Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.
-- Exodus 22:21
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
-- "The New Colussus" by Emma Lazarus
This week's featured posts are "Gaza as seen from a distance" and "There's Something About Todd".
This week everybody was talking about yet another Malaysian Air flight
This one was shot down over the disputed eastern region of the Ukraine. Apparently, missiles sophisticated enough to take down an airliner at cruising altitude require months of training to operate. That fact doesn't align with the official Russian story: that pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine are a spontaneous uprising it supports but is not aiding with its own forces.
Vox has a good account of the situation. Presumably the Malaysian Air flight was mistaken for a military transport plane. Pro-Russian rebels have been shooting at Ukrainian planes for a while now, but the early shoot-downs had been planes low enough to be targeted by shoulder-fired rockets requiring relatively little training. More recently, two Ukrainian planes have been shot down from higher altitudes, suggesting a more complicated system. Three possibilities: Russia is shooting down the planes from its own territory (the U.S. doesn't think so), or Russian military advisers are operating the missiles from the rebel-controlled territories, or Russia started training Ukrainian rebels before the current uprising began.
The wreckage fell onto territory controlled by the rebels, who are not cooperating with outside investigators. Or maybe they are: a rebel leader has promised to turn over the plane's black box.
Lost in all this is the story of the time we shot down an airliner: Iran Air 655 in 1988.
and Israel invading Gaza
Last week I said I hadn't made enough sense out of the Gaza conflict to comment, so I felt a responsibility to provide more insight this week in "Gaza as seen from a distance".
and those refugee kids
Ukraine and Gaza have driven the kids-at-the-border problem off the front pages, but the story is still percolating. At first it appeared the issue was getting so much attention that even this Congress would have to do something. But that is getting less and less likely.
Back on July 9, Kevin Drum predicted that the Republican House would refuse to act on President Obama's proposal to deal with the child refugee crisis.
Well, of course it won't happen. The crisis along the border is tailor made for Republicans. It makes their base hopping mad, it juices their campaign fundraising, and anytime the government is unable to address a problem it makes Obama look bad. Why on earth would Republicans want to do anything to change any of this?
As long as Obama is president, chaos is good for Republicans. After all, most voters don't really know who's at fault when things go wrong, they just know there's a crisis and Obama doesn't seem to be doing anything about it. Exploiting that may be cynical and revolting, but hey, politics ain't beanbag. And in case you haven't heard, there's an election coming up.
Friday, Steve Benen came around:
I was skeptical when Kevin wrote this, but his assessment is looking quite prescient now.
Keep in mind, this isn’t a situation in which the Republican-led House wants one solution, the Democratic-led Senate wants another, and a compromise is elusive. Rather, we’re looking at a dynamic in which the GOP House majority simply can’t pass anything ... So there is no bill and the Speaker’s office doesn’t seem to think there will be a bill. Once again, met with a real challenge in need of a responsible remedy from lawmakers, Republicans aren’t prepared.
Today's closing links to Weird Al's new video "Word Crimes". Here's a word crime: Describing Obama's itemized $3.7 billion proposal as a "blank check", which seems to be theRepublicantalkingpoint. The phrase must rile up focus groups or something, but there's nothing "blank" about $3.7 billion.
Several article have brought some historical perspective: "Child Migrants Have Been Coming to America Alone Since Ellis Island" in Mother Jones and "America’s Long History of Immigrant Scaremongering" in Slate, which recounts all the bogus scares about immigrants and disease through the centuries.
but I couldn't stop myself from writing about Todd Akin
who is not worth your time or mine. I advice you not to read "There's Something About Todd". You have better things to do.
and you also might be interested in ...
How long before the Supreme Court has to rule on this? President Obama's executive order protecting LGBT folks from discrimination by corporations holding government contracts has no religious exemption, something religious leaders had been asking for. In the Hobby Lobby case, Justice Alito denied that his ruling would "provide a shield for employers who might cloak illegal discrimination as a religious practice." We may find out whether that's true.
Alito's statement has some weasel words in it. It may apply only to insincere religious beliefs adopted to "cloak" discrimination. But Alito also said: "It is not for the Court to say that the religious beliefs of the plaintiffs are mistaken or unreasonable." It will be interesting to see if in the future he will claim the ability to look into people's souls to see if their beliefs are sincere or motivated by bigotry. And what about people whose bigotry is sincere?
Why don't these visionary efforts happen in America any more? Helsinki has a plan to integrate all forms of transit -- including some that don't exist yet, like driverless cars -- into a single smartphone app. The goal is to make private automobiles pointless in ten years. You'll just tell your phone where you want to go and it will give you a list of itineraries and prices, then make the arrangements.
Jonathan Chait charts the story of ObamaCare's success via the retreating claims of disaster from arch-critic Peter Suderman at Reason.
The message of every individual dispatch is a confident prediction of the hated enemy's demise, yet the terms described in each, taken together, tell the story of retreat. The enemy’s invasion fleet has been destroyed; its huge losses on the field of battle have left it on the brink of surrender; the enemy soldiers will be slaughtered by our brave civilian defenders as they attempt to enter the capital; the resistance will triumph!
The folks at Politifact have started releasing statistics by network. No surprise: Fox News is the least trustworthy, with 60% of tested claims rated Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire.
Researchers are deciding that the "beauty-status exchange" -- beautiful women marrying rich men -- is less common than they expected. More typically, similarity rules: beautiful people marry beautiful people and rich people marry rich people.
I don't know who I'm rooting for at the Emmys. Cosmos and Years of Living Dangerously are both nominated in the Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series category. At first I thought "Of course it's Cosmos", but this week I started watching YoLD. (Episode 1 and some shorter clips are on YouTube, but to watch the Episodes 2-9 you have to find a friend who subscribes to Showtime.) YoLD is the most comprehensive look at climate change I've ever seen, and it pulls off the remarkable trick of having big-name hosts without turning them into attractive-but-phony mouthpieces.
Each of the hosts is pursuing some question s/he had a prior connection to. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, has long wondered why California wildfires got so much worse during his term as governor. Conservation International board member Harrison Ford seems completely engaged in tracking down the connection between deforestation and corruption in the Indonesian government. (His celebrity status works for us rather than on us; it gets him interviews with officials who would probably dodge a journalist. At least one got pissed when the interview turned serious.) Middle-East-focused Thomas Friedman sneaks across the Turkish/Syrian border to interview farmers driven into the revolution by drought. New Yorker Chris Hayes traces the effect of Hurricane Sandy on a climate-change-denying Staten Island congressman. And so on.
The effect is to get completely outside the standard arguments about hockey-stick graphs and Al Gore. You start to see just how ecological climate change is. It affects everything and is affected by everything.
I think there's something important to learn here about fighting science denialism in general. Remember that John Oliver sketch where he brings out 97 climate scientists to debate three deniers? It's funny because it can't possibly work on TV. But it does illustrate the strategy of denial: Like the Greeks against the Persians at Themopylae and Salamis, the smaller force needs to choose a narrow battlefield (like televised debate) where the larger force can't deploy.
So if climate-change deniers can reduce the argument to something narrow, like the details behind temperature graphs, their position can seem competitive. But climate-change denial isn't competitive, because to do it consistently you have to deny everything; all fields of Earth science are implicated. Ditto for other forms of denial, like young-Earth creationism: It isn't just about the fossil record or carbon-14 dating; it's about everything.
I'd love to hear the backstory of YoLD. I'm sure it's easy to get people to buy in after you can say that Matt Damon and Jessica Alba are involved, but who did they get first and who convinced who later?
and let's close with something fun
Weird Al claims every one of his albums is a comeback album. Well, he's come back with this parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines".
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