Link Banana

Andrew Ferguson, of The Weekly Standard, does something I’ve always been curious to do — watch a party platform in progress — and comes to, among others, this conclusion:

“Republicans,” the platform says, “will attack wasteful Washington spending immediately,” even though they can’t. They can’t impose anything on anybody, either, but nevertheless “we will impose an immediate moratorium on the earmarking system.”

Powerlessness opens up a limitless future. It has the fierce urgency of not right now.

Tyler Colman says that we need to get over the stigma about wine that comes from a box. One reason:

A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.

A jarring and fascinating op-ed from Shmuel Herzfeld in tomorrow’s New York Times about, of all things, kosher meats:

In May in Postville, Iowa, immigration officials raided Agriprocessors Inc., the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the country.

What began as an immigration sting, however, quickly took on larger dimensions. News reports and government documents have described abusive practices at Agriprocessors against workers, including minors. Children as young as 13 were said to be wielding knives on the killing floor; some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week.

… there is precedent for declaring something nonkosher on the basis of how employees are treated. Yisroel Salanter, the great 19th-century rabbi, is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly. In addition to the hypocrisy of calling something kosher when it is being sold and produced in an unethical manner, we have to take into account disturbing information about the plant that has come to light.

There is now greater equality of happiness in America than there was in the 1970s. Eduardo Porter considers why:

Still, it is not surprising that happiness among blacks rose in the years after the civil rights law outlawed segregation and discrimination on the basis of race. Mr. Wolfers speculates that the gay-straight happiness gap is also likely to have declined over the period, for similar reasons. Changes in family life might also help. Married people are happier than unmarried people, on average. Still, later marriages and more divorces might have winnowed out the unhappiest marriages. And while the shift to two-earner families brings to mind the stressful rush from work to pick the kid up at day care, it also has empowered unhappy stay-at-home moms.

…by barring them from popular culture(?!). Maybe it’s just me, but this thesis seems a little absurd:

And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies.

Having said that, I also didn’t know that chimpanzees are endangered. But I attribute it to insuffient publicity for that fact, not their presence popular culture.

It’s a pretty well-understood truth that public perception of the economy’s welfare is disproportionately focused on the price we pay to fuel our cars. Dan Ariely’s recent op-ed explores why:

For the several minutes that I stand at the pump, all I do is stare at the growing total on the meter — there is nothing else to do. And I have time to remember how much it cost a year ago, two years ago and even six years ago.

Yet I have no such memory about the prices of items in any other category. I have no idea how much milk was six years ago, how much bread was three years ago or how much yogurt was a week ago. But I suspect that if I stood next to the yogurt case in the supermarket for five minutes every week with nothing to do but stare at the price, I would also know how much it has gone up — and I might become outraged when yogurt passed the $2 mark.

Another odd thing about the way we buy gasoline is that we usually buy multiple units. I just bought 13 gallons for a little more than $55. The sticker shock isn’t as intense when I see the price per gallon as it is when I’m faced with the total cost. Fifty-five dollars! I remember when I filled my tank for $20 and $25 and $30! Maybe if we bought 13 loaves of bread at a time or 15 gallons of milk we might become just as sensitive to how much we spend on those items.

I haven’t been following too closely, but I found both of these pieces on the (recommended) indictment of the Sudanese president to be useful:

• John Boonstra clarifies a few points — like that Bashir hasn’t yet been “indicted” — that don’t come across clearly in most reporting of the story.
• Richard Goldstone considers whether this will help or hinder the prospects for peace.

Pat Nelson’s Sunday op-ed about street sweeping (and alternate-side parking) mostly reminded me or the only Calvin Trillin book I’ve read. But it also made an interesting point about the questionable efficacy of sweeping at all:

Consider Park Slope, Brooklyn, where sweeping has been suspended for the past three months so that thousands of signs could be replaced to reflect a shorter street cleaning window of 90 minutes, down from three hours (itself progress).

Despite the foul and filthy outcome predicted by many, Park Slope does not look or smell like an urban wasteland. The drains have not overflowed; Union Street and Seventh Avenue are not buried under garbage. Nonetheless, the alternate side parking rules are scheduled to go back into effect tomorrow.

Citing Leona Helmsley’s generous-sounding donation to dogs, Ryan Madoff take offense at something most people happily forget:

The charitable deduction enables people to donate as much of their assets as they like for charitable purposes without paying a tax. While some choose to contribute to broad public goals, the law does not require it. In recent years, charitable status has been recognized for organizations with purposes as idiosyncratic as promoting excellence in quilting and educating the public about Huey military aircraft. Indeed, Mrs. Helmsley might have limited her beneficence to the Maltese breed of dogs she favored, and that, too, would have been allowed as a “charitable” purpose.

If this were only a matter of Leona Helmsley wasting her own money, no one would need to care. But she is wasting ours too.

The charitable deduction constitutes a subsidy from the federal government. The government, in effect, makes itself a partner in every charitable bequest. In Mrs. Helmsley’s case, given that her fortune warranted an estate tax rate of 45 percent, her $8 billion donation for dogs is really a gift of $4.4 billion from her and $3.6 billion from you and me.

To put it in perspective, our contribution to Mrs. Helmsley’s cause equals approximately half of what we spend on Head Start, a program that benefits 900,000 children.

Since I already made one belated July 4th post, there can be no harm in another. Ted Widmer addresses the oft-forgotten fact that that there are many different versions of the Declaration of Independence. For example, I’d never considered this fact:

Most of us would answer that [the Declaration of Independence is] the manuscript written on vellum, dated July 4, 1776, now displayed in a baroque case at the National Archives, where it is protected by bulletproof glass, argon gas and the 55-ton underground vault it is lowered into every night. But like everything connected to the Declaration, the situation is complicated, for that document was not written on July 4; it was a handwritten copy that Congress ordered later that summer and post-dated. The version that was in the room as the vote was taken has never been seen since then.

I’m personally torn about whether I’d find Peter Lovenheim a clever or annoying neighbor, but he’s got some interesting — right is another issue — things to say about the state of the American living.

The previous evening, as I’d left home, the last words I heard before I shut the door had been, “Dad, you’re crazy!” from my teenage daughter. Sure, the sight of your 50-year-old father leaving with an overnight bag to sleep at a neighbor’s house would embarrass any teenager, but “crazy”? I didn’t think so.

There’s talk today about how as a society we’ve become fragmented by ethnicity, income, city versus suburb, red state versus blue. But we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines. I’m talking about the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.

Dan Koeppel raises the spector that American may have to stop counting Cavendish bananas as a staple food. In addition to a thorough history, he includes this astounding fact:

Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined,

Sounding a tad more conservative than usual, David Brooks laments America’s spending well beyond its means:

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

In a mildly repetitive summary of why he gave up salmon, Taras Grescoe offers a smattering of troubling details about the way it’s brought to market. Like:

To rid salmon of the lice, fish farmers spike their feed with a strong pesticide called emamectin benzoate, which when administered to rats and dogs causes tremors, spinal deterioration and muscle atrophy. The United States Food and Drug Administration, already hard-pressed to inspect imported Asian seafood for antibiotic and fungicide residues, does not test imported salmon for emamectin benzoate. In other words, the farmed salmon in nearly every American supermarket may contain this pesticide, which on land is used to rid diseased trees of pine beetles. It is not a substance I want in my body.

Why refrain from calling terrorists jihadis?

First, to call a terrorist a “jihadist” or “jihadi” effectively puts any campaign against terrorism into the framework of an existential battle between the West and Islam. This feeds into the worldview propagated by Al Qaeda. It also serves to isolate the tens of millions of Muslims who condemn the violence that has been perpetrated in the name of Islam.

Second, these words locate the ideological battle exactly where the extremists want it to be. The terms of discussion are no longer about the murder of innocents in terrorist acts; they are about theology.

Third, when American leaders use this language it sends a confusing message to the Muslim world, showing ignorance on basic issues and possibly even raising doubts about American motives. Why, after all, would we call our enemy a “holy warrior”?

Two NYT Op-Eds from last Friday cry out for the good old days (and illustrate how broken my “readflow” is). They both make worthy points.

• Adam Kohen wants to know why states have been stripped of the ability to regulate many things they used to. Through the supremacy clause, the Bush administration stopped them from acting on, for example, sub-prime lenders before the crash.
• Meanwhile, Elizabeth Royte thinks that if big cities had more water fountains — as they did in the old days — there would be less demand for bottled water.

Speaking of places you rarely hear about, Michael Janeway offers an interesting synopsis of Puerto Rico’s tenuous relationship with America.

Puerto Ricans have never resolved their relationship with the United States. For almost 50 years after the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rican sentiment was divided between dreams of statehood and of independence. This ambivalence deterred the island from ever petitioning Congress for one or the other. And until mid-century, sporadic outbursts of violent nationalism haunted the scene.

Partly to put such extremism out of business, Congress in 1948 allowed Puerto Rico to elect its own governor and then in 1950 gave it an intricately designed, semi-autonomous “commonwealth” status short of statehood. Two years later, the island adopted its own Constitution, and Congress quickly ratified it.

His argument:

Congress is considering a major reform of copyright law intended to solve the problem of “orphan works” — those works whose owner cannot be found. This “reform” would be an amazingly onerous and inefficient change, which would unfairly and unnecessarily burden copyright holders with little return to the public.

David Brooks penned an interesting column in today’s New York Times. The basic premise:

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

There’s good reason to find Colson Whitehead’s piece “too clever by half,” but I enjoyed it.

People think I have it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, what with the whole having to be everywhere in the country at once thing. One second I’m nodding enthusiastically in a sales conference in Boise, Idaho, and the next I’m separating conjoined triplets at the Institute For Terribly Complicated Surgery in Buchanan, N.Y., and then I have to rush out to Muncie, Ind., to put my little “Inspector 12” tag in a bag of Fruit of the Loom.

It’s exhausting, all that travel. Decent, hard-working folks out there have their religion and their xenophobia to cling to. All I have is a fistful of upgrades to first class and free headphones. Headphones That Should Have Gone to a More Deserving Passenger.