Please Remove Your Shoes

Now here's a movie I haven't seen yet, but I want to.



Like "Countdown To Zero," it's about fear. But it's not using fear. It shows how being paralyzed by fear induces bad decisions. Or that's what I take away from the Armchair Generalist and Homeland Security Watch. Links to more reviews at Homeland Security Watch.

But it suffers from the same problem as "Countdown To Zero": what can the ordinary citizen do? Unlike nuclear weapons, this is something that everyone who flies faces. I have long been more concerned that I will be detained by the TSA than that my airplane will be blown out of the sky. And, like the Armchair Generalist, I resent that something I have loved, flying and travel, has been made into an occasion for fear.

Countdown To Zero

"Countdown to Zero" continues a rather standard meme within the arms control community. I found it disappointing for that reason and others. Here's an interview with the producer.

The movie relies far too much on fear. Terrorists might get a nuclear weapon, we are told by those who have said it before, Graham Allison, Matthew Bunn, and Rolf Mowatt-Larson, from Harvard's Belfer Center. The message is repeated and amplified by others, along with the possibility of an accidental exchange between the United States and Russia. The examples of near-misses in the latter all took place during the Cold War or slightly after. Some things have done to improve safety on that point, although we don't hear much about that. Should more be done? Certainly, but neither we nor the Russians expect that kind of nuclear exchange the way we did twenty years ago, so that alone makes this sort of accident less likely.

There is the usual footage of mushroom clouds and Hiroshima destruction. More of underground nuclear tests and ensuing nationalistic celebrations in Pakistan and India.

Proliferation is indeed a danger that should be addressed in a number of ways, but there is little that individual citizens can do about it. Export controls and dual-use technology are very wonky subjects indeed. The producer admits that this issue is not in the same league as "An Inconvenient Truth," also his product, in this sense. Citizens can make their views known to their elected representatives. Hmmm. The most encouraging thing he had to say was that young people, previously oblivious to this not-much-talked-about subject, were figuring out that all those nukes are not good thing.

But fear is a poor motivator. It loses its focus and becomes anxiety, and anxiety inhibits action. Fear is so much used on the political scene these days (Tea Party fear of the government they are dependent on, fear of Islam, real fear on the economy) that a single movie presenting a more specialized set of fears is hardly likely to have an impact. And those young people have been lecturing us old folks on how counterproductive our demonstrations turned out to be.

People need a positive reason for action. A world without nuclear weapons is likely to be a better world; that depends on the means toward eliminating those weapons, the negotiations and concessions that would have to take place. But none of that is as easy to present as fear in a handful of Hiroshima dust.

Bits and Pieces - August 24, 2010

It's disturbing that the Smithsonian is slanting its science to the desires of its large contributors.

A Shakespeare journal and a medieval journal decide to take peer review online.

Making it easy to figure out whom to vote for.

You really wanted to hear more about that non-attack on Iran, didn't you?
Tony Karon asks three good questions:

1. Does the U.S. have a right to launch wars of aggression without provocation, in defiance of international law and an international consensus, simply on the basis of its own suspicions about another country's future intentions?

2. Even if Iran were to acquire the means to build a nuclear weapon, would that be a legitimate or prudent reason for launching a war?

3. Is Iran actually developing nuclear weapons?

M. J. Rosenberg makes some similar points.

Gary Hart points out that it's Congress that declares war, and bombing Iran would be war.

Bits and Pieces - August 23, 2010

Places to donate to help flood victims in Pakistan.

We can hope that these will be the last words on Park51 and an attack on Iran, but somehow I'm afraid they won't be. Marc Lynch manages to make some points that haven't yet been made, including

The "war bluff" argument -- that we will be most effective at diplomacy if we can credibly threaten force, with Israel playing the "bad cop" to force Iran to deal with the American "good cop" -- only works if there is adequate trust between the U.S. and Israel. This is why the Obama administration has taken to consulting so regularly and at such high levels with Israel, in order to ensure that communication is clear and consistent. Goldberg's suggestion that Israeli officials would nevertheless be prepared to spring such a surprise undermines that trust.

If Israel truly felt such existential urgency, then wouldn't it be willing to make concessions on Gaza or the peace process in order to build international support and sympathy? If Israel hopes to build an international consensus, this has been an odd way to go about it.

Does a higher degree of income inequality cause financial crises? Or is it stupidity on the part of the bankers? Exhibit A:

“Cars go faster every year, and G.D.P. rises every year, but that doesn’t mean speed causes G.D.P.,” said Mr. Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Business School and co-author of the coming book “Seeds of Destruction: Why the Path to Economic Ruin Runs Through Washington, and How to Reclaim American Prosperity.”

Silly me; I thought that cars had sort of topped out on speed, since the highest speed limits in the country are maybe 75 mph, and have been for some time. But maybe that's not the case for the cars the bankers are buying. And yeah, I see that this brain trust is a professor. And I guess that my two questions aren't mutually exclusive.

Well, Duh

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he takes President Obama at his word when he says he is a Christian. [WaPo]

But look at the way this is worded, so as to maintain the element of doubt. Don't we usually take people at their word as to their religion? Or...is President Obama a...stealth Muslim?

Good grief.

Update: Jon Chait and Steve Benen pick up on McConnell's tactic too.

Bits and Pieces - August 22, 2010

Nabataean art.

The compassion deficit.

The government has lots of dollar coins, but business doesn't want to use them.

More about the floods in Pakistan, which seem to have totally dropped off the MSM's radar.

Also not in the news: looks like negotiations with Iran are off again.

Cow's Udder (Solanum Mammosum)

Here, via PZ. H/t Mark.

Unwise Falafel (and Puddle Jumping)

On a recent afternoon on the streets around Ground Zero, commuters jumped over puddles to make their trains home, French tourists snapped photos, a homeless man jangled a can, an angry woman cried into her cellphone and Ali Mohammed served falafel over rice.... (WP)

Bits and Pieces - August 19, 2010

Doper bears in British Columbia.

A defense contractor is penalized.

What a smart grid could do for your electric bill.

In case you haven't had enough yet on Cordoba House:
Bernard Avishai

Michael Kinsley: "Is there any reason to oppose the mosque that isn't bigoted, or demagogic, or unconstitutional? None that I've heard or read."

They're both actually pretty good.

And one more on why Israel shouldn't attack Iran from the Jerusalem Post.

Community Organizing, Continued

Ezra Klein has two sort of matching posts today on President Obama's popularity. One shows that he's more popular than recent presidents were this far into their presidencies. But Klein's theme is the general hand-wringing about what a failure Obama has been and how everyone is disappointed by him. (I'm not, but Ezra didn't ask me!)

The second post slides right into the Beltway (or somewhere?) idiom that terrible things are happening to Obama's presidency. And it's because Obama, silly man, tried to bring the political part of the nation together when the Republicans were hellbent on thwarting him. So, sad to say, he didn't get anything accomplished.

Except health care reform, financial reform, pulling the country back from a deep recession, getting out of Iraq, speaking out on the anti-Muslim anti-constitutional bigotry, modeling a home garden, and probably a few other things that don't come instantly to my mind.

All the while marginalizing the Republicans as recalcitrant fools.

Ezra, you should get out a little more!

Update: Dave Weigel offers up some appropriate headlines for all Obama occasions.

Roma Expatriation

There's a certain beauty in this. Wait for the punchline in the last sentence in this excerpt.

France expelled nearly 100 Gypsies, or Roma, to their native Romania on Thursday as part of a very public effort by conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy to dismantle Roma camps and sweep them out of the country...

Those repatriated Thursday left "on a voluntary basis" and were given small sums of money — euro300 ($386) for each adult and euro100 for children — to help them get back on their feet in their home country, a standard French practice, officials said...

"For those who left this morning, they can certainly take a plane as early as tonight and come back to France. There's nothing to prevent this," Le Cleve told Associated Press Television News in an interview. "Obviously, these people come back, they are brought to the Romanian border, then come back to France, can leave again and so on. There are some Roma people who have been sent back seven or eight times, each time receiving the famous euro300."

Basic Civics Basics

The thing I find most startling about this Pew Research Center poll finding...

Americans increasingly are convinced - incorrectly - that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, and a growing number are thoroughly confused about his religion.

Nearly one in five people, or 18 percent, said they think Obama is Muslim, up from the 11 percent who said so in March 2009, according to a poll released Thursday. The proportion who correctly say he is a Christian is down to just 34 percent.

The largest share of people, 43 percent, said they don't know his religion, an increase from the 34 percent who said that in early 2009.

...is that only 34% of Americans pay attention. That's being generous too since some of that 34% didn't actually know but guessed correctly. The rest are either clueless to the most basic knowledge of the government and political life or totally brainwashed (so maybe the Rev. Wright is actually a closet Muslim).

The right has successfully gotten their way by painting Obama as a Muslim and then raising an uproar over the existence of Muslims and their places of worship in the US. They've done so by tapping into the old all-Muslims-are-terrorists paranoia egged on during the Reagan administration. There's really no other way to view this. It's plain bigotry, even when in the relatively milder form of the double standard.

Apart from the basic moral bankruptcy and perversion of basic constitutional concepts and duties, don't any on the political and religious right consider their place in history?

Kiwano

Toward a taxonomy of Lakoff-style framing: Two cents

I like and largely buy into George Lakoff's explanation of how we view and judge governance "framed," to use his keyword, as if it were parenting; which we feel ought to be nurturing or tough-lovey, depending on who we are, the circumstances, and how well the political rhetoric and information taps into these feelings. I also like and buy into the more recent explanation by many that corporations behave and serve society badly because our legal systems treat the behavior and status of a corporation as if it were a person and a citizen, which it occurs to me is also a matter of framing in the Lakoff (not the legal) sense. Lakoff's point wasn't to challenge our mental habit of judging government as if it were an individual and we his or her progeny, which is indeed the motive for explaining that we judge corporations also as individuals, because the mindset is a matter of law Congress could dissolve and reform. But I think the observation that we judge organized behavior as personal behavior--and both that we could and might do well to do otherwise--might be the more fundamental one. We seem to be hard-wired to regard any action as that of an agent and maybe in our lizard brains we always will. But hey we don't have to be just lizards.

Bits and Pieces - August 18, 2010

Attacking Iran -
One more reason why we can't.

Goldberg/Netanyahu's blackmail.

Some good stuff here that I'd like to write more about.

That Islamic Center in New York City -
Michael Berube: Conservatives Offer Compromise on Ground Zero Mosque

David Shorr on twisting the argument.

I was thinking of titling this post "Fifteen Minutes Hate Edition," but both of these hates have been going on much, much longer than that. Would be nice to limit them to fifteen minutes.

Quote of the Day

"If we do not change the common dwelling, we shall not absorb in it the other cultures that we can no longer dominate, and we shall be forever incapable of accommodating in it the environment we can no longer control... It is up to us to change our ways of changing."

- Bruno Latour from We Have Never Been Modern (Nous n'avons jamais eté modernes: Essais d'anthropologie symmétrique)

Bits and Pieces - August 17, 2010

New START will get our inspectors back into Russian nuclear bases. Hear that, Republicans?

Turkmenistan opens up a bit more.

Zenpundit summarizes the Chicago Boyz posts on Afghanistan 2050, including mine.

A bunch of good commentary on the Cordoba House brouhaha:
Two mosques, founded in 1970 and 1985, are already within several blocks of the proposed center. Plus a couple of other good links from Joe Klein. The Roger Simon piece is confirmatory evidence for my theory that sarcasm works extraordinarily poorly on the Web.

Steven Walt weighs in.

9/11 (with Allen Ginsberg in mind) Via.

Attacking Iran - Continued

I am becoming convinced that the noise about an attack on Iran - whether by Israel or the US - is primarily about Israel's concerns about the balance of power in the Middle East. Israel's nuclear arsenal of 100-200 bombs is now an open secret, despite Israel's policy of strategic ambiguity.

That policy once served stability in the Middle East, but hanging onto it and other features of a mythical past are serving Israel ill. Israel's past, in fact, was not so good; it has always been at war with its neighbors or in a state of tension, owing to the manner of its beginning in 1948. That can be attributed to the colonial state of mind of the British, but it is Israel that must figure out a way to live in that geography.

The idea of a land of milk and honey, and the myth (and, to some degree, reality) of the heroic kibbutniks who began the development of that land must be part of the inability or unwillingness to face the present and likely future of Israel. But turning to war will hardly fulfill these myths.

Continuing the response to Jeffrey Goldberg's beating of the war drums, Yossi Alpher points out that it's hardly plausible that the Israeli government officials Goldberg interviewed didn't have some publicity in mind, as Goldberg claims, along with a number of other good observations.

Sam Sasan Shoamenesh suggests that Iran's joining the International Criminal Court could be a game-changer. I tend to doubt this; the United States has stayed out of the ICC, and resurrecting this issue will not play well within US politics, particularly when the right is doing all it can to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment. Overlaying another of their bugaboos might occasion a break in the very fabric of reality, as Tom Tomorrow portrayed this week.

But I do agree that the negotiations with Iran need to be moved to a different issue. There is genuinely a problem in knowing which Iran is speaking on any given day, and there needs to be some way to stabilize this. On the other side, there has been too much focus too narrowly on the nuclear program, with little clarity as to what actions on Iran's part are unacceptable. Joshua Pollack makes an attempt at definitions, but it will have to be the parties to the negotiation who decide and let each other know.

On Having It Too Good

I'm a member of an organizational board that has been asking why we're doing some of the things we're doing. We have an exceptionally competent operating organization, so some of our monitoring seems superfluous when things are going so well. But it could be that if people expect to have to report on what they are doing, they may do a better job at it.

We really live good lives in America, most of us. And much of that good is in absences: of polio, diphtheria, and whooping cough for just a few things. Some of us are old enough to have personal experience with friends dying from those diseases or of hearing horror stories from older relatives of what those diseases are like. But others have lived only in a world in which those diseases are absent. So the probability of side effects from the vaccines that prevent those diseases looms larger for them. So diphtheria and whooping cough are on the rise in the United States among the unvaccinated.

Or Kevin Drum's blithe acceptance of Matt Yglesias's belief that barbers need not be licensed. It took five comments to bring out the reason for licensing: sanitation. Barbers and hairdressers use sharp instruments that can carry blood-borne diseases. They use combs that can transmit skin diseases. We don't have those problems because licensing requires sanitation in hair-dressing establishments.

Or those banking regulations that seemed so unnecessary in the 1990s...

I suppose there will always be an ebb and flow. Humans so easily learn to take good things for granted and then look at this silly structure that brought the good things and find it superfluous when it is working properly. But if we've learned anything over the past decade or so, it should be that the structures that work best make themselves seem superfluous and that that is not a reason for disassembling them.

Update: The Beloit College Mindset List for this year's college first-year students. An indicator of how things change.

A Little Reminder Re the Cordoba Issue

I'm constantly amazed that we even have to repeat such things. The NY Times:

Like President George W. Bush before him, President Obama warned against linking all followers of Islam to terrorists. “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam — it is a gross distortion of Islam,” he rightly said. It is our tolerance of others, he said, “that quintessentially American creed,” that stands in contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001...

Too many Republican leaders are determined to whip up as much false controversy and anguish as they can, right through November. Some Democrats will cave. We were disturbed on Monday when a spokesman for the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said that Mr. Reid “thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.”

Mr. Obama and all people of conscience need to push back hard. Defending all Americans’ right to worship — and their right to build places to worship — is fundamental to who we are.

Pakistan

Every day there are smallish articles in the newspapers about Pakistan's floods. I can't imagine why it isn't more of a big deal.

The government in Pakistan is not strong, and its president was out of the country and seemingly indifferent to the floods when they first occurred. Pakistan is part of the fighting in Afghanistan, with the extremely difficult terrain in its northwest provinces open to Taliban fighters from Afghanistan. It is something of an ally to the United States, although some of its government also seems to be something of an ally to the Taliban.

The first case of cholera has been identified, and there will be more.

The United States has repurposed some of its military helicopters from Afghanistan to flood aid in Pakistan, although I can't find a report with today's dateline.

Eric Martin makes a good case for more aid from the US. But it's an uphill slog against an American public that sees aid as ten percent of the budget when it's actually far less than one percent. And we currently have a Republican Party that sees its future in whipping up xenophobia and isolationism. Um, except when they can promote wars.

Pakistan's floods are an enormous disaster. Here are some statistics. I've added comparisons to the United States to give some context.

At least 1,294 persons confirmed dead and 1,366 injured.

A total of 415,862 houses destroyed or partially damaged.

Total area of land affected: 2,698,041 acres of which 2,250,409 had standing crops. In a country of 796,095 sq km, that's 1.3% and 1.1% of the land area. (Numbers not in the Eurasia Review article are from the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia land area and population.) Pakistan's arable land is 24.4% of its total, so that's 4.5% of its arable land affected.

Other reports are of as many as 20 million people displaced. That's 11.3% of the population.

Translating that to the equivalent in the United States, it's 127,747 square kilometers affected, about the size of the entire state of Louisiana, not just the New Orleans area. It's about 35 million people, or the population of the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, and Illinois. Or we might just consider that it would be all the land for miles on either side of the Mississippi River, but with much denser population than that land actually has.

More needs to be done for Pakistan. Now. We can't afford not to.

Bits and Pieces - August 16, 2010

This could be the answer to this. The Nudge Blog collects ways in which a small action can have large consequences in citizen or consumer behavior. I find this particularly mystifying, but encouraging for improving people's eating habits, for example.

Fred Kaplan's big interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Reconstructing the Titanic.

Ezra Klein asks the right questions about an attack on Iran.

Bits and Pieces - August 15, 2010

The Los Angeles Times has been having some good opinion columns on the Prop 8 decision. Here are two: Erwin Chemerinsky on who has standing to appeal the decision and Michael Klarman on whether the Supreme Court is likely to feel it's too far ahead of public opinion.

It's always puzzled me that we pay lip service to the importance of parenthood and actually support it so poorly. Family values, anyone?

Another conservative removes himself from the Fourteenth Amendment nonsense.

Baby bear saved from plastic jar.

More on (not) attacking Iran from M. J. Rosenberg and Juan Cole.

China begins to open up. A very little.

Tamarillos

Appeasement

Paul Kennedy offers us an outstanding historical analysis. He looks at how appeasement has been used and appeared in various times; that it has not always been a bad thing, opprobrium to be hurled at one's opponents, but rather a useful tactic to keep one's nation focused on its priorities.

Just as importantly, he sets out how the world must have looked to British statesmen at the end of the 1930s, and their choices. History, in retrospect, looks different than does the current situation, because in reading history we know how things turned out. This is why the comparisons of Iran (or wherever) to Nazi Germany are foolishly overbroad. We don't know how it turns out with Iran. And how it turns out also depends on what we do or don't do, but we don't know how much.

There's a lot there. Read the whole thing.

And a couple of relevant bits and pieces:
On Iran, by Trita Parsi

And China, by Jamie K.

Bits and Pieces - August 12, 2010

Ezra Klein has some good graphs today: Who can we blame for job losses? and The Bush plan versus the Obama plan in one chart.

And one of these regions is not like the others.

Page van der Linden on Obama's nuclear budget.

One model of nuclear weapon is no more. This seems to be the first time the Department of Energy has announced something like this.

Six essential questions about the deficit, Wall Street, and Washington.

In this particular case, men remain far more trapped in their traditional gender roles than women. I think that this is generally true. Post for another day.

Some good news on the international scene.

What Sergeant James Crowley did wrong when he arrested Henry Lewis Gates.

Yellow Cake, Guantanamo

Photo: Richard Perry / NY Times (link via)

Afghanistan 2050: The Game-Changer

Chicago Boyz is hosting a symposium on Afghanistan 2050. The ground rules were to post a relevant section from a history book in 2050 and explain how we got there. My contribution is now up, and I'm reposting it here.

The Afghanistan War, 2001 – 2011
The Pakistan floods of August 2010 were the turning point. Very quietly, South Africa’s Ambassador Abdul S. Minty detached himself from an International Atomic Energy Agency delegation visiting Israel to deliver a letter from Nelson Mandela to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Appendix XIX; reproduced at the end of this post). The letter urged Netanyahu to lead an effort to bring aid to Pakistan. The stated purpose was to improve Israel’s image in the world and its relations with Turkey in particular, but Mandela’s intention also was to distract Netanyahu and Israel more generally from its fixation on Iran’s nuclear program.

Pakistan, as a central player in the Afghan war, was focused largely on its perceived enemy, India, in the same way that Israel was focused on Iran. India focused on China and Pakistan, and Iran on Israel. At the time of the floods, India and Iran were developing an allliance relative to Afghanistan which would have made Pakistan feel boxed in.

It might have been expected that Afghanistan’s immediate neighbors, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan would have led the way to a settlement. But these two-party grudge matches, state weakness, and rivalries of the various parties with the United States made it difficult to forge the multilateral relations that would prove necessary for peace. The Mandela letter changed that.

Netanyahu began talks immediately with Turkey and Russia to provide aid to Pakistan. Within a week, the first shipments and military helicopters began to arrive. Meanwhile, the United States was diverting some of its military equipment from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Netanyahu then took a risk and sent Tzipi Livni as a special envoy to China and India. China was already providing aid to Pakistan, but Livni’s purpose was to prepare China’s leaders for India’s entry into the aid program. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States volunteered their help. India brought Iran into the relief effort.

Pakistan’s government, preoccupied with the floods, severed relations with the Taliban. After the emergency had been dealt with and the situation in Pakistan stabilized, the helpers realized that their former enemies could be worked with. The United States and Russia immediately called a conference of the neighbors, plus Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which resulted in the Treaty of Isfahan in late 2011, ending the hostilities in Afghanistan and assigning Iran, Pakistan, and India major roles in stabilizing the country. Continuing talks resulted in a settlement between Pakistan and India on Jammu and Kashmir.

….

The Treaty of Ashkabat, which makes southwestern Asia into a nuclear-weapons-free zone, is expected to come into force in 2054. Israel is already converting its complex at Dimona to an IAEA fuel production center. Iran has sent its fissionable materials to the IAEA’s Angarsk nuclear fuel production complex. Both internationally-run complexes will convert the materials to fuel for reactors in the region. Negotiations are beginning on a Southwest Asia free-trade zone; Dubai is leading the first round.

from Southwest Asia’s Remarkable Century, 1940-2050; Svetlana M. Alekseeva, Lev D. Cohen, Courtney R. Manning, and Bashir R. Asad, Chapter 26.

My reasoning: Game-changers are infrequent in history, and it’s tempting to use one as a deus ex machina. I’ve probably made this one go too far too quickly, but game-changers are by nature unpredictable.

Two examples from the last century are the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community and the breakup of the Soviet Union. The first has grown into a partially unified Europe, certainly a game change from the constantly warring continent of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second is recent enough that it can’t be evaluated as fully, but fifteen independent and reasonably stable countries are developing in ways that they couldn’t earlier.

Game-changers don’t come from nowhere. Both of those examples arose out of circumstances that couldn’t continue: Europe’s destruction by war and the economic devastation that the Soviet system inflicted. External factors contributed: the Marshall Plan and the American arms buildup. But ultimately, decisions had to be made internally: the formation of the ECSC and, most likely, Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of perestroika and glasnost, which could serve as cover and a peaceful means for revolutionaries in the republics. We would probably be seeing more rapid and positive movement from the breakup of the Soviet Union if the United States had supported it in the way it did Europe’s transformation.

The game-changer I’ve posited, Israel’s leading a relief effort for Pakistan’s current disaster, has some of those characteristics. The situation in southwest Asia, unstable in multiple dimensions with multiple antipathies, cannot continue without dreadful consequences, which could even include nuclear exchanges. South Africa has some affinities with Israel, but it is outside the current group of countries pressuring Israel in various ways. Ultimately, though, the decisions will have to come from the countries in the region: Pakistan to prize internal stability over its enmity with India, Afghanistan to prize development over regionalism, Iran to prize world integration over regional domination. The larger powers surrounding the region, mainly Russia and China, have to recognize that the current situation is untenable. And Israel must realize that it will have to live with its neighbors and stabilize its internal situation.

Another characteristic of game-changers is that they address multiple, intertwined problems. State weakness, poor governance, and a nuclear arms race are some of the problems of Southwest Asia. The bilateral rivalries and absence of candor in discussions of the issues have precluded lasting solutions.

This is not the only game-changer possible, just what this week brings. Opportunities arise constantly. But reaching out to help is unifying and healing for those who reach out as well as those who are helped.

Appendix XIX: The Mandela – Netanyahu Letter

August 10, 2010

Nelson Mandela
Mandela House
107 Central Street
HOUGHTON, 2198
South Africa

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu
Tel Aviv
Israel

My dear Bibi:

I retain fond memories of our last meeting. We and our countries hold so much in common.

I have a small suggestion for you that could go far. Your country, like mine at one time, feels embattled and endangered. The world is critical of many of your internal problems in ways that seem unhelpful. The same word, apartheid, has even spoken.

At such a time, it may help to look beyond, to one's religion. There are many desperate needs in the world, but one is particularly urgent just now: Pakistan’s damage from their floods. Millions of people have been displaced and crops ruined. Starvation and disease await.

Israel is well-placed to lead in providing aid. Israel has a friend, Turkey, who has recently sponsored humanitarian aid to Gaza. Let those ships bring aid to Pakistan, and let Israel join with them to heal the breach between two friends.

But don’t let it stop there. Your statesmanship can reach beyond your region. You have friends in other countries in Europe and elsewhere. Bring them into the action.

The United States, Israel’s great friend and ally, is beginning to recognize its humanitarian obligations to its other ally, Pakistan. Let there be an outpouring among the nations to support Pakistan in this difficult time.

South Africa pledges its help.

Best wishes from your friend,

Nelson Mandela

Bits and Pieces - August 11, 2010

Tonight and tomorrow are the big nights for the Perseid meteors. I haven't seen a lot so far, but apparently others have. Update: Perfectly clear until sunset, then a thin veil of cloud all night.

Ben Nelson backs New START. Even without insisting on six new strategic bomber bases in Nebraska.

Senators representing their parties, not their states.

Progress in the West Bank.

Managed ignorance.

Things that should not co-exist with other things.

Jeffrey Goldberg and Bibi Netanyahu Would Like the US to Bomb Iran

That, it seems to me and to Steven Walt, to be the short version of Jeffrey Goldberg's Atlantic article.

There's not much point in working through Goldberg's article in detail. Most of it has been said before and discussed before. Flynt Leverett and Hilary Mann Leverett give the conventional responses. Iran says it is already digging graves for Americans, but I think that was in response to something from last week.

Steve Clemons has some meat in his response, as does Steve Hynd. I may come back to these two, which deserve more discussion.

More links here.

For me, though, Bernard Avishai provided the definitive reason why neither Israel nore the United States should attack Iran. Before I explain that, some background. Israel is small enough in land area that any retaliation by Iran will wreak severe damage, missile defenses notwithstanding. The attack itself, whether by Israel or the United States, will end any special position Israel still retains in the eyes of the world. Goldberg:

When the Israelis begin to bomb the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, the formerly secret enrichment site at Qom, the nuclear-research center at Esfahan, and possibly even the Bushehr reactor, along with the other main sites of the Iranian nuclear program, a short while after they depart en masse from their bases across Israel—regardless of whether they succeed in destroying Iran’s centrifuges and warhead and missile plants, or whether they fail miserably to even make a dent in Iran’s nuclear program—they stand a good chance of changing the Middle East forever; of sparking lethal reprisals, and even a full-blown regional war that could lead to the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Iranians, and possibly Arabs and Americans as well; of creating a crisis for Barack Obama that will dwarf Afghanistan in significance and complexity; of rupturing relations between Jerusalem and Washington, which is Israel’s only meaningful ally; of inadvertently solidifying the somewhat tenuous rule of the mullahs in Tehran; of causing the price of oil to spike to cataclysmic highs, launching the world economy into a period of turbulence not experienced since the autumn of 2008, or possibly since the oil shock of 1973; of placing communities across the Jewish diaspora in mortal danger, by making them targets of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks, as they have been in the past, in a limited though already lethal way; and of accelerating Israel’s conversion from a once-admired refuge for a persecuted people into a leper among nations.

Avishai gives the reason this must not happen:

What makes Israel unique--the cultural adventure that it was and is--is not simply Jewish military power, but the evolution of a modern national home, the development of a secular Jewish life, the fusing of Jewish civilization with liberal values--the "Jewish and democratic" thing...

And yet the people who made this modern Israeli culture had first learned to draw. They knew the liturgy, they knew Torah--that is, a whole world evoked by the Hebrew language. The poet Yehuda Amichai had to know the prayer for the dead, God full of mercy, El Maleh Rahamim, before he could give us the ironic poem, "God full of mercy / Were God not so full of mercy / Then there would be mercy in the world / And not just in Him." For emancipation to be poignant, there has to be an ancien regime. Otherwise, there is nothing but abstraction.

An attack on Iran would completely alter the meaning of this ancien regime, for Israel and the world. And Israel and the world would be poorer for it.

Today's Topic: Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran

Jeffrey Goldberg's much-anticipated contribution to the hysteria about Iran is now posted. Steve Clemons provides a gloss. I may have something to say after I read all that.

Bits and Pieces - August 10, 2010

Walter Pincus documents Republican hypocrisy on New START.

Would a carbon tax spur innovation?

More on Iran.

No, no, no! Conservapedia hates the theory of relativity because it gives rise to relativism! (And, um, it's theorem, not theorum.)

Just Wondering

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is making some, possibly pre-emptive, moves toward budget-cutting.

Steven Walt is only one of the many pointing out that whatever Gates's proposals and proclivities toward budget-cutting, Congress will work to preserve defense spending and jobs back at home. This is why, even when the Defense Department proposes cutting some behemoth mechanism that is suitable only against the Soviet Union on the plains of Central Europe, the funding for that mechanism stays in the budget and is perhaps increased.

What I'm wondering is whether it would be possible for some capable and shrewd budget analyst, whether working for the administration, a think-tank, union, political party, or other organization, to work out tradeoffs for those dinosaur programs. Funding for the states is badly needed now just to keep things from getting worse and laying off teachers, firefighters, and police. But how about using the dinosaur funding for loans and other incentives for green technology startups that could use the folks that have been building that military hardware?

A Thought on Birthright

How about we do eliminate citizenship by virtue of being born in the US? In this case, all children in the US would be born illegal and would therefore be limited in their use of medical services, schools, and social security of any kind. We could ensure that these uber-anchor children do not benefit from any social services until they at least learn to speak English. This would save the country billions. We would also then have a merit system in which children would have to earn the right to be US citizens, going through the long, and sometimes decade-long, process of getting citizenship. Prior to citizenship (or denial), of course, they would have to demonstrate sufficient American-ness in the process of getting a green card. Sadly, some children, perhaps most, would not be eligible for the honor and would thus be sent back to the third world country of their birth.

Rambai

Bits and Pieces - August 8, 2010

Albert Einstein on the meaning of this atomic weekend (Friday was the 65th anniversary of Hiroshima, tomorrow Nagasaki).

I will miss Tony Judt and his writing very much.

What religion is doing to ministers and, perhaps, why.

Jonathan Capehart shares yet one more of his fears with us to emphasize that either we have total naked screening of all passengers or all airplanes will fall out of the sky.

Dana Milbank continues to try to be a responsible columnist.

Gary Sick on Iran. And the Iranian lawyer who defended that woman who was to be stoned seeks asylum in Norway. (h/t to Parvati Roma for the second.)

Could this be part of the reason sperm counts are going down?

The state of California and the city of San Francisco are coming down on the side of gay marriage in the Prop 8 case. And how it feels to a newly-married, long-together couple. Meanwhile, Fox News finds that a large majority of "the people" think that Prop 8 is unconstitutional. Let's hear that from all those pundits who keep telling us what "the people" think. Sarah?

Bits and Pieces - August 6, 2010

Experts line up for the New START Treaty. Repubs don't care.

Big year for Perseid meteors! Next week is the max, but they're starting already. (h/t to RG)

Bats going extinct in northeastern US.

Infrastructure going extinct, too.

Is Google a Little Bit Evil?

Having experienced the Cerro Grande Fire from close-up (and evacuated twice), I have a lot of sympathy for Los Alamos's Russian sister city, Sarov.

The Media Filter

Two articles today in the MSM about how the MSM filters our news.

Paul Krugman:

One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.

He's talking about Paul Ryan. The whole thing is worth reading.

When Ryan's proposal came out, I skipped over the usual voucherization (read privatization) of Social Security and other Republican memes, but what really caught my non-economist's eye was his proposal that raising interest rates would pull the money that corporations are sitting on out for investment. Um, if that money gets more return sitting there than it currently does, that will motivate alternatives? Even I can see what's wrong with that. But, as Krugman points out, very few if any of the financial reporters picked up on that rather obvious nonsense, nor the staleness of the rest of Ryan's proposal. They had a narrative, and they were running with it.

And here's Robert Kagan's read on President Obama's briefing on Iran:

It is here that this very straightforward briefing took a bizarre and amusing turn. Some of the journalists present, upon hearing the president's last point about the door still being open to Iran, decided that he was signaling a brand-new diplomatic initiative. They started peppering Obama with questions to ferret out exactly what "new" diplomatic actions he was talking about and, after the president left, they continued probing the senior officials. This put the officials in an awkward position: They didn't want to say flat out that the administration was not pursuing a new diplomatic initiative because this might suggest that the administration was not interested in diplomacy at all. But they made perfectly clear -- in a half-dozen artful formulations -- that, no, there was no new diplomatic initiative in the offing. As one bemused senior official later remarked to me, if the point of the briefing had been diplomacy, then the administration would have brought its top negotiators to the meeting, instead of all the people in charge of putting the squeeze on Iran. Some journalists nevertheless left with the impression that the big "news" out of their meeting with the president was a possible new round of diplomacy.

I left feeling sympathy for this and every administration. Apparently, even spoon-feeding doesn't work. The "news" out of this briefing was that the administration wanted everyone to know how tough it was being on Iran. I was especially struck by the remarks of a senior official, who pointed out that one effect of Iran's growing economic difficulties has been strikes in the bazaars. The student and opposition demonstrations of the past year have been political, but these protests are about economics. If the two ever join, this official suggested, that would pose a real threat to the regime. An interesting point -- though not to the assembled journalists.

Once again, they had a narrative, and they were running with it.

Update: More on Ryan from Krugman.

And here's another bunch of e-mails and other material exposing an unambiguous conspiracy to alter the balance of our media. Let's see how much play this gets in the MSM!

In Honor of Hiroshima Day

All the nuclear explosions since then. Fortunately, only one has been in war (Nagasaki). Hisao Hashimoto has done a real service in preparing this video.

US Detainee Black Site Transfer Policy

Another small bit of evidence to throw on a very large pile that the Bush administration actively subverted, as a matter of policy, the laws of the United States and international society.

Four of the nation's most highly valued terrorist prisoners were secretly moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2003, years earlier than has been disclosed, then whisked back into overseas prisons before the Supreme Court could give them access to lawyers, The Associated Press has learned.

The transfer allowed the U.S. to interrogate the detainees in CIA "black sites" for two more years without allowing them to speak with attorneys or human rights observers or challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Had they remained at the Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have been afforded those rights.

"This was all just a shell game to hide detainees from the courts," said Jonathan Hafetz, a Seton Hall University law professor who has represented several detainees.

Removing them from Guantanamo Bay underscores how worried President George W. Bush's administration was that the Supreme Court might lift the veil of secrecy on the detention program. It also shows how insistent the Bush administration was that terrorists must be held outside the U.S. court system.

Read the whole thing. It's a solid discussion of the global network of black sites - from Guantánamo to Poland to Thailand - and administration attempts to stay one step ahead of US law and federal and likely US Supreme Court decisions, not to mention its rather perfunctory attempts to avoid scrutiny of international law. (Except that the article, like most media and official accounts, continues to assert that Abu Zubaydah, who was tortured repeatedly, was a top Al Qaeda member. Today this is known to be almost certainly false. Start here and move on to here for more on this.).

Yet More Bits and Pieces - August 5, 2010

The strangeness of Dr. Kevin Pezzi, Breitbart's anti-Sherrod writer.

Bad times in Russia - and for the rest of the world that eats grain.

UFOs in Britain.

More aurora - but too far north for me.

Could we do without mosquitos?

Bending the curve.

And I probably should add in the good news from yesterday and today, which everyone has heard by now: U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker struck down the Proposition 8 takeaway of marriage rights for gay Americans. It seems that we can't vote to take away the rights of people we don't like. Unfortunately, this decision will be appealed by people who want to do that. And congratulations to Justice Elena Kagan! The Senate managed to squeak some business through before heading off to vacation. I'm glad to see two women now on the Supreme Court.

Iran and the Rest of the World

President Obama yesterday gave a briefing to a small group of reporters in which he said that Iran seems to be becoming more uncomfortable under the sanctions that have been imposed on it. Here are the reports from Mark Ambinder, Jeffrey Goldberg, Joe Klein, and David Ignatius, all of whom attended the briefing.

Obama's diplomacy is totally different from what we saw under George Bush. Bush simplified the world down into good and evil and convinced us that strong and simple gestures would win the day. But effective diplomacy is a series of actions, small to medium-sized, hardly ever large, that all move toward a goal. It takes time, and, because it works at the margins rather than up the center, may seem irrelevant.

The sanctions against Iran, in this light, are actually a pretty big deal, but they were put together through a number of small actions that lined up China and Russia to participate.

Another characteristic of effective diplomacy is that not all of it is public, in order to allow changes in policy without loss of face. Further, everything is connected to everything else, so overall changes have to be weighed for specific actions. A big example of this is the rise of Iran with the downfall of Saddam Hussein, apparently not considered in 2003.

Iran has made a few moves lately that seem to indicate it would like further discussion. A week or two ago, it announced that it was ready to go ahead with the same deal that Turkey and Brazil brokered and the United States rejected. A non-starter, but a signal that negotiations might be possible. In yesterday's meeting, Obama mentioned feelers from high Iranian officials. According to Ambinder, President Ahmadinejad made a Bush-like offer on television to meet President Obama, man to man.

Brazil's President Lula da Silva last week implored his friend, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, to release to Brazil a woman condemned to death by stoning. Iran rejected Lula's offer.

Neither the Obama meeting with the press nor Lula's plea should be taken simply at face value. Obama is not only informing the press and the American public, he is sending a message to Iran. Likewise, Lula's offer could be a testing of the waters; If Iran had replied positively, that would be a very good signal for negotiations. The rejection says that some things haven't changed. It could also be an attempt to set a wedge between the conservative mullahs and those in the government who would like for Iran to rejoin the world.

The United States is very likely encouraging the continuing participation of Brazil and Turkey in side interactions with Iran. Brazil has an interest in helping to keep Iran's nuclear program within bounds short of weapons; Brazil itself has an enrichment capability that it would like to maintain and a peaceful face on that program that would become less credible if Iran moves too close to a weapons capability. Turkey has an interest in keeping Iran's power in the region from becoming too unbalanced. Obama has said that the United States can no longer operate in the world as an isolated power and needs others to do their part. The problem with the earlier agreement between Iran and these two nations seems to have been in the timing: the typical move by Iran just before action is taken against it to defuse that action. Again, we are not seeing the entirety of these interactions.

The apparent attempt at assassinating Ahmadinejad is undoubtedly being considered by those who develop American tactics. Who was behind it and what were their politics? Are there likely to be others? What is Ahmadinejad's reaction? The mullahs'?

And then there's the overall Arab reaction. Marc Lynch analyzes the annual survey of Arab public opinion conducted by Shibley Telhami and finds little support there for an attack on Iran. But the results, it seems to me, support the idea that a peaceful limitation of Iran's nuclear program would boost Obama's standing in the Arab world.

Update: Interesting...Robert Kagan gives a different point of view on Obama's press get-together, more consistent with my interpretation. From what he says, other reporters heavily overlaid their preconceptions on what Obama was saying, something I'm seeing in other places as well.

More from Steven Walt.

And Christiane Amanpour.

Bits and Pieces, Helmut Potpourri Edition

The "Agrarian vision," by a leading agricultural ethicist.

Sustainability Is Inevitable. What does that mean? Especially given the hundreds of definitions of sustainability?

The other Gulf stain - the giant hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

How to Feed a Hungry World - a symposium at Nature.

Debate on climate and democratization, mostly in German, of course.

Greedy rich bastards. Generous rich bastards.

Limited free will. (via)

Final thoughts on the World Cup - why soccer explains nothing.

Frank Rich in the NY Review of Books on Pres. Obama's achievements/short5comings.

Correct/incorrect shoe-tying. (via)

68 Fantastic British Names Gathered While Watching BBC Credits Over the Years.

And, finally, a new (for me) discovery of a brilliant, charming, hilarious blog going onto the blog roll: Christoph Niemann's Abstract City Blog at the NY Times. Images from there.

Surinam Cherries

Bits and Pieces - New START Edition

Given that the Republicans have been responsible for most of the arms control treaties and their ratification over the past half-century, it seems strange that they now feel the need to end the possibility of monitoring Russian nukes and eventually going on to decrease the excessive Russian numbers of tactical nukes (about 2000, in addition to the nukes restricted in the New START Treaty). But that's what they are doing in their frenzy to deny President Barack Obama any steps forward, even when they're damaging national security in the process.

Here's what others are saying about that:

Michael Tomasky

Joe Cirincione

Max Bergmann

And here's more of the Republican nonsense. Consultative commissions are a part of every treaty. They're designed to deal with glitches that always come up without having to go to the full-up negotiations like those that developed the treaty. Perhaps Goldsmith and Rabkin just haven't been aware of this? Or, more likely, they're jumping on the Republican bandwagon. Update: More about just how crazy this is from Jeffrey Lewis.

And just a wild speculation in response to Steve Benen's question:

Why would Steele want face time with foreign diplomats?

Maybe he's hearing how crazy those diplomats are afraid America's becoming, judging from the Republican response to New START. Yeah, I know that's far too rational. Probably just looking for a new job.

Not In The News Today

This is a very important article.

In it, Fulton Armstrong, a former high-ranking intelligence professional, says that pressure from the White House was the full and total reason for the intelligence community's endorsement in 2002 of the idea that Iraq had WMD. He says it quite bluntly in criticizing Thomas Powers's review of a book by Robert Jervis that finds that the intelligence community just got it wrong. Powers details why Armstrong's statement is important.

The reason why you're not seeing much about this in the MSM is inherent in what Armstrong and Powers say. Check it out.

Mystical Cheese

Photo via Clonehenge

The inventor of the Cheez Doodle, Morrie Yohai, has passed away at the age of 90 (via). Mr. Yohai's invention occurred after taking over his father's snack food business in the Bronx after World War II (during which he was a Marine pilot in the South Pacific).

"We were looking for another snack item,... We were fooling around and found out there was a machine that extruded cornmeal and it almost popped like popcorn."

Yohai said they decided to chop the cornmeal product into small pieces and coat it with cheese....

When Mr. Yohai later sold the company he became,

...group vice president in charge of snacks... his job involved sitting around a conference table with other executives and selecting the toys inside Cracker Jack boxes.

Morrie (if I may) must have swept the prizes in that parlor game (or more precisely, in my experience, dive-bar game) in which one competes with friends over who has had the oddest or coolest job at some point in their life. I once knew someone who claimed he had a job putting the arms and legs on GI Joes - consider what that job might be titled in today's bureaucratic-euphemism-mad work world. Inventing Cheez Doodles is a top-flight candidate for the prize as well. But choosing the toys for Cracker Jack boxes...?!

Morrie later became a teacher and college administrator, and as a philanthropist was founder of the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival.

Yet later, Morrie became a Jewish mystic and poet.

You have most likely never heard of Morrie Yohai. I certainly hadn't until this week and mostly avoid Cheez Doodles. But I think it worth a humble nod of respect for the life of someone who invented a famous snack food, flew airplanes in the South Pacific, chose the toys I and millions of others pulled from Cracker Jack boxes at ballgames, published two books of poetry, and ultimately pondered the depths of Jewish mysticism.

Bits and Pieces - August 3, 2010

Anne Applebaum wants to know specifically what programs those who would cut the national budget would cut.

Bob Inglis (SC, R) is punished for not kowtowing to the Tea Party.

Just how broken is the Senate? De rigeur to link this today, but it really is a good article.

A Republican who isn't stupid or venal: Michael Bloomberg's speech on the Cordoba Society's proposed mosque in New York City. Update: Here's the whole speech. The other was the best I could do at the time.

Steven Walt on nuclear weapons and deterrence.

The New York Times issues a correction.

More on the postponement of the committee vote on New START, from Senator Richard Lugar (IN, R) and McClatchy.

Aurora likely tonight, but probably not for me. The sun has been mysteriously quiet for some time, but it's been frying off some big clouds of particles the last few days. I'll bet we could make this into a disaster story if we tried.

Quote of the Day

Michael Krepon:

The Senate’s consent to ratify New START matters a great deal. To understand why, consider the likely consequences if irreconcilable Republicans are able to block ratification. Their arguments for doing so are so strained that foreign capitals would be justified in concluding that Washington has lost its bearings. America’s standing in the world would take a dive. Friends and allies would count less on Washington. Troublemakers would have more room to maneuver. The currency of international power would continue to flow towards Beijing, and there would be no agreed rules for reductions and verification arrangements for the two largest nuclear arsenals.

Plus the Republicans will be repudiating their long history of developing and supporting arms control measures.

Update: John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has delayed the committee vote until September 15. The most likely reason for this is that they don't have the overall Senate votes for ratification.

A Documented Menace

At some point empirical reality suggests that the threat to police and others in the US is not from "suspected illegal immigrants," with one alleged Arizona case pointed to over and over for the past several months. Rather, an actual and often expressed threat comes from right wing American kooks arming themselves in the name of fantasies concocted in their own conspiratorial minds and really truly murdering police and others (as Homeland Security warned in this document from last year .pdf).

Yet another case. And so on. And so forth. Etc.

BP Blowout - Continued

NOLA.com has a nice interactive graphic timeline of the BP Blowout. Lots to click on in the sidebar as well.

EPA also released results of its second round of toxicity testing on oil and dispersant and found that the dispersants alone were less toxic than the dispersant-oil mixture. Oil alone was found to be more toxic to mysid shrimp than the eight dispersants when tested alone. Oil alone had similar toxicity to mysid shrimp as the dispersant-oil mixtures, with one dispersant exception. Long-term effects can't be measured this quickly, of course, but EPA tested for endocrine activity and found none, one possible route for long-term effects.

There's been a lot of hoo-ha about dispersant toxicity. I am wary of claims of "toxicity," because often it's not used carefully, as I pointed out the other day. Some of the early hoo-ha was based on the material safety data sheets (MSDSs). I've found that MSDSs always err on the side of caution. And there are lots of things that shouldn't be eaten: furniture polish, cleaning products, even salt by the tablespoonful. MSDSs for them would look pretty scary too.

The dilution of the dispersant-oil mixture is going to be enormous. And bacteria eat the stuff. There will be concern that in eating it, they will use up oxygen, and the Gulf of Mexico already has a dead zone, where bacteria eating fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi River have already used up the oxygen. So far (don't have a link, sorry), from one source that I thought reliable, there is some oxygen depletion from bacterial action on the dispersant-oil mix, but it's not serious.

Letting all the oil go without dispersant would have resulted in more oiled birds, turtles, and shoreline. That wouldn't have been so good either.

Bits and Pieces - Blogging Edition

It turns out that the Chinese official I mentioned a few days back didn't defect after all.

Notice that I linked to another blog, which linked to a newspaper article. I did that because the other blogger followed up on what he had said earlier, which was what I linked to. Not uncommon practices in the blogosphere, linking and following up, even if the seeming original story was more exciting than the reality.

I haven't ever wanted to be a part of ScienceBlogs, but we link to some of them in "bloggery" in the sidebar. They're a good group, some better than others, and, within a blog, some posts better than others. That's not uncommon in the blogosphere either.

So comes the New York Times media reporter (editor? Hard to find on the Times site) Virginia Heffernan, who is dismayed by the recent dustup at ScienceBlogs and that science blogs sometimes talk about stuff that isn't science. She goes on to recommend more respectable MSM online outlets, a single blogger who has left ScienceBlogs, and a denialist weatherman.

That blogger who left wrote a post in response, and Ms. Heffernan was kind enough to comment on the post. But oh dear, my goodness! (See, I'm not one of those bloggers who use nasty language!)

Ms. Heffernan had no idea that the denialist weatherman was a climate denialist! She just liked the way he wrote and the pretty graphics!

That's the media critic for the NYT. Good job, MSM!

Deltoid and Mike the Mad Biologist have good posts with lots of links.

Toxic

…Words strain,
Crack, and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
- Burnt Norton, T. S. Eliot

I cringe every time I read or hear the word toxic. Once upon a time, I could depend on its meaning, which the Oxford American Dictionary says is

1. Of or caused by poison.
2. Poisonous.

For a bit more background, here’s the definition of toxin, the noun for which toxic is an adjective.

a poisonous substance of animal or vegetable origin, especially one formed in the body by microorganisms.

And a connotation is that a toxin is deadly. Tetanus toxin, for example.

I chose an older source for the definition because I wanted to go back to how I understand the word. Today, for example, the word is thrown around in articles about the dispersant used in the BP Blowout (NYT, LAT), largely because it was used by Representative Edward Markey (D, MA).

I don’t know what he means, and I’m not just being balky. Corexit, the dispersant used, is not of animal or vegetable origin, it’s thoroughly synthetic, and it’s not clear that it’s deadly. So what is it the congressman is trying to say?

Some tests have shown harm to marine life by some components of some versions of Corexit. That seems to be the basis for the congressman’s claims. But “toxic” goes too far for the findings of those tests, as I understand them.

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
- Burnt Norton, T. S. Eliot

I’m not going to defend or attack the use of Corexit. It’s the excessive use of words that bothers me. And other signifiers. Alarms were shut down on the Deepwater rig, which may have contributed to the disaster. But alarms are too often pasted onto a safety program, often by legislators who want a poltical boost, without considering how they should be used. Safety warnings on products likewise. Too many false alarms, and the damn thing is shut off. Stuff on labels tends to be ignored anyway, and if it’s clearly overblown, it’s just ink on paper. That leads to ignoring the real warning signals.

It’s easy to see why toxicis used that way. We have overused it for a long time. Toxic waste, toxic effluent! Anything that might be harmful has the word pasted to it, along with the more figurative uses, which may have been what diluted the word’s meaning in the first place. Toxic talk, toxic behavior!

I’m not sure how many people still feel the connotation of “deadly” in toxic, but it remains strong for me. Perhaps that is part of the reason it is used, to get attention and raise people’s emotions.

It’s time to give it a rest.

Bits and Pieces - Calling Out The Lies Edition

As I've been noting for the past week or so, more and more people, including MSM editorialists, reporters, and conservatives, have been saying in public that the emperor has no clothes many of the things the Republican Party has been telling us are untrue. Here are several more.

Five myths about the Bush tax cuts

David Stockman on the Republican role in generating public debt.

What They’re Not Telling You. The New York Times editorial board notes the hypocrisy of the Republican "debt hawks."

From neocons to crazy-cons

Dwarf Papaya

Ground Zero Mosque Bozo-ery

Krugman has this right in his critique of the clowns at the ADL who wrote the statement on the Ground Zero mosque.

...the key passage — it’s a pretty short statement — is this one:

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain – unnecessarily – and that is not right.

Translation: some people will feel bad if this thing is built, and we need to take these feelings into account, even though proponents “have every right to build at this site.”

So let’s try some comparable cases, OK? It causes some people pain to see Jews operating small businesses in non-Jewish neighborhoods; it causes some people pain to see Jews writing for national publications (as I learn from my mailbox most weeks); it causes some people pain to see Jews on the Supreme Court. So would ADL agree that we should ban Jews from these activities, so as to spare these people pain? No? What’s the difference?

One thing I thought Jews were supposed to understand is that they need to be advocates of universal rights, not just rights for their particular group....

Not even worth addressing what the usual crackpot demagogues have to say on this.