to Hamas. He did not get it then and now it is likely too late to salvage Abbas. …

Over the last decade the combination of American and Israeli political pressure, missteps, and disingenuousness have consistently left the Palestinian president in a bind, forced to take part in negotiations that he and his advisors knew would never go anywhere, and then hung out to dry when they failed.

And that’s about as bullish as Michael Totten feels about the peace process:

Nobody can know how the next attempt will play out in detail, but none of the actors at this point is optimistic. And that’s without factoring Hamas into the equation, which rejects both negotiations and peace out of hand and vows to wage a decades- or even centuries-long war to the finish. Hamas will gleefully sacrifice a thousand Palestinian lives to kill a few dozen Israelis because its leaders truly believe that if life becomes too precarious and nerve-wracking for Jews in the Middle East that they’ll give up and quit the region forever. It’s a fantastical bloody delusion, but it’s what they believe and they are not going to stop any time soon.

I hate to be too cynical about this myself, but as I’ve said before, the Middle East is a great teacher of pessimism. A few years ago I asked Israeli writer and researcher Hillel Cohen what he expected to see in Jerusalem 50 years in the future. “Some war,” he said, shrugging. “Some peace. Some negotiations. The usual stuff.”

That niggling concern, that the peace process is finally dead, will be keeping political scientists busy long after this war is over, Marc Lynch predicts:

What happens if there is no peace process? There’s a plethora of articles about the vicissitudes of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, but far fewer on how to think about their absence. It has probably been more than a decade since anybody seriously believed in the possibility of a negotiated two-state solution, but most diplomats and pundits continue to go through the motions out of fear of contemplating the alternatives. After the failure of Secretary of State John Kerry’s team, it is hard to imagine anyone else putting much effort in to them any time soon.

Some long-standing assumptions seem ripe for testing. What happens now that peace talks seem unlikely to resume? What is the universe of comparable cases, and how did they end up? Is it really true that Israel cannot sustain the status quo indefinitely? Does the commonly-invoked tension between being a Jewish state and a democracy still really matter to Israelis, given the ongoing changes in Israel’s demographics and the shift rightward in its political culture?

Tightening The Noose Around Russia’s Economy

Yesterday, Europe and the US announced new sanctions against Russia. Obama explains the gist:

The Cable summarizes the news:

The new European sanctions go further than ever before but still fall short of the type of “sectoral sanctions” that would block business with entire Russian industries. That reflects EU leaders’ concerns that hitting Russia too hard would also hurt their own companies and industries. The arms embargo, for instance, doesn’t apply to existing agreements. That means the $1.6 billion French deal to sell Mistral warships to Russia, which had come under fire from British officials last week, will be allowed to go forward, though France has said it will only deliver the first one while re-evaluating whether to also deliver the second.

That’s not the only sacred cow left untouched. While the new coordinated measures target future oil production, they don’t touch the natural gas business, a pillar of Russia’s export economy and a lifeline for Europeans. Both the United States and Europe took steps to restrict trade in key oil industry equipment needed for extracting oil from deep waters, in the Arctic, and from shale — all areas where Russia hopes to boost its oil output in years to come. The U.S. Commerce Department said it will limit the export of crucial oil technology to Russia, but it is not yet clear exactly what goods and services will be banned, how that will affect Russia’s current oil production, or even how much U.S. and European firms will be hit by export bans on certain oil projects.

Robert Kahn foresees “inexorable momentum for further sanctions”:

(1) Europe now is less of a constraint on further U.S. action; (2) Ukraine is achieving success on the battlefield, and without intensified Russian involvement would likely see further gains. If recent evidence of Russian shelling across the border is any indication, Russia has intensified its support in response to developments on the ground, which is justification for further sanctions; and (3) sanctions are likely to be extended over time in response to evasion. This last point is often unappreciated.

As with capital controls, prohibitions on financial transactions create incentives to innovate to evade the control. In some cases, that can be a helpful escape value, but in this case, where the West desires to impose a credible cost on Russia for its continued destabilization of Ukraine, controls need to be extended. If the restrictions on new debt, for example, are evaded in size by using non-sanctioned companies or alternative markets (such as foreign exchange swap markets), I’d expect the types of transactions and/or sanctioned institutions to be extended to close off those flows. This may be only the early innings of the sanctions game.

Yglesias unpacks the EU’s sanctions:

Russia’s export economy consists overwhelmingly of fossil fuels. This sector is Russia’s greatest point of vulnerability, but it is also the most costly sector for Europe to target since Europeans enjoy burning Russian oil and natural gas.

The EU is going to halt the export of certain categories of equipment and technology that are used in fossil fuel extraction. Europe will not target the natural gas sector, but is going to implement restrictions on the sale of equipment used in deep-sea drilling, arctic exploration, and shale oil extraction.

This won’t put much short-term pressure on the Russian economy. What it will do, however, is possibly divide the Russian elite. The long-term financial prospects of the Russian oil sector depend on its ability to continue pressing into new sources of oil. The imposition of this kind of sanctions could turn Russian oil barons into a constituency for a more restrained foreign policy. There is nothing concrete at stake in Ukraine that is nearly as valuable as tapping Russia’s own offshore and shale reserves.

But Julia Ioffe fears a cornered Putin is a dangerous Putin:

This is Putin today: a brash and unpredictable man backed into a corner with little, if any, way out. And it’s not a good Putin to be faced with.

His whole image mirrors that of the Russia he’s tried to create since he came to power in 2000: sovereign, strong, and unbowed by Western heckling. Putin, like the Russia he leads, likes to make decisions on his own terms. And he may very well lash out if the West demands he come out of that corner with his tail between his legs. This causes him to dig in his heels and resist at all costs, or to lash out. Because Putin, and Russia, do not follow commands, and they do not dance to the beat of Washington’s drum.

“Putin backed into a corner is not a great outcome for the West,” says Masha Lipman, a prominent Russian political analyst. She points out that boxing in the hard-to-predict leader of a massive military and nuclear power that has its fingers in various geopolitical pies that are of interest to the U.S. is quite risky. Will Russia retaliate by scuttling Iran talks? By forging a closer bond with China? And what will it make him do in Donetsk?

 

Bad Science On The Big Screen

Jeffrey Kluger is frustrated by Lucy, a film premised on the widely believed misconception that we only use 10 percent of our brains:

The fact is, the brain is overworked as it is, 3 lbs. (1,400 gm) of tissue stuffed into a skull that can barely hold it all. There’s a reason the human brain is as wrinkled as it is and that’s because the more it grew as we developed, the more it bumped up against the limits of the cranium; the only way to increase the surface area of the neocortex sufficiently to handle the advanced data crunching we do was to add convolutions. Open up the cerebral cortex and smooth it out and it would measure 2.5 sq. ft. (2,500 sq cm). Wrinkles are a clumsy solution to a problem that never would have presented itself in the first place if 90% of our disk space were going to waste.

What’s more, our bodies simply couldn’t afford to maintain so much idle neuronal tissue since the brain is an exceedingly expensive organ to own and operate—at least in terms of energy needs…. “We were a nutritionally marginal species early on,” the late William Greenough, a psychologist and brain development expert at the University of Illinois, told me for my 2007 book Simplexity. “A synapse is a very costly thing to support.”

So why does the myth persist? A theory from neuroscientist David Eagleman:

I think it’s because it gives us a sense that there’s something there to be unlocked, that we could be so much better than we could. And really, this has the same appeal as any fairytale or superhero story. I mean, it’s the neural equivalent to Peter Parker becoming Spiderman.

Putting the scientific misinformation aside, Richard Brody feels the film doesn’t live up to its ambitions:

The grand-scale part comes when Lucy’s control of ambient energy taps into the mainframe of existence, the core of space and time. The trailer shows some wondrous stop-motion effects in Times Square and Lucy’s power to swipe action in and out, from high-speed to frozen and back, with her hand, as if swiping along a smartphone or tablet screen. [Writer/director Luc] Besson takes this idea audaciously, exhilaratingly far. I won’t spoil the contemplative delight, except to say that he comes amazingly close to territory covered in the more visionary moments of Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” Even now, I can hardly believe what I saw in “Lucy.”

Yet Malick’s movie—with its authentically profound considerations of the links between experience and transcendence, between ordinary life and intuitions of the absolute, between scientific knowledge and religious ecstasy—has an aesthetic, a style, a tone, a mood, which cohere with its grand ideas. His scenes of family drama in Texas, featuring such actors as Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, are filmed as distinctively and with as original and imaginative a vision as his synthetic images of the beyond, and the substance of that drama (down to the role of music in it, which meshes with the music heard on the soundtrack) is integral to his cinematic-philosophical creation.

Besson, by contrast, films the action with energy and flair but little originality. He realizes his characters with virtually no tendrils of identity to link up to his grander conceit.

Previous Dish on Tree of Life and Malick here. Update from a reader:

My guess is you will receive a version of this from others, but here’s mine:

You mean to tell me that light sabres aren’t real? Or that radioactive spiders can’t bite me and turn me into a superhero? Or that time travel may not actually exist?

It’s a movie, Poindexter. Shut up and let me watch the hot girl kick ass, OK?

Minimalist Or Just Dull?

Ian Svenonius calls out the new minimalist aesthetic of places like the Apple stores as a new form of snobbery:

The anti-stuff crowd invokes Buddhism and Communism-lite in their put-down of possessions and the people who “hoard” them. It’s supposed to be a sign of superstition, a hang-up, a social disease, greedy, sick. People who have things are derided as “fetishists.” Why would one have a record collection when all information is available online to be had by the technologically savvy? … Why should there be record stores, shopping areas, kiosks, video stores, movie houses, bookstores, libraries, schools, theaters, opera houses, parks, government buildings, meeting houses, et al? Public spaces, markets, and interacting with one’s surroundings are primeval, germy and dangerous. After all, it can all be done online.

Anna North expands upon this class analysis:

The idea of a vast anti-tchotchke conspiracy may strike some people as extreme. But others have begun to raise questions about minimalism’s class biases. At her blog Simply Fully, Taryn McCall notes that while she enjoys reading about minimalism online, “many of the most popular blogs that I read are written from the perspective of people who left high-powered, well-paid and benefited corporate careers for a simpler life and now have plenty of savings to show for it.” And, she writes:

“I am very aware that many people do without and receive stigma rather than praise. To them it is not called ‘minimalism.’ They live on very little, but it is not called anything because it is mostly unacknowledged, and when it does come up they are looked down upon as ‘lazy’ or ‘irresponsible’ (a feeling conveyed in even many minimalists’ posts). So I want to say what most minimalists are not saying: the benefits of minimalism depend in large part on where you start.”

Looking at what we wear, Lauren Sherman speculates that minimalist fashion has peaked:

Even a casual observer has surely noticed this shift toward the spare. “We are so overwhelmed with trends, bloggers and over-dressed looks that it’s refreshing to go back to basics,” says Melissa Moylan, women’s creative director at New York-based trend forecasting firm Fashion Snoops, explaining why we all want to look simple so badly.  Inspired by Céline’s Phoebe Philo, as well at Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen at the Row, and Raf Simons when he was at Jil Sander, this flavor of minimalism is less severe than what we saw in the ’90s. (Yes, the clean lines are there, but it isn’t completely devoid of pattern or color either. In fact, Philo’s brushstroke-heavy spring 2014 collection inspired some to call it maximal minimalism.) This not-so-literal take on the concept gives the wearer some slack, which might be why it has become such a popular look. …

But how many perfect tees and pairs of pleated trousers can we pack into our wardrobes? While there’s always a market for basics — not to mention a contingency of diehard minimalists — not every label with a “pare it back” ethos will resonate as strongly as Mansur Gavriel or Protagonist. There’s a fine line between simple and boring.