A young Indian child in class at Katha Community School in the Govindpuri slum district of Dehli during Day 3 of an official visit to India of the Prince of Wales and Duchess Of Cornwall on November 8, 2013. This will be the Royal couple’s third official visit to India together and their most extensive yet. By Chris Jackson/Getty Images.
Ann Friedman observes how, in “the absence of a rational dialogue about the pros and cons of all abortion methods, it can be hard to know where the truth lies.” She addresses the misinformation surrounding mifepristone, the abortion pill:
[T]here’s a general false perception among women that medication abortion will be quicker and easier than a surgical procedure. “The majority think, ‘Hey, I’m gonna pop a pill and that’ll be it,’” the receptionist at an abortion clinic in Nebraska told me. With an early surgical abortion, a woman goes into a clinic and is sure she’s no longer pregnant when she comes out a few hours later. With medication abortion, the process can take up to 48 hours. Even after counseling at a clinic, many women are unprepared for the experience. “I took one pill at home, and I remember at one point actually feeling my cervix open. It was a terrifying feeling,” says Katie, who had a medication abortion in 2004. Another woman described pain that was “so intense that it’s hard to really remember. You sort of feel like you’re tripping or something.” A nurse at an abortion clinic once told me, “Women who have done both will go back to surgical. I’ve never had anyone who’s done both go back to medical.”
But, even if the medication isn’t particularly pleasant, it is quite safe for the woman:
Of the 1.52 million women who have had a medication abortion, there are eight cases of women dying from an infection after taking mifepristone.
SL’s twitter page posted a pic supporting the negotiation team, calling them “the children of Revolution” pic.twitter.com/ZQ8MkuPqLr #Iran
— Reza H. Akbari (@rezahakbari) November 8, 2013
My take: There IS a deal. Hold up is to give Russia & China chance to formally approve it and join photo-op… @hmajd @julianborger @lrozen
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 8, 2013
The fundamental question of the day: Russian FM to #Geneva: coming..not coming…coming..?
— Bahman Kalbasi (@BahmanKalbasi) November 8, 2013
Jonathan Tobin is predictably skeptical of the likely deal being forged in Geneva:
After more than a decade of diplomatic deception, the Iranians finally have what they wanted: an American president and secretary of state ready to recognize their “right” to enrich uranium and to hold on to to their nuclear fuel stockpile and to loosen sanctions in exchange for easily evaded promises. The next stop is not, as the administration may hope, a deal in six months to end the nuclear threat, but an Iran that knows that the sanctions have already begun to unravel emboldened to dig in its heels even further.
Justin Logan chides such hawks for making the perfect the enemy of the good:
[The deal is] not a complete, irreversible end of the problem posed by Iran’s nuclear program. What hawkish observers fail to understand is that there is no such solution, through diplomacy, military strikes, or otherwise. Thus the question was never whether this deal could provide Netanyahu’s desiderata: the shipping out of all enriched uranium, the destruction of Fordow and Arak, and an end to Iran’s pursuit of enrichment altogether. Nobody, perhaps even including Netanyahu thought that was possible. Given his various public statements, Netanyahu seemed to think any deal was a bad deal. So yes, it’s not time to pop champagne corks and forget the world, nor time to throw a tantrum. A prospective interim deal would be a small, but very important, step in the right direction. Given the disaster that would be a war in Iran, we should take this small step and see if it can be built on.
Larison wonders if Netanyahu will harm Israel’s international standing by rejecting the deal:
As Robert Farley and I discussed yesterday, there are three reasons why Israeli officials would publicly attack negotiations with Iran. The first is that they assume that any deal will be unacceptable to them, and are therefore writing off the negotiating process ahead of time. The second is that they want to keep public pressure on to make the deal as tolerable as possible, and the third is that they don’t need to take a risk in endorsing a deal no matter what it involves.
Some combination of the first and third reasons probably explains what Netanyahu thinks he’s doing, but he and his government may be underestimating the danger of isolating Israel on the one issue where Israel enjoys some broader international sympathy. Rejecting the deal out of hand before it has even been finalized gives the U.S. and European governments little reason to listen to Israeli complaints, since the latter are not going to be realistically satisfied, and that will make them much less sympathetic to any Israeli reaction to the deal.
Drum insists the Israeli PM has a credibility issue:
Netanyahu has made it clear that he’s just flatly opposed to any plausible bargain at all. His idea of a deal is that Iran first destroys its entire nuclear infrastructure and then—maybe—sanctions should be eased or lifted. This is pretty plainly not a deal that any national leader in his right mind would ever accept, and Netanyahu knows it. So he’s essentially saying that no deal should ever be made with Iran. Given an attitude like that, who’s going to take him seriously? Nobody. Add to that an unending string of personal affronts against President Obama, and it’s a credit to Obama’s self-control that he’s still willing to talk to Netanyahu at all.
But Max Fisher warns observers not to underestimate Bibi’s power, arguing that he “might be able to exert real leverage over the Iranian talks at perhaps their most vulnerable point: the U.S. Congress”:
Many lawmakers, particularly but not exclusively Republicans, are beginning to rally around the idea that any sanctions relief would be dangerous and requires their opposition. It doesn’t hurt that appearing tough on Iran is a politically popular position that poses few risks for lawmakers and substantial benefit. Keep in mind that according to public opinion polls, Americans hold highly negative views of Iran. In addition, lawmakers have been denouncing the Obama administration over Middle East policy for years. …
This is where Netanyahu could play a major role, and potentially scuttle any nuclear deal with Iran, should one emerge from Geneva. Sanctions relief will be controversial in Congress, and Republican lawmakers will try to draw as much attention to the issue as possible so as to rally public opposition. What they lack is a public face to put on their campaign. Netanyahu can provide that: He is popular in the United States and has demonstrated a flair for rallying Congress. He’s also not particularly shy about criticizing the diplomatic outreaches with Tehran. If Netanyahu continues arguing against an Iranian deal, and particularly if he does so in a way that’s crafted to resonate in any domestic American debate, he could make the Obama administration’s task in Congress much harder.
Meanwhile, Ian Black considers the view from Iran:
In the Islamic Republic, the key to momentum will be sufficiently tangible economic improvements to build up the popular support Rouhani needs to bolster his position vis-a-vis diehard conservatives and the Revolutionary Guards, imbued with decades of suspicion towards the US, the West and their Arab allies. The continuing confrontation over the war in Syria, where Tehran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah back Bashar al-Assad to the hilt while the Saudis support the Sunni rebels, has been a vivid reminder of Iran’s regional reach and influence. For the moment though, Rouhani appears to enjoy the backing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has urged critics “not to consider our negotiators as compromisers.”
Hardliners there have been quiet, but not silent:
As US Secretary of State John Kerry and other foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) arrive in Geneva in what is being viewed as positive developments in the nuclear negotiations with Iran, most Iranian media have given the latest developments straightforward coverage. Even the most hard-line outlets have not shown a strong reaction to what appears to be the beginning steps of an initial interim deal between Iran and the P5+1.
However, Fars News and Raja News both ran an article by [hardline Iranian analyst Mehdi] Mohammadi titled “Warning about repeating the Reformist experience in the new round of negotiations.” Under Reformist president Mohammad Khatami in 2003, Iran agreed to suspend much of its nuclear activity in an agreement with the EU-3 (Germany, France and Britain). Those negotiations were led by Hassan Rouhani, who was the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council at the time. Iran’s top negotiator today, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, was also part of the 2003 negotiation team. After failing to reach a more permanent arrangement, Iran resumed its nuclear activity in 2005, just before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office. Mohammadi wrote, “The biggest threat in the Geneva negotiations is that we repeat the history of the 2003 to 2005 negotiations.”
Stephen Walt looks ahead:
Which side will win? I don’t know, but I do think this is a winnable fight for Obama if he tries. If the negotiators in Geneva can reach an agreement that 1) avoids war, 2) reduces Iran’s incentive for a bomb, 3) moves them further from the nuclear threshold, and 4) strengthens the already-tough inspections regime, and presents it to the American people as a done deal, I think the public will support it strongly. …
The rest of the P5+1 will be ecstatic (except maybe Russia and China, because they benefit from the United States and Iran being at odds), and they will be making supportive noises as well. Hardline opponents won’t be able to attack the deal without engaging in transparently obvious special pleading, partly on behalf of a country that already has nuclear weapons and hasn’t been all that cooperative lately. Under these circumstances, some of those diehard opponents in Congress might think twice about killing the deal, because their fingerprints would be all over the murder weapon. Indeed, that may be why they are now proposing new sanctions: better to kill the diplomatic process before it produces results than to try to discredit a reasonable deal later on.
Crazy good juggling skills:
The Dish recently noted that “Krokodil, a highly addictive designer drug that aggressively eats through flesh, has reportedly arrived in the United States.” A couple of weeks ago, Victoria Bekiempis found reasons to question those reports:
[M]aybe krokodil is starting to be a thing in North America, but there’s scant information out there yet supporting the popular thesis that its use has already spiraled out of control. Rather, the information available points to a few possible cases in Arizona, Illinois and Utah. (Several notorious krokodil deaths in Oklahoma, which prompted much of this krokodil panic, turned out not to be related to krokodil, authorities said this week.)
Part of the reason krokodil, which first made American headlines in 2011 (but surfaced in the East around 2003), has become such a problem in Russia is that heroin addicts, seeking a cheap and readily available fix, were able to acquire codeine over the counter. (That has since changed, according to published reports. The DEA could not immediately confirm the status of codeine in Russia). Since codeine is not easy to get in the U.S., there’s no easy krokodil-cooking startup culture that would kick-start its spread across North America.
Abby Haglage adds:
The less glamorous but more likely culprit in the Krokodil scare—the one that didn’t make headlines—is a drug that Americans have been snorting, sniffing, and injecting for decades: heroin. The sores are nothing new, either. As widely documented on drug policy sites across the web, intravenous drug users are susceptible to a wide range of deadly infections, including HIV, Hepatitis, B/C, and MRSA—many of which can result in gangrenous skin, deep abscesses, and loss of limbs.
Childhood trauma scars elephants, not just people:
African elephants that have lived through the trauma of a cull – or selected killing of their kin –may look normal enough to the casual observer, but socially they are a mess. That’s the conclusion of a new study, the first to show that human activities can disrupt the social skills of large-brained mammals that live in complex societies for decades. The finding, experts say, has implications for conservation management, which often solely focuses on the number of animals in a population, and may extend to chimpanzees, dolphins, whales, and other species.
Wildlife officials often used culling as a conservation tool in South Africa from the 1960s to the 1990s. (It is still reserved as a management tool there.) At the time, wildlife managers worried that if there were too many elephants in a fenced reserve, like the famed Kruger National Park, the behemoths would ultimately destroy the habitat, eating or trampling all the vegetation and uprooting the trees. During a cull, a helicopter pilot herds an elephant family into a tight bunch. Professional hunters on the ground then shoot the animals as quickly as possible. Only young elephants ranging from about 4 to 10 years old are saved. Park officials typically shipped them to other parks that lacked elephants or had smaller populations to increase the herds, because elephants are popular with tourists.
Scientists have known since the late 1990s that many of these elephants were psychologically affected by their experiences during the culling. Other studies have described these effects as akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. For instance, the orphaned male elephants at Pilanesberg and another reserve made headlines for attacking and killing 107 rhinoceroses over a 10-year period, something that elephants had never been reported to do. … Because the Pilanesberg elephants grew up without the social knowledge of their original families, they will likely never properly respond to social threats and may even pass on their inappropriate behaviors to the next generation, the team concludes in the current issue of Frontiers in Zoology.
(Photo: Elephants at South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park. By Robert Nyman)
Portland, Maine voted this week to legalize marijuana. But Jacob Sullum notes that the ballot measure “merely eliminated local penalties for possession of up to two and and half ounces” and that under “state law, possessing pot in amounts below that cutoff remains a civil violation punishable by fines ranging from $350 to $1,000”:
[I]f Question 1 (which officially takes effect in a month) won’t have much of a practical effect, what was the point? As I suggested last month, the Question 1 campaign was a dry run for statewide legalization efforts in Maine and elsewhere. Its messaging focused on the relative hazards of marijuana and alcohol, with ads featuring respectable-looking pot smokers asking, “Why should I be punished for making the safer choice?” Judging from the large majority the initiative attracted, that message, which also was prominent in Colorado’s successful legalization campaign, resonates with voters.
Mike Riggs made similar points before the measure passed.
A profile of the magazine offers insight into how cannabis culture has changed over four decades:
Danny Danko (senior cultivation editor): Tons of companies are coming in to
advertise. A lot of the vapor-pen companies, a lot of the hydroponics companies that sort of shied away from us years ago because they didn’t want that connection to marijuana, have come around because they’re just not afraid of the stigma anymore. That’s one of the things I think High Times has done a good job of—just removing the stigma of the “lazy stoner.” Instead, we try to show that whether it’s in the entertainment business or sports or wherever, we are everywhere. We are doctors and lawyers; we are throughout society and in every part of it. …
Bobby Black (senior editor): It used to be, back in the day, it was always rock—psychedelic rock in the ’60s and ’70s—that was the music associated with pot. Then hip-hop came out—well, and reggae, of course, because of the Rasta culture—and they embraced pot in a big way. The thing that’s changed now is that I’m noticing pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber really embracing pot. And it’s not that pop stars never smoked weed before; it’s just that now they’re out about it and don’t really care. It’s become so accepted that the new generation is just like, “So what?”
Dan Skye (executive editor): Jennifer Aniston!
I think she would sell, because we know that she smokes pot—we’ve heard about it for years. We tried; we got no response. And Miley Cyrus is great. We did a poll a few months back: “What celebrity would you most like to smoke with?” And she scored higher than Bill Maher, which we thought was really kind of funny.
Bobby Black: When the magazine started, all throughout the ’70s, sex was an integral part of it. We had beautiful women on the cover. We walk a fine line with it, because we don’t want to be exploiting women. On the other hand, those covers were sexy—and there is nothing wrong with sex. I’ve always stressed this: High Times is about hedonism. But it isn’t about irresponsible, over-the-top hedonism—it’s about enjoying everything life has to offer, and sex is part of that.
But the reason we don’t put [former porn star] Jenna Jameson in her bathing suit on the cover anymore is because the sales just weren’t there. Our readers would rather stare at centerfolds of plants—and that’s just the facts we have learned over the years.
Try not to drool at your desk, stoners:
(Image: Cover of the June 1980 issue via High Times)
Ambers lists them. A big one:
Overconfidence, and an overage of self-piety, will lead Christie to insist that certain potential problems are simply not. (There’s no way that, I, Chris Christie, would allow myself to make that mistake.) To admit otherwise is to introduce cognitive dissonance. But as the Romney vet of Christieshowed, there are potentially significant questions about his judgment that will dog Christie until he answers them without being defensive. This blindness will serve Christie poorly when it comes to choosing advisers, too. (Rudy Giuliani had his Bernie Kerik. And what was galling about it was how Giuliani simply could not contemplate the idea that Kerik was not up to snuff. Giuliani, after all, had picked him to be part of his inner circle.)
Bouie wonders how the midterms will impact Christie’s chances:
Insofar that his message of electability has any chance of resonating with Republican primary voters, it will be because they have given up the quest for purity, and are desperate to win. which means that, for Christie, the best thing that could happen is for Republicans to have a terrible 2014. If the GOP continues down its path of extremism, and loses its shot at capturing the Senate as a result, Christie has perfect ground for making his pitch.
Unfortunately for him, the more likely outcome is that Republicans do pretty well. The combination of a sluggish economy and voter discontent will hurt incumbents, which threatens the Democratic majority in the Senate and precludes the party from making real gains in the House. And a GOP base that does well—or even okay—in next year’s midterms is one that doesn’t have much interest in Christie’s message.
Finally, First Read notes that “inevitable” candidates often lose:
[E]mbracing being front-runner — three years out, mind you — has its own risks. After all, at this point in the 2008 cycle, neither of the front-runners (Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani) won their party’s nomination. And the early presidential birds (think John Edwards, Tim Pawlenty) usually don’t get the worm. Just something to chew on.
Seattle, Washington, 8.04 am
The Dish 
