Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 373
January 31, 2014
Banks For The Bud Business
Federal law makes it impossible for the legal marijuana industry to put its money in banks. The dangers this produces:
One benefit of banks is the security they offer. And with all the marijuana-related cash exchanging hands in Colorado these days, security is a pre-eminent concern. It doesn’t help that there seem to be fewer and fewer people around to help guard that cash. Last summer, the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly began pressuring armored-car companies to stop working with marijuana companies. And last month, the Denver Police Department barred its off-duty officers from working security at marijuana operations, despite the fact that many moonlight as security guards at liquor stores and bars. That’s because department policy prohibits off-duty officers from working with any business that “constitutes a threat to the status of dignity of the police,” such as porn stores, strip clubs—and now, pot shops.
“They’re setting marijuana up to be a cash business that can’t protect itself,” says [Michael] Elliott [executive director of the Medical Marijuana Industry Group]. “The roles have switched. Now the marijuana industry is the one working to keep things safe.”
The Banality Of Absurdity
Rebecca Schuman is intrigued by the forthcoming Kafka videogame:
The game, according to [developer Denis] Galanin’s charmingly terse press kit, follows a hero named K., who “gets a sudden offer of employment” (ripped from the headlines, as it were—this is the premise of The Castle). This job offer “changes [K.’s] life, forcing him to make a distant voyage. Together with the hero you will experience an atmosphere of absurdity, surrealism, and total uncertainty.”
Sounds about right, yes? Maybe. What Kafka’s popular image obscures is that the real punch line of his works is not the fantastical, but the mundane. In The Trial, Josef K. gets arrested for no reason, but he doesn’t get thrown in a cell, waterboarded, and convicted. He goes back to work, and then spends the rest of his life wrestling with a bureaucracy that is vast, staggeringly incompetent—and boring. The primary story of The Metamorphosis is not actually that Gregor Samsa is a giant and disgusting bug-creature, it’s that his family is really, really bad at managing their finances. The centerpiece of In The Penal Colony, a massive and intricate torture machine, isn’t “remarkable” simply for its gory details—it’s remarkable because its inventor was a fool who wrote in gibberish, and it doesn’t actually work.
Face Of The Day
An anti-government protester stands at a demonstrators’ barricade in Kiev on January 31, 2014. A bill passed by Ukraine’s parliament to amnesty arrested activists gives protesters a 15-day deadline to leave occupied streets and administrative buildings otherwise it will not be implemented, according to the text published the day before. The Ukrainian army has previously said it would not interfere in the protests, which erupted in November after Yanukovych scrapped an integration deal with the European Union in favour of closer ties with Kiev’s historical master Moscow. By Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images.
Deportation Is No Joke
A petition to deport Canadian-born singer Justin Bieber over his recent arrest has attracted well over 100,000 signatures, which is “the required threshold for an official review and response from the executive office.” Christopher Flavelle, also Canadian, hates these sort of stunts:
Americans, could you stop making summary deportation the default remedy for people you decide you don’t like? In what universe does it make sense for somebody to be deported just because 100,000 people sign a petition? The same universe where a Democratic administration deports a record 400,000 people a year to look tough on enforcement, in the hopes of persuading Republicans to agree to immigration reform, that’s where. Please stop treating us as props for whatever populist whimsy catches your flitting glance.
Technicolor Tourism
The Chinese buddy comedy Lost in Thailand (trailer above) was partly responsible for a 62-percent rise in Chinese tourism to Thailand. The Economist considers the effects of film-driven tourism:
It is impossible to find numbers – at least reliable numbers not hyped up by a country’s tourist board. But films’ impact can be seen on two levels. The first is macro. Hollywood, for example, is a hugely important aspect of America’s soft power. There is little doubt that many of the tourists who visit New York do so because their imagination has been caught by the screen images of a thousand films. Something similar also seems to be happening in Nigeria, as Nollywood films, which are shown ceaselessly across Africa, are said to be drawing in visitors.
Then there is the micro level: the effect of individual films, as with the Lost in Thailand example. Tourists flocked to Middle Earth (also known as New Zealand) after the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. International arrivals to the country rose by 40 percent between 2000 and 2006, much of which was attributed to “Tolkien tourism” (by way of a rough comparison, Australian arrivals increased by 13 percent over the same period). Florence apparently expects last year’s film Inferno, based on Dan Brown’s blockbuster, to single-handedly reverse a 10-percent slump in its tourist numbers. Mamma Mia!, if the Daily Mail can be believed, “ruined” Skopelos, the Greek island on which it is set, after the tourists arrived in droves.
Creationism In The Classroom
A screenshot of Chris Kirk’s interactive map on where creationism is taught:
Joshua Cowen took a closer look at schools located in Milwaukee:
Using data from the Wisconsin state education agency’s website, I calculated that the 10 schools reported by Slate to be teaching or affiliated with creationism reported dramatically lower percentages of students proficient in science compared to other private schools participating in the voucher program. Over the 2010-11, 2011-12, and 2012-13 school years, nearly 70 percent of students in grades 4, 8, or 10 scored below “proficient” levels in science, compared to “only” 54 percent of students in other voucher schools (the difference is statistically significant). Setting aside the question of whether the other voucher schools are performing adequately on the state’s science exam, the point is that creationist schools are doing especially poorly. Lest we worry that this comparison is by definition unfair because the state’s science exam may be precisely what the creationist schools are teaching against, consider that the results are similar in math, reading, language arts, and social studies. In each subject area, the creationist schools had far fewer proficient students than the other voucher schools.
The Robots Took Er Jerbs In Poetry!
Brian Merchant examines the rise of poetry-writing computer programs like @Pentametron, which collects iambic pentameter tweets:
It’s especially interesting since Pentametron is artificially creating compelling poetry from explicitly human-authored sentiments. Yet Twitter bots like this only mark the entry point into what we might as well call roboetry. More sophisticated software can be put in service of writing poetry, too; like SwiftKey, a machine learning algorithm that typically teaches Android to adapt to users’ behavior and helps correct their touchscreen text entries. MIT phD candidate J. Nathan Matias taught it Shakespeare instead. …
Other examples abound: A bot that mines New York Times articles for haikus. Designed by the Times resident software architect, it spins haikus like this from articles like “The Fear of Surrendering Again” …
He has a mind as
fascinating to me as
the city itself.
The point is getting clearer: These are pretty good poems. They’re surprising, moving, weird, even a little touching; It’s actually good poetry.
Earlier Dish on Pentametron here.
The Death Row Science Experiment, Ctd
Earlier this week, Lauren Galik noted how Missouri and Louisiana, facing shortages of approved lethal injection drugs, are refusing to tell death row inmates what chemicals will be used to execute them or what pharmacies are supplying them:
Lawyers that represent both condemned prisoners [Herbert Smulls and Christopher Sepulvado] argue that states must answer questions about whether or not the execution will be humane and comport with the Constitution. Without information about the drugs, those questions have gone unanswered.
According to Megan McCracken, Eighth Amendment Resource Counsel at U.C. Berkeley School of Law’s Death Penalty Clinic, “If lawyers for the condemned prisoners can’t get the information [about the drugs], then they cannot meet their legal burden in court to show that there’s a substantial risk of harm.”
By keeping this information a closely guarded secret, states are asking condemned inmates to take their word for it that the source is legitimate and the drugs won’t result in cruel and unusual punishment when administered.
Smulls was executed on Wednesday using pentobarbital “manufactured by a compounding pharmacy whose identity has not been revealed.” Waldman scratches his head:
It’s the 21st century. We can build skyscrapers a kilometer high. We can send ships to Mars. We can put a powerful computer in the pockets of billions of people. Are you telling me that with all our technology, all our engineering knowledge, and all our good old-fashioned American ingenuity, we can’t come up with a quick, effective, and painless way to kill a man? …
Beyond these practical considerations is a moral one: the death penalty is a vestige of a more barbarous time, which is why most countries have done away with it, and why we should too. But if we’re going to do it, surely we can devise a method that doesn’t have all the uncertainty that lethal injection has brought.
Recent Dish on lethal injection here, here, and here.
January 30, 2014
The Best Of The Dish Today
First up, not exactly a correction, but definitely worth noting. The lesson I took from the movie “Lone Survivor” was the following:
Exposed to real danger in a way no one in Washington ever was, these soldiers were given a chance to commit a war crime to save their asses, and chose not to.
I’m not taking that back. But it’s worth noting that the hero of the movie and of history does not share that view at all. The book by Marcus Luttrell blasts the rules of warfare as liberal media cant. This captures his views on the subject of executing unarmed civilians or torturing them:
“I promise you, every insurgent, freedom fighter and stray gunman in Iraq who we arrested knew the ropes, knew that the way out was to announce he had been tortured by the Americans, ill treated, or prevented from reading the Koran or eating his breakfast or watching the television. They all knew al-Jazeera, the Arab broadcasters, would pick it up, and it would be relayed to the U.S.A., where the liberal media would joyfully accuse all of us of being murderers or barbarians or something. Those terrorist organizations laugh at the U.S. media, and they know exactly how to use the system against us.”
For the record.
Six posts you may have missed. Are the Clintons stoppable? Is Christie toast? Our secret Syria policy (grrr). De Blasio’s cravenness and hypocrisy. And a poem by John Updike about Syliva Plath.
The most popular post of the day was Who Can Beat Them? Second up was Republicans Endorse Obamacare Lite.
Renew here! Renew now! And see you in the morning.
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