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The Best Of The Dish Today

A reader sends the above screenshot:

You might note the contrast between American and Canadian reporting on the Ottawa shooting. I listened to CBC on my drive in to work (I live in Los Angeles), and I was impressed by just how measured the reporting was, even with the crisis still ongoing. The attached picture probably goes a long way to explaining why Americans are terrified that tomorrow ISIS will be invading and imposing Sharia, and that we’re all going to die of Ebola, even though the chance of that actually happening is about 1/100th the chance of getting hit by lightning.

Meanwhile, there is a truly disturbing blog-post out there by Chicago Sun-Times reporter, Dave McKinney. It’s simply his letter of resignation to the chairman of the paper, Michael Ferro, after his reporting of a tough story on the GOP candidate for governor, Bruce Rauner. According to McKinney, the Rauner campaign was furious at the story – it detailed an ugly dispute with a business associate, Christine Kirk, in which Rauner allegedly threatened to “bury her”. The editor of the paper defended the story and McKinney in the strongest terms, but McKinney subsequently found his beat curtailed, and some of his reporting excised from the paper:

I was told to go on leave, a kind of house arrest that lasted almost a week. It was pure hell. Kirk told me that his bosses were considering taking me away permanently from the political and Springfield beats. He offered up other potential jobs at the paper, all of which I considered demotions. Because of my unexplained absence from my beat, colleagues started calling, asking if I had been suspended. Or fired.

Eventually, he was allowed back – but then told not to pursue the story any further, as he was intending to. He asks the chairman of the paper, Michael Ferro:

Was all this retaliation for breaking an important news story that had the blessing of the paper’s editor and publisher, the company’s lawyer and our NBC5 partners? Does part of the answer lie in what Kirk told me – that you couldn’t understand why the LeapSource story was even in the paper? Days later, the newspaper reversed its three-year, no-endorsement policy and unequivocally embraced the very campaign that had unleashed what Sun-Times management had declared a defamatory attack on me.

Readers of the Sun-Times need to be able to trust the paper. They need to know a wall exists between owners and the newsroom to preserve the integrity of what is published. A breach in that wall exists at the Sun-Times.

The race between Rauner and the Democratic governor, Pat Quinn, is currently too close to call. Stay tuned.

Today, we published both a riposte to our readers’ defense of #gamergate and an apologia of sorts by a self-described nerd. This topic clearly touches a whole bunch of nerves all round, judging by the avalanche in the in-tray.

So too did my citation of the inebriated tale of Bristol Palin in the now-famous brawl in Alaska. I’m sorry of some of you thought I was belittling a woman claiming she was attacked; my point was merely the sorry, Springer-style language and general mayhem of the moment, captured by one quote. I could have used others. But I have to say I’ve tried mighty hard to restrain myself with respect to the fantasist and fabulist whom John McCain thought could be president at a moment’s notice. I treat the Palins these days a little like an alcoholic would treat a Jäger shot. I sip. And put it down. Don’t I get any props for that? Or do you secretly want me to get all obsessed again?

Four other posts: the growing evidence that the Obama administration is going to bat for the CIA on torture; the news – surprise! – that intervening in Syria can sometimes help the people we’re trying to defeat; an homage to Shia LaBoeuf of viral proportions; and a stunning fall view from St Paul, Minnesota.

The most popular post of the day was Bristol Palin’s quote and John McCain’s shame; the runner up was Vengeance of the Nerds, Ctd.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 22 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here, including the new “Know Dope” shirts, which are detailed here. One reader really wants one:

Please keep up the “Know Dope” shirts for sale as long as possible. I’m broke right now, but I know I’ll have some money around tax season (Jan-Feb) so I can re-new (for the second time!) and buy one of these shirts. I know supplies are limited, but I just wanted to say that IF they are still available then, I will cop one, so I hope you don’t take them down once November 4th passes.

Also, I’m looking forward to the November 2016 California versions!

Know hope. And see you in the morning.

(Photo: A sign is displayed at the Ottawa City Hall, 4 blocks away from National War Memorial where a soldier was shot earlier in the day in Ottawa, Canada on October 22, 2014. By Mike Carroccetto/Getty Images.)

Face Of The Day

Acrobat Vlad Khvostik performs during a photocall at the Moscow State Circus in Clapham in London, England on October 22, 2014. The circus is located at Clapham Common from 22nd October to 2nd November. By Carl Court/Getty Images.

Those Regressive Scandinavians, Ctd

Mike Konczal lets the air out of Cathie Jo Martin and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez’s claim that the US has a more progressive tax system than Sweden:

They are measuring how much of tax revenue comes from the top decile (or, alternatively, the concentration coefficient of tax revenue), and calling that the progressivity of taxation (“how much more (or less) of the tax burden falls on the wealthiest households”). The fact that the United States gets so much more of its tax revenue from the rich when compared to Sweden means we have a much more progressive tax policy, one of the most progressive in the world. Congratulations?

The problem is, of course, that we get so much of our tax revenue from the rich because we have one of the highest rates of inequality across peer nations. How unequal a country is will be just as much of a driver of the progressivity of taxation as the actual tax polices. In order to understand how absurd this is, even flat taxes on a very unequal income distribution will mean that taxes are “progressive” as more income will come from the top of the income distribution, just because that’s where all the money is. Yet how would that be progressive taxation?

Giving Gray Some Shade

The political philosopher John Gray is known, among other things, for his iconoclastic and often brilliant review essays (we recently featured his takedown of Richard Dawkins here). Anthony McCarthy returns the favor by panning Gray’s recent book, The Silence of Animals, quipping that it “could equally well have been called The Silence of Turnips“:

Things take a downward turn towards the end of the first part of the book, where at least the examples are engaging and concern recognisable human travails. At the end of this first section, there is the statement: ‘When truth is at odds with meaning, it is meaning that wins.’ What is this supposed to mean?

And is it true? Is it true but meaningless, or meaningful but untrue? Is it a statement whose truth could be ‘defeated’ by meaning? The relationship the book has with reality is tenuous at this point. Like Captain Ahab hunting the whale of progress, Gray ends up detaching himself from reality, and becomes far more unreal than those he sets out to confound.

This assertion comes after an excursus into the nature of myth and is followed by several pages of praise for Sigmund Freud who, Gray says, taught us to live without consolation, be it religious or a quasi-religious faith in ‘progress’. It is difficult to know what to make of this section in light of the words which end it, seemingly influenced by the poet Wallace Stephens: ‘Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the world that exists beyond ourselves.’

Knowing there is nothing opens us up to… that same nothing? One does not have to hold that hope is a virtue – for some indeed, one of the great theological virtues – to see this as perverse. The idea that in our lives we can make rational choices which fulfil our nature and allow us to flourish as the kind of beings we are helps us to understand that we can also make choices which gradually reduce who we are and move us towards emptiness and nothingness – evil choices, if you will. In the above passage, nothingness is embraced, being rejected, truth discarded.

Walt Whitman, Shameless Self-Promoter

Although the poet’s famed 1882 meeting with Oscar Wilde is now perhaps best known for alleged sexual shenanigans, David M. Friedman, the author of Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, emphasizes the role their confab played in the development of celebrity culture. Friedman writes, “the real subject of Whitman’s conversation [with Wilde] was how to build a career in public, with all the display that self-glorifying achievement requires”:

We can deduce that with confidence because the first thing Whitman did when he reached his den was to give his guest [Wilde] a photograph of himself. … The portrait Whitman gave Wilde in 1882 appeared on his next book, Specimen Days & Collect, an assemblage of travel diaries, nature writing, and Civil War reminiscences. (Whitman had spent the war years in Washington, working as a government clerk and volunteering as a hospital visitor.) He is in profile in the photograph, sitting in a wicker chair wearing a wide-brimmed hat, an open-necked shirt, and a cardigan. A butterfly is perched on his index finger, held in front of his face. “I’ve always had the knack of attracting birds and butterflies,” Whitman once told a friend. Years later Whitman’s “butterfly” was found in the Library of Congress. It was made of cardboard; it had been tied to his finger with string.

By handing Wilde that photo Whitman was teaching him that fame as a writer is only partly about literature. It is also about committing oneself to a performance. Such role-playing isn’t the act of a phony; in Whitman’s mind every pose he struck was authentic. This type of authenticity – the fashioning of an image one would be faithful to in public – Wilde had experienced on a small scale playing the aesthete on the campus of Oxford’s Magdalen College and at parties in London. It was instructive to have its truth verified by a literary star who had proved its efficacy on an international scale. Wilde had always believed there was nothing inglorious about seeking glory. By handing Wilde his portrait, Whitman was confirming that instinct.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

Losing The Opium War

A new report (pdf) from the office of John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, reveals that poppy production in Afghanistan hit a record high of 209,000 hectares last year, despite a $7.6 billion eradication effort:

“In past years, surges in opium poppy cultivation have been met by a coordinated response from the U.S. government and coalition partners, which has led to a temporary decline in levels of opium production,” Sopko said in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and other top U.S. officials. “The recent record-high level of poppy cultivation calls into question the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of those prior efforts,” he said.

No shit, Sherlock. Keating notes that poppy production “actually fell dramatically from 2007 to 2009, and has been climbing steadily ever since”:

The drop in cultivation prior to 2009 probably had less to do with military efforts than with economic factors. Thanks to drought and a global spike in food prices during that period, the gross income ratio of poppies relative to wheat fell from 10-to-1 in 2007 to 3-to-1 in 2008. Since then, global wheat prices have eased—they’re pretty low at the moment—and the price of poppies has increased, and farmers have gone back to the harder stuff. Eastern Nangahar province, which was declared opium-free and touted as a counternarcotics success story in 2008, saw a fourfold increase in cultivation last year.

Farmers may also be hedging their bets in anticipation of the departure of NATO forces—the majority are pulling out at the end of this year, leaving behind a smaller contingent of U.S. troops to train Afghan security forces. The majority of Afghanistan’s poppies are still grown in the Taliban-dominated Kandahar and Helmand provinces, but cultivation has been increasing around government-controlled Kabul as well.

Jason Koebler compares Afghanistan to South America:

Though the situation is a little different because the US has been engaged in an all out war-war in Afghanistan and not just a war-on-drugs war as it has been in South America with cocaine, the failures and patterns appear to be very similar to what has happened there. In South America, for instance, when Colombia or Peru (backed with US money) has tried to curb coca cultivation by applying aerial herbicide, farmers have simply gone to more remote areas or started growing coca plants in between other crops in order to disguise what they were doing.

In the short term, prices go up when supply temporarily falls, then stabilize once the already skilled farmers relocate and get supply back up to normal or record levels. The overall profits flowing into potentially dangerous coffers (in South America, drug cartels; in Afghanistan, the Taliban or local warlords) don’t really change all that much.

So where did all that money go? Ryan Devereaux answers:

While U.S. efforts have failed to effectively diminish drug trafficking in Afghanistan, they have succeeded in making a handful of private security companies increasingly rich, a point that is not addressed in the inspector general’s report. In 2009, official responsibility for training Afghan police forces was shifted from the State Department to an obscure branch of the Pentagon known as Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office (CNTPO), which took over the roughly $1 billion contract. In waging the privatized war on drugs, CNTPO has partnered with such corporate security giants as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, ARINC, DynCorp and U.S. Training Center, a subsidiary of the firm formerly known as Blackwater.

AJ Vicens reminds us why this matters:

Drug addiction is a major problem in Afghanistan, with as many 1 million people addicted to opium, heroin, and other drugs—including children as young as four. In a joint statement that prefaced the release of the 2013 data, Din Mohammad Mobariz Rashidi, Afghanistan’s acting minister of counternarcotics, and Yury Fedotov, the executive director of the UNODC, said that Afghan and American officials are making progress, and that authorities seize roughly 10 percent of Afghan poppy production. But, they continued, not enough “powerful figures” are being prosecuted. That could be a reference to former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s brother, who was accused of having strong connections to the Afghan heroin trade.

Also, as James Weir and Hekmatullah Azamy’s research indicates, access to the lucrative drug trade and other illicit activities is the main draw for Afghans who join up with the Taliban:

In early 2014 we conducted research that examined violent extremism and Taliban networks with the hope of bridging differences between insurgent groups, community elders, and the Afghan government. In interviews with active, former, and imprisoned Taliban, tribal leaders, and government officials in Helmand and Herat provinces of Afghanistan a consensus emerged: joining the insurgency pays well, especially in a countryside marked by insecurity and economic stagnation. And more important than an insurgent salary, — Taliban rarely mentioned, and most emphatically denied, ideological or political inspiration — being associated with the Taliban enables quasi-independent profiteering from a diverse array of illegal activities.

How SpaceX Achieved Lift Off

Tim Fernholz has a lengthy profile of the aerospace company:

SpaceX currently charges $61.2 million per launch. Its cost-per-kilogram of cargo to low-earth orbit, $4,653, is far less than the $14,000 to $39,000 offered by its chief American competitor, the United Launch Alliance. Other providers often charge $250 to $400 million per launch; NASA pays Russia $70 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on its three-person Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX’s costs are still nowhere near low enough to change the economics of space as Musk and his investors envision, but they have a plan to do so (of which more later).

The secret to the low cost is relatively simple, at least in principle: Do as much as possible in-house, in an integrated manufacturing facility, with modern components; and avoid the unwieldy supply chains, legacy designs, layers of contractors, and “cost-plus” billing that characterized SpaceX’s competitors. Many early employees were attracted to the company because they wanted to avoid the bureaucracy of the traditional aerospace conglomerates.

Fernholz determines that the “question for Musk and his investors now is whether he can be more than just a better rocket builder”:

They want to unlock something far more challenging: A space economy where humans can vastly increase their productivity in the vacuum around our tiny world and beyond, even if nobody is quite sure how yet. Nolan of Founders Fund compares this hopeful uncertainty to the founding of the internet. “It wasn’t clear exactly what kind of business can come out of exchanging information really rapidly,” he says.

For example, if it weren’t so pricey, investors could imagine putting up hundreds of new satellites in lower orbits than existing ones, making their communications and imaging far more powerful. Because of the high launch costs, current satellites aren’t upgraded frequently and are stationed relatively far from earth so that they can last longer—the closer a satellite flies to earth, the faster its orbit decays, leading to its eventual demise. As a result, the electronics in them are relatively old technology.

First Razor Blades, Now Cannabis?

Ahead of Halloween, the Denver police department are warning parents about pot-infused edibles:

Jacob Sullum is unconcerned:

For years law enforcement officials have been warning parents to be on the lookout for marijuana edibles in their kids’ trick-or-treat sacks. And for years, as far as I can tell, there has not been a single documented case in which someone has tried to get kids high by doling out THC-tainted treats disguised as ordinary candy. Since 1996, the year that California became the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use, the newspapers and wire services covered by the Nexis database have not carried any reports of such trickery, although they have carried more than a few articles in which people worry about the possibility. …

State officials also have been known to use Halloween as an excuse to remind people that drugs are bad. In 2008 Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum warned that “federal and state law enforcement agencies have reported that flavored drugs, particularly methamphetamines, heroin and marijuana, are circulating throughout the United States and could be ingested by unsuspecting children.” He advised parents to “check their children’s candy for anything which may resemble one of these new drug forms.” McCollum gets extra credit for mentioning candy-flavored meth, an apparently apocryphal threat that the DEA was never able to confirm.

German Lopez researches whether “there been any major incidents involving edibles and children”:

Children’s Hospital Colorado reported a so-called surge in children ending up in emergency rooms after eating marijuana. The increase, however, represented a tiny patient population: from eight cases in all of 2013 to nine through May 2014. In these cases, none of the children ended up seriously injured. One had trouble breathing and needed a respirator, while others went into intensive care for extreme sedation and agitation.

Quote For The Day II

“I get that for many of you, life on Twitter has become more important than life out here in the big grimy. And on a certain level, I get it. But sometimes you’ve really gotta close that laptop, do you feel me? It’s a big brilliant world out here, and Twitter is really small in many ways. The thing about Twitter is that you get to turn it off and go outside. And once you do you can go around and look at all the messy humans out there and say to yourself “look at that guy! He doesn’t know I exist!” and “that lady has no idea what #gamergate is” and “that person couldn’t pick Suey Park out of a lineup.” Then you can go to a bar or make a friend or eat Funyuns or do any number of things that are more intense and interesting than everything that has ever happened in the history of the internet combined. And that’s a good feel,” – Freddie DeBoer.

What The Hell Just Happened In Ottawa?

Some terrifying footage of the shooting at Canada’s Parliament today:

Not a drill or a joke. A man was just shot at the war memorial in #ottawa. Lying beside the tomb

— Peter Henderson (@Henderburn) October 22, 2014

Surreal photo from Ottawa: doors to the Tory Caucus Room on Parliament Hill, blockaded with furniture. Wow. #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/iFNtavhop2

— Taylor Mann (@tailormann) October 22, 2014

CBC: Police statement pulls back from what was earlier being reported. Possible that this was a lone gunman, not multiple. #ottawa

— Andy Carvin (@acarvin) October 22, 2014

Updated: The shooting incident in Ottawa had the appearance of a coordinated attack http://t.co/brn047wYz8 pic.twitter.com/rfCQHTUPft

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 22, 2014

UPDATE: Ottawa police confirm gunman in Canada shooting shot and killed. Search on for possible additional gunmen. http://t.co/sV7ZH50tlf

— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 22, 2014

One shooting victim succumbed to injuries. He was a member of the Canadian Forces. Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his loved ones.

— Ottawa Police (@OttawaPolice) October 22, 2014

CBC NEWS BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: – Shooter still believed at large in downtown Ottawa.
- Police searching cars leaving Ottawa

— On The Go (@OnTheGoCBC) October 22, 2014

Soldier died; 3 other victims suffered non-life-threatening injuries. 1 of them had been shot, Ottawa Hospital says. #cbcOTT #OTTnews

— CBC Ottawa (@CBCOttawa) October 22, 2014

A timeline of what unfolded during the attack in Ottawa http://t.co/J3voI7E41p #OttawaShooting pic.twitter.com/QVG3HQ9f7q

— The Globe and Mail (@globeandmail) October 22, 2014

Canada has just lost her innocence.

— John Ivison (@IvisonJ) October 22, 2014

Tim Mak adds:

It was the second attack inside Canada this week. The shootings come just two days after a 25-year-old man described by police as a “radicalized” Muslim drove his car into two Canadian soldiers in a city outside of Montreal, killing one and seriously injuring the other. Martin Couture-Rouleau, the suspect in that incident, was arrested in July while trying to travel to Turkey. Following his rampage, Courture-Rouleau was shot and killed.