Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 213
July 14, 2014
A Bullet With A Mind Of Its Own
It exists:
[I]magine if you could transform a dumb bullet into a guided missile? That’s what the Pentagon did earlier this year, successfully firing .50-caliber bullets that steered themselves in mid-flight. It has just released a video [above] trumpeting the tip-top targeting of its Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program.
The technology could make our sharpshooters that much more deadly:
Current sniper rifles can regularly hit trucks at 2,000 meters, but not bad guys. (The record kill is 2,430 meters, just over 1.5 miles. It was charted by Canadian army corporal Rob Furlong against a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan’s Shah-i-kot valley during Operation Anaconda in March 2002—but his first two shots missed.) “There’s no limit as far as I can see so long as the bullet’s stable—I think 2,000 or 2,500 meters is very attainable,” [Keith Bell, former commander of the Army sniper school at Fort Benning, Ga] said. “Right now, anything past around 800 meters is an extremely tough shot.”
Duncan Geere adds a few more details:
The bullets are the size of a large pen and can be used in both sniper rifles and machine guns. The full EXACTO system comprises of both bullets and a real-time guidance system that tracks and delivers the projectile to the target. They’re still some way from the battlefield, however. This live fire test is likely just the first of many.
American Teens And Common Cents, Ctd
The Economist examines the challenges facing efforts to improve high-school students’ financial literacy:
First, boosting financial literacy is hard. Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, an American non-profit organization, has surveyed high-school seniors every other year since 2000. These surveys consistently show that students who have taken a full-semester course in personal finance do no better on a standard financial literacy test than those who have not taken such a course. Similarly, a study by Tzu-Chin Martina Peng and her co-authors found that having taken a personal finance course in school is unrelated to investment knowledge.
Second, and perhaps most important, courses in personal finance do not appear to have an impact on adult behavior.
As Buttonwood has pointed out, the knowledge that students acquire in school when they are in their teens does not necessary translate into action when they have to deal with mortgages and credit-card payments later in life. One study, for example, found that financial education has no impact on household saving behaviour. As a paper by Lewis Mandell and Linda Schmid Klein suggests, the long-term effectiveness of high-school classes in financial literacy is highly doubtful. It may simply be the case that the gap in time is too wide between when individuals acquire their financial knowledge, as high-school students, and when they’re in a position to apply what they have learned.
Kurdistan’s Moment? Ctd
Juan Cole’s list of recent “disturbing” news items from Iraq begins with some major developments regarding the Kurds:
1. Last Wednesday Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki angrily lashed out at the Kurds, accusing them of harboring the terrorists of the so-called ‘Islamic State.’ Since the Kurds have in fact fought the IS radicals, al-Maliki’s charge is hard to take seriously. Rather, it appears to be a sign of how angry he is that Kurdistan president Massoud Barzani is pressuring him to step down. I don’t think al-Maliki can get a third term without Kurdish support.
2. Barzani responded that al-Maliki is “hysterical.” The Kurds then withdrew from al-Maliki’s cabinet, in which they had been his coalition partners. The ministries will likely go on running all right, but the move is symbolic of the break between al-Maliki and his erstwhile backers. Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, one of those who suspended participation, says it will be hard for the Kurds to work with al-Maliki unless he apologizes.
3. On Friday, the Kurds seized two important oil fields in the Kirkuk region. Since their willingness to supply Turkey with petroleum seems to be one of the reasons Ankara has increasingly made its peace with Iraqi Kurdistan becoming independent, the Kurds are now in a position to remunerate Turkey even more generously for acquiescing in their national aspirations.
By seizing these oil fields, Keith Johnson fears, the Kurds risk antagonizing the Iraqi government and further escalating tensions between Baghdad and Erbil:
The big questions now are:
How much more will the move strain the unity of an Iraqi government still struggling to push back against a spring offensive by Islamist insurgents? And how will the Kurds actually sell the additional oil they now control? As a solely regional government, the KRG has hit major obstacles in finding international buyers for its crude since it began trying to sell abroad earlier this year — largely because of Baghdad’s threats and diplomatic pressure.
The Kurdish seizure will aggravate U.S. goals of getting Iraq’s Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish populations to work together to fight the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS. Coupled with strident talk of an independent Kurdish state, it further complicates efforts to broker a truce between Baghdad and Erbil, especially regarding international oil sales. “
Luke Harding provides a glimpse of what life is like in Kirkuk these days:
Iraq’s disintegration has affected the city in multifarious ways. It has, for example, touched on the fortunes of Kirkuk’s football club. Nowzad Qader, the head of Kirkuk’s FA, said Iraq wasn’t able to complete its league this year, with players unable to travel to Baghdad. It was too dangerous, he said, since Isis controlled the road. “Isis doesn’t like humanity much, let alone football,” he observed. “If Iraq still exists next season we’ll resume.” Nearby, youths kicked a ball around in the early evening heat.
Qadar said the local FA reflected Kirkuk’s tradition of coexistence, at odds with the sectarian mayhem in the rest of the country. He was a Kurd, his deputy a Turkman and the secretary an Arab. “It’s like a microcosm of Iraq. We work together in brotherhood,” he declared. Maureen Nikola, a volleyball coach, said girls who played on her team came from all of Kirkuk’s ethnic groups. Some of her Christian players had emigrated with their families after 2003, she said. Nikola, a Christian herself, added: “If the peshmerga weren’t here, we would have had to flee, like Mosul.”
Previous Dish on the prospect of an independent Kurdistan here.
Mental Health Break
Yep, Weird Al is still making videos – this time with some lip-dub help from familiar faces:
July 13, 2014
The Best Of The Dish This Weekend
What Netanyahu really thinks:
“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”
David Horovitz spells out what this means:
Not relinquishing security control west of the Jordan, it should be emphasized, means not giving a Palestinian entity full sovereignty there. It means not acceding to Mahmoud Abbas’s demands, to Barack Obama’s demands, to the international community’s demands. This is not merely demanding a demilitarized Palestine; it is insisting upon ongoing Israeli security oversight inside and at the borders of the West Bank. That sentence, quite simply, spells the end to the notion of Netanyahu consenting to the establishment of a Palestinian state. A less-than-sovereign entity? Maybe, though this will never satisfy the Palestinians or the international community. A fully sovereign Palestine? Out of the question.
The “peace-process” is and always was a sham. Greater Israel, if Netanyahu and his supporters have their way, will exist for ever. It seems to me that this is a fact that American policy should not have to absorb.
It was a shockingly beautiful weekend up here on Cape Cod – and I spent much of it playing with my dogs. The Dish was in a very upbeat mood as well: from Linklater’s remarkable new meditation on time and life to the truly promising possibilities of cognitive behavioral therapy; from Oliver Sacks’s LSD joys to Christopher Isherwood’s epiphany of awareness; from a celebration of the beauty and depth of the Latin Mass to two poems in awe of the English countryside in the summer.
Two more: the Christian-Buddhist meditations of Rowan Williams; and the deeper atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The most popular post of the weekend was The Revenge Doctrine, Ctd, followed by Psyched About CBT.
See you in the morning.
(Photo: German fans celebrate as they watch the 2014 FIFA World Cup Finals at a nightclub on July 13, 2014 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. By David Ramos/Getty Images.)
Quote For The Day II
“My first words of my impression of being on the surface of the Moon that just came to my mind was ‘Magnificent desolation.’ The magnificence of human beings, humanity, Planet Earth, maturing the technologies, imagination and courage to expand our capabilities beyond the next ocean, to dream about being on the Moon, and then taking advantage of increases in technology and carrying out that dream – achieving that is magnificent testimony to humanity. But it is also desolate – there is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface.
Because I realized what I was looking at, towards the horizon and in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years. Beyond me I could see the moon curving away – no atmosphere, black sky. Cold. Colder than anyone could experience on Earth when the sun is up- but when the sun is up for 14 days, it gets very, very hot. No sign of life whatsoever.
That is desolate. More desolate than any place on Earth,” – Buzz Aldrin, responding to a Redditor in an AMA this week.
(Image of lunar panorama via NASA/GSFC)
Birth Of A Damnation
Surveying the history of ideas about Hell, Kathryn Gin Lum looks back to a time when Americans seemed especially prone to question its existence:
By the time of the American Revolution in the late 18th century, colonists were arguing not just over the wisdom of waging war against England, but also over the justness of eternal punishment. Attracted by Enlightenment ideas, some members of the founding generation critiqued the British monarchy and the Calvinist God as tyrannical dictators both. As Jefferson put it: ‘It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin.’ Some freethinkers departed from the concept of hell as literal and eternal fire and brimstone in favour of a temporary hell where individuals would be punished in proportion to their crimes before being admitted to heaven. Others abandoned hell entirely, arguing that a loving and merciful God would save all of creation for heavenly bliss.
Why belief in Hell endured – and still remains the majority belief in the United States:
[I]n the new, monarchless US, defenders of hell argued that the threat of eternal punishment was necessary to ensure the morality of citizens. Even a temporary hell, they claimed, would give humans leave to commit socially harmful transgressions, from lying to cheating to murder, since they would still eventually end up in heaven after paying for their crimes. Indeed, the social argument in favour of eternal hell anticipated the arguments we hear today in favour of the death penalty. Both are supposed to serve as ultimate deterrents against crime.
Recent Dish on Hell here and here.
Watching The End Times In Primetime
Matthew Paul Turner unpacks the peculiar theology informing the new HBO show The Leftovers, which is premised on the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world’s population – an event evangelical and fundamentalist Christians know as the Rapture:
Believe it or not, the Rapture, as many evangelicals understand it today, is an idea that’s less than 200 years old, one part of an eschatology invented in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby, a British Bible teacher and devout member of the Plymouth Brethren. As a theologian, Darby constructed an entire Biblical interpretation known as Dispensationalism, an evangelical futurist expounding that, among other things, suggested that God’s relationship with humanity varied according to dispensations, or periods in history.
According to Darby, God’s epic timetable—from Adam and Eve to the apocalyptic end—is split up into seven non-uniform eras. For instance, Darby’s first era—the dispensation of innocence—started with Adam and Eve and lasted only as long as the first biblical pair lived in the Garden of Eden. The second era—the dispensation of conscience—began right after God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden and ended when Cain murdered Abel. Darby said the sixth era—the dispensation of grace—started with the crucifixion of Jesus and would not end until Jesus rescued all Christians from earth, making the way clear for the Great Tribulation—seven years of torment and pestilence—to begin.
After watching the pilot episode, however, Brandon Ambrosino picks up on the nuances of the story being told:
[A]s [series creator Tom] Perrotta has insisted, his rapture isn’t the Christian one. Yes, he said, people will use the word “rapture” because it’s the one they’re familiar with when it comes to explaining mass disappearances. But he hopes Leftovers is able to “disconnect [the rapture] from its religious context,” which he thinks is too “purposeful and clear,” and lacking in “nuance and grief.”
After watching the pilot, I can see that Perrotta was true to his word: his series is not about the rapture that Christians have been obsessing over for a century or two. For that matter, The Leftovers isn’t even a show about a rapture — it’s a show about loss. Which is to say, it’s not a show about an event, but a show about the people left in the wake of that event. As Perrotta explained to the Times, that is a universal theme that should resonate with both religious and non-religious viewers: “We’re always being left behind, we’re always living in a world where there are these spaces where people we knew and loved used to be.”
Still, the religious — and, in my opinion, deeply biblical — influence of the narrative is still lurking throughout the show. In some moments, this influence is blatant, in other moments it’s merely winked at.
The Right To Be?
Are our present joys linked, in some inextricable way, to “some mass atrocity that was committed in the past”? Philosophy professor Peter Atterton considers (NYT) how historical injustices affect our existence today:
Nietzsche once surmised that anyone who had ever wanted to relive a moment of joy was committed to affirming the idea of reliving the entirety of his or her life up to that point. Why? Because Nietzsche, a dyed-in-the-wool determinist, believed that the present instant of joy is made possible by all the events in one’s past that caused it. As he lyrically put it, “All things are enchained with one another, bound together by love.” For Nietzsche this is a splendid thing, for it gives us the power to redeem the past. … I had always solaced myself with Nietzsche’s idea of looking back at one’s life and affirming all of it, even the bad parts, which are indispensable conditions for whatever happiness my life currently contains, until one day it dawned on me that if I am to say “yes” to those events in the past that caused me to suffer but which are causally necessary for my life’s being lived as I live it now, then I must also say “yes” to those events that have caused others to suffer as well.
But who can do this? Who can maintain in good conscience that the Holocaust or slavery was justified because otherwise he or she, or anyone else currently living for that matter, wouldn’t have been born. (Nietzsche notoriously maintained that the only justification of the French Revolution — including the Reign of Terror — was that it produced Napoleon.) Whose natural narcissism is so extreme that he or she can justify the unjustifiable suffering of innumerable innocent lives? The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas was more discerning: “What is most natural becomes the most problematic. Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone?”
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