The Dish

"The less said about him the better?" [Update: some readers swear he says "whom." Listening again, I can’t tell. But Will doubtless knows Coulter’s gender.]

There are, apparently, "scales of soul". Behold the blackness test:

Matt Yglesias has some positive thoughts.

Carol Platt Liebau, a self-described "proud conservative," sees five virtues in Obama’s character: intelligence, color-blindness, self-confidence, an ability to listen and a sense of humor. Money quote:

He listens. Certainly, Barack is a liberal’s liberal, and his leadership of The Harvard Law Review in many ways reflected that fact. But unlike many of his left-wing compatriots, he treated his ideological adversaries with respect on a personal level. Indeed, he always offered the small conservative contingent on the Review a hearing, even though his decision-making consistently showed that he hadn’t ultimately been influenced by their arguments.

A reader writes:

I like reading Sailer’s site; he’s a smart guy ready to take massive grief for pointing out politically poisonous facts from the social sciences. But he tries too often to present himself as The Guy Who Knows Everything. This is plainly true on AIDS in Africa. The key to understanding why AIDS is so common among heterosexuals in sub-Saharan Africa is an STD called chancroid. From the Los Angeles Times of March 1, 1992:

One of the ways it has spread so quickly in Africa is through a sexually transmitted disease called chancroid, which commonly appears as an open sore on the sex organs – and allows unobstructed passage for the virus. In Western societies, a man with open sores on his penis would find few willing sex partners. But, in Africa, married women find it difficult, if not impossible, to refuse the sexual advances of their husbands. Although that attitude is slowly changing, it remains the norm.

This explains why it is as easy for heterosexuals to be infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa as homosexuals. But the media never mention it. Here’s what the Journal of Development Studies said about chancroid in 2002:

While STDs are common in the industrialised countries and can act as co-factors in the transmission of HIV, they play a more significant role in Africa and in South and Southeast Asia because of the kinds of STDs that are prevalent and because of the failure to treat them. In affluent countries, chancroid is virtually unknown. Cumulative cases in the United States for 1989 to 1996 were just over 17,000, compared to 4.1 million cases of gonorrhea, 2.6 million cases of chlamydia, and 1.2 million cases of syphilis [CDC, 1999]. In Africa and South and South-east Asia, on the other hand, genital ulcer diseases such as chancroid constitute a much larger proportion of sexually transmitted diseases. Chancroid is one of the most prevalent STDs in Zimbabwe; in Harare and Bulawayo, the two largest cities, chancroid is one of the top two complaints of men visiting STD clinics, along with urethritis (generally gonorrhoeal). Genital ulcer diseases are most common in areas where water is difficult to acquire and persona l hygiene suffers. While there is convincing evidence that all STDs can increase the transmission of HIV, genital ulcers increase the risk five-to tenfold [World Bank, 1993].

The media are apparently just too squeamish to mention that tens of millions of hetero African men have open sores on their genitals, which facilitates the spread of HIV. This squeamishness has led to a lot of bad reporting over the years.

The video live backstage at CPAC. No wonder he endorsed her:

Last week, a U.S. military official contacted Michelle Malkin to ask her to remove a photograph from her blog that clearly identified an Afghan loyal to Karzai and the U.S. military who had been wounded in an attack at Bagram. By publishing the photo, Malkin unwittingly exposed the man to serious danger. It was an innocent error. But several days after replying to the military official, Malkin still hasn’t either doctored the photo or removed it. It’s too late now, apparently. And so an Afghan who backed the U.S. now risks losing his life because of Malkin’s blog. I’m not linking to the post to save the man more danger. But, please, Michelle. Take the photo down.

From the NYT Magazine’s fascinating story on evolutionary psychology and religion, "Darwin’s God":

In John Updike’s celebrated early short story "Pigeon Feathers," 14-year-old David spends a lot of time thinking about death. He suspects that adults are lying when they say his spirit will live on after he dies. He keeps catching them in inconsistencies when he asks where exactly his soul will spend eternity. "Don’t you see," he cries to his mother, "if when we die there’s nothing, all your sun and fields and what not are all, ah, horror? It’s just an ocean of horror."

The story ends with David’s tiny revelation and his boundless relief. The boy gets a gun for his 15th birthday, which he uses to shoot down some pigeons that have been nesting in his grandmother’s barn. Before he buries them, he studies the dead birds’ feathers. He is amazed by their swirls of color, "designs executed, it seemed, in a controlled rapture." And suddenly the fears that have plagued him are lifted, and with a "slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever."

I’ll post my response to Sam Harris very soon. Apologies. But Dinesh got in the way.

(Photo: An Afghan woman from the Uzbek ethnic group feeds pigeons in front of the shrine of Hazrat-i-Ali in Mazar-i-Sharif, 28 February 2007. SHAH Marai/AFP/Getty.)

My take on the struggle for control of foreign policy in the last years of George W. Bush. The Libby jury is still out.

Clovis, California, 5.30 am.