The clueless Ahmedinajad

Joe Klein and the editorial team at Time apparently sat down with Ahmedinajad when he was in this country for the UN meet.  Klein's comment is not to be dismissed:

for those of us who sat with Ahmadinejad, the real headline was his apparent cluelessness. 

I am glad he puts it so bluntly.  Because we are otherwise way too obsessed with Ahmedinajad when the more important players are the supreme leader--Khameini--the council, and the Revolutionary Guard.

Crossfire gone. Kristol gone. Who is coming in?

I was definitely one of the people who cheered Jon Stewart's stinging words directed at television talk shows like  Crossfire.  Soon after that, quite a few talking-heads shows disappeared from television.
Dan Drezner has a good question: did Stewart do us a favor, or did he kill any remnants of potential for conversations across ideological divides?  Drezner's point is to:

question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse.  Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have.... Hannity.  Is this really an improvement?   

As inane as the crosstalk shows might have been, one of their strengths was that they had people with different ideological and political perspectives talking to (and sometimes past) each other.  You could argue that the level of discourse was pretty simplistic and crude -- but at least it was an attempt at cross-ideological debate.  People from different ideological stripes watched the same show and heard the same arguments.  

He has a good point there.  While it might not have been a direct result of Stewart's criticism, these shows are gone and have been replaced by single-perspective shows.  Drezner notes:

Instead of Crossfire-style shows on cable news, you now have content like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, etc.  These programs have no cross-ideological debate.  Instead, you have hosts on both the left and the right outbidding each other to see who can be the mostbatsh**t insane ideologically pure.  These shows attract audiences sympathetic to the host's political beliefs, and the content of these shows help viewers to fortify their own ideological bunkers to the point where no amount of truth is going to penetrate their worldviews.  Which allows these hosts to say any crazy thing that pops into their head and hear nothing but "Ditto!" after they say it. 

Now, in the intellectual print world, the death of Irving Kristol has revealed the vacuum that exists.  Jack Shafer writes:

Without a substantive challenge, liberals grow smug and lazy. They overreach and overspend. Conservatives need to return to civic responsibility, not just to check their opponents, but to offer the country a valid alternative. They need some new neoconservatives. They need the old Irving Kristol.

From Calcutta to New Jersey .... the mosquito diaries :-)

If people can move, so can other animals.  And, thus, even can mosquitoes!

A couple of years ago, I ran into trouble (ed: when have you not run into trouble?!) for writing an opinion column that as long as humans move around the world, there will always be invasive species.  And, because there is no way we would ever force people to stay put, well, we can only expect more and more of species appearing in habitats far, far away from their original homes.

The latest in the example here is mosquitoes. (HT)

The modern city of Kolkata sits toward the western end of what could, until recently, have been called the natural range of the Asian tiger mosquito: a swath of land stretching from Pakistan to North Korea. Its ancestral habitat is in the forests of Southeast Asia, where it laid eggs in water-filled tree holes or the hollow insides of bamboo stalks, rarely travelling more than a few hundred metres from the cavity where it was born.

Over the course of the past two or three decades, however, the Asian tiger mosquito has become considerably, prodigiously more mobile. It has circled the planet, emerging in Trinidad in 1983; Mexico in 1988; France in 1999; Cameroon in 2000; Nicaragua, Greece, Israel and Switzerland in 2003. It has colonised North and South America, Africa, and Europe, until it has become a great nuisance in Brazil, Albania, Nigeria, Mexico and Italy – “the most invasive mosquito in the world”, a team of researchers wrote in 2007, in the journal Vector-Borne Zoonotic Disease. The mosquito from the Southeast Asian jungle is also now a great nuisance in Trenton, New Jersey – the greatest present-day mosquito nuisance in a wetland state whose history is written in waves of mosquito infestation.

What is the problem, you ask?

The Asian tiger mosquito is capable, in laboratory testing, of carrying and transmitting a variety of viruses, but so far, in the wild, it has been a less effective vector of disease than the yellow fever mosquito, with one notable and alarming exception. An outbreak of chikungunya – a virus that causes high fever and lingering joint pain – on the island of La Reunion in 2005, which infected 266,000 people and killed 248, was traced to a mutation in the virus that enabled it to be transmitted by the Asian tiger mosquitoes. Two years later, a tourist who had been in the Indian Ocean region passed through Ravenna, Italy. There, he encountered a local population of Asian tiger mosquitoes, which had arrived from the United States in a shipment of tyres. The convergence led to Europe’s first outbreak of the disease – and raised the possibility not only of chikungunya continuing to follow the mosquitoes around the world, but of diseases such as dengue or yellow fever making the same mutational leap. 

Of course, we then launch a war on mosquitoes:

New Jersey is merely the northern fringe of the Asian tiger mosquito’s US territory, which now includes the entire southeast, from the Gulf of Mexico across the south and more than halfway up the Atlantic coast. Mercer County and neighbouring Monmouth County, which together form a belt across the middle of the state, are in the second year of a five-year, $3.8 million project, backed by the United States Department of Agriculture, to try to bring the invading swarms under control.

Maybe yet another war we are going to lose!

Thirsty for taxes? Try the stupid soda tax

It is a bizarre "syntax" error when President Obama takes time off his pressing issues to advocate for a "sin tax" on soda.

In the first place, there is no federal role in this. In the fantastic arrangement of a union of states, such issues are best left to state governments.  Second, it is crazy even for state governments to tax soda.  Implement a carbon tax first; that is a tax which should have been implemented years ago.

So, it is particularly insane for the feds to get into this because they are the people who are subsidizing growing corn, which then makes corn syrup extremely inexpensive that then further lowers the cost of soda.  Which means the simplest solution is to remove the subsidies for corn.  Right?

That is exactly what Katherine Mangu Ward argues here:

When corn subsidies (and accompanying tariffs on imported sugar) were instituted seven decades ago, it was a response to the terror of debt-ridden farmers worried about their livelihood. Since then, Iowa has been cheerfully mainlining government cash and voting for whoever promises to send more of it.

Subsidy packages to corn growers have been sweet;in recent years, with an average of about $5 billion annually since 1995, and a bumper crop of cash in 2005 clocking in at about $9.4 billion. Many of the acres of corn grown in the United States wouldn't be profitable if it weren't for federal subsidies (as chronicled in the excellent documentary King Corn, yet those billions keep the cheap corn piling up around our waists.

More on this corny topic here.

Olympics final score: Pele 1, Obama 0

I mean, did Obama really think there would not be any spin on his trip, particularly when there was a distinct possibility that Rio would be awarded the games?

I think this was the dumbest thing Obama and his advisers have done, yet.  I hope this will be the last one.  There are some issues that even during normal times a President should completely stay away from, and this is one of those.

And, BTW, I am really happy that the US will not host the 2016 Olympics.  It is the most doggone awful waste of money ever.  If the market wants that, well and good. But, to waste tax dollars on it? No way!!!

But, what's up with Pele crying about this?  The soccer magician getting too soft in his older years? :-)

The American military coup of 2012

Maybe this award-winning essay is worth a second-read, for those of you who have forgotten it.  For the rest, well, read it and weep!

Temperature rises between India and China

If there was any doubt that I was on the wrong track in my column on the developing geopolitical complexities between China and India, well, erase that thought!
According to this report, China has treated Indian citizens from Kashmir differently from how it treats Indian citizens from the rest of India. 

the Chinese embassy in New Delhi has begun issuing visas to Indian passport holders from Jammu and Kashmir on a separate sheet of paper rather than stamping them in their passports as is the norm with other Indian citizens.  “What the Chinese are doing is definitely new and we have taken a serious view of it,” an MEA official said

Cue that Twilight Zone music!

How the health care reform will be "aborted"?

It has puzzled me that those opposed to health care reform have gone the insane route of using labels like socialism....when they could have scored a lot more points a lot easier by simply zooming into abortion.  Of course, I am not the first guy to have thought about this.  But, I still cannot understand why abortion did not become a populist issue in health care reform.

I mean, the logic is straightforward: if there is a "medicare for all" kind of public option, then we are looking at whether the government ought to:

• provide for services like the "pill", and pay for abortion, or
• not provide for services like the "pill" and not pay for abortion.

If the government chooses either one, then as the single largest purchaser of medical services, it will essentially set the rules for most, if not all, the private insurers too.  So, this will be a defining moment.  (Well, this is the kind of argument that leads to the "socialism" accusation, I suppose.)

And yet the opponents prefer the crazy, insane, rhetoric. 

Anyway, Slate's William Saletan summarizes the challenge really well:

The nuances of the abortion-coverage fight can be tricky, but the core of the problem is simple. Each side is willing to accept a compromise in which no federal tax dollars fund abortion. Pro-choicers have one definition of what this means: Federal money can subsidize any insurance plan, as long as the insurer doesn't use these subsidies to directly cover abortions. Pro-lifers have a more strenuous definition: Federal money can't subsidize any plan that covers abortions, since the insurer would simply take the money with one hand while writing abortion checks with the other. In a private insurance market, each side could stick to its own principles and interpretations. But a socialized market throws them together. To get what they consider neutrality, pro-choicers have to make pro-lifers pay indirectly for abortions. And to keep what they consider clean hands, pro-lifers have to make abortion coverage federally unsupportable and therefore, in a subsidy-dependent system, commercially nonviable.
So the left's argument against abortion exclusion is the right's argument against socialization.

Pretty neat summary, right?  His entire essay is a great read.  Saletan concludes:

The good news, if you're a pro-choice progressive, is that freedom-loving Americans will protect your private abortion coverage. The bad news is that they'll do it by killing health care reform.

 What a catch-22 for liberal Democrats who are some of the ardent advocates of health care reform! 
(I am in a separate minority category: I concede that abortion is murder, but that decision to kill can be made only by the pregnant mother and nobody else.  If the pregnant mother decides to abort, well, there is nothing criminal about it.)

Update: The NY Times has an editorial on this very topic.  Ha, I beat them by a few hours :-)

USA! USA! ..... India?

Here is Jon Stewart getting upset with Aasif Mandvi who reports that India discovered water on the moon, while America's USGS and NASA provided the tech support :-)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Deep Space Naan
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

College athletics: A modest proposal

leaders in the Obama administration and in Congress have expressed a strong interest in education reform and claim to appreciate the crucial role of education in maintaining the United States' leading role in the world. They have also demonstrated sensitivity to outrageous executive compensation.

I bet you the reader agree with this factual statement in an op-ed by Benjamin Rosenberg in the Christian Science Monitor (HT.) 
So, what does Rosenberg want?  Take it away:

The academic fate of our universities is more important than who is crowned national college football champion, so perhaps Congress can spare some time for academics.
Here's how: Most colleges and universities receive federal research grants or subsidies that help them to advance academic and intellectual interests, and to achieve socially beneficial goals. But if the institutions themselves do not value those goals, they should not receive taxpayers' money to advance the goals.
And thus Congress should prevent federal research grants or subsidies from being awarded to any educational institution that pays greater compensation on average to its football or basketball coaches than it does on average to its tenured faculty members.
Any school that pays more to those who coach big time sports than to those who teach students academic subjects shows its true colors. No taxpayer should pay money to such a school.

Cellphone nightmares :-)

Quote of the day (re. the Polanski trial)

In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.

If you also found it awesome, then you will be happy to know that it was George Orwell who wrote that.  (via Nick Gillespie)

Megan McArdle provides a link to excerpts from the transcripts of the trial.  What Polanski did was brutal. Just brutal.  It is a shame that he has been free for so long.

Dow Jones Index reaching 10000

It was at 9789 at the close of business today.
The NY Times has this to say:

The enthusiasm over that round figure is now a decade-long phenomenon. Consider this: President Bill Clinton was in office when the Dow Jones industrial average first closed above 10,000 in March 1999. It retreated in the years after the dot-com bubble deflated, then retook 10,000 in late 2003 and peaked at 14,000 in October 2007. We all know the cataclysm that followed.
So Dow 10,000 does not mean that the market is finally edging ahead; it is simply catching up to where it was a decade ago. “It’s been a bad 10 years, a really bad 10 years,” said David Bianco, chief United States equity strategist at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.
The constant march of inflation also dilutes the meaning of 10,000. Prices rose an average of about 2.8 percent each year in the last decade, meaning the Dow would have to reach about 13,200 in today’s numbers to equal its value then. If this limbo seems dreary, imagine spending the next decade talking about Dow 10,000.

It feels awful to think that we have spent ten years to get back to exactly we once where?
But, does it mean that everything is all and well?  I like Robert Reich's comments on what is going on:

The great consumer retreat from the market is being offset by government’s advance into the market. Consumer debt is way down from its peak in 2006; government debt is way up. Consumer spending is down, government spending is up. Why have new housing starts begun? Because the Fed is buying up Fannie and Freddie’s paper, and government-owned Fannie and Freddie are now just about the only mortgage games remaining in play.

Why are health care stocks booming? Because the government is about to expand coverage to tens of millions more Americans, and the White House has assured Big Pharma and health insurers that their profits will soar. Why are auto sales up? Because the cash-for-clunkers program has been subsidizing new car sales. Why is the financial sector surging? Because the Fed is keeping interest rates near zero, and the rest of the government is still guaranteeing any bank too big to fail will be bailed out. Why are federal contractors doing so well? Because the stimulus has kicked in.

In other words, the Dow is up despite the biggest consumer retreat from the market since the Great Depression because of the very thing so many executives are complaining about, which is government’s expansion

A government-aided market expansion that is the jobless recovery we are experiencing.  My head spins.  Tome to go to bed!

BHO meet LBJ, continued

Back in January--yes, seems like eons ago now--I linked to Juan Cole's observation, which was eerily titled "BHO meet LBJ."

That theme is gaining a lot more momentum recently.  While not that specific phrase, the theme is clear.  First, here is John Kerry--yes, the same Kerry who was one of the early supporters of candidate Obama:

Before we send more of our young men and women to this war, we need a fuller debate about what constitutes success in Afghanistan. We need a clearer understanding of what constitutes the right strategy to get us there. Ultimately, we need to understand, as Gen. Colin Powell was fond of asking, "What's the exit strategy?" Or as Gen. David Petraeus asked of Iraq, "How does it end?"
Why? Because one of the lessons from Vietnam—applied in the first Gulf War and sadly forgotten for too long in Iraq—is that we should not commit troops to the battlefield without a clear understanding of what we expect them to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we maintain the consent of the American people. Otherwise, we risk bringing our troops home from a mission unachieved or poorly conceived.

It was interesting that Kerry's op-ed was in the Wall Street Journal.  I wonder what the deal is with that.
Well, it is not that the "liberal" media is quiet about the ghost of Vietnam.  In the NY Times, Frank Rich presents the following comments in the context of Woodward "leaking" McChrystal's report, and then an unnamed White House official countering it:

it’s “eerie” how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama’s, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.
Within Kennedy’s administration, most supported the Joint Chiefs’ repeated call for combat troops, including the secretaries of defense (McNamara) and state (Dean Rusk) and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president’s special military adviser. The highest-ranking dissenter was George Ball, the undersecretary of state. Mindful of the French folly in Vietnam, he predicted that “within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again.” In the current administration’s internal Afghanistan debate, Goldstein observes, Joe Biden uncannily echoes Ball’s dissenting role.
Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House — and though he had once called Vietnam “the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia” — he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited America’s military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November 1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way, from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he “must second-guess even military plans.” Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of J.F.K.’s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: “Counselors advise but presidents decide.”
Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now.

And Ross Douthat--the conservative columnist at the NY Times who replaced William Kristol--piles on:

However serious his doubts about escalation, Obama seems boxed in — by the thoroughness of McChrystal’s assessment and the military’s united front, by his own arguments across the last two years and by his party’s long-running insistence on painting Afghanistan as the neglected “good war.” But if Obama takes us deeper into war out of political necessity rather than conviction, the results could be disastrous.

Meanwhile, Germany's newly (re)elected Chancellor Merkel's deputy, Guido Westerwelle, will lead the cheers for continued Afghan military engagement:

While Germany's deployment to Afghanistan has become increasingly unpopular, Mr Westerwelle has emerged as the most powerful and articulate proponent of sustained involvement in the war.

So, instead of the Anglo-US lead into the Iraq debacle, we will now have a German-American push in AfPak?

Leave the gun. Take the jilebi?

Yet again, truth is stranger than the Onion's reports.  Here is the BBC explaining how "British Asians are outsourcing murder":

In India, murder is cheap, with hired assassins paid up to $800 (£500).
Formerly, the modus operandi was a drive-by shooting, now it is likely to be a staged road accident.
And it appears there are few risks.

The Godfather with an Indian twist. (ed: it is stupid to explain this way the title of this post!)

Speaking of the Godfather, Professor Diego Gambetta, has some fascinating observations (HT):

IDEAS: In the Mafia underworld, how celebrated is the movie ”The Godfather”?

GAMBETTA: It is very celebrated. Not just by the Sicilian Mafia and by the Italian-American Mafia, but oddly enough by people in the same line of business in Russia, in China, and in Japan. We have evidence that they understood that that was the sector of the economy in which they themselves moved, and there’s lots of evidence that they liked the film, that they could recite, by heart, bits of the film, in countries which you would think would have nothing to do with it.

IDEAS: We’ve got criminals out there in China and Japan who are modeling themselves after Michael and Sonny Corleone?

GAMBETTA: We do have evidence of that. Yes.

IDEAS: What are some other ways that criminals are modeling themselves on film portrayals?

GAMBETTA: Well, I guess ”The Godfather” is the big example because, for example, they don’t like movies like ”Donnie Brasco.”

IDEAS: Why not?

GAMBETTA: ”Donnie Brasco” is a very good movie, but it shows them as losers, as being taken in by this extremely skillful FBI agent, Joseph Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco. Several of them landed in jail, thanks to his undercover operation. And so, the movie portrays them at the losing end, and they don’t like that. Movies for them are a way of advertising, a way of gaining legitimacy.

Oaksterdam University in Calif

Get it? Oakland + Amsterdam = Oaksterdam.
What is so special there?  Ahem, cannabis.  Yes, the old mary jane. weed.

Now, there are moves afoot in California to go further to fully legalise marijuana.

Evidence of the impact that the approval of medicinal marijuana has had on some areas of California is clear in Oakland.

Across the bay from San Francisco, it has come to be known as Oaksterdam, in a nod to the symbolic global capital of marijuana deregulation, Amsterdam.

It is surreal though to look at faculty listing at Oaksterdam University.  Why they don't have the .edu domain I wonder :-)  There are four campuses!!! I bet they are interested in some international locations too.

It appears that there is a de facto decriminalization of marijuana in California.  Of course, this is a state that is in deep,deep financial trouble.  And is releasing prisoners because there is not enough money to keep them in.

So, how do you get to Oaksterdam?  On the Pineapple Express, of course!


Update on Sep 28th:  Fortune has a cover story on pot legalization;

The acceptance of medical marijuana has implications that extend far beyond helping those suffering from life-threatening diseases. It is one of several factors -- including demographic changes, the financial crisis, and the widely perceived failure of the war on drugs -- reopening the country's 40-year-old on-again, off-again shouting match over whether marijuana should be legalized.