Tag: Premium

William R. Polk provides an in-depth explanation of the origins of the crisis, connecting it to the food shortages that preceded it:

Four years of devastating drought beginning in 2006 caused at least 800,000 farmers to lose their entire livelihood and about 200,000 simply abandoned their lands, according to the Center for Climate & Security. In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others, crop failures reached 75 percent. And generally as much as 85 percent of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms, and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies. Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”

As they flocked into the cities and towns seeking work and food, the “economic” or “climate” refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water, and jobs, but also with the existing foreign refugee population. Syria was already a refuge for a quarter of a million Palestinians and about 100,000 Iraqis who had fled the war and occupation. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive…

And so tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry, and impoverished former farmers were jammed into Syria’s towns and cities, where they constituted tinder ready to catch fire. The spark was struck on March 15, 2011, when a relatively small group gathered in the southwestern town of Daraa to protest against government failure to help them. Instead of meeting with the protesters and at least hearing their complaints, the government saw them as subversives.

The lesson of Hama must have been at the front of the mind of every member of the Assad regime. Failure to act decisively, Hama had shown, inevitably led to insurrection. Compromise could come only after order was assured. So Bashar followed the lead of his father. He ordered a crackdown. And the army, long frustrated by inaction and humiliated by its successive defeats in confrontation with Israel, responded violently. Its action backfired. Riots broke out all over the country. As they did, the government attempted to quell them with military force. It failed. So, during the next two years, what had begun as a food and water issue gradually turned into a political and religious cause.

Alan Zilberman considers that trend in movies:

A generation ago film composers took a different approach when they wanted a score to sound significant. Compared to [composer John] Murphy’s “Adagio [in D Minor],” David Newman’s score from “Hoffa” sounds cloying: at the two-and-a-half minute mark, the orchestra overstates its case with high notes and a cacophony of percussion. Randy Edelman’s corny, relentless “Fire in a Movie Theater” sounds dated—anyone who went to the movies in the 1990s will wince when they hear the opening bars. There are some film scores that still sound fresh—James Horner’s score for “Aliens” is pulverizing, and John Williams’ work will always stand the test of time—yet there has been a sea change in film scores from complexity toward simplicity. This is because composers trust canny audiences to feel an emotional response when abstracted melodies contain an aural space for significance (or what feels like significance).

I talked about the power of simplicity with composer Nicholas Britell, who composed all the musical arrangements performed by Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in “12 Years a Slave.” … After studying neuromusicology at Harvard, Britell became deeply aware of, “patterns that trigger cascades of feeling.” … I asked Britell to give an illustrative example of powerful music.

He thought for a moment and suggested François Couperin’s “Les Barricades Mysterieuses [embedded above],” a baroque piece for the solo piano Terrence Malick used in “The Tree of Life.” According to Britell, the key to the piece’s power is the dissonance.

“Throughout the piece, there are certain times where the lines continue a little longer (i.e. “suspensions”). The harmony changes yet they’re still holding an old harmony and then they quickly resolve. This process is something I always find very beautiful. It’s the main technique of a lot of music, where something overstays its welcome by a millisecond then resolves.” Listen again and it’s easy to hear what Britell is talking about: as one melody continues, the notes from another evaporate as if the music is breathing.

Andrew Cohen contends that “no one who digs deeply into these grim cases ever seems to evolve from being a staunch opponent of capital punishment into being a fervent supporter of the practice.” He discusses three Supreme Court justices who changed from pro- to anti-death penalty:

The systemic problems with capital punishment that Lewis Powell mentioned in 1991, and that Justice Blackmun identified in 1994, had not been cured by the time Justice Stevens identified them in 2008 (and again in 2010, in The New York Review of Books, in a review in which he lamented the Court’s broadened application of capital punishment). Nor has the Supreme Court addressed, let alone resolved, these problems in the years since Justice Stevens retired. Just last month, the justices refused even to hear an Alabama case in which an elected judge overrode a jury’s sentencing verdict and imposed a death sentence.

Three Republican-nominated justices, three men of moderation, among the least ideological the Court has produced in the past 50 years, all came late in life to regret their early doctrinal support for capital punishment. Retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the Court, a nominee of President Ronald Reagan, also questioned the use of capital punishment near the end of her tenure on it. She had concerns about the execution of the innocence, she said, and she acknowledged the equal protection implications of the fact that rich capital defendants get better legal representation than poor ones.

Now let’s list the Supreme Court justices of our time, or of our parents’ time, who started out as advocates for the abolition of capital punishment but whose experience with capital cases on the High Court over decades caused them to support the death penalty. Alas, we can’t do it. Not a single justice has ever been so converted. Is that not telling? Exposure to capital cases doesn’t cause these smart and honorable men and women to gain confidence in the neutral and accurate application of the death penalty, because no such confidence is warranted—because no such application exists.

Commenting on Susan Boyle’s revelation that she has Asperger’s Syndrome, Alyssa notes the proliferation of TV characters with autism spectrum disorders and the misconceptions they reinforce:

Many of these depictions of fictional people with variants of autism paint them as savants. I understand this tendency, because it’s a way to give people on the spectrum both dignity and work that they can do as part of a show’s plot mechanics, whether separately or part of a team. But it’s not as if getting diagnosed as somewhere on the autism spectrum is a one-way ticket to genius with side effects.

I’ve been relieved to see Alphas, for example, which had two characters on the spectrum of the show, with very different levels of social and communications skills, as a counterbalance to The Big Bang Theory, which falls somewhat closer to the tendency I’ve just described. And of course Parenthood is a terrific, ongoing exploration of both what it’s like to be a pre-teen and now a teenager with Asperger syndrome, and to parent someone with Asperger’s, without making an argument that Max (Max Burkholder) [seen above] needs to be a genius to somehow pay back his parents for their love, affection, and patience.

Boyle further complicates the idea that people on the spectrum are all math nerds or computer geniuses. Instead, she’s an artist (like Community‘s Abed). And perceptions of people on the spectrum aren’t all that her success challenges. At 52, Boyle is much older than the average pop star (though not than any number of popular classical singers, or Elaine Paige, who Boyle said she hoped to be like at Britain’s Got Talent). She’s single, and speaks about her father’s decision to break off the main serious relationship of her life when she was in her twenties in a way that’s almost inexpressible in the tabloid language used today to analyze celebrities’ relationships.

Christopher Benfey explores the English writer’s “four-year sojourn in Vermont, from 1892 to 1896, [which] was a remarkably productive period for this versatile poet and short-story writer, and established patterns, aesthetic and political, for much that came later”:

During his American interlude, Kipling initiated his lifelong practice of adding verse epigraphs to stories, and sometimes verse epilogues and interludes as well, knitting whole books together with an alternating current of verse and prose. The main inspiration, as Charles Carrington, Kipling’s official biographer, pointed out long ago, was probably Emerson, an overwhelming influence on Kipling’s poetry and prose. It was in The Jungle Books, written in 1893 and 1894, that Kipling first systematically adopted a complicated mix of poetry and prose. Much of the main narrative of the book is built on a contrast between upholders of “The Law,” inculcated by Mowgli’s tutors, the kindly bear Baloo and the severe panther Bagheera, and those who undermine the Law—above all, the monkeys, or “Bandar-Log,” whose herd mentality prevents them from accomplishing anything of significance. Much has been written about The Jungle Books (with Kipling’s encouragement) as in part a political allegory, in which the monkeys figure as American populists, always promising great things and achieving nothing.

Other inspirations for The Jungle Books:

One source that Kipling is thought to have drawn on for his Mowgli narrative is titled “Wolves Nurturing Children in the Dens,” first published in 1852, and written by a British official named William Henry Sleeman. The stories are relentlessly downbeat. When the children adopted by wolves are returned to their families, they have callouses on their elbows and knees from crawling on all fours; they prefer raw to cooked meat; they feed among the dogs; they are incapable of learning human language; they die young, and so on. The responsible parties in Sleeman’s suspiciously similar stories are never the villagers, with their negligent parenting that allows wolves to “carry off” their children, but rather the British officials and those employed by them. The need for European “paternalism” is demonstrated at every turn. The local Hindus must be taught to value their children. To teach them such values, one might say, is another of the White Man’s Burdens.

How Kipling’s narrative differs:

It is a mark of Kipling’s originality that he departed from his Indian sources in several key ways. This supposed guardian of empire and the White Man’s Burden chose a native child for his hero and portrayed Mowgli’s native birth mother sympathetically. … He grows up not with callouses on his knees and elbows, cowering in the shadows, but rather as a virile and sensitive leader, powerful in mind and body, who can kill a tiger, make complicated moral choices, and right the wrongs in both human and animal communities.

A 2006 study found that, out of all Americans, white heterosexual men have the fewest friends. Lisa Wade blames the conditioning boys undergo in their teens:

[M]en are pressed — from the time they’re very young — to disassociate from everything feminine. This imperative is incredibly limiting for them. Paradoxically, it makes men feel good because of a social agreement that masculine things are better than feminine things, but it’s not the same thing as freedom. It’s restrictive and dehumanizing. It’s oppression all dressed up as awesomeness. And it is part of why men have a hard time being friends.

To be close friends, men need to be willing to confess their insecurities, be kind to others, have empathy and sometimes sacrifice their own self-interest. “Real men,” though, are not supposed to do these things. They are supposed to be self-interested, competitive, non-emotional, strong (with no insecurities at all), and able to deal with their emotional problems without help. Being a good friend, then, as well as needing a good friend, is the equivalent of being girly.

Katy Waldman thinks it’s also about gay panic:

Wade doesn’t mention the rainbow elephant in the room, but I wonder whether men are less afraid of girliness here than homosexuality. In many ways, it’s a distinction without a difference, since homophobes tend to imagine gay men as effete. But if a man ever is allowed to relax his stone face, it’s around his romantic partner. Being open, communicative, vulnerable—all of these behaviors evoke love relationships. It makes a sad kind of sense that boys trying to assert their masculinity would steer clear of playing the “boyfriend” around other guys.

Daisy Buchanan believes one solution is to battle the stigma against boys making friends with girls:

I don’t believe men are naturally wired to be any less intimate and caring than women are. But if young boys grow up in a world where they’re mocked for pursuing friendships with girls, and don’t see enough examples of friendships between older men, it’s going to cause huge problems for men and women later in life. Without a network of friends, boys are going to grow up to feel confused, lonely and alienated. According to research from the charity Calm, suicide is now the biggest killer among young men in Britain, with a spokesperson for the charity citing “social isolation” as a major factor. If boys were explicitly encouraged to develop and invest in friendships, it could save lives. And if we tell them that it’s important to make friends with girls as well as other boys, it could change feminism for ever.

This week, Congressman Steve Stockman announced that he is going to try to primary Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). A letter Stockman wrote to his supporters calls Cornyn a traitor:

You are in a foxhole fighting to save our constitutional Republic… …and the last thing you need is a Republican bayonet in your back. But that’s what liberal John Cornyn has been doing to you every day.

Cornyn spokesman Drew Brandewie responds with the above tweet. Daniel Strauss adds:

Stockman’s attack is what a number of tea party challengers have been making against the Republican incumbents they’re challenging. The problem for Stockman is that Cornyn is rated as one of the most conservative lawmakers in his chamber, according to a National Review analysis of Senate voting records.

Molly Ball wonders why Cornyn is being challenged:

[I]f even staunch conservatives like Cornyn can’t satisfy the right, the Tea Party has truly entered its dada period.

Before, right-wingers were content to purge actual moderates, like former Indiana Senator Richard Lugar and Delaware Representative Mike Castle, or patrician establishmentarians like Dewhurst. Now all it takes to provoke their wrath is the belief that government ought to be allowed to function. Next, perhaps they’ll they turn on Cruz, who serves on several Senate committees and is vice chair of the senatorial committee. I asked a GOP consultant who follows Senate races what Cornyn’s supposed sin against conservatism had been—what transgression earned him the wrath of the right. “Well,” the consultant answered, “the honest answer is that he’s not crazy.”

Weigel sees Stockman as little threat to Cornyn:

Enrollments have increased significantly:

Kliff provides details:

Just about 1.2 million people have gained health coverage through Obamacare, according to new federal data released Wednesday morning. Approximately 365,000 of those people have purchased private insurance and 803,000 have been determined to be eligible for the public Medicaid program. These numbers count data from both October and November, and show an especially quick growth in HealthCare.gov enrollment.

Philip Klein downplays the enrollment spike. He focuses on individuals buying private plans:

Just 364,682 Americans picked a health insurance plan through President Obama’s health care program between the Oct. 1 launch of the insurance exchanges and Nov. 30, the Department of Health and Human Services announced today. Though the pace of signups accelerated during November, as only 106,185 Americans had picked plans as of Nov. 2, the combined signups were still less than half the administration’s target of 800,000 enrollments by the end of November. Adding a caveat, HHS noted that it is trying to correct a problem that may have resulted in some of the signups being counted twice, thus potentially overstating the number.

Josh Barro puts the numbers in a much more favorable light: 

My best guess is that signups for private insurance through the federally-run Affordable Care Act exchanges are rising very sharply: About 69,000 during the week ending Dec. 2, up from only about 2,000 in the program’s first week, ending Oct. 7. That means the signup pace is nearly doubling, week-to-week. Unfortunately, I can’t be sure, because the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the federal exchange, is awfully cagey about its data.

Drum chimes in:

There was a big jump at the end of November, and continued growth in the Thanksgiving/Black Friday week after that. That said, these numbers still need to grow substantially. At this point in the game, the enrollment rate needs to start pushing 200,000 per week or so on the federal exchange in order to meet the overall enrollment goals set for March of next year. There’s still lots of work ahead.

C.H. at The Economist wants data on who has enrolled:

Perhaps most important is what the new report does not include. It does not reveal what share of shoppers are young. Obamacare relies on enrolment from young, healthy people to subsidise the cost of insuring the sick. The report also merely explains how many people have chosen a plan; it does not describe how many enrolment forms have been successfully sent to insurers. Without this next step, some of the 364,682 people who have chosen a plan may not have insurance in January after all.

For myself, as a skeptic of the law, part of what’s been striking about watching Obamacare unfold to date is how it’s managed to go badly relative to its supporters’ projections in ways that I didn’t necessarily anticipate. (I worried more about employer dumping into the exchanges leading to budget-busting subsidy payouts, for instance, which currently seem like a fairly-remote possibility.) Presumably we should continue to expect the unexpected, and be prepared for developments that don’t just fall somewhere in between “ringing success” and “death spiral,” but surprise us with where exactly they fall, and how their consequences play out.

Uruguay becomes the first country to legalize the cannabis trade:

The law, effective from next year, will allow registered users to buy up to 40 grams of marijuana a month from a chemist’s; registered growers to keep up to six plants; and cannabis clubs to have up to 45 members and cultivate as many as 99 plants. A government-run cannabis institute will set the price – initially likely to be close to the current black market rate of $1 a gram – and monitor the impact of the program, which aims to bring the industry under state control and push illegal traffickers out of business.

The country’s president has positioned the law as a test:

Before the passage of the bill, president José Mujica called on the international community to assist in what he admitted was an experiment aimed at finding an alternative to the deadly and unsuccessful war on drugs. “We are asking the world to help us with this experience, which will allow the adoption of a social and political experiment to face a serious problem–drug trafficking,” he said earlier this month. “The effects of drug trafficking are worse than those of the drugs themselves.” If the results of the law prove negative, Mujica has said it could be rescinded.

Roberto Ferdman notes that the law could mean a windfall for the Uruguayan government:

The only entity allowed to deal the drug will be the government. Under the new law, Uruguayans registered with the government will be allowed to buy up to 40 grams (1.4 ounces) of marijuana from government-licensed pharmacies. Private companies roped in to help produce enough weed to meet local demand will have to sell their crop to the government for distribution. The government will rake in some extra cash in the process. The black market for marijuana is worth some $40 million. The government won’t earn as much; it plans to sell the drug for about $1 a gram, roughly 30 percent less than the black market price. But it can count on a lot of customers: Uruguay has a relatively high percentage of pot smokers for the region – third only to Argentina and Chile.

Hannah Hetzer, policy manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, sees a larger trend in the region:

In 2011, Kofi Annan, Paul Volcker and Richard Branson joined former Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and other distinguished members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy in saying the time had come to “break the taboo” on exploring alternatives to the failed war on drugs and to “encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs,” especially marijuana. More recently, Presidents Juan Manuel Santos in Colombia and Otto Perez Molina in Guatemala have joined these calls for reform. In May, the Organization of American States produced a report, commissioned by heads of state of the region, that included marijuana legalization as a likely policy alternative for the coming years.

By approving this measure, Uruguay has taken the broad regional discussion on alternatives to drug prohibition one step further, representing a concrete advance in line with growing anti-drug war rhetoric in Latin America and throughout the world.

But as much as American advocates support the law – and some have gone so far as to buy ad time for it -David Down says the law remains remains “deeply unpopular” among Uruguayans:

Consuming weed has been legal here since the 1970s, and several vocal cannabis campaigners have raised concerns about the law, criticizing the government’s plans to monitor cannabis use and limit the number of strains of weed available for sale. The opposing political party here is also threatening to push for a referendum on the law, which was opposed by 61 percent of Uruguayans polled in September. The experiment, in other words, could be short-lived.

(Photo: People take part in a demo for the legalization of marijuana in front of the Legislative Palace in Montevideo, on December 10, 2013, as the Senate discusses a law on the legalization of marijuana’s cultivation and consumption. By Pablo Porciuncula/AFP/Getty Images)

Alyssa praises NBC’s choice of David Remnick to provide political commentary on the Sochi Olympics:

Remnick’s done reporting work (as well as editing the New Yorker) that touches on many aspects of civil society. He’s covered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia from exile and written about the life of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Remnick’s reported on the rise of Russian oligarchy and the war in Chechnya. In 2007, he wrote a long profile of Gary Kasparov. Last year, he checked in with Petr Verzilov, who is married to Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. This year, he filed a thoughtful dispatch on the experience of exile and how it shaped the Tsarnaev brothers, authors of the Boston Marathon bombing.

Remnick, in other words, is a commentator qualified to explain Russian society in some depth to American audiences. The “gay propaganda” law sounds bizarre out of context. But as an attempt to defend “Russian values,” including the Russian Orthodox Church, and to defend and define Russia after the national trauma that was the dissolution of the Soviet Union and ongoing territorial disputes like the one in Chechnya, it makes somewhat more sense. If the “gay propaganda” law is to be the signal issue of the 2014 Winter Olympics, and part of the point of moving the Olympics around the world is to familiarize international audiences with countries they may pay varying amounts of attention to, Remnick is positioned to both contextualize the law and provide a full portrait of Russia to international audiences.

She contrasts Remnick with the new chief of the new Russia Today, Dmitry Kiselyov, suggesting that the latter’s appointment in the lead-up to the Olympics was no coincidence:

[Kiselyov has] suggested that he believes the Cold War isn’t over, but rather, has heated up. His appointment by Putin to head Russia Today suggests that one of the flashpoints in that war is gay rights. And that move is a perfect illustration of the dilemma for NBC, and all the athletes and heads of state who are trying to figure out their approach to the Olympics. Condemning Russia’s treatment of gay people, as well as its other authoritarian policies, is both personally satisfying and morally necessary. But internally, it may only serve to harden the sense among some Russians that their country is culturally different from the people, entities, and nations who criticize it, and that standing firm on Russia’s treatment of LGBT people is an important way for the country to emphasize its cultural and political independence from the decadence around it.

To get a sense of Kiselyov’s anti-gay rhetoric, here is a quote from a couple months back:

“I think that just imposing fines on gays for homosexual propaganda among teenagers is not enough. They should be banned from donating blood, sperm. And their hearts, in case of the automobile accident, should be buried in the ground or burned as unsuitable for the continuation of life.”

Amar Toorf provides the basics on the Kiselyov appointment:

In a decree issued Monday, Putin abruptly liquidated the prominent news agency RIA Novosti, merging it with radio service Voice of Russia to create a new media conglomerate called Rossia Segodnya, or Russia Today. Like its predecessors, the new company will be state-owned, and will be separate from the Russia Today television station, now known as RT. Yet aside from the company’s executive director — a TV presenter and Putin loyalist known for his anti-gay rhetoric and conspiracy theories — details on its scope, structure, or the timeline for its liquidation remain unclear.

Leonid Bershidsky laments the loss of RIA Novosti Editor-in-Chief Svetlana Mironyuk, who tried to make the agency as independent as a state-run outlet can be:

Mironyuk was known as something of a liberal, aligned with former President Dmitry Medvedev, who now serves as Putin’s prime minister. “She has done a lot to make sure that, despite the toughest censorship, RIA Novosti supplied relatively objective information and analysis,” political commentator Grigory Melamedov wrote on his blog at Echo.msk.ru. No one will say this of Kiselyov…

Mironyuk thrived under Medvedev’s presidency, channeling government funds into innovative media products ranging from a large infographics service to commentary delivered by a rapper. Even Russia’s few remaining independent media outlets relied heavily on RIA Novosti for breaking news coverage: With more than 1,700 staff, the agency delivered more news from more locations than the others could ever afford. Mironyuk’s ambitions were expensive. The news agency pays its staff salaries well above market rates for private media outlets. Both Putin’s decree and Ivanov spoke of the need to cut costs. Under Kiselyov, Russia Today will concentrate on carrying a pro-Putin message to foreign audiences, and RIA Novosti projects aimed at the domestic market will be scrapped or downsized.

Marc Champion has more on Kiselyov:

Here’s a quick taste of how he might go about his job. When protests recently broke out in Ukraine, Putin called them “pogroms.” Kiselyov, on his TV show, called the protests a plot by Sweden, Lithuania and Poland to avenge their 1709 defeat by Russian forces at the battle of Poltava. No evidence for this interesting conspiracy was offered.

What Daisy Sindelar is hearing:

Igor Yakovenko, the former head of the Russian Union of Journalists, said the sudden move spoke of “if not panic, then a certain alarm” among the Kremlin elite. “It’s an extremely ineffective decision. I would even say a stupid one,” Yakovenko said. “Because in fact the style of propaganda that’s characteristic for Dmitry Kiselyov is simply open lies. Everything that he says about ‘Maidan,’ everything that he used to say about the Russian opposition, is a complete lie and sometimes sleight of hand. And that’s possible only when you have censorship — conditions in which there’s a monopoly on information.”