Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 347

Right-Sizing The Military, Ctd

Stephen Mihm explains what Chuck Hagel’s 2015 defense budget might mean for the economy:

Hagel’s proposal to cut the military spells trouble for the stock market, right? Actually, no. The headlines about plans to reduce the size of the Army by 6 percent obscured the news that, over the coming years, the actual level of defense spending is set to rise slowly, from $535 billion in 2016 to $559 billion in 2019. And that’s before members of Congress move to shelter their districts’ pet projects.

In fact, what most analysts have missed is that the reduction is strictly in the number of active personnel, not overall military expenditures.

Joyner supports the cuts:

Hagel and the Joint Chiefs have repeatedly emphasized—correctly, in my judgment—that it’s far preferable to take the risks associated with a small but highly trained and well equipped force than those associated with a larger but “hollow” force that is unprepared for the fight. Accordingly, they “chose further reductions in troop strength and force structure in every military service—active and reserve—in order to sustain our readiness and technological superiority, and to protect critical capabilities like special operations forces and cyber resources.” That’s a difficult but necessary trade-off.

But Lindsay Cohn thinks the Pentagon is going about personnel reductions in the wrong way:

It is a mistake to believe that reducing numbers automatically introduces efficiency. In a normal American firm, cutting personnel is an efficient means of reducing costs because a firm can choose whom it wants to fire and can engage in lateral hiring when its need for personnel increases again. In the military, however, one cannot simply fire the lowest-performing people and replace them with new hires, nor can one engage in lateral hiring for certain specialties when a sudden need arises (e.g. combat medics, artillerymen, military lawyers). While it is possible to pass over low-performing officers and deny re-enlistment requests from below-average enlisted personnel, the military has little control over the timing of such actions, and may face budgetary time limits that force out higher performers. In general, the forces will achieve personnel cuts by reducing recruiting and relying on voluntary attrition. This is an inefficient means of managing personnel.

Michael Krepon considers the fate of our nuclear arsenal:

So far, Hagel has been silent about reductions in nuclear forces, promising to preserve all three legs of the so-called triad — missiles, bombers and submarines — while making “important investments to preserve a safe, secure, reliable and effective nuclear force.” But reductions in nuclear forces are coming: It’s not a question of whether, but when — and how deep.

The Dawn Of Ska

Diving deep into a history of Jamaican music, John Jeremiah Sullivan attempts to pinpoint the emergence of ska:

When I … [was] doing my best to stake out some understanding of what was going on musically in Kingston in the late Fifties and early Sixties, I ran into the riddle that bedevils every person who gets lost in this particular cultural maze, namely, where did ska come from? That strange rhythm, that chop on the upbeat or offbeat, ump-ska, ump-ska, ump-ska, exemplified quintessentially in “Simmer Down” (or in parts of Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven,” if there’s doubt of its relevance). Did someone think that up? Can it be traced to a particular song or band, or accident, or earlier Caribbean style (mento, calypso)? Maybe its evolution should be followed out of the island’s deeper past, from African and Afro-Caribbean sources, and Indian influences—both kinds of Indian, in Jamaica’s case. There were a disproportionate number of Chinese-Jamaicans helping to shape Kingston’s music scene—did that have any effect?

As with almost all cases of musicological origin-hunting, the answer is something tedious like, “Yes and no to all of the above.”

Multiple streams converged to prepare the ground for that rhythm, for it to become a rhythmic move that would make sense to the Jamaican ear (and body), or to the fingers of a Jamaican guitarist.

Nevertheless there are moments that can be pointed to, when you hear the insistent uptick venturing forth. Theophilus Beckford’s piano on the classic Fifties proto-ska “Easy Snappin’” is one. You hear it there in the way Beckford’s pounding the chord, hear the rhythm offering itself, If you felt like going all the way, we could play it like this. Count Ossie’s polyrhythmic Rasta drumming on the Folkes Brothers’ “Oh, Carolina” is another such moment. The horns on Cuban-Jamaican blues master Laurel Aitken’s “Boogie in My Bones.” (Or over in the States, electric-guitar pioneer Wild Jimmy Spruill’s string-scratching fingernail technique on Wilbert Harrison’s 1959 “Kansas City”—Spruill a sharecropper’s son from Fayetteville, North Carolina; Harrison a churchgoing city kid from Charlotte). Sit down with any ska freak, and they’ll give you many other moments.

(Video: “Simmer Down” by Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1964)

Little Kids Are Slimming Down

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control (NYT) shows that the obesity rate has fallen 43 percent in the last decade among two- to five-year-olds, while staying more or less the same for all other age groups. Ambers says this bodes well for these kids as they grow up:

A decrease in the growth rate of obesity among 2- to 5-year-olds is very good news because, by 5, a predisposition to obesity seems to be set. This means that, before most kids experience the ability to choose what foods they eat, something (genetics, environment, hormones, stress) has already determined they’ll be obese. Still, virtually all of the way that older kids interact with food is changing. Television advertising is changing. Public school cafeteria food is changing. Attitudes and awareness are changing. Restaurant experiences are changing. Science is changing. The study today suggests that the changes, collectively, are having no net effect just yet.

Zachary Goldfarb looks at some of the explanations the report gives for the decline:

Nutrition assistance such as food stamps and WIC (women, infants and children) may have led to decreases in childhood obesity among low-income Americans as federal standards have changed to promote healthier eating. For example, WIC has revised its funding formula to boost the amount of fruits and vegetables and peanut butter a mother and her child eat. At the time time, WIC has limited the amount of (non-breast) milk that a child drinks, to limit fat intake.

But Philip Bump worries that food insecurity might have something to do with it:

The USDA has data on the number of children who lived in households with food insecurity over the time period the CDC looked at as well as the number of households with children that experienced “very low” food security. … What we see is a dramatic increase in the number of kids living in households that had trouble finding enough to eat — right when the economy went south.

James Hamblin sees no cause for celebration here:

Lest we be lulled into the complacency that once allowed our cartoon characters to enjoy cookies without being reprimanded by their friends, best to consider that the actual conclusion of the study is that 17 percent of kids and more than one third of adults in the U.S. remain obese, and in the last ten years, the final line of the study says:

“Overall, there have been no significant changes in obesity prevalence in youth or adults.”

At best we celebrate with cautious optimism over something of a leveling off. It’s not worse than it was, but it’s far from good.

Mental Health Break

The best hat-juggling performance you’ll see all week:

Quote For The Day II

“Those in control of this state need to stop fighting the future. They must stop governing by fear. They must stop pretending there’s some security blanket in laws that treat others unfairly,” – Texas Senate Democratic Caucus Chairman Kirk Watson.

Today, Texas became the latest state in which its ban on civil marriage rights for gay couples has been ruled unconstitutional.

Lights Out On Mt. Gox

The oldest Bitcoin exchange has gone offline and appears to be insolvent. The crash has cast doubt on the crypto-currency’s future, but Patrick McGuire downplays the event:

For those who are taking the long-view of Bitcoin, this is a large speed bump that will cause a lot of people grief for a long time; but there are bigger and better services on the way that will be able to learn from this crucial example of how not to run a Bitcoin exchange.

Brian Doherty puts the crash into perspective:

A reminder: if you had invested $1,000 in the horrible mistake of Bitcoin five months ago, that thousand would be worth about four times that today. After this Mt. Gox news.

Certainly, that huge value increase is not proof of Bitcoin’s eternal value as either investment or currency (and inflation in the former isn’t that healthy for use as the latter). But it is a sign that “it’s over, man” seems doubtful. People still believe. And that’s important when it comes to either investment or currency.

Kadhim Shubber bids the exchange good riddance:

Mt. Gox has become a gangrenous limb, infecting the wider bitcoin community with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Its reputation has been in a slow decline for some time now—toward the end of last year, news emerged that $5 million of Mt. Gox’s cash had been seized by the U.S. government. The revelations appeared to explain why withdrawals from Mt. Gox had been slow since June 2013, when the seizures occurred. As new and better-run exchanges sprung up, Mt. Gox increasingly became a burden, a holdover from bitcoin’s teenage years.

McArdle thinks the Mt. Gox crash makes Bitcoin regulation inevitable:

I’ve never been very bullish on Bitcoin, because ultimately, the better it performs at evading government surveillance of currency transactions (and government ability to manage debt loads via inflation), the harder those governments are going to try to shut it down. And it turns out that governments are very good at shutting down these sorts of … call them financial workarounds … because they can order the banks and payment networks that service the vast regular economy to refuse to take Bitcoins or take payments from companies that do take Bitcoins. What governments have done to online poker and offshore banking havens, they can do to Bitcoin vendors.

What happened at Mt. Gox only helps the government make its case for much tighter regulation of these networks.

Heather Timmons notes that some Bitcoiners are coming around to the idea of regulation, at least from within:

A growing number of participants believe the nascent bitcoin industry needs to accept the fact that expanding beyond the fringe comes with some some trappings of accountability.

“Nowadays, all bitcoin exchanges are very seriously considering and implementing compliance requirements based on their local jurisdiction’s rules,” said Eddy Travia, chief start-up officer of Seedcoin, a bitcoin company incubator. His firm’s investments include MexBT, a Mexican Bitcoin exchange, where “a large part of the resources…are invested into compliance-related activities,” he said, mostly based on self-imposed rules that are “a kind of self-regulation in anticipation of any potential concerns from the local authorities.”

Felix Salmon assesses the situation:

I actually do believe Coinbase and other next-generation bitcoin companies when they say that they’re much more robust than their predecessors. But I don’t believe that regulators, and the public at large, will believe them. Bitcoin is based on mistrust, which makes it almost impossible for this circle to be squared. There is a small number of cryptogeeks who really love the paradox that they can trust the protocol precisely because they don’t need to trust any given institution. Regulators, it’s fair to say, tend not to be among them. And neither are normal people, who don’t understand the math behind bitcoin, and who have no real ability to secure their coins on their own, and who thereforeneed to be able to trust whatever institution they’re using to store their bitcoin-denominated wealth.

In order for the end of Mt Gox to be a blessing for bitcoin, we’re going to need to see an influx ofnew entrants into the asset class — people who never trusted Mt Gox, but who are happy to trust (say) Coinbase.

Sponsored Content Watch

National Review joins the movement disguising ads as articles.

A Beard-Tasting?

Maybe things are getting out of hand:

“A beard tasting is when [baseball] fans sign up to be blindfolded and sample different substances right off of the beards to win cash,” Holland explained. “You’ve never seen this before anywhere.”

School Lunch On Layaway?

A Salt Lake City school got national attention last month for refusing to give meals to students with outstanding lunch bills, following similar decisions in Texas and New Jersey. Patricia Montague of the School Nutrition Association calls the rise of lunch debt “a broad and growing national problem”:

School meal programs are self-sustaining and financially independent of a school district’s education budget. However, federal regulations prohibit school meal programs from carrying debt from unpaid meal charges from one school year to the next. So when parents don’t pay the balance, and meal programs are unable to cover the costs, school districts are forced to pick up the tab. As a result, many school meal programs have been forced to institute controversial charge policies governing whether, and what, their school cafeterias will serve to students who are unable to pay for a meal.

Research indicates that an increasing number of children arrive in the cafeteria unable to pay for their meals. A 2012 SNA survey of school meal program directors found that 53 percent of school districts were experiencing an increase in unpaid meal charges. Of those facing the increase, 56 percent anticipated that the accumulated debt from those charges would be greater at the end of the school year compared with that of the previous school year. Thirty-three percent anticipated a significant increase in debt. Some meal programs acquire thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of dollars in debt from unpaid meal charges. New York City’s public schools reportedly incurred $42 million in unpaid meal debt between 2004 and 2011.

The Facebook Empire

Matt Buchanan wonders if it can hold together:

When you first sign up for WhatsApp, you’re informed about the pricing model: the first year of service is free; each year after that costs a dollar. A post offering an explanation of why the company charges a nominal fee instead of showing advertising or requiring you to hand over basic demographic information reads like an anti-Facebook manifesto, beginning with a quote from “Fight Club”: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” The post continues, “These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads”—an apt description of WhatsApp’s new owner. After a few more cutting remarks about advertising, such as “no one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement,” the page concludes, “Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.”

Facebook, despite being driven primarily by demographics and advertising, is adamant that it won’t change WhatsApp, an indication of just how overarching the company wants to be: in the pursuit of its next billion users, it is now willing to tolerate a highly discordant new product, like a vast empire that contains many competing nations. Empires always fall; the question now is how big Facebook’s can get before it does.

Earlier Dish on the WhatsApp purchase here and here.