Month: November 2010

The Hairpin has invented the Shopping Bracket (pdf) to help women optimize their purchasing power:

Open a tab for every online shop you like. Go through each tab and put everything you like even a little bit into your virtual cart — no commitment to purchase is necessary. 

Then force yourself to choose between things, over and over for hours, until it's all the way down to just two items, at which point I usually spend a few minutes mumbling pros and cons before closing the window altogether and basking in a deep sense of relief. And voila! You now have all the endorphins of a full-fledged shopping trip without having spent a dime.

Ahmed Rashid writes how it "does not augur well for either the U.S. or Afghanistan":

[Karzai's]  single overriding aim now is making peace with the Taliban and ending the war—and he is convinced it will help resolve all the other problems he faces, such as corruption, bad governance, and the lack of an administration. Karzai’s new outlook is the most dramatic political shift he has undergone in the twenty-six years that I have known him. Although it is partly fuelled by conspiracy theories, it is also based on nine years of ever growing frustration with the West.

The National Post produces a graphic explainer.

"My kids have the same story as every other kid in this world," – Sarah Palin, in a grueling interview with Glenn Beck.

Beck, to his credit, actually asks why Palin has pushed her children so aggressively into the public spotlight:

"My kids are left alone. I mean, but I just don't, I don't ever, ever put them in front of a camera. You know, anybody takes a picture of my kids, I go all TSA on them."

Palin offers the following defense:

Yeah, here's the deal. Here's the deal, what we got ourselves into, I guess, was there on the national stage, literally there at the GOP convention when I, being so proud of my family, bringing them on stage like every other politician has done since the beginning of time, being charged then with exploiting my kids and here I'm looking around going, wait, every other candidate, every male candidate brings their family on stage, proverbially and literally. So having done that. And then from there just sort of a different standard that's been applied in terms of the accusations that there's been exploitation or using the kids for whatever. Then, Glenn, having to correct the record and try to change the narrative into what the truth is about my family. So constantly being on defense and having to sort of counterattack the things that they say. That's the position that we're in.

Where to start? Her first decision was agreeing to run for vice-president with a months' old child with Down Syndrome and a pregnant teenage daughter. You do that, your kids will be at least somewhat in the public eye. But she blindsides the campaign with the teen pregnancy, puts out her own press release about it the Saturday before the convention, and in the same chaotic weekend, the campaign also has to deal with the bizarre details of her one-month public pregnancy and bi-continental, airplane labor with Trig. Anyone one who genuinely cared about the privacy of her kids would have either said no or been extremely careful to release the information as soberly as possible.

And what happens thereafter? She pushes her daughter into a public spotlight, subsequently making her an abstinence advocate, and supporting her appearance on a reality show. She engages in a public family spat with the father of her grandson, Tripp. And she parades a special needs infant in front of the press, dangles him half-naked in front of book tour crowds, uses him constantly as a rhetorical campaign prop, and cites him at almost every speech to appeal to pro-life voters. She also uses her son, Track, to appeal to veterans and the military. She brings her children with her throughout her now two-year campaign for national office, disturbing their schooling and rendering them vulnerable to further inquiry from the tabloids, even as they strike deal with tabloids for their own stories.

To be disgusted by this spectacle is emphatically not a double standard.

What Palin has done with her young children is unprecedented. Think of how Obama strictly protects his daughters, and how George W. Bush did the same. Yes, Romney and McCain involve their offspring in politics – but Meghan McCain is a critic of the GOP, and Romney's kids stuck to Mormon gee-whiz isn't Daddy great stuff. None of them actively enlisted their kids in reality show television.

What Palin has done is use her children, having failed to actually rear them. She is still doing it on her reality show. That she has gone so far as to use and thereby abuse a child with Down Syndrome whose interests are clearly in seclusion, careful nurturing and care, and constant parental attention, tells you a huge amount. So does this:

Her young son, Trig, was to have an operation — routine but still worrisome — on the Friday before [mid-term] Election Day, and so the mother was loath to commit to anything. Trig’s procedure went well. That evening, Palin’s political adviser, Andrew Davis, pulled an all-nighter arranging for her to make a Saturday drop-in on behalf of John Raese, the West Virginia senatorial candidate who was trailing the Democratic nominee, Joe Manchin, the popular governor. Raese’s wife, Elizabeth, had issued a personal plea to Palin to save the day.

Yes, she left her two-year-old with Down Syndrome after a "worrisome" operation to campaign half the world away the next day, to save a far right candidate who lost. But she didn't leave Trig behind on a late-night stop in her red-state tour to promote her last book.

(Photo: Politician and conservative activist Sarah Palin holds her son Trig Palin as she attends a rally for the Tea Party Express national tour October 22, 2010 in Phoenix, Arizona. The tour, part of an initiative to get conservatives elected to the House and Senate, will move across country and conclude on November 1, 2010 in Concord, New Hampshire the day before the contentious mid-term elections. By Joshua Lott/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

I'm a loyal reader and a grad student in public health with an interest in HIV/AIDS, so your posts on Truvada prophylaxis caught my attention. Good news? Yes. Breakthrough? Not so fast. First off, the 44 percent figure is the important one – not 90 percent – because what really matters is how well the drug works in real life. That a large percentage of the participants in this study still didn't take the pills regularly despite having better-than-average medical attention is a serious problem. Also, all study participants received HIV testing, safe sex counseling, condoms, and treatment for STIs during the study. Who knows whether the effect would be as strong with people not receiving all those other protective services – could be higher or lower.

But the biggest red flag to me is behavioral disinhibition, the idea that people act differently when they believe their risk is lower.

A benefit from a 44 percent decrease in infections could quite easily be eliminated by changes in sexual behavior that would result from the knowledge that you're "protected." That's also a huge worry re: male circumcision, which is being pushed in sub-Saharan Africa right now. Studies suggest that circumcision does have a protective effect, but it remains to be seen whether that will hold true on a population scale when men believe it protects them and thus may change their behavior. The circumcision studies, like the Truvada study, were all done with intensive counseling (for ethical reasons) which makes the results far less generalizable. The way circumcision is being pushed in areas with high HIV prevalence is, to me, a quite frightening population-wide experiment, because we just don't know yet whether it will help or hurt.

Yes, the Truvada study is big news, but we'll need a lot more data before we'll know if it's really a breakthrough.

All of this is perfectly true, for the population as a whole. We will indeed see if this good news is a breakthrough. But compliance with drug regimens is always an issue – and a single pill is arguably the simplest, easiest regimen to follow. Perhaps, taking a pill to prevent infection rather than treat it makes it more likely to be missed or followed intermittently – but even then, the danger of failure is much less than with highly complex, multi-drug post-infection regimens.

The core point for me is that if one person diligently takes this drug and has a sex life, he or she is far, far less likely ever to become infected. We have never been able to say that in the three decades we have lived with this disease in America. That's why it's a breakthrough. And given the success of complex drug regimens in Africa and in poor, urban America, I see no reason not to be optimistic about a simple prophylaxis like this – especially for women who cannot get their lovers to wear a condom.

Jonah Lehrer describes two studies showing that talent depends on the way we "chunk" information together. It's why chess grandmasters can memorize winning board patterns and why London cabbies know the city so well. But those skills can hinder individuals when it comes to comprehending new patterns:

The problem with our cognitive chunks is that they’re fully formed – an inflexible pattern we impose on the world – which means they tend to be resistant to sudden changes, such as a street detour in central London. They also are a practiced habit, and so we tend to rely on them even when they might not be applicable. …

Those chess professionals and London cabbies can perform seemingly superhuman mental feats, as they chunk their world into memorable patterns. However, those same talents make them bad at seeing beyond their chunks, at making sense of games and places they can’t easily understand.

After noting that "if you think visitors to the the Douglas County, Colorado courthouse should pass through a full-body scanner, you’re insane," Apollo at Federalist Paupers writes:

The 4th Amendment allows for reasonable warrantless searches, but here we have a woman getting patted down because a nude image of her body revealed a piece of paper in her back pocket – that’s not reasonable. If this device is so wildly inaccurate (or if the security guards are so terribly trained) that it cannot tell the difference between something potentially dangerous and a Junior Deputy Sheriff sticker, then this is a goddamned sham. Phoney baloney nonsense designed to pat down everybody who gets summoned to jury duty or needs to register a corporation.

This is insane. It’s a jawdroppingly stupid waste of security resources… And to have it as a requirement before entering a courthouse – a building that people are legally obliged to enter – makes it doubly odious.

Lloyd Alter sums up a study commissioned by Michigan's Local First on the economics of shopping locally – and not just for food:

[W]hen West Michigan consumers choose a locally owned business over a non-local alternative, $73 of every $100 spent stays in the community. By contrast, only $43 of every $100 spent at a non-locally owned business remains in the community."

David Boaz is keeping score:

Libertarians often debate whether conservatives or liberals are more friendly to liberty. We often fall back on the idea that conservatives tend to support economic liberties but not civil liberties, while liberals support civil liberties but not economic liberties — though this old bromide hardly accounts for the economic policies of President Bush or the war-on-drugs-and-terror-and-Iraq policies of President Obama.

Score one for the conservatives in the surging outrage over the Transportation Security Administration’s new policy of body scanners and intimate pat-downs.

You gotta figure you’ve gone too far in the violation of civil liberties when you’ve lost Rick Santorum, George Will, Kathleen Parker, and Charles Krauthammer. (Gene Healy points out that conservatives are reaping what they sowed.) Meanwhile, where are the liberals outraged at this government intrusiveness? Where is Paul Krugman? Where is Arianna? Where is Frank Rich? Where is the New Republic? Oh sure, civil libertarians like Glenn Greenwald have criticized TSA excesses. But mainstream liberals have rallied around the Department of Homeland Security and its naked pictures.

Here's Healy on the right's complicity:

Santorum and Krauthammer blame a politically correct mentality that prevents profiling. But the Christmas bomber was Nigerian; the shoebomber, a Brit with a Jamaican father. Should we just give the "freedom fondle" to anyone vaguely swarthy? I have a different explanation for how we got here. For nearly a decade, Krauthammer, Santorum and too many others on the Right have relentlessly hyped and politicized the terrorist threat. But when every bungled attack — no matter how inept — gets the screeching siren treatment on Drudge, what do you expect that political dynamic to produce? Sober, sensible policy? Conservatives could stand to think more clearly about ideas and consequences, cause and effect.

Mark Lilla contemplates it:

[A]fter reading these books and countless articles on the man, I’m coming to the conclusion that searching for the “real” Glenn Beck makes no sense. The truth is, demagogues don’t have cores. They are mediums, channeling currents of public passion and opinion that they anticipate, amplify, and guide, but do not create; the less resistance they offer, the more successful they are.