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Nile Gardiner posts on Obama’s latest snub to Israel.
… It is hard to think of another item on the president’s agenda that week which is more important than talks with the Israeli prime minister against the backdrop of the rising threat on the horizon of a nuclear-armed Iran. Significantly the president has reportedly found time to make another appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman during the same time period.
The snub to the Israeli prime minister reflects both Barack Obama’s personal dislike of Benjamin Netanyahu as well as a broader lack of empathy on the part of the Obama administration for Israel. As I’ve noted in previous pieces, the Obama White House and State Department have a long track record of insulting Israel and its leaders amidst significant tensions between Washington and Jerusalem over a range of issues, from Israeli settlements on the West Bank to differences of approach towards the Iranian nuclear threat.
For a revealing insight into Obama’s sneering disdain for the Israeli PM, look no further than this report by Israeli media outlet Ynetnews (based on French sources) following last year’s G-20 summit, which captured the unguarded private views of both the US and French presidents when discussing the Israeli leader: …
Noemie Emery says there is one area where the president excels.
Barack Obama is a wonderful salesman of a singular product: himself. His effect and biography make a spectacular package. Slender and graceful, with a remarkable speaking voice, his facsimiles stare at you from fashion spreads everywhere, while his life story — up from obscure and unlikely beginnings, black and white, Kenya and Kansas, the strange and the all too corny and familiar — is the story of how life should be.
Obama tells his story through his personal medium really well: writing best-selling biographies before he was 40, making himself a senator on the strength of these stories, and then president on the strength of a speech. The upside of this is that he portrays himself beautifully. The downside is that this seems to be all he can do.
In the Illinois state Senate, he voted “present.” In the United States Senate, he sponsored little in the way of real legislation. As president, he has failed so badly to do what he promised that he has been forced to downgrade his slogan from “Yes, We Can!” to “No One Could Have Done It,” to “Maybe We Can’t Do It Yet.” …
Lo and behold, a NY Times columnist thinks buying organic food is as wasteful as recycling. Pickerhead made up the thing about recycling. However, a long time ago John Tierney writing in the Times Magazine suggested recycling is wasteful.
At some point — perhaps it was gazing at a Le Pain Quotidien menu offering an “organic baker’s basket served with organic butter, organic jam and organic spread” as well as seasonally organic orange juice — I found I just could not stomach the “O” word or what it stood for any longer.
Organic has long since become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it and oblivious, in their affluent narcissism, to the challenge of feeding a planet whose population will surge to 9 billion before the middle of the century and whose poor will get a lot more nutrients from the two regular carrots they can buy for the price of one organic carrot.
An effective form of premium branding rather than a science, a slogan rather than better nutrition, “organic” has oozed over the menus, markets and malls of the world’s upscale neighborhood at a remarkable pace. In 2010, according to the Organic Trade Association, organic food and drink sales totaled $26.7 billion in the United States, or about 4 percent of the overall market, having grown steadily since 2000. The British organic market is also large; menus like to mention that bacon comes from pampered pigs at the Happy Hog farm down the road.
In the midst of the fad few questions have been asked. But the fact is that buying organic baby food, a growing sector, is like paying to send your child to private school: It is a class-driven decision that demonstrates how much you love your offspring but whose overall impact on society is debatable.
So I cheered this week when Stanford University concluded, after examining four decades of research, that fruits and vegetables labeled organic are, on average, no more nutritious than their cheaper conventional counterparts. The study also found that organic meats offered no obvious health advantages. And it found that organic food was not less likely to be contaminated by dangerous bacteria like E.coli.
The takeaway from the study could be summed up in two words: Organic, schmorganic. That’s been my feeling for a while. …
And here is the 1996 John Tierney article on the wastefulness of recycling.
AS THEY PUT ON PLASTIC GLOVES FOR THEIR first litter hunt, the third graders knew what to expect. They knew their garbage. It was part of their science curriculum at Bridges Elementary, a public school on West 17th Street in Manhattan. They had learned the Three R’s — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — and discussed how to stop their parents from using paper plates. For Earth Day they had read a Scholastic science publication, “Inside the World of Trash.” For homework, they had kept garbage diaries and drawn color-coded charts of their families’ trash. So they were primed for the field experiment on this May afternoon.
“We have to help the earth,” Natasha Newman explained as she and her classmates dashed around the school collecting specimens. Their science teacher, Linnette Aponte, mediated disputes — “I saw that gum wrapper first!” — and supervised the subsequent analysis of data back in the classroom. The students gathered around to watch her dump out their bags on the floor
Do you see any pattern as I’m emptying it?” Miss Aponte asked.
“Yeah, it stinks.”
“Everybody’s chewing Winterfresh.”
“A lot of paper napkins.”
“It’s disgusting.”
“They’re throwing away a folder. That’s a perfectly good folder!”
“It’s only half a folder.”
“Well, they could find the other half and attach them together.”
Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. “We’ve been learning about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle,” she said, and pointed at the pile. “How does all this make you feel?”
“Baaaad,” the students moaned.
Miss Aponte separated out two bottles, the only items in the pile that could be recycled. She asked what lesson the students had learned. The class sentiment was summarized by Lily Finn, the student who had been so determined to save the half folder: “People shouldn’t throw away paper or anything. They should recycle it. And they shouldn’t eat candy in school.”
Lily’s judgment about candy sounded reasonable, but the conclusion about recycling seemed to be contradicted by the data on the floor. The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a landfill than the two bottles.
Without realizing it, the third graders had beautifully reproduced the results of a grand national experiment begun in 1987 — the year they were born, back when the Three R’s had nothing to do with garbage. That year a barge named the Mobro 4000 wandered thousands of miles trying to unload its cargo of Long Islanders’ trash, and its journey had a strange effect on America. The citizens of the richest society in the history of the planet suddenly became obsessed with personally handling their own waste.
Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense — for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren’t good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations — while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.
The obvious temptation is to blame journalists, who did a remarkable job of creating the garbage crisis, often at considerable expense to their own employers. Newspaper and magazine publishers, whose products are a major component of municipal landfills, nobly led the crusade against trash, and they’re paying for it now through regulations that force them to buy recycled paper — a costly handicap in their struggle against electronic rivals. It’s the first time that an industry has conducted a mass-media campaign informing customers that its own product is a menace to society.
But the press isn’t solely responsible for recycling fervor; the public’s obsession wouldn’t have lasted this long unless recycling met some emotional need. Just as the third graders believed that their litter run was helping the planet, Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental experience, an act of moral redemption. We’re not just reusing our garbage; we’re performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess. Recycling teaches the themes that previous generations of schoolchildren learned from that Puritan classic, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
Andrew Malcolm with late night.
Leno: Bill Clinton says Obama inherited a deeply-damaged economy and if reelected, he’ll inherit an even more deeply-damaged economy.
Conan: President Obama’s campaign donors are promised exclusive access to Joe Biden. And for an extra $10,000, absolutely no access to Joe Biden.
Leno: President Obama moved his big convention speech indoors from a 74,000 seat stadium over the threat of severe weather. A weather phenomenon known as empty seats.
Leno: The good news is China has decided it will loan more money to the U.S. The bad news: The co-signer is Greece.
Leno: Democrat convention at Time Warner Cable Arena and tomorrow at the Bank of America Stadium. Great thinking–the two things Americans love most–banks and cable companies.