Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

I read with great sadness the article you posted about Dr. Torres.  In the summer of 1986, I walked into a dingy office at the New York City health department to report for the first day of my summer internship following my freshman year at Cornell.  They had already given out all the best assignments and I got to pick from the last two that had been passed over by all the other students: work in the NYC morgue or go down to St. Vincent’s hospital and work on an AIDS project.  Later that day I found myself in Dr. Torres’ office.

The work involved a review of medical records of patients with what was then referred to as "ARC" or AIDS Related Complex.  Looking back now the study seems quite primitive, even foolish, but at the time very few people were doing this work.  I still remember several doctors rolling their eyes when I described the work I was doing with Dr. Torres (he wasn’t quite yet the star he would become a few years later).

As you can imagine Greenwich Village in the summer of 1986 was not a very happy place.  People were very scared.  People were dying at ridiculously young ages.  While Dr. Torres was quite charismatic and always friendly, watching all your patients die had to have been devastating to him and his colleagues.  It still haunts me and I was just an observer.

I fear, perhaps like you, that this will be the legacy left to our troops when they return from Iraq. Dr. Torres times 100,000.

It’s a very encouraging column, and it will always be on the good side of the ledger of the Bush administration: that they gave a damn about people with HIV when they didn’t have to. PEPFAR is still up for renewal, and the repeal of the ban on all travel and immigration into the US for people with HIV is finally in the Senate version. No other civilized country still has this ban, enacted by Jesse Helms decades ago. And yet there is still some Republican resistance to lifting it. The president and his friends who have done so much to alleviate the stigma of HIV in America and the world need to tell their GOP allies that there is nothing to fear in removing this anachronism. It will simply treat HIV as it does every other similar disease and require all immigrants to prove that their illness will not become a public charge on government services or expenditure. And it will end an unwarranted stigma and allow the US to be treated once again as a leader – rather than an immigration outlier like Sudan and Saudi Arabia – in the way it treats all non-citizens with HIV.

Humans’ long development phase may have more purpose than you think.

(Hat Tip: aldaily)

Scientific American reviews Stein’s Expelled:

It speaks to their anti-intellectualism and fundamental misunderstanding of science that for the makers of Expelled (and ID advocates more generally) the answer "we don’t know yet" is a badge of shame. "We don’t know yet" is what defines the fruitful frontier for science; it is what directs scientists’ curiosity and motivates them to spend years on research. Research starts where knowledge and certainty drop off. It’s one of the many ironies of Expelled that Ben Stein says he wants this movie to free people to ask questions about science, but the ID theories he defends would close off inquiry with nonanswers.

Like the decision to call evolution Darwinism, the omission of science from Expelled was a deliberate choice.

In fact, it was crucial to the film’s strategy. Because they know Americans revere freedom of speech and fairness, the producers cast the conflict between evolution and ID as purely a struggle between worldviews—a difference of opinions, a battle of ideologies—in which one side is censoring the other. They know that the public will instinctively want to defend the underdog, especially when that opinion aligns with the religious beliefs many of them already share.

It is a terrific strategy, but with one caveat: that airy skirmish of opinions must never, ever touch the ground of solid evidence. Because if it does, if viewers are ever allowed to notice that evolution is supported by mountains of tangible, peer-reviewed evidence gathered by generations of scientists, whereas ID has little more than a smattering of vanity-press pamphlets from a handful of cranks… the bubble pops.

Has it ground to a halt? From an Iraqi sculptor on the NYT blog:

As for me, I have stopped doing art since the early days of the invasion. I lost the desire to do it: the scenes of death and horror we see every day filled my mind and made me stop thinking about beautiful things anymore. I know that many Iraqis feel the same way, because they are just like me, seeing death and killing around them every day.

So every time I pick up my pen and try to sketch, I find myself drawing scenes of death, and when I try to think of it as a way to let off steam a little, I start to feel pity for the person who is going to see it. Since art is a way of communicating, then I’m going to add more frightening thoughts. This is when I decide to stop.

Many of my fellow artists have fled the country, going to places where the might find a bit of hope and a space to breath clean air again in order to be again as creative as they once were.

But those murals on the massive concrete walls we’ve constructed to separate sects? Who’s painting them?

Seeing music:

(Hat tip: Notcot)

A reader writes:

You can be such a shithead when you talk about lesbians, Andrew: That you "can understand" and that political dissent is not tolerated. I don’t know whether you just have some monolithic view of us from 15 years ago that you can’t let go of or what. Anyways, out of every girl I know NOBODY can stomach hillary, save one friend in Denver. And the demographic matches just about what we see other places. It’s probably a class split, with less educated tilting to Hillary.  I’m 33. I expect the women 20 years older than me have more Hillary support, but I haven’t seen it.

And the notion that she is somehow better for gay people is not a pervasive view among lesbians.  The diva factor you described is real and doesn’t work on us the same way it works on the HRC go go boys. The mudslinging she did claiming Obama was lying about his UC professorship got a lot of anger going among my set (lots of girls in the academy, REALLY don’t appreciate denigration of non-tenure track faculty); her vote on the war is a huge problem with lesbians, so many of whom are deeply anti-war.  Oh, and that she cheats and lies. That doesn’t help either.

Today:

How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush’s greatest contribution to nuclear peace would be to issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy’s language while changing the names of the miscreants:

"It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran."

Two years ago:

Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

Is Iran deterrable or not? And if it is, why is Israel’s own nuclear deterrence not enough? Joe Klein weighs in here.

Michael Scherer studies McCain’s position on torture. Marc summarizes McCain’s stance. My own view and distinct recall of the passage of the Military Commissions Act is that McCain blinked – and is still blinking in the face of massive pressure from the torture-wing of the GOP, which has at its center the vice-president’s office. Largely, I think McCain’s stand has been admirable; but it would not be intellectually honest to describe it as steadfast. Maybe if he gets to be president, this nightmare will end. But his legislative actions have ensured legal immunity for the civilian war criminals and the possible continuation of torture under Cheney’s and Bush’s extra-legal rule.

Begala has at Penn. It is also, sadly, hard not to feel the same thing about Begala. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say in public something that wasn’t purely designed to achieve a political end. He was trained by the Clintons well.