Month: June 2005

by Edward

The story of "Zach" is getting lots of play around the blogosphere. He’s allegedly a 16-year-old blogger whose parents sent him to the Christian rehabilitation center called the Refuge because he told them he was gay. The Refuge is run by a larger organization called "Love in Action" (btw, dig the almost pink triangle logo…way to appropriate!).

Supposedly (I’ll keep qualifying the reports because a leading gay news site notes they were unable to confirm his identity, although other online sources aren’t being so tentative) Zach saw an email from the camp to his parents that "clients" aren’t supposed to see. It included the rules (some secret) for the Refuge, and those are stirring up quite some controversy. Among my favorites are

• The clients may not wear Abercrombie and Fitch or Calvin Klein brand clothing, undergarments, or accessories.
• Men must remove all facial hair seven days weekly, and sideburns must not fall below the top of the ear (the top of the ear is defined as where the ear meets the face below the temple). Clean business-like haircuts must be worn at all times. Hair must be long enough to be pinched between two fingers.       [actually, this is one of the rules that makes me a bit suspect of this list, see this "success story" of the program…he hardly fits the enforced look.]
• LIA wants to encourage each client, male and female, by affirming his/her gender identity. LIA also wants each client to pursue integrity in all of his/her actions and appearances. Therefore, any belongings, appearances, clothing, actions, or humor that might connect a client to an inappropriate past are excluded from the program. These hindrances are called False Images (FI¹s). FI behavior may include hyper-masculinity, seductive clothing, mannish/boyish attire (on women), excessive jewelry (on men), mascoting, and "campy" or gay/lesbian behavior and talk.
• Clients may have no contact with anyone who has left the program prior to graduating without the blessing of the staff to do so. Clients may address off-limit persons they inadvertently encounter with a polite "hello" only.
• [Here’s where it gets really scary] All new Refuge clients will be placed into Safekeeping for the initial two to three days of their program. A client on safekeeping may not communicate verbally, or by using hand gestures or eye contact, with any other clients, staff members, or his/her parents or guardians. In case of a practical need, Safekeeping clients may write down their question or request and show it to another client, staff member, or their parent or guardian. Writing may only be used when absolutely necessary. Parents and guardians must enforce their child¹s safekeeping status at home or in their temporary lodging. [and…] Any client may be placed into Safekeeping at any time, at a staffworker¹s discretion.
• Encourage women to accept the more comfortable seats in a room. Men should consider offering a woman their chair when there are none left in the room.
• Clients are expected to maintain a committed pursuit of a positive and thankful attitude.
• [And here are a few doozies from the astronomically frightening "Group Norms" behaviors expected] 1. Be honest, authentic, and real. […]9. Say "I love you _____" after each person is finished relating. […and my favorite…] 5. Maintain strict confidentiality of everything discussed in group. "What is seen here, what is heard here, remains here!" [Oh, so, it’s just like Las Vegas….sign me up!]

Protests have been staged in front of the camp, prompting its leader to hold a press conference. A press statement from the organization seemed (to me at lease) to imply they don’t understand why the protesters are upset:

“LIA is calling upon the community to extend open-minded consideration and tolerance towards young people with same-sex attraction who are currently undergoing the organization’s youth program called Refuge,” according to a press statement from the organization.

(Uh, er, it’s not that they’re not open-minded toward the young people with same-sex attractions, it’s you brain washers they’re not so keen on.) You can read more about the press conference here.

Ironically, despite their name, Love in Action’s mission statement doesn’t include the word "love" once:

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by hilzoy

There’s an interesting article in tomorrow’s Washington Post about a variety of logjams that have come unstuck since John Bolton left the State Department. The most important:

“For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.

Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs. (…)

The nuclear dispute with Russia attracted less public attention but proved important internally. A program designed to dispose of 68 tons of weapons-grade plutonium stalled in 2003 when agreements expired and the Bush administration would not renew them unless they included stronger language holding Russia accountable for any nuclear accidents in its territory and protecting U.S. contractors building disposal facilities from liability, even in the case of premeditated actions. Russia refused, and the Bolton-led talks went nowhere for two years.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), one of the architects of the plutonium program, grew incensed that such a technical impasse could hold up a program of “global importance.” He showed up at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee last year to berate Bolton on the matter.

“I submit that Mr. John Bolton, who has been assigned to negotiate this, has a very heavy responsibility” for the impasse, Domenici said at the hearing. “And I hate to say that I am not sure to this point that he’s up to it.”

Rice pressed for the issue to be fixed, leading to a new framework that the two sides hope to ratify at the Group of Eight summit in Scotland in July. “I’m pleased,” Domenici said, “because I’m finally getting some very positive feedback.” “

This is really, really important. I wrote a post before the elections on this administration’s record on nuclear non-proliferation generally, and Russian loose nukes in particular. There are huge quantities of weapons-grade nuclear material sitting around in Russia, poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. Osama bin Laden has said that he thinks that it is his religious duty to get nuclear weapons. Obviously, if he got them, chances are very good that he would try to use them on us, which would be devastating. Given all that, it’s truly astonishing that we actually secured less nuclear material during the two years after 9/11 than during the two years before 9/11 (Matthew Bunn and Anthony Weir, Securing the Bomb, p. 5). The idea of letting our efforts to secure plutonium stall because we wanted to make sure that US contractors were not liable even for their premeditated actions is just absurd. Apparently, it was John Bolton who held it up, and now that he’s out of the State Department, we can get back to the job of keeping plutonium out of the hands of terrorists.

The story cites several other examples:

“Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Bolton had also resisted using the so-called New York channel for communications with North Korea, a one-on-one meeting used sporadically through Bush’s presidency and most recently revived in May. And fellow U.S. officials said Bolton had opposed a new strategic opening to India offering the prospect of sharing civilian nuclear technology, a move made in March.”

More communication with North Korea; a new approach to Iran: these are important things. I’m glad Bolton isn’t around to screw them up. But the Russian plutonium development is the really big news here. It’s long past time to get serious about that one.

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by hilzoy

A brief post to note two ideas floating around the blogs that I think are wrong, and to note another which is questionable, and provide the resources for anyone who wants to check it out further. The two ideas that are wrong concern the Downing Street memos; the third concerns Thimerosal and autism.

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By Edward

Via Drum
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Who is Tamika Huston? She’s what’s been dubbed a "Damsel in Distress" or DiD by MSM critics lately. A young attractive woman who’s missing, and whose family is appealing to the media for help in finding her. Hilzoy pointed to this excellent satire on the phenomenon by the Poor Man (but that site is experiencing heavy traffic, so you might have trouble getting through).

Unlike the runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, or Natalee Holloway (missing in Aruba), though, Tamika, who’s been missing over a year, did not get her beautiful face plastered all over the airwaves and tabloids. Compared to those other women, she’s barely gotten any attention at all.

Here’s a photo of Tamika:

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by hilzoy

My basic views on economics are as follows: I like markets, except in certain specific situations (e.g., health insurance) where I think they don’t work well, usually for fairly specific reasons. But I think that markets obviously require regulation. For this reason I have always found the idea that support for markets somehow implies opposition to all regulation bizarre. Markets need regulation for various reasons, including: (1) Creating the ground rules that allow markets to operate efficiently (e.g., antitrust laws, requiring transparent accounting for publicly traded companies, laws governing intellectual property, etc.) (2) Dealing with market failures. (3) Codifying a national decision that there are certain things we do not want companies to do in their quest for profits. (E.g., child labor laws.)

My views on free trade are basically similar. In general, I support it. (I supported NAFTA, though I would not have done so had I known about its Chapter 11, described below.) I am not swayed by the argument that free trade costs Americans jobs: I don’t particularly like it when Americans lose their jobs, but I do like it when people in poor countries get jobs, and I think that when free trade agreements are done right, the gains outweigh the losses. But my support for free trade agreements is conditional on their incorporating the sorts of regulatory structures just described, like strong provisions protecting labor and the environment.

Environmental laws are attempts to deal with negative externalities: costs associated with producing goods that are not borne by the producer or the consumer, but are instead foisted off on unconsenting third parties. If, for instance, a company pollutes the groundwater in a given community, everyone in that community suffers, but the company does not compensate them for the costs it imposes on them. Environmental laws deal with this either by banning certain forms of pollution or through taxes or fines, which attempt to place the burden of paying for the pollution on the company that produced it. In either case, they are attempts to rectify a market failure, and if they are well designed, they make the market fairer. Trade agreements, in my view, should not undo this by forcing our companies to compete against foreign firms that are allowed to externalize the environmental costs of producing goods, any more than they should force our companies to compete against firms that receive any other sort of subsidy.

Labor laws, if properly designed, do two things. First, they codify social decisions about the minimum conditions in which people should have to work. Absent such laws, companies would face competitive pressure not to try to ensure (for instance) worker safety. If we want people to be assured of some minimally safe environment, we should enact safety regulations to prevent this sort of “race to the bottom”, and to allow companies to provide safe working environments without placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Second, they provide for collective bargaining and grievance procedures, thereby helping to ameliorate what is usually a serious power imbalance between employers and labor. Protections for individual actors are a large part of free trade agreements: for instance, they always include strong protections for investors, rather than leaving those investors’ fates to the legal system in the countries they invest in. I have never seen why the same logic should not apply to workers.

I do not want our companies to have to compete against companies who trash the environment or abuse their employees, and I do want to use the leverage we have in negotiating free trade agreements to create these protections, which I believe will benefit us all. If we have the right ground rules for free trade, then it benefits people on both sides; if not, not.

That is my general view of free trade agreements. I present it so that you will know where I’m coming from. However, I also think that general views on free trade agreements are virtually useless. When it comes to free trade agreements, the devil is in the details, to a much greater extent than in most other areas of policy. And unfortunately, the details are hard for lay people to assess. I have tried to read the actual text of CAFTA, but gave up when I concluded that I was just not going to understand it. (I stopped reading Ulysses for similar reasons.) All those terms of art: what do they mean? Does CAFTA depart from established norms, and if so, how? Are there innocuous-sounding passages that would play out horribly in real life, or vice versa? I have no clue.

Below the fold, I am going to explain some areas of concern about CAFTA that I have unearthed. These lead me to oppose CAFTA. However, the real purpose of this post, besides providing a useful collection of links and thoughts, is to ask for help from anyone who understands any of the issues involved. (von, there’s a question about IP below.)

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by Edward

Today seems to be a day for painful confessions, so I’ll share one of mine. My first two years of high school (before I was old enough to get a job and make money of my own), my father was struggling financially (the steel mill was perpetually laying people off, he had a chunk of debt, and he was paying alimony). Because of our status, the city allowed my brothers and sisters and I to buy a subsidized lunch at school. For 25 cents we could get the same standard lunch other children paid a few dollars for, but we would have to stand in a special (highly visible) line with all the other children whose parents were struggling.

I’m nothing if not a stubbornly proud s.o.b. I took the quarter my father gave me each morning and bought my lunch in the same line and vending machines my friends did. That bought me a small milk and pack of Oreo cookies (things were cheaper back then). And that’s what I ate for lunch for over two years. I didn’t realize it at the time, but somehow the experience translated into an overall aversion to food. For me, food equaled shame.

There’s a photo of me in swim trunks in my sophomore year yearbook. I’m so frightfully emaciated in that photo, to this day I can’t stand to look at it. Imagine photos of children from famine-stricken countries, and you’ll be very close to how I looked. Someone on the yearbook staff cut it out and posted it on the bulletin board of the offices with a little speech bubble above my head reading "Feed me." I don’t recall being hungry back then (I’m still quite thin and have a fast metabolism, although love handles are settling in now), but clearly I was malnourished.

This is a long-about POV-providing introduction into this post:

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