The Allen Almanac

I haven’t written in awhile but the kids are gone and the wife is asleep so I thought I’d mention this story that’s probably going to get buried since it released over the weekend.

Another one of Bush’s top people has resigned after being linked with a DC prostitution service. This time it is Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias, 2nd in the State Department to only Condi Rice. Hypocrisy is very amusing. Think Progress pointed out that not only was he a member of the sex-is-the-devil party in general, he was a powerful force behind the abstinence-only program this administration has promoted to fight the spread of AIDS in Africa. From the above link (a 2004 story)

Tobias said that promoting abstinence and monogamy are “far more effective” than distributing condoms for preventing the spread of HIV, according to Agence France-Presse. “Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective,” Tobias said, adding, “It’s been the principal prevention device for the last 20 years, and I think one needs only to look at what’s happening with the infection rates in the world to recognize that has not been working.”
[...]
Tobias added, “The message to young people in the schools is not either ‘Be abstinent or here are condoms, take your pick.’ It is a message of ‘Be abstinent.’ Delaying sexual activity is a means of eliminating the risk of infection.”

I should be going to bed but I wanted to direct whatever little bit of audience I still have to two related articles. The first, from The Nation (subscription required, but here’s the interesting bits) regarding a new Unicef report, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries:

Congratulations: Children in the United States do not have the worst quality of life in the developed world. That honor is held by Britain–with the United States a close second. America’s infant mortality rate is exceeded only by Hungary’s; New Zealand is the only country where more people under 19 meet violent deaths each year. On teenage motherhood, we’re way ahead: forty-six births for every 1,000 girls between 15 and 19. The closest challenger (New Zealand again) can manage only thirty. Children born in the richest nation on earth are also the most likely to be noticeably poorer than their neighbors: 21.7 percent of America’s children live in households whose income is less than half the national median. Britain, at 16.2 percent, comes second in the inequality sweepstakes.

[...]

The study shows that the two countries with the greatest economic inequality are also failing their children in less tangible ways. British children reported the worst family and peer relationships and the highest incidence overall of risky behavior (smoking, drinking and unprotected sex); American children ranked third from the bottom (above Britain and Poland) in terms of their personal feelings of well-being. Sure, American adolescents drink and smoke less than kids in some other countries. But the cost of the right’s attempt to meet teenage sexuality with moralizing and repression rather than education is obvious in the teenage pregnancy rates. The country that came out best overall in the study was the Netherlands, known for its traditions of openness and tolerance.

The areas where American children fare worse than most–infant mortality, low birth weight, early childbearing, family instability and child poverty–are all directly related to the status of women. As Ruth Rosen writes in this issue, American women are still underpaid; still working double shifts; still shouldering on their own the burden of care for children and the elderly; still denied the right to control their fertility; still seen as a “special interest group” rather than half the nation. It is incredible that these things still need saying more than a generation after the rebirth of the women’s movement. If the other half can’t be made to see that women’s rights are vital for the whole community, the effects of gender inequality on children of both sexes might at least offer a compelling argument.

[...]

But at least we can afford massive tax cuts and an immoral war.

The second is more narrowly focused on child care and is also at The Nation, but it is a non-subscription article so I will just post this minor excerpt and encourage you to follow the link.

It is as though Americans are trapped in a time warp, still convinced that women should and will care for children, the elderly, homes and communities. But of course they can’t, now that most women have entered the workforce. In 1950 less than a fifth of mothers with children under age 6 worked in the labor force. By 2000 two-thirds of these mothers worked in the paid labor market.

Both articles underline the disassociation in American politics with true family values. Not the faux values proposed by the Republicans or the rhetoric from the Democrats. These are the values that American families care about. Or at least they would if anyone told them there was another way.

A copy of the Unicef report can be found here.

video removed by Youtube

I thought you would like this, nursie.

She will be so relieved.

At least some people in Congress seem to think so. Apparently, a woman is a “female human being who is capable of becoming pregnant.” That is according to page 9 of the Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act (pdf). Click the first link to go to Feministing for more reasons this is a ridiculous bill.

The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”

Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.

Keroack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, will advise Secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy. He will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons.”

from the Washington Post

Next week he will announce that Bill Dembski will be the new Secretary of Education.

New Scientist has an article about a new painkiller being developed from a substance in human saliva that is non-addictive and more powerful than morphine.

Saliva from humans has yielded a natural painkiller up to six times more powerful than morphine, researchers say.

The substance, dubbed opiorphin, may spawn a new generation of natural painkillers that relieve pain as well as morphine but without the addictive and psychological side effects of the traditional drug.

When the researchers injected a pain-inducing chemical into rats’ paws, 1 gram of opiorphin per kilogram of body weight achieved the same painkilling effect as 3 grams of morphine.

[...]

Rougeot and colleagues discovered that opiorphin works in nerve cells of the spine by stopping the usual destruction of natural pain-killing opiates there, called enkephalins.

Opiorphin is such a simple molecule that it should be possible to synthesise it and produce large quantities without having to isolate it from saliva, Rougeot explains. Alternatively, it might be possible to find drugs which trigger patients’ bodies to produce more of the molecule themselves.

Science. It works, bitches.

I don’t understand the mindset of this country when we are willing to spend trillions on war in Iraq, but contribute almost nothing to help the poor of the world. I don’t know how much it would cost to provide everyone in the world with 20 liters of clean water a day, but it couldn’t have cost as much as this illegal war. And the benefits would be world changing. This Guardian article says that 1.1 billion people in the world do not have safe water. If we spent $1000 on each of them, we would still have spent less than this war is estimated to cost.

Nearly two million children a year die for want of clean water and proper sanitation while the world’s poor often pay more for their water than people in Britain or the US, according to a major new report.

The United Nations Development Programme, in its annual Human Development report, argues that 1.1 billion people do not have safe water and 2.6 billion suffer from inadequate sewerage. This is not because of water scarcity but poverty, inequality and government failure.

The report urges governments to guarantee that each person has at least 20 litres of clean water a day, regardless of wealth, location, gender or ethnicity. If water was free to the poor, it adds, it could trigger the next leap forward in human development.

[...]

In the world’s worst slums, people often pay five to 10 times more than wealthy people in the same cities or in London. This is because they often have to buy water from standpipes and pay a middle man by the bucket. “The poorer you are, the more you pay,” says Mr Watkins.

Poor people also waste much time walking miles to collect small amounts of water. The report estimates that 40bn hours are spent collecting water each year in sub-Saharan Africa – an entire working year for all the people in France.

There was a very good article on TomPaine.com on Tuesday that illustrates the problems with Republican bias against social programs.

The simple fact is that Pelosi’s legislative record on supporting veterans’ health care, education and other benefits is among the best in the House, while Buyer’s ranges from mediocre to atrocious, depending on who’s doing the rating. This is not a subjective judgment, but is based on two separate analyses of voting records by distinctly different veterans organizations—the venerable Disabled Veterans of America, and the upstart Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. (Check the ratings yourself from VAWatchdog.org and IAVA.)

It’s the current Republican leadership in Congress and the White House that own the worst record for supporting veterans legislation—a surprising reality utterly at odds with their support-the-troops rhetoric. Some of the loudest proponents of the war—embattled Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio comes to mind—have some of the poorest records for supporting veterans (overall, Senate Republicans had a “D” average from the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ group), while the most prominent war critics and political liberals—Ted Kennedy, for one– have been the strongest supporters of vets’ legislation (the Senate Democrats had a B+ average).

These votes touch almost every aspect of veterans’ lives: The will of the majority has been to cut funds for brain injury research (more than 3,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered severe brain trauma); to use phony prewar statistics to calculate an unrealistically low but politically palatable cost estimate for veterans health care (causing a $3 billion budget shortfall now coming due); and to rebuff Democratic attempts to correct inequities in the G.I. Bill that cheat National Guard and reserve troops (who have contributed half the fighting force in Iraq and Afghanistan) out of college aid.

So much for supporting the troops. One party talks about it. The other one does it. It is one of the Republicans favorite tactics to assign their opponents with the faults of the Republicans so their opponent appears weak if they try to point out who is really at fault. Unfortunately, it works.

• After World War II, millions of veterans lined up for hours for a remarkable purpose: To register for free college educations, to buy homes with no money down and mortgages cheaper than rent, to sign up for vocational training and job counseling, and to apply for business and farm loans—all courtesy of Uncle Sam and the original G.I. Bill.

• In the wake of the Iraq war and occupation, a different sort of line came be found at military bases nationwide: bread lines. Thousands of military families have been left so impoverished they must queue up for donations of surplus cheese, day-old bread and damaged boxes of frozen food . This is especially true for bases in areas with high costs of living, such as the Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton near San Diego, where food lines have become a weekly fixture.

When our warriors come home from Iraq, all too many find empty bank accounts, maxed-out credit cards and the realization that the college benefits used to entice enlistees often don’t cover the costs of a 4-year degree, nor support their families while they’re in class. And they actually have to have a payroll deduction in order to even qualify for those benefits. Still others, wounded in a war costing the country $10 million an hour, learn that their president and Congress have cut programs to heal their injuries, post-combat stress, and economic distress. Some vets wait six months for medical care. There are an estimated 200,000 homeless veterans from all eras on the streets at the moment; at least six hundred of them are known to have served in the current war in Iraq.

It’s hard to comprehend that we could have been a more progressive nation 40 years ago than we are today. Did we just decide we are the greatest nation of all time and quit striving for the American Dream?

Unfortunately, this is not merely a story of shortchanged veterans and hypocritical congressmen who support war but not warriors. That’s just an awful symptom of a bigger problem: a wholesale failure to invest in America’s future. Just imagine how a politician today would be mocked if he proposed offering an entire generation free college (with stipends), subsidized mortgages, job training and medical care. Yet today’s unthinkable was yesterday’s matter of course. There was no hesitation, no griping about government being the problem, not the solution. This bit of modern conventional wisdom—the animating principal of the government haters now in charge of our government—would have seemed like crazy talk back then to most Americans. And when FDR signed the G.I. Bill on behalf of 16 million veterans—1 out of 8 Americans at the time—he ended up powering far more than a return to the status quo. The G.I. Bill transformed the nation and the American Dream, opening up the colleges (formerly elite bastions), raising suburbs out of bean fields (a nation of renters became a nation of homeowners), growing the middle class (from 1 in 10 before the war to 1 in 3 a decade after), and providing the medical, engineering and scientific prowess to conquer dread diseases, usher in the information age and win the Cold War. It was what every social welfare program must aspire to be if it is to succeed: a hand up, not a hand-out.

Such luminaries as Bob Dole, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William Rehnquist, Warren Christopher, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush and George McGovern, among many others, got their starts through the G.I. Bill, as did 14 Nobel Prize winners, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers and a million assorted lawyers, nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers and pilots. This was a wise investment in every sense: A 1988 congressional study found that every dollar spent on education under the bill returned $7 through increased productivity, consumer spending and tax revenue. Unlike the $505 billion and counting being flushed down the Iraq drain, the G.I. Bill left us safer, stronger, more united and more prosperous. That’s called investing in the future—not for the next quarter, but the next quarter century.

We need that sort of an investment today, a new G.I. Bill for all Americans—not only for those in the military, but those young men and women who might choose other forms of service. Had FDR lived to serve out a last term in peacetime, America would have had such a program of national service. What heights could we have lifted our young people with the half trillion dollars flushed so far down the Iraq drain—and the even larger sum that staying the course will undoubtedly cost in the future. Instead, the American Dream so generously nurtured through the G.I. Bill after World War II is now under siege, from the cost of college to the cost of homeownership to the shrinking middle class to the declining numbers of advanced engineering and science degrees our young people earn.

Now we have the unbearable sight of breadlines for the families of our brave military men and women, inadequate budgets to care for wounded veterans, G.I. Bill college benefits that disappear in a haze of Pentagon fine print—and of congressmen and a president who point fingers everywhere but the mirror.

I was going to say something about how America’s priorities are mixed up when we spend so much more money on destruction that we do on creation, but I don’t think America has priorities anymore. Unless you can count making as much money as possible as a priority. The massive class divide in this country is pushing us back towards the feudal age.

What could possibly go wrong with this plan?

Thanks to advances in DNA technology, scientists can now reconstruct new copies of old viruses. Last year United States government scientists reconstructed the virus that caused the influenza epidemic of 1918. Now a team of French scientists has rebuilt a virus that infected our apelike ancestors several million years ago.