Go France

A new film reveals that when a KGB colonel decided to pass on secrets that would devastate the Soviet Union he turned to Paris, hastening the end of the Cold War.

Due credit is given to the French, the once-reviled "surrender monkeys", by, of all sources, the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA's official website still carries a compelling essay, written soon after the affair was declassified in 1996, by Gus Weiss, the American official who ran the Washington end of the case. He concludes: "[The] Farewell dossier... led to the collapse of a crucial [KGB spying] programme at just the time the Soviet military needed it... Along with the US defence build-up and an already floundering Soviet economy, the USSR could no longer compete."

Required Reading

All columnists, and essayists, too, for that matter, should read this 1995 piece by William Safire, A Columnist's Farewell: How to Read a Column. Didn't always agree with the man but he sure could write. And because he took the time to write well, with reasoned arguments and wit, instead of rants and ravings, he managed to do that rare thing, provoke thought among his thoughtful opposition.

Getting Ugly

Killing census workers -- in Kentucky.

Couldn't really bring myself to write about this.

Progress on AIDS vaccine

It doesn't protect even a majority of people but scientists consider it progress that a trial combining two vaccines protected 30% of those tested. Which certainly beats none.

The questions, according to the New York Times: "why it worked in some people but not in others, and why those infected despite vaccination got no benefit at all."

The science is actually really interesting.

One puzzling result — those who became infected had as much virus in their blood whether they got the vaccine or a placebo — suggests that RV 144 does not produce neutralizing antibodies, as most vaccines do, Dr. Fauci said. Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins formed by the body that clump onto invading viruses, blocking the surface spikes with which they attach to cells and flagging them for destruction.

Instead, he theorized, it might produce “binding antibodies,” which latch onto and empower effector cells, a type of white blood cell attacking the virus. Therefore, he said, it might make sense to screen all the stored Thai blood samples for binding antibodies.

“The humbling prospect of this,” he said, “is that we may not even be measuring the critical parameter. It may be something you don’t normally associate with protection.”

Sex and Gender

Not just a problem for human athletes like Caster Semenya, settling the gender question's also a problem in horse racing, too. Though with less serious consequences.

How untidy.

h/t Pam's House Blend

SELLING OUT

Again, if you care about revolution, why on earth would you wear a Che tee shirt? Seriously. Listen to Yoani.

The faces that you see in this small shop are for many people—outside of Cuba—part of a counterculture to confront the status quo. They are the emblems which some call on in an attempt to change what they dislike about their respective societies. But on this Island it is just the opposite, those who look out at us from the posters and T-shirts are, for us, those who created the present order of things, the promoters of the system in which we have lived for fifty years. How could you wear any of these symbols without feeling that you are assuming the culture of power, the emblems of the masters?

Nope, It Ain't Race

Not about race at all -- this little political lovefest with Obama -- in post-racial America.

The picture here's worth at least a word or two.

H/T Field Negro

Snowflakes in Hell?

Jets win two whole times in a row!!! This victory against the rival Patriots of Bill Belichick. Yes, I'm talkin' football.

On the Way Home the Other Night

How to Do a Demo

A perfect case study from thefword.org.uk.

Targeting Class

Great blog post by Timothy Egan in the Times.

...consider the people who showed up in a state of generalized rage in Washington over the weekend. They have no leaders, save a self-described rodeo clown — Glenn Beck of Fox News — and some well-funded Astroturf outfits from the permanent lobbying class inside the Beltway. They are loosely organized under a Tea Party movement, but these people are closer to British Tories than 18th century patriots with a love of equality.

And they have the wrong target.

Mark Williams, a Sacramento talk radio host, was speaking to CNN on behalf of the demonstrators — many of whom carried signs comparing Obama to a witch doctor, an undocumented worker or a Nazi — when he played the blue collar card.

Who is Williams? A garden variety demagogue who calls Obama “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug” and the Democratic party “a domestic enemy” of America. He also refers to the president as “racist in chief.” That says all you need to know about leaders of the Tea Party movement.

Williams repeatedly invoked the “working stiffs” who feel left out. Working people are always the last to get aboard the gravy train, and the first to be used in campaigns that will not advance their cause. And with these demonstrators, and the hucksters trying to distract them from real issues, history repeats itself.

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a trillion-dollar table?

Where were the angry “stiffs” when the banking industry rolled the last Congress — majority Democrat, by the way — into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in permanent credit card hock?

Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion that had to be paid on a few days’ notice — with no debate — to save global capitalism?...

Worth reading the whole thing.

He should also have mentioned the irony of the 2000 election when the silver spoon boy Bush was so popular among "stiffs." Of the Democrats, only Hillary's been effective in attracting them.

Going to Extremes

In the American Prospect, Michelle Goldberg considers why the Right has tolerated, nay, embraced, its radical fringe, while the so-called "left" quickly disposes of people like Van Jones that recently got dumped as Obama's green jobs tzar for a petition that he signed five years ago.

She explains this as a

product of the left's own organizing strategies. While the foot soldiers of the religious right worked to take the Republican Party over from within, activists of the left generally stayed outside party politics, especially the kind of low-level, precinct-by-precinct mobilization necessary to build political power. Democrats don't cater to them because they haven't made themselves a significant force inside the party.

I would assert that the so-called left, the Democrats, don't cater to the left because unlike the relationship of the Right-leaning Republicans to the far Right, the Democrats are no longer a party of the left at all. Center-right, maybe. But Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, the left? I snicker at the mere idea. Which is why the Democrat don't coddle leftist extremists. In fact they rarely even listen to the moderate left.

Perhaps because this mythical Left isn't bolstered by anything approaching a radical left in the United States. There are a few radical lefties. But organized into something as large as a wing? Even a feather? With original thinking going on? Plans for generalized power-grabbing and huge reforms? No. Absolutely not.

What we have are a couple high profile special interest groups: PETA, Green Peace. And a whole lot of losers whose commitment to radicalism is only signaled by the Che face decorating their tee-shirts.

Very few are developing a complex vision for the whole country. If there are leftist think-tanks like the far right has, they're so far underground they're septic.

Give Me Money for Exile

So I'm trying to raise money for an art project in Paris. I hear you saying coals to Newcastle. But still... Be the first to donate!

I'm teaming up with my pal Grégoire Poilroux to create EXILE Gallery, arranging a show by and about the neo-minimalist B-Ville group.

Each donation to EXILE will help liberate experimental art from the cages of time, space, tradition, and market-governed taste. A few bucks puts a poster on the street or a couple of stickers. A hundred dollars helps stage a B-Ville video screening in a Laundromat in Paris, on a bus, or under the eaves of the Metropolitan Museum in New York...

You get the idea.

The Crime of Immigration

I know I'm posting this really late and only including a link in Spanish, but seriously, WTF is going on in Mississippi? A court just stripped a woman of her parental rights because she didn't speak English. Repulsive. When did that become a form of child abuse?

La hija que Cirila perdió por no saber inglés
Un tribunal de EE UU retira la custodia de su hija a una inmigrante
Hace ocho meses que la mexicana Cirila Baltazar Cruz, de 34 años, llegó a un hospital de Pascagoula, Misisipí (EE UU) para dar a luz a su tercer hijo: una niña a la que llamó Rubí. Y hace ocho meses que no la ve. Se la quitaron a los dos días de nacida. Cirila, de origen indígena, fue acusada de negligencia infantil y una orden judicial le retiró la custodia de su hija. Un tribunal estatal refrendó la decisión en mayo. Cirila nunca supo de qué se la acusaba. No habla inglés y no domina el castellano. La niña ha sido dado en adopción.

Slaughtering Queers in Iraq

Foreign Policy mag reports on Iraq's New Surge: Gay Killings
As U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill testifies before Congress today, Iraqi's security is far from assured. Militias now targeting the socially marginalized could soon take their killing spree mainstream. h/t faisal alam

Claire Denis

One of my favorite filmmakers, Claire Denis, has a new movie out -- an oddly positive piece in the NY Times which usually sniffs at her.

Mutism

So I stare at this unchanged page every day and think I could post this, that or the other, what with all the posts I see, the articles I read, the links I actually get sent like microwave dinners, but just feel more mute by the minute.

Must get over this.

Health Care: Debunking the Lies

Foreign Policy takes on some of the "most wildly inaccurate statements" about other health care systems.

My favorite lie...

THE UNITED STATES HAS THE BEST HEALTH CARE IN THE WORLD

There is one yardstick by which U.S. health care distinguishes itself: cost. The United States spends more -- in total dollars, percentage of GDP, and per capita -- than every other country on Earth.

On virtually every other broad metric, the claim that U.S. health care stands for global excellence is demonstrably false. The United States doesn't take a top spot in either the World Health Organization or nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund rankings. The American health-care system is not best in terms of coverage, access, patient safety, efficiency, or cost-effectiveness. It does not produce the best outcomes for diseases such as cancer, heart disease, or diabetes; for the elderly, the middle-aged, or the young; or in terms of life expectancy, rates of chronic diseases, or obesity.

Which countries do come out on top? Often -- France, Switzerland, Britain, Canada, and Japan. On the World Health Organization's list, the United States comes out 37th.