( Congo Army Helps Rebels Get Arms )
Letter

Seeking Peace in Congo

( Seeking Peace in Congo - reaction from Alan Doss )

( UN Told Not To Join Congo Army in Operation )

[new blog post]

Book Club: Women in Acehnese Society

http://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/women_acehnese_society/

If you could receive all the products from a single company for free, but could not resell them, which company would you choose?

I'd choose the Cadbury company. Because I love chocolate, and Cadbury chocolate is the best chocolate in the world!

Which company would you choose, (optional) and why?


Moveon.ORG


Join The NRA
"The Right Of The People To Keep and
Bear Arms, Shall Not Be infringed."!

Death Valley Scotty's Castle

Instead of sharing the pics I recently took of Death Valley, and Scotty's Castle here, I decided to create a page especially for them. I did it this way, because it would have greatly slowed down this journal.

Seems like the cock roaches continue to come out of the wood work for the adulterous Tiger Woods.

I've looked at these women's pics, and find them to be as unattractive as can be, and will never understand how Tiger could have found any of these one night stand gold diggers attractive, when he had a gorgeous, and faithful wife at home. All these women knew that Tiger Woods was married, so I not only blame Woods for whoring around, but all of them, too. My point is, if a woman knows a man is married, then why does she give him the come on, when there are so many single men available? And why do the majority of married men stray?

Although, I've never been into golf, I once held the utmost respect for this man.

A woman who obviously had concentual sex with Woods has surfaced and has hired a lawyer. Why a lawyer?


Moveon.ORG


Join The NRA
"The Right Of The People To Keep and
Bear Arms, Shall Not Be infringed."!

I've been to panels at cons where editors/writers believed that many/most readers don't read prologues and it made no sense to me. Surely a reader would always read the prologue? Or am I wrong? A recent poll of hands at our writers' group saw a 70%-30% split, with most agreeing with me. Well, almost. Truth is few had just a yes or no answer, so I thought I'd create this poll, ask all of you Science fiction and fantasy readers and writers to tell me what you think, and maybe get a good idea of the real answer.

Please spread the word if you can, from yout LJ, Twitter, FB, etc. The more folks who fill this in the more meaningful the results.


Poll #1495748 Prologues: Great, useless or just okay
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 44

As a reader of SF&F novels, do you read the prologue?

As a writer of SF&F novels, you write prologues:

As a gut check, do you like prologues? 1 is no, going through to 10, which is yes.

Any other thoughts on prologues and whether they are a good or bad thing? (or add a comment to the blog)

I posted in my own journal about [what I consider] a security hole on OkCupid. You can see it here: edelsont.livejournal.com/14163.html.

I don't know whether this will be news to y'all. And actually, I'd like to know: is it?

/ Tom

Yesterday I posted the following tweet, which is just a re-tweet of someone else's blog post about Battlestar Galactica:

An interesting look into the "All Along the Watchtower" piano arrangement. http://ow.ly/IK5r #BSG /via @battlestarwiki

This is the non-shortened link:
http://collaborativepiano.blogspot.com/2009/12/some-thoughts-on-battlestar-galactica.html

This line from the post encapsulates what is so cool about the episode:
'Someone To Watch Over Me' is fascinating in that, only a few hours from the end of the entire series, piano music permeates the soundtrack of the episode whose principal plot line is essentially about piano playing.

I finished watching the Battlestar Galactica television series about two weeks ago or so. I liked the show a lot, but I was not a rabid fan. There were a lot of plot weaknesses actually, and a couple of bad ideas. One of the bad ideas was this use of "All Along the Watchtower" as a kind of switch-on for sleeper cylons on board the Battlestar. I mean, why Bob Dylan (or Hendrix, if you're liking that version instead, which was the version that got played in the very last scene of the very last episode) if the story takes place 150,000 years or so before Dylan wrote the song? Why does the Dylan generation of baby-boomers *still* enjoy this kind of god-like and iconic privilege in our pop culture? At the end of Season 3, when the noises were revealed to be sounds from that song, it was a total shark-jumping moment for me, total buzzkill.

That said, the very presentation of the song, the strangeness of its arrangement and instrumentation, the way it congealed aurally for the sleeper cylons, was pretty cool. And then, in Season 4, in the episode referenced in the blog post linked above, we learn that Starbuck learned how to play the song on the piano when she was a child, because her father always used to play it, and Hera, the cylon-human half-breed, had written the notes out on a piece of paper as a gift to Starbuck, and it all came together. It was hokey, an attempt at creating mysterious plot connections between characters (a la LOST, but not as good as LOST does it), but I liked it anyway... one of those fun, if rather pointless, a-ha moments. Pointless, because it's obvious the writers were just creating an a-ha moment out of thin air. The connection didn't have much meaning, development, or explication in the show's overall mythology.

Anyway, the blog post I linked to above tells about how adults who played piano as a child (like me!) might get more out of the episode than anyone else. Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), to me, was by far the BEST actor on the show, and this was an episode where she could deliver. (See the scene below) The writers asked her to do some stupid things throughout her character arc, and she really pulled it off. Despite some silly demands, she had me hooked all the way until the end. I really liked this piano episode, with the mysterious piano player who channeled Starbuck's father. It encapsulates some of the very best and the very worst aspects of the show:

Kara plays 'All Along The Watchtower' from Robin on Vimeo.

Perceptions of Aceh in Yogyakarta

http://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/perceptions-of-aceh/

[my first go at a serious-ish blog entry... let's see how long this lasts!]

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — International Criminal Court appeals judges on Wednesday reversed a decision to release former Congo Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba from custody, ordering him to stay in jail until his trial.
The court in August ordered Bemba freed, saying he would otherwise spend too much time in custody after his arrest in May 2008.
But appeals judge Akua Kuenyehia ruled Wednesday that there was a risk Bemba would flee if released.
"The potential length of sentence if he is convicted is a further incentive for him to abscond," Kuenyehia said. Bemba faces a possible lengthy prison sentence, although the court's statutes mention no maximum term.
Bemba did not react to the decision and said nothing at the brief hearing, but one of his lawyers told reporters they would continue to fight for his release.
"We expect this issue to be examined again by the pretrial judges," said attorney Aime Kilolo.
Bemba faces five counts of murder, rape and pillage for allegedly commanding a militia responsible for atrocities in the Central African Republic. That country's president at the time, Ange-Felix Patasse, had appealed to Bemba's militia for help in defeating a coup.
He has not entered a plea ahead of his trial, which is scheduled to start April 27 next year.
Bemba is the most senior political figure in the custody of the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal. He ruled a vast chunk of northeastern Congo during that country's 1998-2002 war, with support from neighboring Uganda. After a peace agreement ended the war, he became one of the country's four vice presidents in a reunited Congo.
Bemba was arrested in Belgium and transferred to the court in The Hague in July 2008.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

I was at the Pascasarjana conference at UGM this week, and there was a literature panel that covered banned Indonesian writers throughout the ages. There was a panel about Mas Marco, and another about Lekra. I didn't learn anything new in these two presentations that I didn't already know (that was the disappointment), except that many of the writings of Marco, Tirto Adhi Soerjo, and the Lekra gang beyond Pramoedya, are now available. Then a friend on facebook showed me indonesiabuku.com, and boy was I excited to find these four volumes:

Karya2 Lengkap Tirto Adhi Soerjo


Karya2 Lengkap Marco Kartodikromo


Two out of their three volumes on Lekra writers:

Lekra Tak Membakar Buku: Suara Senyap Lembar Kebudayaan Harian Rakjat 1950-1965 (Essays)

and

Laporan dari Bawah: Sehimpun Cerita Pendek Lekra Harian Rakjat (Short Stories)



The third Lekra volume is poetry, and they were out of stock, and I probably wouldn't have bought it anyway... as nice it would be to have that third volume, I know myself enough to know that I don't have the sustained patience for poetry.

Anyway, it's great to find this stuff recovered and published again, with academics and small literary foundations taking great lengths to make it available. It reminds me of a path I did not take in my graduate studies, but might have been just as interesting... a PhD in Modern Indonesian Literature Studies.... I miss my Bahasa Indonesia and Indonesian history classes at University of Michigan!

Dear Elise Vincent,

I'm not sure who you are, but if you are going to report on health statistics, it would be a great idea to learn a) how to find them, and b) how to source and interpret them. I am shocked and amazed to learn that, although UNAIDS reports HIV/AIDS prevalence for ages 15-49 at 5.4% in Uganda and 2.8% in Rwanda, you have decided that Uganda's prevalence (presumably for the population at large) is 30% and Rwanda's is 15%. Interesting math, there. I'd like to know your source for those statistics. Did you go to Goma to write this article? Was "HIV prevalence in bordering countries" one of your "man on the street" interview questions?

And what about your Goma "data"? "Officially," you say, the prevalence is 5%. I beg to differ. In the DR Congo 2008 Antenatal Surveillance Survey, Goma's prevalence among pregnant women, which is usually slighly higher than in the general population, is around 2.2%.

Not to mention that, although you cite "Medecins du Monde," you don't tell us in which hospital they operate and from whence they report their "data." You tell us that they see 200 women per month for antenatal care visits, during which these women are offered HIV counseling and testing. Apparently "10-20%" are positive. Which is it? Ten percent or 20%? If it varies month to month, don't they have enough "data" to provide an annual average? Do we know whether it is rising or falling?

Your points regarding lack of resources are valid. They are valid for everywhere in DR Congo, and many many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. That said, I think it is irresponsible to make a comment such as, "only monotherapy is available, which increases the risk of resistance." I'm not sure we're worried about the risk of resistance as much as we should be about your further comment, that doctors are only prescribing the day of delivery rather than beginning at 28 weeks. The point of this sentence, which you left out, is that ARVs prescribed at 28 weeks can be effective in reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS, whereas if the mother begins therapy at delivery, it will not be effective.

Not quite as bad as the sports writer that said that DR Congo's infant mortality rate was 92%, but still...

Respectfully yours,
congogirl

ps. Le Monde, if you posted "Letter to the Editor" info, I'd have copied you on this message.

( Full text in French under the cut )

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
For Immediate Release
December 1, 2009
2009/1199

On-The-Record Briefing
U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Ambassador Eric Goosby
On the U.S. Commitment to Fight AIDS and the
Launch of PEPFAR’s New Five-Year Strategy

December 1, 2009

Washington, D.C.

MR. DUGUID: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the State Department this afternoon. We are with Ambassador Eric Goosby, who is the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator. His duties include running the entire U.S. Government’s international HIV/AIDS efforts. In this role, Ambassador Goosby oversees the implementation of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that is, PEPFAR – as well as the U.S. Government engagement with the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

With that, I give you Ambassador Goosby.

AMBASSADOR GOOSBY: Well, thank you. It’s a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk to you today. I’d like to begin to – with acknowledging the efforts of many people on PEPFAR from the State Department, USAID, CDC, Department of Defense, Peace Corps, and other agencies that all contribute their expertise at field headquarters to make this program work. It’s a combination of people all over the world who support people in-country to put the programs in place, really quite an orchestration.

I’d also like to acknowledge the efforts of President Bush and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle for creating and supporting this program. I’ve been working in HIV/AIDS for 25 years, both domestically and internationally. And I can remember the days before PEPFAR was in place – they weren’t that long ago – when patients were two, three in a bed, put under the bed, on the floors, in the hallway of most of the Sub-Saharan African countries that we’re engaged in now, waiting for treatments that basically weren’t available.

Today, the situation is markedly different. PEPFAR has brought hope to millions of people across the world with its treatment and care programs. In 2009 alone, PEPFAR has supported life-saving antiretroviral therapy for more than 2.4 million people, essential care to nearly 11 million people, and counseling and testing for nearly 29 million people. And through efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission, PEPFAR prevention of transmission from mother to child for 100,000 babies born to HIV-positive mothers in the past year alone, building upon the nearly 240,000 babies born HIV-free over the past five years.

But unmet needs are still the dominant feature of this program. We have gotten through approximately a third of the population that is in need of care and the millions who are participating in high-risk behaviors who need prevention interventions. There are an estimated 33 million people living with HIV, 2.7 million new infections occurring annually, approximately 2 million deaths annually, and for every two people we’ve put on treatment, five more have become infected. If we are to sustain the gains we’ve had and have made against this epidemic, PEPFAR must work in closer collaboration with country governments to support and mount a truly global response to the shared global burden of disease.

Today, I’m announcing the release of our five-year strategy, which will be followed later in the week by the release of several annexes with more information about specific areas within the document. Let me give you a quick overview of PEPFAR’s next phase.

First, we’re going to begin transitioning from an emergency response to a sustainable one through greater engagement with and capacity building of governments. PEPFAR has already started this with its Partnership Framework activity, which is a five-year strategic plan developed in collaboration with our partner governments. But we need to do more, especially around supporting the creation of mid-level government capacity to oversee, manage and eventually finance these programs. It is a good start.

Secondly, we’re going to focus on prevention. We’re going to scale up highly effective prevention interventions like male circumcision, prevention of mother-to-child transmission. We’re going to work with countries to determine not just how many people are infected in their communities, in their countries, but where the new infections are occurring. Geomapping and understanding that demographic relationship to geography allows you to make decisions around prevention program positioning, so you can put your programs in front of that expanding movement of the virus through the population.

With treatment, we will continue a strategic scale-up of services to more than four million people. The focus will be on certain populations – the sickest, pregnant women, pregnant women in general who are HIV-positive, and HIV/TB co-infected individuals – while we work with both our country partners in the international community to continue to lower the price of commodities and distribute the costs of treatment among multiple funders.

As we carry out these prevention, care and treatment activities, we will do so with an eye toward how these activities strengthen the broader health system. We will work not only to continue our quality delivery of services and expansion of both care, treatment and prevention services, but we will also look to create a durable response that can benefit the entire healthcare system and continue the expansion and capability of services for what are often HIV-positive populations.

I look forward to working closely with partner countries, other donors, and PEPFAR staff in the field to implement the concepts of this strategy. I’d like to thank you, and I’m open to any questions that you might have.


( Read more... )

OMG I haven't posted here for ages, and actually have things to post about (like holidays!), but here are my final 2 bridesmaid dress options.

#1

Daniela's: an actual formal dress (but imagine it in dark blue).



I tried it on and it does look kinda awesome. But it is VERY formal, and I don't attend very many formal things. Perhaps buying it will encourage a string of my friends to also get married? *shrug*

Picture of ME in it follows in an f-locked post.

#2

David Lawrence: fancy but still regular clothes dress. Slinky jersey sleeveless grecian dress



I haven't tried this on yet, but the sales assistant at the Richmond David Lawrence recommended it. So I am trekking to Nunawading (!) where they have one hopefully in my size, to try it on tomorrow.

Apparently you're supposed to give formal wear places like 2-3 months to order a dress in your preferred shade (of which there are dozens) and style and size. And the wedding I'm attending is in February, I've known about it for like a year so I have no one to blame here but myself... but gosh, that's rather organised :)

The PEPFAR Paradox

By Katie Paul
Newsweek
December 1, 2009
http://www.newsweek.com/id/224963
As far as storylines go, PEPFAR has had it pretty good so far. Since George W. Bush first introduced the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2003, the program has been able to swing around impressive credentials: more than 2 million people in 15 focus countries have started on antiretroviral treatment and more than 10 million have been supported with overall care. Thanks to the program's promising results, Congress raised the budget of PEPFAR by $4 billion over the course of its existence. With $6.7 billion to its name, PEPFAR is now the biggest public-health initiative in the world.

But after years of steady gains in funding, health experts say PEPFAR's funding will likely flatline under the Obama administration. At the same time, they expect the gap between the number of people who need treatment and the number getting it to widen. With budgets squeezed by the financial crisis, and a growing call in global health circles to move away from "AIDS exceptionalism"-defined as greater funding for AIDS programs at the expense of overall health resources-the jewel of Bush's foreign-policy portfolio is poised to start looking much less shiny.

But even though its results may not look as impressive, the program is as strong and smart as ever. Up until now, PEPFAR was defined by the "E" in its name: emergency. The emphasis was on starting up strong and making a big impact, which often meant bypassing local governments to get as many people on treatment as possible, as quickly as possible. But while that has produced impressive results, the approach is far from sustainable. The program's record on preventing transmission of HIV has been lackluster, and worldwide the number of new infections is drastically outpacing the number of people receiving treatment, according to PEPFAR's published reports. For every two patients put on antiretroviral drugs today, five others contract HIV-a rate that has remained steady even as PEPFAR money made enormous strides in bringing down the death rate.

If that doesn't change-and there is little indication it will-PEPFAR risks becoming a black hole of an entitlement program, committed to funding treatment indefinitely as more and more patients live longer and longer. "The problem is, there's no way you can treat ourselves out of this epidemic," said Dr. Stefano Bertozzi, who directs HIV work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "As you newly start people on treatment, you need to maintain those people you started on treatment in previous years. The number of people you're sustaining next year is always going to be greater than the number of people you're sustaining this year." According to a cost analysis from the Center for Global Development, an independent research firm, maintaining present successes for the ever-increasing number of patients would cause U.S. AIDS spending to swell to $12 billion by 2016, consuming half the foreign-assistance budget and squeezing out U.S. spending on other programs, including other health initiatives.

The way out of this conundrum, according to policy experts? Shift more resources over to prevention efforts. Transfer programs to local ownership and put national governments on the hook for delivering services. Monitor and evaluate which programs are working, then report the results.

According to Eric Goosby, the U.S. global AIDS coordinator in charge of PEPFAR, those items are all on the agenda. On the prevention front, PEPFAR is pouring resources into peer-education programs and mother-to-child transmission interceptors. The program is also doubling the funding for monitoring and effectiveness studies, from $23 million this year to $40 million to $50 million in 2010. And in line with the administration's push to broaden global health and development plans beyond one disease-epitomized by a new $63 billion, six-year initiative-Goosby is looking to move away from both reliance on NGO contractors and commitment to a narrow AIDS focus. "Patients are going to need these drugs 20 to 30 years in the future, so we need to focus on sustainability. To do that, we need to work off PEPFAR platforms to expand into a broader constellation of services for each patient," he says.

That position has the support of AIDS advocates, who have had to fight off accusations that AIDS gets too much attention in the public-health realm. "It doesn't make sense for a counselor to have a discussion about contraception with a woman in one building, then have a different program in a different building about HIV prevention. People co-infected with HIV and TB shouldn't have to go to clinics across town to have those problems dealt with," says Bertozzi of the Gates Foundation. In other words: public health isn't a zero-sum game.
Of course, making the change is easier said than done. Politically, the strategy is risky. Improvements on the prevention side, which may produce the best results in the long term, are difficult to measure (you can show how someone caught a bug, but it's tougher to prove a negative and track why he didn't catch it). And while increased partnership with national governments is a worthy goal, it also carries the risk of slow transitions, less impressive results, and a loss of congressional enthusiasm when funding time comes around again. Handing off programs to local control can be a messy process, cautions Peter Navario, a global health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in HIV/AIDS systems in developing countries. In one case he cites, an international NGO that tried to turn over a program to doctors and administrators in South Africa ended up having to resume leadership of the program-twice.

But lower expectations and untidy transitions may be a necessary price to pay. Expensive quick fixes can't work forever; eventually, local doctors are going to need to be trained to take over from their expat counterparts. If, as the experts say, the Obama administration is putting all the right pieces into place to mold PEPFAR into a post-emergency program, then the challenge at home is to make sure congressional support doesn't wane if critics spin the numbers as evidence of ineffective leadership. The new monitoring and evaluation studies should help. They would have helped even more if they had been implemented at the start, say AIDS fund administrators. But so the proverb goes: if the best time to plant a tree is 200 years ago, the second best time is today.

What my profile says:



What the Staff Robot and IceBreaker did with that:



X-posted from my journal.

Hi there... wow, tonight I started a new blog over at Word Press... it's called http://jgrayman.wordpress.com , and for the moment still uses the title "The AnthroLOLogist". For the three or five friends who still read this livejournal, don't worry! It's not a replacement. There will be no strict demarcations, but this blog will tend toward the personal and the new blog will tend toward the professional. I don't even know if I will have the discipline (or time) to write in it, seeing as how I hardly ever update this one anymore. My thinking was that I've got all these ideas lately about what's going on in Aceh, or opinions about stuff in Indonesia, or back home, but this journal hasn't been much of a place for those kinds of discussions. And so maybe, just maybe, that is one reason why I don't write. I also see lots of blogs on Huffington Post and The Daily Beast that are big crap, and I know I can write better than a lot of those people getting published on those macro-blogging sites. My thoughts and opinions would probably be too niche, not-mainstream topically, for those sites... I'm just saying that if those sites are perfectly willing to publish crap, then I can write my own little Indonesia and Aceh blog, with some other musings too, and for those who care about these things, it will be better than crap. A new blog at Word Press offers up some tagging and publishing advantages, where I can create a publications page (or category), and upload many of the research reports I've written since I started working in Aceh. With my name, and proper tags attached, I can both share some of the obscure things that some people look for but can never find online, and I can self-promote for the sake of my career.

That said, I have mixed feelings about the emergent demarcation, however fuzzy. I used to love letting it all hang out on the internet (read this blog from 2002-04 and you'll see what I mean), and I liked the idea that projecting myself out online, on dozens of websites, but primarily here on livejournal, was an actualization of a "dispersed subject," where the Jesse over there (or then) is not the Jesse over here (or now), and one Jesse is not exactly responsible to the other Jesse, at least not directly. I've changed a lot since then, and while it might not be for the better, there are reasons for the changes, both good and bad. Maybe I got burned too many times by unwittingly putting myself out there for others to exploit. Or, more likely, maybe now I feel like I've got something to lose (or more to gain). Again, that's a mixed bag. The dispersed subject that I once idealized has turned into an interpellated subject, where professionalization matters (hey, I am now a member of the American Anthropological Association for two years running!). I'm not saying that I suddenly harbor dreams of tenure track academia or senior management at an NGO or donor organization... I guess I'm saying that I am ready to distinguish my work by developing my ideas more cogently, and practicing my writing in a more formal register/discourse.

Well, before I build up expectations or navel gaze my way toward more justifications, let's just see how it goes for now, and we'll revisit this plan a few weeks/months from now and see how it's working out.

Short video from NPR's Science Friday telling of Michael Musnick a "citizen scientist" who studies turtles, and came up with a simple solution to save them from getting stuck between railroad tracks (where they die from mid-day heat). Then he convinced the NY authorities to help him implement it. Michael Musnick, you rock.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10242

All through OkCupid's redesigns and adding and dropping features, their core matching system made it all worthwhile, because it actually works if you use it well. They finally got around to fiddling with that ... early this year? Sometime last year? I forget. They mostly got rid of the adjustment they used to make for uncertainty when people haven't answered a lot of questions, which had the effect of making all match scores shoot up for people who only answered a small number of questions. You still get a significant adjustment if you've answered a tiny handful, but by the time you've got, say, 50 questions in common with someone, you can now have matches in the 90s, even though there's no solid basis for it.

However, they didn't quite completely ruin the one thing that made OkCupid good, because they still let you see how many questions someone answered, and how many they answered in common with you. So you could still tell - if you knew to look - when your high match score with someone should be taken with a lot of skepticism, and when it was real.

Now, though, it seems that they've gotten rid of that. I logged in this week and saw that someone with a 95% match had viewed my profile, so I looked at hers... and there's no way that I can find to see how many questions she answered. Is this 95% for real, or is it a random coincidence from someone's first 20 questions?

If this is true, then they've finally succeeded in making OkCupid no better than any other similar site. Their one huge advantage over all other sites - matching system that can actually work - now rendered useless.

Did they really do that? Anyone know why?