Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2623

After The Flood

by Patrick Appel

Kate Larkin worries that the Pakistani floods are damaging the country's irrigation system:

Without adequate irrigation, severe food shortages will become even
more likely over the coming months. The Asian Development Bank, which
is leading the first assessment of the flooding, says that 80,000
livestock have already perished and that 2 million hectares of crops
are still underwater.

Flood - Irrigation - Asian Development Bank - Earth Sciences - Natural Disasters ...

Do Moderate Muslims Exist?

by Conor Friedersdorf

Claire Berlinski has the answer:

That they do is a proposition so
easily verifiable that I don't even have to leave my apartment to do it.
I can just look out the window.

Elsewhere in the same post:

I've just walked down a street filled literally with thousands of Moslems of exactly the kind many people are seriously arguing do not exist. I saw them with my own eyes, as I have every day for the past five years. With so many other questions in the world, why waste time...

Word Play In The War Zone

by Chris Bodenner

Retired Army Col. Andrew Berdy vents over at Tom Ricks' place:

Can you explain to me how
why, the myth of "all combat troops out of Iraq" is allowed to
perpetuated by the press, much less our senior military leadership? Yes, the mission has changed. But units
my son's Stryker Brigade (not the one that just left!) are, and
will be, combat infantry

This is fiction pure and simple. I just don't get how the nation has swallowed this and why...

Avatar Of Hope (And Industry)

by Zoe Pollock

Bill Donahue has written a great dispatch in the current Atlantic on Mongolia's comeback efforts, beginning with a 131-foot stainless-steel statue of the infamous Mongol warlord:

Genghis Khan sits astride a stallion, grimacing as he clutches a gold-tinted stainless-steel whip. The statue's pedestal is a columned, white-granite rotunda, and everything inside the rotunda is calibrated to impress and make money. There's a collection of Bronze Age artifacts, a screening room...

Yglesias Award Nominee

by Chris Bodenner

"I am not ultra-ultra-conservative on every issue. I actually support gay marriage. I think the gay marriage thing would definitely surprise people. I
mean, for some people, it will surprise them to the point that they
won't want to hear it. "No, that can't be, I really want to have this
sort of idea of her in my head," so I sort of rain on their parade
there," - Elizabeth Hasselbeck.  All the right people are pissed.

Same-sex marriage - Elisabeth Hasselbeck - ...

So Many Choices

by Patrick Appel

Jonah Lehrer takes on choice blindness:

we are completely ignorant of how fallible our perceptions are. In thisstudy, for instance, the consumers were convinced that it was extremelyeasy to distinguish between these pairs of jam and tea. They insistedthat they would always be able to tell grapefruit jam andcinnamon-apple jam apart. But they were wrong, just as I'm wrong tobelieve that I would be able to reliably pick out the differencebetween all these different coffee beans...

Not An Onion Headline

by Chris Bodenner

Sharron Angle Campaigned Against Black Football Jerseys On Religious Grounds: Color is 'Thoroughly Evil'  Money quote:

The black uniforms were then confiscated and held under "lock and key"
by the administration, which refused to compensate the team for the
money they had spent acquiring the jerseys.

They must not have had access to an Ecto Containment Unit.

Sports - Sharron Angle - Shopping - Apparel - Republican

Pseudovariety

by Patrick Appel

Philip H. Howard provides a visual:

Three firms control 89% of US softdrink sales. This dominance is obscured from us by theappearance of numerous choices on retailer shelves. Steve Hannafordrefers to this as "pseudovariety," or the illusion of diversity,concealing a lack of real choice. To visualize the extent ofpseudovariety in this industry we developed a cluster diagram torepresent the number of soft drink brands and varieties found inthe refrigerator cases of 94...

Did The Stimulus Work? Ctd

by Patrick Appel

Chait counters Manzi:

Private forecasters unanimously believethat fiscal stimulus can temporarily boost growth. They give nocredence whatsoever to the various right-wing alternative models inwhich foscal stimulus does not boost growth. Moreover, in 2001, whenthe objective case for fiscal stimulus was much weaker, there was noreal debate about the efficacy of fiscal stimulus. The fact thatRepublicans are fiercely contesting the merits of fiscal stimulus now,while almost nobody...

Faces Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

Alexis Madrigal explores them:

Photographer James Mollison reveals the variability of our uncanny
human cousins in a stunning series of close-up portraits of the Great
Apes. The tight focus of his photographs forces us to look
right into the eyes of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans
of different ages and personalities.

More here, including an explanation of how the photographer got the apes to look so intently. (Click on the image to enlarge. Go here for...