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Book Club: Relating To Resurrection

A reader writes:

Something in How Jesus Became God that resonated personally was the discussion in Chapter Five regarding After-Death Communications as an explanation for the visions of the resurrected Christ that some disciples received. Our son was born with a severe heart defect and had to undergo open-heart surgery at age two. We were told there was a 90% chance of his survival. Two days after the surgery, he suffered heart failure in the ICU. We went through several weeks of alternating between hope and despair as to what could be done for him, including receiving a heart transplant, but eventually we had to decide to remove all life support. He died in our arms, slowly, hour by hour, as we watched his vital signs decline to nothingness.

Neither my wife nor I had ever experienced anything so emotionally tortuous. We both fell into depressions, and in my case I began to experience dreams that I was being visited by my son. What was exceedingly real about these dreams was the physical sense of holding him in my arms, his cheek next to mine, listening to him babble. A tremendous sense of contentment flooded over me, knowing that he was alive. I would wake up at peace, and it would take five or more minutes for me to understand I was back in a different world of pain and sorrow. These dreams persisted for a few months and then stopped entirely.

I’m not a believer in an afterlife, but I am a believer that experiences such as these could convince anyone that someone close to them who had died tragically and unexpectedly, was alive in a real sense – not here on earth, but in heaven (if they believed heaven exists). This could have happened to any number of Christ’s followers, and it was a very short step for them to then exalt Jesus as being at the right hand of the Father, since his disciples had spent three extremely intense years speculating that this unique and remarkable man could very well be the promised Son of Man, or even the Son of God.

My own effort to explain how I view the Resurrection of Jesus is in my last post in the Book Club here. But I also have personal experiences that are similar to my readers, and I wrote about them at length in my book about surviving the plague of AIDS, Love Undetectable. I was diagnosed with HIV six weeks after one of my closest friends at the time had been diagnosed with AIDS. He had kept it a secret, until one afternoon he asked to meet me at the fountain in Dupont Circle, where he told me his diagnosis as I told him mine. The coincidence had us both smiling. We were already both Catholics and both writers and both gay in a terrifying era very different from today. But from that moment on, we bonded even more deeply, and over the next two years, I and his other close friends took care of him as he slowly slipped away from us. I saw him turn into a walking skeleton; I saw him pound the floor in pain; I saw him wracked by intense and unremitting fevers; I saw his breath literally taken away from him; I saw as cancer lesions speckled his body and advanced relentlessly toward his lungs; I saw the unspeakable shock and pain of his family; I listened to his voice, racked with fear and pain, over the phone at night; and I was entrusted with the details of his funeral. Watching my dear friend die at 31 of an agonizing disease will never leave me. And I will always, somewhere deep down, feel in some ways guilty for having lived, while he died.

But after his death, I felt his presence strongly at times. He appeared to me in symbols – like the sea-gulls that flew over the bay where we had released his ashes, or one gull that kept recurring in my life on the Cape and elsewhere as an almost sacred sign of his presence. He appeared to me in my dreams – and in one unforgettable one, I didn’t at first recognize him.

He was Patrick and yet no longer Patrick. His tormented shell of a body, racked by slow starvation and countless lesions, was now resplendent. His face was clear, his body more luminous than in life, all flaws removed. And he was happy. Weeks would then pass and I would suddenly be arrested by a sense of his presence – on the sidewalk, reading a book, sleeping on the beach. I cannot fully explain this, although a modern mind can always analyze it from the perspective of grief, survivor guilt, wish-fulfillment, and the like. And over time, Patrick’s presence diminished. But I experienced it as very, very real for as long as it lasted.

So, yes, I can indeed see the disciples having similar experiences – and they have been attested to in countless other lives as well, in studies and surveys over the years, as Ehrman notes. I infer from mine that Patrick is alive and well, and that one day, we will be together again. Perhaps at that fountain in Dupont Circle. And we will be laughing. And happy. And free from death and the fear of death. That is my faith. And I believe it was the faith of the disciples as well. It is what I mean by resurrection.

(Read the whole Book Club thread on How Jesus Became God here. Please email any responses to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com rather than the main account, and try to keep them under 500 words. Painting: Pietro Lorenzetti from the basilica in Assisi.)

John Kerry Tells The Truth … And Therefore Has To Apologize, Ctd

A reader notes that the chorus of indignation at John Kerry’s use of the term “apartheid state” to refer to Greater Israel’s destiny never actually engages the substance of his statement. So Ted Cruz, calling for Kerry’s resignation:

The fact that Secretary Kerry sees nothing wrong with making such a statement on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day demonstrates a shocking lack of sensitivity to the incendiary and damaging nature of his rhetoric.

Whatever else this is, it is not an argument that Israel is not an apartheid state or on its way to becoming so. On the left, we have this from Barbara Boxer:

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and any linkage between Israel and apartheid is nonsensical and ridiculous.

But what about those under Israeli control who have no right to vote at all? It doesn’t occur to Boxer that the apartheid-like regime on the West Bank is actually a function of Israeli democracy, since a majority of Israelis support it. But, of course, AIPAC created the template all these lemmings follow and its statement is the purest of them all:

Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate.

But is it true? That’s the question AIPAC never wants debated. So it polices the American discourse to prevent it. Since the observation is of the bleeding obvious, this can be hard. Jeffrey Goldberg, my old sparring partner on matters of Israel, wrote this a decade ago:

A de-facto apartheid already exists in the West Bank. Inside the borders of Israel proper, Arabs and Jews are judged by the same set of laws in the same courtrooms; across the Green Line, Jews live under Israeli civil law as well, but their Arab neighbors — people who live, in some cases, just yards away — fall under a different, and substantially undemocratic, set of laws, administered by the Israeli Army. The system is neither as elaborate nor as pervasive as South African apartheid, and it is, officially, temporary. It is nevertheless a form of apartheid, because two different ethnic groups living in the same territory are judged by two separate sets of laws.

Here’s Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, making the exact same argument:

“The simple truth is, if there is one state” including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, “it will have to be either binational or undemocratic. … if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Here’s Tzipi Livni:

The time has come for the same youth to ask, to what kind of state do they want to leave the gas reserves? To a Jewish democratic Israel? Or to a binational Arab state? Or to an apartheid state? It is impossible to deal with economic issues and to ignore the important diplomatic issues related to two states for two peoples.

Here’s another former prime minister, Ehud Ohlmert:

If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.

Of course, Kerry could be criticized for speaking an undiplomatic truth in a meeting he considered off the record. But the peace talks are at a dead end anyway, and it’s perfectly appropriate for a US secretary of state to explain why such a failure is a dreadful portent for the future of Israel. It’s a truth that the Israelis need to hear from Americans just as much as they need to hear it from their own leaders.

The real question is: why do some want this fact deemed off-limits in America when it sure isn’t in Israel? And the answer is obvious: AIPAC has no interest in a two-state solution and wants no impediment to the permanent establishment of Greater Israel, even if that means keeping half or more than half of the country in undemocratic bantustans for ever. That’s another truth no one is allowed to say out loud. But man does it sit there right in front of our noses.

When Mental Illness Is A Gift

Priscilla Long, wondering why schizophrenia persists across generations, points to a link between the illness and creativity:

Imagination, suggests Princeton molecular biologist Lee M. Silver, is related to the brain’s “noise” (random firings of neurons, or nerve cells), thus generating more associations. Brain scans of people with schizophrenia and their unafflicted family members show mega-amounts of random noise. Brain scans of control subjects (no schizophrenia in the family) do not.

A recent major study confirmed a high association between people in creative professions and their first-degree relatives (parents, offspring, and siblings) who have psychopathologies such as schizophrenia. Could there be inherited brain structures that produce thought patterns such as “broad associative thinking” in which contradictory images and ideas knock about together, structures that serve an artist’s work but that in some brains go too far and become the twisted thoughts of mental illness? Does selection for a more robust imagination – so very useful to us humans – keep imagination’s more dysfunctional forms from dying out?

Similar observations are made about bipolar disorder, which have played a role in the current TV trope of mental-illness-as-superpower. A reader, responding to our post on the new series Black Box, worries about romanticizing mental illness:

Having bipolar disorder, especially untreated bipolar disorder, is not a wondrous gift.

Sure, some people afflicted with it do well for themselves. Some can harness the energy and do great things with it. Most people ruin their lives with lousy careers, broken relationships, and a lot of detritus from the manic episodes, interspersed with bouts of crippling depression that make the disasters that much harder to clean up after. Or get appropriate treatment and try to live moderately normal lives.

Living with bipolar disorder is bad enough. Giving the public the perception that bipolar people can somehow transcend their daily struggles and become wildly successful because of this wonderful gift is offensive.

Another:

As someone with bipolar disorder – luckily completely controlled for years – I certainly agree that the ‘mentally ill genius’ trope is tired, and misinformed. But the thing is, it’s not totally misinformed

My own experience with mania has been that the long ramping up into a bad state with disordered thinking and behavior actually includes a period of very lucid, insightful, and hugely productive mental states that have brought out some of my best thinking and work. I still marvel at what I once accomplished in a single flight from Boston to San Francisco. (My clients were wowed by the work, too.) Those peak periods are not quite superpower-level, but there is definitely some truth in the trope. As my sister, who also has bipolar, once said: “Let’s rent a cottage for a month, go off our meds, and knock out a couple of novels.”

It’s funny because there is some truth in there. That’s what makes bipolar so dangerous: it has its upsides.

Chart Of The Day

Emma Green flags a new Brookings report that notes the growing numbers of religious progressives in America:

Blacks, hispanics, and people of mixed race are all more likely to be religious progressives than conservatives; these groups are also among the fastest-growing demographics in the United States. Similarly, Millennials are more than twice as likely to be religious progressives than religious conservatives; in fact, people older than 50 make up more than 60 percent of those who are considered to be religious conservatives. Although it’s impossible to talk to an 18-year-old about her views on culture and predict what she’ll think in two decades, these demographic trends suggest that the religious right is about to start shrinking.

But the question of influence is a little fuzzier. Although more than a third of Millennials are considered religious progressives, roughly 40 percent don’t have any faith at all: A growing number of young people don’t identify with a particular religion. That, along with the fact that an overwhelming majority of religious progressives don’t see religion as “the most important thing in their life,” suggests that faith is losing its overall influence over how people think about social and cultural issues.

This has, it seems to me, some salience when it comes to the question of religious freedom. What about the religious freedom of those who are pro-gay as a function of their faith? Are they not penalized by the law in North Carolina that bans marriage equality and also makes it a misdemeanor to perform a gay wedding not backed by the law? Of course they are:

“By preventing our same-sex congregants from forming their own families, the North Carolina ban on same-sex marriage burdens my ability and the ability of my congregation to form a faith community of our choosing consistent with the principles of our faith,” said the Rev. Nancy Petty, pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, who joined the lawsuit. As part of the state ban, it is a Class 1 misdemeanor for a minister to perform a marriage ceremony for a couple that hasn’t obtained a civil marriage license. In addition, the law allows anyone to sue the minister who performs a marriage ceremony without a license.

Gay leftist Mark Joseph Stern demands those defending religious freedom defend the progressives’ religious freedom as well. Very happy to. Even Ponnuru wants the ban on unlicensed marriages to be repealed. The more general point is that the assumption that religious convictions are solely behind banning marriage equality is empirically false. Religious liberty cuts all sorts of ways – and we shouldn’t pick or choose between one church and another.

Donald Sterling’s Personal Foul, Ctd

Corona is the last sponsor to drop Clippers, who are left with zero total sponsors only a lingering and indecisive State Farm.

— NBAMVP (@NBAMVP) April 28, 2014

BREAKING: LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling banned for life by NBA over racist comments in recording.

— The Associated Press (@AP) April 29, 2014

Many readers are asking along these lines:

Nice post on Sterling. Now the $64,000 question: Is it permissible, in your view, for Sterling to face sanctions for his comments? Or do you believe that it’s improper for the NBA or its customers to call for Sterling to face consequences for his words? If so, why not? But if not, why is this situation different from the Eich affair?

To respond to each question in turn: yes, of course, if an owner of a business makes baldly racist remarks urging public dissociation from an entire racial group, private sector sanctions – from the NBA or fans or sponsors – are “permissible.” They are always permissible in a free country. That’s why Brendan Eich is out of a job. The second question is whether what is permissible is proper or justified, and that will always depend on the specific case. I think it’s obviously appropriate in the Sterling case – because the remarks are horrifyingly racist. If Brendan Eich had made comments telling his friends to keep away from faggots, if he’d used any such terminology or had ever been shown to have discriminated against gays in the workplace or in his daily interactions, then his case would be very similar. But no such comments are in the public or private record, and there’s zero evidence that he ever acted in the workplace to harm gay employees. Au contraire, which is why gay Mozilla employees were divided about his ouster, with some supporting him. Sterling’s remarks, in contrast, reveal him to be a crude, foul bigot – which is why there is no division at all among African-Americans in the league – or beyond the league – about his fate.

Unfiltered feedback from readers on our Facebook page. One makes this distinction:

“Eich contributed to a successful campaign that actually stripped gay couples of existing rights, whereas Sterling is being assailed because of private remarks made in a phone call.”

Here is what I would say to that.

Yes, Eich did – even though the result was subsequently overturned thanks, in part, to Chad Griffin and AFER. But donating to a political cause or voting for a political party can have many motivations. Such acts can be driven by bigotry, sure, but also by general discomfort with sudden social change, religious conviction, misunderstandings, personal experiences, worries about unintended consequences, and the like. And you cannot know that Eich was motivated by rank Sterling-level bigotry – in fact, we have plenty of evidence that he wasn’t and isn’t. And remember too what was on the ballot in 2008. The choice was either civil marriage or civil unions with all the state-accorded rights and benefits of civil marriage. Now I have long argued that civil unions are no substitute for civil marriage – but am I prepared to say that everyone who disagrees with me is motivated by the kind of rank bigotry that Sterling represents? Of course not. That was the position of the Human Rights Campaign for many years, after all. They may be tools, opportunists, resource-hoggers and credit-grabbers, but they’re not bigots. It was the middle ground favored by at least a third of Americans at one point. They weren’t and aren’t all bigots of the Sterling variety. And I think the term “bigot” should be reserved for those like Sterling who have demonstrated it without a shadow of a doubt.

Sarah Palin: Anti-Christian, Ctd

A reader sends the above video:

On reading your post re: Palin and torture, I couldn’t help but think of this “New Rules” on Maher’s show. I played it for my Sunday school class.

Another:

Don’t you think you and others are giving Palin a bit too much credit when you say things like “she is drawing on a brutal theology from the past” or it’s an “allusion to converting Muslim prisoners by coercion”? Do you really think she has any grasp on history? I agree her statements are barbaric, but I do not believe she is capable of thinking at the level you and others ascribe to her. She’s incapable of allusion. I think the thought process, such as it was, was more like “Baptism = water; waterboarding = water; that will get a laugh.”

Yes, it’s frightening that John McCain wanted to foist this creature upon the world, but I am angrier at John McCain than I am at her – that would be like being angry at a cat for thinking like a cat (no disrespect to cats intended.)

My view is that Palin is a delusional, paranoid fantasist. My point is perhaps better expressed thus: her conflation of torture of Muslims with a Christian sacrament could objectively be seen as a terribly dangerous provocation in the context of Islamist terror. Whether she meant it that way is something I cannot know. Another reader also quotes me:

“It reveals that vast swathes of American Christianity are objectively anti-Christian, even pagan, in their support for this barbarism.” Andrew, as a practicing and proud Pagan, I must strongly dissent. Pagans do not endorse torture. Please do not malign us this way.

Ouch. Another reader:

I’m not sure that you calling them “Christianist” really has any authority. Who gave you the power to determine who is Christian and who is not?

Palin and her ilk believe themselves to be Christians. Who am I or anyone else to argue with them? This is what Christianity is, revealed in its reality. And it has always been thus. It is the same Christianity that Nietzsche wrote about – a cult of revenge. A cult of revenge for those who feel themselves on the bottom. Whether it is revenge wrought in this world or the next, casting the “evil” to hell is revenge, pure an simple.

Andrew, sometimes you are smart, but you use your mind to see what you want to see, not to see more fully how the world actually is. You have come to see Republicanism for what it is, you have yet to see Christianity for what it really is.

And who are you to say what Christianity really is? My use of the term Christianist is simply to distinguish the political abuse of Jesus teachings from the teachings themselves. It’s an act of linguistic hygiene. And someone who sees the urge to torture others as intrinsic to Jesus’ teachings has simply never read the Gospels. Another dissent along those lines:

By any reasonable standard, Palin and her supporters are Christians. They believe in God. They believe that the Bible is the word of God. They believe that Jesus is both the son of God and his earthly incarnation, and that he sacrificed himself for the salvation of all mankind. They’re biblical people, alright. Since this book, which Palin and her followers believe – despite all evidence to the contrary – is the True Word of the Creator of the Universe, says that followers of other gods must be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 13:6 etc), it follows quite naturally that Palin and company need shed no tears over their sufferings. God has cursed the unbelievers (the “terrorists”), and they will suffer for eternity for their transgression, at least, according to other parts of the Bible.

One might hope that the love of Jesus will help to transcend these base mentalities, but since Jesus intends to bring the law of Moses to the world, we can expect that many will remain anchored firmly to the bedrock. According to you, this is just “fundamentalism”. To my mind, this is the natural result of faith – belief without evidence.

Jesus transcended the laws of the Old Testament, and transformed their rules into the single rule of caritas. Another adds:

You forget one thing in your well written rebuttal: the Inquisition was a Christian enterprise. Christians, or more accurately, Christianists, are highly capable of this.

Of course they are and have always been. That doesn’t make it an expression of Jesus’ teachings. A “committed evangelical Christian” chimes in:

I’m sorry, but these views on waterboarding are not and never will be anything that I agree with. But the more important question is this: What’s it going to take for this Christianist madness in America to dissipate? I can’t see any option other than a serious decline in adherence to Evangelical Christianity in America, at least among whites. That would disrupt and eventually destroy Evangelicalism’s accommodation with, and takeover of, the Republican Party. Given how the Millennial generation seems to feel about Christianity at the moment? Highly likely, I’d say. Politically, that would be a good thing. Spiritually, I’m not going to enjoy it.

Another wants to forget the whole thing:

At some point it might be worth asking whether more good would come from ignoring Palin entirely rather than addressing her most egregious slights, which merely lets her know how offensive she needs to be to elicit a reaction from the press. Maybe post a poll on “No More Palin News?” I don’t click on any stories on Yahoo or Google news, or Politico or other sites, that feature her in the headline. I figure page clicks only give them more incentive to run such stories, which in turn fuels her to say more asinine things.

One more reader:

Thanks much for shining more light on Sarah Palin’s embrace of torture, and the favorable reception her speech received. To be honest, the increasing popularity of torture in the United States, and the role of faith in that process, has been woefully understudied as its own “puzzling” development, one that is actually worthy of social scientific study on its own. I have a published study (pdf) engaging this “curious” case of torture’s increasing popularity, a trend that seems to befuddle even the most notable experts on torture like Darius Rejali (whose work I admire in so many ways).

In short, some of the process can be chalked up to the “hidden” nature of American torture. Because we can’t see the torture (with the exception of the Abu Ghraib photos), those who have a strong “faith” in what they cannot see but are told (by authoritative figures like Sarah Palin, or Dick Cheney, or George W. Bush) can imagine that the tortured are all “terrorists” and that water boarding isn’t “that bad” anyway, and that those who do the torturing are, like Jack Bauer, good and right and just. This is also one of the reasons why Jose Rodriguez’s illegal act to destroy the tapes of water boarding sessions was so effective – it removed a possibility that their heroic narratives of what torture is doing, and who it is doing it (and to whom), could be easily shattered by the screams and images and cruelty that is the reality of the torture chamber.

I know you’re swamped with emails, but if you get a chance to read the study, you’ll also notice that you and the Dish are quoted in my study. Your blogging and work on torture has inspired my own in so many ways over the years, so thanks for what you’re doing on it and I hope you continue to shed light on this incredibly troubling trend and politicization of this barbaric “tactic” that should be left in the dustbin of history.

Unfiltered thoughts from readers on our Facebook page.

John Kerry Tells The Truth … Therefore He Must Apologize

The state of Israel controls a large amount of neighboring territory, seized in war, in which the inhabitants are divided by ethnicity, with one group, the original inhabitants of the land or refugees from ethnic cleansing, are systematically disadvantaged compared with the other. They are penned into eight distinct areas from which they have to get through checkpoints to move around. They have no right to vote for the government that controls their lives. This arrangement has now lasted a year longer than the apartheid regime in South Africa – and, unlike that regime, looks set to continue indefinitely. It also comprises a massive project of ethnic and social engineering in which the dominant ethnic group continues to settle the occupied territory in an attempt – forbidden by the Geneva Conventions – to change its demographic nature.

None of this is in dispute. But when an American secretary of state explains this in private he is forced to recant publicly. And that surreal kabuki dance is an almost perfect symbol of why US engagement with Israel-Palestine is, at this juncture, such an enormous waste of time. The US is barred from telling the truth, which makes a real negotiation impossible. The Israelis know that they will never be subject to real US pressure, because the US Congress stands ever-ready to do whatever Israel asks. And so the beat goes on.

You can, of course, debate for ever who bears the blame for the Israel-Palestine clusterfuck at any specific point in history, and for a while the Palestinians were the more serious obstacle to any kind of settlement. They bear some real responsibility for the nightmare they now live in. You can also point to various moments before and after the violent establishment of the Jewish state when something better might have been achieved, and both sides bear the blame at various junctures. The launching of the second Intifada and the assassination of Rabin, for example, were fateful moments – when extremists seized the initiative. You can also (rightly) note that the occupation of the West Bank began as a defensive maneuver, and therefore should not be regarded as some kind of naked colonial enterprise, but as a matter of self-preservation. You can also rightly note that, compared with all its neighbors, Israel’s rambunctious democracy is a beacon – if only it weren’t also the means for the permanent suppression and humiliation of an entire people, whose land and homes were taken from them by force of arms.

But what you cannot argue, it seems to me, is that continued American financial and military support for the maintenance of this mess makes any sense at all, and that continued American diplomatic engagement is in any way a rational policy. The US president simply does not have the power to force Israel to stop its illegal, immoral and foul settlement of the West Bank – because the Israel lobby controls this aspect of foreign policy through the Congress, whoever is in the White House; and so we are committed indefinitely to supporting a de facto apartheid regime in perpetuity. That support drives a stake through any attempt to repair relations with the Muslim world, and establish a better diplomatic position with which to isolate and pre-empt Islamist terror. And so we remain trapped in this nightmare – held responsible for everything Israel does (with good reason) and yet unable to stop or affect any of it. If your marriage were like this, your best bet would be a divorce. And it’s coming to the point where America needs to do the same thing with Israel.

My view is that we should therefore end any and all government aid to the Jewish state, and stop using our UN veto to protect it from appropriate international censure.

We should withdraw from any direct negotiating role between the two parties, and try and make the broader international situation more conducive to Israeli withdrawal and Palestinian moderation. At the same time, we should support Palestinian efforts to join international organizations, and be willing to be part of any international force that could police an eventual two-state solution. We should attempt to create a great power coalition, like the one pressuring Iran, to come up with a proposed territorial solution.

Is this an attack on Israel, a Jewish state many of us support in principle but find increasingly difficult in practice? I’d argue not. I’d argue that the dysfunctional relationship between Israel and the US Congress makes American attempts to be an honest broker in the dispute a farce and helps sustain the intolerable occupation indefinitely. The US alienates the Israelis and the Palestinians by this relationship, and the rest of the world increasingly sees the US as simply an obedient and very powerful poodle for the Israeli government. By disengaging, we at least free ourselves from a lose-lose position, which hobbles US foreign policy in other ways. For Israel to seek both to annex the West Bank permanently and also be allied with the West is not something the West can reciprocate indefinitely without abandoning core democratic values.

No doubt these arguments will mean I will be accused of anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism. I’m resigned to that. That too is part of the dead-end. For my part, I still believe in the dream of a free and Jewish state in the ancestral homeland, democratic and prosperous, and have nothing but profound admiration for its achievements and tenacity and acts of benevolence and entrepreneurship around the world. I just do not believe a friend allows a friend to spiral into self-destruction and the abandonment of its ethical core. I think we’ve done about all we can to help achieve a settlement through direct diplomacy – but the Obama years have proven irrefutably that, at this late stage, it’s worse than useless.

It’s time for a divorce. Which is the only thing that could make a functional relationship with Israel possible again.

(Photos: John Kerry by Alex Wong/Getty; Netanyahu and Putin by Dmitri Azarov/Kommersant via Getty Images; Two Palestinian activists sit inside an Israeli bus as it rides between a bus stop outside the West Bank Jewish settlement of Migron, near Ramallah, and a checkpoint leading to Jerusalem, on November 15, 2011. By Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty; Netanyahu and Putin by Dmitri Azarov/Kommersant via Getty Images.)

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #202

A reader nails it:

I got it! I got it! Finally, I know one.

It’s a golf course.

Another sleuth:

Those fluffy white things in the large, otherwise empty blue expanse in the top half of the photo were a dead giveaway. I literally can see some of those exact same things outside MY window right now, and I’m in Albuquerque. Therefore, this photo was taken from my room at the Midtown Days Inn in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Another moves in the right direction:

Corpus Christi, Texas. That’s a wild punt. If I knew the proper golfing analogy, I’d use that instead.

A hail birdy? You’re asking the wrong blog. Another spots a key clue:

The cars don’t have license plates on the front, so this golf course is probably in Florida.

Another reader elaborates on the Florida-ness:

First-time player, since I’m not nearly the traveler that most Dishheads are. Roads, golf course, neighborhood designs and manmade ponds all scream South Florida – and the powerlines on the horizon clinch it; that’s the Everglades. It’s not Broward County, or I’d recognize it, so I’m going to guess Palm Beach County, specifically, Boca Raton. If I make it past the readon,

I’ll count that as a moral victory.

Another also goes for Boca:

Palm trees, SUVs, cookie-cutter houses, flat terrain as far as the eye can see. This is America at its most boring. Boca Raton it is.

Ouch. That reader probably didn’t spend an hour looking at golf courses then:

I spent an hour looking at golf courses. Naples, Florida. That’s all I got.

A former winner isn’t calling his travel agent:

Meh. Looks like somewhere I’d probably have no fun and complain about the humidity. I am going to go with Idon’tcare, Florida. Or somewhere down south (palm trees) that doesn’t require front license plates (mostly down south, anyway). I think that’s the county seat of Ialreadywon County.

This is probably the only US location we’ve ever featured that hasn’t elicited a single contestant’s praise or fond memories:

Florida. That’s all I’ve got for you. A subdivision of one-story houses, a golf course, and lush-looking trees (including palm trees!) on land as flat as a pancake. Whereabouts in Florida? I’ll let the more diligent Dish readers answer that one.

A more diligent reader almost gets the right city:

Kissimmee, Florida? It looks like the view from one of the many hotels in the area that host business conventions and cater to Disney-hungry tourists.

Along those lines, the view’s submitter checks in:

So excited that you used my picture this week. Will a photo from a major tourist city in the continental US be too easy?

Definitely not – only 27 readers participated this week, and only a handful got the right city, including this one:

After living in central Florida for several years, my first thought was Orlando: completely flat land, golf, palm trees, and the one towering building in the distance that looks like the Champions Gate Resort. After spending time on Google Maps, though, I couldn’t narrow it down – there are just too many golf courses in that area of the country.

Seriously:

For a map with less dots, below is this week’s OpenHeatMap of reader guesses (zoom in by double-clicking an area of interest (in Florida), or drag your cursor up and down the slide):

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This reader doesn’t need to guess:

Well! This is the first time I’ve ever been struck with recognition at a VFYW contest – more than just, “Oh, I recognize the city” but “I’ve been in that hotel!”

The landscape is inescapably Orlando – flatness, golf courses, those radio towers – and an Orlando I recognize from my stay at the Ritz-Calrton Orlando, Grande Lakes a couple years ago. After checking out a satellite image, I realized the room is on the other side of the hotel from where I stayed, but it appears to be a room directly above the porte-cochere/entrance, facing northeast:

As for the floor and the room number – you have got to be kidding me. I leave that to people with time on their hands to call the hotel and ask themselves.

Or we can just ask the view’s submitter!

Did I mention how much time I saved this weekend by not competing in the VFYW Contest? That was until you asked me to try to find a picture and identify the window of a hotel room in which I stayed almost a year ago from the outside of the building.

In the pictures, the Ritz-Carlton in the hefty building with the two wings and two cupolas. The JW Marriott is the narrower long building with the single cupola. There is a low double (Ritz and JW Marriott) conference center in between the two hotels.

My room was on the not yet floor in the Ritz-Carlton in the rear in the wing that was nearer to the JW Marriott. It faced outward toward the golf course – not inward toward the other Ritz-Carlton wing nor outward toward the conference center/Marriott. If you need a picture with a drawing, I suggest you contact the hotel directly. Nothing personal – I plan to enjoy my free time this weekend.

Another guns for the right window:

Flat, full of golf courses, palm trees, lakes, and tracts of dreary, identical, single-story housing. Can’t be anywhere but Florida. The state only has 1,481 golf courses so it was just a matter of looking at them all in Google Earth. I started working from south to north but luckily my wife looked at the picture and suggested the Orlando area. Only took me about 10 tries before I found the water hazard with the two distinctively shaped sand traps beside the fairway, on the course at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando Grande Lakes Resort.

The view is from a room at the front, not very high up, maybe 3rd floor, so judging by how the row of palm trees lines up I am guessing the marked window:

Other contestants got closer. Here’s a husband and wife team that has played (and guessed correctly) in every contest this month:

Our guess is that the photograph was taken from the Ritz-Carlton Orlando “Grande Lakes” Hotel, located at 4012 Central Florida Parkway, Orlando, Florida. It was taken from a guest room window in the front the of the hotel, several floors over the main entrance/lobby, with the photographer facing northeast. We spent some time working out the angles to determine the correct hotel window, but with so many to choose between, the window selection is at best a semi-educated guess, so we’re crossing our fingers for luck:

The landscape of the contest photograph made us both think immediately of Florida, although neither of us has been there. My wife picked out several buildings in the distance that appeared to be hotels – including one really large one. The concentration of hotels outside of an obvious urban area suggested Orlando, because it brings in tourists for Disney World and various other attractions. My wife tentatively identified the large hotel in the far distance to the left of the contest photograph as the “Florida Hotel & Conference Center” in Orlando, and so we studied large hotels with golf courses in that area. It was my wife that found the Ritz-Carlton.

What first caught her eye was that in the paved parking lot in the contest photograph the parking spots are numbered, and all the cars are parked “backed-in.” (Likely meaning a valet-parking area). She saw an identical parking lot at the Ritz-Carlton, and from there we were able to confirm that everything else matched too.

Great entry. Another:

The photo this week was taken from the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes in Florida (4012 Central Florida Pkwy, Orlando, FL 32837). My guess as to window is in the attached picture. I am guessing the photo was taken from the 8th floor in an even numbered room (It appears the odd numbered rooms fact the pool rather than the front drive?)

I figure every one of these I guess correctly gets me closer to the prize. After a dozen or so contest entries, mostly correct, I got a mention in last week’s contest for my Cook pine strategy and it made my day! I still look forward to this every week, though it can be infuriating at times (there are way too many hotels on golf courses).

Succeeding in difficult contests like this one gives you leg up in future tie-breakers. Meanwhile, it appears Chini got a head start this week:

I suppose it helps to have a little advance training. A few weeks ago, an old college friend sent me a view from a building in Florida, and tracking that one down made this contest a cinch. This week’s view comes from Orlando, Florida and looks almost exactly northeast along a heading of 46.69 degrees. The picture was taken from a room on, oh, let’s say the 7th floor of the Ritz-Carlton Orlando Grande Lakes:

Per the view’s submitter, the room number was 1033. No one even guessed the tenth floor by name, but two readers guessed it correctly via window circling. Since the hotel has 14 floors, the fifth from the top is the correct one. That means Chini nailed it, as did this week’s winner, who is a 20-contest veteran:

The photo is taken from the Ritz-Carlton Orlando Grande Lakes in Orlando. I’m going to guess it’s from the 8th floor – the room is marked here:

This one was an odd one – seemed impossible at first, going from the lack of major landmarks in the photo. But then there were a few quick bits of deduction: It’s a state with palm trees, and no front license plates – Florida. And it’s clearly from a hotel overlooking a golf course. With that to go on, my partner and I started looking at Google Earth views of Florida hotels with golf courses attached and pretty quickly hit on the Ritz-Carlton. The balcony railing matched the balcony railings in traveler photos from the hotel, and then the clincher: Finding the building in the back left of the photo on Google Street View:

Picking the room was the toughest part. I’m guessing it’s above the hotel’s driveway, and between the lines of palm trees (since it’s facing to the left, and only one of the lines is visible in the photo). From rough guesses about positioning, I’m going with the eighth floor, just to the right of the center of the hotel. To guess a room number, maybe 811?

Congrats! And in case you wanted to know the identity of that matching building, the winner of Contest #166 has got you covered:

This week’s contest photo was snapped at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes at 4012 Central Florida Parkway, Orlando, Florida 32837. I’ll guess the window is on the 8th floor on the east side of the building:

Ordinarily I would write something interesting about the city or the structures in the picture, but we’re dealing with Orlando. So I’ll just note that from the Ritz-Carlton, you can see a CubeSmart self-storage facility:

See everyone for the next view on Saturday. No more golf courses, promise.

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

Sanctions Redux, Ctd

Julia Ioffe reviews the reasoning behind the new sanctions we imposed on Vladimir Putin’s cronies yesterday:

The psychological factor of naming these [Russian “crony banks”] is not to be underestimated. First of all, it removes the curtain cloaking this shadowy “crony economy,” full of small, strange banks whose business is far from obvious. It shows the Russians that we know how and by whose hands the economy runs. Furthermore, says prominent Russian economist Sergei Guriev, “the continuation of adding companies and banks indicates that future sanctions may include certain truly systemic financial institutions.” …

“I don’t think the Russians quite understand the extent to which the world financial system is integrated with the dollar and the U.S. financial system,” says one administration official involved in the sanctions deliberations. “I don’t know if these people have assets in the U.S. I always suspected most of their assets are in Europe. But once the U.S. banking system has redlined you, it’s hard to do business. You’re radioactive.”

Which is why it’s starting to work. Western financing in Russia has seized up.

But Bershidsky thinks the sanctions are too weak:

The banks are too small to matter: At worst, the holders of almost $2 billion in private deposits at SMP Bank will have to find a new bank if they plan to use their debit and credit cards overseas. Some significant omissions suggest that the list’s drafters intentionally avoided Putin’s friends’ major possessions. Volga Group, for example, holds a 23 percent stake in Novatek, Russia’s biggest independent natural gas producer, and a 32.3 percent stake in Sibur, a major petrochemical producer. Kovalchuk’s Abros holds stakes in a large pro-Putin media holding as well as one of Russia’s biggest insurance companies, Sogaz. Sechin runs state-owned Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company. And though Washington officials earlier suggested Gazprom chief Alexei Miller would be mentioned, he is conspicuously absent. So is his company, long used to make Ukraine toe Russia’s line.

Keith Johnson complains that the sanctions don’t hit Russia’s energy sector:

Seriously targeting the energy sector would be crucial, though, because energy exports make up more than half the Russian government’s revenue. Gas sales to Europe, in particular, are a point of vulnerability for Gazprom, since about three-quarters of its sales go to Europe. But Russia’s oil firms, especially Rosneft, are also huge producers and long-time partners of big Western firms, with ambitious expansion plans. …

Big Oil firms continue to talk up their investments in Russia, and some, such as Royal Dutch Shell, plan to ramp up investments in major energy projects in Russia. European countries continue to plan major deals with Russian nuclear power firms. Big European companies that have long-standing trading ties with Russia, meanwhile, are arguing against a ramping-up of sanctions.

So why bother with sanctions at all? Keating’s take:

The best reason for sanctioning Putin that has little to do with influencing his decisions on Ukraine may be that, as Dan Drezner argued the last time around, it will gain the U.S. some leverage for the future. Indeed, sanctions are generally pretty bad at deterring bad behavior by hostile regimes, but the carrot of lifting sanctions has been pretty effective lately. It’s hard to believe that the U.S. could have made as much diplomatic progress as it has with countries like Iran or Myanmar if it hadn’t been able to offer sanctions relief in exchange for concessions.

The relationship between the United States and Russia has been profoundly damaged, probably for years to come, by the Ukraine crisis. Even if the U.S. may not be able to do much to influence Putin now, it’s seems basically inevitable that the two superpowers will face another crisis soon and it could certainly help to have something concrete to offer Russia’s most powerful people in exchange for cooperation.

Granted, in the short term, that’s pretty cold comfort for Ukraine.

Fred Kaplan makes a moral case, even as he acknowledges that sanctions don’t often work:

Sometimes, as with South Africa’s apartheid system, sanctions are worth imposing on moral grounds. And, in that case, because the sanctions were so deep, widespread, and long lasting, they finally paid off.

In this sense, sanctions against Russia are worthwhile, too. First, the West has to do something about Putin’s incursions and threats in Ukraine, and the fact is, there’s not a lot it can do. Second, if Putin isn’t determined to invade Ukraine outright, the pain of the sanctions to date—and the threat of more pain to come if he escalates—might affect his calculations on the costs of going ahead and the benefits of keeping still.

However, it’s illusory to think that these or any other sanctions will have more than a marginal impact on Putin’s behavior, especially when it comes to Ukraine, which has been integral to Russia—as a market, a supplier, and a security buffer—for centuries. If Putin decided that it was in his vital interest to chop off eastern Ukraine and call it a part of “New Russia,” then no economic sanctions—none that the United States and Western Europe can plausibly impose—would dissuade him from doing so.

John Cassidy wonders whether Putin will respond rationally:

[I]f the previous round of sanctions—which extended travel bans and asset freezes to a number of people and institutions close to Putin—did not change Putin’s behavior, it’s questionable whether these new measures, which are basically more of the same, will have much impact. Indeed, Putin’s failure to rein in the pro-Russian forces that have seized buildings in Donetsk and other cities raises three disturbing possibilities: first, that he is not fully in control of the local militants; second, that his cost-benefit analysis doesn’t weigh the economic costs imposed by the sanctions very highly; and third, that he’s not the wily rational actor everybody has assumed him to be. He might be something else.

The Healthcare.gov Hangover

Kliff contemplates the disconnect between Obamacare’s success and the perception of that success. One big reason for it: Heathcare.gov:

“News about the problems with the exchanges was on a lot longer than any discussion of beating the enrollment goal,” [Kaiser’s Liz] Hamel says. “It’s possible that all the reports were still in the forefront of people’s minds.”

And its likely that most Americans are gauging their understanding of how well — or poorly — Obamacare is going from the news coverage. Most Americans already have health insurance, and aren’t shopping on the exchanges for new policies. So even if the Obamacare experience improves, most people won’t necessarily notice.

“So many people are not impacted by the law that they’re more likely to respond to messages in the media than they are to evaluate their own experience,” Hamel says. “That makes me think it will be a while before there’s any shift in how people think the law is going.”

Relatedly, Ezra listens to Scott Brown’s anti-Obamacare rhetoric:

Scott Brown, who’s now running for Senate in New Hampshire, has found the perfect position on Obamacare. He’s for it. He’s just not for calling it Obamacare.

In an interview with WBUR, he called Obamacare a “disaster.” Then he was asked what he’s for — and he went on to describe Obamacare. … [T]he polls are clear. The American people don’t want Obamacare. However, they like what’s in Obamacare. And they don’t like it when Republicans try to get rid of Obamacare. Brown’s position shows Republicans a way out: a rebranding of Obamacare, accompanied, perhaps, by some vague tweaks and changes to be named later. Fauxbamacare, in other words.