Rhinocrisy

“Now with amino-proteins!” my shampoo (Pantene Pro-V) told me this morning in the shower.

“Don’t be daft,” I said. “What the hell is an amino-protein?”

After perusing the back of the bottle, I was reassured that my shampoo “penetrates and helps replenish the amino-proteins that are naturally found in hair but are lost over time.”

Further down, I noted, in the list of ingredients, bold-faced, double-starred: Lysine HCL, Methyl Tyrosinate HCL, and Histidine. Pantene Amino-Protein Complex, the bottle declaimed proudly. “Oh!” I cried (in my mind), cottoning on. “You mean amino-acids!“

Clearly what had happened was that someone had, for whatever reason, decided that it was a good idea to include these revitalizing components in the shampoo. Hair is composed of two forms of keratin (alpha and beta), which form heterodimers and are quite strong, mostly because they are largely composed of the amino-acid cysteine, which contains a sulfide group that can be used to form strong, stable covalent bonds (disulfide bridges) between protein molecules. In other words, hair is composed of a fairly complex protein machinery, and “revitalizing” it with three simple amino-acids (the building blocks for proteins) makes about as much sense as doing auto repair by soaking your Honda in a warm bath of spark plugs and power steering fluid.

But let’s be honest: all the real advances in hair care happened fifty years ago, when some guy realized that you could synthesize all the sodium lauryl sulfate you wanted down at the Dow Chemical plant in Wilmington. It’s much harder for hair-care researchers these days to make breakthrough discoveries that would win them the Nobel Prize in Cosmetology. So you make shit up, so what?

And then, obviously some guy in marketing saw that some boob of a scientist had written “amino-acids” right on the front of the goddamn bottle. “Those crazy scientists!” he must have said, rolling his eyes and crossing out the word ‘acids’. “They may have all that book-knowledge, but they just don’t have common sense. No one is going to want to put acid in their hair! Come on!”

“Chee!” replied the bottle of shampoo, shining prettily.

In 2002 the U.S. gave Uzbekistan $220 million in aid, broken down as follows:

Although this is clearly money well-spent, some groups complained that we were giving money to (and generally being chummy with) a regime that had a fairly awful human rights record. So aid diminished to $86 million in 2003. In December 2003, Colin Powell decided that the human rights record of Uzbekistan simply didn’t meet the human rights standards the State Department had set for giving aid; the country was technically ineligible for aid. But, fear not - executive authority trumped these standards, and President Bush signed a waiver allowing Uzbekistan to continue receiving aid, despite the fact that it was just too damn horrible a place. It was vital security concerns that made him make that decision, you see.

However, in July of 2004, even that bulwark was steam-rolled by public shame, and the U.S. dramatically suspended aid to Uzbekistan completely, which by then had trickled down to a mere $18 million.

But wait!

Here’s the clever, clever part. Our budget is so vast and labyrinthine that SURELY we could find ways to sneak money to our friends, if we wanted to. And so, not surprisingly, we find that the U.S. augmented its budget to help Uzbekistan fight the spread of bio weapons by $21 million in August of 2004.

“What’s that?” you say. “We had a budget to help Uzbekistan fight the spread of bio-weapons?” Yes, that’s right. $39 million worth, before. “And it wasn’t suspended in July?” No, no. Why would it be? That was the State Department. Entirely different, don’t you see? “Well, what other hidden budget items sending money to Uzbekistan don’t we know about?” you might then ask. Well, who knows? That’s why they’re hidden, after all!

The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote an article in the Guardian about the recent violence and why he feels the U.S. will never stop supporting Karimov. Refreshingly honest, which I guess is why they canned his ass.

People you should be reading instead of me for Uzbekistan news: Registan, Scraps of Moscow and Wanderlustress, who is actually blogging from Uzbekistan (Tashkent, I think).

The salient bits, for you lazy ones: the death toll is up to several hundreds (maybe). No one knows for sure how many, because journalists have been expelled from Andijan. People are fleeing into Kyrgyzstan, and are now being accepted as refugees; camps are being set up. Karimov says Islamists are to blame, and implausibly suggests that this was all a plot by Hizb-ut-Tahrir to reduplicate the coup in Kyrgyzstan which deposed Akayev.