Jack

So far, Washington and Colorado are the only states to have legalized the commerical production and sale of cannabis as well as its recreational use. But they almost certainly won't be the last, thanks to the dramatic rise in public support for legalization. But according to a series of articles in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly, there is a real risk that the emerging marijuana industry will prove a public policy disaster.Jonathan Rauch makes the meta point that though rising support for marijuana legalization bears a superficial resemblance to rising support for same-sex marriage -- both causes have
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Remember death panels? In a memorable Facebook post, Sarah Palin famously warned that Obamacare would lead to a world in which Americans would have to stand before "death panels" to justify access to medical care. My sense is that conservatives objected to Obamacare on rather more prosaic grounds -- they suspected that despite the CBO's claim that the legislation would be deficit-improving, its costs were being underestimated and its benefits were being overestimated, and that it would ultimately lead to a larger, more expensive, and (yes) more intrusive government, etc. But Palin's reference to death panels captured the imagination of
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Last year, Scanadu caught our attention with Scout, its simple-to-use tricorder-style health monitor. Now a new iPhone case promises to make monitoring your vital signs even easier. Called Wello, the case has sensors built in that can give you a...

It isn't every day that academic research comes along to tell you something you really wanted to hear and that you suspected was the truth all along? In this case it’s about the long running debate around top executive pay.

My apologies upfront: that was simply an irresistible headline. On Sunday, Ross complained that conservatives are not being allowed to negotiate the terms of their surrender on marriage equality:

We are not really having an argument about same-sex marriage anymore, and on the evidence of Arizona, we’re not having a negotiation. Instead, all that’s left is the timing of the final victory — and for the defeated to find out what settlement the victors will impose.

Michael Potemra seconds:

Contrary to the lessons being taught by our toxic culture, not every momentary advantage needs to be followed up with the crushing and humiliation of one’s enemies. So the question should not be, “Can we succeed in getting society to treat those who disagree with us as moral lepers?” but “Is it right to do so?” Churchill famously started one of his books with a credo that included the phrase “In Victory: Magnanimity.” Magnanimity is definitely not a virtue that today’s culture prizes — but this is a moment that calls for it.

Rod’s summation:

American Christians are about to learn what it means to live in a country where being a faithful Christian is going to exact significant costs. It may not be persecution, but it’s still going to hurt, and in ways most Christians scarcely understand. Maybe this will be good for us. Maybe. We’ll see.

It seems to me there is an important distinction here. If the gay rights movement seeks to impose gay equality on religious groups by lawsuit, or if it seeks to remove tax exempt status for institutions that refuse to include gays for theological reasons, then I agree that such attempts to humiliate and coerce opponents should be resisted tooth and nail. Such spiking of the ball is a repugnant and ill-advised over-reach, and, to my mind, a betrayal of the soul of the movement. We should be about the expansion of freedom for everyone, not its constriction. We should be in favor of persuasion, not coercion. The question of allowing any individual or business to discriminate against gay people and gay couples is, however, a much trickier area. In any public accommodations, I think it’s counter-productive and morally disturbing. But my own strong preference is for as much live-and-let-live as possible: i.e. not filing lawsuits against anti-gay businesses but supporting pro-gay ones in the marketplace.

Still, championing the ability to fire gay people on religious grounds does not seem to me to be a winning argument for those opposing marriage equality. A majority of even Republicans favor laws banning workplace discrimination against gays, and the national majority is immense: around 68 percent for and only 21 percent against. In the same poll, 80 percent of Americans thought this was already the law! That’s a hill I would not aim to die on, if I were the Christianist right.

But what Ross and Michael and Rod are really concerned about, it seems to me, is the general culture of growing intolerance of religious views on homosexuality, and the potential marginalization – even stigmatization – of traditional Christians.

I sure hope that doesn’t happen, but it’s not something a free society should try to control by law. There is a big difference between legal coercion and cultural isolation. The former should be anathema – whether that coercion is aimed at gays or at fundamentalist Christians. The latter? It’s the price of freedom. The way to counter it is not, in my view, complaints about being victims (this was my own advice to the gay rights movement a couple of decades ago, for what it’s worth). The way to counter it is to make a positive argument about the superior model of a monogamous, procreative, heterosexual marital bond. There is enormous beauty and depth to the Catholic argument for procreative matrimony – an account of sex and gender and human flourishing that contains real wisdom. I think that a church that was able to make that positive case – rather than what is too often a merely negative argument about keeping gays out, or the divorced in limbo – would and should feel liberated by its counter-cultural message.

Rod wonders if being the counter-culture “will be good for us.” In my view, it really could be. Since Constantine, Christianity’s great temptation has been to doubt the power of its truths and to seek to impose them by force. And its greatest promise has been when it truly has been the counter-culture – in the time of Jesus and the decades after, or, say, in the subversive appeal of Saint Francis’ radical vision. Why see this era as one of Benedictine retreat rather than of Franciscan evangelism? Why so dour when you can still be the counter-cultural salt of the earth?

(Photo from Getty)

We American coffee-drinkers have known the Era of Starbucks and the Epoch of Sanka.  It seems, however, we currently live in the Age of the K-Cup.

And we’re about to discover everything that means.

Over the past half-decade, single-serve, instant-brew coffee pods—called K-Cups—have taken over more than a quarter of the U.S. ground coffee business. Last summer, the Wall Street Journal judged the K-Cup’s rise “unstoppable” and reported that product category was worth over $150 million. 

K-Cups and Keurig (the best-known brand used to brew them) are both manufactured by Green Mountain Coffee. That company—worth some $16 billion itself—owned the patents for its chalices of disruption, but they expired in 2012, and since then it’s had a problem.

It’s historically operated on a razor blade model: Its Keurig business makes real money not by selling machine brewers but by selling K-Cups. Now cheaper competitors have moved in. They sell inexpensive one-off cups and reusable, extensible cups—threatening the company’s business on both sides.

A lawsuit recently filed by TreeHouse Foods alleges the company has taken anti-competitive action to stop the rise of off-brand K-Cups. It claims “Keurig has been busy striking exclusionary agreements with suppliers and distributors to lock competing products out of the market,” according to Karl Bode of TechDirt.

That’s all background, though, to the technology Green Mountain Coffee is preparing to implement. Later this year, the company will release its “Keurig 2.0” product. It will use a whole new type of K-Cup that affords customers “game-changing functionality” and “excellent quality beverages.” To achieve all this quality and game-changery, the company will also stop supporting “unlicensed pods.”

That’s right. The machine barista will refuse to brew any K-Cups its corporate overlords did not sanction. 

Bode calls it the “the java-bean equivalent of DRM.” The news, first announced last fall, is confirmed by a food industry trade publication. It really looks like coffee DRM is coming.

DRM—digital rights management—originally referred to music or video files that resisted their owners’s efforts to share or play them freely. Once, most music files purchased online had DRM; now, almost none of them do. (Although streaming music services like Spotify or Beats Music present an interesting substitute for DRM. With those services, the user never downloads files at all.)

We’ve been used to DRM in the cultural world for some time, but this is an early appearance of it in the kitchen. It appears so obviously counter to the consumer’s interest as to be risible. The Keurig launched on its ease and convenience—just brew one cup, whenever you want!—and now it’s sprouting new stipulations to hold onto its business—oh, but, please, do make sure it’s our brand of coffee.

Whether or not it goes to market, the “Keurig 2.0” hints at the food technologies that will be possible in the future, on both a micro and macro scale. Between ever-shrinking microchips and ever-increasing mechanization, food companies will have more control over what gets cooked and how. They won’t have *all* the control, though. For if we add computers to coffee makers, it won’t be long until we hear about how they can be hacked—just like toilets, just like refrigerators. 

As ingeniously self-deprecating as RadioShack's Super Bowl commercial was, its finances are sadly even more proficient at making a mockery of the company. Shares fell by a delirious 24 percent after holiday sales came in way under its (already managed) expectations. Today the company announced that it will be closing 1,100 stores, leaving it with 4,000 brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S.

(Aside: How in the world are there still 5,000 RadioShacks? That's three times more than Chipotle.)

RadioShack's long slide coincides the steep ascendance of Amazon as America's great brick-and-mortar destroyer. In 2003, Amazon and RadioShack each had about $5 billion in sales, as WSJ business editor Dennis Berman pointed out. Last year, Amazon had $75 billion to RadioShack's $3.5 billion.

Some further comparison is illuminating: At the end of 2013, RadioShack had 5,000 brick-and-mortar stores with 27,500 employees and $3.5 billion in sales, which is $127,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 1,066th most popular in the world. At the end of 2013, Amazon had zero brick-and-mortar stores with 117,300 employees (full- and part-time) and $75 billion in sales, which is $640,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 5th most popular in the world. 

What are people still buying at RadioShack? The company's biggest sales category is the wireless market, and that's some of the worst news for RadioShack. “The mobile phones category was very weak, and mall traffic is very weak,” analyst David Schick said. “The majority of folks have their mobile phones. We are past adoption.”

Last year, I predicted that that the confluence of e-retail and increasingly efficient global sourcing and stocking (i.e.: the Amazon & Wal-Mart Effect) would eventually gut retail employment. We haven't seen that hypothesis borne out in the macro evidence yet, as retail has actually recovered from the nadir of the recession just fine. But with the ongoing implosion of stores like RadioShack and JCPenney, plus the unstoppable growth of e-commerce, which relies on far fewer employees, I don't see any other logical conclusion. With $600,000 in sales per employee, Amazon is 3X-4X more efficient than the stores it's eating. This is not the picture of a growth sector:

 

It was a good old-fashioned Olympic scandal in Sochi, when South Korean figure skater Kim Yuna lost to a less experienced Russian. The judgment spurred millions of angry Tweets, and a Change.org petition protesting the result was the site’s fastest growing record—reportedly more than 1.2 million signatures in about 12 hours.

Skating officials and fans around the world have questioned the decision, but critics remain focused on the South Korean outrage, largely since their sports fanaticism has made headlines before. Diehard citizens of countries like South Korea may seem odd to some; a post on Yahoo had the misguided headline: “Deal with it, South Korea.” But this injunction didn’t really understand the nature and depth of nationalist feeling—and the extent to which a sentiment often associated with extremism, even war, can be pervasive in the psychology of everyday life, including in sports fandom.

The ideology of nationalism has a complex history, originating in early-modern Europe and evolving in myriad ways as it's spread throughout the world. Today nationalism can be civic, ethnic, or a combination of the two, but all nationalists “carry strong attitudes and beliefs about their own people and about others, who feel their attachment to their nation passionately, and who even, at times, act with great cruelty against their enemies,” according to Joshua Searle-White in his book The Psychology of Nationalism. This us-versus-them mentality and its negative effects have been well examined from a political and historical standpoint, but surprisingly few have studied its psychological roots. From a social-psychological perspective, nationalist sentiment is thought to stem from two main points: attachment and identity.

Basic cognitive development theories, like those of Jean Piaget, suggest that children undergo a socialization process that moves from the egocentric to the sociocentric, as they build attachments to groups to fulfill their basic human needs. According to an essay by Daniel Druckman, “At the level of the nation, the group fulfills economic, sociocultural, and political needs, giving individuals a sense of security, a feeling of belonging, and prestige.” Numerous theories from psychologists like Freud and Maslow agree that the need to belong is a fundamental human motivation; national attachment can fulfill that need and help individuals construct their identity.

Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory suggests that a person’s identity is based in part on his or her group, so a group’s status and importance affects the individual’s own. In other words, you want to view your nation as being superior to others to increase your own self-esteem, creating “in-group favoritism” and “out-group devaluation” (xample: the classic “U! S! A!” chant).

“I would argue that we human beings have a constant need to improve our sense of ourselves. The easiest way to do that is to compare ourselves to others—and see ‘us’ as better than ‘them’,” says Searle-White, a professor of psychology at Allegheny College. Yet some countries seem to inspire more group loyalty than others. There are many theories, none concrete, for why this is, but it seems to depend on historical, cultural, and situational context.

Some psychologists theorize that a nation’s size and military power, as well as past military conflicts, have the greatest effect on nationalistic tendency. Druckman, a professor at George Mason University and a scholar at Macquarie University in Sydney, suggests that people in smaller countries who feel threatened by neighbors and are less well-equipped to handle attacks are more prone to nationalism. The constant threats and feelings of insecurity at a national level seep down to the individual—is my country strong enough?—and since people draw self-esteem and status from their country, a common reaction is to lash out against feelings of inferiority by displaying a sense of superiority.

In South Korea as elsewhere, group loyalty plays out not just in global politics but, even particularly, in global competitions that incite strong personal feelings, as in sports.

“If my country is small and I have bad neighbors, and therefore I feel I have to be vigilant all the time, the idea of being small, threatened, and vigilant should translate into other areas of life, such as sports,” Druckman says. A country that might feel weak and unable to defend itself, like South Korea—with its nationalist grievances related to a series of invasions from Japan and China, the Japanese occupation through World War II, the war and continuing conflict with North Korea—will react instinctively to perceived slights or unfairness in athletics as well. “I think the vociferousness of the reaction relates back to a feeling of some kind of cultural inferiority,” Druckman adds. “The situational, contextual roots of insecurity lead to extreme patriotic identification as well.”

Though nationalism is a global phenomenon, the forms it takes can be very local. For example, “a member of a small and disenfranchised minority will likely experience nationalism differently than will a member of a majority group in a powerful country,” Searle-White notes in his book. 

In the years since South Korea’s last Winter Olympic outrage—Kim Dong Sung’s speed skating loss in 2002—the country has grown in many ways. Samsung, once a smaller South Korean producer, became the world’s largest electronics company by revenue, outselling Apple in smartphones. Seoul was crowned an it travel destination, and Gangnam became a household name. And, of course, there was Kim Yuna’s Olympic win in Vancouver 2010. In some ways, South Korea’s overpowering nationalism has lessened, as noted in The New York Times:

“South Koreans often treated sports as an avenue to affirm the national pride they desperately wanted … Chung Hee-joon, a professor of sports science at Dong-A University, attributed the change in part to recent self-reflection on an excessive nationalism in South Korean sports and other areas that critics liken to methamphetamine.

‘Nothing elevated the superiority of being Korean and Korean blood abroad more than sports,’ he said.”

Given all the negatives, it may seem counterintuitive that there can be positive mental and emotional benefits to national loyalty. But, as Searle-White writes, “nationalism is not inherently evil; indeed, devotion to a nation can bring out transcendent qualities in people, facilitating selflessness, courage, and idealism.” It’s not far-fetched to imagine that South Koreans’ loyalty and love for their country helped them make the many cultural and economic advancements they now take pride in.

According to Druckman, there are several theoretical benefits to nationalism—including the idea that group loyalty bolsters self-esteem and that the more loyal one is, the more pride one gains.

“There’s nothing quite so psychologically satisfying as the feeling of belonging to a group,” Searle-White explains. “Nationalism can be remarkably unifying, and unlike class or some versions of religious identity, it can do it across gender, class, and political lines.”

In the case of South Korea and its recent Olympic wound, many will never forgive the perceived injustice of Kim Yuna’s loss in Sochi; some may seek retribution in four years when the 2018 Winter Olympics begin in Pyeongchang. Others are now embarrassed by their compatriots’ zeal. But the country’s unity is still apparent if you look at the way South Koreans rallied behind their Olympic star. “She gave a gift to all of us by showing that there was nothing impossible,” the daily Chosun newspaper said in an editorial, as reported by The New York Times. “Yuna elevated the national prestige.” 

In dismissing the Ukrainian revolution as a “fascist” coup, officials in Moscow have conjured up memories of the turbulent period following the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Russian leaders used similar slurs to justify separatism in Eastern Europe. On March 2, 1992, 22 years ago this week, civil war broke out in Moldova between government and secessionist forces over a narrow strip of land along the Ukrainian border.

Alexander Lebed—the Russian general whose 14th Army unit intervened in the conflict, ensuring the future of the breakaway state known today as Transnistria—boasted of his role in stopping Moldova’s “fascists" leaders. Several years later, Lebed entered Russian politics, declaring, without much irony, that his country needed its own version of Chile’s right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet.

A decade later, the Kremlin has the strongman Lebed pined for, Moldova’s conflict with its separatist region persists, and Russian troops still occupy Moldovan territory in violation of Russia’s international commitments. And now the Russian military has occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, another territory with a large ethnic Russian population and a pro-Moscow secessionist movement, in violation of international law. Moscow's intentions there remain unclear.

“Separation movements in Moldova and the Caucasus in the early 1990s had clear local roots that reflected local aspirations. In Crimea today, it’s clear that the aspirations are coming from outside in,” said William Hill, a professor at the National War College who worked for many years on Transnistrian conflict negotiations as head of the OSCE mission to Moldova. “Russia has the capabilities to create a de facto separation between Crimea and the [Ukrainian] government in Kiev. But it’s hard to see what they will gain from it.”

In fact, Russia may actually lose from it—and lose big. Putin’s primary objective appears to be preventing Ukraine’s new government from making good on its pledge to sign an association agreement with the European Union. And Russia has had some past success in supporting breakaway regions as a means of keeping former Soviet states like Georgia and Moldova from establishing closer relations with the West.

But supporting Crimean separatism is an expensive gamble for Putin—and not just because the West is weighing economic sanctions against Russia in response to its military incursion in Ukraine. On Monday, Russia’s MICEX stock index shed nearly $60 billion and the Russian ruble plummeted to a record low on fears over the crisis in Ukraine, forcing Russia’s panicked Central Bank to raise interest rates (the ruble and Russian stocks bounced back a bit on Tuesday as tensions in the region appeared to ease). What’s more, across the post-Soviet space, the Kremlin's attempts to destabilize its neighbors are destabilizing its own budget.

Before the Crimean crisis, Russia was already footing the bill for three breakaway states: Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova. As these states are unrecognized by the international community—Russia doesn’t even recognize Transnistria—they exist to a large extent outside the international economic system. While they may have bilateral agreements with certain countries that generate a modicum of trade, the economic benefits associated with globalization and foreign investment are negligible in these territories. This leaves them highly dependent on Moscow’s largesse, which often comes in the form of subsidized pensions, infrastructure projects, and cheap gas.

Georgia's breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which won de facto independence with the aid of Russian troops after a brief 2008 war, are black holes for Russian tax dollars. In April, the International Crisis Group (ICG) reported that Moscow had earmarked $350 million for infrastructure projects in Abkhazia between 2010 and 2012, with that number expected to triple to $1 billion between 2013 and 2015, but that only half of the $350 million had been spent because of mismanagement and corruption. The group noted that Abkhazia—which is located just miles from Sochi, the site of this year’s Winter Olympics—effectively depended on Moscow for a staggering 70 percent of its budget and also received roughly $70 million in pension payments for Abkhaz residents, many of whom have Russian passports. “Abkhazia’s economy is like a drug addict on Russian help,” the report quoted an opposition figure in the region as saying. “We want real help to support our economic development, not ‘facade’ assistance.”

In South Ossetia, a territory with a population comparable to Altoona, Pennsylvania, Russia is spending nearly $1 billion, or roughly $28,000 per resident, according to a 2010 ICG study (South Ossetia’s population is difficult to verify, and estimates range from 20,000 to 70,000). In August, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported that South Ossetia “remains totally dependent on Russian subsidies to rebuild infrastructure and industrial capacity” after its 2008 war with Georgia, and that most of the 27 billion rubles Russia allocated for the province have “vanished without trace,” prompting the territory’s prosecutor-general to open more than 70 criminal investigations into the mysterious disappearance of the funds (Russia scaled back its funding for South Ossetia in response to this embezzlement).

Transnistria’s economy, meanwhile, is heavily dependent on Russian energy and financial subsidies as well, in addition to exports from several industrial plants. Last year, Kamil Calus at the Warsaw-based Center for Eastern Studies estimated that the province had run up roughly $3.7 billion in debt to Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned natural gas giant. “The economic model operating in Transnistria is inefficient and can survive only thanks to support from Russia,” Calus wrote. And this is by design, he added. Russia “is not interested in the region’s economy becoming self-sufficient,” Calus explained. “Since Moscow subsidises the inefficient Transnistrian system, it is able to control this breakaway republic and to deepen the divide between Transnistria and Moldova.”

These figures may seem like drops in the bucket for a Russian government that just poured $51 billion into the Olympics and plans to spend $440 billion in 2014, but the geopolitical philanthropy Moscow offers to these breakaway regions is a serious drain on Russia’s struggling, oil-and-gas-dependent economy.

If Crimea becomes another territory under de facto Russian control, Moscow would likely be forced to pick up the tab yet again. And keep in mind: The peninsula has 2 million inhabitants, which makes it 40 times the size of South Ossetia, eight times the size of Abkhazia, and four times the size of Transnistria. That adds up to a lot of pension payment for Crimea’s residents, 20 percent of whom are over the age of 60.

Not only that, but Crimea’s economy is particularly vulnerable to isolation. The regional government is currently struggling with a $1-billion budget deficit, and trade and export-based industries like mining and chemical production together comprise almost a third of the Crimean economy. While 40 percent of Crimea’s exports head to the “Customs Union” countries of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, 60 percent head elsewhere (roughly a quarter of exports go to EU countries). Crimea has long promoted its beaches as tourist destinations—and tourism is central to its service economy, with more than 6 million tourists, up 8 percent from 2011, visiting the peninsula in 2012—but this industry is also likely to suffer from a protracted conflict (the effect that becoming a pseudostate has on tourism is a contentious subject; Georgian and Abkhaz officials, for example, can’t seem to agree on whether tourism has increased or decreased in the province in recent years).

Faced with these dim economic prospects, Crimea could turn to illicit activities to generate state income. Breakaway regions have a reputation for cultivating smuggling and black markets—whether because they have few revenue streams, because local authorities are busy enriching themselves, or because they are not integrated into the international legal system. In a 2011 investigation of smuggling in Transnistria, for instance, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations reported that between 2005 and 2011, authorities along the Moldovan-Ukrainian border carried out 10 interdictions of radioactive materials and interrupted 587 illicit weapons shipments.

On top of it all, according to Hill, the seizure of Crimea may ultimately cost Russia more influence in Ukraine than it gains.

“Having worked with Russian officials, I can tell you they don’t understand social movements,” he told me. “They perceive everything as orchestrated from the top. They don’t understand that they’re risking long-term hostility from across Ukraine.”

Funding separatism is costly enough as it is, without factoring in the incalculable price of losing more of the Ukrainian street. 

Extreme cold kills more people than extreme heat, and it does so in a variety of ways.

You could freeze to death. You could be spending more time inside, picking up all sorts of nasty respiratory infections. More often, though, frigid temperatures get you in an even sneakier way: Cold weather causes arteries to constrict and blood to become thicker, increasing chances of having a heart attack or stroke. The winter months usually see a peak in various types of heart diseases, including heart attacks.

Weight, fitness, and lifestyle factors all contribute to the likelihood of having a heart attack during a cold snap, of course. But now, it looks like there's another cause—one far beyond your control. There’s evidence that your risk of dying of heart disease in the cold could depend on the temperature at which you experienced life as a fetus.

A forthcoming study in Social Science and Medicine shows that people who were in utero during the warmer months were more likely to die from this type of wintertime heart disease during cold periods.

For the study, researchers from University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Mannheim, Germany examined 13,500 Swedes born in Uppsala, a town just north of Stockholm, between 1915 and 2002. They then matched up their birthdays with the outside temperatures during the times they were gestating.

They found that the likelihood that the person would go on to die a cold-related heart-attack death was 16 percent higher for every 6 percent increase in the number of warm days they spent in utero. (Uppsala is not very warm, granted. The study viewed “warm” days as those that were above 56 degrees F.)

What's more, for the Swedes born during a warm time, the risk of a heart-disease death was higher in a cold spell than in a warm one. In other words, if you were born in August and you hear the word "flurries" on the news, clutch the nearest space heater and don't let go.

What’s the reason for this odd association? One theory is the developmental plasticity hypothesis, or the idea that these warm-weather gestaters have mismatch between the signals they received in utero and their experiences in real life. Not unlike a spoiled millennial who is about to enter the real world after breezing through Cornell, this zygote is in for a rude awakening.

There is not much that Swedes—or anyone—can do about the month in which they are conceived, but it’s an interesting takeaway for people who immigrate from more temperate climates to colder ones. It seems like the better idea would be to go in the opposite direction: There’s a theory that the ongoing migration from the Northeastern U.S. to Southern states saves 5,400 lives a year.

The implications of Vladimir Putin's Crimean adventure.

1. Did the Justinian plague help drive the Golden Age of Islam?

2. Mearsheimer on the future of Taiwan.

3. Why Sweden has so few road deaths.

4. Philip Longman takes a critical look at the Texas economic model.

5. Scott Sumner on Edward Hugh and Abenomics.

Under one view, credibility is like a chain.  If the United States does not keep one of its public promises, the credibility of the chain falls apart.  In essence observers are using the behavior of the American government to draw inferences about its true underlying type.  A single act of breaking a promise or failing to honor a commitment would show we really cannot be trusted, or that we are weak and craven, and so that characterization of our true type would be applied more generally to all or most of our commitments.

Under a second view, we don’t have that much credibility in the first place.  To be sure, we can be trusted to do what is in our self-interest.  But there is not much underlying uncertainty about our true type.  So we can promise Ruritania the moon, and fail to deliver it, and still the world thinks we would defend Canada if we had to, simply because such a course of action makes sense for us.  In this setting, our violation of a single promise changes estimates of our true scope of concern, but it does not much change anyone’s estimate of the true type of the American government.

Insofar as you believe in the first view, our inability/unwillingness to honor our commitment to the territorial integrity of Ukraine is a disaster.  Insofar as you hold the second view, our other commitments remain mostly credible.

For the most part, I see the second view as more relevant to understanding U.S. foreign policy than the first.  We’ve broken promises and commitments for centuries, and yet still we have some underlying credibility.  Remember those helicopters evacuating Saigon rooftops in 1975?

Still, when it comes to Taiwan, or those Japanese islands, or other Pacific islands, I think the first view plays a role.  That is, I think the world does not know our true type.  How much are we willing to risk conflict to limit Chinese influence in the Pacific?  Whatever you think should be the case, what is the case is not clear, perhaps not clear even to our policymakers themselves.  (In contrast there are plenty of data on the parameters of American preferences toward Middle East and Israel-linked outcomes, and our willingness to incur costs to alter those outcomes.)

That is another way of thinking about why the Ukraine crisis is scary for the Pacific.  It is one reason why the Nikkei was down 2.5% shortly after market opening Monday morning (Asia time) and ended up 1.3% down for the day.  The Chinese stock market did just fine.

Here’s George Will back in 2008:

Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today’s near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement. For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer. The New York Times has not recently repeated such amusing headlines as “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling” (1997), “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops” (1998), “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction” (2000) and “More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime” (2003).

George Will spoke too soon.  If it’s really a blind spot with progressives then they won’t be able to stop even if they try to, because they aren’t even aware of what they are doing.  Tyler Cowen directs us to another example from the New York Times:

What is happening in America today is both unprecedented in our history, and virtually unique among Western democratic nations. The share of our labor force devoted to guard labor has risen fivefold since 1890 — a year when, in case you were wondering, the homicide rate was much higher than today.

Yup.  I was wondering was life was like before we had lots of guards.  Thanks for telling me.

Last month, Jamie Coots, the pastor of a snake-handling church in Kentucky featured in the reality show Snake Salvation, died from a snake bite that occurred during a worship service. (He refused medical treatment for the bite.) Michael Sean Winters considers the questions snake-handling raises about what religious liberty really means, connecting it to pending court cases over the ACA’s contraception mandate:

The law is a complicated thing. … I readily confess that my opposition to the mandate, based on the institutional integrity of our Catholic schools and hospitals, must wrestle with the institutional integrity of Pastor Coots’ church to believe the Bible commands snake-handling. The nettlesome of the issues, however, is itself a sign of moral seriousness. The morally serious person is not the zealot for whom all moral calculations are easy. The morally serious person is she who recognizes the difficulties, the qualifications, the nuances, as well as the moral law.

Peter Lawler hesitates to draw any grand lessons about religious liberty from the issue of snake-handling Christians:

When I teach constitutional law, I treat snake-handling as a gray area when it comes to religious liberty under our Constitution. The limit to that liberty is the rights of others, beginning with the right to self-preservation.

The faith of the snake handler encourages behavior which is needlessly personally destructive and so a crazy violation of the law of nature according to our founding philosopher John Locke. A church with roused up men handling snakes could hardly be called a safe space. But handling is, after all, voluntarily chosen and (at least almost always) hurts no one but the handler himself. So some states are permissive—and others repressive—when it comes to snaking handling as a religious practice.

I’m not sure what we can learn about [snake] handling that can illuminate our present controversies over religious liberty. Well, maybe that’s the point. Our historical answer has been to be reluctant to apply high principle to tough cases, but to err on the side of accommodating the practice of good people whose lives are completed by faith. The Yoder decision that exempted the Amish from valid secular policy concerning compulsory education neglected principle on behalf of prudence. What’s the harm? And, of course, there’s plenty of good in giving the Amish the space they need to live their faith as they understand it. The Amish are in many ways are models of responsible, self-reliant American life.

The snake handlers could never win a similar victory in our courts. They’re much less fashionable. Who’s less fashionable, in fact? But can’t we say that the snake-handling churches do more good than harm for particular persons? Lives really are transformed in the direction of responsible citizenship by genuine faith. It’s easier, in some ways, to side with the snake handlers than the Amish. After all, they seem to require nothing of their believers in or outside of church but faith, and they do nothing that affects the rights of those who don’t share their belief. For me, our great history of religious accommodation means erring on the side of our singular diversity of churches as organized bodies of thought and action. So my state of Georgia is correct in letting the church be, without making a big deal out of it.

(Video: Clip from Snake Salvation)

Since the closing ceremonies at the Sochi Olympics concluded, Vladimir Putin has done his best to make clear that he intends to make things as difficult as possible for Ukraine’s new interim government. First he ordered massive military exercises, involving some 150,000 troops, on Ukraine’s border.  While some observers noted that not enough medical units were included to indicate an invasion, it was clearly a provocative act.

At the Kunming train station in China's Yunnan province, 27 people have been killed and 109 are injured after a group of men wielding knives went on a rampage this evening.

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“The gay movement has really brought this on themselves. These African countries have only been concerned about passing these laws after the global homosexual movement started pushing their agenda in these very morally conservative countries. What looks like offensive action by these governments is really defensive … We were invited by these African countries when they were confronted with the problem. And frankly, a lot of this comes down to male – you know, white male homosexuals from the United States and Europe going into these African countries because the age of consent laws are low and able to take these, you know, young, teenage boys and turn them into rent boys for the price of a bicycle. And that just outraged the people in these countries,” – Scott Lively, the American Christianist, partially responsible for the terrorization of gay people in Uganda and Nigeria.

WHO’S DUMB NOW? Palin Mocked in 2008 for Warning Putin Might Invade Ukraine if Obama Elected.

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Talking and texting are still illegal, but a California court of appeals ruled today that it's perfectly ok to use a cell phone while driving if you use it as a map. The court reasoned that because cell phones could only text and call when the handheld laws were enacted in 2006, only those functions are banned.

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Television news in the internet age may exist solely so field reporters can put themselves into harms way in order to emphasize the danger of inclement weather. Enter NBC's Miguel Almaguer, who had to be rescued yesterday from a mudslide east of Los Angeles.

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The two reunite at a fundraiser for the Republican Governors Association in Boston.