Current Affairs

by hilzoy

Scott Lemieux is right: this is a good post about Larry Craig’s arrest:

“By the cop’s own admission, he (the cop) “pumped his foot slowly up and down in response.” In other words, Craig asked for sex using an arcane code extremely unlikely to “alarm, anger, or disturb” — according to the the equally arcane code defining disorderly conduct in Minnesota — an uninitiated fellow-lavator, and the cop knew what it meant and said yes.

Where’s the victim?

What I find more astonishing is the definition of “disorderly conduct.” By this reckoning, ten years and thirty pounds ago, I had disorderly conduct foisted upon me approximately…let’s see…15,923 times.

Per week.

Give or take.

But, even if they’re unwanted advances, that’s the natural order of things, right? Whereas men have to be protected from the unwanted advances of men at all costs (why? because they’re worried they just might succumb to a particularly persuasive piece of foot telegraphy?).

Given the constant, daily harassment women endure (come on now, don’t tune out; stay with me, here) — harassment that makes us compress our daily activities into daylight hours, that circumscribes where we go, who we go with, and even what we wear; intrusive harassment, ruin-your-day, make-you-feel-powerless/angry/depressed harassment — the overzealous prosecution of the toe-tapper really pisses me off. It’s like those sophomore discussions one has of human trafficking, in which someone invariably says “but what about the men?”, and then the rest of the discussion, in some form or another, is overwhelmingly preoccupied with those minority cases. Heaven forfend we don’t keep men front and center, even if it makes lousy Bayesians of us all.

Look: if there’d been groping, a physical risk, or even just a persistent advance in the face of a single “no” (which doesn’t seem to have ever been uttered), I’d be supportive regardless of the gender base-rates involved. But “he tapped his foot and looked at me funny”? Please! Men! Grow a pair!”

Honestly: I loathe sexual harassment. Leaving aside the attempted rapes on the one hand and all the myriad gropings and propositions on the other, I have been stalked twice, asked by a professor (now dead) whose class I was enrolled in to spend the summer with him, had a pitcher of beer poured over my head for saying no, and so on and so forth. I even got a buzz cut once — 1/4″ long hair, max — because some jerk grabbed my breasts, and when I pulled away he started screaming obscenities at me. I was writing a travel guide at the time, so going to restaurants and discos alone was part of my job, and since I couldn’t figure out how to obtain a nun’s habit, cutting all my hair off seemed like the best way to make the levels of sexual harassment drop to remotely bearable levels.

(I’m not kidding. I did this. I figured that in the split second when I was walking past someone, he would be thinking: “what on earth is that?“, rather than grabbing me. It worked. Plus, ever since I since I watched the original Star Trek, I had wondered what I would look like with no hair. Now I knew.)

I only called the police once — see “attempted rape”, above — and the charming officer who responded said, and I quote: “why don’t you just head down to the beach tomorrow in a nice bikini and see if he tries again?” And much as I loathed all the rest of the sexual harassment I’ve encountered, I don’t really see that most of it — the cases in which I was not touched, at least — should be illegal, as opposed to merely vile.

If it were illegal, however, I would have thought that since women are far more likely to receive unwanted advances than men, the police should focus a bit more attention on protecting us.

And one more thing:

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by hilzoy

From the LATimes:

“While genetic discrimination is banned in most cases throughout the country, it is alive and well in the U.S. military.

For more than 20 years, the armed forces have held a policy that specifically denies disability benefits to servicemen and women with congenital or hereditary conditions. The practice would be illegal in almost any other workplace.

There is one exception, instituted in 1999, that grants benefits to personnel who have served eight years.

“You could be in the military and be a six-pack-a-day smoker, and if you come down with emphysema, ‘That’s OK. We’ve got you covered,’ ” said Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University.”But if you happen to have a disease where there is an identified genetic contribution, you are screwed.””

(Full disclosure: Kathy Hudson is a colleague.)

There are many problems with this system. The most obvious is its fundamental unfairness: it does not deny coverage for all diseases that are not caused by a person’s military service. If no one has any idea why you got sick, or even if, as in the emphysema case discussed above, it’s clear that your illness is not due to your military service but to some other non-genetic cause, you’re covered. But if you have a genetic disease, you’re out of luck. Another is that it seems wrong not to cover veterans with serious illnesses: they put their lives on the line for us, and we should be willing to help them when they need it. A third problem that it gets the nature of genetic disease wrong:

“Only in a few cases, such as Huntington’s disease, does a specific mutation in a particular stretch of DNA guarantee the onset of illness.

In most cases, a faulty gene increases an individual’s risk of developing a disease, but does not ensure it. Typically, an external event is necessary to trigger the onset of a medical condition.

Such was the case with an Army helicopter gunship pilot who was reassigned to desk duty after she became too pregnant to fly.

Dr. Melissa Fries, an Air Force geneticist who became involved in the case, said the pilot developed a blood clot in her leg — a typical complication of pregnancy that is exacerbated by inactivity.

She was diagnosed with chronic thrombophlebitis, a condition that disqualified her from flying. The pilot, who declined to discuss her case, decided to retire from the Army.

As part of her medical work-up, doctors discovered she had a genetic mutation for Factor V Leiden, which is found in 5% of Caucasians and increases their risk of developing blood clots.

An Army physical evaluation board, which determines disability benefits, denied her claim because of the mutation.

Her military doctors were stunned since her thrombophlebitis was probably caused by her pregnancy and desk job. They downplayed the role of her mutation because 99% of Factor V Leiden carriers never develop blood clots.

Military doctors now discourage their patients from getting potentially life-saving genetic tests, undermining their ability to provide top-notch care.

“If someone called me up with regard to genetic testing, I had to say, ‘That might not be something you want to pursue,’ ” Nunes said. “That’s very hard to say.””

If you are in the military, you get sick, and it turns out that there’s a genetic component to your illness, then you will be denied coverage unless you can show that your service exacerbated your condition — a hurdle that people with non-genetic diseases do not have to meet. The genetic component of your disease might not be very large, and it might not increase your risk of getting the disease by that much; its existence alone is enough to have your coverage denied. As I said above, this is unfair. But it’s also likely to become a much larger problem in the future. As time goes on, we are going to discover that more and more diseases have some genetic component, and therefore more and more members of our armed services are going to discover that they are not eligible for health benefits after discharge, even if they have diseases that were covered without question before.

This is just wrong, and someone should try to change this policy.

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by hilzoy

From the NYT:

“The Islamic-inspired governing party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a larger-than-expected victory in nationwide parliamentary elections on Sunday, taking close to half the total vote in a stinging rebuke to Turkey’s old guard.

With nearly all the votes counted, the Justice and Development Party led by Mr. Erdogan won 46.6 percent of the vote, according to Turkish election officials, far more than the 34 percent the party garnered in the last election, in 2002.

The secular state establishment had expected that voters would punish Mr. Erdogan’s party for promoting an Islamic agenda. But the main secular party, the Republican People’s Party, received just 20.9 percent, compared with 19 percent in the last election. The Nationalist Action Party, which played on fears of ethnic Kurdish separatism, won 14.3 percent, officials said.

The results were a mandate for Mr. Erdogan’s party, with large numbers of voters sending the message that they did not feel it is a threat to Turkish democracy. It fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to amend the Constitution, a blank check that secular Turks fear. According to the preliminary results, Mr. Erdogan’s party will have at least 340 seats in the 550-seat Parliament. The main secular party will have at least 111; the nationalists at least 71, and independents an unusually large 28 or more.”

Some bloggers are taking this as a defeat for the West and a victory for radical Islam. Thus, Michelle Malkin: “The choice in the minds of many Turks is this: sharia or secularism? East or West? Submission or resistance?” I think this is a profound mistake.

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by hilzoy

Now this is interesting. Via Kevin Drum, an article in the Washington Post. It’s on research suggesting that one of the main drivers of differences in crime rates is environmental lead levels. I’m putting excerpts from the article, plus discussion, below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Like Matt Yglesias, I’m puzzled by this:

“The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors met two weeks ago for budget negotiations, but could not agree to a funding increase for the agency. To make matters worse, donors have not yet delivered over $35 million dollars in promised contributions. That may not seem like a tremendous amount, but the IAEA’s total budget is only $379 million.

In a rare move, IAEA Director Mohammed elBaredei appealed directly to the Board of Governors, which is composed of thirty-five IAEA member states, to urge them to consider the consequences of an IAEA budget that provides for zero-growth. (…)

elBaredei’s plea makes me wonder if we are living on borrowed time. Accidents are bound to happen, particularly as more and more countries seek nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuel. But, as he points out, the agency’s ability to respond to a Chernobyl style incident is severely diminished by an overstretched budget. Also, some of the important verification work the agency does in places like North Korea and Iran may be called into question by the ageing environmental sampling technology the agency is forced to use. elBaredei even says that the IAEA must outsource some of its lab work, calling into question the whole principal of neutrality that gives the IAEA its credibility.

The board has until September to finalize the budget, so there is a chance that they may reconsider. The alternative — an IAEA without the resources to counter, say, nuclear smuggling — is truly frightening. “

The Christian Science Monitor reports that we owe a third of the missing funds, and adds some context:

“With the IAEA’s ¤283 million ($379 million) annual budget, the United Nations has touted the Vienna-based agency as “an extraordinary bargain.” The US Office of Management and Budget has stamped it as “100 percent” worth the US allocation. The IAEA and ElBaradei were jointly awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. (…)

The negotiations by the IAEA Board of Governors ended last week with the prospect of zero increase in funding, prompting ElBaradei to speak out. The budget deadline is in September, at the IAEA General Conference.”

If there ever was an agency we ought to fund, the IAEA is it. They are competent; they have a good track record; they are extremely credible to people who no longer trust us; and they are dealing with some of the most important issues on the planet. It would be one thing if they needed trillions of dollars to carry out their work. But they are asking for so little. 22% of $379 million is $83.38 million By the standards of the Federal budget, that’s practically a rounding error. To put it in context, this year President Bush requested $204 million for abstinence education. If we can manage to spend $204 million on a discredited approach to sex ed that’s in the budget solely as a sop to religious conservatives, surely we can manage to increase the budget of the agency responsible for verifying compliance with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, coping with accidental nuclear discharges, nuclear safety, and a host of other really, really important issues. Better still, cut the abstinence education and send the whole $204 million to the IAEA.

I’ve put parts of el Baradei’s letter to the IAEA’s governors below the fold. I have also cleaned up characters that came out oddly in my source — for instance, I assume that in “we can’t do it”, the second word is “can’t”, and have altered it accordingly.

***

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