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Mental Health Break

All your favorite vocal hooks from the ’90s:

The Best Of The Dish Today

You may remember the rather refreshing position of Rand Paul that he wanted to cut the billions of dollars in aid we give to Egypt and Israel. Well, guess what? As David Corn notes, Paul has now changed his tune. He’s dropped the idea of ending aid to Israel and is now urging an end to aid to the Palestinians unless they don’t only recognize Israel but recognize it as a Jewish state. The idea of cutting off aid to Israel has now disappeared from his website. I’m unaware of any ideological epiphanies Paul has had on the question of foreign aid, so, if you want to find an explanation for the sudden swerve to neoconservatism, you’d have to look at the process by which a candidate gets the money and support to run for president.

Meanwhile, a reader responds to our latest indie Dish update:

Lookin’ good, team. But just tryna make sure I understand all this correctly: What is “affiliate income”? And how much revenue has come in from 1/1/2014 to current?

“Affiliate income” is the money we get from the Amazon links for any book mentioned on the Dish. When a person buys a book, or any other item on the site within a 24-hour session, we get a tiny percentage of the purchase price. (More on the Dish’s approach to affiliate revenue here.) In the first four months of 2014, we generated $10,417. But in the month of April alone, with the advent of our Book Club, we made   $5,245 in affiliate revenue. It’s not much compared to our subscription revenue, but over the course of the year it definitely adds up. Last year, our $25,000 in affiliate revenue basically paid for an intern’s salary and healthcare benefits. So thank you to all the Book Clubbers  for your help on that front.

Today I failed to do my homework on the alleged smoking gun Benghazi email from Ben Rhodes. It is, when viewed in context, merely spin in a confusing time. Quite why it took so long to be released is another matter. I tried to give an assessment of the paradox of Obama’s popular yet unpopular foreign policy; wondered if I sound gay; and gawked at the unreconstructed racism of Donald Sterling.

The most popular post of the day remained Sarah Palin: Anti-Christian, followed by my response to David Harsanyi about Israel’s intransigence on settlements. That Palin post has had an extended life on Facebook. But Palin has always been a traffic-booster.

One last thought from Oakeshott’s Notebooks, which I’ve been gulping:

In love is our existence made intelligible. For in love are all contraries reconciled.

That’s quite a statement from a philosopher. But he was always much more than that.

See you in the morning.

How Long Do You Go? Ctd

According to Harry Fisch, author of The New Naked: The Ultimate Sex Education for Grown-Ups, the average hetero “sex session” lasts less than eight minutes:

There have been studies in which couples consented to be scientifically observed having sex, and one of the observers timed each session with a stopwatch to make a fairly accurate assessment about the length of the coupling. Not surprisingly, there is an extremely large variation in the time it takes a couple to have sex, ranging from the excessively short (about two minutes or less, which famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey dryly noted was a “frequent source of marital conflict”) to the “Are you done yet?” (over forty minutes).

An astonishing 45 percent of men finish the sex act too quickly, which is to say, within Kinsey’s conflicted two minutes. That’s pretty speedy. Way too speedy for the average woman to be able to have an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone. At least five minutes, and more like seven, is usually what’s needed for a woman to be able to achieve orgasm. And even though the average length of the average inter-vaginal sex session is about 7.3 minutes, that’s still not particularly long, especially for women who usually take much longer than men to become aroused enough to have an orgasm.

But Alice Robb cautions readers not to conclude that the discrepancy “simply represents more evidence of a male-dominated society’s inherent pleasure inequality”:

As it happens, men may be more bothered by it than women.

For a 2004 paper in the Journal of Sex Research, University of New Brunswick researchers S. Andrea Miller and E. Sandra Byers interviewed 152 heterosexual couples on their “actual and desired duration of foreplay and of intercourse.” Their subjects spanned a wide range of ages—21 to 77 years old—and relationship type—from 6-month to 50-year partnerships. Miller and Byers found that men reported a much longer ideal duration than did their partners.

It’s true that for both sexes, the “ideal” length of both foreplay and intercourse was much longer than the actual. But the New Brunswick results at least suggest that the men are not happy with this status quo.

Previous Dish on sexy time here.

The Case For Eating Bugs

Joseph Stromberg makes it:

This graph [above], from the UN report, shows the greenhouse gas emissions that result from producing a kilogram of pork and beef, compared to a kilogram of insect meat … Because demand for meat is rising around the world, livestock production is going to become an increasingly big reason why the planet is warming — unless we find an alternative.

Then there’s the matter of ethics. Obviously, smart people disagree about the ethics of eating meat, and many argue that the pleasure we derive from eating meat outweighs the pain and suffering experienced by a cow or pig in captivity. But few argue that these animals experience no suffering at all. Many scientists who’ve studied the insect nervous system, though, believe that they don’t feel pain. Raising these insects for meat — instead of cows, pigs, and chickens — would reduce the total amount of suffering that results from our appetite for meat.

But just how does one get Americans on board with entomophagy? Nick Cox interviews the young founders of Six Foods, who are looking to do just that:

[Laura] D’Asaro, who was an African Studies major, says she first “caught the bug” after eating a caterpillar on the side of the street while traveling in Tanzania. A lifelong on-and-off vegetarian who enjoyed meat but struggled with the ethical and environmental issues that came with it, she found insects to be a perfect compromise. She told [Rose]Wang, who was then her roommate, about her discovery.

“I never thought she’d be into it, because she’s more traditional,” said D’Asaro. “[But] she’d just been in China and had eaten a scorpion, and said it tasted a little bit like shrimp without the fishy flavor.”

So Wang and D’Asaro started ordering live insects and experimenting with them. They knew they were onto something when they made a box of fifty green caterpillar tacos for a pitch competition and left them in the Harvard Innovation Lab fridge. “We didn’t think to label them,” she said. “We got back from our pitch competition half an hour later… and there were only five of them left, because people had eaten them, not knowing they were insects, and had loved them, and just kept going back for more.”

And Daniella Martin talks to a nutritionist who is trying to market a cricket-based protein powder:

Bodybuilders and extreme athletes tend to be early adopters of nutrition trends. That’s why they are precisely the demographic Dianne Guilfoyle, a school nutrition supervisor in Southern California, hopes to capture with BugMuscle, a protein powder made up entirely of ground insects.

“If people see bodybuilders taking it, they might accept it more willingly,” says Dianne, whose son Daniel is a cage fighter.

There are many benefits to using insects as a base for protein powder. For one, the main existing sources are soybeans and milk whey, both of which cause health concerns for some people. While insect protein might not be a perfect alternative for those with shellfish allergies, for others it could present an alternative that’s healthier for their bodies and the planet than some of the existing options. Previously, whey protein was the only protein powder source to supply a complete amino acid profile: all nine of the essential amino acids required for human nutrition. But guess what else is a great source of these amino acids? That’s right, insects.

Previous Dish on eating bugs here.

Sheldon Loses His Chinese Visa

Adam Taylor comments on the latest moves by China’s Internet censors, which included blocking “The Big Bang Theory” from the country’s popular video streaming sites:

In some ways, the removal of the show is not so surprising. China is in the middle of a crackdown on pornography and other unsavory behavior online. The campaign, titled “Cleaning the Web” by the Chinese state, has seen some unorthodox targets, such as the e-books section of Sina.com.cn.

But “The Big Bang Theory” is hardly a scandalous show.

On IMDB’s parental guide, it receives a rating of 15 out of 50. And what’s really odd about the online TV show crackdown isn’t what they chose to take offline – it’s what they allowed to remain on. For example, “House of Cards” is still available online. That HBO political drama, very popular in China, has plenty of scenes of violence and sex. And Sunday, China’s CCTV began airing a translated version of “Game of Thrones,” a fantasy show that frequently shocks even hardened U.S. viewers with profanity, nudity and violence.

Adam Minter suspects this is really about driving more viewers to state TV:

The “Big Bang” ban most likely has less to do with content and more with competition. By licensing popular U.S. shows, China’s privately owned video streaming sites are stealing eyeballs and advertising dollars away from state-owned networks such as CCTV. “The most likely explanation is that ideology is just an excuse,” tweeted Zhou Xuanyi, a philosophy professor in Wuhan, on Sina Weibo. “The real reason is that the censors want some benefit if you’re going to be earning money on their turf.” Indeed, the Beijing News reported Monday that CCTV was already preparing a dubbed “green edition” of “Big Bang Theory” — minus “excessive content” — for broadcast on its own channels.

Breaking The Glass Ceiling Only To Fall Off The Glass Cliff

Bershidsky explains why women CEOs get fired more often than men:

This is not evidence of male superiority on the job, but of the so-called glass cliff theory. According to this, women and other “occupational minorities,” such as people with a different skin color, tend to get appointed to top jobs when a company needs saving. When these women fail — and in a crisis, the probability of failure is higher — boardrooms fall back on tradition. They replace the women with white men who have lots of industry experience. …

“Glass cliff” hires are prominent among the 23 female chief executives who run Fortune 500 companies: Marissa Mayer at Yahoo!, Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, Mary Barra at General Motors and Irene Rosenfeld at Mondelez (formerly Kraft). They were appointed to effect breakthroughs and turnarounds. In many such situations (Barra is an exception), female chief executives are brought in from outside the company. Strategy& confirms that 35 percent of incoming female CEOs are outsiders, versus 22 percent for men.

Where The Drinkers Are

Terrence McCoy charts new WHO data on drinking habits around the world:

Patrick Winn examines the findings on female drinkers:

Obviously, most women in Muslim-majority countries don’t touch alcohol. But those who do apparently don’t hold back. In Syria, Turkey, Egypt and Malaysia — all Muslim-majority nations — more than 9 in 10 women tell the WHO that they’ve never, ever consumed the stuff. This apparently leaves lots of booze for the 1 in 10 who do. The female drinkers of Turkey and Egypt, for example, drink more than twice as much as their American sisters.  …

Apart from Vietnam, one of the only other countries where female drinkers binge worse than men is the United Arab Emirates or UAE — an Islamic kingdom where Muslims caught drinking can be locked up. And yet — among drinkers — 1 in 3 female drinkers in the UAE report bingeing at least once per week. So do 1 in 4 male drinkers. Much of this drinking takes place in the booming business hub’s hotels and compounds, where foreigners are allowed to booze out of public view.

Recent Dish on the dropping rates of drinking in Russia here.

The View From Your Window

Somerville, Massachusetts, 3.33 pm

There Are Less Painful Ways To Die

Stephanie Mencimer calls lethal injection a “terrible way to kill people.” She claims that the “veins of death row inmates can’t handle the needles”:

Many death row inmates were once IV drug users, and by the time they reach the death chamber, their veins are a mess. Others are obese from years of confinement, which also makes their veins hard to find. Compounding that problem is the fact that the people inserting the needles usually aren’t medical professionals. They’re prison guards (in Oklahoma they’re paid $300 for the job), and they’re usually in a big hurry to get it done quickly—an factor that doesn’t mesh well with the slower-acting drugs states are now resorting to.

Sonny Bunch recommends the guillotine as an alternative:

There are other, less dramatic, ways, of course. Hanging and firing squads would probably be quicker and more painless than lethal injection or the electric chair. But the guillotine really seems to solve everyone’s problems: It was designed to deliver an efficient, quick, and painless death. It performs that task admirably. I understand the irony of a reactionary such as myself embracing the Terror’s preferred method of execution, but one must give credit where it’s due.

If we’re going to do something—and a large number of Americans and American states are pretty committed to performing executions—we ought to do it right. And “right” in this case means a quick and painless death. I can’t really imagine any reasonable objections to a widespread adoption of the guillotine.

Dish readers raised several objections to bringing back the guillotine when John Kruzel suggested it last year.

Has China Pulled Ahead?

These are just the numbers from three years ago:

So it’s only a matter of time before China overtakes the US as the world’s largest economy – and by one measure, it may be there already:

The World Bank’s International Comparison Program takes account of international prices to give a more accurate measure of real output. The statisticians have just completed the exercise for 2011, and they found that China’s economy back then was 87 percent as big as the U.S.’s — not 47 percent, as output converted at market exchange rates would have you believe. Since 2011, China has grown much faster than the U.S. According to the new numbers, its economy will be the world’s biggest before 2014 is out, if it isn’t already.

But Christopher Ingraham deflates the excitement, noting that Purchasing Power Parity isn’t a useful way to compare economies:

On that measure, China is looking pretty good. … But there’s a reason that standard measures of GDP don’t use the PPP conversion. As the Wall Street Journal’s Tom Wright explains:

China can’t buy missiles and ships and iPhones and German cars in PPP currency. They have to pay at prevailing exchange rates. That’s why exchange rate valuations are seen as more important when comparing the power of nations.

Standard GDP measures take these exchange factors into account. And here, China is doing about as well as one would expect. They’re still the world’s second-largest economy, but their GDP is less than half the size of the U.S. GDP.

Drum also downplays the new numbers:

I don’t want to pretend to some kind of faux naivete here, but can someone tell my why there’s suddenly a big frenzy about whether China is now the biggest economy in the world? China has 1.3 billion people. Of course they’re eventually going to eventually be bigger than the US. If not this year, then next year or the year after. Everyone knows this. Everyone has always known this. It’s no surprise, and it’s no big deal. They’ve still got about the per capita GDP of Albania, and it will be decades before they become even a middle-income country.