Month: July 2010

A new strategy in the fight against AIDS in Africa:

In the education study in Malawi's Zomba district, which has both high HIV rates and school dropout rates among young girls, the World Bank found cash payments for at least 75 percent school attendance each month reduced infection rates by 60 percent, compared to an unpaid control group. "Girls who received payments not only had less sex, but when they did, they tended to choose younger, safer partners," the World Bank said in a statement on the studies, which were released on the first day of the 18th International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

Cash transfers, the institution said, enabled a significant drop in what is called "transactional sex" among girls and young women who trade intercourse for assistance, gifts or money. Schoolgirls who received payment appeared to avoid older, wealthier men who are much more likely to be HIV positive than schoolboys, according to the study.

In the NYT, the corruption of language continues. If China threatens repeated beatings and sleep deprivation, it's torture. If the US does it, it's not.

Anchorage, Alaska, 11.41 pm

Julian Sanchez exposes Jonah Goldberg's double-standard:

Some unemployable inner city junkie who resorts to theft can expect a lecture on personal responsibility—not sympathy for how “unseemly” it is for his crime to be publicly exposed.  But a multi-millionaire who beats up women and then threatens murder?

But at least Jonah said something. Lopez remains mum on her feminist woman-beater.

They're still full of it. David Gregory admirably insists they give specifics. They cannot. They will not. They are fiscal frauds. Maybe at some point, the voters will realize this. Maybe even before November. These are the people who doubled the debt in eight years of growth. And they want to go back to the very same policies that made that happen.

"Our men need to know they can count on each other in battle, and we can't have them getting distracted by illicit romantic dalliances. Especially if one's a little blond Adonis farm boy and his buddy's a real tough street kid straight out of Brooklyn. I mean, think about it: What if they lock eyes and abandon their post to start ripping each other's fatigues off, revealing twin sets of glistening washboard abs and at last fulfilling their hidden passions?" – Gen. James T. Conway, commandant of the Marine Corps.

Greenwald:

We chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government:  functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.

Drezner:

I have one small quibble … which is with the "redundancy and waste" argument about multiple agencies doing the same work.  This is a standard argument in favor of rationalization, and it's not always wrong.  It should be noted, however, that some redundancy is actually a good thing, particularly on an issue like counter-terrorism.

Ed Morrissey:

The Post’s series may wind up exposing classified data, but what it mainly exposes in the first installment is the reality that we went the wrong direction five years ago in intelligence reform, and it’s costing us both money and security.  While that was utterly predictable, the exposure of the reality might finally prompt Congress to return to intel reform and demand real restructuring, streamlining, and bureaucratic reduction before it really gets too late.

Gabriel Schoenfeld:

Leaks of highly classified information can pose a serious threat to our security. But in foreign policy reporting, leaks are also the coin of the realm.  Some of them pose no danger at all. Indeed, they are a principal channel by which the public is informed, which is why the  subject is so contentious.  In this particular instance, there does not even appear to have been a leak.  There is nothing top secret about "Top Secret America" (at least in its first installment). In this respect it is a case of false—and very smart—advertising.

Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman:

This piece is about much more than dollars. It’s about what used to be called the Garrison State — the impact on society of a Praetorian class of war-focused elites. Priest and Arkin call it “Top Secret America” and it’s so big, and grown so fast, that it’s replicated the problem of disconnection within the intelligence agencies that facilitated America’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack. With too many analysts and too many capabilities documenting too much, with too few filters in place to sort out the useful stuff or discover hidden connections, the information overload is its own information blackout. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe,” a retired Army three-star general who recently assessed the system tells the reporters.

Patrick Lang:

More is not better, bigger is not better. Gigantism is inherently bad.

Why has this catastrophic growth occurred?  There are probably several reasons, most of them embedded in our shared culture.  We like big.  There is an assumption in American culture that "bigger and more" must be better.  We tend to assume that we can solve problems by throwing money and manpower at them.  Why?  We are addicted to the leveling idea.  My insistence that smaller is better is typically seen as "elitist" because it implies that all people are not created equal and that some people do much better work than others, often being capable of the intuitive leaps called "intuition" by the "elitists" and "guessing" by the levelers.  The levelers are in charge. 

Ambinder:

The best solution is probably not to have 60 percent of all intelligence work done by government employees. But neither, given the distribution of expertise, is an IC workforce of 95 percent government employees.

Both the Senate and the House have a chance to use Priest's series to reform the problem. The Senate will hear from DNI nominee James Clapper on Tuesday, and you can bet that he'll bring contracting reforms to the table. The House (and the White House) can resolve the logjam over the intelligence authorization act. And the public debate about a sensitive issue can finally begin.

Congrats to the WaPo for the kind of work that will actually save newspapers.

"Mel Gibson might be my favorite feminist. If he's not number one on my list, he's pretty close, in competition with Pope John Paul II. As you probably suspect, I don't have in mind the usual definition of "feminism." I can guarantee you there'll be no fawning Ms. magazine cover story on Gibson (or JPII). But give me a few minutes to fawn a little," – Kathryn Jean-Lopez, in 2003, after being given a sneak preview of the pornographic sadist snuff movie called "The Passion Of The Christ."

Now to the transcript of a man who abandoned his wife and kids and then assaulted his girlfriend:

MG: You're a c— and a whore! That's what you are and you have just proved it. You got out of here in record time.

OG: Because I'm saving my life and my daughter's life. That's what I'm doing. I don't give a damn about my music. And I don't give a damn about you spending another penny. I'm saving her life. You almost killed us, did you forget?

MG: The last three years have been a fucking gravy train for you.

OG: You were hitting a woman with a child in her hands. You! What kind of a man is that, hitting a woman when she's holding a child in her hands? Breaking her teeth, twice, in the face. What kind of man is that?

MG: Oooh, you're all angry now! You know what, you fucking deserved it.

I agree that much of this is unseemly to be aired in public, but grotesque? When the woman involved is clearly fearful for her safety? Gibson, in the passage above, is clearly threatening violence against his girlfriend and admits in this passage to a previous brutal assault, saying that a woman "fucking deserved" to have her face punched in and teeth broken. When you listen to the audio, his voice operates as a kind of lethal weapon, a vocal expression of brute violence. It's terrifying. Jonah Goldberg, perhaps sensing vulnerability as an editor at a magazine that championed Gibson as a religious genius and a, yes, feminist, pivots:

I'm much less inclined to buy this conventional wisdom that [Gibson]'s a mainstream conservative of some kind. I know he's a committed old school Catholic, or so he says. I know he made a film about Jesus that was very warmly received by many conservatives and criticized by many others. But I've seen interviews with him where he could be a commenter on Daily Kos.

Yes, the man who viewed John Paul II as too liberal is actually a lefty. But what we see in this dialogue is deeply revealing, it seems to me, about Gibson's mindset and the fundamentalist psyche that is undergirding politics and culture the world over.

He is a deeply disturbed man whose "spirituality" is wrapped up in extreme violence and fascist imagery. What motivates him is clearly power – heterosexual white male power – imposed on others by raw violence or the threat of violence. He is a fascist in temperament – which is why racism and anti-Semitism and murderous hatred of gay people come naturally to him. And this is how he sees himself as a Christian.

Will we read any revisions to the encomiums to his disgusting attack on the Christianity of the Gospels in "The Passion", his depiction of Jesus as a human being killed dozens of times by hook-nosed Jews as a literal expiation for the sins of humanity? Will the right wing now revisit its elevation of this deranged thug as a Christian exemplar? Will Lopez actually revise her view of a man who wishes that the mother of his child be "raped by a pack of niggers", who uses the c-word liberally, who punches a woman in the face … as a feminist worth revering along with that protector of thousands of child-rapists, John Paul II? Or will we read more posts, like Goldberg's, suggesting that Gibson is actually a creature of the hard left?

Or will, at some point, the cognitive dissonance actually break? What, one wonders, would it take? What event, what fact, what data could ever undermine the mad certainty of these perverse fanatics?

(Photo: Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelical Christians (C) defends Mel Gibson 's intentions in the making of the film 'The Passion of The Christ,' comparing it to a Michelangelo masterpiece, while Rabbi Abraham Cooper (L) and Rabbi Marvin Hier (R) listen during a press conference at the Museum of Tolerance, in Los Angeles, 24 February 2004. The Christian and Jewish leaders met to discuss their views of the film, which was released the following day. By Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images.)

He's apparently close with Todd:

As ex Ben Barber said quite succinctly, “They may go get married, make however much money, and call it quits.” Barber says he texted Bristol last night, asking whether she was pregnant again. No, came the answer, Barber says.

Mercede's latest.