Rob Thomas – no, not the singer – is an American producer and screenwriter, best known for creating the critically-acclaimed TV series Veronica Mars and Party Down. One year ago this week, he launched one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time in support of a Veronica Mars movie. (Our discussion thread of the innovative, Dish-like project is here.) The movie is coming out in theatrical release and video-on-demand this Friday.
In our first video from Rob, he addresses the possibility of thousands of Kickstarter investors actually getting part of a film’s profits:
But, as he explains at length in the next video below, fans who invested in the Veronica Mars Kickstarter are getting much more than just pride out of the deal:
Pilot-blogger Patrick Smith is debunking speculation about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished from radar screens on Saturday while en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Smith’s bottom line:
Unfortunately it could be weeks or even months before we have a solid idea of what happened. And tempting as might be, we should be careful not to speculate too broadly. Almost always the earliest theories turn out to be at best incomplete; at worst totally wrong. Seeing how little evidence we have at the moment, any theories are, for now, just guesses.
All we know for sure is that a plane went missing with no warning or communication from the crew. That the crash (assuming the plane did in fact go down) did not happen during takeoff or landing — the phases of flight when most accident occur — somewhat limits the possibilities, but numerous ones remain. The culprit could be anything from sabotage to some kind of bizarre mechanical problem — or, as is so common in airline catastrophes, some combination or compounding of human error and/or mechanical malfunction.
Jordan Golson explains how a plane can disappear in this day and age:
It is a misconception that airline pilots are in constant communication with air traffic control, or that planes are constantly watched on radar. Once a plane is more than 100 or 150 miles from shore, radar no longer works. It simply doesn’t have the range. (The specific distance from shore varies with the type of radar, the weather, and other factors.) At that point, civilian aircraft communicate largely by high-frequency radio. The flight crew checks in at fixed “reporting points” along the way, providing the plane’s position, air speed, and altitude. It isn’t uncommon to maintain radio silence between reporting points because cruising at 35,000 feet is typically uneventful. Some aircraft communication systems don’t require pilots call in; flight management computers transmit the info via satellite link.
Rachel Lu observes how Chinese media are covering the disappearance of the plane, which was carrying 153 Chinese nationals:
On Chinese social media, a particularly anxious place after the Kunming horror, some speculation about the cause of MH370′s disappearance has linked it to terrorism or sabotage. On March 10, well-known television host Yang Lan wrote to her 34 million followers on Weibo that “more and more signs are pointing to a terrorist attack.” Huang Sheng, a professional investor and author, compared MH370′s disappearance to the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 in 1988. Ran Xiongfei, a sports commentator, also wrote, “Everything is unknown, but signs of terrorism are becoming more noticeable.”
By contrast, Chinese state-owned media have been very cautious not to draw conclusions about MH370′s disappearance. While some state-owned media have translated international reports about possible probes into terrorism, People’s Daily and China Central Television (CCTV), two of the Communist Party’s flagship media outlets, have not explicitly associated the plane’s disappearance with terrorism. Although many readers would likely prefer those outlets to engage the question directly, state media’s hands are tied. According to the U.S.-based China Digital Times, China’s Central Propaganda Department has issued instructions prohibiting “independent analysis or commentary” of the incident.
Update from a reader:
Here’s how I’ve been explaining the Malaysian Airlines search to friends: Suppose I asked you to find my car (yes, it’s smaller than a plane but no smaller than a life raft or debris field). I don’t know exactly where I left it, but I think its somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas (250 miles – about the over-water distance between Malaysia and Vietnam). It was dark, so I don’t know if I was on the main highway or a side road, and there wasn’t anyone around in the desert to see me go by. Oh, and it’s possible I made a turn and ended up somewhere in Arizona (although, based on the latest news, maybe I ended up turning around and driving towards San Francisco?)
One more thing: I might have parked it in an underground garage.
Another:
Your reader’s analogy is off base. The car would be the ONLY car in the entire vicinity, with no cities, or buildings, or other cars in the way. If you have 100 of that guy’s friends and some experienced helicopter pilots and sent them into a barren area with only one car to find, you would expect they would find something – especially if your friend can tell you the last GPS point his car was recorded at. And the underground garage is simple a red herring: the plane might be at bottom of the sea, but it certainly smashed into pieces when it hit the water, and would be visible.
Something is very very bizarre here, especially if it’s true that after going off of civilian radar, it kept flying in the opposite direction for more than an hour.
Followup from the first reader:
I don’t dispute the suggestion that my car would stand out in the desert … IF YOU CAME ACROSS THE CAR. The point of my analogy was to address the sheer immenseness of land (or water) mass to be covered by an aerial or sea search, much less at satellite level (more coverage but smaller detail). I’ve been working with Tomnod, the crowd-sourced satellite image analysis site, and there’s a whole lot of nothing to work through before even covering a small fraction of the original expected crash site.
Of course, the new indications that the plane turned and headed for the Straits of Malacca mean all bets are off in even remotely guessing how long it will take to find the plane.
Finally, Dianne Feinstein – not exactly a radical critic of the surveillance state – is pushed to the Senate floor to expose the CIA’s unauthorized obstruction of the Senate’s inquiry into their torture program:
She nails the CIA under John Brennan as being contemptuous of Congress and demands to know why they haven’t responded to her inquiries:
This is a remarkable, unprecedented speech – an open accusation from a respected Senator that the CIA has illegally spied on the Congress, done its utmost to prevent the truth about the torture program coming out, and has been engaged in stone-walling and misinformation and deliberate “intimidation” of Senate staffers tasked with the huge task of finding out what happened. The full text of DiFi’s remarks are below. They’re meticulous and damning about the CIA’s actions under director John Brennan – so damning, I’d argue, that the president has to ask himself if this man can be trusted to follow the constitution and the law. I urge you to read the entire speech. It’s one for the history books.
Feinstein reminds us that the Senate investigation began after the news broke that the CIA had destroyed tapes of its torture sessions – over the objections of the Bush White House Counsel and the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA insisted that the tapes’ destruction was not obstruction of justice because there were countless other records of the torture sessions. So the Senate Committee convened an inquiry into those other cables and documents. Here’s what they found:
The resulting staff report was chilling. The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us. As result of the staff’s initial report, I proposed, and then-Vice Chairman Bond agreed, and the committee overwhelmingly approved, that the committee conduct an expansive and full review of CIA’s detention and interrogation program.
At the very beginning, then, the CIA – in the person of Jose Rodriguez – was destroying video evidence of its war crimes. Brennan’s subsequent shenanigans with the Committee – and attempt to sue back in retaliation after being exposed as spies on their very over-seers – is utterly of a piece with this pattern of concealment. Through all the details of this battle, that has to be kept in mind. The CIA’s actions are bizarre – unless you understand the gravity of the war crimes they committed and illegally and unconstitutionally concealed from the Congress. And it seems they sure do, as their own internal Panetta report – the smoking gun Feinstein says the CIA itself provided to the Senate – confirmed. Hence the bottom line from DiFi:
I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function. … The CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as Executive Order 120003, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.
Brennan this morning said that “nothing could be further from the truth.” And yet this is how Feinstein says she found out about the illicit spying on the committee’s staffers:
On January 15, 2014, CIA Director Brennan requested an emergency meeting to inform me and Vice Chairman Chambliss that without prior notification or approval, CIA personnel had conducted a “search” — that was John Brennan’s word — of the committee computers at the offsite facility. This search involved not only a search of documents provided to the committee by the CIA, but also a search of the ”stand alone” and “walled-off” committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications.
According to Brennan, the computer search was conducted in response to indications that some members of the committee staff might already have had access to the Internal Panetta Review. The CIA did not ask the committee or its staff if the committee had access to the Internal Review, or how we obtained it.
Instead, the CIA just went and searched the committee’s computers.
So either Brennan or Feinstein isn’t telling the truth. Then there’s this passage from the speech that got me to sit up straight:
As I mentioned before, our staff involved in this matter have the appropriate clearances, handled this sensitive material according to established procedures and practice to protect classified information, and were provided access to the Panetta Review by the CIA itself. As a result, there is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime. I view the acting general counsel’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff—and I am not taking it lightly.
I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.
Think about that for a moment. A man who was once the lawyer for the torture unit is now the lawyer for the CIA as a whole! A man deeply invested in war crimes is now the designated point man for “intimidating” the Senate staff. If that alone doesn’t tell you how utterly unrepentant the CIA is over its past, and how determined it is to keep its actions concealed, as well as immune to prosecution, what would?
And how do we know that the lawyer is not just protecting his own posterior, because the report could lead to consequences for those who enabled such war crimes?
We don’t. The evidence is mounting that the CIA committed horrific war crimes, destroyed the evidence, and subsequently obstructed the Senate’s inquiry and intimidated Senate staffers with a spurious counter-suit. We still cannot read the Senate report on a vital matter for this country’s historical record and the rule of law. The CIA is obviously trying to stonewall the truth about this as long as is possible – perhaps in the hope that a GOP Senate victory this fall could bottle up the report for ever.
The president must make sure this doesn’t happen. He needs to hold Brennan fully accountable for the unconstitutional crimes he is accused of. He needs to ensure that if he doesn’t have the stomach to investigate and prosecute war crimes from a previous administration, which is his legal obligation under the Geneva Convention, he at least won’t prevent the full and awful truth from seeing the light of day. So far, I have not seen any clear sign that Obama is on the side of transparency and constitutionalism in this. And many of us are sick and tired of waiting.
What Feinstein didn’t say—but it’s surely implied—is that without effective monitoring, secret government cannot be justified in a democracy. This is indeed a defining moment. It’s a big deal for President Barack Obama, who, as is often noted in these situations, once upon a time taught constitutional law. Feinstein has ripped open a scab to reveal a deep wound that has been festering for decades. The president needs to respond in a way that demonstrates he is serious about making the system work and restoring faith in the oversight of the intelligence establishment. This is more than a spies-versus-pols DC turf battle. It is a constitutional crisis.
And it must be resolved in favor of the rule of law.
Particle Fever is a new documentary that follows the scientists who worked with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider for four years until July 4, 2012, when they announced the discovery of the long-theorized Higgs boson, or “God particle.” Josh Modell explains what was at stake for the scientists depicted:
After years and years of meticulous planning and building—from both the big-dreaming theoretical physicists and their more down-to-earth counterparts, the experimental physicists—the Collider came online in 2008. To understand what an extraordinary achievement the construction of this massive thing was, imagine the inside of a computer blown up to five stories, complete with a 17-mile circular underground track.
What’s harder to convey, and Particle Fever does its best to do so, is the real-world importance of the Higgs particle itself. Scientists know it will inform their field forever—or, if it doesn’t exist, disprove everything they know. The mass of the Higgs is what it all comes down to. If it’s heavier, that suggests the existence of a chaotic “multiverse,” exploding the field of physics. If it’s lighter, it suggests that theories of orderly “supersymmetry” are more likely.
[Director Mark] Levinson—whose film background consists of dramatic narratives—had one requirement. “I did not want to make a science documentary about particle physics,” Levinson says. “I wanted to make a dramatic character-oriented film that could engage people in a unique period in the history of science.”
Russell Brandom appreciates the chance to witness the scientists’ enthusiasm:
Tracking the scientists from the collider launch onward, you can see them growing more confident with each test. After the first energy beam successfully circulates through the collider ring, the joy is tangible. “It worked. It just worked. And there are so few times in life when it just works,” gushes physicist Monica Dunford. “We rocked! The first beam? We destroyed that shit.”
Christy Lemire finds the film “accessible but fun, with a surprisingly emotional payoff at the end”:
Heady stuff, indeed. But “Particle Fever” also works on a purely visual, visceral level. It’s shot beautifully, with crisp, vibrant footage of not just the collider itself—which resembles a buzzing, whirring, seven-story stained glass window—but also of the striking landscape surrounding the lab. The snow-covered French Alps against a baby-blue sky are especially spectacular.
And Mark Moring thinks that “especially [for] those interested in the intersection between faith and science, it’s a fascinating film”:
The field of particle physics is incredibly complex and difficult to understand, but the filmmakers do an admirable job of “dumbing it down” for a lay audience while also communicating challenging ideas. It finds a nice balance, and makes for not only an entertaining 99 minutes, but quite educational and thought-provoking as well. Faith-based audiences will especially appreciate wrestling with spiritual questions about the origins of the universe while getting a glimpse into the science behind it all.
Previous Dish on the Higgs boson here, here, and here.
Katya Gorchinskaya points out that Crimea’s independence referendum doesn’t allow voters to choose the status quo:
The ballot asks two questions and leaves no option for a “no” vote. Voters are simply asked to check one of two boxes: Do you support joining Crimea with the Russian Federation as a subject of Russian Federation? And: Do you support restoration of 1992 Crimean Constitution and Crimea’s status as a part of Ukraine? That Constitution declares that Crimea is an independent state.
Steve Saideman calls this further evidence that the vote is a sham:
So, why bother with such a clearly illegitimate referendum? Authoritarian regimes have a long history of sham elections which provide some kind of domestic legitimacy to their rule.
To be fair, Russia’s elections have not been shams. Those for who governs in Russia, anyway. For those who govern in the frozen conflicts? Not so much. Still, those who disrespect democracy still feel compelled to use the guise of democracy to appear less authoritarian and more legitimate. It may not play well outside of Russia, but it might do ok within.
Indeed, some scholars have found that these kind of elections can be used to scare the opposition. That is, holding such an event puts opponents in difficult positions, as the fakeness may actually suggest that the government is strong, rather than weak.
Daniel Berman believes the outcome is predetermined:
The Crimean Parliament, in deciding to hold the referendum, a decision made with the help of Russian troops who removed the 36 traitors who had infiltrated the 100-man assembly, has by its own admission already decided upon accession to the Russian Federation. As the decision has already been made, the current election is a mobilization election – its objective is not to poll the population for its opinions, those are neither wanted nor desired, but rather to demonstrate to the wider world irreversibility of the decision on annexation, and the futility of efforts to reverse it. The campaign that is currently being run therefore aims to produce the highest possible turnout with the highest possible margin in support. The opinions of foreigners regarding its legitimacy are irrelevant – there will be no effort made to allow for a credible showing by the NO campaign. On the contrary, the No campaigners, by virtue of the their insistence on opposing the referendum, are demonstrating their desire to not be part of the new Crimea. It only makes sense then for the Russian forces to drive them out early.
Monitoring, Erik Voeten explains, won’t ensure the referendum is really free:
The problem is that there are many ways to manipulate an election. For example, Chris Blattman reports on a new paper, which shows that politicians simply relocate fraud from polling stations where monitors are present to places where they are not.
Even more troublesome, Alberto Simpser and Daniela Donnofind evidence that high-quality election monitoring induces governments to resort to tactics that may have long-term negative implications for democracy. Rather than simply stuff ballot boxes, which is easy to identify, governments rig courts and administrative oversight bodies or suppress the media. Indeed, Simpser and Donno find that high-quality election monitoring is correlated with subsequent declines in the rule of law, administrative performance and media freedom.
Posner advises letting Russia take the peninsula, from which it has little to gain:
In the end, Crimea—a poor, tiny region with a potentially unruly minority population of unhappy Tatars and resentful Ukrainians—is a booby prize in the contest over Ukraine. And in fact, Russia has lost that larger fight; Ukraine, more populous than Poland, is now permanently outside its orbit. Russia has no friends and only a handful of allies of convenience. Back in 2008, when Russia tried to persuade the world to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, only Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru (population 9,000), Vanuatu (population 262,000), and Tuvalu (population 11,000) heeded the call (and Vanuatu later changed its mind). By contrast, the United States’ illegal military intervention in Serbia, a Russian client state, enabled Kosovo to break away and form a state with the support of the United States and more than 100 other countries. Today, Russia can call on Syria, Belarus, and Cuba for diplomatic support. It is a declining state that can do little more than bully a few impoverished and geopolitically insignificant neighbors. Let it.
Meanwhile, Keating situates Crimea within the long-running debate over self-determination vs. territorial integrity:
It’s true that Washington’s insistence that Ukraine’s territorial integrity be respected seems a bit incongruous with its support for the independence of, say, Kosovo or South Sudan. And Russia has certainly exploited the Kosovo precedent in its bids to gain international recognition for Georgia’s breakaway regions—Abkhazia and South Ossetia. On the other side, Russia has spent recent years talking itself blue at the U.N. Security Council about respecting territorial sovereignty in places like Libya and Syria but is willing to send its military into the territory of its neighbors on the pretext of protecting the rights of ethnic Russians—which is one possible reason why China’s been fairly tepid in its support for Russia’s actions.
(Photo: A member of the new pro-Russian forces dubbed the ‘military forces of the autonomous republic of Crimea’ stands guard in the Republican military enlistment complex in Simferopol on March 10, 2014. Crimea’s pro-Russian authorities sought to boost their claim to break from Ukraine Monday as volunteer soldiers swore an oath of allegiance in front of prime minister Sergei Aksyonov. He told journalists 186 volunteers had so far joined the new Crimean ‘self-defence’ units after pro-Moscow forces took power in the region and announced their intention to join with Russia, with a referendum planned for Sunday. By Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images)
Joe McGinnis was responsible not only for several books that are rightly understood as landmarks of journalism – he was also the case study of arguably the most famous essay about journalism, Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer.” He was a deeply curious and ferociously independent writer, compelled by the minutiae of the human comedy and riveted by the depths of human tragedy. I think of him as some kind of eternal, unstoppable foe for Roger Ailes, whose media campaign for Nixon in 1968 presaged so much of what was to come – and still reins supreme – at Fox News. And yet Ailes and Joe were extremely close friends their entire lives and Joe would defend him – if not his network or politics – tenaciously as the years went by. That was how Joe was. Once he loved you, he loved you. And I was blessed by some of that love.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Joe – at the tender age of 26! – transformed political journalism with The Selling Of The President, the legendary expose of the cynicism of media optics in presidential campaigns – and, by the by, a lovely, ornery rebuke to the magisterial tomes of Theodore H White, as Ann Althouse notes. And the first thing to say is that the man could write. He couldn’t write a bad sentence. His narratives powered along; his prose as clear as it was vivid; his innate skill at telling a story sometimes reaching rare moments in non-fiction when you’re lost in what is, in effect, a factual novel.
But what I truly treasured about Joe – and I came to love him even though we only met a couple of times – was his dogged imperviousness to his peers or to establishment opinion. If he smelled a story, he would dig in, obsessively recovering its human truth. If others thought the story was irrelevant or non-existent, it wouldn’t affect him. His motivation, as it was with his first book, was to peel back the layers of image and propaganda and spin to reveal the reality. He did this with Jeffrey McDonald. And he did it with Sarah Palin.
Of course, we bonded over the former half-term governor. He reached out to me when I was wildly exposed among journalists for refusing to believe her stories at face value. And what we bonded over was not a mutual revulsion at her politics. What we bonded over was the abject failure of the American press to say what had to be said about this preposterous, delusional maniac plucked from deserved obscurity by John McCain to be a heartbeat away from a potential presidency.
Her candidacy was a total farce; a disgrace; an outrage to American democracy; an appalling act of cynicism. Joe saw the creation of this media figure as a continuation of the Ailes recipe for optic politics, and he was appalled as so many mainstream outlets nonetheless insisted on taking this joke seriously.
So he went to do what others wouldn’t: to find the real truth about Palin, and he came closer than almost anyone.
I don’t see his last book as some kind of aberration, though it was obviously not in the same league as The Selling Of The President or Fatal Vision. I saw them all as a continuing crusade for a journalism that takes a stand, that welcomes obloquy if that’s what it takes to get to the truth, and that cares about our democracy. He would never have aimed for the “view from nowhere” or the facile mantra that one leading Washington journalist gave me when asked to explain why they hadn’t sought any proof for the fantastic Trig story that Palin spun: “Why ask questions when you know you won’t get an answer?” For Joe that was pathetic. As indeed it was.
One email I got from him that captures his tenacity and his humor:
My shrink asked me this afternoon if I thought my book was a factor in Palin’s decision not to run. I said, “It might have been. It certainly didn’t tip her toward running. She may well have seen what one lone reporter turned up in four months and realized what teams from MSM outlets might learn in twelve, as they would have done over the next year, if she’d run.”
She said, “In that case, the people of the United States will be eternally in your debt.”
I said, “Great: let’s work out a payment plan, like the ones I have with the IRS, the federal student loan agency, and American Express.”
She said, “By the way, you owe me $375: did you bring a check?”
Another, responding to this aside from me – “My cd4 count just plummeted to 350. But I’m fine”:
If I were an irreverent bastard, I’d note that this coincides with your endorsement of Ron Paul.
Romney will be the GOP nominee. If all the media energy expended on chasing phantoms were put to good use, we could stop importing foreign oil.
And Obama will trounce Romney in November. As he deserves to.
Easy one. This is Kuala Lumpur. Looks to be near Chow Kit and very near where I used to live and work. Lovely city, shame it’s not a better photo.
Another:
Quezon City, Philippines. Just a guess, but the buildings look very familiar.
Another looks closer:
Neoclassical architecture in a somewhat rundown location … Havana? Given the new cars on the street, I’m probably way, way off but I can’t think of another location that fits the bill. A tough one this week! Kudos to the reader who figures it out …
This week our hats are off to the small handful of readers who even ventured a guess. In fact, this might have been our most difficult contest yet. Another reader noticed an architectural hint of Italy:
I saw this and I thought: Porticos! Bologna! But Bologna (at least the parts I was in) didn’t look this drab and industrial. And these porticos don’t look like Bologna’s … but I thought I’d give a shout-out to Bologna anyway for being so stupendously endowed with 23 miles of porticos. (Are porticos the feminine opposite of masculine towers and spires? I get big domes as the outward opposite … maybe porticos are the inner opposite? People do a lot of socializing in them … )
Another must be joking:
That’s Nahant as viewed from Kelly’s Roast Beef on Revere Beach, MA.
This one definitely is:
Hell on Earth, Hades.
Other readers went south of the border:
Tall cactus, Spanish-style roof, Spanish language sign on the wall (Prohibido Fumar?), Catholic-style church, DirectTv satellite dish all point to Mexico, but I can’t home in on anything closer than this. So let’s go with Oaxaca, because it’s fun to say.
Two others guessed Mexico:
For no particular reason, I’m guessing Mexico. And I would like to propose a new sub-category for your contest: The Ugliest Building. I nominate that monstrosity in the left foreground. I hope someone found a way to stop the designer before he or she had a chance to work on a second building.
And:
Some churches get photographed a lot. Take for example the little blue-domed jewel on the Isle of Santorini that shows up everywhere. The church in this week’s contest – not so much. While searching I did find this incredible mid-century monstrosity from Oklahoma City:
Now that’s a church I would have grooved to as a 10-year-old skeptic. As for this week, a semi-informed guess puts this somewhere in Latin America. A wild guess puts it in Aguascalientes, Mexico.
Latin America is right, and Mexico was the closest incorrect guess. A frustrated reader at least gets the right continent:
Fuck this shit. Twenty hours I’ve been at it, including a laborious wiki-google tour of every cathedral in Brazil, and I’m still not even sure I have the right continent. I’m going with São Paulo because they get DirectTV there, they’re big into roof-mounted radio antennas, and I found one (1) streetlight on Street View that matches the one on that utility pole. But who knows. This morning’s failed waking brainwave – a search for “ugliest cathedral” – was my official last gasp.
Only two readers even guessed the correct country, city, or address. One of them, naturally, was Grand Champion Chini:
Now this is a bit more like it. Though it was pretty obvious that we were dealing with South America, I had to overcome a personal misconception to get to the right spot. See, my only previous encounter with this week’s city was in Vonnegut’s Galapagos, a book which gave me the unfortunate impression of a much smaller town. As a result, I spent far too much time down in Argentina, when I should have been looking far to the north.
This week’s view comes from Guayaquil, Ecuador. The view looks southeast along a heading of 147.87 degrees, probably from a room on the 4th floor of the Hotel Oro Verde, perhaps room 406. A view of the actual window and a marked bird’s eye shot:
Here’s the original shot with the Edificio Forum and the Iglesia de la Victoria inserted:
But Chini won long ago, so here’s the winning entry:
Searching all over Latin America for last week’s contest (Medellín) paid dividends this week. After identifying the top of a San Pedro or Peruvian Torch cactus at the bottom of the photo and seeing all the AC units and open air arcades on nearby buildings, South/Latin America seemed like a good place to start. The shape of license plates on the many visible cars confirmed South/Latin America instead of the US or Southeastern Europe. A satellite dish on the nearest building indicated cardinal direction and rough latitude.
The primary architectural clue is the domed church in the distance. Latin America is full of these. A few searches IDed this one as Iglesia La Victoria in Guayaquil, Ecuador:
From there it took some Google Maps surfing to identify the tall, beige highrise with the rooftop radio tower, and from there the location of the photo: Hotel Oro Verde, next door to the (former?) US Consulate:
Hotel Oro Verde has online reviews with photos that confirm it as the window’s location:
Judging the room number is once more an educated guessing game. Based on analysis of sight lines, the estimated height of neighboring buildings:
From a photo of the hotel’s hallway, and assuming that floor numbers start with 0 in Ecuador, I submit that the room number is 512 or 513, depending on whether even or odd numbers are on the east or west side of the building:
Impressive entry! From the photo’s submitter:
I’m a 51-year-old US citizen doing my culinary externship in Ecuador. Finally I’m somewhere with a VFYW! This was taken from room 416 of the Oro Verde hotel in Guayaquil, Ecuador. So glad to have your site to keep me up to date while I’m away. I’m a proud (founding, I believe) subscriber. You and your team rock!
The CBO estimates that the number of uninsured will drop by 4-5 percentage points in 2014 thanks to Obamacare. If you use 2011-12 as an approximate baseline, Gallup reports a drop of about 1.5 percentage points through February. These numbers probably aren’t precisely comparable, but they represent a ballpark—and it doesn’t look like a statistical fluke anymore.
Against it have to be arrayed other surveys suggesting that the uninsured form a much smaller proportion of Obamacare patients than anyone might have hoped for:
Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look.
To my mind, if those numbers pan out, it would be a devastating result for the law. For a new law this disruptive to fail to reduce significantly the numbers of uninsured is a pretty fundamental indictment. The trouble is: we don’t really know for sure yet, and all these surveys may be misleading. Jon Cohn is appropriately cautious about the Gallup numbers:
It’s a sign of progress, but only a sign.
Gallup is probably the best available source for real-time data on the uninsured rate. And the pattern Gallup detected—unusually large increases in coverage among African-Americans and Latinos—would be consistent with a program that benefits low-income groups the most. But Gallup’s survey is not as reliable as the big government surveys on the uninsured, which won’t be available until next year. In addition, the Gallup data for last year, 2013, shows a very strange pattern, with the uninsured rate spiking to 18 percent in the middle of the year for no apparent reason. That makes it hard to be certain exactly what’s happening right now.
It’s possible that people who were losing insurance as a result of changes in the law last year have been shifting to new plans on the Obamacareexchanges — which would still be consistent with the theory that Obamacare hasn’t made major gains among the long-term uninsured.
Additionally, taking the longer view, the 15.9 percent rate isn’t historically that low. Measured monthly, the uninsured rate had been as low as 15.9 percent in early 2011. In 2008, the year Obama campaigned for president promising universal health insurance, the uninsured rate was consistently below its current rate, reaching a low of 14.4 percent quarterly and a monthly low of 13.9 percent.
It would be great if we could get a definitive “Obamacare works!” or “Obamacare failed!” But things don’t work that way. Even when we get a lot more information, researchers are going to argue about exactly what is going well or badly, and by how much.
So, yes, Democrats have something to be optimistic about today. Beyond that, there’s only one thing we can say with any certainty: Anyone who says that health-care reform has already proven to be a solid success or a total failure is talking through their partisan hat.
I wholeheartedly second your critical views on the spurious claims of oppression and religious persecution coming from Christian opponents of same-sex marriage, like Dreher, who don’t happen to share the evolving views of the majority of the society. He wrote:
I had a conversation with a man who is probably the most accomplished and credentialed legal scholar I’ve ever met, someone who is part of this country’s law elite. The fact that I can’t identify him here, or get into specifics of what he told me, indicates something important about the climate within law circles around this issue. On this issue, he lives in the closet, so to speak, within his professional circles, and explained to me why it has become too dangerous to take a traditionalist stand in law circles, unless one is prepared to sabotage one’s career.
To be persecuted or oppressed, there has to be some one or something doing the persecution or oppressing. But he cites no action taken by any other party – such as the guy’s employer, his colleagues, the state, or anyone else – that in any way constitutes real persecution or oppression. All he cites is this particular individuals’ own personal feeling of discomfort and unease with the growing unpopularity of his personal views on the subject. I’m sorry, but that’s just life in a free, democratic, pluralistic society where public opinion, politics and the law are constantly evolving, along with the rough and tumble of discourse in the public square.
Another adds, “One has to look no further than the email from your reader about his tragic health issues after being fired for being gay to know why this whining from Rod Dreher is total crap.”
What I found striking was the ferocious emotional fervor behind Rod’s complaint – even directed toward me, who’s about as pro-religious freedom and anti-victimology as you’ll get in the gay world. The best way I can think of explaining it is Rod’s and others’ pain at being deemed by their peers as some version of Bull Connor, when their perspective is much more nuanced and complicated than that. Sure, some opponents of same-sex marriage are lazy bigots. But some are traditional Christians who simply find the whole concept impossible to square with their existing convictions about marriage and sex. Some are just leery of excessive change. Some worry about unintended consequences. Some are just embarrassed by the whole thing and want it to go away. If the gay community ignores this, and rhetorically bludgeons all our opponents into the simple rubric of “bigots” or “haters”, we truly are engaging in a reverse prejudice of our own.
At the same time, of course, so many of those in favor of marriage equality, especially among the young, simply cannot fathom how someone can rationally be against it. It’s civil marriage, after all. Traditional Christians have long since gotten used to civil divorce. And so the new gay-inclusive majority is placing enormous psychological pressure on Rod and others. The next generation is demanding a reason for the resistance to civil equality for gays – and they cannot get one that makes any sense to them. Absent that, what are they going to believe? Of course they’re going to assume prejudice unless someone comes up with a very good reason for his or her position, especially when they use words like “bully” – a calculated attempt to push back against anti-bullying campaigns in high schools.
That’s why I recommended that Christianists go aggressively into the culture to make the positive case for exclusively procreative heterosexual marriage, and try to explain why preventing gay couples from having basic legal protections would be so terrible. My hunch is that Rod knows this would fail. The Pope hasn’t even been able to convince Catholics of Humanae Vitae. What hope for the heathens? And so the bigot label would stick. And Rod certainly doesn’t subjectively feel like a bigot, and objectively is not with respect to gay friends and acquaintances, as I can attest. So he’s lashing out.
Another reader:
Apart from the complaints of “I’m being persecuted!” (which are a little hard to swallow given that Christianists are successfully pushing and passing legislation that would exempt them from anti-discrimination laws), the complaint here seems to be that those on the side of marriage equality are not willing to listen to their intelligent, principled arguments against same-sex marriage. The truth is that people on side of equal rights are still waiting for such an argument.
Let’s look at Prop 8 in California. The ballot measure won originally because the right repeated the same lies about LGBT people and the LGBT rights movement over and over: child abuse! teaching about homosexual sex in the classroom! won’t somebody think of the children! When asked to provide arguments supporting their position in court, they couldn’t, to the point where their attorney admitted as much. Aside from “the Bible says so!”, the Christianists have nothing.
The case of the accomplished legal scholar in the excerpt from Dreher’s post seems to be more a case of professional censure because of a piss-poor argument. This legal scholar feels he is unable to stand up in a group of his peers and … what, exactly? Revisit the arguments that the Christianist right have been making in court? Announce that he believes same-sex marriage is wrong because the Bible says so? If that’s his position, then I think it’s perfectly appropriate that his peers would criticize his position and (probably) wonder about the fitness of an attorney who clings to such a position in spite of the merits of the arguments for and against. If, for example, I hired an attorney to represent me, and he did all his research, considered all the arguments for and against, then showed up in court and made the kind of arguments that the proponents did in the Prop 8 case, I think that I (as a client) would have very good reason to question his competence (and quite possibly grounds for a malpractice suit).
Another:
Reading your reaction to Dreher’s rant, a thought came to my mind that I have pondered often. I agree that many (most?) Christians who disapprove of same-sex marriage are probably not motivated by bigotry, at least not the kind of furious bigotry exhibited by, e.g. white supremacists towards racial minorities. But it astonishes me that Dreher can’t understand why people would be appalled at anti-equality attitudes. He may think it’s just people adhering to their religious faith, but to people like me (pro-equality), those attitudes exhibit a lack of self reflection and empathy that I find disturbing in otherwise intelligent people.
Look, the biblical commands against homosexuality are a few lines in a book that otherwise talks mostly about the proper way to sacrifice beasts, and yet the Christianists are constantly harping on the topic as if the primary focus of Christian belief is some weird and futile goal to eradicate homosexuality. So no, if a colleague tells me that she’s opposed to same-sex marriage on the basis of her religious beliefs, I’m not going to assume that she’s a bigot, but I am going to think her to be hidebound, unreflecting, and a blind adherent to an ideology that she hasn’t bothered to really try to understand. It’s not enough that there are a few lines in the Old Testament to support systemic social injustice against millions of people.
Michael Brendan Dougherty recommends that Republicans change how they talk about race:
Conservatives in the GOP like to assail identity politics and tout their own ideology as one of color-blindness. Sometimes this is stupidly marketed to black voters as a selling point for Republicans. “We don’t categorize you by race,” brags a Republican. The black audience hears: “We don’t take the most salient part of your American political identity seriously.”
Some reasons Republicans should care about black voters:
First because it’s just the right thing to do; black Americans deserve more competition for their vote than they are getting. Secondly, in the America that is being shaped by a new great wave of immigration, black Americans stand to lose even their precarious place in the American polity, to be kicked down to the bottom of an even more racially stratified society. Conservatism provides a natural vocabulary and political direction for communities that feel like they are losing their place. Thirdly, the GOP desperately needs to win votes in cities where the party is practically absent. And improving its margin among blacks in the South will do a lot to keep those states solidly red.
The Dish 