Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 158

Inside The Mind Of A “Jihadi Tourist”

The scholars from the Salaf stated that if two evils coincide, then the lesser evil is to be selected.—
Life of a Mujahid (@LifeofMujahid) July 05, 2014

Michael Muhammad Knight almost became one in Chechnya. He describes what motivated him to go and what ultimately held him back:

For me, wanting to go to Chechnya wasn’t reducible to my “Muslim rage” or “hatred for the West.” This may be hard to believe, but I thought about the war in terms of compassion. Like so many Americans moved by their love of country to serve in the armed forces, I yearned to fight oppression and protect the safety and dignity of others. I believed that this world was in bad shape. I placed my faith in somewhat magical solutions claiming that the world could be fixed by a renewal of authentic Islam and a truly Islamic system of government. But I also believed that working toward justice was more valuable than my own life.

Eventually, I decided to stay in Islamabad. And the people who eventually convinced me not to fight weren’t the kinds of Muslims propped up in the media as liberal, West-friendly reformers. They were deeply conservative; some would call them “intolerant.” In the same learning environment in which I was told that my non-Muslim mother would burn in eternal hellfire, I was also told that I could achieve more good in the world as a scholar than as a soldier, and that I should strive to be more than a body in a ditch. These traditionalists reminded me of Muhammad’s statement that the ink of scholars was holier than the blood of martyrs.

The Trail Of Tear Gas

From Egypt to Palestine to Ferguson, US-made tear gas—sold on the Almighty “Free” Market—represses democracy. pic.twitter.com/sBgFa4UvtU

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 20, 2014

Yiannis Baboulias looks at the market for tear gas:

‘Non-lethal technologies’ are in demand, and governments are spoilt for choice. If you have been gassed in Egypt, Palestine or America, it was most likely with Combined Systems products made in the US. The Bahrainis use French tear gas. The Greek police is supplied by five different companies from all over the world; the canisters I have seen in use were made by Condor in Brazil. Tear gas is the perfect tool for governments increasingly inclined to look on the public as a potential source of disturbance, rather than the source of their democratic mandate. An independent study earlier this year estimated that the market is currently worth $1.6 billion.

He describes his own experience of the chemicals:

As soon as a canister explodes in your vicinity, your skin starts burning. It becomes hard to breathe because you’re producing so much mucus, your eyes shut involuntarily and it feels as if your head is about to melt. The canister itself is dangerous. It gets hot as the CS [2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, the most common type of tear gas], solid in the unopened canister, is turned into an aerosol; touch it without heavy-duty gloves, and it can burn. Prolonged exposure causes severe respiratory problems and heart attacks; it can cause pregnant women to miscarry and can kill people who suffer from asthma and other bronchial problems.

Mental Health Break

A brilliant medley on the question of Scottish independence and the best thing you’ll see on the Internet today:

In Rush To War, No Time For The Law, Ctd

Allahpundit despairs at how many members of Congress are eager to sidestep a vote on a war with ISIS. If they don’t exert some control over this process now, he warns, they’re not any more likely to do so if and when our military commitment starts to snowball:

What’s important is keeping Congress as politically comfortable as possible, and the less power they retain, the easier that becomes. Some members justify their deference to O in terms of the assets he plans to use: Bernie Sanders told the NYT he’s okay with letting Obama bomb who he wants as long as ground troops aren’t sent in, the key distinction being … I don’t know. I guess the president has inherent authority to put airmen’s lives at risk but not infantry’s? Does that make any sense? … They’re not going to cut the money off once men are in harm’s way. And they’re certainly not going to vote on an AUMF later, as Sanders’s airstrikes-yes-infantry-no formulation seems to imagine. Once they’ve allowed Obama to wage war unilaterally from the air, it’s the easiest thing in the world to let him wage war unilaterally on the ground too. If anything, Congress will be even more eager to have its fingerprints off of ground operations.

Cody Poplin compares the several proposed AUMFs currently being circulated on Capitol Hill. But their authors might just be wasting paper, as Obama is signaling that he already has all the permission he needs. Matt Welch cuts him no slack for flouting the Constitution:

In last year’s run-up to what once seemed like inevitable war against Syria, the president made what can be interpreted as an incoherent claim: that he had enough legal cover to start bombing Syria, but that he would nonetheless seek congressional approval. When that approval was not forthcoming, the president decided on a diplomatic solution instead. But note how he treated the congressional-authorization question one year ago today:

[E]ven though I possess the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security, to take this debate to Congress. I believe our democracy is stronger when the President acts with the support of Congress. And I believe that America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together.

So either the president no longer believes these things, or he finds such beliefs to be an untenable hindrance in the waging of his latest war. At any rate, as in his more blatant nose-thumbing of Congress over U.S.-led regime change in Libya, Obama’s position on the constitutionality of war is essentially the opposite of what it was when he first sought the presidency.

But of course, as Steven Mihm points out, the American tradition of presidents going to war without explicit Congressional authorization goes all the way back to George Washington:

Washington sought “buy in” to go after the Indian tribes that began attacking white settlers on the western frontier in the late 1780s. Like the Islamic State today, they posed a threat that was at once amorphous, hard to reach, and even harder to combat. The Miami and Shawnee tribes of the Ohio River Valley had scalped and murdered settlers, stolen livestock and taken civilians captive. In 1789, Washington dutifully went to Congress, and warned lawmakers that it might be necessary to “punish aggressors” on the western frontier. Congress, preoccupied by other matters, declared that it wouldn’t “hesitate to concur in such further measures” that Washington had in mind. No formal vote authorizing war was held.

Meanwhile, Josh Rogin and Tim Mak note that the $5 billion Counterterrorism Partnership Fund Obama first proposed in May is back in play:

Several top Democratic and Republican senators told The Daily Beast on Friday that the administration has given Congress zero details about the proposed fund and consultations have been next to nonexistent. But Democrats said that was perfectly fine with them. “I support doing what we need to do to defeat ISIS,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez told The Daily Beast when asked about the fund. Senate appropriators are already preparing to hand Obama the $5 billion. The draft of the defense appropriations bill would give the Pentagon $4 billion of the funds. The draft of the State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill contains the other $1 billion. All the money would be classified as war funding in the overseas contingency operations part of the defense budget.

The Premium Slowdown Continues

This is welcome news:

On Wednesday, the Kaiser Family Foundation published its annual survey on the health plans that employers are offering their workers. It’s large and comprehensive and generally regarded as the most reliable measure of what’s happening in the employer market.

The big finding is that the growth in health insurance premiums was only 3 percent between 2013 and 2014. That’s tied for the lowest rate of increase since Kaiser started measuring (this is the 16th year of the survey).

Cohn unpacks the survey:

Critics of the Affordable Care Act insisted it would cause employers to jack up premiums. There’s no evidence of that happening.

And of course this data is consistent with all the other recent data we’ve gotten on health care spending under Obamacare. National health care spending, the amount of money we spend as a country, is rising at historically low rates. Premiums inside the new Obamacare exchanges, where people buy insurance on their own, are generally rising at moderate rates and in some cases declining, which is highly unusual.

It’s hard to say exactly how much Obamacare has to do with these changes. But it makes the critics’ arguments look awfully shaky.

Drum chips in his two cents:

How long will this slowdown in health care inflation last? My guess is that it’s more or less permanent. It will vary a bit from year to year, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it hit 3-4 points above the general inflation rate in some years. But the downward trend has been in place for three decades now, and that’s long enough to suggest that it was the double-digit increases of the 80s and early 90s that were the outliers. Aside from those spikes, the current smaller increases are roughly similar to health care spending increases over the past half century.

Kliff explains “why, even with premiums rising slowly, it might not feel to workers they’re actually getting a better deal”:

Deductibles have grown 47 percent since 2009; 34 percent of workers are now enrolled in health insurance plans that have a deductible of $2,000 or higher. While premiums grow slowly, workers are essentially asked to spend money in other places with these rising deductibles.

Jason Millman also focuses on those increasing deductibles:

High-deductible plans are attractive to employers because they get to bear less of the insurance cost. Many economists also like the plans, because they’re supposed to make people spend more wisely on their health care.

The big question is whether employees are prepared to handle potentially big medical bills before they hit their deductible. As the The Upshot noted last week, people in employer insurance recently said they’re pretty happy with the services their health plans cover, but they’re much less satisfied with what they’re paying out of their own pockets.

The End Of Britain? Ctd

A reader responds to my take:

Well you may be indifferent to the Scots gaining independence, but in our family it’s absolutely thrilling! We were Jacobites who participated in the 1690, 1715 and 1745 rebellions. We were at Culloden and the entire family had to flee to the Cape Fear River region in North Carolina after the battle. They hid out at Brompton Plantation, which was owned by the Royal Governor Gabriel Johnston, a brother to my sixth great grandfather. During the Revolution they were officers in the NC Militia, and then after the Tories burnt their home to the ground, they moved to South Carolina, where they fought a guerilla campaign with General Francis Marion (aka the Swamp Fox) against the English. I have the pistols my gggggg-grandfather carried at Culloden and during the American Revolution next to my bed (photo attached). To finally win independence and get from under the thumb of the English would be bloody brilliant and a long time coming!

Another takes a step back:

I am an agnostic on Scottish independence. I get the impulse; I get your possible acceptance. But how can anyone looking at our current world situation not be anything but appalled by the possible positive vote? If it passes, won’t every active independence movement – Quebec, Catalan Spain right away – get a boost? Doesn’t it give an easy way for Putin to insist that eastern Ukraine vote for the same? Wouldn’t it give a boost to parts of the U.S., particularly if Dems some time in the near future gain control of all levels of the federal government, that might start talking secession? As a true conservative (not tea-partier or corporatist), shouldn’t you be worried about the larger impact of a positive vote?

Yes, I can see those concerns. And that’s why I hope in my rational mind that they don’t secede. But given the existence of a separate nation, and given the peaceful, democratic manner in which this divorce could take place, I don’t see much of an analogy except for Catalonia. A reader notes:

More than 500,000 have actually signed up to participate in the V for Vote demonstration for Catalonia’s independence, with their IDs. And many, many more will come.

Another drills down into the Scottish question:

I wonder if the Scots might not end up shooting themselves in the foot? There’s a triumvirate of failures they are setting themselves up with:

1) I’m with the Betfair people. It’s easy to say “yes” to a pollster with no consequences, but much harder in a ballot box. I suspect a “no” vote is much the more likely.

2) If they do lose, they can’t come whining back to the table for a good 15 or 20 years.

3) They have, without thinking too much about it, aroused English nationalism, as you detected on your recent visits. I have always been mildly ticked off by the “West Lothian question”, as it used to be known: Scottish MPs voting on wholly English matters. However, since devolution and now with this independence debate, I am convinced that it is an injustice of titanic proportions on me and 53 million other English men and women who put up with Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs (the latter two to a lesser extent) having a say on matters that have no impact upon the people they represent. They can vote without personal consequence. The reverse would never be allowed.

As a natural Labour supporter, I can see that me and mine need the Scottish Labour vote to drive a left-of-centre agenda, but frankly, and you hit the nail on its head, all this self-serving “we want to be independent, but thanks England, we need you to bank-roll us,” has made me agree: “fuck ‘em”. I’m not sure I want them anymore. My public services are on their arse because of Tory cuts, yet Scotland’s flourish, not because of extraordinary financial management on the part of the Scots, but because my English pounds get spent disproportionately across the border. The Treasury reports that it spends £10,152 for every Scot. It spends £8,529 for every English man or woman. Here in the East Midlands where I live, it spends a miserly £8,118. It spends 25% more on a Scot than it spends on me. (See this linked pdf.)

What on earth is Scotland going to do without my money? I am completely convinced that if they do go their own way, Westminster will cave in and agree to bankroll them for years to come.

Whatever comes of this independence movement, one thing seems certain, and that is that they will lose a substantial amount of influence, either by becoming independent, or by the certainty that Scottish MPs must – must – be prevented from voting on wholly English matters. I might have to suffer a lifetime of damned old-Etonian, Oxbridge power and influence, but at least it’ll be English power and influence.

A final aside. I travel to the US a lot. About 20 years ago, when I first starting going to North America, I would take great pains to tell people I was British, or from the UK. Not anymore. I realised that in the last few years, I am English when asked. No conscious decision to change; I just did. I am more and more English and less and less British everyday.

All Dish coverage of Scottish independence here.

Was The Ebola Epidemic Preventable?

Laurie Garrett argues as much, blaming the international community for not acting on the crisis early enough:

Shortly after the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared an outbreak of the same strain of Ebola that first appeared in Zaire in 1976, outside humanitarian responders appeared on the scene to assist Guinea; they were the organizations that dominated the treatment and prevention efforts throughout the spring and into the summer, as Ebola spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone. During that time the outbreaks were largely rural, confined to easily isolated communities, and could have been stopped with inexpensive, low-technology approaches.

But the world largely ignored the unfolding epidemic, even as the sole major international responder, Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French acronym, MSF), pleaded for help and warned repeatedly that the virus was spreading out of control. The WHO was all but AWOL, its miniscule epidemic-response department slashed to smithereens by three years of budget cuts, monitoring the epidemic’s relentless growth but taking little real action. Even as the leading physicians in charge of Liberia and Sierra Leone’s Ebola responses succumbed to the virus, global action remained elusive.

Julia Belluz flags a new study that assesses the virus’s chances of making its way to America:

In a Sept. 2 article in the journal PLoS Currents: Oubtreaks, they published their findings. “Results indicate that the short-term (3 and 6 weeks) probability of international spread outside the African region is small, but not negligible,” they wrote. Ghana, the United Kingdom, Gambia, the Ivory Coast, and Belgium were the countries most at-risk of importing at least one case by Sept. 22, the date they chose as the projected cut-off for their model. Out of the 16 countries analyzed, the US ranked 13th (toward the last) for risk of importing Ebola by that time. The risk for the US was as high as 18 percent and as low as one percent.

And as Ronald Bailey notes, the same study calculates that any US outbreak would only infect about 10 people. Meanwhile, Joshua Hunt takes a look at another promising ebola treatment, made by the pharmaceutical company Toyama Chemical:

The Fujifilm subsidiary’s small yellow tablets are marked アビガン, which is a Japanese rendering of the brand name Avigan. They inhibit the replication of viral genes within an infected cell, while also mitigating their ability to spread from one cell to another—a two-pronged approach to fighting influenza that Fujfilm says is unique. The drug was approved in March by Japan’s health ministry as a treatment for both novel and reëmerging forms of influenza, but researchers have theorized that it could be an effective emergency treatment for Ebola. …

Avigan offers new hope because, since it received regulatory approval for sale in Japan in the spring, it has been manufactured on a much larger scale than the experimental drugs being developed specifically for Ebola. Supplies of ZMapp, which was created by the San Diego-based Mapp Biopharmaceutical, have already been exhausted, and its results have been mixed. Two American doctors treated with ZMapp recovered, but a Liberian doctor who also received it died. Fujifilm’s Avigan stockpile would be sufficient to treat twenty thousand people—the exact number of infections that the World Health Organization has estimated might occur before the current outbreak is brought under control.

Meme Of The Day

The new greeting that’s grazing the nation:

The Skinny On Narrow Networks

Philip Klein complains about the narrow healthcare networks of many Obamacare plans:

Insurers throughout the country offering coverage through the new health insurance exchanges drove a hard bargain with medical providers, and thus many of those providers chose not to participate. The end result was that Americans who obtained coverage through the healthcare law often found that they didn’t have much choice when it came to doctors or hospitals. Those who averted “rate shock,” in other words, often found themselves exposed to “access shock.”

Lawmakers and regulators have been taking measures to try to address the problem going into the 2015 benefit year, but it is not clear whether the moves will actually improve the consumer experience.

But how much harm do narrow networks really do? A new working paper by Jonathan Gruber and Robin McKnight tries to answer that question. Jonathan Cohn is encouraged by their findings:

People who switched to narrow network plans saved both themselves and their employers huge amounts of money: Spending on medical bills declined by approximately one-third, according to the paper. Partly this was because people were getting care only from providers that charged less, Gruber and McKnight found, and partly that was because they were seeing fewer specialists.

That wasn’t necessarily good news: In theory, it could have meant that these people were getting worse medical care. But Gruber and McKnight detected no evidence of that. The hospitals in the narrow networks performed just as well on typical measures of quality. And while people were using fewer specialty services, Gruber and McKinght write, these people were also spending more time with their their general practitioners and family doctors—and less time in the emergency room. That’s exactly the kind of transformation many experts say is necessary.

Kliff fully admits that cutting “patient spending by one-third is no small feat for a health insurance plan.” But she isn’t confident “that every foray into limited choice will go equally as well”:

Its probably most fair to read this study as a proof of concept: set up correctly, limited choice plans can save money without sacrificing quality. Whether all plans work this way is something we’ll learn more about, as more people on Obamacare keep enrolling in these products.

Mental Health Break

A fan of life: