KNOWLEDGE = SAFER DECISIONS While millions of Africans will possibly benefit from lower-cost AIDS drugs, leading longer and more productive lives with HIV or AIDS, tens of millions stand to benefit from the low-cost strategy of sex education and condom distribution. All Africa reports that "HIV/AIDS prevention programmes have had a dramatic effect on changing risky sexual behaviour, authors of a five-year study in Ethiopia said on Friday. The study, which was carried out among 1,500 factory workers in Ethiopia and started in 1997, showed a marked drop in casual sex and an increase in condom use. Prevalence rates of the virus also plummeted."

AM DEN STRASSE Tomorrow, people will be shivering on street corners around the world, protesting a variety of things -- including a pending war with Iraq. (Odd to have a war that is "pending.") Berlin expects to host one of the biggest anti-war rallies in Germany since Europeans took to the streets in droves to raise a hue and a cry about the 33,000 nuclear warheads the USSR and US had pointed at each other.

BETTER THAN ME I mean that in the most positive, and shallow, sense. Memepool's got it going on.

IF YOU'VE GOT 'EM, SMOKE 'EM International agreements, really, just get in the way of good, old-fashioned self-determination. "... few are aware that 190 countries are finalizing a treaty on tobacco, probably the most reliable global killer. Even fewer know how the United States is trying to eviscerate the treaty, which threatens the tobacco industry and with it the money the industry supplies the U.S. economy – and specifically the Republican Party... According to World Health Organization projections, smoking will become the leading cause of death – claiming 10 million lives a year – by 2030... The vast majority of countries involved in the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control quickly agreed on several goals. They wanted to exempt tobacco control from free-trade challenges, standardize tobacco packaging (banning terms such as "light" and "mild"), and initiate a crackdown on tobacco smuggling. Most also wanted to limit tobacco advertising as much as possible and agreed the treaty should urge countries to erect whatever barriers they could, given legal restraints... Only Germany, Japan, and – most of all – the United States have contested these points." Now that's leadership.

CITIZEN FARMER Farmer and writer Wendell Berry pens "A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America." Thoughtful. Cogent.

CALL HIM ISHMAEL I'll just let Ignatius make his own point today: "There's a scene in "Moby-Dick" where Captain Ahab, in his pursuit of the white whale, angrily destroys the quadrant he uses for navigation. It's the moment when the hunt becomes irrational, leaving the ship with nothing to steer by other than the dictates of the chase itself... The Bush administration hasn't reached the Ahab moment yet, but it's getting close. Over the past few weeks, the hunt for Saddam Hussein has become so intense that it has seemed almost self-destructive. The administration appears willing to sacrifice almost anything -- America's alliances, its prosperity, even the security of its citizens -- in its determination to oust the Iraqi leader from power... You can't wage war without having something of Captain Ahab's relentless passion. But a nation heading into war also needs prudence and good judgment. America's best generals, people such as Grant and Marshall and Eisenhower, were at once cautious and decisive. Their greatness lay in the fact that they never lost sight of the long-term interests of the United States." There's more.

A CHICAGO-STYLE SHOUT OUT TO FEBRUARY Miss Smartypants remains in form. "At lunchtime I thought 'okay, it is freezing cold but I can run across the street to that sandwich shop I like and that is a short trip that I should be able to survive,' and then I go to the sandwich shop and it is closed. Closed. Just plain closed, on a Wednesday, at lunchtime. Abraham Lincoln's birthday was yesterday but SO WHAT, you can’t just deny people cheese sandwiches because of that, and besides, didn't we invent President's Day just so everyone would have the same day off and not mess around with all this Washington/Lincoln crud? Before President's Day it used to be like this February war for dead-presidential primacy, sort of like the East Coast/West Coast Bad Boy/Death Row thing---LINCOLN CREW REPRAZENT! AIN'T NO HOMEY LIKE THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR! or WOODEN TEETH BE THA SHIZNIT, PIMPS UP HOES DOWN! (Just for the record, I do not get President's Day off. If you do, please sleep late for me.)"

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY This is hilarious and terrifying, all at once. A smart, well-designed Flash animated look at the pending war with Iraq. I'm going to go home and sulk now.

LOVECRAFT: THE MUSICAL I thought I was the only one who wanders around singing, "Lovecraft! H.P. Lovecraft!" during certain B-52 songs, but now there's "A Shoggoth on the Roof," a musical that the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society should never have produced. "This is the musical that destroyed the Other Gods theatre company 23 years ago. This is the musical that Stuart Gordon claims to have nothing to do with. This is the only musical that dares put Great Cthulhu himself on stage for a musical number!"

BUSH IN THE LOCKER ROOM Josh Marshall is another moderate liberal like myself who has spent the past few months having internal debates with himself before finally agreeing that there were some reasons to support the administration's Iraq policies. But, like me, he's getting a bit pissed off. He uses NATO as his foil, and makes some intelligent points, but here's where he cuts to the chase: "The president and his crew are acting like that not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is high school kid who's always running into reverses and always blaming it on someone else. At first you think he's getting a bad shake until you see the same thing happening over and over again. It's always someone else's fault. The South Koreans are lame. The Europeans are lame. Our Arab allies are lame. Everybody is lame. We're given excuse after excuse. But at the end of the day the result seems to be our historic alliances, if not in shambles, then at least thoroughly beat-up. After all, what profiteth a man if he gain regime change in Iraq, and yet lose the whole world order in the process?"

GET IT BACK ON. YOUR WAR, I MEAN. A new raft of Get Your War On strips brings us current with the day before yesterday's news. Because even a modern war needs some rib-tickling.

WWBD -- WHAT WOULD BESSIE DO? A nervous thank you to salon.com for pointing me in the direction of the "Cool to be Real" website that helps young gals across this strong nation of ours... well, "be real." Oh, did I mention that they get this help from the Cattlemen's Beef Board and the National Cattlemen's Beef Association? Apparently, today's kidz like to be real by eating steaks and tacos with their girlfriendz -- or that's what the poll would have us believe. Send cards to your REAL friends and chat with REAL girls and by the way eat as much beef as you can cram down your throat because beef is real.

IT REALLY IS ALL ABOUT NUANCE I prefer this translation: "As the prophet, peace be upon him, once decreed: 'Osama and Saddam. You must form a super-team of Islamic leaders, and then there's no way you can lose. Also, here's the private number of the French Prime Minister. Give him a call. Seriously.' "

WHY THEY MADE THE INTERNET, PART 312 Tomato Nation goes balistic with transcripts of 33 phone calls between Regina and Sarah. If they didn't invent the Internet so scientists could easily exchange top-secret mathematical formulae, they certainly wouldn't have invented it for this.

THE GREAT ROCK AND ROLL SWINDLE Slate's Rob Walker chimes in on the Tatu controversy -- those teen Russian faux-lesbian popsters -- by filling in the details first, explaining how the duo emerged from nowhere with their teasing pop music and tantalizing videos about forbidden same-sex love. Walker posits, "So this could be described as … enlightened? After all, it shows a lesbian couple overcoming fear and reproach. Perhaps there's something positive about the world's youth learning to embrace non-heterosexual pop stars." Or it could be a commercial scam designed to further sexualize teenagers, relationships and the media. He leans strongly in that direction, taking the whole affair to task for its hypocratic provocation. But Walker falls just short of calling this sad, sorry business what it is -- sexist, pandering and corrupt.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS I've been told that Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of the most beautiful cities in North America. I wonder if I can convert my 401(k) into Candian dollars without being double-taxed...

AND NOW FOR AN OPTIMISTIC MOMENT If Al From and Bruce Reed of the Democratic Leadership Council can sound so smart, why do the Democratic candidates for President continue to act so dumb? This DLC Memo on how to win back the White House hits the right notes. It's worth reading if you want to feel -- even for a moment -- that the Democrats stand a chance in 2004. Here are From and Reed: "The... way to attack Bush and the Republicans is not to hold them to the Democratic Party's standards, but to hold them to the standards they set for themselves. The administration will spend the next two years insisting that the president has kept his promises. Your job is to show that in the ways that matter, he has not. President Bush promised to change the tone in Washington, but instead has exploited Americans' fears to his political benefit. He promised to unite the country, but his agenda is designed to divide us. He promised to restore integrity to the Oval Office, but all too often he has sided with special interests instead of the nation's long-term interest. He promised to restore responsibility in our country, but he has spurned it in his budget andfailed to demand it from his cronies... You don't have to abandon your policy arguments. But the stakes are higher and the terms are much different in the wake of 9/11. The 2004 election will be about our values, not our lockboxes. To win that debate, you need to make a moral critique of the Bush administration, not just a programmatic one."

ANI-FI YOUR WINTER The new Matrix site is sure to crash from bandwidth issues as two generations of kids rush to get their fill of black overcoats and deft flying kicks to the head, but until the two movies hit the theaters this summer and fall the site is the place to go for your Matrix fix. The Animatrix section of the site offers nine animated film shorts (low bandwidth options are available for the connectivity paupers among us) that fill in the story between movies one and two.

AMERICAN JUSTICE How I long for the days of the Reagan administration, when all we had to fear, oddly, was mutually assured destruction and all the conservative ratcheting that came along with it. Today, when there is nothing mutual about whatever destruction may take place, the Republicans seem far less interested in things like the government staying out of the people's business than they used to. Take the draft of a second round of Justice Department proposals, the roll-off-your-tongue USA Patriot Act 2. Benjamin Franklin would electrocute himself over some of the provisions sitting quietly waiting for the right moment to be introduced. Sometimes I just want to punch Mikhail Gorbachev for ending the Cold War.

DRIVING BACKWARDS CIA Director George Tenet's warning that nuclear proliferation may well be the driving foreign policy issue of the century is well-timed. When coupled with the administration's new national security doctrine with its preemptive first-strike feature, it is alarming. The Bush administration has demonstrated over the past 24 months that it values international treaties and organizations the way a football team values a fourth down punt. It should come as no surprise that the administration's solution to addressing a growing list of potential nuclear nations will involve U.S. quarterbacking -- with the intent of dragging, or bludgeoning, the international community into our corner after the fact. (Witness NATO -- France and Germany's political games aside -- being trammeled for not rushing to the aid of Turkey before the fact to respond to an act of aggression by a member state [the U.S.] that hasn't taken place, and when it does take place will occur outside of the parameters of the alliance.) This backwards approach to international relations is destined to place the United States in increasingly difficult confrontations of our own design with no guarantee that the support of the world community will be on our side. The solution to the global proliferation of weapons of mass destruction starts with international consensus -- what is acceptable and what is not -- followed by agreements followed by sanctions and enforcement for those who don't sign on or who break the agreement.

LIFE, THAT OTHER THING, AND THE PURSUIT OF.... WHATEVER. Here's the news from the front: The draft legislation for "The Domestic Security Enforcement Act of 2003" has been developed by the Justice Department. By the way, they forgot to consult with Congress on it, but here's the skinny, courtesy of the San Francisco Chronicle -- "The draft legislation would reduce judicial oversight of surveillance, authorize secret arrests, create new death penalties and allow the government to revoke the citizenship of any American who is a member of -- or gives material support to -- a group designated as a "terrorist organization" by Ashcroft... Secret arrests? Expatriation because you belong to a suspicious political group? Unchecked surveillance? These are instruments of repression, used by totalitarian states." Write your congressmen, folks. But don't sign the letter -- it may be used against you in a secret tribunal.

IT'S THE BEST. REALLY, IT IS. The Academy has tossed out the names, and now everyone can brace themselves for this weekend's extra-thick entertainment sections in their newspapers as last year's hit films take out new full-page ads to celebrate the love.

WHAT YOU MISSED (and the rest of America didn't) Television Without Pity is concise this week when it comes to ripping "Joe Millionaire" to shreds. But I do like Entertainment Weekly's Greek Tragedy-driven take on why Sarah will be picked -- "We all want to see Sarah when she finds out he's poor. But the scene would be so much sweeter if she finds out AND she gets picked. Fox won't let us down." And I live in this country, don't I? Criminy.

JUST SAY NO (after you get your permit) Put your John Hancock or Molly Pitcher on the petition to allow United for Peace and Justice to organize a march in New York City this weekend. There are going to be tens of thousands of people marching in protest of a war against Iraq. The least the city can do is give them a friggin' permission slip. Whether you support the U.S. position on Iraq or not, supporting the right of people to demonstrate and air their own views should not be a serious issue of debate.

DEATH BY NEWSPRINT Odd to see Bob Rayner -- one of the more buttoned-down editors I worked with during those lean college years -- penning a story on Punchline, Richmond's now-dead alternative weekly newspaper. Still, if you want to know how good publications go bad, look no farther. It's all about the advertising.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN DAMASCUS David Ignatius had a sit-down with Syria's Bashir Assad, whose views on the U.S. position toward Iraq shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Yet Syria represents a traditional Arab approach to change and reform, and if policymakers in the U.S. believe that a regime change in Iraq might open the door to broader regional reform (and I am slightly hopeful that might be the case) Assad has two other suggestions -- one is that regime change will lead to a regional explosion, and the other is that conservative regimes in the region like Syria will simply clamp down harder. Foreign policy at gunpoint is one hell of a gamble, for both sides.

CASE BY CASE? The Council on Foreign Relations' Morton Halperin suggests that containment is working in Iraq, and that a wiser course for the U.S. to follow involves strengthening containment through international cooperation. I'll take Halperin's position a step farther than Iraq, and view it not from the context of Iraq alone but from the position that Iraq can be a starting point for rebuilding international cooperation, standards, policies and enforcement as they relate to weapons proliferation, human rights and regional stability. That Saddam Hussein represents a threat to the region is not arguable; how immediate a threat he represents is. If the U.S. goes to war against Iraq, parallel efforts are urgently needed to deal with the international frameworks that have been bent and damaged in the process. If the U.S. steps back from the fray, the intent of containing Saddam Hussein's ambitions should not be forgotten -- but perhaps it can be dealt with in the broader context of how the world wants to manage the affairs between nations in the coming century.

SMASH 'EM UP, BASH 'EM UP (Do it all over again.) I don't know how many of the people polled by ABC News and the Washington Post grew up playing with Smash 'Em Bash 'Em Robots, but my guess is it's somewhere around 56 percent. That's the number of people who -- after saying they supported the U.S. overthrow of the Iraqi government regardless of UN support -- oppose postwar rebuilding efforts if it meant the U.S. "would have to keep troops in the country for several years and spend $15 billion a year, the most conservative publicly available estimates of what it would take to stabilize a post-Hussein Iraq." The poll, among other things, suggests that Americans just don't buy into the argument that you fix what you break, which explains why so few of us care that Afghanistan is choking on its own dust a year after the U.S. committed itself to rebuilding that shattered country.

GOT IT Belated admission that Tanya Donnelly's spring 2002 release "beautysleep" was one of the best releases of the year, that's what this is. Take Donnelly's old world of The Breeders and Throwing Muses and toss liberally with Bjork, a touch of lo-fi and some Norah Jones or Eartha Kitt crooning. And 4AD will let you listen to the whole disc if you're really curious (try the second and third tracks -- "the storm" and "the night you saved my life").

PUT YOUR NEW WORLD ORDER WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS Thomas Friedman returns from Cloud Nine (registration required at the NYTimes, folks) to offer a long-ignored view -- the Old World Order needs to step aside, or wise up. Here's Friedman -- "Today's world is also divided, but it is increasingly divided between the 'World of Order' — anchored by America, the E.U., Russia, India, China and Japan, and joined by scores of smaller nations — and the 'World of Disorder.' The World of Disorder is dominated by rogue regimes like Iraq's and North Korea's and the various global terrorist networks that feed off the troubled string of states stretching from the Middle East to Indonesia." One overdue string of headlines involves the relevancy of the U.N., the NATO alliance and a host of other global bodies -- and not the tired Bush argument that "We think they suck, so we're going to ignore them as much as possible," but a fresher argument of "Oh, yeah. Real stinkers. Let's figure out how to reshape them now, because it's going to take forever to agree on a name and carpet samples, anyway." If you look at the trends, you'll see that the world is entering a phase of heightened global problems -- the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; water issues, the explosion of AIDS/HIV in Africa, Asia and Russia; global economic troubles -- that can either be solved by global thinking or by individual states taking matters into their own hands. I'll leave it to you to decide which path offers the most long-term potential. And so Friedman is right when he says, "How the World of Order deals with the World of Disorder is the key question of the day. There is room for disagreement. There is no room for a lack of seriousness." It is exactly because there is no effective global framework for establishing standards of behavior and expectations, and then enforcing them, that the Bush administration has gotten us where we're at vis-a-vis Iraq -- exactly that, and the Bush administrations total unwillingness to re-imagine what a cooperative framework might look like. And countries like France, in particular, quite possibly didn't deserve a seat at the table 50 years ago, and certainly don't now. India, Indonesia, Brazil -- these countries represent populations, economies and cultures that will be standing toe-to-toe with Europe, the United States and China 30 years from now. Maybe when we get around the restarting a global conversation, we can change some of the languages.

SAPPHIC POPCORE Welcome to the newest music genre: softcore lesbian pop. Russian popsters Tatu are Moscow's entry into a curious European phenom -- combine a little electronica with a pair of kiss-and-tell suggestive groping girls, and you've got a hit. Tatu's U.S. release is sure to push some contrasting trends: the continuing commodification of an "it's okay to be gay if you're cute and not a member of my immediate family" attitude that continues to be pushed by the media, and the ongoing titilation of a culture that finds it impossible to believe that same-sex relationships aren't all about sex. The folks at trendcentral.com blather on a bit about it in their entertainment section.

WHY 2003 MATTERS TO 2004 The presidential race doesn't kick off in earnest until the spring of 2004, when the Democrats will have a primary front-runner emerging, and the Republicans will be seriously driving policy to support a Bush second-term. As Howard Kurtz reports, the spring of 2003 already looks like the spring of 2004 -- at least on the Democratic side. There are a lot of contenders splashing in the waters right now -- Senators Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, Graham, Biden and Dodd; congressmen Gephardt, Moseley-Braun and Kucinich; Governor Howard Dean; General Wesley Clark and former contender Gary Hart. The benefit of such a broad slate of Democrats in the pool this early is two-fold -- though it's likely to feel very unfocused and discouraging to many Democrats initially. First, an early race with a lot of swimmers -- especially with some huge trigger issues on the front pages, like Iraq, North Korea, the economy, Medicare, the Bush budget's slash-and-burn on the welfare world and the environment -- means that the Democrats will not only have a chance to debate and haggle over real issues, but that ultimately the party will have to figure out how to win on the issues. Or be prepared to be even less relevant than NATO by 2005. And secondly, for what feels like the first time in three years, George Bush is going to find himself playing defense for some truly conservative and political policy decisions. Of course, the Democrats might just do what they've done for the past several years, which involves swinging poorly at bad pitches and watching easy hits float across the plate. In which case, all of us will deserve to be punished with four more years of the Bush administration, and some of us will look even more seriously about overseas employment opportunities.

NO, NOT REALLY I didn't actually fall in love with Sonya, but every week or so I dance half-clothed through her ramblings at This Imploding Heart. That was before I discovered that she was a killer bee.

LE SIMPLICITE' My Blue House always sends me scampering to peruse the small cluster of quality sites she links to every blue moon. This week, links for the francophone, the lover of queens and the Renaissance costume sandinista.