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Foreign Policy posted a photo by Jeroen Oerlemans of a young man holding books in the rubble of a building. This is part of a series of war photos you can access by following the link.
…Dutch photojournalist Oerlemans took this photograph while reporting from Tyre, in southern Lebanon, during the 34-day summer war with Israel. “I was just returning from shooting the arrival of some humanitarian aid to the besieged town,” he recalls, “when, right in front of me, a five- or six-story building went up in smoke.” Oerlemans ran toward the wrecked building, where, he says, “I witnessed the first casualties being carried away from the scene. In the smoldering ruins, dazed people were stumbling around, some trying to get themselves together, others frantically pulling others from underneath the rubble.” An air alarm went off, indicating the Israeli bombers might return. “Everyone fled,” Oerlemans says. But this boy remained, “stoically” wandering through the smoke. “We never spoke,” the photographer recalls. “I’m not sure why he was picking up those books.”
In Contentions, Rick Richman discusses Hillary Clinton’s surprise that appeasement has not helped US relations with Iran. Shrugging one’s shoulders is not an acceptable Plan B when dealing with thugs intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. Perhaps she will move past surprise and actually think about what has worked in the past.
In an interview last week with Al Arabiya, Hillary Clinton expressed surprise that “engagement” has failed, since “so many experts” thought it would succeed:
“People say to me all the time, what happened to Iran? … When President Obama came in, he was very clear that he wanted to engage, and that’s what he’s been trying to do — reaching out to the Iranian people, reaching out to the Iranian leadership. And you have to ask yourself, why, when so many experts thought that there would be a positive response to President Obama’s outreach, has there not?”
It’s a puzzler. But who were those experts who thought an outstretched hand, a video, an apology, a private letter, and a speech would cause Iran to slow (much less agree to stop) its nuclear weapons program? How many thought a nine-month period for response would produce anything other than nine months of uninterrupted centrifuge-spinning? …
The Streetwise Professor gives an example of the idiocy of ideology.
There are reports that Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are planning to implement health care deform legislation through a reconciliation procedure that would require only 50 votes (plus Biden’s) to pass the Senate.
Obama assures us that he is not an ideologue. His supporters assert that he is very intelligent. But only an ideologue or an idiot would attempt to use such parliamentary chicanery to force the passage of transformational legislation that will affect the life of every American against the intense opposition of a healthy majority of the electorate.
The immediate political consequences of this action would be devastating to those who take it. The substance is bad enough. But adding procedural insult to substantive injury will intensify the fury of the backlash. An idiot would not know: an ideologue would not care.
But an ideologue would be willing to incur these political costs in order to achieve a deeply held desire to increase vastly the intrusions of the state into our lives, knowing that such a change would be (a) very difficult to reverse, and (b) would fundamentally alter the relationship the citizenry and the state in a way s/he greatly desires; the ideologue would reason that the long term political consequences would be well worth the short term political costs. …
The Streetwise Professor also discusses the more destructive effects of Obama’s version of Obamacare.
Thirteen months into his administration, Obama has deigned to release an outline of his proposal for his signature policy issue: health care “reform.” …
…In a nutshell: it strips out from the pending bills noxious but irrelevant-in-the-scheme-of-things elements like Bribes for Ben; takes the worst elements from the House and Senate bills; and adds (as hard as it is to believe) even more destructive elements.
Two features are particularly destructive: the creation of a body empowered to review and reject insurer premium increases, and taxes on capital income to finance the huge costs of the proposal.
Hard as it is to believe, the Obama proposal is even more costly than the Senate bill; definitive estimates are unavailable (and would be unbelievable in any event) due to the paucity of details, but guesstimates put the cost within hailing distance of a trillion dollars. (Leading me to endorse the wisdom of a bumper sticker I saw: “I hope Obama doesn’t know what comes after trillion.”) …
In Contentions, John Steele Gordon praises Walter Russell Mead’s article on the Tea Party movement.
… I’ve just finished reading Walter Russell Mead’s blog post over at the American Interest on the Tea Party movement. It’s a brilliant piece of work and, indeed, “I wish I’d said that.”
Mead puts the movement firmly in the context of American history, demonstrating the similarity of this movement with previous populist movements in the Jacksonian, Progressive, and New Deal eras. All those movements changed the country profoundly and were anti-elitist in nature. As Mead explains,
The Tea Party movement is the latest upsurge of an American populism that has sometimes sided with the left and sometimes with the right, but which over and over again has upended American elites, restructured our society and forced through the deep political, cultural and institutional changes that from time to time the country needs and which the ruling elites cannot or will not deliver.
While it is way too early to tell how powerful the Tea Party movement will prove to be, it is certainly anti-elitist to the core. But this time, unlike in Jackson’s and Roosevelt’s days, the elite doesn’t really recognize itself as being an elite. They think they are doing the people’s work, even if the people are too stupid to know what’s good for them. Like Mead, I think those elites are soon to find out what the word democracy really means. …
And here is Walter Russell Mead’s piece in the American Interest.
…Today in the United States many of our core institutions are fundamentally out of sync with reality: they cost more than we can pay but they don’t do what we need. We have colleges our people cannot afford — and that often leave graduates without a basic grounding in either the history of our civilization or the practicalities of contemporary life. We have a health system that we cannot pay for and which fails to cover enough people. We have a public school system which has been failing too many of our children for far too long, costs unconscionably large amounts of money considering its poor performance — and vested interests block necessary reforms. Our federal, state and local governments are locked into an employment system and mode of organization that we cannot pay for — and that does not do the job. Our retirement system is a time bomb and all our political class can do is watch the fuse burn. …
…My guess would be that the Tea Party movement is part of a very big wave. The link between a business driven agenda of modernization and reform and a populist agenda for empowerment, deregulation and attacks on privileged professions which are also costly economic bottlenecks is what, historically, has driven many of the populist movements that change the face of the country. …
…What this means for conventional politics is harder to predict. American populism is notoriously turbulent and unstable. …
…The sorting out process seems to be happening fast, though. “Birthers” and “truthers” are being gently but firmly ushered to the door. For now at least, many Tea Partiers seem to want a populist coalition that focuses on economic and government reform while moving more slowly on social issues. Perhaps the movement is pulling itself together more quickly than past populist upsurges have done because the combination of higher education levels and better communications make today’s populists a little more ready for prime time than some of their predecessors. The ability to organize populist political movements quickly and effectively on a national scale may be one of the ways in which the United States has progressed in the last fifty years. The gap in education and skills between the ‘peasants’ and the elites is not as large as it used to be, and so when the ‘peasants’ are unhappy they can move much more quickly than they used to. …
Tunku Varadarajan says that partisanship means the political process is working.
…We have here a situation where the party in power is having trouble enacting legislation because the party in opposition is doing its utmost to frustrate the process. The party in power says that this is unconscionable. Since when, however, does a party have the right to facile lawmaking? After all, the entire structure of American constitutionalism works on the assumption that the greater risk lies in too many laws, not too few. That is why we do have two houses, and presidential vetoes, with a two-thirds override.
What’s so wrong with political and legislative partisanship, anyway? It’s the best thing for transparency in government, with each side quarrying for information, and keeping a close eye on the other’s activities. Furthermore, partisanship is both the cause and the result of a peculiarly American sense of self-help, of a kind of democratic idealism that leads Americans to believe that nothing is inevitable or hopeless in government. …
…Partisanship is all about finding policy flaws in politicians, rather like finding character flaws. That’s why it seems so ad hominem, something that brings politicians down to our level: They are mere mortals, like us, as flawed and perfectible as we are. In other lands, they develop ineffable mystique, but not here. In terms of ideas, partisanship has the benefit of forcing the sides to differentiate themselves and come up with ideas that separate them from the other side. It’s a living, dynamic force that keeps inventing new political ideas. Exposure to partisan criticism helps a politician to refine a policy and to beware of policies which have no support. A good blast of partisan ridicule acts like a pumice stone. It knocks away the dead skin and leaves the body-politic cleaner. …
Theresa Poulson, in the National Journal, interviews Charlie Cook.
NJ: How seriously should we be taking the Tea Party movement?
Cook: Well I think in politics in general and particularly in midterm elections, intensity matters. And whether a movement is constituted by tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people or not, if it’s a sizable enough group with enough intensity, they can make a huge impact.
And I think back in July and August during the town meetings, there was an enormous amount of intensity and it was really sort of the early warning signal that something was going horribly wrong for the president and Democrats in Congress, to build up that kind of intensity of opposition so early on and creating a political environment which a lot of Democratic members of Congress had to be looking at their $173,000 a year pay stubs and thinking, “Gosh, this isn’t nearly enough money to put up with this kind of abuse.” And they did have abused heaped on them.
But I think the Democratic problems and the president’s problems, they, by a factor of a hundred, go beyond the Tea Party movement, but the Tea Party movement is sort of the tip of the sword.
In Slate, James Ledbetter comments on the silence that money buys at the New York Times.
A little more than a year ago, when the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim increased his stake in the New York Times Company (NYT), I wrote “I pity the Times Mexico bureau chief who has to tiptoe through who is and isn’t out of favor with the paper’s new sugar daddy.” Now we have a very clear example of how the Times treats Slim within its pages; it’s not pretty, and the journalistic compromise can be seen well beyond Mexico.
…This is a scandalous story, involving one of the world’s largest banks, a powerful federal judge, and two Mexican telecom giants. Under any other circumstances, the business section of the Times would be expected to cover it, as the Journal and Bloomberg have. Yet as of Saturday midday, I cannot find a single mention of any aspect of this case, anywhere in the physical New York Times, or on its Web site–not even a blog post or a wire story. Perhaps as the lawsuit moves on, the Times will be compelled to cover it. But for the moment, it certainly appears that Carlos Slim’s investment has bought the silence of one of the world’s most important newspapers.
The Economist reports on the disintegration of an ice shelf in the Antarctic that appears to be caused by an event that scientists know little about.
…The Wilkins shelf may or may not have been the victim, ultimately, of climate change. Regardless of what weakened it, though, it was not rising temperatures that caused the sudden break up. Peter Bromirski of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego thinks he knows what did: a little-studied phenomenon called infragravity waves.
Ocean waves come in several varieties. Normal swells, known technically as gravity waves, are created by wind pushing the surface of the sea up and gravity then pulling it down, causing it to bounce. Gravity waves have a frequency of about once every 30 seconds. When such swells hit the coast, however, part of their energy is transformed into vibrations that have periods ranging from 50 to 350 seconds. These are infragravity waves, so called because they are sub-harmonics of the original gravity waves.
…The original analysis had detected storm-driven swell shaking the ice. Dr Bromirski’s work showed a second signal. Waves with longer periods were also shaking the Ross shelf—indeed, they were inducing a much larger response than the storm waves were. Dr Bromirski and his colleagues report in Geophysical Research Letters that the movements caused by infragravity waves were three times larger than those induced by the swell. …
…Applying this model to the Wilkins ice shelf, Dr Bromirski concludes the likely explanation for its sudden disappearance is that it was shivered to pieces by infragravity waves generated by a series of storms on the coast of Patagonia. A case, then, of being both shaken and stirred.