Month: August 2014

How Sexually Fluid Are Women Really? Ctd

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

More readers have reacted to my post on the great, cascading river that female sexuality is, or isn’t, as the case may be. One makes the fine point that, even if bachelorhood goes unremarked in some locales, that’s not always the case:

I have to dissent. Since the stigma against being gay is more intense for men, I suspect there are still more gay men who are covering it up by getting into relationships with women. Especially in small towns across America.

This same reader goes on to agree with Savage that the problem is monogamy:

I don’t dispute your point about women having far more pressure to project desirability and to pair up; but as for the woman in Dan’s podcast, isn’t it just as likely that she’s simply bored of monogamous straight sex with this particular guy? Maybe she’s thinking of women 90 percent of the time because every instance of bland sex with her boyfriend reminds her that there’s another kind of experience she’s depriving herself of.

I can’t listen to the podcast, since I’m at work, but I’m assuming the boyfriend knew she was bi when they started dating? If so, then the boyfriend knows there’s a dimension of her sexual appetite he is utterly powerless to satisfy. I’d be curious to know how bisexuals get around this issue. Because while the boyfriend sounds selfish, he has reason to fear that his girlfriend’s sex with another woman will develop into much more than that. On the other hand, if he gives the affair his blessing, then would it be fair for him to expect to indulge based on his attraction to a physical trait he desires but his girlfriend lacks?

Of course, these are the absurdities that come with our society’s imposing sexual monogamy on creatures who don’t really want it. As more of us straights talk candidly with gay men who are in open relationships that last, you’ll see polygamy go mainstream. In 50 years, there will be a Mad Men-type show set in the early aughts, and the next generation will mock us for being Puritans. (Also, for being fat and haphazardly destroying the planet, but that’s an email for another day.)

Another reader thinks that not just bisexual women but straight ones, too, feel the occasional or more-than-occasional tingle for a woman:

You wrote, “Savage, in his response, likens her persistent desire to be with women to kinks and fetishes people try to repress over the years (he mentions foot fetishes), and it’s like, gah, this woman is a lesbian!”

Nope. She’s not.

I came out as bisexual in my late teens because hey, most of the time (maybe not 90%, but definitely more than 50%) I fantasized about women. But then, at university, I tried dating some girls, and the reality was way different from the fantasy. Not my thing at all. This wasn’t a fear of the social consequences of not being straight; I had already come out to all my friends. This was me being faced with the reality that vaginas, in person, are not my thing. I’ve been married to a guy for a few years now, and my fantasies haven’t changed, but my in-person sexual preference is definitely for penises. I bet this is not uncommon among straight women.

I’m still waiting to feel something other than envy when I see pictures of Natalia Vodianova, but who knows, that day may come! And I’ll leave it to the trans activists (not the bisexual activists this time) to offer up the obvious suggestion for where someone might turn if they’re into women but not vaginas. Or, I’ll save them the trouble: Not all women have vaginas.

Yet another reader dissents, and might have something to contribute to a certain hit TV show:

I’m following your thread on female sexual fluidity with interest for I was a Federal female inmate for over 11 years and believe me, it is real.

In my experience, well over half of the general prison population and probably more than 75% of long-timers, paired off – got girl friends. (Sex outside of a relationship happened but wasn’t the norm.) These pairings were not merely high school-type, best-friend stuff. A few, due to religious scruple or fear of breaking rules were chaste, albeit with lot of smooching. Most were sexual … or as sexual as was possible in an overcrowded institution where caught-in-the-act meant weeks in the hole.

From what I could gather, most of the women did not think of themselves as lesbian or even particularly bisexual. Many were not sufficiently sophisticated to know what they were but if they’d had to select, most would have probably chosen “straight.” Often they maintained relationships with lovers or husbands on the streets and I would watch at mail call as an ardently committed couple swooned over pics of each other’s boyfriends. Now that’s pretty fluid. So I’m here to profess that, lock us up at least, and we’re a sexually fluid gender.Behind the walls we even gave it a name. We called it being “gay for the stay.”

The real question is, what does Natasha Lyonne think about all this? But the relevant question here, which is probably answerable, is how this compares with what goes on in men’s prisons. A lack of opposite-sex options has been known to cause a kind of fluidity in both sexes, but I’m not sure what that says about life in the coed world at large.

And then there’s a reader who agrees with me, and who shares the following anecdote:

I have a female friend who was with her boyfriend exclusively since high school.  She thought sex with her boyfriend was OK.  No complaints.  Then one night when she was in her late 20s, she had an extremely vivid sexual dream involving a female celebrity and everything changed.  Up to that point, she had never even considered sex with a woman, now she had become obsessed with it. Luckily, her boyfriend was very supportive and helped her explore these thoughts (and not in a creepy way) by renting lesbian movies, reading books about lesbian sexuality, going to group discussions at the local LGBT Center about questioning your sexuality, etc…

It took over a year, but she was eventually sure that she was a lesbian even though she hadn’t actually been with a woman sexually (or even kissed a woman) up to that point.  So she and her boyfriend officially split (they remained very close friends) and she started going on dates with women she met online or through events at the LGBT Center.  She eventually met a woman through some mutual friends, fell in love, and went to Vermont to get a civil union. They’re still happily together today.  They went back to Vermont on their 10-year anniversary and got married.

I’ve talked with her at length about the whole crazy roller coaster ride.  She says that she never even considered that being gay was an option when she was growing up. Never crossed her mind.  You don’t really know what other people are feeling or what’s normal.  It’s kind of like being a kid who is nearsighted and not knowing that you need glasses.  You just assume that things are blurry because they’re far away and that everyone else is seeing the same thing.

So, in at least once case, a woman who identified as straight stopped over at bi before arriving at lesbian. Doesn’t mean all bisexual women will do so.

And finally, a reader gets at the essential:

I think that the “female fluidity” thing is a male fantasy superimposed on flimsy evidence just because, as I said earlier, men think they know it all. They know how to be men and they know how to be women too. And yeah, Dan is gay but that doesn’t make him immune to the socialization and stereotypes. Males are taught to believe a lot of nonsense about women. Just as we are taught to believe nonsense about them.

Ultimately, I’m not particularly concerned with how sexually fluid the typical woman turns out to be, and am far more interested in the reasons we keep hearing the ‘women are sexually fluid’ refrain. It is, as this reader notes, partly about how neatly this matches up with something many straight men have long hoped to hear: A threesome’s in the cards, not for me, oh, no, she’s the one who wants it! Not, of course, that that’s what it actually means for a woman to be bisexual, or sexually fluid, but it does help explain why there’s such a receptive audience for every scrap of evidence that this is just how women are wired.

But the bigger issue, for me, is that ‘women are sexually fluid’ is used as a way to affirm what many already believe about female sexuality of all stripes: That it’s basically nonexistent. That women care about relationships, but don’t experience intense physical desire. The way it’s often framed, this allegedly fluid female sexuality isn’t so much about lusting after men and women at various points in one’s life or one’s afternoon, but rather, about women never lusting after anyone, and thus being equally content with a male or female best friend.

Is Russia About To Invade Ukraine? Ctd

by Dish Staff

As Ukrainian forces surround Donetsk and prepare for what they say is a final advance on the separatist stronghold, NATO has reiterated its warning that a Russian invasion is likely:

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said there was no sign Russia had withdrawn the troops it had massed at the Ukrainian frontier. Asked in a Reuters interview how he rated the chances of Russian military intervention, Rasmussen said: “There is a high probability.”

“We see the Russians developing the narrative and the pretext for such an operation under the guise of a humanitarian operation, and we see a military build-up that could be used to conduct such illegal military operations in Ukraine,” he said.

Jeremy Bender observes that if Russia decides to invade, it is prepared to do so on multiple fronts:

According to The Interpreter, there has been a sharp increase in Russian troop movements in Belarus. Belarus borders Ukraine to the north, and the border crossing between the two countries is located less than 150 miles from Kiev. Belarus and Russia share close relations. Russia maintains military bases in the country, and Russia recently announced plans to build an airbase in the west of Belarus.  A YouTube video, thought to have been taken today in the Belarusian city of Vitebsky, shows a large number of Russian troops and equipment. The city is located approximately eight hours due north of Ukraine.

A second YouTube video, shot on August 10, depicts another large armored convoy in Novoshakhtinsk, by the Rostov region of Russia. This convoy is less than 20 miles from the Ukrainian border, and it is less than 150 miles to either of the separatist-held cities of Luhansk or Donetsk. Simultaneously, a Russian aid convoy is set to enter Ukraine in the north east through the city of Kharkhiv, according to a document translated by The Interpreter. The convoy is said to contain humanitarian cargo for the east of Ukraine and it will fly under the signal of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) once it passes into Ukrainian territory.

But Ukrainian authorities now say they won’t let the aid convoy cross the border:

Russian news agencies reported that hundreds of white trucks were being packed with supplies and sent to the eastern Ukraine border, but a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Andriy Lysenko, said Ukraine would not allow the trucks to cross into the country because the aid was not certified by the Red Cross. “This convoy is not a certified convoy. It is not certified by the International Committee of the Red Cross,” Lysenko said, according to the Associated Press. Another Ukraine presidential aide, Valery Chaly, told reporters that the supplies would be loaded onto other transport vehicles before they crossed into Ukraine territory held by separatists, Reuters reported.

Ed Morrissey worries that things are on the verge of getting out of control:

The convoy doesn’t even have to include military supplies to produce the kind of provocation Putin has clearly desired for months. They can set themselves up as “observers” once inside Ukraine and block Kyiv from further military action against the rebels. If the Ukrainian military does proceed, then Putin can send in his troops in order to protect his “humanitarian” mission. Whatever happens, it’s going to happen quickly. The West had better be prepared to shut Russia down economically when it does — and it would be best to “telegraph” that intention to Putin now, as the WaPo’s editors advise, in order to avoid the situation altogether. If Putin wants to donate aid, let him work through the Red Cross. Anything else is a thinly-veiled provocation for a European war that only the Russian media would miss.

Paul Huard flagged another troubling sign late last week:

“The probability of invasion is much, much higher than it has ever been,” James Miller, managing editor of The Interpreter, told War is Boring in an e-mail. The Interpreter translates media from the Russian press and blogosphere into English for use by analysts and policymakers. The Russians reportedly have moved military vehicles with “peacekeeping” insignia to the border—a first since the crisis in the Ukraine began. Earlier this month, NATO warned that the Russians could mount an incursion into Ukrainian territory under the guise of a peacekeeping mission. The Interpreter reports that it has found several pictures and a video showing Russian armored vehicles bearing the insignia “MC,” an abbreviation of the Russian words mirotvorcheskiye sily or “peacekeeping force.”

Meanwhile, Josh Kovensky highlights Putin’s ever loopier propaganda, featuring Mickey Rourke and Steven Seagal:

Russians saw a familiar face on television last night, when Seagal appeared at a show in honor of the “reunification of Crimea with Russia.” Seagal did not appear alone; a Russian-nationalist motorcycle gang called the Night Wolves accompanied him. At the show, the bikers reenacted Russia’s version of the past eight months of Ukrainian history. An idyllic Slavic scene is interrupted by marching Ukrainian Nazis, whose swastika formation bizarrely matches that of “Springtime for Hitler.” The swastika-shaped Ukrainian Nazi junta is controlled by a pair of massive hands emblazoned with symbols of the U.S., holding huge cigars.

The Nazi-Ukrainians go on a reign of terror until a bunch of Russians with AK-47s show up, duking it out with the Kievan Fourth Reich until the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics solidify, with many evil Ukrainian-Nazi-Fascist-Junta members set on fire in the process. At the end of the show, a massive Mother Russia statue appears along with the Soviet national anthem, heralding the reunification of Crimea with Russia.

The Mom Behind National Sex Offender Registries Wants To Scale Them Back

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Slate is running a series of articles this week on why and how U.S. sex offender registries have become the beast that they have. Writers Matt Mellema, Chanakya Sethi, and Jane Shim – all students at Yale Law School – kicked things off Monday by talking to Patty Wetterling, the woman largely responsible for the sex-offender registry’s national creep.

In 1989, Wetterling’s 11-year-old son Jacob was kidnapped on his way home from a convenience store with his brother and friend; he was never found, and his abductor’s identity remains unknown. At the time his kidnapping, only a few states had sex-offender registries, and Wetterling came to see this as a big problem. She pushed for her home state of Minnesota and all states to adopt them. And voila: the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act of 1994.

“But the world has changed since then,” Wetterling told Slate:

What’s changed, Wetterling says, is what science can tell us about the nature of sex offenders.

The logic behind the past push for registries rested on what seem like common sense assumptions. Among the most prominent were, first, sex offenders were believed to be at a high risk for reoffending—once a sex offender, always a sex offender. Second, it was thought that sex offenses against children were commonly committed by strangers. Taken together, the point was that if the police had a list, and the public could access it, children would be safer.

The problem, however, is that a mass of empirical research conducted since the passage of Jacob’s Law has cast increasing doubt on all of those premises.

Sex offense recidivism rates have actually been shown to be lower than for most other crimes. And in 93 percent of cases with child victims, the offender was not some untraceable stranger but someone known to the victim.

Some states are starting to come around. In California, one of the first states to enact a sex offender registry (in 1947!), the board that manages it is calling for reforms. In a 2014 report, the California Sex Offender Management Board (CSOMB) argues that not only does it unduly burden registrants in its current, expansive state, it is also less effective than a much less robust registry would be:

California’s system of lifetime registration for all convicted sex offenders has created a registry that is very large and that includes many individuals who do not necessarily pose a risk to the community. The consequences of these realities are that the registry has, in some ways, become counterproductive to improving public safety. When everyone is viewed as posing a significant risk, the ability for law enforcement and the community to differentiate between who is truly high risk and more likely to reoffend becomes impossible.

The board also notes the extraordinary cost of running the current registry. Far from taking money away from fighting sex crimes, reigning in the registry a bit would allow more resources for tracking high-risk offenders and developing other ways of protecting communities, it says. CSOMB concludes with advice that would be wise to heed way beyond California:

If the current registration system was effective in the ways intended, these might be considered part of the price to pay for the greater good. But, since the current registry does not attain its intended purposes, many of these unintended consequences are without justification.

Today at Slate, Sethi maps out which states force people to register as sex offenders for things like public urination, consensual teen sex, and prostitution. Free Range Kids blogger Lenore Skenazy recently highlighted how “any registering snafu” once you’re on the list – including notifying the state of an address change a week after the move instead of the week before – can result in an extended registry period or renewed time in jail. In Texas, the administrative error comes with a mandatory minimum of two to five years.

Obama’s Imperial Presidency? Ctd

by Dish Staff

Last week, Douthat provoked a conversation about Obama potentially legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants with an executive order. Chait is uncomfortable with Obama’s plan:

I fully support Obama’s immigration policy goals. But the defenses of Obama’s methods seem weak and short-sighted. To imagine how this method might be dangerous, you have to abstract it away from the specific end it advances and consider another administration using similar methods for policies liberals might not like. What if a Republican president announced that he would stop enforcing the payment of estate taxes? Or suspend enforcement of regulations on industrial pollution? Or laws on workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians? …

The Linzian nightmare that seized many liberals last year is a vision of a political system in which neither the president nor the Congress can share power, and neither recognizes the other’s legitimacy. The extremism of the Republican Party may have precipitated Obama’s confidence in unilateralism. To think that the cycle will end here, and that a future president won’t claim more expansive and disturbing powers to selectively enforce the law, requires an optimism not borne out by history. In the short run, we will rejoice in the sudden deliverance of massive humanitarian relief to people who have done nothing more than try to create a better life for their families. In the long run, we may look back on it with regret.

But Jonathan Cohn doesn’t worry much about Obama’s potential executive actions because a Republican president could reverse them:

I totally get the underlying concern here. The limits of presidential power matter and smart, reasonable people can disagree about what they should be. But here’s one fact to remember: Any action Obama takes will, by definition, lack the permanence of legislation. President Ted Cruz could undo it on January 20, 2017. He might not want to do that, for all sorts of political and practical reasons. But he or any other Obama successor would have the same kind of unilateral authority to act that Obama does. And reversing an executive order is a heck of a lot easier than trying to undo legislation—which, after all, requires new legislation, which in turn means pushing a new bill through both houses of Congress and getting a presidential signature.

On the legal merits, Eric Posner continues to insist that Obama can act to halt deportations:

When government agencies decide which types of corporate or tax fraud to investigate, and which types to ignore, they exercise executive discretion, as they do when they decide whether to shut down an undercapitalized bank or a restaurant that has served food that gives someone a stomachache. This is why a crusading prosecutor, like New York’s Eliot Spitzer in his time, can decide to crack down on a type of conduct—insider trading, accounting fraud, whatever—that had previously been winked at. We live surrounded by “domestic Caesars.”

All of this goes double for immigration law. The president’s authority over this arena is even greater than his authority over other areas of the law. For decades, presidents of both parties have deferred legal action against millions of people who entered the country unlawfully. As the immigration law experts Adam Cox of New York University School of Law and Cristina Rodriguez of Yale Law School have described in a paper, this has been going on at least since the 1940s.

Steinglass sees the “threat to the rule of law here comes mainly from America’s unrealistic immigration policies”:

The country is a very rich, well-governed country that shares a 3,000-kilometre-long border with a much poorer, badly governed one, which in turn borders countries that are poorer still. Until Central America becomes stable and prosperous, it will continue to send millions of emigrants to the US. Current immigration quotas, which date from 1990, limit each country to no more than 7% of the total of 700,000 legal immigrant visas each year; in principle, Mexico is treated the same as Switzerland. Enforcing this skewed system requires America to constantly raise the already large sums it spends on patrolling the Mexican border; in 2012 America spent $11.7 billion on border security. Fully sealing the border could cost $28 billion per year. The American public (let alone the Republican party) has shown no willingness to appropriate that much money. Deportations rose from 70,000 in 1996 to 419,000 in 2012, with the Obama administration deporting as many people in its first five years as the Bush administration did in eight. Yet this has made no dent in the total population of undocumented immigrants. And the current level of deportation seems to be politically unsustainable. Latino constituents are increasingly fed up.

He goes on to argue that “Republican inability to articulate any coherent immigration policy other than “deport them all” amounts to a preference for fantasy over reality, rather than engaging in the messy job of making policy for the real world.” But Reihan thinks Congressional gridlock is good, in that it serves as a check on government actions that lack public support:

The House of Representatives was designed to be the part of Congress that is most responsive to popular opinion. It’s not at all obvious that members of the House are failing in their constitutional obligations when they are resisting a legislative proposal—even one backed by every significant business lobby under the sun, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and other enlightened billionaires—that increases immigration levels when doing so is extremely unpopular.

However, Yglesias points out that by obstructing action on this and other issues, the House GOP ends up with less favorable outcomes:

Regardless of your views on what should happen with the unauthorized population, a compromise is strictly preferable to letting immigration authorities flail away at the situation just as a compromise was strictly preferable to letting the EPA handle climate change without congressional input.

Yet at this point, blindly choosing the worse outcome over the better one has become such an ingrained habit for the ideological right that it barely seems to have been considered. Instead, immigration restrictionists waged a vigorous intra-party war against the supporters of comprehensive immigration reform. They sought to prevent a sell-out, and did so utterly without regard to whether blocking comprehensive reform would actually lead to an outcome they prefer.

Kurdistan’s Sticky Situation

by Jonah Shepp

iraq_oil_map

Oil may not be the be-all, end-all of the Iraq conflict, but it does play its part. Brad Plumer examines the oil politics of Iraqi Kurdistan and what’s at stake in the fight against ISIS:

By June of this year, Iraqi Kurdistan was producing 360,000 barrels per day — about 10 percent of Iraq’s production (and about 0.5 percent of the world’s supply). And much more was expected. In a 2009 State Department cable leaked by Wikileaks, one foreign firm said Kurdistan “has the potential to be a world-class hydrocarbon region.” Yet ISIS posed a (partial) threat to that boom when they showed up on the outskirts of Erbil, a city of 1.5 million that is hosting many of the oil and gas firms in the Kurdish region. On August 8, Reuters reported that some 5,000 barrels per day had gone offline in Kurdistan as a result of the fighting. Various oil firms, including Chevron, said they would withdraw some non-essential personnel from the region.

So far, the disruptions have been relatively minor, particularly since the US has launched airstrikes against ISIS that allowed the Kurdish military to retake a number of towns. The Kurdish regional government now insists that “oil production in the region remains unaffected.” ISIS, for its part, clearly has an interest in seizing oil fields. The group reportedly controls seven oil fields and two refineries in northern Iraq, as well as a portion of a pipeline running from Kirkuk to the port city of Ceyhan in Turkey. Reports have suggested that ISIS is now selling some 10,000 barrels of oil per day to fund its activities.

So it would make sense that, in an effort to help the Kurds defend themselves, the US might have some concern for an industry that serves as a major driver of development in Kurdistan. But Steve LeVine pushes back against those who believe the American intervention is primarily about protecting that industry. He sees two problems with their argument:

The first is that the Obama administration has steadfastly discouraged ExxonMobil, Chevron and the other companies from working in Kurdistan.

Until recently, it sought to sabotage the region’s efforts to export its oil. The White House’s rationale has been that, to the degree Kurdistan gains de facto financial independence from Baghdad, the less likely that Iraq will hold together as a country. On Twitter, Middle East energy expert Robin Mills has been among those pushing against the it’s-about-oil theory. A second problem is Obama himself—he is fixated on renewable energy and opposed to oil. When he has embraced oil, such as shale, Obama has done so reluctantly and often in order to placate the fossil fuels industry and its advocates. There may be rational speculation surrounding the role of oil in former George W. Bush’s original assault on Iraq, but there is little likelihood that it featured on Obama’s list of reasons to bomb ISIL.

Yishai Schwartz agrees that the all-about-oil argument, though “seductive”, is also reductive:

It seems likely that the decades of U.S. involvement and the vast web of American relationships in the region—both of which have a great deal to do with oil—play a role in making Americans more viscerally concerned with the region and its people. In that sense, our humanitarian impulse in this conflict is quite likely connected to oil, albeit in a distant and complex way. But that is a long chain and a nuanced argument, to which the “Obama is worried about the world’s oil supply” thesis bears very little resemblance. So where does this conviction come from? Perhaps it’s cynicism borne of past experience: Oil has played a major role in Western interventions in the Middle East, often with disastrous results. But we shouldn’t assume that every statesman is Henry Kissinger or every action is a new Suez operation. The colonialist paradigm is a useful lens for historians, but when it becomes an ideological commitment for the political commenter, it’s simply another set of blinders.

Schwartz gets it exactly right here. Nobody doubts that petroleum, its ubiquity in the modern economy, and our dependence on it factor heavily into American foreign policy; it is, after all, the only reason we’ve been allied for 70 years with the Saudis, a regime whose values, interests, and activities contradict our own at every turn. It’s right and necessary to acknowledge how damaging petro-politics can be and to worry about our government being beholden to the whims of despotic rentier states. I’m not a huge Thomas Friedman fan, but he’s right to harp on this point as he has done periodically for years.

But the presence of oil interests in Iraq does not ipso facto preclude the possibility that American policy there might also be guided by something else. I used to buy into the theory that the 2003 Iraq invasion was about oil, and as LeVine mentions, it was likely part of the equation, but then so were the domestic politics of the War on Terror and a settling of scores between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein. A conspiracy-minded focus on any of these drivers obscures the key fact that the war was driven by an ideology – the neoconservative theory that democracy can be exported by force – that is dangerous in and of itself and whose promulgators have yet to exit the public sphere despite having been pretty conclusively proven wrong. So by all means, let’s talk about the oil, but let’s not mislead ourselves that it’s all about oil.

Water, on the other hand, might really be what it’s all about:

Mosul is not the only dam for which IS has fought. After taking large parts of Iraq in a campaign that started in Mosul, the country’s second largest city, in June, on August 1st IS battled to take control of Haditha dam on the Euphrates in the eastern province of al-Anbar. The fighters were repelled by Iraqi troops and Sunni tribes, but reports suggest the offensive continues.

IS may want to control these resources in order to bolster its claim to run a state. But it may have additional motives. Baghdad and southern Iraq rely on water being released from these dams. So IS could cut off the water, limiting flows to Baghdad and the south or, conversely, release large amounts that could cause floods (although this would also flood areas controlled by IS, including Mosul city, south of the dam). Any change in water flows would also affect the availability of food, because Iraq is heavily dependent on irrigation to grow wheat, barley, rice, corn and fruit and vegetables.

I’m at a loss for why people aren’t freaking out about this a whole lot more.

Who’s Really Making Marijuana Users ‘Lab Rats’?

by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

The state of Colorado has just launched an asinine campaign to keep kids off marijuana. The initiative’s first tack, unveiled Monday, involves a cadre of nine-foot-tall rat cages staged around Denver, “with messages communicating the potential damage marijuana has on a teen’s brain and the notion that Colorado’s youth are the test subjects for continued observation,” according to a press release.

The “Don’t Be a Lab Rat” campaign will also feature television commercials (example above) and a website with warnings like the following:

Is Mother Nature’s miracle plant as harmless as most teens think? Maybe not. In fact, many early studies have shown the exact opposite. Scientists from Duke to Cambridge have uncovered a laundry list of troubling side effects.

Schizophrenia. Permanent IQ loss. Stunted brain growth.

Still, some people question this research. Claiming the studies need to go deeper. Look further. But who will be their guinea pigs?

Who’s going to risk their brains to find out once and for all what marijuana really does?

Don’t be a lab rat.

Marijuana Policy Project communications director Mason Tvert obviously disapproves of the ads. He told CBS Denver:

You don’t have to say, ‘You’re going to become a lab rat and it’s going to destroy you.’ This is the same type of fear-mongering that’s failed to prevent teen marijuana use for decades.

Seeing as many teens know older adults (possibly even their parents) who smoked pot as young adults and didn’t become developmentally-stunted schizophrenics, the warnings probably won’t ring too true. But the thing is, anyone who uses marijuana – medically or recreationally – is essentially a “lab rat” right now.

We don’t have a ton of research on how marijuana affects teen brains, glaucoma patients, veterans with PTSD, or anyone else. And there is precisely one reason we do not: because of federal drug policy.

American doctors and scientists have been clamoring to study marijuana’s health benefits and risks more closely. Yet the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 controlled substance with “no accepted medical use,” which makes it incredibly hard for researchers to study it. (Other Schedule 1 drugs – including LSD and Ecstasy – also face regulatory hurdles that limit their medical potential, though studying these drugs is slightly less difficult than studying weed.) Among other things, would-be marijuana researchers must get special dispensation from multiple federal agencies and buy their supply from a federal grow facility that’s perpetually understocked. The New York Times recently detailed the hoops these researchers must jump through:

To obtain the drug legally, researchers … must apply to the Food and Drug Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse — which, citing a 1961 treaty obligation, administers the only legal source of the drug for federally sanctioned research, at the University of Mississippi. … The process is so cumbersome that a growing number of elected state officials, medical experts and members of Congress have started calling for loosening the restrictions. In June, a letter signed by 30 members of Congress, including four Republicans, called the extra scrutiny of marijuana projects “unnecessary,” saying that research “has often been hampered by federal barriers.”

(…) Despite the mounting push, there is little evidence that either Congress or the Obama administration will change marijuana’s status soon. In public statements, D.E.A. officials have made their displeasure known about states’ legalizing medical and recreational marijuana.

When state governments and anti-drug crusaders warn folks not to be lab rats, let’s remember who’s keeping them that way.

Robin Williams, RIP, Ctd

by Dish Staff

People Leave Tributes To Robin Williams Outside Mork & Mindy House

Megan Garber honors the comedy legend:

[Robin Williams] has been with us—and next to us, and above us—for more than 40 years, not just on the screens of multiplexes, but in our living rooms and in our lives. There’s Good Morning, Vietnam, on Netflix. There’s Mrs. Doubtfire, on TBS. There are those reruns of his stand-up on Comedy Central. There are all those clips on YouTube. …

We refer to our actors—the big ones, at least—as “stars.” We do that mostly because it’s a convenient cliche. But we do it as well because celebrities have a kind of cosmic constancy in our lives. The people we put on our screens—the people we elevate and exaggerate, the people whose likenesses we watch, huddled together in darkened rooms—form their own kind of firmament. Ancient humans used the stars to navigate the world; we ask our own stars to do similar work. We look to them not necessarily to guide us, but to orient us.

What are your thoughts about Mrs. Doubtfire? How funny is the Genie? Do you think that “words and ideas can change the world“? However you answer those questions, they will reveal something about you and your place in the universe.

A bit more down to Earth, Alyssa reflects on Williams’ remarkable range, which “resonated in radically different ways”:

Williams excelled in bring out the strength in characters who initially appeared weak, and in bringing dignity to people mired in hopelessly undignified situations. He also slyly exposed the weakness and selfishness in people who seemed to be strong, even when he was only acting with his voice. As the Genie in Disney’s gorgeous animated movie “Aladdin,” Williams beautifully captured the dilemmas of a being who had access to tremendous power, but had to manipulate other people to get closer to his own heart’s desire. He was critical to making the movie more than kids’ stuff.

Marlow Stern adds:

[Williams] didn’t just play a huge role in the lives of children; he was a malleable, adaptable comedian who could cater to audiences young and old, gay and straight. Take his outré turn as gay Miami nightclub owner Armand Goldman in Mike Nichols’ The Birdcage (a personal favorite), which saw him shift from flamboyant scenery-chewer to composed pseudo-Republican parent at the drop of a hat. Or as Joey, the sleazy, besieged used car salesman in Cadillac Man.

A good glimpse at Robin’s range:

But Damon Linker sees the darker edge of that versatility:

In his manic and maniacal stand-up routines no less than in his greatest dramatic acting, Williams danced on a tightrope over the abyss.

He behaved like a man desperately trying to distract attention from an emptiness within himself. The possibility that he ended his own life leaves me feeling terribly sad. But it also feels somehow fitting, like the confirmation of a half-acknowledged hunch — or the fulfillment of an awful prophesy barely perceived or understood.

On stage Williams could be exhilarating, and exhausting, as he hurtled through a kaleidoscopic array of characters, some impressions of famous people, most of them conjured from the depths of his own slightly deranged and riotous imagination. In well over an hour of frenzied free-association, Williams would careen through the world, making bizarre connections, heaving forth fragments of ideas and clumps of observations from what must have been a tortuous unconscious.

When it was over, I was invariably worn out by laughter — but I also felt slightly unnerved, aware on some level that I’d just been entertained by one man’s utterly distinctive form of self-abuse. It was less a comedy routine than a comedic seizure.

That spectacular energy came from “not just natural genius,” Willa Paskin points out, “but also cocaine, drugs, emotional pain”:

At his best, and also at his worst, there was something uncontrollable about Williams. Even perfectly in control of his body, of his impersonations, of his timing, he seemed powerless—or scared—to stop being a fount of funny, to turn it off. His non-stop energy often had a childlike quality to it—Peter Pan in Hook; an overgrown boy in Jack; even Mork, who like all Orkans aged backwards—but also something more substantial, more dangerous, and more unhinged. … Performers’ deaths, especially the unnatural ones, often color, at least for a little while, their work. Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” is not a song you could listen to the same way after she drank herself to death.

J. Cohn hopes that Williams’ death raises more awareness of depression and the risk of suicide:

Although we’re accustomed to hearing about artists and their hidden “demons,” Williams was such an effervescent, joyous presence that his struggles could put into sharper relief just how life-altering and devastating mental illness can be. If he couldn’t conquer it on his own, who could? The lesson would be one last, great contribution from an artist who made so many already. …

We’ve come a long way since the days when we treated the mentally ill as freaks—covering up and denying their problems, holding them singularly responsible for their conditions, or locking them up far away in institutions. We’ve also learned a great deal about the interaction with addiction—and the extent to which both afflictions can have deep genetic roots or be shaped by experience very early in infancy and childhood. But we still treat it as a second-class disease. It’s evident in the choices we make as a society and, too often, in our actions as individuals. The stigma, though far less potent, lingers.

Comedian Jim Norton can relate:

So many comics I know seem to struggle with the demons of self-hatred and self-destruction. While my physically self-destructive days ended when I got sober, the thought of suicide has always been there, as an option, behind a glass that I could someday break in case of an emergency. I glamorized the idea of constructing my own exit. …

The funniest people I know always seem to be the ones surrounded by darkness. And that’s probably why they’re the funniest. The deeper the pit, the more humor you need to dig yourself out of it.

Read all of our RIP coverage here.

(Photo: A makeshift memorial for Robin Williams is set up in front of a home in Boulder, Colorado on August 11, 2014. The exterior of the house was used in the opening credits for “Mork & Mindy,” the comedy based in Boulder that catapulted Williams’ career. By Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)

Medical Services On Aisle Five

by Dish Staff

McArdle sees the logic of Walmart getting into the healthcare business:

The company is piloting what it hopes will be a broad network of primary-care clinics. The company already has urgent-care clinics in about 100 stores, but the new facilities will provide much broader services such as chronic-disease management that are normally provided at a doctor’s office. And it is doing so at an admirably low cost: A doctor’s visit at one of its primary-care clinics costs just $40, in cash — the only insurance they take is their corporate health plan and Medicare.

This model makes a lot of sense to me.

Doctor’s offices are, as the Affordable Care Act’s designers frequently stressed, remarkably inefficient compared to most of the rest of the economy. There are a lot of efficiencies that can be brought to the market by a big company employing staff physicians and centrally coordinating things such as purchasing and information technology. And what is Wal-Mart very good at? Central coordination of purchasing and IT.

Jonathan Cohn tentatively supports Walmart’s efforts:

Walmart’s famously ruthless approach to cost-cutting has its downsides. It’s easy to imagine the company treating its medical employees badly or, maybe even worse, creating a system of medical care that isn’t very good for patients. But the company also has a chance to be innovative, in ways that could benefit the public. It can make medical care easier to get, simply by providing routine care at more convenient times (like a Sunday afternoon, when your doctor’s office probably isn’t open). Walmart can also use its buying power to bargain for better prices from drug makers and suppliers. As Dan Diamond of the Advisory Board notes, the two South Carolina clinics are in two of the poorest parts of the state—where the need for cheap health care is greatest, particularly since South Carolina hasn’t expanded its Medicaid program.

Not Again, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Dara Lind brings us up to date on yesterday’s developments in the Michael Brown case:

After Sunday night’s unrest, a protest and rally scheduled for 10am Monday morning was canceled, and the mayor of Ferguson has said that anyone who attempted to show up to the rally would be arrested. Regardless, people still turned up at police headquarters to protest. Police officers were there with riot gear. After about two hours, the police succeeded in getting the crowd to disperse and started making arrests.

On Monday night, protests continued. Groups gathered in the street, raising their hands in surrender and chanting “Don’t shoot” – it’s become the unofficial motto of the Ferguson protests. Police also attempted to disperse these protests, moving down W. Florissant, the main street in the neighborhood. This time, they used tear gas and explosives to clear crowds, and fired rubber bullets. One report indicates that police cocked their rifles at protesters. Police told protesters to “go home,” but several residents protested that they were trapped in cul-de-sacs while the main road was closed off. Police also threatened press with arrest if they didn’t leave the scene.

Ed Morrissey is hung up on the weekend’s rioting:

So far, it appears that no one died or got seriously injured during the riot, although that hasn’t been entirely confirmed yet. If so, consider that luck. Riots get very ugly very quickly, and usually include vendettas from old conflicts and new. That was the case in the LA riots of 1992 after the Rodney King verdict, which resulted in 53 deaths, more than two thousand injuries, and 11,000 arrests.

In the end, though, the LA riots did what the Ferguson riot did last night — damage the community that had the grievance in the first place. Riots are about rage and insanity, not justice or accountability, and it drives people away rather than heal, regardless of whether the underlying cause is just or not. It destroys investment, usually in areas which already suffer from a lack of investment in the first place, and mires the area even deeper into poverty and dysfunction. It’s senseless and harms the people that were allegedly victimized in the first place.

But Jia Tolentino is more disturbed by the authorities’ response:

The chief of the St. Louis County Police Force “ask[s] the public to be reasonable” in this difficult time. The police, in the meantime, are dealing with looting and considerable unrest, but all accounts point to them not being reasonable.

Mychal Denzel Smith is frustrated:

Rioting/looting (what some would call rebellion) may not provide answers or justice. But what to do with the anger in the meantime? We are told to stay calm, but calm has not delivered justice either. Do we wait for the FBI to investigate? I guess, but what to do in the meantime, as the images coming from Ferguson echo Watts in 1965? We’re told not to tear up our own communities, when time and time again we’re reminded that they don’t belong to us. Deaths like Michael Brown’s tell us we don’t belong here. What, then?

Counting the bodies is draining. With every black life we lose, we end up saying the same things. We plead for our humanity to be recognized. We pray for the lives of our young people. We remind everyone of our history. And then another black person dies.

Amy Davidson weighs in on the whole sad affair:

Michael Brown was black and tall; was it his body that the police officer thought was dangerous enough? Perhaps it was enough for the officer that he lived on a certain block in a certain neighborhood; shooting down the street, after all, exhibits a certain lack of concern about anyone else who might be walking by. That sort of calculus raises questions about an entire community’s rights. One way or the other, this happens too often to young men who look like Brown, or like Trayvon Martin, or, as President Obama once put it, like a son he might have had.