Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 164
September 4, 2014
Remembering Sotloff, Foley, And The Rest, Ctd
Will Saletan reacts to Steven Sotloff’s murder the same way I did yesterday, urging us to remember the people whose suffering Sotloff and James Foley gave their lives to bring to light. He rounds up some of the latest reports on ISIS’s many atrocities:
Start with Monday’s testimony before the U.N. Human Rights Council. The documented incidents include 1,700 captives executed in Tikrit, Iraq, and 650 in Mosul, Iraq. Some 1,000 Turkmen massacred, including 100 children. More than 2,000 women and children kidnapped. “Systematic hunting of members of ethnic and religious groups.” Women raped and sold. Young boys executed. Girls enslaved for sexual abuse. Children recruited as suicide bombers. More than 1 million refugees, half of them kids.
Then read the report Amnesty International issued Tuesday. Its title is “Ethnic Cleansing on Historic Scale: The Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq.” The report details, with eyewitness testimony, several more ISIS atrocities in Iraq. At least 100 men and boys herded together and shot to death in Kocho. “Scores of men and boys” summarily executed in Qiniyeh. More than 50 men “rounded up and shot dead” near Jdali. Human Rights Watch also released a report on Tuesday. It offers new evidence about the massacre in Tikrit. “Information from a survivor and analysis of videos and satellite imagery has confirmed the existence of three more mass execution sites,” says the report. That brings the death toll to “between 560 and 770 men.” The captives were shot dead while lying in trenches with their hands bound.
Saletan argues that these evil acts compel America to step in and stop the Islamic State from killing thousands more. It’s hard to dispute that: surely someone has to stop them, and since we’ve already committed to doing so, yes, we must follow through on that commitment to prevent atrocities and protect the innocent. Still, we know that such interventions are slippery slopes, and I only hope that in trying to alleviate this unimaginable humanitarian crisis, we don’t end up prolonging or exacerbating it. It’s hard to see from the vantage of the present how things could get any worse, but then it always is.
Decades Of Drought
The Southwest faces a surprisingly high risk of it:
A new study published as a joint effort by scientists at Cornell University, the University of Arizona, and the U.S. Geological Survey finds that the chances of the Southwest facing a “megadrought” are much higher than previously suspected. According to the new study, “the chances of the southwestern United States experiencing a decade-long drought is at least 50 percent, and the chances of a ‘megadrought’ – one that lasts up to 35 years – ranges from 20 to 50 percent over the next century.” … [Columbia climate scientist Richard] Seager says that the region hasn’t had a megadrought in several centuries; the Dust Bowl drought of The Grapes of Wrath, though incredibly severe, was not long enough to qualify.
Scott K. Johnson offers a sense of scale:
In the 1150s, for example, reconstructions tell us that the Southwest was in the midst of almost 25 years of below-average precipitation. For a solid decade, the Colorado River averaged about 85 percent of its normal flow. Arizona is allocated about 15 percent of the Colorado’s water, which now rarely makes it to the Gulf of California before drying up. That’s a decade without an Arizona’s share of water.
Bioclimatologist Park Williams, speaking with Doyle Rice, notes that more of the West has been in a state of drought over the past 15 years than in any other 15-year period since the 1150s era. Rice zooms in on California, which – while not as vulnerable to megadroughts as Arizona or New Mexico – has recently seen “the state’s worst consecutive three years for precipitation in 119 years of records”:
As of Aug. 28, 100 percent of the state of California was considered to be in a drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. More than 58 percent is in “exceptional” drought, the worst level. Record warmth has fueled the drought as the state sees its hottest year since records began in 1895, the National Climatic Data Center reports. Because of the dryness, Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown declared a statewide drought emergency this year. Since then, reservoir storage levels have continued to drop, and as of late August, they were down to about 59 percent of the historical average. Regulations restricting outdoor water use were put in place in late July for the entire state. … There are reports of wells running dry in central California.
Tom Philpott gulps:
This (paradoxically) chilling assessment comes on the heels of another study (study; my summary), this one released in early August by University of California-Irvine and NASA researchers, on the Colorado River, the lifeblood of a vast chunk of the Southwest. As many as 40 million people rely on the Colorado for drinking water, including residents of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and San Diego. … The researchers analyzed satellite measurements of the Earth’s mass and found that the region’s aquifers had undergone a much-larger-than-expected drawdown over the past decade – the region’s farms and municipalities responded to drought-reduced flows from the Colorado River by dropping wells and tapping almost 53 million acre-feet of underground water between December 2004 and November 2013 – equal to about 1.5 full Lake Meads drained off in just nine years, a rate the study’s lead researcher, Jay Famiglietti, calls “alarming.”
Considering how much of the Colorado River Basin, which encompasses swaths of Utah, Colorado, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, are desert, it’s probably not wise to rapidly drain aquifers, since there’s little prospect that they’ll refill anytime soon. And when you consider that that the region faces high odds of a coming megadrought, the results are even more frightening.
Meanwhile, B. Lynn Ingram, coauthor of The West Without Water, warns of “cautionary parallels between our modern society and past societies that were forced into mass migration and in some cases collapsed under prolonged periods of drought”:
A particularly dry stretch occurred between 900 and 1400 AD, during the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly, when two 100-year long droughts descended on the West. These droughts caused large lakes to shrink or dry out completely, more frequent wildfires, and extreme hardship for native populations as natural water sources shrank and other resources declined. … Like these past societies, our modern society experienced rapid population growth throughout the relatively wet 20th century. Today, California has 38 million people, a number that may double by 2050, made possible by developing all available sources of water, including underground aquifers that took thousands of years to accumulate. We are not only using all available surface waters, we are drawing down our “water in the bank.” The drilling of these aquifers is currently unmonitored and unregulated, providing free water Central Valley farmers, increasingly only to those who are willing and able to drill deeper and deeper wells. Over the past year, the companies that install these wells and pumps are working round the clock, often deepening wells by 1,000 to 2,000 feet.
(Map from the U.S. National Drought Monitor)
Joan Rivers, RIP
.@MelRivers’ statement on the passing of her mother Joan Rivers: “her final wish…that we return to laughing soon” pic.twitter.com/1LuS6K63WS
— Neetzan Zimmerman (@neetzan) September 4, 2014
Remembering Joan Rivers: A life in pictures of the comedy legend and her famous friends. http://t.co/vBCEJuzl43 pic.twitter.com/Wkcy1fzkZy
— E! Online (@eonline) September 4, 2014
Man, I seriously hate this…We lost another comic. RIP Joan Rivers. You did it the only way you knew how….YOUR way! U are already missed
— Larry The Cable Guy (@GitRDoneLarry) September 4, 2014
Loved Joan Rivers on the second season of Louis. Hilarious bit. https://t.co/nq8ivdzJ93
— Dave Snider (@enemykite) September 4, 2014
Joan Rivers was like that friend who always says inappropriate things but for some reason it makes you love them more. RIP
— BriBry (@BriBryOnTour) September 4, 2014
“I said Justin Bieber looked like a little lesbian — and I stand by it.” – Joan Rivers, RIP. — Brian Rie$ (@moneyries) September 4, 2014
But hey we will all forget all the sexist racist homophobic comments Joan rivers made because she’s dead
— stay strong lovely (@SmilerOfDestiny) September 4, 2014
Joan Rivers shutting a heckler down the way only Joan Rivers could: https://t.co/AnT4XRqXax
— Hazlitt (@HazlittMag) September 4, 2014
We should all be a little more like Joan Rivers: honest, feisty, unapologetic. What a woman.
— Jamie Stelter (@JamieStelter) September 4, 2014
RIP Joan Rivers, a fearless comedy legend. If you haven’t seen it, this doc @ her is a #mustwatch: http://t.co/3y7Aketuaa #comedy
— The Director List (@TheDirectorList) September 4, 2014
“I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking.” – @Joan_Rivers Rest in Peace — Isabelle Fuhrman (@isabellefuhrman) September 4, 2014
Perhaps the saddest thing about Joan Rivers dying is that Joan Rivers isn’t here to make a joke about it way too soon.
— Katie Nolan (@katienolan) September 4, 2014
The Healthcare Spending Trend
Yesterday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a report on projected healthcare spending. What Jonathan Cohn sees as the “main takeaway”:
We’re making progress on controlling the cost of health care. We might even be making a lot of progress, although it’s too soon to tell.
Why the report may be too pessimistic:
Keep in mind that CMS actuaries are famously conservative. In the past, they’ve tended to overestimate how much spending will rise—not because they’re imprecise or biased, but because they tend to err on the side of caution. In a conference call Wednesday, several actuaries made clear they weren’t discounting the possibility that the health care industry is becoming more efficient. One actuary said “Right now it is still too early determine” how much the health industry has changed. Others expressed similar sentiments.
“If the payment reforms have the kind of effect advocates of them expect, these projections could turn out to be conservative,” Larry Levitt, senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me later via e-mail. “The actuaries tend to take a wait and see approach to new developments where there is little evidence as to what effect they’ll have. We are in somewhat unchartered territory here.”
Jason Millman adds important caveats:
A few points worth noting about the actuary’s projections: Taking a cue from the trustees overseeing Medicare, the actuary’s office assumes that Congress will once again approve a “doc fix” to avoid the scheduled 21 percent cut to Medicare physician payments. The actuary also assumes that the Affordable Care Act’s temporary bump in federal reimbursement to Medicaid doctors will go away at the end of the year as planned, though some Democrats and physician groups are pushing for an extension of the policy to encourage more doctors to take Medicaid patients as the program expands.
Philip Klein, as he does with most ACA-related news, puts a negative spin on the report:
As the economy improves, Obamacare continues to expand, and the Medicare age population explodes, health spending is expected to rise by an average of 6 percent a year over the 2015 to 2023 time period. Though this would be lower than the 7.2 percent average over the 1990 to 2008 span, it would still outpace the growth of the economy.
Because of this, health spending as a share of gross domestic product is expected to increase from 17.2 percent in 2012 to 19.3 percent in 2023 – representing nearly one in five dollars of the economy.
Kliff frames the numbers differently:
Medicare actuaries expect that health care costs will outpace economic growth by 1.1 percent. That’s not ideal; most health economists would like to see the two numbers grow at the exact same pace. But it’s still a smaller gap than what has existed historically. Between 1990 and 2008, health cost growth outpaced the economy by 2 percent.
This is big. The Medicare actuaries are saying that, while they do expect a slight rebound in medical spending post-recession, they don’t think we’re headed back to the super-fast growth that, for decades, has been a hallmark of the health care industry. And when health care eats up a smaller chunk of the economy (and the federal budget) that leaves more money to spend on other important things like education and infrastructure.
The War Over The Core, Ctd
One-time Common Core supporter Bobby Jindal found himself squaring off against his former allies once more last week, when he filed a lawsuit against the Department of Ed alleging that the standards “effectively nationalize [the] education curriculum” and are “patently incompatible with the Tenth Amendment.” Although many view the move as political theater ahead of the ’16 elections and few expect the suit to succeed on its merits, Max Ehrenfreund characterizes it as “an escalation” of the campaign against the standards. In a lengthy article about the conservative backlash against the Core, Tim Murphy notes that its drafters “always anticipated a learning curve – just not a political insurgency intent on destroying the program before it had a chance to produce results”:
The trajectory of Common Core just might wind up resembling that of the Affordable Care Act.
Once the hysteria passes, it’s likely to be viewed as a genuine improvement to the education system– even if the vision of a national standard isn’t fully realized. “The [original] promise was, ‘Wow, this is nearly every state in the country!'” the New America Foundation’s [Anne] Hyslop says. “We may not have that moving forward, but we’re at least going to have a good 25 or 30 states.” From the perspective of the policymakers who pushed for Common Core seven years ago, that would still be a success story.
But it came at a heavy cost: The grand bipartisan consensus has been cut clean to the bone, offering a preview of the obstacles facing future reform efforts. If you thought math and reading standards were a hard sell, try biology. And activists are already taking aim at [Common Core co-drafter David] Coleman’s new Advanced Placement tests, administered by the College Board—tests they fear have been infected with the ills of Common Core.
The political consequences are still unfolding. In June, the Pew Research Center released new evidence that the gap within the GOP had closed: self-identified “business” conservatives opposed Common Core at the same rate as “steadfast conservatives” (61 percent). If that holds true, the 2014 midterms, where many candidates have staked out anti-Core positions, just might determine the standards’ fate in many states. Common Core now faces the highest-stakes test of all—the ballot box.
All Dish coverage of Common Core here.
The PC Police?
Rotherham council is a damning indictment of the Labour Party pic.twitter.com/sYG0Fx3v83
— Jon Scraggle (@JScraggle) September 4, 2014
Margaret Talbot examines the role of political correctness in the sexual exploitation scandal taking place in Rotherham, England:
One explanation for why these crimes went on for so long, more or less unchecked, is that police officers didn’t believe what they were hearing: they thought that the social workers who reported a pattern of sexual abuse involving Pakistani gangs and young girls were exaggerating or misinterpreting. The scale of it could have seemed implausible—an understandable human response, perhaps, though not the most useful one for law enforcement.
The other leading explanation is that, because most of the perpetrators were Pakistani and most of the victims were white, local officials were reluctant to proceed, worried about inflaming ethnic tensions. Last week, the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, denounced what she called “an institutionalized political correctness” at work in this case.
Though this might sound like a rhetorical flourish, there seems to be some truth to this claim.
Rotherham is an economically stressed city of two hundred and fifty-eight thousand people, with an ethnic minority population of about eight per cent. The Labour Party has long controlled the town council, but, in recent years, the Party has been joined by a few members of the populist right-wing faction U.K.I.P. When investigating individual cases, the Rotherham report found no evidence that ethnic consideration had determined outcomes for children. But, when it came to setting policy, a certain skittishness seems to have played a role. According to the report, “Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be ‘giving oxygen’ to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion.” Perhaps that, too, is a concern that deserves some sympathy—though because its immediate result was a failure to rescue children from brutal circumstances, the sympathy only goes so far.
A few days ago, Hugh Muir challenged that interpretation:
[C]an it really be true – as the tabloids and the right robustly claim – that a significant contributor truly was political correctness; the fear of officials that by intervening appropriately in cases where the suspects were Pakistani Muslims, they themselves would be castigated as racist? If it is, it is outrageous. It is also ludicrous.
Political correctness – if we are to persist with that hackneyed term – required members of a diverse society to accord to others the level of dignity they would want for themselves. The right conflated its meaning so as to describe any prescription on its behaviour that it didn’t like. Everything, from the description of coffee to adoption policy, became “political correctness gone mad”. Perhaps the idea was to discredit the concept by hoisting it into the realm of absurdity. But even then, the concept never, ever required anyone to turn a blind eye to the mass abuse of the vulnerable by criminals. And anyway, to do so on grounds of political correctness would never have made sense.
If a backlash was feared, where would it have come from? There is no minority lobby for criminals and paedophiles. So long as communities knew the issue was one of law enforcement rather than an assault on those communities themselves, they would have supported tough action by the authorities.
September 3, 2014
A Generational Split Personality
Jesse Walker pans Millennials Rising by Neil Howe and William Strauss:
A generation, Strauss and Howe wrote, is “a society-wide peer group, born over a period roughly the same length as the passage from youth to adulthood (in today’s America, around twenty or twenty-one years), who collectively possess a common persona.” They accepted the existence of exceptions and edge cases, but they insisted a core persona is there.
Contrast that with Karl Mannheim’s “The Problem of Generations,” a 1923 essay that has become a touchstone for sociologists studying generational change. Like Strauss and Howe, Mannheim defined a generation not just by when its members were born but by the events that shaped their worldviews in their youth. Unlike Strauss and Howe, Mannheim did not write as though those events shape an entire generation the same way. Instead he wrote of different “generation units” with different reactions to their formative experiences. The Napoleonic wars, he elaborated, produced “two contrasting groups” in Germany, “one that became more and more conservative as time went on, as against a youth group tending to become rationalistic and liberal.” (For a more recent example, consider the ways different American boomers reacted to the upheavals of the 1960s.)
For Mannheim, those opposing units still belong to the same social cohort: “they are oriented toward each other, even though only in the sense of fighting one another.” But they did not have the “common persona” that Strauss and Howe imagined.
Old School
Elizabeth Green contends that the US lags behind educational powerhouses such as Finland and South Korea in part because “our school system is earlier”:
It dates back to the 19th century, and in many ways the one-room schoolhouse is the model of our system, where an adult is working alone. One adult. Japan, South Korea, Finland – these were systems that were completely reformed after World War II. There is a lot more modern or contemporary thinking that has gone into these systems. We are still living with the legacy of an early 19th century education system.
Decentralization is another factor:
Those countries also have very strong national governments, so they set standards for the schools and have a much greater power at the level of implementation. Our federal government only controls 13 percent of local school funding. Through incentive programs, the Obama administration has actually been very successful at getting local schools to do things because they want every last dollar they can get. And yet once they promise to do something like evaluate teachers in new ways, there’s actually nobody watching at the implementation level to make sure they do it in a smart, strategic way. We have these top-down reform priorities and the federal government is successful in getting schools to adopt them, but there’s no quality check on that process. That’s fundamentally different than other nations.
Another fundamental difference: the US population is 2.5 times larger than Japan’s, 6 times larger than South Korea’s and a whopping 58 times larger than Finland’s, with far more regional diversity than all three. That vastness certainly makes educational reform more difficult for the US than other national governments.
(Photo: Teacher and children in front of sod one-room schoolhouse in Woods County, Oklahoma Territories, ca. 1895 via National Archives and Records Administration and Wikimedia Commons)
Weed Growers Of The Corn
Several years ago, while inspecting a cornfield, Kaitlin Stack Whitney discovered five marijuana plants “each standing about eight feet tall, in the middle of our survey plot and bursting with buds ready to harvest.” Apparently, this isn’t unusual:
Once a corn field is planted and herbicide applied, many farmers don’t return to a given field until harvest time. The biotechnological and labor-saving innovations that have reduced costs for corn farmers mean that literally no one walks into the average corn field during the growing season. Which presents a major opportunity for marijuana growers. Indeed, entire Internet forums devoted to sharing tips for growing marijuana in other people’s corn fields have sprouted. …
Growing marijuana in cornfields keeps it better hidden than growing in remote forests, albeit in plain sight. Helicopters and thermal imaging are only able to detect large patches of marijuana by color difference. So marijuana growers use GIS technology and handheld GPS devices to spread out their growing into distributed networks of small patches, like the one I stumbled across. This tactic also reduces the risk of losing one’s marijuana crop: If one patch is found and destroyed, the rest of the plants are in other locations, known only to the GPS and the marijuana grower. Man-made patterns in natural areas are a telltale sign of marijuana to enforcement agencies; growing it in corn renders that giveaway moot, as everything is in rows. The growing conditions for marijuana are also better in cornfields than remote forested land: Every input that corn farmers carefully measure and apply to maximize their crop growth—fertilizer, herbicide, irrigation—benefits the marijuana plants, too.
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