Friday Reads: Let’s talk Turkey!

Good Morning!

So, it’s Black Friday and I am thankfully not part of any of the national crass consumerism season so I am home catching up with stuff.  I thought I’d try to find some eclectic things to read about today.

A friends sent me this link to the National Geographic Magazine that helped sponsor and document a dig in Nepal. Was the Buddha actually born much earlier than thought? Archeologists have uncovered a shrine-within-the shrine at the Buddha’s supposed birth place.

The excavations showed that older wooden structures lay beneath the walls of the later brick Buddhist shrine. The layout of that more recent shrine duplicates the layout of the earlier wooden structures, pointing to a continuity of Buddhist worship at the site, Coningham says.

“The big debate has been about when the Buddha lived and now we have a shrine structure pointing to the sixth century B.C.,” Coningham says. The team used two kinds of scientific dating to find the age of the early shrine.

Outside scholars applauded the discovery but cautioned against too hastily accepting the site as the oldest discovered Buddhist shrine without more analysis.

“Archaeologists love claiming that they have found the earliest or the oldest of something,” says archaeologist Ruth Young of the United Kingdom’s University of Leicester in an email message.

They’re not certain if it is an older Buddhist shrine or a shrine of an earlier belief system that then became a Buddhist shrine. Either way, it’s fascinating.

Three unpublished Salinger stories have been put on the web.

Salinger scholar Kenneth Slawenski, author of J.D. Salinger: A Life confirms that these are truly Salinger’s unpublished stories, having read the previously guarded manuscripts. In an email to BuzzFeed, he wrote “While I do quibble with the ethics (or lack of ethics) in posting the Salinger stories, they look to be true transcripts of the originals and match my own copies.”

On Reddit, the original uploader claims that the source is this eBay auction, which appears to be a book published illegally — the title page reads oxymoronically, “the three stories in this book remain unpublished.” PJ Vogt, who is fairly sure that “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls” is the same story he read at Princeton, confirms that the images on the leak don’t appear to be that same manuscript. “My memory is that Princeton’s copy looked like a submission — typed out pages, maybe even double-spaced. These seem too laid out to be from that collection.”

Are we witnessing the return of breadlines here in the land of abundance?

In an article published on Monday, The Times’s Patrick McGeehan describeda line snaking down Fulton Street in Brooklyn last week, with people waiting to enter a food pantry run by the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger. The line was not an anomaly. Demand at all of New York City’s food pantries and soup kitchens has spiked since federal food stamps were cut on Nov. 1. The cut — which affects nearly all of the nation’s 48 million food stamp recipients — amounts to a loss of $29 a month for a New York City family of three. On the shoestring meal budgets of food stamp recipients, that’s enough for some 20 individual meals, according to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

The food stamp cuts are occurring even though need is still high and opportunity low. In a report released today, the Coalition estimates that one-sixth of the city’s residents and one-fifth of its children live in homes without enough to eat. Those numbers have not improved over the past three years. The lack of economic recovery for low income New Yorkers is at odds with gains at the top of the income ladder, reflected in soaring real estate prices, rising stock prices and big Wall Street bonuses.

And there are more food-stamp cuts to come. House Republicans have proposed to cut the program by $40 billion over 10 years in the pending farm bill; the Senate has proposed a $4 billion reduction. With Congress framing its task not as whether to cut the program, but how much, is there any doubt that food lines will soon be getting longer — and children hungrier?

A small, battered book sold for over $14 million last week. It is a small bit of American History.

It is yellowed, battered and unassuming; but on November 26th the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in what would become the United States, sold at a Sotheby’s auction for a record $14.2m.  The book was published in 1640, using a press shipped from England. It was clearly well used and (from its marginal marks) well studied. Ten other copies survive; this was the first to appear at auction since 1947. The seller was the Old South Church in Boston, which also owns another copy.

I’m worried about the outcome of the Hobby Lobby Lawsuit that’s all dressed up in first amendment rights for corporations.  It just doesn’t pass the smell taste to me on any level.  Here’s an interesting op-ed read with that in mind.

The religiously committed owners of the companies whose cases the court will decide – Hobby Lobby employs 13,000 people in its 500-store chain – say they object not to all birth control but only to the methods they believe act after fertilization to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting and continuing to develop. This belief is incorrect, as a brief filed by a coalition of leading medical authorities demonstrates; although there was once some confusion on this point, the disputed hormonal methods are now understood to prevent fertilization from occurring in the first place. European medical authoritiesrecently reached the same conclusion and have changed the label on an emergency contraception pill to say it “cannot stop a fertilized egg from attaching to the womb.”

There is something deeper going on in these cases than a dispute over the line that separates a contraceptive from an “abortifacient.” What drives the anger about this regulation is that, as the opponents see it, the government is putting its thumb on the scale in favor of birth control, of sex without consequences. In a revealing article published earlier this year in the Villanova Law Review, Helen Alvaré, a law professor and longtime adviser to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, describes the contraception mandate as the culmination of what she calls the “contraceptive project.”

Professor Alvaré writes: “The churches opposing the mandate hold, and teach women and men to maintain, an understanding of the sacredness of sexual intercourse, and its intrinsic connection with the procreating of new, vulnerable human life.” The government policy of covering contraception, she says, would have the effect in law of characterizing these teachings “as violations of women’s freedom and equality.”

As Professor Alvaré surely knows, nearly all Catholic women use birth control at some time during their reproductive lives and they have abortions at the same rate as other American women. And her article acknowledges a recent and widely reported study that found that the abortion rate dropped by as much as two-thirds among women in St. Louis, most of them poor, who volunteered for a two-year project in which they received free birth control; the women were able to choose the highly reliable long-lasting contraceptives that are priced out of reach for many women who will now be able to receive them under the Affordable Care Act.

To the extent that the “contraceptive project” changes anything on the American reproductive landscape, it will be to reduce the rate of unintended pregnancy and abortion. The objection, then, has to be not to the mandate’s actual impact but to its expressive nature, its implicit endorsement of a value system that says it’s perfectly O.K. to have sex without the goal of making a baby.

Well, that’s a few reads to get your the long weekend going!  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Tuesday Reads

Good Morning!

The usual bunch of warmongers and profiteers have not failed to disappoint on the Iran Nuclear Deal.     It’s just amazing to me that so many folks seem so ready to kill our young people unnecessarily. But, it is what it is.  Pat Johnson called Israeli PM Bibi Cheney yesterday. I am inclined to agree.

To explain Benjamin Netanyahu’s frenzied reaction to the Geneva agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, let me begin with the stack of brown cardboard boxes under my wife’s desk.

Each of the five cartons contains a gas mask and related paraphernalia for a member of my family to use in the event of a chemical-weapons attack. They were delivered last January, as part of the gradual government effort to prepare every household in Israel for a rain of Syrian missiles. I suppose that having “defense kits” in the house could be macabre, but what we usually notice is that they’re a nuisance: another thing on which to bang your toe in an overstuffed city flat.

What’s more, they’re apparently an obsolete nuisance. A couple of weeks ago, the usual nameless military sources told the local media that the Defense Ministry would recommend ending production of  gas masks for civilians. According to the leaks, intelligence assessments said that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was successfully reducing Syria’s poison-gas arsenal.  In other words, the U.S.-Russia agreement on Syria’s chemical weapons is working, and one result is a significant improvement in Israeli security.

To put it mildly, this isn’t what Prime Minister Netanyahu expected in September when President Barack Obama opted for a diplomatic solution rather than a punitive attack on the Assad regime for using chemical arms. Back then, Netanyahu barely concealed his view that American weakness was both a catastrophe and a betrayal that would encourage Iran to develop nuclear arms. At a military ceremony, he proclaimed that Israel could depend only on itself. “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” Netanyahu said, quoting the first half of an ancient Jewish maxim, without the second part, which says that someone who is only for himself is nothing. “We are for ourselves!” he declared. A nameless senior official, making the prime minister’s warning more explicit, said that “a diplomatic failure in Syria without [an American] military response” might force Israel to attack Iran. The failure of diplomacy was virtually a given; the only question was what would come after.

The Syria agreement was the warm-up act for the interim accord with Iran. This time the hostile Middle Eastern state is a greater regional power, and the weapon of mass destruction to be tamed is nuclear rather than chemical. Pressure was exerted through American-led economic sanctions, rather than deployment of American forces for a military offensive. No one can yet be sure that the interim deal will lead to a full agreement to keep Iran from getting a bomb. But theimmediate steps promise an improvement in Israeli security. Among other measures, Iran has obligated itself to a complete halt in developing the Arak reactor, which potentially could produce plutonium, and has agreed to tight inspections to insure that it is keeping the deal.

That of course, is the lead up to GERSHOM GORENBERG‘s diagnosis and explanation of “Bibi’s Agreement Anxiety Disorder”.  It sounds like something he contracted from the Republicans in our country.  Why is it two countries with such reasonable people can get such out there elected officials?  We’ve gotten two solid days of  bomb, bomb, bomb Iran from our unreluctant belligerents. 

Republicans are opposed to President Obama’s deal with the Iranians — whatever it is.

A couple of minutes after 9 p.m. on Saturday, word crossed the news wires that negotiators in Geneva had reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Then, at 9:08 p.m. — before any details of the pact were known — Ari Fleischer delivered his opinion on the agreement, via Twitter.

“The Iran deal and our allies: You can’t spell abandonment without OBAMA,” he wrote.

This is the sort of trenchant judgment Fleischer was known for as chief spokesman for President George W. Bush at the start of the Iraq war. His anagram analysis was so relevant to the topic that it deserves application to his name, too. Turns out you can’t spell “Re: Chief Liars,” “Hi, false crier,” “Hire Sir Fecal” or “I relish farce” without ARI FLEISCHER.

But Fleischer’s instant and reflexive response — even knees don’t jerk as quickly as he did — set the tone for Republicans. Three minutes after Fleischer’s tweet came one in agreement from Ron Christie, another veteran of the Bush administration. “Precisely,” he wrote, also without the benefit of knowing what was in the agreement. “A disgraceful deal.”

An hour later — still before Obama detailed the accord in a statement from the White House — John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, had analyzed the administration’s motives in reaching the deal.

“Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care,” he tweeted at 10:15 p.m., 19 minutes before the president spoke.

Aha! So the agreement to suspend Iran’s nuclear program, negotiated over several months, was actually a clever (and prescient) ruse to turn attention away from problems with the health-care law, which surfaced in the past several weeks.

And of course, John Bolton considers any one that doesn’t want to bomb Iran to be a surrender monkey.  Isn’t he irrelevant?  Do we have to hear from him?  I mean REALLY?  (Right Wing Source Alert!)

John R. Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations in President George W. Bush’s administration, isn’t pulling punches about the United States’ forged agreement with Iran: It’s a poor deal.

In his own words: It’s an “abject surrender by the United States,” he said in a commentary penned for The Weekly Standard. It’s a “Hail Mary” agreement that comes at considerable U.S. costs, he said. But that’s what happens with an administration that would rather have any deal than no deal, he said. “The inescapable conclusion is that … the White House actually did prefer a bad deal to the diplomatic process grinding to a halt,” he said, The Hill reported.

The biggest problem for the United States is that the deal doesn’t ban Iran from enriching uranium — and Capitol Hill lawmakers agree on that point, he said.

The deal includes a ban on weapons-grade enrichment.  It does not include banning the kind that is used in medicine and energy production.

The U.S. acknowledges that Iran is enriching and will continue to enrich uranium – whether under mutual agreement, as is the case under the interim agreement struck in Geneva this weekend, or in the future, under a permanent, comprehensive agreement.

Of course, if there is no comprehensive deal, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Iran will continue to enrich as it has for years, in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and international sanction.

“As part of a final resolution,” Rhodes said under persistent questioning, “you could have a mutually agreed-upon state in which Iran’s program is much different than it is today – they’ve dismantled elements of that program, they’ve accepted constraints, limitations, verification measures, and have a very limited enrichment capacity on Iranian soil.”

The Obama Administration and its negotiating partners are hoping to finally curtail Iran’s nuclear program to being limited and entirely peaceful in exchange for a wholesale lifting on sanctions.

There has been some other good news besides the talks with Iran.  It appears there are charges that have been filed in the Steubenville rape case against enabling adults.  These charges should send a strong notice to any adults enabling sexual assault and underage drinking  including coaches.

Four school employees, including the superintendent and an assistant football coach, were indicted by a grand jury investigating a possible coverup in the Steubenville rape case.

The charges were announced Monday by the state’s top prosecutor, who decried “blurred, stretched and distorted boundaries of right and wrong” by students and grown-ups alike.

“How do you hold kids accountable if you don’t hold the adults accountable?” Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine asked.

Superintendent Michael McVey, 50, was charged with tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice in the aftermath of the incident at the center of the case: the sexual assault of a drunken 16-year-old girl by two high school football players after a booze-fueled party in August 2012.

An assistant coach, Matthew Belardine, 26, was charged with allowing underage drinking, obstructing official business and making a false statement.

Two school employees, strength coach Seth Fluharty, 26, and elementary-school principal Lynnett Gorman, 40, were charged with failure to report child abuse.

More than a few economists are arguing for some improvement in the lives of the middle class. Paul Krugman argues we should expand social security.

Before I get there, however, let me briefly take on two bad arguments for cutting Social Security that you still hear a lot.

One is that we should raise the retirement age — currently 66, and scheduled to rise to 67 — because people are living longer. This sounds plausible until you look at exactly who is living longer. The rise in life expectancy, it turns out, is overwhelmingly a story about affluent, well-educated Americans. Those with lower incomes and less education have, at best, seen hardly any rise in life expectancy at age 65; in fact, those with less education have seen their life expectancy decline.

So this common argument amounts, in effect, to the notion that we can’t let janitors retire because lawyers are living longer. And lower-income Americans, in case you haven’t noticed, are the people who need Social Security most.

The other argument is that seniors are doing just fine. Hey, their poverty rate is only 9 percent.

There are two big problems here. First, there are well-known flaws with the official poverty measure, and these flaws almost surely lead to serious understatement of elderly poverty. In an attempt to provide a more realistic picture, the Census Bureau now regularly releases a supplemental measure that most experts consider superior — and this measure puts senior poverty at 14.8 percent, close to the rate for younger adults.

Furthermore, the elderly poverty rate is highly likely to rise sharply in the future, as the failure of America’s private pension system takes its toll.

When you look at today’s older Americans, you are in large part looking at the legacy of an economy that is no more. Many workers used to have defined-benefit retirement plans, plans in which their employers guaranteed a steady income after retirement. And a fair number of seniors (like my father, until he passed away a few months ago) are still collecting benefits from such plans.

There’s also a few arguing still for single payer health care.

Even if its rollout becomes more expeditious, the Affordable Care Act does little to reduce the incentives that companies have to barricade themselves behind high information and transaction costs. In the financial sector, I previously noted, this perverse incentive is described as “strategic price complexity.”

A complicated new program applied to a complicated old industry makes it hard for everyone to figure out exactly what they will be getting relative to what they are paying. As a result, many ordinary people and small businesses fall prey to redistributional paranoia.

Accusations of ripoffs proliferate, along with assertions that the Affordable Care Act is unfair to young people or that it simply represents transfers from the affluent to the poor, or from whites to people of color.

The program clearly has redistributive impact, but much of it will be muted over the life cycle. People who pay more for their insurance will get more benefits in return. The biggest transfers will go from the healthy to the sick (who are sometimes poor precisely because they are sick) and from one part of the health care system (emergency room care) to another (insurance-covered routine care).

But the structure of the program seems unintentionally designed to intensify distributional conflict. Its highly means-tested subsidies create strongpolitical resentments and contribute to very high implicit marginal tax rateson lower-income families.

A single-payer insurance system, whether based on an extension of Medicare or on the Canadian model, promises many profoundly important benefits. Right off the mark, it promises simplicity.

And even a call for a guaranteed income.

‘Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult.” Reuters, 4 October 2013

How much is that?

It’s about £1,700 a month – over £20,000 a year.

Payable to whom?

Everybody, or at least, every adult citizen. It’s called a “basic income” and everyone gets it, no strings attached.

You have to be joking.

We’ll have to see whether the Swiss think it’s funny or not – they are holding a referendum, which is something they do quite a lot. But the idea of a basic income suddenly seems to be back on the radar after many years of being out of fashion. The New York Times announced recently that at the cocktail parties of Berlin there is talk of little else; US policy wonks are getting excited about it too.

This sounds like some communist plot. How can anyone take seriously the idea of paying people to sit around on their backsides?

The idea is endorsed not only by experts on inequality such as Oxford’s Sir Tony Atkinson, but by the late Milton Friedman, an unlikely communist. The idea of a basic income is one that unites many left- and rightwingers while commanding very little support in the mainstream.

What on earth did Friedman see in the idea?

He saw an alternative to the current welfare state. We pay money to certain people of working age, but often only on the condition that they’re not working. Then, in an attempt to overcome the obvious problem that we’re paying people not to work, we chivvy them to get a job. Our efforts are demeaning and bureaucratic without being particularly effective. A basic income goes to all, whether they work or not.

See?  There are sane people in the world and many are still working at making it a better place.  My suggestion is that there are a few we could just ship to the moon and do with out.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?