Jane Galt weighs in on my lengthy AIDS post. She finds several flaws in my argument, namely the following assumptions. Since her points are reasonably independent, I'll address them in turn.

It assumes that the drugs we use will work the same way in Africa, even though the major AIDS strain there is different from the one here.

I haven't heard that the AIDS strain is different, and definitely would be interested in the data demonstrating that. Jane is an economist and has an MBA, and I am a physics grad student doing Magnetic Resonance Imaging research, so neither of us has a real claim to authority on biochemistry. So I admit freely that what I'm about to state may be totally wrong and I invite corrections. From what I have read, it seemed to me that the AIDS virus operates by targeting our immune system in a specific way. So it isn't obvious to me that the drugs would not have any effect.

Since the virus here in the US has been aggressively targeted, it has presumably mutated in response. Whereas in Africa, where the virus originated, it has been effectively left alone without much need for evolutionary defensive mutations. So if anything, I believe that AIDS drugs would potentially be more effective there.

It is all speculation of course - both Jane's critique on this point and my response. I just don't see this issue as a practical concern. I would love to have any biochemistry-types out there to weigh in on this, though. Please email me...

It assumes that education will have the same effect there as it did here (although given that AIDS education is only apparently about 50% effective here, and unsafe behavior seems to be -- anecdotally -- on the rise again with the advent of the "cocktails", that may not be enough of a goal to shoot for)

Again, I don't know where the 50% statistic comes from, so in all fairness I have to discount it. But the main point, that we cant assume that education will have the same effect, seems borderline insulting. Why wouldn't education be effective? What is different about the mental capacity of a African as compared to an American homosexual ? (yes, I'm comparing a racial group to a social group, so its apples and oranges). My point is that education is education. And it must be made part of any plan to treat the problem of AIDS. It isnt a silver bullet by any means, of course, but there's no reason to say it won't have any effect.

It assumes that a disease vectored primarily through heterosexual sex will respond to education and/or treatment the same way as one vectored primarily through homosexual sex and blood-to-blood contact.

Hmm. Treatment is a biological issue, we have already addressed that in Point 1. Education is presumably tailored to how the disease is vectored, clearly we won't be putting as much emphasis on homosex as opposed to the dangers of unprotected heterosex. It's obvious that education must be tailored to the problem and is not one size fits all. This is really the same thing as Point 2 above. There isnt a new critique here, just a combination of the previous two.

Most of all, it assumes that the drugs we send can be administered in Africa the same way they are here. I'm sorry, I just don't see it. Roads. Clinics. Electricity. Health care workers. Education, to believe that little bugs you can't see can really make you sick. (Don't snicker. It took your ancestors a hundred years to believe it.) Population density. Attitudes about sex. Look at where AIDS campaigns are working -- Southeast Asia and America/Western Europe, both with relatively shame-free attitudes about most sorts of sex, both with high levels of population density and a functioning health care infrastructure, both with compact high-risk populations that could be targeted and identified.

This is the meat of Jane's argument and the point on which I agree with her (in broad outline). The infrastructure is shockingly bad. But it is NOT non existent, either. I have friends living in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Durban, and friends who hail from small villages in Kenya and Zaire and Zambia. A lot of my family has traveled to Africa also. From all accounts, it isn't the primitive backwards wasteland that it has been portrayed as in our collective sterotyping unconcious. They actually DO have roads, clinics, electricity, and health care workers. They are just pathetically, even criminally underfunded. Africans (with teh possible exception of Thabo Mbeki) DO understand that little bugs make you sick, they are capable of comprehending the education needed to change behaviors. The culture is relatively shame-free about sex (let me tell you btw, southeast asia is pretty prude in comparison) but there is the problem of misogyny and the position of women is not that great. Education, especially for women, can do a great deal.

In fact, this underscores the point I was trying to make in that we need a broad-based approach, based on pragmatic realities such as Den Beste originally pointed out and Jane has also illustrated above. The AIDS epidemic needs to be attacked on the symptoms and the root causes. The symptoms can be controlled with drugs, the root cause with education. We dont have unlimited supply of money, so the approach pioneered by Brazil is essential - manufacture the drugs locally for cheap (yes, it is cheap. and yes, African countries do have the manufacturing and technical knowledge). This saves money which can instead be spent on education, tailored to the culture and the specific manifestation of the epidemic, which is indeed not the same as it is in the US.

My complaint with the standard approach is that it inverts the problem. The UN wants 68 billion to pay mostly for drugs at market price (outrageous!) and then basically import AIDS education materials verbatim from San Francisco for cheap. The money needs to be freed to be targeted at education instead, and the drugs are NOT a financial obstacle at all.

I wish that more attention in the blogsphere would be drawn to the issue of compulsor licensing and eminent domain. That's the real key.

John Weidner has a proposal for the Blogsphere to support the Iranian freedom movement.


Count me in!

What meek analysis of mine could suffice to critique Bush's Corporate Responstability (sic) speech, when pictures truly are worth a thousand words? Fark has made all further comment irrelevant with a hilarious photoshop contest guaranteed to give Sean Hannity fits.

Original:



(in my opinion, the original is ironic enough :)

But here are my personal favorite entries:



Simple, aiming to simply remove the ironic part :)



One Nation, under Dow, with profit and stock options for all. (CEOs anyway)

and in closing:



Because, what with the PATRIOT Act, Ministry of Homeland Defense, and whatnot, all our base actually are belong to them.

People ask me why I read National Review Online. Isn't it just a partisan rag, full of ideolouges like Goldberg who are just frontmen for the GOP? Well, I am not denying that Goldberg is what some might affectionately call a "media whore". But there are writers of true calibre on National Review. They may be conservative, they may be white, they may be Republicans. Good for them - these (highly overlapping) groups are integral not just to the realm of politial debate but to the fabric of diversity in this country itself. Even as they sometimes argue against diversity, they serve that ideal.

For example, John Derbyshire looks like a typical Angry White Guy. Sort of like the Hank Hill stereotype, but with a graduate degree. But he is not provincial in his outlook at all - for example, read his series of articles that he wrote while traveling throughout in China last summer:

August 16, 2001: Last Days in China
August 14, 2001: Derb Does China, Part IX
August 9, 2001: China Diary, Part VIII
August 7, 2001: Chinese Lessons
July 26, 2001: China Diary, Part VI
July 23, 2001: An Outsider Inside
July 13, 2001: China Diary, Part IV
July 12, 2001: China Diary, Part III
July 11, 2001: Beijing Journal, Part II
July 10, 2001: Beijing Journal, Part I

These are wonderful essays and provide a firm context for his strident critique of China and our foreign policy. He is one of those rare men of conviction. I think he's horribly wrong on many of his opinions, but he holds them for rational reasons and I value him as a thinker on the right. If you doubt the rationality of his thought process, read his article today in defense of Islam. He pulls no punches in describing terrorists, fascists, and has denigrating words for Arab culture as a whole. But read the piece carefully and you will clearly see the outline of his thinking. He doesn't hide it, he lays it out on the table.

No, it's not snowing in Hell. John Derbyshire has defended Islam in the pages of National Review. Get over it.

Likewise, National Review has been the only place to turn to for analysis of Iran, as I have mentioned in previous posts. Michael Ledeen has done a fantastic job in following the story. Likewise, founder William F Buckley Jr has been another consistent, principled, and insightful voice (though he has surrounded himself by demagouges and apologists). And Dinesh D'Souza has written some solid analysis of the political forces behind Islamofascism recently.

It's just as good a magazine as The Nation, and just as unfairly mischaracterized. The writers above are just as wrongly labeled and misrepresented as are Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky and have become to some degree equivalent straw men targets for demonization by the left just as the right has done.

Iranians are all Americans now. They are locked in a desperate struggle to reclaim their society from a tyrannical regime, and the regime knows it. The Liberal blogsphere is mostly silent on this (notable exception is NZBear - see link at left) but there is at least one beacon being shined on it from the Conservatives. The only Democrats who seem to care about bringing democracy to the middle east are the ones on television - Toby delivered an impassioned rant about supporting democracy to Arab nations last night on the West Wing that made me long to switch universes.

But back in the real world, Iranians are trying to do it on their own, and America hasn;t even commented let alone support them. As noted earlier, July 9th was the anniversary of the student riots and was expected to be a tumultous day. Not that you would notice reading the American media, but on the 9th, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tehran, defying government bans on gathering.

It wasn't just students and youngsters either:

Many of those taking part in the commemoration were not young students, but middle-aged and even elderly people, some of them wearing ties to symbolise their attachment to the era before the Islamic Revolution.

Michael Ledeen also notes that it wasn't just the public, but even members of the police, who were supportive:

The epicenter of the violence was Isfahan, where tens of thousands of the regime's young opponents fought with the militias who tried to quash demonstrations honoring the student uprising of 1999. At least half a dozen people were killed, scores hospitalized, and literally thousands were arrested in Isfahan and Tabriz, where similar insurrections took place. This was no peaceful demonstration; the people called for an end to the regime. And when the militias attacked, something quite new occurred: local police and even members of the Pasdaran, the "Guardians of the Revolution," shielded the opposition and even shot back at the militiamen. Nothing of the sort had happened in the 23 years of the Islamic Republic.
...
Thousands of students � they claim 100,000, which is probably too high a figure, but in any case a substantial number � marched on the radio and television headquarters, only to be attacked by helicopters and the usual thugs. But as these events unfolded, the streets of the city were filled with enormous throngs of people � organizers claim several million, but it is impossible to confirm these numbers � stood and sat immobile, simply looking at one another as if to give courage to one and all.

And leaders within Iran have spoken out in response - the next day, Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, a senior religious Imam in Isfahan for 30 years and appointed by Ayatollah Khomeini himself, resigned his post in the theocracy. He bitterly condemned the hard-liners as "louts and fascists, who are a mixture of ignorance and madness, but whose umbilical cord is connected to the centre of power, and who are completely uncontrolled and beyond the law". In clearest possible terms he spoke of the threat to Iran and her people itself. 125 members of the Parliament supported him. The response from the government has been to silence the media and censor the full text of Taheri's statements:



Blank spaces. Reflect on what they mean. Some of what was censored reads as follows:

"I am embarrassed and ashamed," he wrote. "You cannot blame (the United States and the Shah) for the failures and corruption of our country. This has all resulted in our people turning away from Islam, rising unemployment, inflation, high cost of living, a "satanic gap" between the rich and the poor, an ailing economy, government corruption and addiction." He describes the regime as a vast mafia that responsible for "a failing foreign policy, corruption, bribery, brain drain, and the harassment and jailing of journalists and writers." These people, he said, "are riding on a stupid camel of power onto the field of politics." And worst of all, this mafia gang funds and supports vigilante forces who "continuously sharpen their dinosaur fangs of violence, with the hope of marrying their ugly, oppressive, fear-evoking bride of violence to religion."

As Ledeen points out, the Iranian oppressed masses yearn for help from Washington. When Bush denounced Iran as part of the axis of evil, Iranians cheered. But when the Bush Administration was asked about what the US response would be.. well, here's the transcript:

QUESTION: Scheduled for tomorrow, there are supposedly going to be major demonstrations in Tehran. Does the State Department have a message for the demonstrators, given US interest in this recently?

MR. BOUCHER: No.

QUESTION: You have no message?

MR. BOUCHER: We don't.

QUESTION: This is supposed to be a really big demonstration and, you know, the "axis of evil" speech from the President, un-elected few � (laughter) �

QUESTION: Is that the official US line?

MR. BOUCHER: That's the official US line. No, the official US line is, you know, we don't comment when people demonstrate. I mean, when do we give messages to demonstrators?

QUESTION: Well, no.

MR. BOUCHER: I guess � no, I remember. Bob Strauss went out the night that the Soviet Union fell out, fell apart, and he gave the liberty message to demonstrators. That's about the only instance that I can remember that we've been out there. Certainly in places as far away as Tehran, the idea that we would have a message every time there's a demonstration is a little far-fetched.

QUESTION: All right. Well, it's just I asked it because in the context that the President did call them a member of the "axis of evil" and mentioned the un-elected few. There's been a lot of talk about supporting the people who want democracy there, and you know, they're having a big demonstration tomorrow, so I thought it would be a nice way to.

MR. BOUCHER: Iran has been more and more open as time goes on, and we'll watch that process from afar at this point.

(thanks to Michael Ledeen's article. I couldn't find it on the State Dept website. Deliberate?)

Looks like Iran is on its own.

UPDATE: comments by NZBear, Dave Trowbridge, John Wediner, Craig Schamp, and Hossein Derakshan. Instapundit gave Iran a big boost by noticing it, also.

I've held off on commenting on President Bush's "peace plan" until now because there just hasn't been any real analysis to stimulate mine. The left sees it as disenfranchisement (a curiously inconsistent attitude). The right wishfully sees it as the Master Plan Rope a Dope Moral Clarity Perfection. Both interpretations are ultimately more self-serving than having any real relevance to the issue of peace, I just haven't found anything to say, aside from my opinion that Bush has no idea whatsoever what he is doing.

Palestinians and Israeilis alike see Bush's peace plan however in different terms. It's basically absolutely nothing new. It was just a circular path, a tautological loop, with a Arafat plopped in the center to act as Red Herring.

However, at least one analyst in the US sees it the way the people in the mideast do.
William F Buckley writes in NRO:

For all that it is our objective, strategic and emotional, to deny the stated objectives of the terrorists, it is precisely they who have moved us to new and strenuous diplomacy and to the language of ultimatums. Mr. Bush managed to say to the Palestinians on Monday that the thing they most specifically desire, which is statehood, they will specifically not achieve: until there is a cultural revolution in the land.

What will come of President Bush's initiative?

Probably more terrorism.

One argument against re-unification of Palestine and Israel is that it would "destroy the character of the Jewish state" - which is also teh basis of teh argument against the right of return. But Israel is not a democracy and its Jewishness is part of the problem - Israel is torn between its democratic charter and its Jewish identity. Consider that the religious parties have such dominance that they force El Al to observe the Sabbath - even when that means that bereaved families of the victims of the July 4th shooting are forced to wait an extra day to be flown home! El Al is a small, state-subsidized airline, so it needn't ecessarily operate at a profit, but cost estimates of the ban of Sabbath operations are in the tens of millions of dollars.

Worse, the Knesset is on the verge of adopting laws making it illegal for Arab Israeilis to own property. The parallels with South Africa and pre-Holocaust Germany are frightening and this has provoked enormous outcry within Israel. This is not the only instance of apartheid-style policy however - the Arab population has faced discrimination in many areas including basic infrastructure, health services, even child care. These are documented daily in teh excellent pages of Ha'aretz, a paper that is required reading if you care to comment on Israeli society.

The problem is that Israel is not a democracy, despite the broad and explicit language in the 1948 charter affirming democratic equality without consideration of race or religion. This has great economic and social cost, to both Jewish and Arab Israeilis (not to mention secondary effects upon the Palestinians).

That is the reason that a broad, inclusive, American-style democracy and an explicit Bill of Rights is needed. Such a legal framework, modeled exactly after our American government, would allow equal rights to flourish and would also put the brakes on Jewsish Fundamentalism, whose power has risen unchecked in the Israeili givernment and which has eroded and inflicted great damage upon Israeili society.