The scope of the tainted milk scandal seems to be expanding daily:

Milk tainted with melamine, a compound banned in food, has killed three other babies, two in China’s northwestern Gansu province and one in eastern Zhejiang. The health scare erupted after Sanlu Group last week revealed it had produced and sold melamine-laced milk, and a subsequent probe found a fifth of 109 Chinese dairy producers were selling products adulterated with the substance. [Emphasis mine] At the latest count, 6,244 children have become ill with kidney stones after drinking powdered milk laced with melamine, with three deaths and 158 suffering “acute kidney failure.”

Reading this reminded me of a Chinese academic and America expert I met over dinner last spring in Beijing while I was traveling with a delegation sponsored by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (the good people who brought you “ping-pong diplomacy”). Her current topic of study? America’s muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, and incidents such as these, which led to our modern regulatory institutions.

No one had to spell out the obvious parallels to China’s current situation. That very morning, the New York Times had reported on a mass demonstration against a planned petrochemical plant near Chengdu, a project which had been approved by the central government’s National Development and Reform Commission. Such demonstrations seem to be generally tolerated, so long as the protesters don’t directly challenge the central government’s authority or legitimacy, as these protesters took pains to do:

“We’re not dissidents,” said Wen Di, an independent blogger and former journalist living in Chengdu. “We’re just people who care about our homeland. What we’re saying is that if you want to have this project, you need to follow certain procedures: for example, a public hearing and independent environmental assessment.”

Of course, there’s one big difference between China today and the U.S. in the first half of the last century: For all its imperfections, America had a democratic system of government which was better suited structurally for responding to scandals like these in a productive way.

So apparently someone has been using an underwater pipeline to smuggle vodka out of Russia. Thing is, I would have thought the pipe-flow would have been in the opposite direction.

Andrew Sullivan, responding to Christopher Hitchens’ claim that an Obama presidency will mean “more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less”, says:

I can face the idea of a president Obama taking on and finally defeating Osama. In fact, that’s the major reason why I favor his candidacy… . Obama will try to correct the massive stretegic error of the Iraq invasion and pivot Western allies toward a greater focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I believe that Obama will be able to do this with much less global p.r. blowback than McCain and that the support president Obama will get from our European allies will dwarf McCain’s.

First of all, I should point out that I, too, would welcome a President Obama “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” For what it’s worth, I could face a Honeydew-Beaker Administration “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” (Hey, I wouldn’t even mind if it happened in the next 3-4 months, under Bush, but I get the feeling that happenstance might upset someone…)

What I really wanted to draw attention to is Sullivan’s assumption that Obama will be able to formally and officially expand the Afghanistan problem into an Afghanistan-Pakistan problem with “much less global p.r. blowback than McCain.” Au contraire. I expect there will be more blowback against Obama.

Right now, he can ride high on a wave of global public support, but those thronging masses in Berlin and elsewhere are supporting him because they expect something in return: a massive rupture with Bush-era foreign policy. Since this is inchoate mob opinion we’re talking about here, it wouldn’t do to overanalyze it; basically they want more talk, fewer bombs, and they think he’s the one who’s going to give that to them. Americans, on the other hand, seem more inclined to take him at his word on his promises to get tough with Pakistan (though they still favor McCain on national security issues).

Something tells me that, if it comes to a choice between upsetting Americans’ expectations, and upsetting the world’s, the President of the United States is going to side with…well, the United States. And this is going to cut across a number of issues besides Afghanistan/Pakistan, as Slate pointed out awhile back:

If his diplomats or military advisers told him that the Iranians perceived his willingness to talk as a sign of weakness, he might reconsider his pledge to meet with the Iranian president as quickly as he now promises. Maybe when presented with confidential data gathered by eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, he would be less keen to drop all the measures taken by Bush and criticized by the opposition. Maybe his belief that “the United States needs to lead the world in ending this genocide” in Darfur would put him at odds with reality or with some members of the international community. In each of these cases, Obama would suffer the consequences of high expectations. He would be trapped between the desire to preserve his high standing in the world and the need to act in ways that would erode that standing. Of course—his advisers would argue—it is better to have this political goodwill in the first place. But even if that were true, political goodwill should always be handled delicately. Starting modestly and building up is also an option, sometimes a better one if you aim to keep expectations realistic. (This, I think, is the way John McCain would play his cards internationally.)

It’s undeniable that the “get tough on Pakistan” rhetoric is good for Obama’s short-term political interests. The world simply isn’t listening as closely to the candidates’ statements as are Americans, so it’s easier for them to bask in the unadulterated glow of St. Barack. But if Obama wins in November, he may soon come to realize that hell hath no fury like a Berliner scorned.

Ron Bailey deconstructs the application of the precautionary principle to the Large Hadron Collider:

[T]he empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics “experiments” for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord’s colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion.

As I’ve mentioned before, the precautionary principle cuts both ways. What if, because we neglected to do the LHC experiments, we didn’t know some crucial bit of physics that was the only way we could avoid some future calamity on Earth? Certainly, the chances of that coming to pass aren’t terribly high. Then again the chances aren’t zero, are they?

Warmonger? Mass murderer? Evil incarnate? Yes, Hitler was all of these things, but, as Niall Ferguson says, he was also an inept colonialist, and his Reich one of the last, worst incarnations of the resource-extraction colonial power. Ferguson’s short review focuses mostly on Nazi Germany’s treatment of Ukraine, a place where ethnic Germans and various other minority groups who had suffered under the Russians were inclined to view the Nazis as liberators.

That sentiment didn’t last long:

What went wrong? The answer can be given in four words: arrogance, callousness, brutality and ineptitude. All empires are prone to these vices, of course. But the Nazi empire took them to such an extreme that any possibility of sustainable rule was destroyed. Later empires worried about winning hearts and minds. The Nazi empire was both heartless and mindless. The “arrogant and overbearing Reich Germans”, strutting around in their fancy uniforms, alienated even the ethnic Germans they claimed to have freed from foreign oppression. Moreover, they took positive pride in starving the newly subject peoples. “I will pump every last thing out of this country,” declared Reichskommissar Erich Koch, when put in charge of the Ukraine. “I did not come here to spread bliss …”

Props to Reichskommissar Koch for understatement of the century.

There were some dissenting voices in the Reich government. One official in the Ost Ministerium (nicknamed Cha-ost Ministerium, or Ministry for Chaos) called Germany’s record in the east

a masterpiece of wrong treatment … to have, within a year, chased into the woods and swamps, as partisans, a people which was absolutely pro-German and had jubilantly greeted us as their liberator.

But could they have been more successful if they had been less brutal and incompetent? Probably not, Ferguson says. By then it had been proven that even relatively (much much) better governed empires, such as Britain’s, were a constant nuisance to their thoroughly industrialized mother states.

I’ve intentionally restrained myself from posting more about this silliness, but I have to say I don’t really see how this explanation improves the situation:

“Keep in mind, technically, had I meant it this way, [Palin] would be the lipstick. The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig, just following the logic of this illogical situation,” Obama said.

Someone needs to tell the Obama camp just to shrug off these kinds of tempests in a teapot and focus on policies and issues and such.

One of Kerry’s biggest weaknesses in 2004 was his abject failure at controlling the news cycle. Just when the media was beginning to tire of covering the Swift Boat Vets story, the Kerry campaign responded with comically incompetent attempts to manipulate public opinion, like this Byzantine chart, thus pouring new life into coverage of the Swift Boat accusations and terminally distracting his campaign.

Unless Obama wants to repeat Kerry’s performance, he needs to just shut up about these faux-controversies.

I duly note Damir’s concerns about McCain-Palin’s scary Georgia statements.

And yet I note that Palin studiously avoided mentioning a military response or a military presence, unless one were to read “vigilance” and “support” as codewords for boots on the ground. I agree it makes Palin’s bit about NATO—shall we say—less than coherent. But Obama and his foreign policy advisers apparently agree almost point by point with this policy that Damir calls scary.

I think what this points to is the fact that certain elements of American foreign policy these days are idées fixes that cross party lines. And until someone comes along once again to smash these ideas with a hammer, Nietzsche-like, then we will find that foreign policy folly is a bipartisan issue.

UPDATE: I dumbly did not click through to read the original source comments on that Palin interview, where she spells out more explicitly that, yes, NATO membership means the possibility of a war. But I stand by the fact that Obama has unfortunately matched the McCain-Palin position.

Over at Slate, David Haglund attempts to make the case that the Big Lebowski works as an anticipation of the perfidy of the neocons:

Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that appreciating Walter is essential to understanding what the Coen brothers are up to in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and more prescient than many of its fans have recognized. Perhaps that’s because Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He’s a neocon. If that seems like a stretch, consider the traits Walter exhibits over the course of the film: faith in American military might (the Gulf War, he says, “is gonna be a piece of cake”; in the original script, he calls it “a fucking cakewalk”); nostalgia for the Cold War (“Charlie,” he says, referring to the Viet Cong, was a “worthy fuckin’ adversary”); strong support for the state of Israel (to judge from his reverent paraphrase of Theodor Herzl: “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream”); and even, perhaps, past affiliation with the left (he refers knowingly to Lenin’s given name and admits to having “dabbled in pacifism”). Goodman, who has called the role his all-time favorite, seems also to have sensed Walter’s imperialist side. “Dude has a rather, let’s say, Eastern approach to bowling,” he said in an interview. “Walter is strictly Manifest Destiny.”

So, yeah, all the points of comparison do line up kind of conveniently, like Haglund says. But if we’re going to be interpreting the movie this way, why stop with Walter? The entire cast of characters, one could say, represents a skewering of the entire American political landscape. When you start to make pat interpretations, it’s hard to stop: There’s the dude (Sixties radicalism as a spent force), Maude Lebowski (Europhilic coastal elites), Jeffrey Lebowski…the other Jeffrey Lebowski (a straigh-from-central casting, cigar-chomping GOP corporate welfare case), and Donny (the “silent majority” in America’s flyover country, who can’t get a word in edgewise over all the partisan bickering). Indeed you can make a good case for these and many more readings, but by doing so, don’t we lose a little of the magic of the original?

As The Dude himself might put it, “No, you’re not wrong, Haglund. You’re just an asshole.”

No matter if you’re on the side of the climate change consensus or one of the skeptics, it makes sense not to restrict our options to emission-reducing cap-and-trade schemes alone. We should simultaneously study every possible weapon in the arsenal to deal with warming, including geo-engineering schemes like this one:

It should be possible to counteract the global warming associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide levels by enhancing the reflectivity of low-lying clouds above the oceans, according to researchers in the US and UK. John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, US, and colleagues say that this can be done using a worldwide fleet of autonomous ships spraying salt water into the air.

One of the most common objections to these types of proposals I’ve heard is the “unintended consequences” canard. Sure, we ought to move cautiously before attempting the intentional manipulation of weather on a planetary scale, and do so with the benefit of much more scientific understanding than we have now. But that kind of precautionary principle cuts both ways: The unknown costs of inaction may in fact be just as high as the unknown costs of action.

Anne Applebaum notes that Sarah Palin breaks the Hillary mold of the powerful woman politician, but not just in the narrow ideological sense:

In the end, though, it is not just Palin’s large family and important job which have made her the topic of the day at every school pick-up queue in America. It is also the fact that she breaks the Hillary Clinton mould, not only in personality and lifestyle but in ideology as well. By this, I don’t mean merely that she’s a conservative, that she’s an evangelical Christian, or that she opposes abortion. More interesting are the ways in which she shatters all of the stereotypes altogether: Left/Right, Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative. In practice, it isn’t even easy to say on which side of America’s increasingly confusing culture wars she stands. Is it “Right-wing” to go back to work two days after having a baby, as she did while governor? It is “feminist” to support one’s unwed daughter’s decision to have her baby? Is it liberal or conservative for women to play sports or drive snowmobiles? Or is it the case that, especially where women are concerned, none of these categories were [ever] as rigid as politicians have sometimes made them seem? While I wouldn’t say that women like Palin are a dime a dozen, in real life there are plenty of conservative women with full-time jobs and post-feminist lifestyles, just as there are plenty of liberal or Left-wing women who decide to stay home with their children.

And this is only part of the reason I would have loved to have waited until 2012 to back Sarah Palin for President.