Hope is not a plan

A thought from John Kovalic, on election day:

A lot of my friends in the USA are posting things like, "If you don't plan to vote today, PLEASE vote. Every vote is important. Just vote."

If you do vote, you'll probably just ruin it for the rest of us.

As I've discussed before, abstinence-only sex education is clearly ineffective, with up to 95% of Americans engaging in premarital sex and a concomitantly high rate of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Despite the lack of good empirical support for any value in trying to tell kids to act the way their parents didn't, abstinence-only sex education has nonetheless been the Federal mandate for the past eight years, a mandate that bleeds unhelpfully over into the restrictions we place on public health money we donate to other countries.

So, if abstinence-only is a bust, what can we do?

In a recent study published in the journal Pediatrics, Rand researchers Chandra et al find that teens exposed to very high levels of sexual content on television are significantly more likely to get pregnant or get someone else pregnant. Specifically, those in the 90th percentile for amount of sexual content watched on television were twice as likely to end up involved in a pregnancy as those in the 10th percentile. Although this study doesn't show causation, it does point to a potential problem and mirror other concerns about how sexual behavior is modeled in the media.

Note that the point is not necessarily "sex bad," but rather "sex portrayal bad." If you catalog the sexual material you've been exposed to on television recently, how much of it involves the use of safer sex items (e.g. condoms) and sexual interactions between healthy, long-term adult couples, and how much of it involves wild, seemingly spur-of-the-moment sex between people who don't really know each other? In the wake of a recent proposal to alter how sex education is done in England, much discussion ensued about how lower teen pregnancy rates in many Western European countries probably have a lot to do with open, healthy discussion of sexuality between teens and their parents -- giving the teens good models to work from.

He thinks the real problem is cultural - teens wanting to lose their virginity fast and sociable girls having nothing to lose by getting pregnant.

Professor van Loon says in Holland parents are more likely to spend time talking to their children and the emphasis is more on the romantic side of sex.

Rand summary of the study

Just this last March, a 14-year-old ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan was breached during an incident in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. I gave some background on that situation here, but the short version is that the Nogorno-Karabakh region, located just west of center in Azerbaijan, is predominantly an ethnic Armenian enclave. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, underlying tensions here have been resurrected full force, including fighting from 1991 to 1994, and again this year.

Now, reportedly spurred on by the disastrous outcome of Georgia's recent attempt to rein in South Ossetia, the two nations involved have signed a new agreement to "facilitate the improvement of the situation in the South Caucasus and establishment of stability and security in the region through a political settlement of the conflict based on the principles and norms of international law and the decisions and documents adopted in this framework". Those are the words of Dmitry Medvedev, who helped broker the agreement.

The government of Azerbaijan is surely very aware of the fate of the last government that challenged one of Russia's pet ethnic groups, and wants to avoid being the next Georgia. At the same time, out-and-out ceding of Nogorno-Karabakh represents a loss of one fifth of Azerbaijan, which also seems unacceptable, especially as it will further disrupt the already discontinuous structure of the country by punching a big hole in the center.

BBC article

In attacking the current financial bailout package, Alaskan Governor Palin had these words for us this week:

"We're hearing now more talk of additional taxpayer bailouts ... for companies, for corporations, perhaps even states now who may be standing in line with their hands out despite, perhaps, some poor management decisions on their part that helped tank our economy," she said.

"Republicans can help shore [these sectors of the economy] up without getting any more addicted to opium, other people's money. We need to have a rational discussion. What and when is enough enough?"

To that, what can we say except $1.87 of Federal spending into Alaska for each $1 paid in Federal taxes by Alaska.

So there are states standing in line for Federal handouts? Shameful.

CNN article

In the last month or so of the election, our now president-elect was simultaneously called a Socialist and a "hidden" Muslim (ignoring, perhaps, the various disagreements Muslims and nominal Socialists have had in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya in the past). A friend of mine very accurately said that these things are all just a proxy for fear. It's the same generic fear of the world that thinks that a president can fundamentally, say, alter the second amendment.

As an aside, I'd appreciate it if there were more overlap between avid support for the second amendment and avid support for the first. After all, the point of the guns is not having guns, but keeping government from becoming an entity independent of and in suppression of the people. The second supports the first, and without the first, there's not much value in the second.

This week, Representative Paul Broun said this:

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.
"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

There is, perhaps, some irony in a white guy from Georgia comparing a black man from Illinois to Hitler.

After making the comparison, Broun disingenuously said he wasn't making the comparison. Notably, despite his fears of Obama-lead Brown Shirts marching through our streets, the program Obama is actually suggesting was for an emphasis on overseas, civilian-based security services. In other words, as many of our own officers have noted, and as our allies have observed, the United States military is not a police force. It's not supposed to be. Our soldiers do their best to help with rebuilding and securing Iraq and Afghanistan, but fundamentally, it would be better to have properly trained, nonmilitary personnel handling many of these jobs.

But nonetheless, pandering to what he no doubt views as his core demographic -- whether that's true or not -- Broun has misrepresented our next president's remarks and has chosen to spend his time in scared guy fantasy land, where he can pretend to be Tom Hanks in his own personal Saving Private Ryan.

I'll let my search results just now in looking for Broun's congressional page have the last word:

AOL article

Back in February of this year, delegates from over a hundred nations met to discuss the banning of cluster munitions. Early next month, these nations will sign the proposed treaty into law, and hundreds of nations will eschew the use of persistent warfare methods that cripple and kill civilians long after the conflict is over.

As I described in this earlier post, the major arms distributors -- the U.S., China, and Russia -- didn't attend the original conference and are highly unlikely to be signatories to the treaty. However, as Thomas Nash from the Cluster Munition Coalition points out, getting this many countries to sign on, including NATO members, will help to preclude the use of cluster weapons in future operations:

"What you are going to see is a comprehensive stigmatisation of the weapon," he says.

"You're going to see this weapon becoming a thing of the past."

Lacking its own facilities to decommission these munitions, the United Kingdom has contracted with Nammo Demil to destroy 28 million bomblets. Pleasingly, the bomblets are largely recyclable:

The bomblets are extracted, the fuses are cut off and the copper inners are removed.

The copper, aluminium and other metals are sold for scrap. The packaging for the bomblets is burnt for heating.

This is a hopeful sign for the future.

BBC article