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Michael Young, in Beirut’s Lebanon Daily Star, explains that just being anti-Bush is not a cohesive policy for the Middle East.
There is great discomfort these days among those who backed Barack Obama’s “new” approach to the Middle East when he took office 10 months ago. That shouldn’t surprise us. Everything about the president’s shotgun approach to the region, his desire to overhaul all policies from the George W. Bush years simultaneously, without a cohesive strategy binding his actions together, was always going to let the believers down. …
…Obama feels that an America forever signaling its desire to go home will make things better by making America more likable. That’s not how the Middle East works. Politics abhor a vacuum, and as everyone sees how eager the US is to leave, the more they will try to fill the ensuing vacuum to their advantage, and the more intransigent they will be when Washington seeks political solutions to prepare its getaway. That explains the upsurge of bombings in Iraq lately, and it explains why the Taliban feel no need to surrender anything in Afghanistan.
Engagement of Iran and Syria has also come up short, though a breakthrough remains possible. However, there was always something counterintuitive in lowering the pressure on Iran in the hope that this would generate progress in finding a solution to its nuclear program. Engagement is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end among countless others. Where the Obama administration erred was in not seeing how dialogue would buy Iran more time to advance its nuclear projects, precisely what the Iranians wanted, while breaking the momentum of international efforts to force Tehran to concede something – for example temporary suspension of uranium enrichment. For Obama to rebuild such momentum today seems virtually impossible, when the US itself has made it abundantly clear that it believes war is a bad idea. …
Roger L. Simon blogs on an unlikely topic. Al Jazeera more informative than CNN? And his comments get even better.
It’s probably no surprise to readers of this blog that no hotel we have stayed on our European vacation has had Fox News. CNN International and BBC World have been the exclusive English language stations, so it’s easy to guess the view of America that was projected – not a lot about the Tea Party movement but endless blather about how Teddy Kennedy was the greatest statesman since Cicero and thank various deities that massive health care reform in the backward USA will soon be enacted in his memory. Nauseating, of course, but you watch because it’s the only thing on. Call it MA (Masochism Abroad).
And then it seemed to get worse. We checked into the Hotel Villa Malaspina in a southern suburb of Verona and found neither CNN, nor the BBC on our room TV. No English-language channel at all, only something listed as “ALLJAZZ,” which I took to be easy listening and dismissed. Only accidentally surfacing for a soccer match did I discover it was Al Jazeera in English! …
I expected the worst, of course, but was soon astonished. Except for those stories when the “I”-word was prominent (you know, that little country south of Lebanon), Al Jazeera was clearly better, more honest, more informative and more entertaining than CNN International or the BBC. And kinder to the US. In fact, it wasn’t even close. Also, since much of the news they reported was coming from the Middle East, they seemed better informed about such things as the death of the Iraqi Shiite leader Hakim (they referred to Saddam Hussein flatly as a fascist, something you rarely hear on CNN) and the Al Qaeda suicide bombing in Saudi Arabia (they had nothing but withering contempt for Al Qaeda – no pussy-footing “insurgent” rhetoric for them). …
David Warren comments that previous generations have coped with more severe pandemics.
That “Spanish flu” of 1918-19 — which infected perhaps one-third of the world’s population, and killed up to one-fifth of those — focused chiefly on healthy young adults. Perhaps 100 million died. There is no way to establish an accurate number, but this was possibly more than the Black Death of the 14th century, in volume, if not proportion to previous population. More, by far, than died violently in the course of the Great War, and yet the sufferings in the trenches play a larger part in our historical memory. …
This struck me when reading English mediaeval history. Perhaps one-third of the English were wiped out in the “Great Pestilence” of 1348-50, and many villages disappeared from the landscape. (In other parts of Europe, three-quarters or more of the people were lost, and whole regions became de-populated). The event hardly went unnoticed, but it is not writ so large in contemporary accounts. Dynastic changes take precedence in the chronicles. The fallout from the plague is nearly ignored: such demographic effects as the loss of all the clergy in many places, who had to expose themselves repeatedly in the course of delivering last rites; the sudden loss of cultural continuities that this entailed. …
… Our ancestors took these things in their stride.
Should we? Granting, of course, that we should do whatever is in our power to limit death and suffering — as human beings have always done, according to their lights — should we give the matter more or less weight than our ancestors did?
There was a tendency in the past, especially the Christian past, to look upon plagues, and every other unavoidable disaster, as acts of divine judgment. …
…It is a paradox, worth pondering, that with such “backward” attitudes, and suspicions of divine retribution, our ancestors may have done a better job of coping with disaster.
Seems the Center for Disease Control is thinking of promoting circumcision. David Harsanyi thinks government agencies should be more circumscribed. His point is this new CDC campaign shows the folly of socialized medicine.
… And what would a proactive CDC mean when government operated health care insurance? No, I don’t believe Washington would deploy a phalanx of grinning, twisted doctors to perform coerced circumcisions. But when the CDC dispenses medical advice of the “universal” brand, it’s difficult to accept that a government-run public insurance outfit wouldn’t heed advice and act accordingly.
What if the CDC, through meticulous study, realized that circumcision was an entirely worthless procedure? Why would “we” waste $400 a pop? Would the CDC campaign to “universally remove” the operation from hospitals? Today, incidentally, government- run Medicaid doesn’t pay for the procedure in 16 states. Most private insurers, on the other hand, do.
Though dismissed by public-option proponents, this is an example of how government persuasion can influence our decisions — first by nudging and then, inevitably, by rationing.
The larger, more pertinent point for today is that government has zero business running campaigns — and these things inevitably turn into scare- mongering efforts — that try to influence our choices regarding our children and our bodies. Especially when the procedure has so little to do with society’s collective health. Circumcision is a personal choice.
Well, a personal choice for everyone except that poor little sucker lying on the chopping block.
John Stossel explains how market forces ensure the efficient use of resources.
…What Obama says in favor of a public option — as of today, at least — tells us how little he understands competition. The public option’s virtue, he told Smerconish, is that “there wouldn’t be a profit motive involved.” But as St. Lawrence University economist Steven Horwitz writes in The Freeman magazine, profit is not just a motive (http://tinyurl.com/m4nd2j). Profit (along with loss) is what enables competition to perform its discovery role:
“Suppose for a moment that we try to take the profit motive out of health care by going to a system in which government pays for and/or directly provides the services. … (P)ublic-spirited politicians and bureaucrats have replaced profit-seeking firms.
“By what method exactly will the officials know how to allocate resources? By what method will they know how much of what kind of health care people want? And more important, by what method will they know how to produce that health care without wasting resources? … In markets with good institutions, profit-seeking producers can get answers to these questions by observing prices and their own profits and losses in order to determine which uses of resources are more or less valuable to consumers. … (P)rofits and prices signal the efficiency (or lack thereof) of resource use and allow producers to learn from those signals.” …
Daily Mail, UK reports on the first image taken of a single molecule.
…Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule.
‘This is the first time that all the atoms in a molecule have been imaged,’ lead researcher Leo Gross said. …
…To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand. …
Generation Y may be tech savvy, but may have difficulty understanding nonverbal communication, writes Mark Bauerlein in a WSJ op-ed.
…In Silicon Valley itself, as the Los Angeles Times reported last year, some companies have installed the “topless” meeting—in which not only laptops but iPhones and other tools are banned—to combat a new problem: “continuous partial attention.” With a device close by, attendees at workplace meetings simply cannot keep their focus on the speaker. It’s too easy to check email, stock quotes and Facebook. While a quick log-on may seem, to the user, a harmless break, others in the room receive it as a silent dismissal. It announces: “I’m not interested.” So the tools must now remain at the door.
Older employees might well accept such a ban, but younger ones might not understand it. Reading a text message in the middle of a conversation isn’t a lapse to them—it’s what you do. It has, they assume, no nonverbal meaning to anyone else.
It does, of course, but how would they know it? We live in a culture where young people—outfitted with iPhone and laptop and devoting hours every evening from age 10 onward to messaging of one kind and another—are ever less likely to develop the “silent fluency” that comes from face-to-face interaction. It is a skill that we all must learn, in actual social settings, from people (often older) who are adept in the idiom. As text-centered messaging increases, such occasions diminish. The digital natives improve their adroitness at the keyboard, but when it comes to their capacity to “read” the behavior of others, they are all thumbs. …
Slate’s Tom Vanderbilt, argues for increased enforcement of traffic laws.
… Which brings us to the first social benefit of the traffic ticket: It is a net for catching bigger fish. One reason simply has to do with the frequency of the traffic stop, particularly in a country like the United States, where the car is the dominant mode of transportation: Most crimes involve driving. But another factor is that people with off-road criminal records have been shown, in a number of studies, to commit more on-road violations. A U.K. study (whose findings have been echoed elsewhere) that looked at a pool of driving records as compared with criminal records found that “2.5% of male drivers committed at least one primary non-motoring offense between 1999 and 2003 but this group accounted for 30.6% of the men who committed at least one ‘serious’ motoring offense.” (Interestingly, the proportion was even more marked for women.) …
…Which raises the second benefit of traffic tickets: They help keep people—drivers and those outside the car—alive. Several studies have found a “negative correlation” between someone receiving a traffic violation and their subsequent involvement in a fatal traffic crash.
The consequences of not issuing tickets were shown in a recent study of traffic violations in New York City. From 2001 to 2006, the number of fatalities in which speeding was implicated rose 11 percent. During the same period, the number of speeding summons issued by the NYPD dropped 11 percent. Similarly, summonses for red-light-running violations dropped 13 percent between 2006 and 2008, even as the number of crashes increased. …
…The “folk crime” belief helps thwart increased traffic enforcement: Why should the NYPD, whose resources and manpower are already stretched, bust people for dangerous driving when they could be going after murderers? Well, apart from the fact that more people are killed in traffic fatalities in New York City every year than they are in “stranger homicides,” there is the idea, related to the link between on-and-off-road criminality, that targeting traffic violators might be an effective way to combat other crimes. Which brings us to the third benefit of traffic tickets: increased public safety. Hence the new Department of Justice initiative called DDACTS, or Data Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety, which has found that there is often a geographic link between traffic crashes and crime. By putting “high-visibility enforcement” in hot spots of both crime and traffic crashes, cities like Baltimore have seen reductions in both. …
Jonathan Pearce has Samizdata’s quote of the day.