Category: The Dish

Brian Feldman narrates what went down in Nevada this weekend:

Government officials from the federal Bureau of Land Management attempted to seize cattle from a Nevada farmer over the weekend, arguing that the farmer, Cliven Bundy, owed money to the government for grazing his cattle on public land. On Saturday, the week-long dispute ended with a four-hour standoff between the bureau and nearly 1,000 of Bundy’s supporters, some armed.

The dispute began in 1993, when Bundy’s allotment of land for grazing cattle was altered to include some environmental protections. Bundy did not accept the change and continued to use the land anyway without paying grazing fees. In 1998, a judged order that Bundy remove the cattle and pay trespassing damages—Bundy did not comply. In 2013, a judge authorized the government to impound the approximately 900 cattle, located on the ranch about 80 miles from Las Vegas.

John Hinderaker defends Bundy even though he acknowledges he has no legal grounds for his claim:

To begin with, his family has been ranching on the acres at issue since the late 19th century. They and other settlers were induced to come to Nevada in part by the federal government’s promise that they would be able to graze their cattle on adjacent government-owned land. For many years they did so, with no limitations or fees. The Bundy family was ranching in southern Nevada long before the BLM came into existence. …

The bedrock issue here is that the federal government owns more than 80% of the state of Nevada.

This is true across the western states. To an astonishing degree, those states lack sovereignty over their own territory. Most of the land is federal. And the federal agencies that rule over federal lands have agendas. At every opportunity, it seems, they restrict not only what can be done on federal lands, but on privately-owned property. They are hostile to traditional industries like logging, mining and ranching, and if you have a puddle in your back yard, the EPA will try to regulate it as a navigable waterway.

Kilgore is dismayed at those standing up for the rogue rancher:

Call it “individualism” or “libertarianism” or whatever you want, but those who declare themselves a Republic of One and raise their own flags are in a very literal sense being unpatriotic.

That’s why I’m alarmed by the support in many conservative precincts for the Nevada scofflaws who have been exploiting public lands for private purposes and refuse to pay for the privilege because they choose not to “recognize” the authority of the United States. Totally aside from the double standards involved in expecting kid-glove treatment of one set of lawbreakers as opposed to poorer and perhaps darker criminal suspects, fans of the Bundys are encouraging those who claim a right to wage armed revolutionary war towards their obligations as Americans. It makes me really crazy when such people are described as “superpatriots.” Nothing could be more contrary to the truth.

Matt Ford scrutinizes Bundy’s flawed understanding of state sovereignty:

Bundy’s claim that the land belongs to Nevada or Clark County didn’t hold up in court, nor did his claim of inheriting an ancestral right to use the land that pre-empts the BLM’s role. “We definitely don’t recognize [the BLM director’s] jurisdiction or authority, his arresting power or policing power in any way,” Bundy told his supporters, according to The Guardian.

His personal grievance with federal authority doesn’t stop with the BLM, though. “I believe this is a sovereign state of Nevada,” Bundy said in a radio interview last Thursday. “I abide by all of Nevada state laws. But I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.” Ironically, this position directly contradicts Article 1, Section 2 of the Nevada Constitution[.]

DL Cade flags the above video on Schlieren Flow Visualization, “a photographic trick that allows you to see density changes in air and, therefore, actually capture sound waves on camera”:

Starting off with a simple diagram and heat as an example, producer Adam Cole breaks down how this type of photography works, after which he shows you several examples of actual sound waves captured using a high-speed camera and Schlieren Flow Visualization.

Meanwhile, artist Adam Brown explores the question of what a digital photo “sounds” like in his project “Concentrism.” His process: “take a digital photo, turn it into audio waves, etch them onto a vinyl record, and ‘play’ it back using a USB turntable and a projector”:

For most of us, the point of taking a picture or recording sound is to hold on to something fleeting. And fleeting moments, Brown points out, aren’t relivable without a “carrier” — whether that’s a piece of silver gelatin paper, a vinyl record or a hard drive. There is no lasting message without the medium. So what happens to the message when the medium changes?

Brown doesn’t just want people to think about the transformation process — he wants them to see and hear it. He plays the records, which project the image as they spin, for an audience. Sometimes in galleries, sometimes in lecture halls, the projected images take a few minutes to “play,” slowly appearing line by line as the audio waves are turned back into a photo. …

One of the most unique elements in the performance is the sound that accompanies the image as it plays. Observers are literally “listening to data.” The noise emitted is actually the noise that the image is making as it translates, pixel by pixel, from sound to light. “It’s really a low bass rumble,” Brown says. Apparently, photos sound like white noise.

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The alleged Kansas shooter made no effort to conceal his hatred of Jews:

In a 2010 radio interview, Frazier Glenn Miller, the man suspected of killing three people Sunday at a Jewish community center and a Jewish retirement center in Kansas, said he was interested in the tea party, voiced support for then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and spoke approvingly of Ron Paul, the Texas Republican congressman and presidential candidate. In late April 2010, Miller, a former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon, was a guest on The David Pakman Show, a nationally syndicated left-of-center radio and television program. At the time, Miller was running for US Senate as an independent in his home state of Missouri with the slogan “It’s the Jews, Stupid,” and Pakman pressed Miller on his extreme views.

During the interview, Miller was unabashed about his anti-Semitic positions. When asked whether he thought the United States would be better off if Hitler had succeeded, Miller responded, “Absolutely, the whole world would…Hitler would have created a paradise on Earth, particularly for white people. But he would have been fair to other people as well.” He added, “Germans are blamed collectively because of the alleged so-called Holocaust.”

His views on gays were equally charming:

Miller regularly railed against the LGBT community. He told one interviewer that he sought “the creation of an all-white nation within the one million square miles of mother Dixie. We have no hope for Jew York City or San Fran-sissy-co and other areas that are dominated by Jews, perverts, and communists and non-white minorities and rectum-loving queers.”

In another interview, Miller was asked if he was “gay-friendly.” Wrong question, he told the interviewer. “If you think about what homosexuals do, if that doesn’t make you sick, you’re just as sick as they are,” Miller replied.

Mark Guarino notes that anti-Semitic violence has been on the decline in the US for some time:

The shooting comes at a time when incidents against Jews in the United States are dropping significantly. In a study released earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported a 19 percent decline in 2013 compared with the year before. This continues “a decade-long downward slide and [marks] one of the lowest levels of incidents reported by the Anti-Defamation League since it started keeping records in 1979,” the report says.

“The falling number of incidents targeting Jews is another indication of just how far we have come in finding full acceptance in society, and it is a reflection of how much progress our country has made in shunning bigotry and hatred,” added ADL National Director Abraham Foxman in the report.

But Zack Beauchamp examines the global data, which paints a very different picture:

The most comprehensive data on worldwide anti-Semitism comes from Tel Aviv University. Its Kantor Center for the Study of Modern European Jewry annually tallies official reports of anti-Semitic violence, death threats, and vandalism, which it publishes in an annual report. From 1989 to 2012, when the last report was published, the data shows a clear and consistent rise in anti-Semitic violence.

Most of the violence was, unsurprisingly, recorded in places with high Jewish populations. Thirty percent of the attacks Kantor recorded in 2012 took place in France, which houses the world’s third-largest Jewish population after Israel and the United States. Europe also has large Muslim immigrant populations, many of whom are poor and socially isolated. This “globalization of populations,” according to Ohio State sociologist William Brustein, explains the recent upsurge in European anti-Semitic violence.

When asked about the risks of Truvada, Dave Cullen answered in three quick parts: healthcare costs (discussed by readers here), side effects, and people not taking the drug consistently:

A New Yorker piece backs up Cullen on the side effects:

Taking Truvada to prevent H.I.V. comes with very few risks. In the N.I.H. study, one in two hundred people had to temporarily go off the pill owing to kidney issues, but even those people were able to resume treatment after a couple of weeks. While bone-density loss occasionally occurs in Truvada takers who are already infected with the virus, no significant bone issues have emerged in the PrEP studies. And though about one in ten PrEP takers suffer from nausea at the onset of treatment, it usually dissipates after a couple of weeks. According to the U.N. panel’s Karim, Truvada’s side-effects profile is “terrific,” and Grant said that common daily medications like aspirin and birth control, as well as drugs to control blood pressure and cholesterol, are all arguably more toxic than Truvada.

A reader is still worried about the indirect risks of PrEP:

I’m sympathetic to your position; I will probably take Truvada when I’m at Bear Pride in Chicago. I plan on using condoms anyway, but … you know. Alcohol and all that. Sometimes you don’t pay attention.

But for the record, I do think the points that those concerned about Truvada raise regarding substituting it for a general sexual health strategy are reasonable in some ways. Case-in-point: gonorrhea. I can tell you right now, I am much, much more afraid of drug-resistant gonorrhea than I am of HIV.

Another asks:

One criticism I’ve read of Truvada is that if lots of gay men start taking it, but even a small subset of them do not take it as directed, i.e. once a day, that it could lead to different resistant strains and a strengthening of the virus? Is that at all true?

Not really, as Rich Juzwiak recently reported:

[Jim Pickett, the director of advocacy for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago] told me he believes drug resistance is “something to be watchful for,” but not a huge concern of his for a few reasons.

One is that resistance is common in the world of HIV medications. He said he’s HIV positive himself, and has been on various meds since 1997, building up resistance to “a whole bunch of drugs over the years.” And because maintaining a Truvada prescription requires a comprehensive HIV test every three months, Pickett suggested that there would be opportunity to keep a mutant strain of the virus contained:

And if you were going in for your refill and it was found out that you were actually positive, they could immediately determine what kind of strain of HIV you have. If it has any kind of genetic alterations due to it being exposed to a certain drug, suboptimal levels of drug, that could be determined. It could also be determined that you don’t have any drug in your system. And if you don’t have drug in your system, you can’t be resistant.

You also can’t be resistant if you don’t become HIV positive. People get confused about that a little bit, like the drug itself can create resistance. Well, the drug has to be at suboptimal levels and come into contact with HIV. If you don’t come into contact with HIV, no resistance. If you come into contact with HIV and you don’t have any drug in your system, no resistance. It’s just that suboptimal part. But it’s a harder thing to happen than I think people think about.

Another reader notes an obvious way to lower such risks:

I wish the discussion would remember that many gay guys – I think I once heard Dan Savage say as many as 30 percent – spend their entire lives without having anal sex, and that a lot are also in situations where they’re already at extremely low risk of contracting HIV, such as men who aren’t as active sexually or prefer practices that don’t involve intercourse. While the current safe sex rhetoric is obsessed around condoms, it is so because it is also obsessed around equating male homosexuality with anal intercourse, and sexual expression shouldn’t just be about one act.

Another risk-averse reader wrings his hands:

I’m a 38-year-old gay man, young enough that none of my friends died of AIDS but old enough that I have spent virtually my entire conscious life worrying that I would die from it. I’m a rarity: a fully condom-compliant gay man. I’ve never had difficulty using them and have never had sex without them, except with my husband.

Plus, I’ve always tried to avoid having sex with guys who don’t use condoms regularly for casual sex. Avoiding barebackers is a rule that has served me well; I’ve never had an STD, despite a huge number of partners.

PrEP – while undeniably a good thing – is very disorienting. Do I avoid barebackers who use PrEP? Just continue using condoms with them? Start taking PreP myself and forgo condoms altogether? What a wonderful, frightening thought that is.

I know I should be celebrating. Instead I’m still worrying … about a new set of issues.

Those two adjectives – “wonderful” and “frightening” – say it all. Fear is a terribly difficult thing to leave behind, especially when you have lived your entire life in its shadow.