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Nile Gardiner reports on the president’s latest slap towards Israel.
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has an eye-opening piece for Bloomberg that reveals in stark terms what President Obama really thinks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Israel itself. As The Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent Robert Tait reports:
The damning assessment of the Israeli prime minister, relayed by senior White House officials to an American journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the most graphic sign yet of the toxic relationship between the two men, who have clashed continually over the stalled Middle East peace process.
Writing on the Bloomberg website, Goldberg quoted Mr Obama as repeatedly saying, “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are” in response to a spate of recent announcements for thousands of new Jewish settler homes in east Jerusalem and the West Bank on land the Palestinians want for a future state. …
Andrew Malcolm says obama might as well work on gun control, he can’t do anything that’s important.
President Obama has settled on a political communications strategy for his final term that begins Sunday:
Talk about admirable aspirations, ignore the nation’s economic and fiscal realities, keep everyone fighting amongst themselves over anything at hand while calmly deploring all the disputes, rancor and chaos that this president has helped to engineer.
Such stunning cynicism has actually worked pretty well for the Real Good Talker this past year.
Never mind stratospheric millions of jobless, an amazingly ineffective economic stimulus program, historic highs in poverty rates, a national debt larger than a national economy and nearly 50 million people collecting food stamps tossed out like free candy from a parade float.
Instead, talk about educating every single American child for their own fair shot at some kind of idealized future, delivering better healthcare to millions more people for less money with no additional doctors and protecting ill-defined middle-class Americans from someone doing something to them.
None of it will ever come to pass on his grand rhetorical scale. But the community organizer doesn’t care. By the time enough figure it out, Obama will be back in the Pacific golfing with Choom Gang buddies while another ghostwriter drafts the next autobiography. …
Popular Science writes on the shipping problems on the Mississippi.
Rain or shine, the battle of the Mississippi rages on. The vital shipping lane that supports middle-American economies from the Upper-Midwest to New Orleans is once again in dire straits as the Army Corps of Engineers struggles to control Big Muddy–this time by making it deeper. Wracked by the worst (and longest) droughts in memory, the Midwest and the river are critically short on water, so short that the shallowest stretch of the river between Cairo, Ill. and St. Louis could become unnavigable in the next month, and the Corps of Engineers is just about out of geoengineering options to mitigate the problem, NPR reports.
The Army Corps of Engineers has been building and managing the complex and sprawling system of levees, locks, dikes and spillways along the length of the Mississippi River for decades now, bending the river–which periodically wants to change its course, top its banks, and otherwise be, you know, a natural flowing body of water–to its will. Meanwhile, human development along the river offers the Corps a smaller and smaller envelope in which to err.
Usually when the Corps of Engineers finds itself in a jam along the Mississippi the culprit is heavy rainfall and flooding, which test the strength of decades-old levees and dams designed to keep the river in (as they did as recently as 2011). But right now, the Corps is scrambling to deal with precisely the opposite–even after tapping reservoirs all along the Upper-Midwest, there’s simply not enough water to be had. …
The Economist on the return of wolves to the civilized world.
IN AUGUST 2011 Desiree Versteeg, a Dutch mortuarist, was driving home in the suburbs of Arnhem in the eastern Netherlands when she saw an animal in the road. “At first I thought it was a dog. Then I thought it was a fox. Then—I couldn’t believe my eyes—I saw it was a wolf.” She got out of the car to take a picture. “I was seven or eight metres away from him. He couldn’t get away because a fence was blocking his path. He turned and stared at me. That was a frightening moment.” Both she and the wolf fled.
From Ms Versteeg’s photographs, and from the carcass of a deer found nearby—its throat torn out in classic wolf fashion—scientists verified that she was the first person to have seen a wolf in the Netherlands since 1897. Having talked to the experts, she now understands that the wolf was probably more frightened than she was. “But all you know at the time is: it’s a wolf, it’s a predator and I’m in its way.”
Ms Versteeg’s experience illustrates a dramatic reversal that has taken place in the West over the past couple of decades. Economic change has led to a fundamental shift in humanity’s attitude to wolves. For the first time since man first sharpened a spear, he has stopped trying to exterminate them and taken to protecting them instead. The effort has been so successful that wolves are recolonising areas from which they disappeared as much as a century ago. As they do so, they are forging revealing divisions over whether mankind can live side-by-side with the species it replaced as the Western world’s top predator.
Most man-made extinctions have been accidental—the result of over-hunting, or importing predators or diseases. Wolves are different. Through most of human history, killing them has been regarded as a public good. As soon as anything that looked like a state developed, it set about exterminating wolves.
In England King Edgar imposed an annual tribute of 300 wolf skins on Idwal, king of Wales, in 960; monarchs made land grants on condition that the beneficiaries carried out wolf hunts; King Edward I employed a wolf-hunter-in-chief to clear central and western England of wolves. By the end of the 15th century they seem to have disappeared from England, though in Scotland they hung on a little longer: in 1563 Mary Queen of Scots had 2,000 Highlanders drive the woods of Atholl for a hunt that bagged 360 deer and five wolves.
America’s original settlers, then, had no previous experience of wolves. …
… On both sides of the Atlantic the wolf’s supporters are in a majority. They include disproportionate numbers of young people, women and city dwellers. By and large, the farther away people live from wolves, the more they like them. The big exception is Native Americans, who live close to them and respect them. Wolves feature in their mythology as man’s creator or brother and, according to Chris McGeshick of the Mole Lake Band of the Chippewa tribe in the Great Lakes area, the Indians see their fate as linked to the wolf’s: “We’re doing better, we’re exercising our rights, we’re getting back to where we were before the Europeans arrived. As the wolf gets stronger, so do the tribal people.”
Environmental and animal-welfare organisations are leading the fight to keep the wolf protected. They have generous supporters, for whom the wolf is totemic. When Defenders of Wildlife polls its 1m members about the species they care about, the wolf always comes out top, according to Jamie Rappaport Clark, its president and a former director of the federal government’s Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). That makes lobbying for the wolf a priority: “Our members expect a return on their investment.”
But the wolf’s supporters do not care for it as much as its opponents hate it, and they have good reason to. In 2009, the worst year for her since the wolf’s reintroduction, Kim Baker, a rancher in Montana, suffered seven confirmed wolf kills, 12 head of cattle missing and yearlings that, worn down by harassment, weighed in at an average of 710lb (322kg) instead of the expected 770lb. She calculates the total losses that year at around $42,000. “Sometimes it gets pretty doggone depressing. If you could see what the wolves leave…We don’t raise our cattle to be tortured.” Photographs show savaged dogs and cattle with their rumps chewed off. Ranchers get compensation for losses; but Ms Baker says that, because of the difficulty of proving that a wolf was to blame, the pay-offs make up for only 10% of her losses.
In Europe conflict between wolves and farmers has been sharpest in France, where heavy subsidies still sustain agriculture in marginal areas. Joseph Jouffrey, president of the shepherds’ association in the Hautes-Alpes, says that one of his neighbours recently lost 67 sheep. Around 5,000 were killed by wolves in the whole of France last year, up from around 1,500 five years ago. As in America, farmers say the compensation does not cover their losses. There have been anti-wolf demonstrations and arson attacks in the national park where they first appeared, and death threats against the park’s staff.
In the fight against the wolves, hunters tend to side with the ranchers and shepherds (see article). Moose-hunting in Sweden is an important part of rural life, says Gunnar Gloersen, a hunter from Varmland in mid-Sweden. Every year 100,000 moose are shot, partly to protect pine trees, whose young shoots moose eat, and partly for sport. Even the schools and the police stations close on a moose-hunting day. Wolves disrupt shooting by slaughtering around 5,000-10,000 moose a year and, more importantly, by killing hunting dogs. The costs of losing a dog are not just emotional: a well-trained jamthund is worth €10,000 ($13,000). The presence of wolves reduces the value of hunting rights and, according to Mr Gloersen, costs landowners in his part of Sweden around €50m a year.
The division between the wolves’ opponents and supporters is cultural as well as economic. While supporters regard themselves as caring for the planet, opponents see themselves as in touch with the earth. Pierre de Boisguilbert, the general secretary of France’s Société de Vènerie (hunting with hounds), characterises the wolf’s supporters as “bobos”—bourgeois-bohemians, a disparaging term for urban left-wingers. “The bobos love the wolf. They’ll never see one, but the idea of the wolf is great.”
In America, the argument over the wolf’s protected status escalated into a full-blown political battle. Wolf numbers swiftly hit the FWS’s (modest) target of 100 wolves per state, so in 2002 it started talking about removing their protection. To stop this happening, the environmental and animal-rights organisations took the federal government to court. As judges deliberated, and more cases were brought, the wolf population rocketed, and hunters and ranchers got increasingly angry. In 2011 Congress lost patience and legislated to override the courts and “delist” the wolves. They are now fair game in all the Rocky Mountain and Great Lakes states where they are present. …