Month: July 2004

More evidence that many parts of our agricultural industry – even with chickens now – is, with respect to treatment of animals, a moral disgrace. Money quote:

The group said its investigator also obtained eyewitness testimony about employees “ripping birds’ beaks off, spray-painting their faces, twisting their heads off, spitting tobacco into their mouths and eyes, and breaking them in half — all while the birds are still alive.”

Just incredible – but perhaps unavoidable in a food industry that often treats animals with contempt and cruelty. (If you care about these issues, can I recommend again Matthew Scully’s moving and important book, “Dominion.”)

MORE CAKEWALKING: A reader writes:

Thirty years ago in the small West Virginia town where my father grew up, I participated in what was billed as a “cakewalk.” The contestants simply walked around in a circle. One person standing just outside this circle was blindfolded and held a broom. At his whim he let the broom fall across the path of the circling contestants. If the broom fell behind you, you won the cake. Thus I have always assumed that a “cakewalk” referred to something accomplished by blind luck, without any element of skill. Perhaps this Appalachian contest, helps explain the etymology of the first definition of “cakewalk” provided by your reader.

I found this paragraph in the Washington Post account a little surreal:

The government source said the Archives employees were deferential toward Berger, given his prominence, but were worried when he returned to view more documents on Oct. 2. They devised a coding system and marked the documents they knew Berger was interested in canvassing, and watched him carefully. They knew he was interested in all the versions of the millennium review, some of which bore handwritten notes from Clinton-era officials who had reviewed them. At one point an Archives employee even handed Berger a coded draft and asked whether he was sure he had seen it.
At the end of the day, Archives employees determined that that draft and all four or five other versions of the millennium memo had disappeared from the files, this source said.

This suggests that Berger was trying to purloin potentially embarrassing data on his tenure. That’s astonishing. Meanwhile, the New York Times finally puts the story on A1 – but only as a device to finger the Bush administration. C’mon, Keller. You can do better.

More evidence of a “collaborative relationship.”

Who said the following: “This broad agenda we will carry into the new term comes from a basic conviction: Government should never try to control or dominate the lives of our citizens. Yet government can and should help citizens gain the tools to make their own choices and to improve their own lives.” It was Bush last night. It’s the exact formulation Bill Clinton used to use. Bush, however, has provided no firm details for his proposals for healthcare and education. We’ll see, I guess.

TEN YEARS OF BLAIR: It’s a decade and a day since Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party in Britain and Oxblog gives him a worthy tribute:

He has reinvigorated centrism in Britain, as the DLC and similar organisations did for the United States. Again like his transatlantic partner [Clinton], Blair’s mark was to make many of the economic reforms of Thatcherism palatable to the left. As a result, the British economy has in our lives never been stronger. Whereas a quarter-century ago it had fallen past the Federal Republic of Germany and France, and was about to fall past Italy as well, it is now closing in on Germany for the European crown, and its per capita GDP mark it as the second richest country in Europe past Luxembourg.

I’d add, however, that this achievement is essentially parasitic. Thatcher restored Britain’s economy, and John Major made that transformation permanent. Blair merely made it palatable. He has failed to reform the public services in any fundamental way, and has an unfortunate authoritarian streak when it comes to civil liberties. Nevertheless, he has made Britain safe for capitalism, helped liberate the Iraqi and Afghan people from vile despotisms, made the Bank of England independent, and the Tory party close to redundant. I often post stories predicting his demise. But I’m confident he’ll win the next election easily.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “You have the highest quality reader letters (blog, newspaper, or magazine) I have ever seen. I have to admit, I am sometimes so mystified by your vehemence about minor phenomena (such as Michael Moore) that I start to wonder If you are kind of nutty. (I’m a middle-aged liberal woman from Massachusetts, maybe that’s why I don’t get it?) Then the reader responses you choose to display redeem you.” Indeed they do. Thanks to Reihan Salam for selcting the best ones – and to all of you for writing in. There’s more here.

BLOGS AND POLITICS: Dan Drezner has now co-produced a paper on the subject. He is an academic, after all.

We’ve been told for a very long time that even if you’re HIV-positive, you can still get infected by other strains of HIV and get what is called “super-infection” with a less manageable form of HIV. No one ever provided much hard evidence for this and studies were few and far between. But we now have a new study, the best so far, that essentially debunks the notion of super-infection altogether. It was announced at the Bangkok conference and you can read the abstract here. Bottom line:

In a study of 33 HIV+ couples who engaged in frequent, unprotected sex, researchers at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology in San Francisco found no evidence of superinfection, the sequential acquisition of multiple HIV variants.
HIV is a highly mutable virus encompassing two quite different types around the world, HIV-1 and HIV-2. Within those types there are variations known as “subclades” that are typically subdivided further into genetically differentiated strains.
The epidemic in the U.S. consists almost entirely of a single subclade, HIV-1B, while HIV epidemics in other parts of the world involve a mix of subclades. In the study, researchers investigated potential superinfection involving variations within HIV-1B.
In 28 of the 33 couples, each participant was infected with a strain of HIV-1B that was genetically different than that of the person’s partner, and the 28 couples were particularly relevant for these preliminary results.

The study also examined thirty other men who had many sexual partners and unprotected intercourse, and found only one individual had “super-infection,” and he had only recently sero-converted. There may indeed be a window early in infection, when super-infection can occur. But after that … it appears you can’t get reinfected. This is important news for a couple of reasons: first, the HIV-positive men have clearly developed some kind of immune response to new viral strains. Could this be developed into a vaccine? Second, the finding opens up a new possibility for restraining the epidemic. It makes a lot of sense for people with HIV only to have sex with other people with HIV. If neither man can get reinfected, they can also dispense with condoms, a benefit that could encourage them to stay having sex within their own HIV-positive sub-population (or within a monogamous HIV-positive relationship). This has a name: sero-sorting. It’s already happening informally, and may be one reason why, despite lots of anecdotal evidence of more condom-less sex, we haven’t seen huge increases in infection rates. It may be that the pozzies are all having sex with each other. Long may they continue to do so.

It’s hard to see where his extra votes are going to come from.

ANOSMIC DREAMS: More about life without smell.

O’REILLY: He’s against outing people, except when he’s in favor of it.

STANLEY AND THE DUTCH: I’m not going to wade again into the thickets of research on marriage, cohabitation, parenting and so on in Scandinavia and Holland and elsewhere. But I should note that Stanley Kurtz’s latest piece is striking not only because of how modest his claims now are. His latest forumlation is:

Gay marriage is not the only cause of rising out-of-wedlock birthrates. I never said it was and it doesn’t take a demographer to realize that lots of factors contribute to husbandless women having babies.

Round of applause, please. But some important context. Kurtz’s lede – which he portrays as some new consensus view in Holland – is that

a group of five scholars in the Netherlands issued a letter addressed to “parliaments of the world debating the issue of same-sex marriage.” The Netherlands was the first country to adopt full-fledged same-sex marriage, and this letter is the first serious indication of Dutch concern about the consequences of that decision.

Hmmm. My Dutch reader weighs in:

The Reformatorisch Dagblad is of course a small partisan conservative Christian newspaper, there are just 5 university professors who state their opinion (now what would you say if 5 Berkeley scholars would issue a letter “proving” gay marriage is healthy?) and the facts they try to connect are actually uncorrelated. Yes marriage is in decline in the Netherlands as it has been for decades and the bigger part of that happened long before gay marriage was legalized. In fact, there has been some increase in (straight) marriages lately.
The reason why out of wedlock births are on the increase is because it is simply possible to arrange proper contracts for joint parenthood quite easily without marriage in the Netherlands now and quite a few people like it that way. The insinuation that this results in unstable parenting is preposterous.

But Stanley is ghetting more inventive. Here’s the latest gambit:

[T]he meaning of traditional marriage was transformed every bit as much by the decade-long national movement for gay marriage in Holland as by eventual legal success. That’s why the impact of gay marriage on declining Dutch marriage rates and rising out-of-wedlock birthrates begins well before the actual legal changes were instituted.

How convenient. Now, merely campaigning for equal marriage rights weakens marriage. So you can blame the fags for the decline of an institution they have had nothing to do with. A million sighs of relief go up from the social conservatives.

CAKEWALK?? An unusual lapse into political incorrectness at the NYTimes:

All this fumbling has left Mr. Obama, the smooth-talking, Harvard-educated law professor from Chicago, looking like the only candidate in a race that may make him the only African-American in the Senate. Voters who don’t know him yet surely will after the Democratic National Convention, where he will be keynote speaker. But it would be too bad if Mr. Obama cakewalked into Washington. Not just for Mr. Obama, who would take office with an asterisk (“*ran against incompetents”). Illinois voters deserve to see a capable opponent force him to answer tough questions and defend his positions. In other words, they deserve a nonludicrous race.

“Cakewalk,” a reader informs me, has two possible meanings:

1. Something easily accomplished: Winning the race was a cakewalk for her. 2. A 19th-century public entertainment among African Americans in which walkers performing the most accomplished or amusing steps won cakes as prizes. 1. A strutting dance, often performed in minstrel shows. 2. The music for this dance.

You learn something every minute in the blogosphere.

CNN has some sources saying Berger did too stuff his socks.

Bush seems to be changing his tune a little on the campaign trail:

Mr. Bush noted: “The enemy declared war on us. Nobody wants to be the war president. I want to be the peace president. The next four years will be peaceful years.” He repeated the words “peace” or “peaceful” many times, as he has done increasingly in his recent appearances.

How does he know? What if Iran gets a nuke? What if there’s another major terror attack? The president has obviously been worrying about his hard-edged image with women. But he needs to avoid lapsing into incoherence.

BERGER WITH FRIES: Glenn is all over this story. One more question: were they boxers or briefs?

An environmentalist is killed by a tree. Mine, mercifully, is free-standing.

Here’s a strange discrepancy in the NYT’s own account of Sandy Berger’s illegal purloining of classified material from government archives. Here’s one version:

Republicans accused him on Tuesday of stashing the material in his clothing, but Mr. Breuer called that accusation “ridiculous” and politically inspired. He said the documents’ removal was accidental.

Then later on in the piece, we read:

Mr. Breuer, the lawyer, said Mr. Berger inadvertently put three or four versions of the report on the plots in a leather portfolio he had with him. “He had lots of papers, and the memos got caught up in the portfolio,” he said. “It was an accident.”
Mr. Berger also put in his jacket and pants pockets handwritten notes that he had made during his review of the documents, Mr. Breuer said.

So it’s “ridiculous” to assert that he stuffed notes and copies of documents in his clothing, and yet he stashed them in his pants pockets and jacket. Is the critical issue here whether he stuffed them down his underpants or socks? If so, I can’t wait for the fruits of the loom, I mean, inquiry.

WHY? The salient question – and we have yet to have an even faintly plausible answer – is why? What was the purpose of stashing document copies that were allegedly available elsewhere? How could such a thing be “inadvertent”? Why is such an accomplished Washington player unable to come up with a reasonable explanation for such bizarre behavior? The Washington Post reports this morning that

A government official with knowledge of the probe said Berger removed from archives files all five or six drafts of a critique of the government’s response to the millennium terrorism threat, which he said was classified “codeword,” the government’s highest level of document security.

All the drafts? And now they’re missing? Doesn’t that sound like trying to cover your back? And yet the 9/11 Commission has not complained that it lacked any important documents; and the originals are still in the archives. I still don’t get it. My best bet is that Berger was engaging in advance damage control – saving the drafts to help concoct a better defense of his tenure. If so, it’s classic Clinton era sleaze – not exactly terrible but cheesy subordination of national security for partisan political advantage. But at times like this, I sure am glad we have the blogosphere. Can you imagine the mainstream press really pursuing this story alone? Meanwhile, Clinton thinks the possible leaking of classified information is just hilarious. About as hilarious as his anti-terror policy.

FREE THE VIBRATORS: The woman charged in Texas for selling vibrators has now had the charges dropped. One of her crimes was not merely selling the sex toy, but explaining how to use it:

Texas law allows for the sale of sexual toys as long as they are billed as novelties. But when a person markets the items in a direct manner that shows how they are used in sex, it is considered criminal obscenity.

And there you have America’s screwed-up attitude toward sex summed up in two sentences.