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Romesh Ratnesar takes to the pages of TIME to ask, in apparent seriousness, “Is It Time to Invade Burma?”

The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.

So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. U.N. food shipments have been seized. U.S. naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.

[…]

That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the U.S. to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — “I can’t imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it’s not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government’s consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan.

Let me just go on the record: Hell no, it’s not time to invade Burma. Are you friggin’ kidding me?

Frankly, I don’t care what the junta in Burma wants. The international community doesn’t recognize them as legitimate. If the people who do these things for a living decide that ignoring the junta and dropping relief supplies will do more good than harm, I don’t have any problems with it.

But coercive humanitarian intervention? No, thanks.

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Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argues for abolishing the minimum voting age and letting kids vote “when they decide they want the vote.” Matt Yglesias seconds the emotion.

Gobry’s argument is long and largely defies excerpting. It boils down to:

• Setting maturity at 18 is arbitrary.

• Kids will grow up and face the consequences of current policy decisions, so should have some say over them.

• It would diminish the ability of the elderly to succeed in rent seeking behavior.

• Any argument that justifies denying the vote to children could be applied to some class of people that is now allowed to vote.

These things are all true. But, really, this argument just illustrates reductio ad absurdum.

We have a representative democracy and believe that those who will have to pay for and abide by government policies should elect those who make said policies. We also believe that those who are voting should be educated, have a stake in society, and be mentally competent to make decisions.

These goals are, however, not fully mutually achievable.

We don’t want people who are seriously insane or otherwise truly incapable of understanding what they are doing to vote even though they are nonetheless subject to the laws of society; then again, we also limit their criminal liability. As a practical matter, though, there are few enough of these people that we can decide on a case-by-case basis.

Similarly, it would be absurd to allow infants to vote. They obviously can’t communicate their ideas in a manner comprehensible to us and they have limited ability to process information. How about a 5-year-old? They can walk and talk. But so few of them have even the slightest understanding of the workaday world that it would be silly to give them the vote. At best, they’d just reinforce their parents’ choice. And, as with mentally incompetent adults, they have far less culpability under our law. They can’t sign contracts and are seldom held accountable by the state for their actions.

But, of course, we can find individual 8-year-olds who are smarter and more mature than some 18-year-olds. And, certainly, nothing magically transforms a person who is 17 years, 364 days old into a responsible human being the next day.

So, 18 is arbitrary, right? Well, no. It’s an age where we expect most people to have the requisite maturity to be responsible enough to make certain decisions. They can sign contracts and be held accountable for them. They can join the military. They can get full-time jobs. The burden is on them to demonstrate that they’re not mentally competent to be responsible for violation of the criminal code.

Could we maybe lower the age to 16? Or 15? Maybe. Certainly, I was very interested in politics and had decided preferences that I could articulate as a 14-year-old. But, frankly, most people at that age aren’t paying attention. And, while that’s true of many adults, few 15-year-olds are paying taxes or otherwise contributing to society.

The last consideration, incidentally, is something that no one has mentioned in the comment sections of Gobry’s or Yglesias’ posts, despite some pretty interesting discussions taking place there. One of the fundamental ideas of our Republic is that the right to participate in government flows from the duty to fund it. “No taxation without representation” was one of the rallying cries of our war for independence. The two were always thought to be linked.

Indeed, suffrage was once restricted to landholders on the basis that only those who were paying for government had any right to have a say about it. We ultimately democratized, coming to see that disenfranchising the poor was wrong since they faced many of the burdens of citizenship, including military service. (And the passage of the income tax rendered the issue moot, regardless.) Eventually, attainment of majority was deemed enough to satisfy the “stake in society” principle. We even lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 because we came to believe that forcing people to go to war at 18 but not allowing them to have a say over whether we sent them was wrong. (Although, oddly, we’ve since decided that we can withhold their right to drink alcoholic beverages or smoke cigarettes.)

If rights and responsibility are linked, then the voting age must also be the age of accountability. If you’re mature enough to vote, you’re mature enough to be liable for you conduct. Consideration of lowering the voting age should be made with that in mind.

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Sun May 11, 2008 6:09pm EDT
By Wafa Amr

JERUSALEM, May 11 (Reuters) - Eighty-year-old Beatrice Habesch sobbed when she caught sight of her father’s house in Jerusalem on Sunday and remembered how it was taken over by Jews in 1948.

“This is our house! This is my house!” she shouted as fellow Palestinians held her back from running towards the building.

Some 300 Palestinians marked 60 years since Israel’s founding in May 1948 with a protest walk through affluent Jewish parts of west Jerusalem that were once home to many Arabs. They wore black T-shirts with “This is my House” printed on the back.

[Read the report]

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May 7 - It’s only a short drive from their house in East Jerusalem to their ancestral home in West Jerusalem, but the journey is a long one for one Palestinian couple.

As Israel prepares to celebrate its 60th birthday, Wilhelmine and George Baramki return to the ancestral home in Jerusalem which they fled during fighting when Israel declared its independence.

Now, they wonder whether they will ever enjoy the ‘right of return’ enshrined in Palestinian demands for statehood.

Helen Long reports.

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By Saree Makdisi, Los Angeles Times, 11 May 2008

There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who spurned whom and whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon’s stroll through the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.

All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is that — after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967 war — Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.

Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land. And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.

This is a position, I realize, which may take many Americans by surprise. After years of pursuing a two-state solution, and feeling perhaps that the conflict had nearly been solved, it’s hard to give up the idea as unworkable.

[Read the article]

Gaza plunged into darkness for the second night
11 May 2008

GAZA, (PIC)– For the second night running the Gaza Strip is plunged into darkness as the sole power station supplying electricity had to stop because the Israeli occupation has stopped supplying fuel necessary to run the station.

The disruption of the electricity supplies threatens the lives of new-born babies who need to be put in incubators, patients on ventilators or those dependent on dialysis machines as hospitals have very limited amounts of fuel to run their emergency generators.

The Energy Authority in Gaza said that the Israeli occupation refuses to supply it with the necessary fuel to run the main power station at the pretext of security issues at the supply terminal.

[Read the report]

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Rela Mazali, Jewish Peace News, 8 May 2008

Growing up and living mostly in Israel, I have long been aware of children’s complex reactions to the state sirens used in Israel to commemorate both the victims of the Nazis and the soldiers and para-military personnel killed while serving terms of duty. Many children find it hard not to giggle, others openly and subversively enjoy giggling, grimacing to make others laugh or squirming, still others are terrified or angry and defiant. Usually, as they grow up, they learn to contain these responses and comply with the national 60 second freeze. I note this because I think that children’s “borderline”, pre-socialization conduct can serve as a forceful illustration of how this ritual functions.

I won’t unpack the full complexity of what I believe the sirens are and do. This introduction to the following piece by Tamar Rotem is just a partial sketch in which I’d like to highlight the surveillance that I see as a central component of their function. Though moderately critical of the sirens’ use, Rotem’s opinion piece, from Haaretz, clearly illustrates of the power of this surveillance mechanism.

[Continue reading]

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The New York Times
May 8, 2008

The White House is removing a member of the Federal Election Commission for standing up for clean elections, while trying to install another member whose specialty is keeping eligible voters from casting ballots. The Senate, which must confirm nominees, should insist that President Bush appoint commissioners with a proven record of supporting voting rights and fair elections.

Mr. Bush is purging the current F.E.C. chairman, David Mason, presumably because he was responsible enough to challenge the funding machinations of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign. Mr. Mason shocked his fellow Republicans by notifying Mr. McCain that he might run afoul of the law by switching from public funding to private donations once he secured the party’s nomination.

The White House proposes to replace Mr. Mason with Donald McGahn, a Republican warhorse. F.E.C. commissioners are expected to be aligned with a party — one of the new Democratic nominees is a staff member of Senator Charles Schumer of New York — but Mr. McGahn has a particularly partisan background. He was the party’s Congressional campaign counsel — and the ethics lawyer for Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader from Texas who left office under multiple clouds.

The six-member commission, which now has four vacancies, has been rendered inoperable. If it is to perform its role as referee of national elections, it urgently needs a full complement — and it needs commissioners with the sort of professionalism displayed by Mr. Mason.

Senate Democrats should push for someone more suitable than Mr. McGahn, and they should continue to oppose Hans von Spakovsky, a terrible nominee with a record as a Justice Department lawyer of aggressive partisanship and opposition to minority voting rights.

For the latest reform news and to access previous reports, releases, and analysis from Democracy 21, visit www.democracy21.org.

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