Ryan Cooper

1. The first signs of spring ! 2. Yglesias on the Fed . 3. A profile of Guillermo del Toro . 4. A great article on a moderate Muslim academic trying to engage young potential radicals . 5. Radley Balko on SWAT violence .

1. A border vigilante gets the death penalty for murdering two Hispanic citizens . 2. One in five Air Force women report being sexually assaulted . 3. Here's a great idea for electric cars...from the 1910's . 4. Every single Republican on the House Energy Committee is a climate change denier . 5. Randall from XKCD has an awesome radiation chart .

Kevin Drum says : Here's the thing: my guess is that virtually nobody in the country thinks that cities are greener places than towns or suburbs. And by "virtually nobody," I mean maybe a few percent tops. For most people, it's wildly counterintuitive on all sorts of levels to think of big, dirty, crowded, urban areas as "green." It just doesn't compute. I'd like to solicit some opinions here. Is that really true? What's your gut reaction? (No fair looking up stuff, I'm really just honestly curious.)

Do it now!  Chances are there won't be another chance to help me out with the whole Africa thing.  See here to learn how.

"That instead they want to write letters to Barack Obama is, again, a testament to the fact that the Senate’s preening self-regard is matched only by its lack of comprehension of the issues."  -- Yglesias

I'm not the full non-interventionist that Daniel Larison is.  I have to say that the failure of the West to intervene in Rwanda was a terrible mistake.  But I also think that clear-cut situations like that are extremely rare, and I am not remotely convinced that we face something similar in Libya.  So far the situation there is mildly encouraging in that it wasn't a completely unilateral rush to war.  I remain thankful that at least McCain isn't in charge of things.  Lord knows he would have gone off half-cocked and invaded Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia by now. Setting that aside, my cocktail-napkin theory of humanitarian interventions is that if they're going to be done, they should be done right.  There needs to be a clear and obvious rationale (like genocide) and clearly defined objectives.  There needs to to be strong international support consisting of massive, overpowering force with more than token forces from at least a half-dozen great powers, an...

Last week the big news in the Kuruman area was a strike in one of the outlying townships called Batlharos.  Students had been protesting the widespread use of corporal punishment, and the teachers called the police.  One of the police officers struck a student and was arrested for assault.  The whole thing seemed finished for a time, but apparently one of the local political leaders whipped the students into a frenzy and they attacked the police station en masse , stacking stones and a tree in the road, breaking windows, and burning a police car.  The main road was blocked, necessitating a lengthy detour.  The situation remained bit unstable until reinforcements arrived from Kimberley Friday night and clamped down.  By Saturday things were back in order. Just a quick view of mob behavior.  It's a rare situation that would be improved by such random violence.

I'm away from the computer for the next couple days. I'll be back soon!

Beware! Anyone who spends a bit of time around serving Peace Corps volunteers quickly realizes they're a little, well, off.  Aside from our shabby dressing, poor haircuts, and ratty backpacks, we generally struggle interacting with other non-volunteers outside the village. Spending a lot of time alone, or unable to speak normally about our favorite subjects, we can lose some self-awareness when it comes to conversation.  Forgetting how nice it is to speak easy and fluent English and immersed in Peace Corps culture, we tend to ramble at length about tedious subjects only another volunteer could appreciate or find interesting, and we can forget how to notice we're boring the pants off every non-volunteer in the room (and sometimes the volunteers too).  Every volunteer gets this to some degree, some worse than others. The other issue is the "village voice."  (This may only apply to English-speaking countries.)  Here most people speak at least some English, b...

Check out TPM's slideshow of staggering images from the devastation.  I urge people that can to donate towards humanitarian relief. UPDATE: Felix Salmon has some wise words on donations in general.  Don't give money to Japan, he says: We went through this after the Haiti earthquake, and all of the arguments which applied there apply to Japan as well. Earmarking funds is a really good way of hobbling relief organizations and ensuring that they have to leave large piles of money unspent in one place while facing urgent needs in other places. And as Matthew Bishop and Michael Green said last year, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. That often results in a mess of uncoordinated NGOs parachuting in to emergency areas with lots of good intentions, where a strategic official sector response would be much more effective. Meanwhile...

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor, post-explosion. Cooper has what is probably a common fear about nuclear power plants: 6. Drill Baby Drill - What’s happening with the Japanese nuclear reactors scares the shit out me. This crisis alone is enough to convince me that nuclear energy is a bad idea. I’ll take global warming over a nuclear meltdown any day. I don't think this is a good reason to oppose nuclear power.  For better or worse, the environmental trade-off is that whatever disasters happen, they will be confined to a relatively small area, while global warming by definition will affect the entire planet.  (I'll take 10 Chernobyls over a 20-foot rise in sea levels any day.) On a side note, I think the only reason that Republicans are huge supporters of nuclear power is because the DFHs were and are against it. The French seem to have a handle on the nuclear issue and provide a good overview of what a nearly all-nuclear power system would look like.  Basic...

1. GOP budget cuts would hit tsunami warning centers . 2. Awesome pictures of a volcano in the DRC . 3. A look at Alcoholics Anonymous . 4. Douchebag Texas cops thwarted . 5. Tyler Cowen, a notorious foodie, hyperventilates about some gas station tacos outside DC . 6. Paul Krugman looks back from 2096 .

I am frankly stunned at the chorus of voices calling for intervention in Libya.  Everyone from Nicholas Kristof to Christopher Hitchens to David Frum to Fareed Zakaria is joining the "do something" chorus.  They are even using the classic slogans of the Iraq war, banging on about "credibility" and "reputation" and "democracy" and "responsibility to protect." This is just unbelievably dangerous.  Though most of the warmongers only propose a no-fly zone, it is still a terrible idea.  No-fly zones have a way of turning into land wars.  I would have thought that two bloody, failed wars in the Muslim world might convince people to think twice about proposing yet another use of military force in a Muslim country most of us know nothing about.  America has no significant interests there, there is no international support, and we know very little about the Libyan rebels.  We don't know if the rebels are united or would fragment after ...

My apologies for the light posting, I've been a bit busy.  I just wanted to call your attention to these Ezra Klein interviews with Tom Vilsack on rural issues and Grover Norquist on the budget deficit.  Both very interesting.

"For the sake of conversation, set aside principled opposition to racism, religious bigotry and systematic violations of the constitution. Let's say we want the biggest counter-terrorism bang for our buck on the domestic front? How much do you think we accomplish by harassing the local Muslims in Tennessee when they want to build a mosque or a local community center with a swimming pool? Or passing laws outlawing Sharia? Again, stated like that, it seems pretty friggin' obvious. Virtually all of what passes itself off as awareness of the threat of Islamic extremism is little more than mindless forms of petty harassment that probably have no effect whatsoever other than some small and incremental increase of the marginalization that is likely the largest single driver of sympathy with violent extremism abroad. You don't even need to get to all the principled reasons for combating Islamophobia. You can just oppose it on the general level of its compl...

Why don't whales get cancer? Or rather, why don't they get a lot more cancer than people? Carl Zimmer has an interesting post on the subject: Blue whales can weigh over a thousand times more than a human being. That’s a lot of extra cells, and as those cells grow and divide, there’s a small chance that each one will mutate. A mutation can be harmless, or it can be the first step towards cancer. As the descendants of a precancerous cell continue to divide, they run a risk of taking a further step towards a full-blown tumor. To some extent, cancer is a lottery, and a 100-foot blue whale has a lot more tickets than we do... In a review in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution , Caulin and Maley took Calabrese and Shibata’s model and ramped it up to blue-whale scale. They found that the huge size of the animals means that by the age of fifty, about half of all blue whales should have colorectal cancer. By age 80, all of them should have it. It’s likely that blue wha...

1. Another look at the Stuxnet worm . 2. A profile of Haaretz magazine in Israel . 3. A blog to watch: Bleeding Heart Libertarians . 4. The coming generational war . 5. How we train our cops to fear Islam . 6. Vacuum MagLev .  From London to New York in an hour.

Up today: Freedom , by Jonathan Franzen. Summary: this insightful and well-constructed work ultimately did not live up to the hype. Freedom is the story of one family, the Berglands, a typical four-member unit, and their musician friend.  Their lives are drawn in exquisite detail; the richness that Franzen manages to create (reflecting what must have been a massive amount of work) is the best part of the book.  I won't go into much detail about the plot.  Like a lot of modern novels, the plot is almost beside the point; backstory makes up about half the book. The defining feature of the Berglands is that they are mostly miserable failures.  The book is saturated with awkwardness, anxiety, and resentment; with competition, hatred, envy, and dishonesty; and most of all with sheer bloody-minded foolishness.  This litany of failures (which barely lets up throughout the book) are mostly of the small, pathetic variety.  Though there was some reconciliation t...

This blog is my find of the month.  It's got the best illustrations using Microsoft Paint I've ever seen—a great example of simple but seriously skilled cartoon art.  Some of my favorites: 1.  Going to a party heavily sedated . 2. The god of cake . 3. Don't exceed your level of responsibility . 4. The sneaky hate spiral . 5. Texas . 6. A revised cartoon pain scale . 7. A unfortunate fishing accident . 8. How Kenny Loggins ruined Christmas . 9. Things that make you feel like an idiot . 10. The scariest story . 11. How to tell if your dog is retarded . 12. Moving across the country with said dog .

The GOP doesn't care about the budget deficit . Not even a little bit . For the umpteenth time, they're just using it as a convenient excuse to gut programs they don't like, such as Teach for America . Teach for America costs the federal government $21m a year. That's what happens when you pass an $858 billion tax cut and then try to make up for it with cuts to domestic discretionary spending. Now if we can just eliminate 20,000 more programmes like Teach for America, we might get back to deficit-neutral, though it's an open question whether future Americans will care about our achievement since they won't know how to add. The Peace Corps is also up for a $70 million cut .

A member of Congress (!!!) defeated the "Watson" supercomputer in a round of Jeopardy .  The mind reels.

Turns out I won't be returning to PST.  Regularly scheduled content will resume shortly.

1. Unsupervised gas fracking (astonishingly) leads to massive environmental catastrophe . 2. The war on women . 3. Somebody stole Reed College's directory to make a fake college in order to steal Asian students' admission fees . 4. Malcolm Gladwell on college rankings .