… try being a transgender traveler:
You have the right to have manual search procedures performed by an officer who is of the same gender as the gender you are currently presenting yourself as. This does not depend on the gender listed on your ID, or on any other factor. If TSA officials are unsure who should pat you down, ask to speak to a supervisor and calmly insist on the appropriate officer.
Alexis Madrigal proposes:
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist says he has a simple fix for the uproar over the Transportation Safety Agency's body scanners. Distort the image, Willard Wattenburg argues, and you take away (at least some of) the privacy objections that could be made. In Wattenburg's formulation, noted by the Washington Post, bodies would be stretched as in a funhouse mirror, presumably removing any titillation associated with nudity.
One suspects that the news that a single drug can drastically lower the chances of getting infected with HIV may not receive the attention it deserves. Tenofovir-Emtricitabine or Truvada is an old drug, well-established and not on the cutting edge any more. But it's the first drug that, if taken by HIV-negative men, has now been proven to help prevent HIV infection. Why? Because the drug – used to treat people already infected with HIV – presents enough obstacles to new virus entering the body's CD4 cells that infection fails to take place:
In the study, published Tuesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers found that the hundreds of gay men randomly assigned to take the drugs were 44 percent less likely to get infected than the equal number assigned to take a placebo. But when only the men whose blood tests showed they had taken their pill faithfully every day were considered, the pill was more than 90 percent effective, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, head of the division of the National Institutes of Health, which paid for the study along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“That’s huge,” Dr. Fauci said. “That says it all for me.” The large study, nicknamed iPrEx, included nearly 2,500 men in six countries and was coordinated by the Gladstone Institutes of the University of California, San Francisco.
This could have real implications especially in those subcultures where using condoms is rare, where the closet or the DL make any candid discussion of HIV before sex taboo.
It is a form of protection “that does not involve getting permission from the other partner, and that’s important,” said Phill Wilson, president of the Black AIDS Institute, which focuses on the epidemic among blacks.
But it can also provide a safety net for those who have a lapse, or an accident, or all those other ways in which sexual desire overwhelms judgment, especially among young men whose hormones are surging.
People understandably have been fixated on a vaccine. For many reasons, a vaccine for a super–sophisticated retro-virus that is constantly mutating has always been extremely hard. But if you combine combination therapy for those infected with prophylactic use of Truvada for those uninfected, you could sharply cut new infections. And such sharp cuts in infection rates can turn an epidemic into something much rarer.
This is the best news in a very long time – alongside the recently developed vaginal microbicide – because it empowers people to protect themselves in ways that do not involve any action before or during sex, when one's judgment is most impaired.
(Photo: Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding (in green) from cultured lymphocyte. This image has been colored to highlight important features. Multiple round bumps on cell surface represent sites of assembly and budding of virions.)
SEPTEMBER 29, 2010 — The Atlantic Wire rounded up stories on succession in North Korea.
MAY 21, 2010 – Lisa Camner explained why North Korea would sink a South Korean war ship.
MAY 2009 – Robert Kaplan wrote about "the hazards of overreacting to Kim Jong Il's nuclear tests."
NOVEMBER 2008 – B.R. Meyers wrote that "To hope that a new administration in Washington can build trust with the North Koreans where their most sympathetic blood-brethren have so abjectly failed would be to take American exceptionalism to a new extreme."
SEPTEMBER 2008 – B.R. Meyers wrote that "We should be thinking less about the transition of North Korean power, and more about the worldview that Kim and his potential successors have in common."
JANUARY 2008 – The Atlantic asked a group of foreign policy experts, "What is the likelihood that North and South Korea will continue to reconcile and normalize relations over the next five years?" 54 percent said "somewhat likely." And 41 percent said "highly likely."
OCTOBER 2006 – Robert Kaplan wrote that "the furor over Kim Jong Il’s missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades."
JULY 2005 – The magazine conducted a Pentagon style war game for a conflict on the Korean peninsula.
JANUARY 2004 – Kenji Fujimoto wrote about his experiences as Kim Jong Il's personal chef.
DECEMBER 1998 – Paul Bracken wrote that "our bases in Asia are becoming more vulnerable to attack by ballistic missiles. Defending them will be very expensive and might provoke even larger missile deployments. At stake is the United States' reputation as the world's lone superpower."
FEBRUARY 1997 – Bruce Cumings wrote: "For more than forty years what little we have known about North Korea has come largely from reporters and policy experts whose views of that country's intentions and capabilities may well be misleading or false. The time has come, one student of Korean affairs argues, to let North and South settle their differences directly, and bring U.S. soldiers home."
OCTOBER 1987 – James Fallows wrote that "dependence on the United States has led the South Koreans to magnify our power over their domestic affairs."
DECEMBER 1983 – Sanford J. Ungar wrote that "Now, when South Korea's economic success is costing the jobs of Americans, South Koreans wonder if we would fight for them again."
SEPTEMBER 1953 – Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall wrote about America's mistakes in Korea.
A reader writes:
Your recent posts have made me think about a billboard here in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina that depicts a Rambo-like Christ ripping himself from the cross. I just had to search the Internet for an image to send to you … and here it is. Enjoy!
Close-up of roided Jesus after the jump:
Battle-scarred libertarian Brian Doherty has his doubts.
A reader writes:
For your contest I would like to nominate Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning", a gem from the late '80s about Indigenous Australian land rights. The video manages to combine close-ups of indigenous children and self-righteous head bobbing.
Another:
While the verses and chorus aren’t terrible, the bridge (“The time has come/To say ‘fair’s fair’/To pay the rent/To pay our share/The time has come/A fact’s a fact/It belongs to them/Let’s give it back”) is a horrid masterpiece of Rock Star Preaching.
Sargent has the latest:
The central question still remains: Will the Senate Democratic leadership agree to hold a cloture vote on the Defense Authorization Bill containing repeal, and will the leadership commit to a two week period of floor debate? This is key because in combination with the Pentagon report, holding this debate — and allowing the full and open amendment process that Republicans have insisted on — could remove the last pretext GOP moderates have to withold their support.
So here's what to watch: A senior leadership aide tells me the final decision on whether to hold that cloture vote and open debate will likely be made later next week.
That's because Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, has said he will hold hearings later next week on the released Pentagon report. The Senate Dem leadership intends to watch closely how the moderate GOP Senators publicly react to the Pentagon report in those hearings. If they seem to be softening, the prospect of getting 60 votes for repeal increases — this is a real possibility, as far-fetched as it may seem — which would ratchet up the pressure on Senate Dems to allow the cloture vote and agree to the protracted floor debate.
Patrick Chovanec notes a trend in China:
The other day, I was talking with a part-time maid we had hired to help us settle in to our new apartment after relocating within Beijing. She had told us, when we hired her, that she was divorced. Now that she had gotten to know us, however, she informed me — matter of factly — that while she was, in fact, officially divorced, she still lived happily with her husband and daughter as a family. Seeing the quizzical look on my face, she reassured me that the only reason they had gotten a divorce — a mere legal technicality — was so they could circumvent the one-home-per-family restriction and qualify to buy a second home in Beijing.
(Hat tip: Ezra)
Palm Beach, Aruba, 5.02 pm
The Dish 