Link Banana

A refrain that merits repetition:

The simple truth is that Americans are going to have to get used to more expensive gasoline. And while they may continue grumbling at the pump, they need to accept the fact that even at $3.50 or $4 per gallon, the fuel they are buying is still a bargain.

Specifically, does it count if you cast an absentee ballot but die before the actual day of the election? In South Dakota you wouldn’t count, but in other states you would.

In 2004, USA Today reported that California, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and West Virginia all allow for the counting of absentee ballots of deceased voters while many other states technically do not. Many states that prohibit these so-called “ghost votes,” however, lack the reporting system to quickly update voter rolls with recent deaths. That means it’s very unlikely that a recently deceased voter would have his or her absentee ballot nullified.

Jessica Winters explores how the two differ, and finds they’re mostly the same. Except, maybe, for this:

Maybe it’s the “might” factor that allows us finally to draw a line between procrastination and writer’s block. A block is thick, insurmountable, cast in stone, “as impenetrable as the Great Pyramid,” in Clarke’s words. Procrastination is a more pliant creature. When we defer a challenge until a hazy, ill-defined “later,” one might say that we devalue future time and belittle our circumstances in it; but you could also say that we are irrationally exuberant about the future—it becomes an ascetic, distraction-free idyll where all appetites have been permanently gratified, where minutes stretch out as luxuriously as hours, where all our creative prayers are answered.

Also of note, Ben Zimmer’s exploration of from whence the word came.

Slate’s running a special issue on procrastination. So far, the best thing I’ve seen in it is Seth Stevenson’s “Letter to a Young Procrastinator.” A sample:

Stop resisting and embrace your procrastination. Don’t agonize in front of a blank computer screen. Don’t sit around for hours—intending to start your work any moment now—only to find that in the end you’ve accomplished zilch, save for ruining your own day.

I thought I posted this yesterday… alas, Slate’s Explainer tackles the question of whether it’s Myanmar or Burma that’s refusing to let outside relief workers into the country.

Some err on the side of letting the country itself decide, while others don’t. On the Burma/Myanmar question, both newspapers and countries are divided over whether to recognize the switcheroo. Burma’s military leaders changed the English-language version of the country’s name to Myanmar in 1989, based on the short version of the country’s name in Burmese, “Myanma Naingngandaw.” While the United Nations adopted the new name in June of that year, the United States continues to call the country Burma because the change was never ratified by a legislative body in the country.

Taylor Clark’s piece about demystifying vegetarianism had me after the first paragraph:

Every vegetarian remembers his first time. Not the unremarkable event of his first meal without meat, mind you. No, I mean the first time he casually lets slip that he’s turned herbivore, prompting everyone in earshot to stare at him as if he just revealed plans to sail his carrot-powered plasma yacht to Neptune. For me, this first time came at an Elks scholarship luncheon in rural Oregon when I was 18. All day, I’d succeeded at seeming a promising and responsible young man, until that fateful moment when someone asked why I hadn’t taken any meat from the buffet. After I offered my reluctant explanation—and the guy announced it to the entire room—30 people went eerily quiet, undoubtedly expecting me to launch into a speech on the virtues of hemp. In the corner, an elderly, suited man glared at me as he slowly raised a slice of bologna and executed the most menacing bite of cold cut in recorded history. I didn’t get the scholarship.

In addition to getting a new president today, more than a few people are beginning to fear that Russia planning to go to war with Georgia. Passport quotes a Russian journalist saying:

Nobody wants war, but both sides are doing everything to spark a military conflict. This is not the first time this situation has arisen. Recall how World War I began. States wanted only to protect their national pride and frighten their opponents. But at some point, the tensions escalated sharply and, coupled with mass mobilizations of their armies, the conflict in the Balkans spun out of control with tragic consequences for the entire world. This scenario could be repeated in the Caucasus.

For Slate, Anne Applebaum said roughly the same thing.

Emily Bazelton does an admirable job explaining Israel’s conundrum with it’s recent influx of African refugees.

Israel loves to be the first on the scene when there’s a humanitarian crisis: In 1977, Menachem Begin welcomed 66 Vietnamese boat people spotted by an Israeli cargo ship near Japan; more recently, Israel sent medical teams to India after the 2001 earthquake and arrived in Asia with emergency aid after the tsunami in 2004. But if Israel embraces thousands of African refugees, millions in Egypt alone could try to follow. All developed countries worry about the effects of an influx of poor refugees. But the problem is especially delicate for Israel, which worries about someday losing its Jewish majority to the growing Palestinian population (especially if it does not relinquish control of the West Bank). And then there’s the country’s location: It’s not as if there are other prosperous democracies in the region for refugees to choose among. Maybe it was only a matter of time before Africans decided to opt for this shorter trek over the long voyages to Europe and North America.

Bruce Ackerman and Jennifer Nou offer the most interesting argument I’ve seen regarding the Supreme Court’s recent voter ID ruling:

Indiana’s law insists on a photo ID to vote, which in turn requires documents, like a birth certificate or passport, that verify identity. Getting these papers costs voters money as well as time and effort. This leads to the question the court failed to ask: Does the extra expense violate the absolute ban on all “taxes” imposed by the 24^th Amendment?

Two things:

• Could be made of moss. Apparently that’s popular.
• Should be devoid of brightly-colored plastic. Tom Vanderbilt makes a number of interesting points about what these things mean. I don’t exactly share his Bowling Alone-style despair, but it’s interesting reading.

Thought-provoking piece Mark Gimien about the irrelevance of the much-touted Gini coefficient in capturing the inequalities of everyday life. His conclusion:

When economists talk about inequality, they are talking about something that can easily be captured in an equation about national income. When noneconomists talk about inequality, however, they have in mind not their neighbor’s wallet, which they can’t see, but their own, which they can. They are thinking of what they can and cannot afford, and also of the most visible extremes of wealth and poverty around them. That’s why India’s Gini index may be lower than our own, and yet it will be the rare person who will say that India is more equal in any sense that matters. When we talk about inequality, it’s not about resentment of the next door neighbors’ pool. It’s about gut issues: whether we feel poor, whether we feel that those around us are poor. That’s why it’s worth thinking about in the first place. Unfortunately, the usual way that economists talk about and measure inequality tells us next to nothing about it.

There’s been a fair bit of coverage of London’s maybe-important mayoral election, which is tomorrow. Anne Applebaum offers the best, and most entertaining primer I’ve seen.

The candidates haven’t exactly gone out of their way to discourage this kind of commentary. Though he’s been more staid than usual during the mayoral campaign, Boris is a man who can’t stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of “drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs”).

Adjectives like mop-haired, blustering, and old Etonian appear in just about every profile of him ever written. So does his most famous quotation—”Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3”—though that line is misleading since his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. “Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon,” he once remarked, “there lurks a blithering buffoon.”

Ken, by contrast, isn’t funny or self-deprecating at all. His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro’s dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. Like Boris, Ken often offends people, though his insults are less likely to have started out as jokes. He called the U.S. ambassador to Britain a “chiseling little crook” and told a Jewish journalist he was behaving “like a concentration camp guard.”

Shmuel Rosner’s argument against Jimmy Carter’s recent plea for engagement is rather inelegant. I did, however, find this contention interesting.

There’s no moral virtue in talking to one’s enemies. Engagement is a tool, but so are disengagement and isolation. Both are effective, if used wisely; both can be damaging if used in haste. Talking to one’s enemies is a tool—as is complaining about one’s reluctance to talk to one’s enemies. This is the tool now being used by Hamas and Syria—assisted by Carter—as they try to escape and counter the isolation being applied to them. Making the case for engagement helps them achieve their strategic goal.

I feel it would be a mistake not to mention this snippet from Chris Baker’s excellent psuedo-review of GTA IV. I wonder if it will give any anti-video game crusaders pause. He seems to doubt it will.

The game’s improved characterizations give far greater weight to the act of killing. Grand Theft Auto was never the most violent game going. In the sci-fi shooter Gears of War, you can chain saw enemy aliens until fountains of blood seem to splatter onto the inside of your monitor. But since the game’s world is firmly entrenched in the clichés of 1980s blockbusters like Aliens, you feel some distance from it all. There’s no such distance in GTA IV, where the physics of death feel shockingly real—bodies can’t be blown apart or torn to pieces, but they react convincingly to explosions and severe impacts. Each death is a decision. At one pivotal moment, Bellic has to choose between killing two people—one a total jerk who could help advance his career, and one a good friend who can’t do much for him. There’s no right or wrong decision here—well, actually, there are two wrong decisions—and players will struggle to make the choice. No cheat code or online FAQ can help you here.

As you probably know, one of the five pillars of Islam is the Hajj, or pilgramage to Mecca. As Ray Fisman explains, an interesting study has found that the experience makes pilgrams more moderate than those who haven’t gotten to go.

But the changes from the Hajj experience transcended mere shifts in religious observance, inspiring many pilgrims with newfound feelings of tolerance. While in Mecca, Hajjis can’t help but rub shoulders with Muslims of every shape and size. Sunni and Shiite, African and Pakistani, all live and pray together as a single congregation of millions. This intermixing of peoples in Mecca seems to have caused the Pakistani Hajjis to express more tolerant views of other Muslims. Just over half of the Pakistanis who didn’t go on the Hajj told the survey team that they had a positive view of other Muslim countries. This figure jumped to nearly 70 percent among Hajj survey respondents.

Even more surprising, Hajjis were 25 percent less likely to believe that it was impossible for Muslims of different ethnicities or sects to live together in harmony—a finding that would seem to be of particular interest for those trying to bring peace to the streets of Baghdad. This greater sense of goodwill among peoples even extended to non-Muslims (who were obviously not represented in Mecca). Hajjis were more likely than non-Hajjis to hold the opinion that people of all religions can live in harmony. Hajjis were also less likely to feel that extreme methods—such as suicide bombings or attacks on civilians—could be justified in dealing with disagreements between Muslims and non-Muslims.

I’ve been thoroughly bored by the last few months of the presidential campaign, but this bit of counter-intuitive advice got my attention:

Even as Hillary Clinton trails Barack Obama in pledged delegates, the popular vote, and number of states won, she has made it clear that she plans to stay in the race for the nomination. All of which brings me to this logical conclusion: It is time for Barack Obama to drop out.

If Clinton had the good of the Democratic Party in mind, she would have given up her bid the day after the Mississippi primary, which Obama won by 25 points. The delegate math was as dismal for her campaign then as it is now, even after Pennsylvania, and she was facing down a six-week gulf before the next election.

But Hillary Clinton isn’t going to drop out. There simply isn’t a function in her assembly code for throwing in the towel.

Obama, on the other hand, is fully capable of it. And if he’s really serious about representing a new kind of politics, now is the time for him to prove it in the only meaningful way left. Moreover, were he to play it right, dropping out now nearly guarantees that he’ll be elected president in 2012.

For some reason neglecting to mention recent rumors about a CNN-CBS pairing, Troy Patterson says that CBS’s news products are so bad they should just take pity and pull them off the air. His opening barb:

To judge by the ads, the most loyal adherents to CBS’ quasi-journalistic programming are impotent and incontinent. It so happens that they share these afflictions with the network’s actual news division.

Daniel Engbar makes a convincing argument that PETA’s X Prize is deeply flawed:

So what’s wrong with the PETA prize? You need to sell your product in order to win. According to the contest guidelines, the million-dollar meat must be available in stores to qualify for the cash. Fake-chicken entrepreneurs have to demonstrate a “commercial sales minimum” at a “comparable market price”; in plain English, they need to move 2,000 pounds of the stuff at supermarkets and chain restaurants spread out across 10 states during a period of three months. And the Franken-meat can’t cost more than regular chicken.

Given that both Nevada and the Democratic presidentic presidential candidates are opposing the storage of the nation’s nuclear waste there, what are we going to do? One interesting option:

Nevada’s anti-Yucca dossier neatly summarizes this optimistic attitude: “It is almost inconceivable that progress in waste treatment and disposal methods will cease over the next century.” There are several promising techniques in the pipeline, starting with accelerator-driven transmutation of waste, in which proton beams are used to reduce a substance’s half-life. ATW is a favorite of Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., who gives it a shout-out on his anti-Yucca Mountain page. But skeptics claim that ATW is far too expensive and laborious, and will never be able to handle anything more than a token amount of waste.

As people across this country rush to complete their taxes and assure that the big bad IRS, Mark Gimien offers a piece that should have been called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the IRS.”

But the IRS I have come to view with something approaching affection. For each of the last several years, I have owed the IRS money at tax time. And each time, rather than hauling me off to prison, the IRS has done its best to make my life easier.