Category: Old Dish

We’ve been told for a very long time that even if you’re HIV-positive, you can still get infected by other strains of HIV and get what is called “super-infection” with a less manageable form of HIV. No one ever provided much hard evidence for this and studies were few and far between. But we now have a new study, the best so far, that essentially debunks the notion of super-infection altogether. It was announced at the Bangkok conference and you can read the abstract here. Bottom line:

In a study of 33 HIV+ couples who engaged in frequent, unprotected sex, researchers at the Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology in San Francisco found no evidence of superinfection, the sequential acquisition of multiple HIV variants.
HIV is a highly mutable virus encompassing two quite different types around the world, HIV-1 and HIV-2. Within those types there are variations known as “subclades” that are typically subdivided further into genetically differentiated strains.
The epidemic in the U.S. consists almost entirely of a single subclade, HIV-1B, while HIV epidemics in other parts of the world involve a mix of subclades. In the study, researchers investigated potential superinfection involving variations within HIV-1B.
In 28 of the 33 couples, each participant was infected with a strain of HIV-1B that was genetically different than that of the person’s partner, and the 28 couples were particularly relevant for these preliminary results.

The study also examined thirty other men who had many sexual partners and unprotected intercourse, and found only one individual had “super-infection,” and he had only recently sero-converted. There may indeed be a window early in infection, when super-infection can occur. But after that … it appears you can’t get reinfected. This is important news for a couple of reasons: first, the HIV-positive men have clearly developed some kind of immune response to new viral strains. Could this be developed into a vaccine? Second, the finding opens up a new possibility for restraining the epidemic. It makes a lot of sense for people with HIV only to have sex with other people with HIV. If neither man can get reinfected, they can also dispense with condoms, a benefit that could encourage them to stay having sex within their own HIV-positive sub-population (or within a monogamous HIV-positive relationship). This has a name: sero-sorting. It’s already happening informally, and may be one reason why, despite lots of anecdotal evidence of more condom-less sex, we haven’t seen huge increases in infection rates. It may be that the pozzies are all having sex with each other. Long may they continue to do so.

It’s hard to see where his extra votes are going to come from.

ANOSMIC DREAMS: More about life without smell.

O’REILLY: He’s against outing people, except when he’s in favor of it.

STANLEY AND THE DUTCH: I’m not going to wade again into the thickets of research on marriage, cohabitation, parenting and so on in Scandinavia and Holland and elsewhere. But I should note that Stanley Kurtz’s latest piece is striking not only because of how modest his claims now are. His latest forumlation is:

Gay marriage is not the only cause of rising out-of-wedlock birthrates. I never said it was and it doesn’t take a demographer to realize that lots of factors contribute to husbandless women having babies.

Round of applause, please. But some important context. Kurtz’s lede – which he portrays as some new consensus view in Holland – is that

a group of five scholars in the Netherlands issued a letter addressed to “parliaments of the world debating the issue of same-sex marriage.” The Netherlands was the first country to adopt full-fledged same-sex marriage, and this letter is the first serious indication of Dutch concern about the consequences of that decision.

Hmmm. My Dutch reader weighs in:

The Reformatorisch Dagblad is of course a small partisan conservative Christian newspaper, there are just 5 university professors who state their opinion (now what would you say if 5 Berkeley scholars would issue a letter “proving” gay marriage is healthy?) and the facts they try to connect are actually uncorrelated. Yes marriage is in decline in the Netherlands as it has been for decades and the bigger part of that happened long before gay marriage was legalized. In fact, there has been some increase in (straight) marriages lately.
The reason why out of wedlock births are on the increase is because it is simply possible to arrange proper contracts for joint parenthood quite easily without marriage in the Netherlands now and quite a few people like it that way. The insinuation that this results in unstable parenting is preposterous.

But Stanley is ghetting more inventive. Here’s the latest gambit:

[T]he meaning of traditional marriage was transformed every bit as much by the decade-long national movement for gay marriage in Holland as by eventual legal success. That’s why the impact of gay marriage on declining Dutch marriage rates and rising out-of-wedlock birthrates begins well before the actual legal changes were instituted.

How convenient. Now, merely campaigning for equal marriage rights weakens marriage. So you can blame the fags for the decline of an institution they have had nothing to do with. A million sighs of relief go up from the social conservatives.

CAKEWALK?? An unusual lapse into political incorrectness at the NYTimes:

All this fumbling has left Mr. Obama, the smooth-talking, Harvard-educated law professor from Chicago, looking like the only candidate in a race that may make him the only African-American in the Senate. Voters who don’t know him yet surely will after the Democratic National Convention, where he will be keynote speaker. But it would be too bad if Mr. Obama cakewalked into Washington. Not just for Mr. Obama, who would take office with an asterisk (“*ran against incompetents”). Illinois voters deserve to see a capable opponent force him to answer tough questions and defend his positions. In other words, they deserve a nonludicrous race.

“Cakewalk,” a reader informs me, has two possible meanings:

1. Something easily accomplished: Winning the race was a cakewalk for her. 2. A 19th-century public entertainment among African Americans in which walkers performing the most accomplished or amusing steps won cakes as prizes. 1. A strutting dance, often performed in minstrel shows. 2. The music for this dance.

You learn something every minute in the blogosphere.

CNN has some sources saying Berger did too stuff his socks.

Bush seems to be changing his tune a little on the campaign trail:

Mr. Bush noted: “The enemy declared war on us. Nobody wants to be the war president. I want to be the peace president. The next four years will be peaceful years.” He repeated the words “peace” or “peaceful” many times, as he has done increasingly in his recent appearances.

How does he know? What if Iran gets a nuke? What if there’s another major terror attack? The president has obviously been worrying about his hard-edged image with women. But he needs to avoid lapsing into incoherence.

BERGER WITH FRIES: Glenn is all over this story. One more question: were they boxers or briefs?

An environmentalist is killed by a tree. Mine, mercifully, is free-standing.

Here’s a strange discrepancy in the NYT’s own account of Sandy Berger’s illegal purloining of classified material from government archives. Here’s one version:

Republicans accused him on Tuesday of stashing the material in his clothing, but Mr. Breuer called that accusation “ridiculous” and politically inspired. He said the documents’ removal was accidental.

Then later on in the piece, we read:

Mr. Breuer, the lawyer, said Mr. Berger inadvertently put three or four versions of the report on the plots in a leather portfolio he had with him. “He had lots of papers, and the memos got caught up in the portfolio,” he said. “It was an accident.”
Mr. Berger also put in his jacket and pants pockets handwritten notes that he had made during his review of the documents, Mr. Breuer said.

So it’s “ridiculous” to assert that he stuffed notes and copies of documents in his clothing, and yet he stashed them in his pants pockets and jacket. Is the critical issue here whether he stuffed them down his underpants or socks? If so, I can’t wait for the fruits of the loom, I mean, inquiry.

WHY? The salient question – and we have yet to have an even faintly plausible answer – is why? What was the purpose of stashing document copies that were allegedly available elsewhere? How could such a thing be “inadvertent”? Why is such an accomplished Washington player unable to come up with a reasonable explanation for such bizarre behavior? The Washington Post reports this morning that

A government official with knowledge of the probe said Berger removed from archives files all five or six drafts of a critique of the government’s response to the millennium terrorism threat, which he said was classified “codeword,” the government’s highest level of document security.

All the drafts? And now they’re missing? Doesn’t that sound like trying to cover your back? And yet the 9/11 Commission has not complained that it lacked any important documents; and the originals are still in the archives. I still don’t get it. My best bet is that Berger was engaging in advance damage control – saving the drafts to help concoct a better defense of his tenure. If so, it’s classic Clinton era sleaze – not exactly terrible but cheesy subordination of national security for partisan political advantage. But at times like this, I sure am glad we have the blogosphere. Can you imagine the mainstream press really pursuing this story alone? Meanwhile, Clinton thinks the possible leaking of classified information is just hilarious. About as hilarious as his anti-terror policy.

FREE THE VIBRATORS: The woman charged in Texas for selling vibrators has now had the charges dropped. One of her crimes was not merely selling the sex toy, but explaining how to use it:

Texas law allows for the sale of sexual toys as long as they are billed as novelties. But when a person markets the items in a direct manner that shows how they are used in sex, it is considered criminal obscenity.

And there you have America’s screwed-up attitude toward sex summed up in two sentences.

I was sorry to hear that Paul Foot, one of Britain’s most dogged journalists, died of a heart attack last Saturday. The Telegraph obit does him justice. His Marxist views were silly when they weren’t fueled with anger and hatred, but he had a keen nose for actual injustice and often sniffed it out. I liked this testament: “There are more people walking the streets of Britain who have been freed from prison by Paul Foot than by any other person.” They were all innocent, of course. And few journalists can claim to have done such tangible good in their lives.

TOWARD CLARITY ON IRAN: Amir Taheri agrees with the Dish that the subject should be front and center in the campaign.

SOMERBY ON WILSON: Bob Somerby’s a major hater of this blog, but he’s often got good things to say and a sometimes extraordinary diligence in rooting out the truth. He’s no fan of Bush’s, to say the least, but he can see through the Joe Wilson carapace of cant:

Let’s compare two important statements-Bush’s famous 16 words, and Wilson’s amazing new admission:

BUSH: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

WILSON: I never claimed to have “debunked” the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.

Finally! This is what we’ve always told you – Wilson had no way of knowing if the 16-word statement was right or wrong. He had no way to debunk it! But throughout his thrilling and best-selling book, he calls this statement a “lie-lie-lie-lie,” over and over and over again. But then, grinding overstatement like that has been the problem with Wilson all along (as the three senators correctly note). And now, alas, Dems will start to pay a price for investing so much in his presentations.

Well, they would if the media were willing to debunk the fraud they so ably hyped. But they won’t, will they?

A strangely moving account of living with no sense of smell. Imagine being susceptible to drinking perfume, or not noticing a gas leak, or having no olefactory sexual instincts. It does have some advantages though:

I will have to soldier on, and draw what comfort I can from a recent exchange with an ex-boyfriend who, as we reminisced about our relationship said wistfully, “You were the best girlfriend in the world. You let me bring curry home from the pub every night and I could fart as much as I liked.” I’m putting it in my next personal ad.

Here’s another site exploring a world without scent. The beagle is incredulous, of course.

MORE MOORE: He doctors a date and misrepresents a newspaper headline.

ON OHIO: Another reader weighs in:

The blog seems to have it partially wrong while the reader letter is partially right. Bush is trying to cut in Kerry’s Catholic base around Cleveland. The problem is that he risks further alienating liberal and moderate Republicans as well as Independents in the Cleveland suburbs. Running an abortion ad is high stakes poker because most campaigns view the risk as greater than the reward. Also the conventional wisdom says that the loser tends to be the one who brings it up. Bush is obviously convinced that his economic message isn’t viable in the area and has therefore resorted to his nuclear daisy-cutter. This is about fear not opportunity. Bush has plenty of wedge issues working against Kerry among traditional Catholics without dropping the a-word.
Another thing to consider is the choice of the medium. 60 Minutes? Why would you broadcast this message to such a wide audience? Granted the audience does tend to skew older, but why run the risk when you can target the message more precisely to a more narror audience and cheaper as well?
Finally the blog does contain one piece of wisdom explaining why. “Because according to Voinovich, the Bush administration has not been doing enough to stop Ohio from “bleeding jobs.” That’s a fairly damning source. Even if the recovery numbers are there, Voinovich clearly doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of the perception.

It’s obviously knife-edge close in Ohio. And that cannot be too encouraging for an incumbent.

Anti-gay crusaders, Brownback and Santorum, will now be given speaking slots at the GOP Convention. More honest. Prime-time? We don’t know yet.

They are still getting the uranium-Africa SOTU reference wrong. After a while, it begins to look pathological.