Things I Like - Food

No Reservations, the travel/food program hosted by cooking’s bad boy Anthony Bourdain is the only ‘food’ show that Mr. White will watch. Bourdain’s show is not only interesting (he dines in places that we will likely never step foot), it’s also entertaining. This is due primarily to Bourdain’s willingness to say exactly what he’s thinking and do just about anything (anyone willing to pose for this photo is certifiable).

And thank goodness for that! At his entertaining best, here are some of Bourdain’s thoughts on the current TV Food programming from Eat Me Daily

On Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern
I don't know how he does it. I respect his stamina…I've got to hand it to the guy for being able to get up in the morning and face nothing but lizard parts and testicles, especially in some tropical climate without the benefit of alcohol. I honestly don't know how he does it. I would have hung myself in the shower stall.

On Iron Chef America
I have a soft spot in my heart for this show. But the judges, man...Who are these douchebags they put on there? Jeffrey Steingarten at least knows what he's talking about. The show gets really good chefs to go on there, and to have them judged by the likes of Mo Rocca makes me want to vomit in my mouth.

And my personal favorite:

On Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee
She makes her audience feel good about themselves…All you have to do is waddle into the kitchen, open a can of crap and spread it on some other crap that you bought at the supermarket…The most terrifying thing I've seen is her making a Kwanzaa cake. Watch that clip and tell me your eyeballs don't burst into flames. It's a war crime on television. You'll scream.

If you haven’t already, pick up a copy of Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential – the first book to lay open the restaurant world in all its scary glory. Just a quick warning – you may not be able to dine out for a while after reading.

Do You Really Want Unfettered Capitalism?

From Paul Kedrosky's blog:
"Some interesting comments from Atlantic writer/editor James Fallows on his return from living in China. Here are his first impressions, which can be reduced to the two "C"s: cellphones and clean air.

Even in a downturn -- and, yes, in Washington, not Flint. Everything looks so comfortable and lush! The air is so clean! (Today's reading in Beijing: "Hazardous.") And the cell phone coverage is so crappy! I can barely recall a moment in China when I was out of signal range. Today alone in Washington, half a dozen dropped calls.

There it is, the China/U.S. trade-off in a nutshell."

TW: Wags like to say China is more capitalist than the U.S., they may be right. But is unfettered capitalism really a desirable outcome? Imagine no OSHA, no FDA, no EPA, no FTC etc. We have more regulations and a much more livable society. We also have tremendously entrenched legacy systems and powers (e.g. telecoms, health care providers, automotive industry), who really would prefer that the status quo be retained.

China (and India, Brazil etc.) are benefiting greatly from modernizing their societies without many of the entrenched technologies which burden our society. The U.S. benefited from the same dynamic 100-125 years ago as we overtook Europe. Food for thought.

Sanford Tweetery

From Karen Tumulty at Time (best of the snarky tweets relative to Gov. Sanford):
"@Roland_Hedley: Governor Sanford kicks off 2012 campaign by disappearing, paradoxically raising national profile. Crazy like Fox.about 17 hours ago from web
@pourmecoffee: BREAKING. Sarah Palin can see Mark Sanford from her window - wait, never mind, it's a bear. about 1 hour ago from web
@Roland_Hedley: Report: Sanford wandering in wilderness, triggering excited speculation from GOP faithful that he'll return with tablets.about 10 hours ago from web
@pourmecoffee: MARK SANFORD CLUE? We left a sandwich and chips outside on the patio last night and it's gone this morning. about 3 hours ago from TwitterGadget
@marklisanti: It's OK, everybody, Mark Sanford's here. We're playing Wii Tennis, shooting sh-t, making sandwiches. Pretty fun day, actually about 16 hours ago from web
@thejoelstein: If, like SC Gov Sanford, I shut off cell and left for days to "write," I'd be writing alimony checks - and I'm a writer. http://bit.ly/wYn0z about 18 hours ago from web"

If Health Care Providers Act Rationally Costs Will Infinitely Increase

TW: Kwak makes one of those somewhat obvious yet crucial points. If doctors behave like rational suppliers, medical costs will continue to escalate and at probably increasing rates. He references the now ubiquitous Awal Gawande New Yorker piece in which Gawande compared a high-cost locality- McAllen, TX to a lower cost TX locality. Kwak's points out that the McAllen doctors were merely behaving as rational suppliers, the exception were the lower cost suppliers in the other locale.

As we have mentioned before, health care providers make their living providing/selling health care. They are not saints, they are not irrational and they are at the end of the day suppliers. To expect hospitals, doctors, pharma companies etc. to optimize your health care costs is to expect irrational behavior.

To a certain degree as technology and systems improve, the health care folks not pushing higher, more expensive treatments may be the ones ferreted out and pushed out.



From Jim Kwak at Baseline Scenario:
"...our health care system has high-cost and low-cost areas; the high-cost areas have no better outcomes than the low-cost areas. So theoretically we can solve our health care cost problem by making the high-cost areas behave like the low-cost areas.

However, the market incentives go in the other direction; the economically rational thing for providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) to do is to run up procedures and thereby costs. It would be better if providers focused more on patient outcomes or organized themselves into accountable care organizations, as Gawande prefers; but there is no economic reason for them to do so. People are not magically going to become more altruistic overnight.


...In some ways McAllen isn’t the aberration; according to the old Chicago economics department, everywhere should be like McAllen.

Remember all the people who said that you can’t blame mortgage brokers and investment bankers for being greedy, because that’s how a capitalist economy works? Well, you could make the same defense for the McAllen doctors. We long ago stopped expecting lawyers and accountants to behave contrary to their economic interests; now we simply expect them to conform to the law and to certain professional codes of conduct, and otherwise make as much money as possible. Why should we expect anything different from doctors?..."
http://baselinescenario.com/2009/06/21/the-health-care-problem/

Now They Know How Islamic Groups Feel

TW: I tend to get very libertarian quickly when it comes to law enforcement and civil liberties. I feel many of the "anti-terrorist" measures taken since 9/11 are overly intrusive, paranoid and sacrificial of too much liberty in the name of security. Conservatives (the non-libertarian slanted ones at least) typically have been highly supportive though of the intrusive measures as they tend toward the security end of the "liberty/security" scale.

For this reason, the irony is considerable as conservatives get uptight about domestic security agencies probing "right-wing" groups of various ilks here in the U.S. It is uncomfortable when your "own" (understanding the vast majority of conservatives are not "extremists") are the targets. Perhaps now they will have some empathy for Islamic types of whom the vast majority of members are not extremists either.

From Washington Monthly:
"WHEN IDEOLOGY TRUMPS LAW ENFORCEMENT.... Newsweek had an item the other day...

'In February, the Missouri Information Analysis Center, one of several "fusion" centers created after 9/11 to share intelligence among local, state and federal agencies, issued a "strategic report" warning about a resurgence of the "modern militia movement." Last week, on the same day that white supremacist James von Brunn allegedly killed a guard at Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum, Missouri's police chief informed legislators that the fusion center had suspended production of such reports. Why? Outcry from conservative activists, who felt they were being tarred too. [...]

They may talk about it less in public now, but law-enforcement and intel officials tell NEWSWEEK they're quietly scrutinizing threats from the far right just as carefully as those from Islamic extremists.'

So...Law enforcement officials decided, on purpose, to stop preparing reports on potentially dangerous radicals, because conservative activists said scrutiny of extremists made them feel put upon? Conservative activists whine about all kinds of things; shouldn't law enforcement officials ignore them and focus on real threats?"

The Humanization Of Iranians

TW: Regardless of the outcome of the on-going struggle in Iran, as the piece posits, the world and particularly American view of Iran has been greatly altered. We tend to demonize our "enemies" (see our WWII Japanese caricatures) or even potential "enemies", especially the non-European ones. We have been pissed off at the Iranian government for a long time. Bombing demons and caricatures is must more palatable than the alternative.

The recent events in Iran will make any moves towards belligerence much more challenging. Perhaps explaining partially at least the visceral reaction from the neo-cons to Obama's measured responses.

From Economist:

"ONE thing seems certain to emerge from the chaos in Iran. Whether it becomes the next revolution or the next Tiananmen, Iran has been humanised to Americans—and to many others around the world—to a degree not possible in the earlier era of "mad mullahs" versus "Great Satan". For a long time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad *was* the face of Iran for those in the West who feared it (or wanted to engender fear of it). Now, that face may as well be Neda Soltani (pictured), the young woman shot dead on the street while she spoke on her mobile phone.

With what result? Iran is now likely to play a role in the American imagination more like that of Poland during the cold war: as a country of good people dominated by a few bad people, not as a country of martyrdom-seeking Shiite maniacs. I'm guessing this also makes the possibility of bombing Iranian nuclear facilities even more remote under a President Obama than they were before. Simply put, we may have forever lost our appetite for bombing nuclear sites near population centres, with Iran's population brought to our televisions and monitors as they have been this past week.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2009/06/humanising_iran.cfm

Things I Like - Art

These glass sculptures by Kari Russel-Pool are absolutely beautiful.

When Life Hands You Lemons

Trophy

Tonic

Peach Trophy

See more from Kari here
via Daily Art Muse

1930 Flashbacks

TW: There is a site for everything on the web. Have come across one that summarizes the Wall Street Journal day by corresponding day for 1930. I like historical snapshots of contemporary media. They can be instructive, these are from June, 1930.

From http://newsfrom1930.blogspot.com/:
"Market students have been encouraged by the general gloom for the past two weeks. This contrasts with the “new era” thinking of last summer when no end was seen to the rise in stock prices and margin debt was hitting a record every week. History says the current gloom is just as mistaken as last summer's unjustified optimism. Historically there has been no case in this country since 1900 when business failed to turn upward the year following a [recession].

Harvard Economics Society says the recent market weakness reflects pessimism and uncertainty, but sees no change in the fundamentals, forecasts “an early improvement in business.”

Miami's population grows from 29,571 in 1920 to 110,025 in 1930

Economists feel the current situation in commodity markets is starting to look like a bottom; a combination of underproduction and easy credit at low rates should work as usual to correct conditions.

Maurice S. Benjamin of Benjamin, Hill, & Co. predicted two months ago that the market would have to undergo a severe pullback before reaching new highs. He then sailed for Europe. Following that correct call, he now says the decline is over and predicts a quick improvement in business, stock prices much higher by fall, and still higher by next spring [TW: making one correct call is nice, being able to make the next...not so easy hello Mr. Roubini...]

Front page above the fold editorial: “This is America. Piffling talkers would turn back the calendar to the nineties and destroy the economic progress of thirty years. Vicious rumors spread for selfish purposes; flippant predictions of a five-year slump in business; wholesale demands for the cutting of wages are unworthy of American intelligence. Credit is super-abundant. Business is no worse than three months ago. Twelve months of declining volume is behind us. Many adjustments have been all but completed. Engineering and marketing brains are as fertile as ever. Problems there have always been. To proclaim their insurmountability is childish.”

Powdered Wine....

"Mountaineering gourmands no longer have to forgo a glass of red wine after conquering a peak. Trek‘n Eat has now launched a new red wine in the form of a powder. The beverage powder that comes in convenient portions packed in pouches has an alcoholic content of 8,2%, which is similar to a light bottled wine. A matching mulled wine has also been developed for expeditions in snow and the cold – for celebrating the special moment at night camp."

TW: Another treat from Trek n'Treat...I don't think so...I think I would suffer wine deprivation first.

Jocks v. Nerds

TW: Takes awhile to get rolling, u can jump in at 2:30 minute mark.

The Hill-o-bama Team Works

TW: One does not hear an extraordinary amount about Hillary Clinton. She is in the news about as often as most secretaries of state but not as much as an almost POTUS nominee and a controversial former First Lady might be. The same thing happened when she became a first-term Senator from NY, she quietly went about her business in an effective manner.

Merely restoring the State Department to its traditional role as the primary diplomatic in place of the Pentagon is a huge and positive step. It is very early but so far she and Obama have made a pretty strong team.

From Economist:
"...Mischief-makers have been trying to discover tensions between the two former rivals ever since Mrs Clinton moved to Foggy Bottom in January. So far they have been frustrated...

Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton have hewed to the same line over the current uproar in Iran—expressing worries about the violence but avoiding raising the spectre of “American interference”. Mrs Clinton has followed Mr Obama’s lead in holding out a welcoming hand to assorted anti-American strongmen. “President Obama won the election. He beat me in a primary in which he put forth a different approach,” was her sharp response to a Republican congressman who reminded her of her former hawkishness when Mr Obama shook Hugo Chávez’s hand. Mrs Clinton now enjoys the highest popularity rating of any of Mr Obama’s cabinet; she also enjoys the admiration of some Republicans...

Mrs Clinton’s success has partly been a matter of good fortune. The State Department is delighted to see the arrival of an administration that does not regard Foggy Bottom as enemy-occupied territory. It also has better relations with the Pentagon than it has had for years. If Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way to antagonise State, Robert Gates, who replaced him in 2006, has bent over backwards to woo it, publicly agonising over the “creeping militarisation” of foreign policy and calling for a “dramatic increase” in the “civilian instruments” of national security, such as diplomacy and foreign aid.

...She has struck a balance between deploying her star power and deferring to the president. She is routinely greeted as a rock star wherever she goes, and has enjoyed mixing with ordinary people: holding a spirited discussion with the teenage audience of an Indonesian television show, “Awesome”, for example. But she has always known when to defer to Mr Obama or other cabinet secretaries, such as Tim Geithner.

...Mrs Clinton has also seemed content to delegate the day-to-day management of some of the world’s most volatile regions to special envoys: the Afghanistan-Pakistan region to Mr Holbrooke; the Middle East peace process to George Mitchell...But in general Mrs Clinton has disentangled herself enough from the daily demands of these regions to focus on strategic questions that are too often given short shrift: overhauling the management of foreign aid, improving the United States’ relations with Latin America and managing the rise of Asia, which is arguably the most important strategic issue facing the country..."
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13856297

Mankiw Is A Red-Light Thinking Hypocrite

From Greg Mankiw (conservative economist at Harvard):
"In the debate over healthcare reform, another claim one often hears is that better prevention will save us money. I have noted previously how "schlocky" this argument is. Over the weekend, a doctor writing in the Wall Street Journal puts the point as follows:

Prevention of a disease, we all assume, should save us money, right? An ounce of prevention . . . Alas, If only such aphorisms were true we’d hand out apples each day and our problems would be over. It is true that if the prevention strategies we are talking about are behavioral things—eat better, lose weight, exercise more, smoke less, wear a seat belt—then they cost very little and they do save money by keeping people healthy.
But if your preventive strategy is medical, if it involves us, if it consists of screening, finding medical conditions early, shaking the bushes for high cholesterols, or
abnormal EKGs, markers for prostate cancer such as PSA, then more often than not you don’t save anything and you might generate more medical costs. Prevention is a good thing to do, but why equate it with saving money when it won’t?
Think about this: discovering high cholesterol in a person who is feeling well, is really just discovering a risk factor and not a disease; it predicts that you have a greater chance of having a heart attack than someone with a normal cholesterol. Now you can reduce the probability of a heart attack by swallowing a statin, and it will make good sense for you personally, especially if you have other risk factors (male sex, smoking etc).. But if you are treating a population, keep in mind that you may have to treat several hundred people to prevent one heart attack. Using a statin costs about $150,000 for every year of life it saves in men, and even more in women (since their heart-attack risk is lower)—I don’t see the savings there

Mankiw again: As a daily consumer of a statin, I appreciate the extra lifespan, even at the cost."

TW: This piece frames a couple of issues. One is the Republican/Conservative approach to health care reform. They are red-light thinkers. Red-light thinkers are cancerous to life, all they do is point out problems, rarely if ever solutions. Watch and listen to Republicans on health care, 90% of their stuff is red-light thinking. Usually with elliptical tropes like "don't put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor, stop socialized medicine". Or like the above they point out challenges but offer no solutions.

Is preventative medicine a panacea, of course not. In a completely cold-hearted approach limited or no prevention might be the cheapest way to provide health care. Smok'em if you got 'em, that way you day young before those old age health care bills kick in. Don't wear a seat belt that way you head gets bashed in so that those costly back surgeries are not necessary. Is less preventative care the answer though, OF COURSE NOT.

I see posts like Mankiw's frequently from conservative commentators trying to drip, drip, drip against health care reform so that we end up with the same old, same old. But what really gets me with this post is his last sentence- "As a daily consumer of a statin, I appreciate the extra lifespan, even at the cost."

His post laments the value of prevention, the high cost etc. Yet when it comes to his own personal situation (where presumably Harvard is covering all his health care with a great plan), he "appreciates the statins regardless of cost". Ponder that.

Things I Like - Humor

These made me chuckle:

I hope this isn't a text book...

Better than a Rick Roll

Mean post-its

Schadenfreude Alert: Chavez Is Struggling

TW: What goes up can go down. Hugo Chavez perhaps more than any other dictator benefited from soaring oil prices. As those prices have plunged and even with the recent partial rebound, Chavez' political strength has suffered.

A negative externality associated with fossil fuels is propping up poorly run governments, especially those hostile to the U.S. Developing policies to ensure oil prices remain stable and contained can pay benefits far beyond our balance of trade and putting more bucks into our consumers' pockets.

From Economist:
"...inflation is close to 30%, real wages are falling and welfare schemes have suffered big cuts in their budget. The mood on the streets of poorer suburbs of Caracas, the capital, is glum.

...Officially, unemployment is stable at around 7%...According to the Central Bank, the economy grew by 0.3% in the first quarter compared with the same months of 2008. Construction is supposed to have expanded by 3.6%. But some economists doubt the figures.

Public investment is under strain. This month, for example, the boss of Caracas’s metro system announced a review of a new line already under construction, with the probable scrapping of two stations.

...Food consumption among poorer Venezuelans may be declining...Opinion polls reveal a sharp rise in worries over the cost of living. The government’s answer to years of persistent inflation has been price controls and Mercal, a state-owned and subsidised grocery chain that offers a limited selection of staples at discounts of up to 40%. But Mercal’s sales fell by more than 11% in the first five months of this year, partly because of store closures and distribution problems.

...The most popular of Mr Chávez’s social misiones is Barrio Adentro, which includes a network of primary-health centres initially staffed by thousands of Cuban doctors. But many of these have also closed. Poorer Venezuelans must rely on rundown public hospitals, which have been starved of funds under Mr Chávez.

...oil output has been falling. When the oil price plunged last year, its direct transfers to welfare programmes fell to $2.7 billion, from $7.1 billion in 2007.

...On the face of things, the recent recovery in the price of oil to around $70 a barrel should enable Mr Chávez to muddle through without radical shifts in policy...To sustain public spending at its peak level without deficits would have required Venezuelan oil to sell at an average of $90 a barrel last year

...Mr Chávez’s hopes of remaining in power for decades to come depend, as ever, on the price of oil."
http://www.economist.com/world/americas/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13864830

Answer: Remember the Four Horsemen

TW: Question: To Those Who Oppose Legitimate Financial Reform I Say...

Innovation We Need: Smart Grids (final segment)

TW: Final segment on smart grids (obviously I like the idea). This segment focuses on the implications for utilities and overall implementation challenges.

The notion of distributed power storage via things like V2G (see below) is exciting. As you likely know, typical power generation is most efficient when done in predictable steady flows, but demand peaks and troughs (hot days v. really cold days, weekends v. working hours etc.). Alternative energy generation has the opposite problem as wind and sun generate power in sync with the weather conditions. Power storage limitations preclude optimizing the generation and consumption dynamic. Distributed storage could help bridge that chasm

Smart meters cost roughly $500 per to buy and install. That is not chump change and likely requires a 3+ year payback. Obama has stepped in with some limited funding through the stimulus package but more will be needed. There are many competing incentives and stakeholders with varying agendas. But we need smart grids!!

From Economist:
"...The advantage from the utility’s point of view is that it becomes easier to balance supply and demand by reducing consumption at times of peak demand, such as during very hot or cold spells, when people crank up their air-conditioners or heaters. As well as improving the stability of the system, it could also enable utilities to postpone the construction of new power stations, or even do without them altogether, by reducing the peak level of demand that they have to meet.

Moreover a smart grid will make it easier to co-ordinate the intermittent and dispersed sources of power, from rooftop solar panels or backyard wind-turbines, for example. And, of course, a smart grid could also help manage the charging of electric vehicles. The best time to charge vehicles is at night, when lots of cheap electricity is available. “If we don’t do that, then we will add to peak loads and we’ll have to build huge amounts of infrastructure to handle our vehicles,” says Robert Pratt of PNNL.

The flow of energy between the grid and electric cars need not be one-way. With millions of electric cars plugged in at any one time, they could act as an enormous energy-storage system, absorbing excess power from wind turbines on windy nights, for example, but also feeding power back into the grid if necessary (an approach called “vehicle to grid”, or V2G) if the wind suddenly drops.

....Implementing all this will not be cheap. A smart meter costs about $125, and can cost several hundred dollars more to install, once the necessary communications network and data-management software at the utility are taken into account.

....The American government is spending some $4 billion from its economic-stimulus package on smart-grid initiatives, but providing a smart meter for every American home would cost far more: California’s investor-owned utilities alone are spending about $4.5 billion on deploying smart meters over the next few years. That implies that a nationwide implementation could cost around $50 billion.

But PNNL estimates that $450 billion would have to be poured into conventional grid infrastructure to meet America’s expected growth over the next decade anyway...One problem is that power companies are understandably reluctant to invest in technologies that will reduce consumption of the product they sell, even if there are other benefits. One way to realign the public interest with that of the utilities is through a process called “decoupling” which breaks the direct relationship between electricity sales and profits, a measure that has been successfully employed in California. Energy use per person has remained largely flat over the past 30 years in California, but it has increased by roughly 50% for the rest of America.

But in some instances the business case is straightforward. Enel spent around €2.1 billion ($3 billion) installing its 30m smart meters in Italy, but now saves around €500m a year as a result, so its investment paid for itself within five years.

...Reducing peak demand in America by a mere 5% would yield savings of about $66 billion over 20 years, according to Ahmad Faruqui of the Brattle Group, a consultancy that has worked with utilities on designing and evaluating smart-meter pilot programmes. Moreover, studies have shown that the best in-home smart-grid technologies can achieve reductions in peak demand of up to 25%, which would result in savings of more than $325 billion over that period, calculates Dr Faruqui...“

Sunday Funnies

Obama Taking Fire From the Left

TW: I post much on the righties/wrongies bitching and moaning about Obama, now for a little lefty griping. I tend to get in more furious debates with lefties than wrongies because I perceive them as ungrateful bastards given political realities. But I subscribe to the idea that if media is covering lefties griping that is better than them covering wrongies as it moves the debate to the left as opposed to the opposite direction. None of which is to say I agree much with what Taibbi says below.

From Matt Taibbi's blog:
"...Eight years of Clintonian squirming was bad enough, but now we have Barack Obama, smoking Habeas Corpus and not inhaling it.

Why is the Gitmo decision classic Democratic Party thinking? Because when certain of us said we wanted Gitmo closed, we sort of meant a change in policy - we didn’t mean just physically closing the plant, moving the prisoners elsewhere, and leaving the policies essentially unchanged.

...There’s always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They’re all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they’ve basically codified the closet by ushering in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along — and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.

Now there’s this Gitmo business. This, folks, just isn’t that tough a call. The prison (and the much less publicized archipelago of hard sites in foreign countries where more terror suspects are held) was a symbol of everything wrong and stupid about the Bush administration. Snatching people up by force and dumping them in rocks on the middle of the ocean without due process is the kind of thing that was last done by “civilized” cultures back in the days of the Roman Empire; since then it’s been the exclusive province of sociopathic third-world dictators like Stalin and Mobutu Sese Seko. It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration, a result of our having accidentally elected an emotionally retarded sadist to the White House.

Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He’s going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand — he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama’s decision, it’s weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he’s bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it’s wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.

It’s one thing to change your mind or play both sides of the fence on matters that don’t involve human lives, on theoretical/hypothetical campaign issues, but another thing to do it with actual incarcerated human beings as the key variable in the political equation.

I still like Obama, in a lot of ways. Having a president with less ability to inspire public confidence at a time like this, with our economy in such a death spiral, would be a disaster; God knows where we’d be right now with a McCain or a Mike Huckabee at the helm. But this guy has to show some stones somewhere along the line. He has to just forget the DC game and just take a clear stand on an issue like this sometime. He’s kind of running out of time to rescue his all-important first impression."
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/05/30/the-end-of-the-obama-honeymoon-part-ii/

Things I Like - Odds & Ends

These came from a site called allPics4u and were categorized under artwork.
Creative, creepy, odd...yes. Artwork - I'm not sure about that:

How Big Is This Iran Thing? What Is This Iran Thing?

TW: BIG. Very big.

The world is witnessing an organic push for democracy, not imposed by the West, an internal organic push by its own citizens. This would be a first in that part of the world. Mind you this is not a push for liberalized Western democracy with codified individual liberties, strong judiciary etc. so the resulting regime, should it ever assume power, would be a different animal than say a Vaclav Havel Czech republic. Yet it would be a massive improvement compared to the status quo.

Two pivotal events occurred in 1978-1979, the overthrow of the Shah with an installation of the Shiite theocracy in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Both events have led to a spiraling series of negative impacts on the West.

An agitating Iran seeking to foment problems for the West at many turns (i.e. Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, indirect terrorist acts in the 1980's etc.). While the Afghani Soviet freedom fighters originally strongly supported by the West morphed directly into the Taliban and Al-Qaeda (two related but very different entities).

Imagine an Iranian regime less outward focused on causing distracting mischief and more inwardly focused on addressing its own population's needs and desires. The Iranian economy has never come close to its potential under the clumsy leadership of the theocracy and the populist Ahmadinejad. The economic sanctions imposed by the West while by no means 100% effective could if reduced greatly help the economic development of a nation under more enlightened leadership.

An Iranian pluralistic revolution would also create a template which could have serious implications for the balance of the Middle East and South Asia. The Islamic Revolution of Khomeini launched the strident, radicalized Islam with which the West has wrestled for thirty years. Radicalized Islam replaced the nationalistic but secular movements of Nassar in Egypt and Assad in Syria as the leading anti-Western alternative.

A less theocratic, more pluralistic Iranian revolution could provide (especially combined with the evolving Iraqi nation) a means by the people of the region could engage with the West in a far more constructive manner.

Will this happen? who knows. Even if it does the challenges will be considerable- the Iranian nuclear program will not go away and a less theocratic and pluralistic Iran would still have no interest in being the West's lackey. That said should this revolution occur, and perhaps even it does not, this revolution unlike the last may make the world a less dangerous place.