Robert.mccowen

FUN FAX: Child refugees from Central America are far more likely to be vaccinated than kids in Texas. http://t.co/xQ4cVUY8tb

— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) July 12, 2014

Despite the ginned-up hysteria about scabies-ridden, drug-resistant-TB-carrying gangbangers being bused to our sacred borders, there are smarter discussions to be had about the children fleeing gang violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Commentor Martin phrased it well:

This is not an immigration crisis. This is a refugee crisis, and it needs to be spoken of as one.

These are not people that have decided to run to the US as a choice for a better life, these are people that are fleeing violence at home. They’re little different than the refugees piled up along the borders of Syria. They’re different only in the sense that they didn’t stop in Mexico but continued all the way to the US – probably due in part to the fact that Mexico’s drug crime problem is only marginally better than the rest of Central America’s. So the calls for sending them across the border is simply one to turn our refugee crisis into Mexico’s refugee crisis. That’s not going to happen because that’s not how the US treats our neighbors, regardless of who is in the White House.

Obama needs to speak directly to these point because public opinion is that these are people from Mexico crossing the border to take advantage of our immigration system. That’s simply not the case.

Not every media outlet is spreading the ignorance — here’s a short clip [warning: autoplay] from a Boston news station, sympathetically interviewing a ten-year-old who’s recently joined his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in eight years, in a local city where “twenty percent of the students have arrived in just the last two to three years”.

And here’s some good advice from another BJ commentor:

Even though no one is making it easy to help these kids right now, there are a few things one can try. The system is a long way from offering them foster care, etc. To move that and other humane possibilities along, one would have to put tremendous pressure on Congress and the Administration, particularly the Department of Homeland Security. Try calling 202.282.8010, the office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs; and also Craig Fugate’s office at FEMA, 202.646.3900. Both offices are also reachable via mail and e-mail.

To provide short-term emergency help — kids as young as 3 are “sleeping” on concrete floors — the usual suspects have been trying to get access. The Red Cross is a good example. Another group I can recommend is Kids In Need of Defense (KIND).

And if you are, or know, a lawyer who would like to donate time to help these kids, I recommend getting in touch with the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Gregory Chen, the Director of Advocacy, can be reached at advocacy@aila.org or via 202.507.7600.

If you have other suggestions, or resource links, post them in the comments.

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I noted a while back that there would be an audio edition of Lock In, from Audible. What I had not noted, until this very second, is that Audible was planning to do something pretty neat with the audiobook: Namely, that it was recording two complete versions of the book, one narrated by Amber Benson, and the other by Wil Wheaton, and offering both for sale.

Why two versions? Because it’s a cool idea for this particular novel, for all sorts of reasons that I will leave for you to discover. I’m delighted that Audible has created both versions, and I’m especially happy that Amber and Wil are the ones bringing the book to audio life — I’m fans of each of them, both as performers and as writers. I’m about as excited as I can get to hear both editions.

Now, at this point you may be saying to yourself: You mean I have to choose between the Wil Wheaton version and the Amber Benson version? That’s too hard! They’re both too awesome! Don’t make me choose!

Okay, we won’t. Here’s what we’ll do: Pre-order either audio version of Lock In between now and August 22nd, and Audible will throw in the other version, free. Order Wil’s, get Amber’s. Order Amber’s, get Wil’s. You’ll get two fantastic interpretations of the novel for the price of one. Compare and contrast! Alternate chapters! Mix and match! Really, there’s no way to go wrong on this one.

Remember, however: If you want in on this — and if you’re a fan of audiobooks, you so very much do — You need to preorder from Audible by 11:59pm (Eastern) on August 22nd. Don’t wait! Don’t live your life in unfathomable regret!

I’m super geeked out about this. My thanks to the folks at Audible for doing this, and to Amber and Wil for being the voices of Lock In. This is really special. I can’t wait for you folks to hear them both.

(Note: US only for the time being. I know, I know. Sorry, the rest of the universe.)

I’m a huge fan of roasted chicken dishes because they tend to be one-dish–you throw everything in a pan or dutch oven just roast away, letting the heat of the oven and rendered fat from the chicken do all the work of crisping the chicken and flavoring the veggies. So I was thrilled when I saw Aimai’s recipe in my “One Dish” thread. (Please bookmark for future reference.) I swear by my roasted chicken, which is just a very simple preparation of roasting chicken on top of onions, garlic, fennel, apple, and coins of ginger. I’m not sure anything could replace it in my heart. But if any dish could do it it would be Aimai’s variation. I’ve made it at least three times she posted the recipe, switching up things only very slightly. (I’ve used half-and-half a couple of times, poultry seasoning in place of the fresh sage, and since so many of my people are heat-averse, I use a sparing pinch of red pepper flakes instead of the peppers. I also used cut-up chicken and less garlic.) Each time it’s turned out beautifully…and that sauce is nothing less than genius. Try it yesterday.

Take one 4 lb chicken
10 garlic cloves
Handful of fresh sage
1 cinnamon stick
1 dried red pepper (or two)
Peel of one lemon
Juice of one lemon
1 cup milk
1/2 cup or 1 cup of dry white wine
Onions–Sliced in quarters longitudinally so the shape will be preserved.
Celery–sliced in long batons about 2 inches
Carrots–Chunks
sometimes parsnips–same size as the carrots

Salt and pepper the chicken all over. Brown it in butter or olive oil. Drain pan but save any sticky bits. Then put the vegetables and all the other ingredients in a roasting pan or a dutch oven and put the chicken down on top, nested in the liquid, and cook until the top is browned and golden, chicken is done, and the base vegetables are cooked. The milk and the lemon will “break” and make a classic sauce. For extra killer deprssion repair you can add some cream at the last minute to the sauce and you get an unbelievably rich sauce for pouring over potatoes or rice or dipping bread.

What are your favorite roasted chicken dishes?

And here I thought “Go on vacation for two weeks, and when you come home everything in your frig has turned into a science experiment” was a joke… From the Washington Post:

A government scientist cleaning out a storage room at a lab on the NIH Bethesda campus found decades-old vials of smallpox last week, the second incident involving the mishandling of a highly dangerous pathogen by a federal health agency in a month.

The vials, which appear to date from the 1950s, were flown Sunday night by government plane to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta, officials said Tuesday. Initial testing confirmed the presence of smallpox virus DNA. Further testing, which could take up to two weeks, will determine whether the material is live. The samples will be destroyed after the testing is completed…

An FDA scientist found a cardboard box on July 1 containing glass vials, each several inches long, sealed with melted glass. The box was lined with cotton padding, Skinner said. Several vials were labeled flu virus or other specimens. Sixteen other vials were either labeled “variola,” or smallpox, or suspected of containing smallpox virus. All the vials were immediately secured in a containment laboratory on the NIH. The 16 suspect vials were flown to Atlanta. Testing confirmed the presence of smallpox virus DNA in six.

“This was a lab that didn’t realize it had these vials,” said Skinner. Because the vials are made of glass and sealed with melted glass, officials say the vials appear to date to the 1950s. He said the material could have been sitting around in the storage room “unbeknownst to the people up there for many years.”…

********
Apart from an uneasy feeling about those dusty shelves in the back of the garage, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

• When people talk about the “pro-life” message of movies like “Juno” and “Knocked Up,” I am quick to remind them that a movie about abortion would likely be very short. I mean, “Woman  is faced with unwanted pregnancy/woman has abortion/woman is pretty happy with her choice just doesn’t make for a very compelling storyline. Well, along some dumb abortion-humping liberal comes to prove me wrong. “Obvious Child” is a small, independent film that hasn’t been hyped or shown nation-wide. The box office reflects that, as Jonah Goldberg–happy culture warrior–is gleeful to report. I’m more than willing to concede that America secretly hates 1/3 of its women for being slutty murderers if Pantload and his ilk will quit skreeing about liberal Hollywood.
• Rich people are scamps. Sometimes I just want to tickle them ’til they pee. Sometimes I just want to guillotine them ’til their heads fall off their bodies in an adorable manner.
• How would you like to eat some congealed shrimp and mayonnaise paste? Lots I bet. Question: Why is the shrimp dish in a fish mold? (Thanks to Origami Isopod for the link.)

No one could have predicted:

The day after the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling, a group of religious leaders sent a letter to President Barack Obama asking that he exempt them from a forthcoming executive order that would prohibit federal contractors from discriminating against LGBT people.

The letter, first reported by The Atlantic, was sent on Tuesday by 14 representatives, including the president of Gordon College, an Eric County, Pa., executive and the national faith vote director for Obama for America 2012, of the faith community.

“Without a robust religious exemption,” they wrote, “this expansion of hiring rights will come at an unreasonable cost to the common good, national unity and religious freedom.”

I guess they think that since slut-shaming is now a protected religious right, so is gay bashing.

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Do yourself a favor and read this summary of the Texas Republican Party platform if you want to see what modern Republican party activists believe in their heart of hearts (or, as the linked piece says, what they say when they are essentially talking to themselves.) I don't want to spoil it for you but let me say this: they're big fans of some really novel ideas. Like nullification.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Dear American “Airlines,”

So that you may not duck this formal complaint with the cheap excuse that it is profane and uncivil I will endeavor to keep my swearing to a minimum. I suspect, however, that I will be as successful as your airline is at getting flights off the ground on time. What say we forgive one another in advance for coming up short?

Simply put, American Airlines, you are a very bad airline. The following tale of woe is true in every detail, as I am certain that other customers who have been bent over and cornholed by your sad excuse for a going transportation concern will be able to attest. Through repeated mergers and acquisitions you have managed the incredible feat of becoming the world’s largest airline while retaining all of the charm, efficiency, and customer service of the third largest taxi company in Lagos. Future generations will look back on this accomplishment with awe and wonder.

On Thursday, June 19 my flight out of Peoria, IL (where hopes and dreams go to die) was canceled for “weather.” I was helpfully rebooked on a flight Friday, June 20. As this cut into an already brief vacation to Mexico, the ticket agent was kind enough to offer me the opportunity to fly out of Bloomington, IL, located 45 minutes away, on the same day. Thus I drove at breakneck speed to Bloomington to make the outbound flight. Figuring that a canceled outbound flight would be lonely if not paired with a canceled return flight, I arrived at O’Hare to find my 9:05 flight to Peoria on Monday, June 23 was also canceled. For “weather.” Suspiciously, the 9:05 flight was canceled before 7 PM yet a separate flight to nearby Bloomington on which your agents refused to book me took off (after sundry delays) at 9:15. If the 9:05 flight could not fly through the “weather”, I can only assume that the 9:15 flight was torn asunder with the loss of all on board since PIA and BMI are merely 30 miles apart.

Realizing that a gaggle of upset customers was waiting at the gate to be accommodated, the AA gate agent helpfully walked away. Like, she just left. This employee – let's call her Eva Braun, to choose a random name – did not return for a full hour, time that I strongly suspect* she used to fortify herself with prescription cough syrup and Jeppson’s Malort.** Upon her return I waited a considerable amount of time to advance in this line at a pace best described as that of a pre-holiday queue outside the last open butcher shop in Riga, Latvia prior to the fall of Communism. When my turn came, Eva informed me that she was “busy” and I should, I quote directly, “go find someone else to help (me).” As a different flight was preparing to depart from this gate, my issue was “not (her) problem.”

American Airlines, I could get better customer service from the Kansas City Mafia. That’s not even one of the good ones.

After trying several people in AA uniforms standing behind desks at AA gates, I finally found a young lady who was able to reschedule me for a flight on Tuesday, June 24. As this strands me overnight in Chicago, I asked which hotel I would be boarded in for the evening. She informed me that I could get a “discounted rate” at area hotels but that I would bear the cost of the room. Confused, I asked slowly if I heard correctly – my hearing has been a bit out of whack since I stood too close to a loudspeaker at a Motorhead show in 1996. She replied, with no small amount of embarrassment, that since the cancellation was due to “weather” and thus "beyond the control of the airline," I would not be compensated with a hotel. Or even a lousy meal voucher. Given that AA cannot seem to control its own scheduled flights it comes as no surprise that the company has not yet mastered control of the weather.

At this point I would like to reiterate that you, American Airlines, are a very shitty airline and I wonder if perhaps you would not be better suited in another line of business. I’d have had better luck getting home by slathering my naked, hirsute body with expired Soviet postage stamps and taking a running dive into a Post Office.

Here I lie on the linoleum of O’Hare Terminal 3, pondering how a company that only does one thing could be so terrible at the thing. In the future it is my fervent hope that AA is purchased by a company that is competent at what it does – say, the makers of Jimmy Dean’s breakfast meat cylinders – and this will instill some managerial and organizational competence in your alleged airline. Their product may be a horror unequaled in the Western world, but at least they don’t fuck up the one thing they do. And I am fairly confident that Jimmy Dean’s would not make me sleep on an airport floor or make me buy my own shitty airport dinner.

In closing, American Airlines is a ball-gargling clusterfuck of an airline. How your one-lung shitshow manages to limp from quarter to quarter in solvency is a mystery. I lie here certain that your long term plan to fly the idea of customer service into the ground at high speed has been foretold by prophecy and cannot be stopped.

You are worse than Delta. How is that even possible. Don't worry though, they plan to one-up you by instituting a new policy under which one passenger on each flight is chosen at random and shot.

In spite,
Ed

*Libelous, likely untrue
**Look it up

Here is a very long guest post about the situation in Iraq. Most be will below the fold:

What is Going on in Iraq- Adam L. Silverman, PhD*

John asked yesterday “what is going on in Iraq?” After communicating with him offline, he asked if I would do a guest post with my answer. What we are seeing in Iraq is that the Iraqis are reorganizing, or attempting to reorganize, themselves. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the al Qaeda affiliate in the Levant, which is fighting against the Iraqi government and the Shi’a, is basically capitalizing on Sunni discontent and disenfranchisement. This looks like, and at one level is, settling scores. It is true that the Sunnis are outnumbered and I have had conversations with informed observers who argue the Iraqi Sunnis know they cannot win, unfortunately no one seems to have told the Iraqi Sunnis that!

Iraqi Sunnis have been telling us, explicitly, since as far back as 2007 when we started partnering with the Anbar Awakenings guys that as soon as they had a chance – read as soon as we were gone and conditions were right – they were going to go after the Shi’a. They are specifically and especially interested in going after the expatriate Shi’a that we had empowered and put in charge: Maliki and his Dawa Party and the Hakim’s and their ISCI Party and its Badr Corps militia. The Sadrists are not too high on their list of favorites either. By not actually listening, and by listening I mean hearing what they said and observing their behavior in order to get a fuller understanding of their messaging, we have helped to make this worse.

First we seem to have, as policy and strategy, defaulted to and decided that democracy was really just voting and that majority rule was great, so what if it created majoritarianism. We compounded our problems from not actually understanding the message from the Awakenings and Sons of Iraq folks, by empowering the expatriate Shi’a. These Shi’a, PM Maliki and his Dawa Party and Ayutalluh Uzma Hakim and his ISCI Party and Badr Corps, where established in Iran as opposition to Saddam Hussein and are still closely tied to Iran. An important secondary effect that we do not like to think about is that when we brought the Badr Corps personnel into the Iraqi Army we were rebuilding, we did not let their ties to Iran stop us from including them. And I cannot emphasize enough about distrust of Iran among both Sunni and Shi’a Iraqis. Iran is like the black helicopter idea for Iraqis! During my first in depth interview with a Shi’a sheikh who was also an Imam, he told me that the Dawa and ISCI folks were not really Iraqis and that they were not even really Muslims, let alone Shi’a. He told me they were Zoroastrians – adherents to the ancient Persian monotheistic religion. I heard variations of this over and over again from Iraqi elites and notables, and not so elites and notables, who could not have coordinated their messages to me.

Another self-inflicted wound was how we handled the Sons of Iraq handoff in 2008 when the Maliki government decided it was going to take over administration of the program from Coalition Forces. I was in regular contact with a number of the most influential Sons of Iraq and Awakening leaders in my brigades Operational Environment (OE) as part of my cultural engagement work for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division as a lot of these leaders were also the tribal, community, and/or religious leaders in the OE. No one was happy with how they were being treated, and this went beyond the usual complaining about losing control and prestige, let alone money, in the handoff. Rather, this was an honor and pride issue. I listened to an influential local Shi’a leader, who had joined the Awakenings movement assert that the Maliki government was going to turn his Sons of Iraq personnel into walid shab chai (the boy that brings the tea). It is the Iraqi’s country, and their government made a legitimate request, but we had ample reason to recognize that PM Maliki’s government was planning on targeting the Awakenings and Sons of Iraq, which should have influenced how we did the handover. At the time that we turned over administration, PM Maliki was already rolling up Awakenings and Sons of Iraq leaders in Wassit and Diyala Provinces in advance of the 2009 provincial elections in order to neutralize opposition and coup proof himself. In the most recent national elections he did the same thing with members of Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiyya List. He was able to arrest or force into hiding enough Iraqiyya List members to reduce Allawi’s plurality and overturn its constitutional right to attempt to form a governing coalition.**

The Iraqis rolled us in the 2008 Status of Forces negotiations and the deliberations on establishing the provincial and then national election processes. Once they realized they could run out the clock on us, they did. As a result we are no longer there to play referee and other events have diverted our attention. That is why now is a good time to settle scores. Syria is stuck in a Civil War, which provided the Levantine al Qaeda affiliate a way back into Iraq. They have capitalized on the dashed hopes and angers of a lot of Iraqis and scores are now being settled. Some of this is just vengeance, but some of it is also the process of state and societal formation, regardless of whether we like the potential outcome of that process. For all that we do not like to think about these things, state and societal formation, or reformation, is usually violent. It is often serially violent as well. There will be periods of violence – challenges to the established order or by the order to consolidate power, as well as to determine who gets to be included within society and who is to be partially or fully excluded. These periods will be interspersed with periods of calm. It is not, however, a quick or even easy process. The US has gone through this, though we like to ignore or forget it unless we have no other choice. For everyone who knows Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion and the War of the Rebellion (now doing business as the Civil War) there have been well over a hundred smaller and localized rebellions, violent challenges to state and society, etc.

State and societal formation and consolidation is a long process. It is often ugly and violent and it is what we are witnessing in Iraq. Right now the Iraqis are working out just who gets to be considered an Iraqi, as well as who gets to be in control and how state and society are going to be organized. And when this wave passes, eventually there will be another one. Expectations will have been raised, but whoever emerges will not be able to meet them, until one day they finally are able to do so and things will settle down. We have been watching this in Egypt for almost three years now.

And this does not even account for what the Kurds may do. I fully expect the Kurds to declare independence as soon as they think everyone is sufficiently diverted with the Sunni versus Shi’a Arab violence in Iraq, the Civil War in Syria, and other events in the region that they can create a fait accompli on the ground. Given that Turkey’s governing party is increasingly divided and internally conflicted, the time may be ripe for independence from a Kurdish perspective.

* Adam L. Silverman is the Cultural Advisor at the US Army War College. He served in Iraq in 2008 as the Cultural Advisor to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team/1st Armored Division as the Human Terrain Team Iraq 6 Field Social Scientist and Team Lead. The views expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Army War College and/or the US Army.

** For full disclosure: I know two of the Iraqiyya List members that PM Maliki targeted to flip the elections. One was the acting mayor of Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. The other is a retired Iraqi Army brigadier general who helped to form the Awakening movement and Sons of Iraq in our Operating Environment. Both of them, as is the case with most Iraqis, come from mixed kinship and tribal affiliations. They were Shi’a and Sunni respectively, but both had close familial relatives, as well as extended tribal kin in other parts of Iraq that were from the other sect. The real fight in Iraq, while now galvanized around Sunni versus Shi’a, has always been about resources and who gets to control. The extremists utilize sectarian religious differences to capitalize on these resource disputes and turn them into an existential religious fight.

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58% of Republicans believe that global warming is a hoax.

63% of Republicans believe that we should limit the release of greenhouse gases from existing power plants in an effort to reduce global warming.

Meanwhile, a woman in Florida named Crystal Metheney was arrested and charged with firing a missile into a car.

Don’t ever change, Florida. BTW- could a legal argument be made that that name was a form of child abuse?

Please move somewhere sane, Betty. There are lots of tropical climates without killer flying attack frogs and, even worse, Floridians.

*** Update ***

Wait- can you think how awesome her trial would be if she invokes Florida’s Stand Your Ground laws? Beautimous!

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Outside of the GoT podcasts, this site seems even more dour than normal the last couple of days. So since we all like maps and most of us like food (sometimes even food-like substances like ketchup) here’s 40 interesting food maps of the U.S. I was particularly amused by this:

FEMA has been using Waffle Houses as unofficial indicators of disaster recovery in recent years. Why? First of all, the chains are conveniently located (red dots) across the hurricane zones of the US (the gray lines on this map are hurricane and tropical storm tracks since 1851), as you can see in this map from Popular Science. Waffle Houses usually operate 24 hours a day and have exceptional disaster preparedness that lets them open back up quickly after a storm, the magazine reported. So whether a Waffle House has made it through an extreme weather event can be a handy thing to know. Because of this, Waffle Houses have been reporting their statuses to FEMA since 2012.

And here I thought they were testing whether the grease was made of an indestructible superproduct to be used against our national enemies.

Now back to our regularly scheduled bad news.

Charlie Jane Anders, at io9:

The Social Security Administration just released its 2013 list of baby names in the United States. And once again, Game of Thrones rules. There were 1135 Aryas, 241 Khaleesis and 67 Daeneryses born in 2013. And 15 Theons and five Robbs. But some new names also came on the scene…

According to Nameberry, the most popular new girl’s names of 2013 include Vanellope — apparently inspired by Sarah Silverman’s character in Wreck-It Ralph? There were 63 Vanellope’s in 2013, up from zero in previous years. Other popular new girl’s names are Pistol, Prim, Rarity (from My Little Pony?), Charlemagne and Rebelle…

If Nameberry isn’t just messing with us, there are at least six little girls in America named Charlemagne. Truly, history is dead.

Brand new boy’s names included Rydder, Jceion, Hatch, Tuf, Lloyal, Xzaiden, Charger, Kyndle, Power, Warrior, Kaptain, Subaru, and Vice…

Jceion?!? That’s not a name, it’s the scrabble tiles dug out of the couch cushions after a rainy weekend entertaining relatives from out of town. And there’s at least ten kids condemned to a life of being contradicted by strangers on the spelling of their own name. Take it from someone whose parents named her after an (obsolete) pop song, it’s only romantic or creative when you don’t have to live with it.

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I’m quite puzzled by Rebecca Schuman’s piece defending the Obama administration’s proposed universal rating system for higher ed.     I certainly agree that the problems the ratings purportedly address are real.   As Paul has argued at substantial length, the current system — under which the students and taxpayers will cover ever-more-astronomical tuition fees with virtually no accountability — is a disaster that combines the worst features of free markets and government monopolies.  The problem, however, is that the administration’s proposals are mostly irrelevant or counterproductive to the problems of accessibility, rent-seeking and cost-shifting that are endemic to the current system.  Giving universities higher ratings based on the earnings of graduates doesn’t provide incentives to lower tuition; it provides strong incentives to avoid students from poor backgrounds and from offering majors that lead to less lucrative careers.  Basing ratings on retention rates doesn’t provide incentives to lower tuition costs or cut administrative bloat; it provides strong incentives not to fail anybody who can pay the tuition and avoid committing a felony during their tenure.   Accountability is necessary, but doing it through formal ratings systems is a very dangerous game.  As the USNews ratings have taught us, it’s enormously difficult to design ratings systems that aren’t easy to game in ways that subvert their intended goals.  The Obama administration’s system seems particularly poorly designed.

I would go into more detail about why the proposed ratings system is a bad one, except that Schuman has done most of the work for me.   For example:

I’ll start with the aspect of the plan that causes the most agita in academia: The emphasis on graduate earnings. Critics of the program are right to point out that a school that churns out hedge fund managers (or, you know, the legacy rich, who were always going to “earn”) does not deserve a better rating than a school with a stellar program in, say, social work, one of the worst-paid but most important jobs in the known universe. But the fix for this is easy: Tie aid not to salaries, but to relative earnings specific to both field and region.

First of all, Schuman’s “easy” fix is inadequate; it addresses the “maximize business majors and kill your social work program” issue, but not the “punish schools that serve relatively more students from disadvantaged backgrounds” problem.    But more to the point, the whole form of argument will be familiar to anyone who has read “liberal hawks” distance themselves from the Iraq War.  (“When I favored the Iraq War, I favored an imaginary war fought by competent people that came out well, not the one offered by the Bush administration.”)    If the administration offers a better universal rating plan, we can consider it.  What’s relevant for the time being is the one actually being offered, which is terrible.

Even more remarkably, Schuman doesn’t actually defend any of the details of the rating system.  Rather, her defense of the proposals rests on the premises that 1)if university presidents (including Ken Starr) don’t like something it has to be good, and 2)even a really bad rating system will force “accountability” for reasons that are as opaque as the causal mechanism that would cause a stable liberal democracy to spontaneously replace a deposed Saddam Hussein.  I assume it doesn’t require elaborate argument to show that these are unserious arguments.    That problems are real doesn’t make any proposed solution effective, and basing one’s policy views based on people you don’t like opposing them is a poor way of proceeding.  (If university presidents oppose cuts to state aid, does that mean we have to support them?) The universal rating system is worth doing only if it’s likely to work, and is Schuman implicitly concedes in its current form it almost certainly won’t.

The bigger issue here is that the better solution to the current crisis in higher ed would be to replace indirect subsidy with direct subsidy — state schools that offer an affordable tuition, a broader system of Pell Grants that offers more aid to the non-affluent, but structured in a way that creates downward pressure on tuition.  But with these solutions off the table, we’re struck with alternatives that are unlikely to accomplish much, a central problem of the current American political condition.

CIA Public Affairs Director in @USATODAY oped: "We believe in strong oversight" http://t.co/Lo5j7MvCCv

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) March 19, 2014

@matthewstoller @JasonLeopold CIA Director Stringer Bell: "Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy??"

— billmon (@billmon1) March 19, 2014

From the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Senate Intelligence Committee believe that laws may have been broken in their bitter dispute over top secret documents relating to the C.I.A.’s detention program and who has the right to read them.

The Justice Department could settle the matter. But, according to department officials, it has little enthusiasm for wading into the middle of a politically charged battle that has raised constitutional issues about the separation of powers and the scope of congressional oversight.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. seemed to reflect his department’s ambivalence when he noted on Wednesday that it receives many criminal referrals and often declines to investigate or prosecute…

But some senior lawmakers said last week that they would support having an independent investigator examine the allegations because the Justice Department should not be mediating a dispute between the executive and legislative branch.…

According to several people who have read the report, it concludes that the agency gained little valuable intelligence from its brutal questioning of Qaeda detainees, and that C.I.A. officials repeatedly misled the White House, Congress and the public about the value of the program.

The era after Sept. 11 is already one of the most closely studied periods of C.I.A. history, and it is not expected that the report will reveal previously undisclosed interrogation tactics or clandestine programs.

Rather, according to a former senior intelligence official briefed on the report, the agency’s objections have much to do with its tone, which the official described as prosecutorial…

ORLY?

Journalist Masha Gessen, in the Washington Post:

… When I talk to LGBT refugees from Russia about what it’s like to live in New York, the first thing they mention is the safety. Which is funny and awful, because they are talking about the most basic kind: physical safety. People are no longer afraid of being beaten or killed, or having their kids taken from them. Other than that, they have no safety net: no job, nor the right to look for one; no friends, other than those they met at the Russian LGBT refugee support group; no papers. This last one becomes the biggest missing piece. “Bez bumazhki ty bukashka,” an old Soviet song goes: “Without a piece of paper you are but a tiny bug.”

And a tiny bug is exactly what you feel like if you live in New York City, speak with an accent, look like you’re under 40 and have no papers. No rental apartment, no alcoholic drinks, no Costco card for you. One of the most prized recipes exchanged among new refugees, second perhaps to securing a good immigration lawyer, is how to get a New York state ID. It involves opening bank accounts, engaging in a certain number of financial transactions and traveling to the outer boroughs on a regular basis — because not all bank branches will open an account for someone with a foreign passport and without a Social Security number. Refugees also coach one another on how to get an apartment through a co-signer, how to get your emergency-room bill adjusted down and where to find free English classes.

And then there’s the one place in New York City where you can get a gorgeous bumazhka — a piece of paper — recognizing you and a partner as a married couple. You can use your Russian passport with its tourist visa. Hell, the visa can even be expired. You need one witness. Pay $25, and a city official will say to you: “By the powers vested in me by the State of New York, I now pronounce you married. You can seal your union with a kiss.” Then you kiss. In public, safely…

And I do not even believe in marriage. I’m opposed to it as an institution, and I’ve spoken about it publicly often enough that the Kremlin youth movement has declared me the No. 1 enemy of the traditional Russian family. But it turned out that getting settled in the United States with my partner and our three kids would be a lot easier if we got married. When Darya and I wed in late March, we frustrated our chosen minister by trying to refuse to say vows as part of the ceremony. In the end, each of us ended up writing our own vows. In hers, Darya said she was not so much wedding me as she was marrying the United States of America.

“We are still in the honeymoon period,” she said of her new country. “I’m sure we will have our ups and downs. But I will always love her for enabling me to marry the woman I love.”…

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Our submitter spotted this behind a building on a college campus in Maine — a college that apparently does not tolerate outside-the-utility-box thinking among its employees.

Poor Ed. If only he worked in a jurisdiction where his style of painting could truly be appreciated, like, say, San Francisco…

Or Boston…

Or Salem, Massachusetts…

…or dozens of other cities around the world. Don’t give in to the man, Ed!

related: The Gateway to Contractor Hell

There has been a lot of discussion of Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century, which argues that:

• The ratio of wealth to income is rising in all developed countries.
• Absent extraordinary interventions, we should expect that trend to continue.
• If it continues, the future will look like the 19th century, where economic elites have predominantly inherited their wealth rather than working for it.
• The best solution would be a globally coordinated effort to tax wealth.

The United States is now an outlier among western countries in terms of income inequality and you can bet your car elevator that the rich are going to be able buy off much of our government, especially with the current SCOTUS in place:

Wealthy people will be even better poised to influence the 2014 and 2016 elections than they were to influence the 2010 and 2012 elections. Now, wealthy people are not a single voting bloc, but most wealthy people would like to continue being wealthy. And so you see bipartisan movement towards policies that protect their wealth, most recently with the Democratic legislature in Maryland voting to eliminate the state’s estate tax.

Over time, a political system that gives the wealthy more power is a political system that is going to do more to protect the interests of the wealthy. It’s the Doom Loop of Oligarchy, and we’re seeing it daily.

Of course you know who else who thought that capitalism would go into a death spiral. And now writers as different as The Wire’s David Simon and National Review’s Jimmy P are wondering if that bearded Satanist was right after all, or at least many people will soon believe that he was.

I like capitalism (though I don’t like money or people bragging about how much they make or how cheaply then live), but if I wanted to hasten its demise, I’d be cheering Paul Ryan on. Maybe the neocons never really stopped being Trotskyites.

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I’ve touched on this before, and while I know many of you kids don’t believe me, there was something cool about being a conservative in the 80s, at least within the imaginations of producers of popular culture. Nowadays Nick Gillespie and stripey shirt guy are the only ones even trying but consider this: Alex P. Keaton lost his virginity to an older, sophisticated red-head that he met at a Milton Friedman lecture.

The most surprising thing to me about CommencementGate (or should that be CommencementGhazi) was the fact that these assholes can get paid 35K to give a speech. That said, I was hoping that we wouldn’t be stuck with the Tim Egan/Olivia Nuzzi/Damon Linker “more in sorrow than in anger…STFU kids” pieces everyone’s been talking about, that some real dinosaur from the ’80s would rear his head, come into the airspace of the United States of America, and drop some Reagan era anti-PC jive (trashing college kids was a staple of 80s discourse) on us. And who better than P. J. O’Rourke to do it:

1989 happens to be when the Berlin Wall fell. I know, I know, most of you weren’t born, and you get your news from TMZ. A wall falling over can’t be as interesting as Beyonce’s sister punching and kicking Jay Z in a New York hotel elevator. But that 1989 moment of “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (and I’ll bet you a personal karaoke performance of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” that you can’t name the poet who wrote it) had interesting consequences. Stop taking selfies and Google “Berlin Wall” on the iPhones you’re all fiddling with.

[…]

Do you know Milton Friedman graduated from Rutgers? Do you know who he is? Won the Nobel Prize for economics. I checked your Department of Economics website. Courses are offered in “Economics of Crime,” “Income Inequality,” “Women in the Economy” (Condoleezza Rice won’t be getting her honorarium for speaking at this ceremony), and “Game Theory.” (Useful on Xbox? Or not so much?) But I don’t see a course called “Capitalism and Freedom,” also the title of the book by Milton Friedman that has been shaping economic debate in this country for half a century.

There’s a dumb Santayana/Santana pun, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and a bit about pony-tailed hippies. Epic!

If you want to know what Reagan era cool conservatism was like, this flips the track and brings the old school back.

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Maria Konnikova, in the New Yorker, on “Multitask Masters“:

… Strayer believes that there is a tiny but persistent subset of the population—about two per cent—whose performance does not deteriorate, and can even improve, when multiple demands are placed on their attention. The supertaskers are true outliers….

So what are we going to learn from them, exactly? For one, Strayer thinks, that the ability is probably genetic to a large extent. You are either born with the neural architecture that allows you to overcome the usual multitasking challenges, or you aren’t. Already, with their admittedly limited sample, Strayer and his team have found that supertaskers exhibit different patterns of neural activation when multitasking than most of us. There is less activity in those frontal regions—the frontopolar prefrontal cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex—that have been implicated in multitasking and executive control in the past. Supertasker brains, in other words, become less, not more, active with additional tasks: they are functioning more efficiently. “Their brains are doing something we can’t do,” Strayer says….

The irony of Strayer’s work is that when people hear that super-taskers exist— even though they know they’re rare—they seem to take it as proof that they, naturally, are an exception. “You’re not,” Strayer told me bluntly. “The ninety-eight per cent of us, we deceive ourselves. And we tend to overrate our ability to multitask.” In fact, when he & his University of Utah colleague, the social psychologist David Sanbomnatsu, asked more than three hundred students to rate their ability to multitask and then compared those ratings to the students’ actual multitasking performances, they found a strong relationship: an inverse one. The better someone thought she was, the more likely it was that her performance was well below par…

Much more at the link — including a web version of the supertasker challenge, if you want to establish whether you’re a slan among the Two Percenters.

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Apart from reinforcing the sad reality that most of us can’t text and walk (much less drive) at the same time, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up the weekend?

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Huffington Post has the story of Army National Guard SSG Tracy Dice Johnson, who has received notification by the Department of Veterans Affairs that she will receive VA survivors benefits, dated retroactively to the death in combat of her wife, ANG SSG Donna Johnson, who was killed by an Afghan suicide bomber on October 1, 2012.  This was before the Supreme Court ruled the Defense Of Marriage Act unconstitutional, which happened in June of last year.

Dice Johnson, an outspoken critic of DOMA, was informed of the decision on Saturday at the American Military Partner Association’s gala, where she received the organization’s 2014 Community Hero Award. She called the VA’s announcement “an important step toward our end goal of achieving equal treatment for all military families.”

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Jane Meyer, in the New Yorker:

… Around dawn on October 23, 1983, I was in Beirut, Lebanon, when a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with the equivalent of twenty-one thousand pounds of TNT into the heart of a U.S. Marine compound, killing two hundred and forty-one servicemen. The U.S. military command, which regarded the Marines’ presence as a non-combative, “peace-keeping mission,” had left a vehicle gate wide open, and ordered the sentries to keep their weapons unloaded. The only real resistance the suicide bomber had encountered was a scrim of concertina wire. When I arrived on the scene a short while later to report on it for the Wall Street Journal, the Marine barracks were flattened. From beneath the dusty, smoking slabs of collapsed concrete, piteous American voices could be heard, begging for help. Thirteen more American servicemen later died from injuries, making it the single deadliest attack on American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima…

There were more than enough opportunities to lay blame for the horrific losses at high U.S. officials’ feet. But unlike today’s Congress, congressmen did not talk of impeaching Ronald Reagan, who was then President, nor were any subpoenas sent to cabinet members. This was true even though then, as now, the opposition party controlled the majority in the House. Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, was no pushover. He, like today’s opposition leaders in the House, demanded an investigation—but a real one, and only one. Instead of playing it for political points, a House committee undertook a serious investigation into what went wrong at the barracks in Beirut. Two months later, it issued a report finding “very serious errors in judgment” by officers on the ground, as well as responsibility up through the military chain of command, and called for better security measures against terrorism in U.S. government installations throughout the world.

In other words, Congress actually undertook a useful investigation and made helpful recommendations…

Go read the whole thing, it’s not long. And next time someone you can’t unfriend yawks about BenghazAIIIIEEEEE!!!! on the social networks, remember: Sharing is Caring.

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Great news! Sort of. I watched this trickle through the scientific press for a while and I guess I can no longer ignore it.

Researchers in the US are closing in on a therapy that could reverse harmful ageing processes in the brain, muscles, heart and other organs.

[...]The infusions had a striking impact on the animals’ performance. Aged rodents … found their way around a water maze as well as six-month-old mice, and reacted like three-month-olds in an experiment that tested how well they remembered a threatening environment.

[...] Chemicals … encouraged the growth of blood vessels in the aged brain, which improved circulation in the organ. They also boosted the numbers of neural stem cells, which mature into brain cells. Older mice that received [it] had a sharpened sense of smell, able to distinguish odours as well as young animals could.

To reverse aging even a little bit sounds like a miracle. And not a congratulations-now-you-have-cancer miracle like telomerase but the sort of thing an actual person could use. You might ask why I feel a little trepidation about this news hitting it big.

Hopes have been raised by three separate reports released by major journals on Sunday that demonstrate in experiments on mice the dramatic rejuvenating effects of chemicals found naturally in young blood.

Infusions of young blood reversed age-related declines in memory and learning, brain function, muscle strength and stamina, researchers found. In two of the reports, scientists identified a single chemical in blood that appears to reverse some of the damage caused by ageing.

So we can (maybe, pending clinical trials) revitalize the elderly. It might even be easy. The caveat is pretty big though. We already know that young blood does the trick (in mice), so unless the purified protein (GDF11) works nearly as well and does not cost much you will soon see a demand for blood from lots and lots of children.

That may sound like a stretch. I hope so, but think about the potential market demand. It would make viagra look like a niche product. Literally every living person will want it. Can they make enough synthetic GDF11 to satisfy all that demand? Can they make it cheap enough for everyone to afford? Anyone with a pamphlet’s worth of medical knowledge and a centrifuge can make blood plasma. Much as we collectively do not want to see a black market show up, a lot of us individually will have a hard time not willing one into existence.

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This is an interesting project:

One hundred years after the beginning of World War I, the British National Archive has launched an ambitious project to sift through and classify its vast trove of records from that world-spanning conflict.

It’s asking everyday people to help. Operation War Diary is a collaboration between the Archive, the Imperial War Museum and crowdsourcing Website Zooniverse. The effort aims to mobilize an army of amateur historians….

The problem is, there are far too many documents for War Museum agents or other physical visitors to the Archive to have any realistic chance of doing useful curating. Even after the Archive digitized the Great War collection, the Museum still needed help.

Lintott and Smith’s Op War Diary connects the vast war archive to Zooniverse’s legions of armchair researchers. Sitting at their laptops, Zooniverse users can read a few random WO/95s after work or on the weekend.

They add a bit of metadata specifying what kind of information is in the old documents—names, dates and places. Those data tags make it much, much easier for authors, academics and lay readers to find the war diaries they actually want to read.

This is just the beginning of the process; once reviewed, there’s a process for vetting competing or contradictory tags. Should help make the archive considerably more useful for scholars.

 You can still enter to win a signed copy of the new edition of Off to Be the Wizard (Magic 2.0). In addition to that book, the prize package will also include the Basic Instructions 2014 Box Calendar, and a signed copy of a book by a different author. This week, the bonus book is The 27th Mile, By Ray Charbonneau, and in this case I'll point out that if you chose to go to Ray's site and purchase a copy, all of the proceeds will go to help victems of the Boston Marathon bombings.

You can enter below by friending Off to Be the Wizard on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or by answering a question.

Sadly, the offer is only open to people in the United States. Shipping costs, what can I say? The contest closes on, April 19th at 12am, then a new give away with a different bonus book will begin. Thanks, and good luck!

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As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell first emerged when I was attending a parochial high school, so I can still sing most of both soundtracks from memory. I always preferred Godspell, but I know mine is the minority opinion, so here’s some happy news for those of you who are, or once were, practicing liberal Christians and/or Muppet aficionados, via Paul Constant:

Just in time for the upcoming Easter weekend comes Muppet Christ Superstar, an “album” of nine songs from the 1971 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar—with the lead characters recast as Muppets. Kermit plays Jesus, of course, with Gonzo playing his backstabbing friend Judas and Miss Piggy filling the role of Mary Magdalene.

And voicing all those roles is 20-year-old songwriter Christo Graham, the mastermind behind the parody and a drama and film student at Bishop’s University in Quebec. Graham told us he recorded the album over a couple nights in his bedroom, and although he plays several instruments and has already released five albums of original music (available on Bandcamp), he used karaoke tracks for Muppet Christ Superstar, singing all parts (even the backing vocals, ostensibly from the Electric Mayhem, and Gonzo’s chickens)…

(Warning: While you should be able to play the entire soundtrack by clicking on the link below, the volume is set on HIGH and I couldn’t figure out how to turn it down in the embed. Adjust your speakers accordingly!)

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Apart from nostalgia and related silliness, what’s on the agenda today?

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