Later On

A review of a disturbing book:

Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman’s Fight for Justice
by Kathryn Bolkovac

A review by Natalie Wilson

In 1998, Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska police officer trained in forensic science, applied to work with the private military contractor DynCorp on a peacekeeping mission in post-war Bosnia. During her training, she overheard a fellow recruit boast, “And I know where you can get really nice 12- to 15-year-olds.” “I must have misheard,” she recalls thinking. “Any other alternative would not only be repulsive but wildly illegal.” However, when a roughed-up young woman was delivered by a local police officer to her office, Bolkovac was spurred to investigate a crumbling bar named Florida. There she found a thick stack of U.S. dollars and a bundle of passports belonging to women and underage girls from the Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, damning evidence that soldiers and DynCorp workers were making use of victims of sexual trafficking.

The U.N.-sponsored effort in Bosnia had the essential elements for trafficking, Bolkovac writes: “lots of money; lots of free time to scheme; completely new surroundings a continent away from home; an audience of broken, desperate people ripe to betaken advantage of.” In The Whistleblower, she calls for the eradication of the “boys-will-be-boys environment” of contractors like DynCorp, showing how the scarcity of women on such missions allows them to function like fraternities, with the “boys” punishing those who dare to expose their “fun.” She details an atmosphere with no formal mechanism to report sexual harassment, and uses the harassment she herself suffered to explore the insidious nature of sexism. When she blew the whistle on their involvement in trafficking, Bolkovac’s superiors tried to frame her as psychologically unfit for the job and wrongly accused her of falsifying time sheets.

“Intimidation was not only the tactic captors used with trafficking victims, it was also becoming an effective method used by the high ranks to silence human rights officers in the field,” she writes. There were upsides. Bolkovac and others brought Bosnia’s first successful prosecution against an abusive husband; her investigations led to the formation of anti-trafficking taskforces.

Nevertheless, the “well-greased machine of human trafficking” grinds on, not only because of the pervasive attitude that victims are “whores seeking a free ride home,” but, Bolkovac argues, because of monetary disincentives to airing problems. She posits that if DynCorp were to get bonuses for mission time with “no incidents,” managers might be under pressure to ignore breaches in conduct by civilian peacekeepers.

The U.S. State Department and the U.N., by hiring and supervising these military contractors, remain complicit in hiding, as well as perpetrating, sexual trafficking. Contract workers from companies like DynCorp continue to be shipped around the globe — to Haiti, Liberia, Iraq and Afghanistan, areas that see regular allegations of sexual assault and human-rights violations from the very forces meant to keep the peace. We all have a stake in stopping this ongoing atrocity, not least because we’re paying for it: Ninety-six percent of DynCorp’s $2 billion in annual revenues is footed by the U.S. government.

Natalie Wilson is a lecturer in women’s studies and literature at California State University, San Marcos. Her feminist analysis of the Twilight Saga and fandom, Seduced by Twilight, comes out in spring from McFarland.

Constant Reader pointed out this very intriguing post (“Falling Demand for Brains“) by Paul Krugman, in which he refers to his earlier extrapolation published in 1996, which begins:

When looking backward, you must always be prepared to make allowances: it is unfair to blame late-20th-century observers for their failure to foresee everything about the century to come. Long-term social forecasting is an inexact science even now, and in 1996 the founders of modern nonlinear socioeconomics were obscure graduate students. Still, many people understood that the major forces driving economic change would be the continuing advance of digital technology and the spread of economic development throughout the world; in that sense, there were no big surprises. The puzzle is why the pundits of the time completely misjudged the consequences of those changes.

Perhaps the best way to describe the flawed vision of fin de siecle futurists is to say that, with few exceptions, they expected the coming of an ”immaculate” economy — one in which people would be largely emancipated from any grubby involvement with the physical world. The future, everyone insisted, would bring an ”information economy” that would mainly produce intangibles. The good jobs would go to ”symbolic analysts,” who would push icons around on computer screens; knowledge, rather than traditional resources like oil or land, would become the primary source of wealth and power.

But even in 1996 it should have been obvious that this was silly. First, for all the talk about information, ultimately an economy must serve consumers — and consumers want tangible goods. The billions of third-world families that finally began to have some purchasing power when the 20th century ended did not want to watch pretty graphics on the Internet. They wanted to live in nice houses, drive cars and eat meat.

Second, the Information Revolution of the late 20th century was a spectacular but only partial success. Simple information processing became faster and cheaper than anyone had imagined, but the once-confident artificial intelligence movement went from defeat to defeat. As Marvin Minsky, one of the movement’s founders, despairingly remarked, ”What people vaguely call common sense is actually more intricate than most of the technical expertise we admire.” And it takes common sense to deal with the physical world — which is why, even at the end of the 21st century, there are still no robot plumbers.

Most important of all, the long-ago prophets of the information age seemed to have forgotten basic economics. When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important. Late-20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers. Late-21st-century America is supremely efficient at processing routine information; that is why traditional white-collar workers have virtually disappeared.

These, then, were the underlying misconceptions of late-20th-century futurists. Their flawed analysis led, in turn, to the five great economic trends that observers in 1996 should have expected but didn’t. . .

Continue reading.

Here’s the score after 25 rounds, me on the left, AI on the right:

Cute game. Can you beat that score for 25 consecutive rounds?

In this case, monitoring the monitors: helping you be sure that when you buy produce labeled “organic”, it is in fact organic. Marion Nestle at Food Politics:

On March 02, USDA announced that it was revoking its accreditation of two certifying agencies, Certified Organic, Inc. (COI) and Guaranteed Organic Certification Agency (GOCA).

USDA says COI failed to

• Communicate with hired inspectors about proper procedures or ensure they were adequately trained
• Adhere to internal procedures according to their operational manual
• Keep confidentiality agreements on file for all employees with knowledge about certification applicants or operations
• Indicate on certificates the effective dates for organic certification,
• Ensure adequate training for employees about the regulations
• Provide clients with cost estimates including inspection fees
• Clearly identify the company’s responsibility to pay for any required pre- or postharvest testing
• Verify organic system plans against the actual practices of their certified operations

GOCA’s problems had to do with “persistent noncompliance,” including such things as “failure to require clients to use defined boundaries and border zones as required by the organic standards.”  This mayall  sound absurdly bureaucratic but it means the certifiers could be overlooking producers’ violations of organic standards.

You can track down the records of such things on the USDA’s website, and see the handful of other such enforcement actions at the National Organic Program’s site.

I’d say this is progress.  Organic producers are supposed to follow the rules of the National Organic Program, and to be inspected to make sure they do.  If the inspectors aren’t doing their job diligently, you won’t be able to tell whether the organic foods you buy are worth the premium prices.

This is a key point of a recent FoodNavigator story on the market for organics.  The U.S. industry is expected to go from $21.1 billion in 2010 to $36.8 billion in 2015.   How come?  Because of “the government’s monetary and regulatory support and increasing acceptance of organic food in the country.”

People will pay more for organics if they think the producer is credible.  Organics are about credibility.  That is why the USDA needs to fiercely enforce organic certification.   Doing so protects the industry.  The more of this sort of thing, the better.

The GOP hates this sort of thing, as you know. The GOP view is that we should not impose government regulation and monitoring on businesses, because we can trust the market to sort out any problems.

Interesting article in the New Scientist:

Fish oil may soon be on the menu for people with cancer to prevent weight loss during chemotherapy.

Weight loss is common during chemotherapy for aggressive tumours, both because treatment may reduce appetite and because tumours lead to muscle wasting. “This leaves patients unable to be given other treatments, such as radiation,” says Rachel Murphy of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Trial studies suggested that fish oil could help, but larger clinical trials proved inconclusive – possibly because the trials involved people with advanced cancers that were difficult to treat.

Now, Murphy and colleagues have shown that 16 people newly diagnosed with lung cancer who were given 2.2 grams of fish oil a day maintained their weight during chemotherapy. A control group that went without the oil lost an average of 2.3 kilograms over the same period.

Fish oil may help prevent weight loss by reducing the inflammation response that causes muscle degradation, Murray says.

Journal reference: Cancer, DOI: 10.1002/cncr.25709

Valobra is one of the great shave sticks. A very fine lather (take my word for it) with the Rooney Style 2, three smooth, comfortable passes with the iKon open-comb bulldog holding a Swedish Gillette blade, and then a splash of 4711. Very pleasant.

This is fun. Right now I’m winning.

By George, I’m starting to get my head around it! I think I’ve got it! It’s just like with Liza effing Doolittle!

As one does of an evening, I was reading aloud the definitions and examples in the little book 1001 Most Useful Spanish Words, by Seymour Resnick, when I realized two things: I knew every word of most sentences, and I was automatically, without thinking about it, and rather fluently (it seemed to me) trilling every damn “r” I encountered. Effortlessly.

Whatever unconscious subroutine that had to learn (or had to be created) was now fully engaged and on autopilot—like the handoff to the computer-synthesizer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “Take it! It’s over my head!” And by George, it took it!

I’m so excited. I’ll probably not sleep a wink tonight, up until early hours reading definitions aloud.

It strikes me that this is the process in lots of learning—all learning?—in that first there is conscious, painstaking, and deliberate practice, probably always with a growing sense of frustration (that reminds me of that irate time just before a baby learns to walk: totally frustrated with current locomotion and with inability to do something else—that maybe it doesn’t even know what, just knows that it doesn’t yet have it), and then suddenly: wham! Everything falls into place and you’re doing it (whatever it is: skating, bicycling, hearing Morse code as actual letters and words, trilling Spanish “r”s—whatever) automatically, without having even to think about it: it just happens.

Pretty cool. I guess this is why people get hooked on learning languages.

And, of course, I must acknowledge that I did in fact learn Esperanto first, and I do think that facilitated the learning here, truly: I learned how to learn a language with a language that was designed for ease of learning—a kind of rapid prototyping. But having done it once, the process has a certain familiarity: the constant, repetitive flashcard exercising, the saying everything aloud as you read it or think it, the hunting down the words you need a lot—the prepositions, certain key verbs, how to tell time, and all that.

I think I first realized I had broken through when I was looking in the back of the aforementioned book, where he simply has the words (without definitions) collected by category. I was looking at the number words—always an intimidating array—and realized that they were now all familiar, since that is exactly what we were just learning in class. I knew that sucker! Number words! Damn!

I think I knew then that, if I didn’t have it licked already, it could be be licked in time—and in a shorter time than I expected.

Glenn Greenwald documents a string of lies about Bradford Manning from the mouth of the Pentagon spokesman. I know some readers don’t like Greenwald, but generally I find him careful to document his charges.

The way the military is behaving is shameful. But, then, they are behaving the way they seem usually to behave: lie, cover-up, classify, and deny. Then belatedly admit that all the things they were denying were true. (Examples: Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, Abu Gharib (still covered up, though a few enlisted scapegoats were sacrificed), the murders at Guantánamo, the wedding party that was bombed into oblivion, countless civilian deaths, …)

The article is here.

Exceptionally nice shave today, though the Virgilio Valobra soap today offered only so-so lather. I”ve had excellent lather before from this soap, so I’ll try again with a different brush. The Gerson is, however, a very nice brush.

Three passes with the Fat Boy and a much-used Swedish Gillette blade, followed by a splash of my new Klar Seifen aftershave. And then I had to run out to get errands done before our Pilates session: so late posting.

My weight is up somewhat over the past couple of days, and I note that I now view food (and my weight) differently. I’ve separated my weight (and my food) from emotional reactions and moral judgments, so that now it’s simply a matter of looking at the situation—what foods I’ve eat, what activity I’ve done—and making appropriate adjustments. Obviously, the food journal is key: the objective timely record of what is actually happening regarding exercise and food intake and my daily weight reading.

So: I’m cutting my morning cereal from 1/2 cup of oat bran to 1/3 cup (measurements taken before cooking). Yesterday I had a heavy snack just before class (which goes from 11:30 am to 2:00 pm): an apple, a hard-boiled egg, and 1 RyVita cracker. That was to tide me over until I could eat lunch, but it’s too large a snack, verging on being a lunch in itself.

So now I will up the content to an apple, two hard-boiled eggs, and 2 Ry-Vita crackers, and that will be lunch. I’ll have a mid-afternoon snack, and then a regular dinner.

Finally, I had a late-night snack last night of a green salad with a hard-boiled egg and the light dressing (Galeos Ginger Wasabi Miso Dressing). I think I don’t do well with late-night snacks: throws off my metabolic pace. So no more late-night snacks.

I also note that Galeos is the target of a class-action lawsuit that claims their salad dressings are not low-fat. According to one story:

The label says the dressing contains 14 calories, 1 gram of fat and 56 milligrams of sodium per tablespoon. It should show 120 calories, 11 grams of fat and 390 milligrams of sodium in a two-tablespoon serving,” according to an independent lab cited in the lawsuit.

Another story on the same lawsuit makes this point:

Food labels are frequently found to be in error, but the law allows a significant margin before a product is considered to be “misbranded.” Government testing of the food labels consumers are told to rely on to make healthy eating choices is virtually non-existent.

The FDA is certainly underfunded (big food companies hate the FDA, and the GOP doesn’t like regulation, so they work together to keep the agency underfunded), but the result is that we (the public) think we’re protected when we’re not.

This lawsuit suggests at the very least that I should go easy on that particular dressing

The Catholic church in Philadelphia is up to the usual practice of the Catholic hierarchy: protecting pedophile priests and bringing them into contact with new potential prey. Katherine Seelye reports in the NY Times:

Three weeks after a scathing grand jury report accused the Philadelphia Archdiocese of providing safe haven for as many as 37 priests who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior toward minors, most of those priests remain active in the ministry.The possibility that even one predatory priest, not to mention three dozen, might still be serving in parishes — “on duty in the archdiocese today, with open access to new young prey,” as the grand jury put it — has unnerved many Roman Catholics here and sent the church reeling in the latest and one of the most damning episodes in the American church since it became engulfed in the sexual abuse scandal nearly a decade ago.

The extent of the scandal here, including a cover-up that the grand jury said stretched over many years, is so great that Philadelphia is “Boston reborn,” said David J. O’Brien, who teaches Catholic history at the University of Dayton, referring to the archdiocese where widespread sexual abuse exploded in public in 2002.

Some parishioners say they feel discouraged and are caught in a wave of anxiety, even as they continue to attend Mass.

“It’s a tough day to be a faith-filled Catholic,” Maria Shultz, 43, a secretary at Immaculata University, said after Mass last weekend at St. Joseph’s Church in suburban Downingtown.

But Mrs. Shultz, who has four daughters, expressed no doubt about how the church should deal with the 37 priests. “They should be removed immediately,” she said.

The church has not explained directly why these priests, most of whom were not publicly identified, are still active, though it is under intense pressure to do so. Cardinal Justin Rigali initially said there were no active priests with substantiated allegations against them, but six days later, he placed three of them, whose activities had been described in detail by the grand jury, on administrative leave.

He also hired an outside lawyer, Gina Maisto Smith, a former assistant district attorney who had prosecuted child sexual assault cases for 15 years, to lead a re-examination of the cases.

“There is a tremendous sense of urgency here,” Mrs. Smith said in an interview this week at the archdiocese, where she said she and a team had been working around the clock, without interference from the church hierarchy. “They’ve given me the freedom and the independence to conduct a thorough review,” she said, with “unfettered access to files.”

She added that announcements about her initial review would be coming “sooner rather than later.”

“The urgency is to respond to that concern over the 37, what that means, how that number was derived and what to do in response to it,” she said.

Philadelphia is unusual in that the archdiocese has been the subject of not one but two grand jury reports. The first, in 2005, found credible accusations of abuse by 63 priests, whose activities had been covered up by the church. But there were no indictments, mainly because the statute of limitations had expired.

This time, the climate is different.

When the grand jury issued its report on Feb. 10, the district attorney immediately indicted two priests, a parochial school teacher and one who had left the priesthood, on charges of rape. He also indicted a high-ranking church official on charges of endangering the welfare of children — the first time the courts have reached into the church hierarchy in the sex scandal in the United States. All four are due in court on March 14. . .

Continue reading.

I do like Bill Evans.

As I was losing weight I grew increasingly frustrated: I was obviously (according to the scale) making progress, but I didn’t feel it—I felt like I didn’t understand what was going on. I couldn’t get my head around it—until I did, at that point 6.5 months into it when things suddenly fell into place for me. I continued doing the same things I had been doing, but now I felt like I understood them and how they fit together.

I think the same thing is happening in my Spanish study: I feel like I can’t get my head around it and that I’m not making progress—except by the growing number of cards with the green rubber band (the vocabulary I know) shows that I am certainly learning words, and my scores on the quizzes and homework are quite good. But it doesn’t feel like progress because I’m groping for a broader grasp and better understanding.

It was frustrating, but then I thought: “I’m learning vocabulary and learning the lessons we’re studying, clearly. And I know that those who demonstrate this level of learning at this point go on to actually learn Spanish—i.e., get their head around it. So I just need to be patient, keep up with the daily work and do the lessons, and eventually I’ll get it.”

And that’s when I remembered that I had just gone through this same process with the weight-loss effort: continuing progress even through a period of confusion and a feeling of ignorance and frustration, until finally the fog dissipated.

I am now on the maintenance program officially, though I plan to lose a bit more on my own: I know now how this thing works.

I’m curious, now that my regular supply of food journals has been interrupted. Does anyone have any food journals they especially like? Obviously, I can use any blank notebook, but some of the special-purpose notebooks have some nice features.

I know that if you Google “food journal template” you can find a ton of downloadable PDFs. And of course there are various computer programs and apps, but I found that writing the info by hand and focusing on the points of specific interest to me was helpful. So that’s what I’m looking for.

Any recommendations?

Good post with video from Open Culture:

Last Thursday, the sun delivered the goods, unleashing a beautiful solar flare. The eruptions lasted somewhere around 90 minutes, and the plasma flares were all captured in high def by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a project dedicated to studying the sun and its impact on space weather. This footage comes soon after another groundbreaking NASA video – the First 360 Degree View of the Sun.

Worth bookmarking. Link comes from Open Culture, which notes:

On the first day of the big TED conference, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, offered a supremely optimistic take on the revolutions transforming Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and perhaps beyond. Throughout the past few weeks, many Westerners have tuned into Al Jazeera’s live English-language coverage on the web and found themselves pleasantly surprised by the balance and depth of their reporting. Now you get 17 upbeat minutes with the leader of the Qatar-based news organization …

A very good column by Nat Hentoff, posted at Cato.org:

George W. Bush is clearly enjoying his release from the glare of the presidency. In photos, he looks almost serene, and he doesn’t publicly criticize the cumulative incompetence of his successor. However, in early February — looking forward to attend a charity gala in Geneva, Switzerland — he was jolted when he had to cancel his trip lest he be arrested when he arrived.

The Center for Constitutional Rights was about to file, in Geneva, individual criminal complaints against Bush by two victims of torture.

Switzerland, like the United States, is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. And every nation signing this treaty is required to prosecute anyone, including government officials, who have been involved in "complicity or participation in torture."

Moreover, the Convention makes it unmistakably clear that "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war … or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

As I and both American and international reporters have written, President Bush did authorize such "enhanced interrogation techniques" as waterboarding — a procedure that makes the prisoner feel he is about to drown. And waterboarding thoroughly qualifies as torture in American and international law.

Indeed, in his recent memoir, Decision Points, George W. Bush openly, and without regret, writes that when in 2003, the CIA asked him if it was permissible to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described master planner of the 9/11 atrocities on his nation, Bush replied: "Damn right."

And he adds that in order to save lives, he would make the same decision again.

In Switzerland, as news broke about the forthcoming arrival of George W. Bush, reports Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney of the Center for Constitutional Rights: "Calls for Switzerland to investigate Bush for torture mounted, and news began to spread that complaints would be filed." ("George Bush: no escaping torture charges," The Guardian).

After all, Switzerland did sign the Convention Against Torture and thereby must prosecute — or extradite for prosecution — anyone on its territory against whom there is actual reason to believe that he or she did engage in torture.

And on Feb. 12, 2009, a USA Gallup poll and the Center for Constitutional Rights declared that "two-thirds of Americans say they want investigations into the role of Bush administration officials in torture and warrantless wiretapping, and 40 percent want to see prosecutions."

These days, however, torture is hardly even a minor concern of most Americans amid such more vital issues as unemployment, Obamacare, the rising national deficit and the 2012 presidential campaign. Moreover, President Barack Obama has often insisted that "we must look ahead, not backward," and has opposed any investigations of alleged violations — by Americans, in the field or all the way up the chain of command — of laws against torture.

In this refusal, isn’t Obama himself violating that part of the Convention Against Torture insisting that every nation that signed it must investigate any of its citizens on whom there is probable reason to believe they did engage in such torture as waterboarding?

Also, as the ACLU often emphasizes, no American against whom there is evidence of actively being involved in or authorizing torture has yet been prosecuted.

Meanwhile, there has been a series of carefully documented books on the CIA’s practice of torture in its secret prisons ("black sites") as well as its direct implementation of "renditions" of torture suspects to other countries to be tortured. But no CIA operator, or headquarters officials ultimately responsible for "the renditions," has been prosecuted.

On Feb. 9, Marian Wang of ProPublica charged: "CIA officials Involved in Abuse and Wrongful Detention Rarely Reprimanded, Sometimes Promoted!" Of all nations, aren’t we especially known for basing our justice system on the bedrock of our rule of law?

For an example involving a well-known victim of CIA imprisonment and torture by rendition, she cites "the case of German citizen Khalid El-Masri, who was kidnapped and transferred to a secret prison in Afghanistan for interrogation in 2003."

Dig this: "U.S. officials have since admitted that the CIA wrongfully imprisoned El-Masri. Though the lawyer who signed off on the decision received a reprimand, the CIA never punished the analyst who pressed for El-Masri’s wrongful rendition, despite recommendations from the CIA’s inspector general.

"A former CIA official told the Washington Post in 2005 that the analysts ‘didn’t really know. She just had a hunch’ when she made the decision regarding El-Masri."

Where is that agent now? "She now runs the CIA’s Global Jihad unit, which leads the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaida." Surely we want to be certain, not based on a hunch, that we get real-life al-Qaida murderers before they get us.

Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have assured us and the world that we will never abandon our values.

Tell that to El-Masri.

Or, more challengingly, as an American, tell it to yourself.