A peculiar piece

There's an article at the New York Times written by a black gay man entitled My struggle to take Anti-Hiv medication.    I think people should find it odd.

First, there's no doubt that he's had much misfortune in his life:

My father was convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison in 1989, where he contracted H.I.V. No one in my family is exactly sure how. In 1991, six months after he returned home, he died. Less than two years later, my mother also died. I was only 7.

I don’t remember my parents in any great detail, but I do remember that people in our rural South Carolina community ostracized my sister and me once they learned our parents were H.I.V. positive. One parent even transferred her daughter out of my second-grade class.

He goes on to explain that he was put off asking for this HIV prophylactic drug by the first doctor he asked:

I was 27 when I first worked up the nerve to ask my doctor for a PrEP prescription. I was there for my fifth annual H.I.V. test, and I’ll never forget the look of disgust on her face as she told me why I wasn’t a candidate for the drug: I didn’t engage in “reckless sex” and I wasn’t a “druggie.” She was white and her tone was so thick with judgment that it made my skin crawl. I quickly dropped the subject. 

Five years later, with a more sympathetic doctor, he did go on it, but this is where it gets odd:

Instead of telling me why I wasn’t right for the drug, we spent the time talking about why I felt that I needed it. I had promised my parents that I would take every precaution against H.I.V., so I put enormous pressure on myself to take it. Plus, it let me be extra cautious about my health and my partner’s health. After our conversation, he tested me for H.I.V. and wrote me a prescription.

Promised his parents posthumously, I assume he means?  Anyway, having obtained the drug:

My first few weeks on PrEP, I felt fine. Every morning at 8 a.m. my cellphone chimed with a reminder for me to take my pill. I even began to develop a subtle sense of pride in knowing that although I was having sex only with my partner, I was upholding my word to my parents.

But as the one-month mark approached, I began to have serious doubts about why I was taking PrEP. After all, I wasn’t having sex with men other than my partner; same for him. We still used condoms, despite having been together for several years.

I recognize that PrEP is effective and agree that it should be available to people who want to take it. But after about a month of taking it off and on, I just stopped. I couldn’t get over the psychological barrier that somehow I was weakening my body by training myself to rely on pills. Instead, my partner and I decided to take the precautions we’re comfortable with.

Um, unless his partner was already HIV positive (or on medication for it), and this is never stated as being the case, the only implication seems to be that he took it because he cannot trust his partner to be true to his promise that he isn't sleeping around with other men.  Or, perhaps, that he couldn't keep his own promise to his partner - who he has been with for several years?

He points out that blacks have historical reasons to be wary of the medical establishment, and notes:

Retention rates for PrEP are deplorable — one study showed usage in Mississippi dropped by 15 percent over a three-month period — and it’s clear to me why. I had guilt and carried emotional baggage. I also felt alone in my journey. There was no PrEP community that I could find with which I could share my anxieties, no PrEP “sponsor” to call and discuss my night terrors or fatigue.

Is it possible that low retention rates indicate confidence that a partner found is HIV negative and faithful?   Not after 3 months, I guess.

Really, the article just seems to re-enforce something about the expectations of a gay lifestyle - that they have very low expectations of their partners - or themselves? - managing to have sexually exclusive relationships even if they promise to do so.

The conservative case for gay marriage is supposed to be about treating gay men similarly to how straight men behave - but honestly, how many heterosexual men (or women) have the expectation that they are at risk of contracting an STD from a steady girlfriend or boyfriend if they have started sleeping together (and assuming they don't have one from the start)?   Very, very few, I would say.   It's pretty much a natural expectation of fidelity that does not even need stating.  But in the gay community, it seems that it is quite the reverse, and few people think that is unreasonable.

The matter of exclusivity in relationships is one where a vast difference still lies between the heterosexual and homosexual communities.

Decline and Fall

(Before I start - Jason, I wouldn't have picked you for a Waugh fan.  I was quite surprised.)

Anyway, Crikey has an amusing free article up noting the descent of Mark Latham, who I was annoyed to see turning up on Sunrise this morning.  

The entertainer, part 2

Look, perhaps JC, who visits here sometimes, can try telling "struth" to get on the antidepressants, or take some professional counselling, or something.  Here's part of his unhinged performance for today:

JC, stop ignoring these paranoid, depressed twits who share forum space with you and only find solace in imagining that an armed uprising will set Australia back on the path of true righteousness and wealth.   It's a very unhealthy place if you let them encourage each other that they aren't nuts.

Stop motion Wes

I've said before that Wes Anderson's artistic sensibilities seem best suited to a cinema medium where he can control absolutely everything - stop motion animation.   (I haven't seen all of his films, but Fantastic Mr Fox remains my favourite thus far.)

Here's his next stop motion effort, which looks good, but has that slightly concerning aspect of whether he will do Japanese culture justice:

Reason not to trust competitive swimmers

Via NPR, I was linked to an article in Chemical and Engineering News, talking about the smelly and unhealthy disinfection by-products (DBPs) of chlorinated swimming pools:

But the biggest contributor to DBPs in pools is urine. Researchers estimate that swimming pools contain an average of 30 to 80 mL of urine for each person that’s jumped in. Some of that is released accidentally or without the person realizing.

But for elite swimmers, peeing in the pool is an accepted part of the culture. Eldridge, the Masters swimmer, confirms that peeing in pools is commonplace in elite competitive swimming. It’s a frequent topic of conversation and joking among swimmers.

Practices can last for hours, Eldridge says, and swimmers chug water during stops between intervals. Swimmers rarely leave the pool during that time. “Do you really think that all these people in the pool, exerting at the level they are, drinking as much as they are, don’t have to pee in two hours?” she asks.

Olympic swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte have both been captured on video admitting to peeing in the pool and seeing nothing wrong with it. A quick YouTube search turns up multiple such videos highlighting their cavalier attitudes.

Hero Jimmy

I just got around to watching the Jimmy Kimmel videos in which he attacks Senator Cassidy for his claims about what he would insist on in Obamacare repeal, and it is a very impressive performance.

The follow up, where he puts the boot into that Fox News host is equally refreshing.

You can watch the first video with some commentary at Slate, and the follow up also is also there.

It is incredible, from here, to see how dire Republican politics has become in the United States.   How can they be so hell bent on repeal of such a key area of government policy with so little care for the details of what it is being replaced with? 

Kimmel is being praised all over the mainstream media for his stance, and he deserves it. 

Who would have thought, watching him years ago on the Man Show (which presumably made more than a few feminist liberals grind their teeth - although I think it was, basically, good natured) that he would become such a liberal hero?   

Modern reproduction

Well, this is news to me.   Via an article from QUT entitled

What motivates men to donate sperm online?

 (no, the answer is not pornography), I've learnt that such do it yourself on line services exist.  (Sure, sperm banks have been around for a long time, but we're talking about a non commercial system here.)

This one, Pride Angel, is English based, and as the name suggests, seems designed mainly to cater to gay and lesbian couples who want to reproduce but don't have all the right equipment at hand, so to speak.  Single women can use it too, though.  They'll sell you the "insemination kit", too.

I have no doubt that gay couples can be good parents, and I feel that those who adopt or foster any child with health or behavioural problems who are difficult to place with families are positively praiseworthy.

On the other hand, it will be a long time before I can see that the commodification of child creation by gay, lesbian, or straight people via these methods as normal and unobjectionable.

Update:  didn't I once write here that the image of the stork delivering babies was a premonition of the future in which semen would be flown around the cities by drones for immediate use for people using a service like this?    I think I did...Yes, I did back in 2013.  (I've been having odd thoughts for longer than I remembered.)

A familiar title

Helen Dale's apparently going to get her ex-boss David Leyonhjelm (Mr Glum now that he doesn't swing as much power as he used to in the Senate) to launch her new book The Kingdom of the Wicked in a couple of weeks' time.

Googling the title to see if there were any early reviews (there aren't), I was suddenly reminded that it shares the title with a (not very widely read, I think) later novel by Anthony Burgess, also set at the time of Christ, and which I actually once started to read, but quickly abandoned as not being to my taste.

I guess it is a generic sounding title for a Roman historical novel (or an alternative history one - which I think her's is), and it does have a subtitle (threatening that it's a series), but I still think a different title might have been a better idea given some of the literary controversies in her past...

To someone who never visits...

Happy birthday, apparently, to:

Philippa Martyr, whose photo here I took from her own blog, so I assume it's up to date...

(I shouldn't be rude, given she recently nearly met her Maker, were it not for the government funded medical care which she now, as a self identifying Catholic libertarian* - excuse me while I roll my eyes - presumably thinks should have been a private facility.) 

*  secular libertarians are annoying enough;  Catholic libertarians are even bigger fantasists who I find all the more annoying.

An updated graph of some consequence

Endorsement by reliable idiot is a sign of a bad movie

I've never watched the first Kingsman movie - the enthusiasm with which it was endorsed by wingnuts for its political incorrectness was a good warning sign, as well as several reviews which indicated to me that I really would not like anything by its director - so I am somewhat pleased that the second is receiving a lukewarm response from the critics. 

And here is more confirmation than I would have thought possible that it must be objectionable on all levels - a thorough endorsement by Breitbart's British village idiot James Delingpole, whose science comprehension level of a 12 year old naughty boy who wasn't paying attention in class indicates taste in movies of a similar immaturity.  

Indian rubber

The BBC has a story about a festival in India, and its connection to increased condom sales:

Many years ago, a young woman who had just moved from the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad to Delhi, told me about the "fun" they had during Navratri - the festival of nine nights.

It's a time when even the most conservative parents adopt a somewhat relaxed attitude and teenagers and young unmarried men and women are allowed to stay out until late in the night, participating in the traditional garba dances held at hotels, banquet halls, parks and private farmhouses.

Since the late 1990s, there have been reports that during the festival, youngsters often throw caution to the wind, indulge in unprotected sex, and two months later, there's a spike in the rate of pregnancy and many land up at clinics seeking abortions.

Although many long-time residents of Gujarat insist that these reports are hugely exaggerated and maybe even a figment of overactive imaginations, the fact remains that over the years, doctors and health workers have flagged up the issue and state authorities have expressed their concerns.

There have been attempts to encourage young people to practice safe sex and reports say that revellers, in many cases girls or young women, are shedding their inhibitions to buy condoms.

Jaswant Patel, chairman of the Federation of Gujarat State Chemists and Druggists Associations, says over the past 10 years, he's seen the sale of condoms go up by at least 30% during the festival period.

"Condoms are sold not just at chemists and general stores, they are stocked at even corner shops that sell paan (betel leaf) and most of the buyers there are teenagers and college students," Mr Patel told the BBC.

But despite the increase in condom sales, Dr Ruby Mehta, a gynaecologist who's run a clinic in Ahmedabad for the past 20 years, says a spike in teenage pregnancies after the festival has continued.

The expected clarification

The authors of the "1.5 degrees is still possible" paper should have been more careful in their PR about it - the misrepresentation was entirely predictable.  But here's their response to some of the media coverage anyway:

A number of media reports have asserted that our recent study in Nature Geoscience indicates that global temperatures are not rising as fast as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and hence that action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is no longer urgent.

Both assertions are false.

Our results are entirely in line with the IPCC’s 2013 prediction that temperatures in the 2020s would be 0.9-1.3 degrees above pre-industrial (See figures 2c and 3a of our article which show the IPCC prediction, our projections, and temperatures of recent years).

What we have done is to update the implications for the amount of carbon dioxide we can still emit while expecting global temperatures to remain below the Paris Climate Agreement goal of 1.5 degrees. We find that, to likely meet the Paris goal, emission reductions would need to begin immediately and reach zero in less than 40 years’ time.

While that is not geophysically impossible, to suggest that this means that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are now unnecessary is clearly false.

Poor Mexico

Mexico is having a rough, what, 40 years, isn't it?   A country particularly prone to natural disasters, as well as the misfortune of being next door to rich and callous drug dealers and users of the United States, I've been feeling sorry for the place for some years now. 

I've also been increasingly interested in visiting it, as the TV shows I've seen over the last year or two make it look particularly interesting, from the spectacular ruins to the lively version of Catholicism.  Does this sound odd - but I've also noticed how much I like Mexican characters when used as comic sidekicks - Guillermo on Jimmy Kimmel's show, for example; or Pedro in Napolean Dynamite.  I think it's the comic use of stoicism that appeals.

And it's stoicism that they really need a lot of at the moment.

Come on, how can this be avoided

Look, you don't have to be a woman or gay man to observe that when Melania Trump turns up on TV with an outfit like this:

or, from early on in her current role, this:

it's an unavoidable conclusion - she has terrible fashion sense, and (I would guess) just lets designers convince her that wacky is good.

And as for the weird behaviour between Donald and her - if anything like this had happened between Obama and Michelle, you would not have heard the end of it for a month on the wingnut sites:

Alternative nostril stuff

A doctor at The Atlantic cast a somewhat cynical eye at Hillary's promotion of alternative nostril breathing, but ends on a non judgemental note:

I don’t believe that antianxiety rituals need sound physiologic rationale. CNN later dove into the “studies” that have been done on alternate-nostril breathing, which mostly involve 20-some subjects and are published in places like International Journal of Yoga, which conceivably has some degree of pro-yoga bias.

These sorts of rituals work because we believe they work. Alternate-nostril breathing affects the circulatory system by way of the nervous system—by calming a person down through distraction and a sense of control. In the case of Clinton, the control is over a body that was falsely said to suffer from illnesses by conspiracy-minded “doctors” who swore that she had Parkinson’s disease, and judged by a nation for her clothing and appearance and smile or lack thereof, while her male opponent was allowed to never smile and to brag about using his status to coerce women to “let” him assault them, and the news dismissed it as “explicit sex talk,” and even evangelical Christian leadership said it “ranks pretty low on their hierarchy of concerns.”

And so it helps to breathe in through one nostril, and then exhale, and then breathe out through the other. And then repeat. It helps if your eyes are closed.

Which reminds me - has any wingnut doctor, or commentator, ever apologised for the relentless on line rubbish they pushed during the campaign that Clinton was virtually at death's door?  

Credibility completely blown

Nassim Taleb needs help, not only for his hyper aggressiveness on Twitter, but for his extraordinary lack of fashion shame, too:

The entertainer

I've noted before, this paranoid regular at Catallaxy is (from what I can gather) an outback pub entertainer.  I trust that he doesn't tell jokes as part of his act.   Probably plays the guitar and looks to have a drink afterwards with any local redneck who'll listen to him complain about how completely and utterly stuffed is the country that hasn't had a recession for 26 years:

The Rudd/Gillard wars all over again

It's kind of incredible that the Coalition is undergoing the same destabilising turmoil that happened with Rudd and Gillard - with the only difference being that Abbott is so thick he doesn't seem to realise that the public doesn't want him back:

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has threatened to cross the floor of Parliament and vote against any move to introduce a clean-energy target, describing as "unconscionable" any move to wind back support for coal in favour of renewables.

Given that the Turnbull government, due to that pesky constitutional problem, is hanging on by a thread anyway, it must seem particularly odious to him that Abbott would be talking up instability in his own government.

Abbott's reputation as a PM is already near rock bottom.  This is only making it worse, if that is possible.

Hearing the completely wrong message, of course

Hey, JC, you are completely wrong, of course.

It was predictable that any paper that says "maybe we can still limit global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees because it seems to us that models have been running a bit 'hot'" would be interpreted by twits like you as "the models are all wrong, and this is fantastic everything is going to stop at 1.5 degrees".

Are you typical of traders?  Because if so, it seems to show that traders can have the analytical abilities of a 10 year old and still be able to make a living. It's quite surprising to me, in a way.

Anyway, to better educate yourself (yes I know - as if) on what the paper means, try reading ATTP with his succinct list of doubts about the paper, which will no doubt be expanded upon by others over the next few days.  Many scientists in the field are skeptical about the methods used to reach their conclusion, and it's actually not hard to understand why, even at this stage.  

Then try David Roberts at Vox on this, and his explanation of how the new paper, even if correct, is like this:

It’s like we’re starting a 100-mile marathon, and we’ve got to read a book while we’re running, but we also need to build upper-body strength, so we’re holding the book with one hand and lifting a barbell with the other, and by the way, we’ve never run farther than 10 miles.

Now, along comes this new paper that says, effectively, “Hey, the marathon is only 99 miles!”

That’s ... nice and all. It’s great that what we need to do is not geophysically impossible, merely more difficult than anything humanity has ever done before, by multiples.

I reckon the reason the authors of the new paper might like to sound optimistic of the implications is because they recognise that one lukewarmer argument is the defeatist one that it is already too late to do anything about emissions, and we may as well forget about them and work out how to do geoengineering as the only possible solution.

But always, always, the danger in any paper revising in any way what they think the models mean is that people like you will say "see, the climate scientists were always wrong and now admit that it's all rubbish and everything is going to be fine".  It's the completely wrong message to take, but you're ideologically motivated to hear it wrong. 

As it happens, everyone else at Catallaxy is too high on the red cordial of Trump at the UN, so they don't seem to be showing much interest anyway.  

Truly, the Right of politics has never been more globally dangerous.

Update:  And here is the proper perspective, from some of the new paper's authors (my bold, to make it easier for comprehension challenged traders to follow):

In a study published in Nature Geoscience, we and our international colleagues present a new estimate of how much carbon budget is left if we want to remain below 1.5℃ of global warming relative to pre-industrial temperatures (bearing in mind that we are already at around 0.9℃ for the present decade).

We calculate that by limiting total CO₂ emissions from the beginning of 2015 to around 880 billion tonnes of CO₂ (240 billion tonnes of carbon), we would give ourselves a two-in-three chance of holding warming to less than 0.6℃ above the present decade. This may sound a lot, but to put it in context, if CO₂ emissions were to continue to increase along current trends, even this new budget would be exhausted in less than 20 years 1.5℃ (see Climate Clock). This budget is consistent with the 1.5℃ goal, given the warming that humans have already caused, and is substantially greater than the budgets previously inferred from the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2013-14....

The emissions reductions required to stay within this budget remain extremely challenging. CO₂ emissions would need to decline by 4-6% per year for several decades. There are precedents for this, but not happy ones: these kinds of declines have historically been seen in events such as the Great Depression, the years following World War II, and during the collapse of the Soviet Union – and even these episodes were relatively brief.

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that greenhouse emissions can only plummet during times of economic collapse and human misery. Really, there is no historical analogy to show how rapidly human societies can rise to this challenge, because there is also no analogy for the matrix of problems (and opportunities) posed by climate change.