The Dish

Peter Jay Hotez reports:

Most people in richer countries equate tropical disease with the big three—HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria —and funding agencies allocate aid accordingly. Yet a group of conditions known collectively as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) has an even more widespread impact. They may not often kill, but they debilitate by causing severe anemia, malnutrition, delays in intellectual and cognitive development, and blindness. They can lead to horrific limb and genital disfigurement and skin deformities and increase the risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS and suffering complications during pregnancy. They not only result from poverty but also help to perpetuate it. Children cannot develop to their full potential, and adult workers are not as productive as they could be.

Food of the future.

Chris Bachelder works towards a theory of surprise:

Surprises are, in their effect and regardless of content, instruments of wonder and spirit. A surprise lifts aliveness toward consciousness, where it does not (and cannot) permanently reside. There are many reasons to read literature, of course. One very good reason to read literature is to be surprised. In reading, we perform the nearly oxymoronic feat of seeking surprise.

"Haiti, land of blue sea and green hills, white fishing boats on the sea, and the hidden huts of peasants in the tall mountains. People strong, midnight black. Proud women whose arms bear burdens, whose backs are very straight. Children naked as nature. Nights full of stars, throbbing with Congo drums. At the capital lovely ladies ambergold, mulatto politicians, warehouses full of champagne, banks full of money. A surge of black peasants who live on the land, and the foam of the cultured elite in Port-au-Prince who live on the peasants.

Port-au-Prince, city of squalid huts, unattractive sheds and shops near the water front, but charming villas on the slopes that rise behind the port. A presidential palace gleaming white among palm trees with the green hills for a backdrop. A park where bands play at night. An enormous open-air market.

"Ba moi cinq cob," children beg of tourists in the street. Cinq cob means a nickel. They speak a patois French. The upper classes, educated abroad, speak the language of Paris. But I met none of the upper-class Haitians," – Langston Hughes, from Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander, 1956.

Peter Lopatin reviews 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:

[T]he solution comes to [the protagonist] in the book’s final chapter, when the star atheist realizes that “to be human is to inhabit our contradictions . . . to be unable to find a way of reconciling the necessary and the impossible.” In the face of that primal inability, and of the “brutality of incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides . . . we try, as best as we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence.” Like the asymptotic relation in which a straight line approaches a curve to which it will be tangent only at infinity, “we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we?”

Tom Bissell reviews a new book by Elizabeth Fraterrigo about the Playboy empire:

Playboy was the first men’s magazine to use the crueler tricks of wish fulfillment previously relegated to women’s magazines. Before Playboy, as Fraterrigo observes, the typical men’s magazine trafficked in rustic stories about bear wrestling: vicarious was all you wanted the stories to be. Playboy sold a lot of things, but it also sold soft young bodies, and it suggested that if its readers purchased its things, and lived by its code, those bodies might be touched and caressed. Playboy pushed, issue after issue, decade after decade, ways of thinking about desire that were neither emotionally realistic nor experientially viable. Meanwhile it epitomized and, indeed, calcified mainstream ideas of beauty to such an extent that Hefner could reasonably demand a commission on every breast augmentation performed since 1965.

Freddie DeBoer assesses the impact of Ayn Rand:

People far abler than I have prosecuted the case against Rand, and I don't intend to rehash it here. But this tendency of her writings and her philosophy to compel people to slap concrete on the foundation of their own ideas, to build a moat around their intellectual life, to categorize the whole world into the tiny fraction who are worthy and the great horrid mass that are simply not to be listened to in any circumstance… this is the greatest failing of the woman and her teachings. There are a worse things to inspire people towards– genocide, war, ethnic cleansing– but still, a philosopher whose greatest contribution is a vast incuriosity is a dismal thing.

A reader writes:

This reader is bonkers:

"I'm with you in thinking that Obama is the best thing the Democrats have going for them right now. But I also think that in having the supermajority, they actually undercut him. They don't have to compromise and so they don't try to. Instead, what passes as legislation is a horrid mismash of corporate interests and traditional, not progressive, balms of the Democratic Party. I know this country can do much, much better. And I think Obama needs a less powerful Democratic party to make it happen, like Clinton did."

This is one of the most ignorant things I have read in a long time. The reason it took a year to pass health care, when it had been teed up well before Obama's inauguration, was because Democrats tried to get the GOP onboard. Remember the months and months of wooing Olympia Snowe? Obama's health care conferences? But the GOP decided to simply just vote no, because electorally that was their best bet.

And what your reader shows is that it works; by simply obstructing and voting no, they get people to believe that it was Democrats' fault nothing gets done, and that they should vote for the GOP, so that Dems will have to compromise. Bullshit. That's insane.

And let me remind your reader that the bill the Senate passed, and what appears to be the final bill, is exactly what Bob Dole, Bill Frist and many republicans, who looked at health care in good faith, advocated. No public option, deficit reducing, individual mandate insurance. For the love of God, convince that reader to vote for Coakley.

I'll try. First off, there's no compromise with the current GOP. They make Gingrich look like Pope John XXIII. If they got back majorities in the Congress, there will be no debt reduction; there will simply be nihilism until they can try to beat Obama in 2012.

Secondly, there's a lie masquerading as analysis going around. And that is that the health insurance bill is some sort of radical idea, fomented by "radical leftists", etc etc. This is propaganda. In fact, the final bill is exactly where a sane compromise is to be found: near-universal coverage; no single payer; no public option; reforms for pre-existing conditions and other injustices; cost control mechanisms; Medicare cuts; deficit reduction. 16 years after the Clintons tried, it's a more moderate bill. It was widely debated in the campaign. It isn't perfect. It needs work. But it's a start.

The blame for the delay lies fundamentally with a GOP that is still intent on putting power before country, and decided the day Obama took office that he was such a threat to their beleaguered brand that they would oppose everything he proposed, demonize him as much as possible, forgo any cooperation, and then try to blame him for the recession, the wars, the unemployment, and the debt he inherited … while never actually proposing any serious alternative on any of them.

It is a nihilist, populist, primal scream. And if the Massachusetts result is interpreted as a vindication of that strategy, we will have thrown away a very rare constructive moment for targeted government action to tackle the deep problems – healthcare access and cost, too much reliance on carbon energy, an empire bogged down in two quagmires, a debt that will soon threaten this country's currency – in favor of news cycle, tactical Rovian bullshit.

The Dems have been incompetent and petty; the Republicans have been nihilist. The dawdling of the last few weeks is unforgivable. But Obama's attempt to produce reform through the center is the best chance we've now got. The last time I urged a vote for someone I found as dreadful as a candidate as Coakley was John Kerry. Because the alternative was so much worse.

So think of this as 2004. Are you really, really going to give Bush a second term because Kerry is so easily portrayed as an elitist hack? C'mon, Massachusetts Independents. Give the president the chance he needs. I know it sucks. But vote Coakley.

Google knows.