Jamila Trindle and Keith Johnson note an economic silver lining of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine:
It may be cold comfort when enemy tanks are still on its border, but some observers suggest that Kiev should be able to write off at least $5 billion of its debt to Russia because Moscow has effectively stolen Ukrainian territory and energy resources, as well as military hardware and bases. “An obvious focal point for the Ukrainian government now that Russia has intervened across its border, and actually seized land/assets is debts owed to Russia,” said Tim Ash, head of emerging markets research at Standard Bank Group. “No doubt the lawyers are sharpening their pencils as we speak.”
There are already a few ways in which Russian takeover could end up alleviating Ukraine’s debt, the most pressing of which is probably the $1.8 billion (and counting) that Kiev owes Gazprom for natural-gas shipments over the last year.
But Felix Salmon explains that some debt, like the $3 billion Russia lent to Ukraine in December, may prove harder to shake:
[T]he loan was not, technically, a bilateral loan from Russia to Ukraine. Instead, it was structured as a private-sector eurobond. … This is a notorious vulture-fund move: a hedge fund buys bilateral debt from a sovereign, and then sues not as a sovereign but rather as a private-sector creditor. I can think of a few hedge funds which would be interested in Russia’s debt, if they could buy it at a discount to where the rest of Ukraine’s debt is trading. After all, to use a term you might have seen on this blog in the past, this loan is, legally, pari passu with all the rest of Ukraine’s bonded debt.
(In fact, this bond is arguably senior to the rest of Ukraine’s bonds, thanks to a very unusual provision which allows Russia to accelerate the debt if Ukraine’s GDP falls. But since there now seems to be no chance that Ukraine will pay the coupon on this bond, it’s going to be in default very soon anyhow.)
There is much to say about Matchar’s article, but I only want to comment on one thing. She writes: “The most reliable statistics available place the number of false rape reports at between 2 and 8 percent of all rape reports. Yet most people, both in and out of the MRM [men’s rights movement] community, believe these numbers to be much higher.”
First off, “most people” believe those numbers to be much higher? Really? That is news to me, and it would probably be to “most people” I know. Moreover, there’s nothing backing that assertion, save that single survey, of which she writes that it found that “both male and female college students believe that about 50 percent of rape allegations are false.” However, if you actually read the linked-to survey, it finds that 50 percent of “intercollegiate athletes” who were “predominately male” believe that. Color me surprised that in a big group of male college athletes and the occasional woman, half of them think that rape victims are lying.
Another focuses on the “2-8 percent” statistic:
It seemed to beg the obvious question: “Does that mean that 92-98% of sex assault reports result in convictions? That seemed impossible. So I clicked through and read the report. The definition is buried pretty deep in the article, but I wanted to send it to you, because it’s a pretty key piece of context for understanding how common this actually is. The study defines “false accusation” thusly:
The determination that a report is false can then only be made when there is sufficient evidence to establish that the sexual assault did not happen (was not completed or attempted.) This does not mean that the investigation failed to prove that the sexual assault happened–in that case the investigation would simply be inconclusive or unsubstantiated.
In other words, an accusation only counts as “false” if there is demonstrable evidence if its falsity – that is, if there’s definitive evidence of deception. That leaves a huge swath of accusations that are not provably “false” but also not provably “true” (i.e. they do not result in conviction.) The article, I guess, is assuming that, out of that undetermined swath, there’s not a single false accusation. This seems an unwarranted assumption, to say the least.
So the reality is: Somewhere between 2-8% of reports are so false that it is actually possible to prove a negative – that they did NOT happen. (Note: This seems like a high number for that, no? 1 out of 20?) Plus, some other number of reports do not admit of strong proof either way, but are false. A third group of cases are true reports, but not provably so, and a fourth group results in sexual assault convictions.
The MRM is unhelpful and out of line when it makes a direct comparison between the problem of being raped and the problem of false rape accusation. Rape, sadly, happens far more, and it’s even more damaging than a false accusation. No one should dispute that. However, progressive feminists are also unhelpful and out of line when they minimize and dismiss the victims of false accusations, or when they insist that anyone who accuses someone of rape must be taken at their word.
The truth is, statistics aren’t very helpful in this area. We don’t know what happens behind closed doors and we don’t know who is telling the truth. But I do know that quoting misleading statistics while acting as if one is being reasonable and generous, as Matchar surely does, is only a more clever and more patronizing way of dismissing a movement that, whatever its faults, addresses a real and serious problem.
Megan Neal summarizes a study on the spread of fake news through Facebook:
[A] team of researchers at Northeastern University, led by Walter Quattrociocchi, decided to study how it is that erroneous information jumps the credibility fence and becomes widely believed to be true. Their theory, published on the arXiv preprint server last week and unearthed by MIT Technology Review, is that it has something to do with the kind of people who read “alternative” news, because they’re generally mistrustful of the mainstream media. …
Logically enough, the folks who were more prone to reading alternative websites (defined as “pages which disseminate controversial information, most often lacking supporting evidence and sometimes contradictory of the official news”) were also more likely to buy into a conspiracy theory. The thinking goes that those radical readers are A) less adept at parsing accurate information and B) already skeptical of mainstream journalism, and looking for an different take.
Relatedly, Mary Elizabeth Williams flags a “a new study from the University of Chicago that reveals that nearly half of all Americans believe medical conspiracy theories”:
The findings, published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, are culled from a study of 1,351 adults who were polled about their beliefs on six popular theories: “The CIA deliberately infected large numbers of African Americans with HIV under the guise of a hepatitis inoculation program,” “Doctors and government still want to vaccinate children even though they know these vaccines cause autism and other psychological disorders,” “The FDA is deliberately preventing the public from getting natural cures for cancer and other disorders because of pressure from drug companies,” “Health officials know that cell phones cause cancer but are doing nothing to stop it because large corporations won’t let them,” “Public water fluoridation is really just a secret way for chemical companies to dump the dangerous byproducts of phosphate mines into the environment,” and “The global dissemination of genetically modified foods by Monsanto is part of a secret program launched by the Rockefeller and Ford foundation to shrink the world’s population.” As the study’s authors write, “49% of Americans agree with at least one medical conspiracy theory and 18% agree with three or more.”
Cass Sunstein lists reasons individuals believe in conspiracy theories:
Here’s an excellent predictor of whether people will accept a particular conspiracy theory: Do they accept other conspiracy theories? If you tend to think that the Apollo moon landings were faked, you are more likely to believe that the U.S. was behind the 9/11 attacks. (With a little introspection, many of us know, almost immediately, whether we are inclined to accept conspiracy theories.)
Remarkably, people who accept one conspiracy theory tend to accept another conspiracy theory that is logically inconsistent with it. People who believe that Princess Diana faked her own death are more likely to think that she was murdered. People who believe that Osama bin Laden was already dead when U.S. forces invaded his compound are more likely to believe that he is still alive.
The second set of explanations points to the close relationship between conspiracy theories and social networks, especially close-knit or isolated ones. Few of us have personal or direct knowledge about the causes of some terrible event — a missing plane, a terrorist attack, an assassination, an outbreak of disease. If one person within a network insists that a conspiracy was at work, others within that network might well believe it.
Erwin Chemerinsky begs Justice Ginsburg to retire this year:
So long as the Democrats control the Senate, President Obama can have virtually anyone he wants confirmed for the Supreme Court. There has been only one filibuster against a Supreme Court nominee, and that was to block Justice Abe Fortas’ elevation to chief justice, not to block his initial appointment. There were 48 votes against Thomas and 42 against Alito, but Democrats filibustered neither. Besides, if Democrats have control of the Senate, they could change the rules to eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, just as they did for lower federal court judges and presidential appointments to executive positions.
In the end, the only way to ensure that President Obama can pick someone who will carry on in Justice Ginsburg’s tradition is for the vacancy to occur this summer. Indeed, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who will turn 76 this summer, should also carefully consider the possibility of stepping down this year.
Bernstein agrees. Garrett Epps suspects that Supreme Court Justices “just don’t see the issue the way the rest of us do, as a straightforward matter of presidential elections and judicial votes”:
Since the retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens in 2010, she has been the senior justice on the liberal side of the Court. This is an important job—when the Court’s conservatives vote together as a five-member bloc, the senior liberal justice assigns the task of preparing the liberal dissent. The purpose of such a dissent is to discredit the majority’s reasoning and offer future courts grounds to distinguish or overrule the case. Ginsburg often assigns that duty to herself; her major dissents are masterpieces of the genre.
If she were to retire at the end of this term, that leadership role would, for the next few years, fall to Justice Stephen Breyer, 75. (Chemerinsky also suggests that Breyer “consider” stepping down.) Though Ginsburg and Breyer are both “liberals” on this Court’s spectrum, they are a study in contrasts. Where Ginsburg fights, Breyer dithers; where her ideas are clear, his are mercurial; where she draws lines, he wanders across them; where her dissents are straightforward, his tend to be—well—incomprehensible. In the showdown over the Affordable Care Act, Breyer, along with Justice Elena Kagan, crossed the aisle to support Chief Justice John Roberts in limiting Congress’s Spending Power; Ginsburg’s s opinion dripped contempt for this newly minted limit on a crucial federal power. I wouldn’t be surprised if she thought that her departure would leave the liberal wing without real leadership.
Whatever Justice Ginsburg’s reasoning for resisting the chorus—maybe she expects Hillary to win the White House in 2016, and would like to have her replacement appointed by a President Clinton, just as she was—Emily Bazelon is right that she “has made it more than clear that she isn’t going to retire because columnists and law professors think she should.” There is something strange and unseemly about public calls for a vigorous justice to retire. Does anyone really think the justice has yet to think through her decision? Isn’t the doomsday scenario of a 6- or 7-justice conservative bloc screamingly obvious to her? Should any of us really counsel Justice Ginsburg on her major life decisions?
Mona Chalabi presents the evidence against toilet seat covers:
Public health professionals are continually emphasizing that it is virtually impossible to catch an STI from a toilet seat.
It would require the perfect storm of bacteria (i.e. you would have to sit down on the exact place where the virus was deposited, immediately after it was deposited, and it would have to be a super virus that could survive outside the body).
That improbability is highlighted by a blog post on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, which suggests that “if someone has an open, draining wound (MRSA [Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus] positive) and sits on the toilet seat and does not wipe it, someone else can sit on the toilet seat and if they have an open wound contract MRSA, also.” The number of people with open wounds on the part of their bums that hits the seat is likely to be low. And of those people, the number with MRSA-positive wounds will be even lower.
Despite that, demand is high. One U.S. company that sells automatically dispensing toilet seat covers has 2,000 accounts in the Americas and takes in $5 million a year.
Mark Harris is out with a new book, Five Came Back, which chronicles the wartime service of the great American directors Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, and George Stevens. Tom Carson suspects that “movie buffs will never think of any of these filmmakers in quite the same way again”:
[T]he mind boggles at imagining Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino all donning uniform for the duration to make films championing the Iraq war’s righteousness. That their very approximate 1940s equivalents did just that—generally for a fraction of their peacetime pay—is a trenchant reminder that World War II was different. …
Despite the constant tension between their essential function as propagandists and their new responsibilities as documentarians, all five directors certainly managed to keep busy and even do good work. Peppy as ever, Capra oversaw the Why We Fight series and rode herd on those of his fellow filmmakers who were also attached to the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps. Ford, the lone exception, joined the Navy and got a shrapnel wound while filming the battle of Midway. His waywardness undimmed by working for the Pentagon, Huston shot three documentaries—Report From The Aleutians, San Pietro and Let There Be Light—uncompromising enough to horrify the brass, the reason the last of them, about the rehabilitation of shellshocked GIs, was suppressed for decades.
David Denby focuses on San Pietro (scene embedded above, full version here):
In early 1944, John Huston made a film about an infantry unit’s tortuous struggle to clear the Germans out of San Pietro, a small town northwest of Naples, and the surrounding countryside. When “The Battle of San Pietro” came out, in 1945, it was hailed for the power and the grit of its combat scenes and for its portrait of civilian misery, and Huston was praised for his courage. The film has been honored in those terms many times since.
Yet, as Harris reports, the scenes in “The Battle of San Pietro” were largely re-created after the town had been taken from the Germans.
Huston had access to official accounts of the struggle, culled from interviews with soldiers who had fought in it, and he used maps and a pointer to keep the American tactics and the chronology straight. But the bloody progress of the G.I.s across fields and along a stony ridge outside the town was staged; Huston’s actors were soldiers whom the Army assigned to the project. The men certainly look the part, their faces fatigued and worried. Huston asked them to stare into the camera now and then, as people do in newsreel footage. At times, the camera jerks wildly, as Ford’s camera had in Midway. Huston turned the signatures of authenticity into artifact.
But Denby doesn’t seem to mind much:
Huston not only presents the physical hardships of battle; he creates the war as a cultural and moral catastrophe. The sense of desolation is broken only at the end of the movie, by a scene of children playing in the street, their innocent faces making a minimal claim against despair. Even if the images are mostly contrived, “San Pietro” is aesthetically of a piece—and magnificent.
Philip French touches upon the post-war side of Five Came Back:
Hollywood was in transition when they returned, the major studios being broken up by order of the supreme court. None, however, made a real success as an independent producer, and this excellent book is ultimately a tale of disappointment and disillusionment. But there is a heartening moment in 1950 at the height of the McCarthy era, as vindictive rightwing investigators descended on Hollywood. The deeply conservative Cecil B DeMille and his reactionary cronies from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals attempted to depose the liberal Joseph L Mankiewicz as president of the Screen Writers Guild and impose a loyalty oath on all members. Wyler, Ford, Huston, Stevens and Capra came together in a grand reunion to oppose the move and they carried the day.
Moira Weigel, an American, spent a month working at a Shanghai TV station “to learn how rising China spins its story to itself”:
The Department of Propaganda may not have had any mysterious purpose in renaming itself a Department of Publicity. It had become an association of what were effectively PR companies, like ICS, making advertisements—if not for individual products, then for the high life available in China’s booming coastal cities. Slicker than CNN, more aggressively confident than CNBC, it was our own publicity apparatus refracted back to us—in a country where largesse and wealth still carried the scent of overall growth, rather than sour, curdled privilege. … What I found was not propaganda in the grim midcentury sense. Rather than apparatchiks, we had presenters in miniskirts, faces dewy with an aerosol spray that held their makeup and made them all smell like flour. The scripts I read were not injunctions to follow Mao Zedong Thought but ejaculations of positivity about new products.
Like Red Bull, perhaps:
Christopher Beam, the very white American seen in the video, talks about his performance:
When I signed up for “You Can,” I figured I would dance so badly that it would expose the singular awfulness of Chinese television. Not that it needed my help: Flip through the channels at any given moment and you’ll see a predictable combination of World War II epics (Chinese good, Japanese bad), Korean soap operas, Korean-inspired Chinese soap operas, plus a slew of identical-looking talk/dating/talent shows, the most popular of which are Chinese copies of foreign programs. While most networks run like businesses, the party still has final say over content—a system that discourages risk-taking. And when foreigners go on television, it’s often as the proverbial “trained monkey,” the strange Other to be gawked at. I thought that by embracing that role and pushing it to the extreme, I could somehow transcend it.
He didn’t; he lost; his dance never aired. But it’s YouTube gold.
Megan Garber reminds us that the big Big Bang news hasn’t yet been through peer review:
Scientists are, like the rest of us, impatient. They are, much more often than the rest of us, justified in this. Imagine dedicating your career to learning something new about the mechanics of the world—the gravitational forces exerted on a cell membrane, the flappings of a bee’s wings, the earliest churnings of the cosmos—and then imagine actuallyfinding that thing. Now imagine that, instead of doing what every impulse would guide you to do (share that news with everyone you know/share that news with everyone you don’t know/shout that news from the rooftops or at least your Facebook page) … you are made to wait. And wait. And wait. Until, many months later, your work has been deemed acceptable for proper publication.
… The Big Bang news is simply emblematic of a larger trend. As the philosopher David Weinberger puts it: “Scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new medium, becoming like the network in which it lives.”
Lawrence Krauss puts the significance of the discovery, should it hold up, in layman’s terms:
If it turns out to be confirmed by other experiments, think about what this discovery implies for our ability to explore the universe (besides the other remarkable implications for physics): when we use light to look out at the distant universe, we can only see back as far as three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled sufficiently to become transparent to light. But gravitational waves interact so weakly that even waves produced less than 10-35 seconds after the Big Bang can move through space unimpeded, giving us a window on the universe at essentially the beginning of time.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the current result is in some tension with earlier claimed upper limits from other experiments, so we will need to wait for the results of a host of other experiments currently operating that can check this result.
For some people, the possibility that the laws of physics might illuminate even the creation of our own universe, without the need for supernatural intervention or any demonstration of purpose, is truly terrifying. But Monday’s announcement heralds the possible beginning of a new era, where even such cosmic existential questions are becoming accessible to experiment.
Putin argued then, as now, that the United States was on dangerous ground in its approach toward Ukraine. “The United States somehow decided that part of the political elite in Ukraine is pro-American and part is pro-Russian, and they decided to support the ones they considered pro-American,” he said. “We believe this is a mistake.”
He gave voice to the motivation that drives him now in Ukraine (beyond, of course, the possibility of extending Russian influence and perhaps territory). The breakup of the Soviet Union, in his view, was hasty and ill-conceived, and it cut off many ethnic Russians from mother Russia. He seemed to be testing an argument for the irredentist push Russia is now pursuing in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. “What did the collapse of the Soviet Union mean?” he asked. “Twenty-five million Soviet citizens who were ethnic Russians found themselves beyond the borders of new Russia. Nobody gave a thought to them. Is it not a tragedy?”
But Lucian Kim believes Putin’s true concerns are his own grip on power and his paranoid attitude toward the West:
Convinced that the new authorities in Kiev will finally pull Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit, Putin is hacking off as much of the country as he thinks he can get away with. He doesn’t want to re-create the Soviet Union as much as form a ring of buffer territories to ward off Western influence from the Russian heartland. For Putin, it’s the beginning of the endgame for his regime’s survival.
As Michael Totten sees it, the Ukraine debacle is all about checking the expansion of NATO:
What he most fears is that Ukraine might join NATO, removing yet another buffer state between himself and the West and kiboshing his plans for the Eurasian Union, a euphemism for a 21st century Russian empire. (Does anyone seriously believe Kazakhstan will be an equal partner with Moscow?)
Keeping his former Ukrainian vassal out of NATO will be easy now even if a militant anti-Russian firebrand comes to power in Kiev. The Crimean referendum—whether it was free and fair or rigged is no matter—creates a disputed territory conflict that will never be resolved in Ukraine’s favor. It will freeze and fester indefinitely. There isn’t a chance that NATO would accept a member that has a disputed territory conflict with Russia. No chance at all. Ukraine is as isolated as it could possibly be from the West without getting re-absorbed into Russia entirely.
Putin did the same thing to Georgia in 2008 when he lopped off the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and he did it for the same reason.
Numerous commentators have stressed the potential short-term and long-term economic and political costs to Russia of annexing Crimea and/or an extended military conflict with Ukraine (see in particular this commentary by Sergei Guriev and this one by Samuel Greene). So perhaps the simplest answer to this question is that whatever the economic costs, the Russian leadership has become convinced that doing nothing after ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled Ukraine represented a security threat that could not be ignored. This could have been due to a very specific calculation, such as the belief that there was a credible threat to the future of the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Crimea, or it could have been due to a more general concern that allowing Russia’s ally — Yanukovych — to fall without a response would signify weakness moving forward. Either way, the key distinction of this explanation is that Russia’s moves were essentially reactive in nature to a perceived security threat.
The AAAS is campaigning to debunk the idea that scientists disagree about climate change:
The report points to a 2013 Yale paper that found around a third of Americans thought that “there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about global warming.” Twenty percent said they didn’t know enough to say, and only 42 percent knew that “most scientists think global warming is happening.” The truth, the AAAS repeatedly states in its campaign, is that 97 percent of climate experts agree that climate change is happening.
“Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening,” they state unequivocally. “This agreement is documented not just by a single study, but by a converging stream of evidence over the past two decades from surveys of scientists, content analyses of peer-reviewed studies, and public statements issued by virtually every membership organisation of experts in this field.”
Christopher Flavelle considers the reasons Americans disbelieve in global warming:
The available polling data suggests Americans’ views on climate change increasingly have more to do with politics than science.
As I wrote in December, Republicans and Democrats used to agree about the need for stricter laws to protect the environment: More than 90 percent of respondents from both parties supported the idea in 1992.
Two decades later, the share of Democrats who said they support stricter environmental protections was still above 90 percent. But the share of Republicans who said the same had dropped by half, to 47 percent. The Pew Research Center, which performed the survey, called environmental protection arguably “the most pointed area of polarization” over that period.
What’s interesting about that change is that whatever you think about the strength of the scientific consensus on climate in 2012, it was leagues stronger than in 1992. So even as the science was becoming clearer, Republican support for doing anything about it was plummeting.
The Dish 