Propaganda – Page 12 – Rolling Doughnut

Luckily, I have a forum to grind my axe.

Via Kevin, M.D. I read a recap from a doctor who had to amputate a patient’s finger. It’s an interesting enough story, but something caught my eye in the middle of the story.

… there’s a deeply ingrained taboo that prohibits me from causing permanent damage.

If you read Rolling Doughnut, you won’t be surprised at what immediately popped into my mind. I wonder what this doctor thinks about unnecessary infant circumcision? Based on experience, I guess the answer. I find it, precisely as guessed, here, from three years ago (about a topic I discussed last year):

Note to anti-circumcision trolls: I will ruthlessly delete or negatively alter your screeds about how awful regluar circumcision is, etc. I fully support circumcision done under normal hygenic circumstances. If you desire to grind your axe, do so elsewhere.

I wouldn’t have posted on the entry if I’d seen it in 2004, but I’ve been called an anti-circumcision troll a few times. It’s always a misguided smear offered at the end of a debate by the advocate of routine infant circumcision when his or her only fair response would be to admit defeat in defending the indefensible. The desire to excuse the unnecessary cutting of children is too deep for that, of course.

Wishful thinking about all the possible horrors the child will presumably no longer face – which he most likely wouldn’t have faced anyway, without circumcision, and almost never to an extent requiring surgery – are irrelevant, as are claims about the religious validity of this unnecessary surgery. If anyone should get this, it should be a doctor. Unfortunately, that too often flops in practice. From the 2004 entry, GruntDoc stated this about infant circumcision:

… I believe it is painful to the infant. So is falling down, hitting the coffee table, slamming a finger in a car door. Since I have never read about an infant describing his circumcision, it’s one of those things I think is best done as soon as possible (ask any adult who’s had a circ: it’s like chickenpox, the younger you have it the better off you are).

One painful incident is not like the others in his example.

It’s anti-intellectual to claim that not remembering pain is relevant to the discussion. The surgery is medically unnecessary; no further excuse-seeking is justified. If we factor in the child’s ability to not remember the pain as valid, we may excuse any number of surgical interventions with a potential to prevent future disease. Just look at the prevalence of breast cancer in males. Should we think of the good that can be done for those few men if we remove the breast tissue from the majority of newborn males? They won’t remember it! The thought is absurd, of course. Circumcision is the same. But circumcision advocacy isn’t about facts in context.

As to his last point, I can direct anyone interested to men circumcised as adults who don’t think it’s better. They think they’ve made a tragically stupid mistake. I can also point anyone interested to men circumcised as adults who state that the pain was less than it’s made out to be by the fear-mongers. Are those examples subjective? Of course. But so is the nonsense that all men are happy with being circumcised as infants or that the subjective preference of parents for potential benefits is superior to the subjective preference of the male when there is no medical indication for intervention.

Also, forgive me if I don’t cheer the logic of defending the 100% guarantee of pain imposition on an infant who hasn’t consented, no matter how well forgotten, over the low-single-digit risk that the male would need circumcision later in life, with pain that would be better managed through more effective pain relief techniques. I sympathize with the pain men who need adult circumcision will feel, but life has risks. That’s part of the deal. And the men who merely choose it will get no sympathy because they clearly value whatever benefit they perceive more than avoiding the pain. Yet, I’m supposed to value both equally – to the detriment of infants – through crude analysis implying that delayed pain, however unlikely or unnecessary, is worse than pain now. I will not because I am not irrational. Those few who need or choose adult circumcision should not dictate what happens to healthy infants.

For example:

My main argument for it is hygeine. Yes, many many men take good care of themselves, but you only need to see a couple of men with severe balanitis or penile CA, and the argument gets better. I was once told by a urologist that after a slew of penile cancers / amps following WWI (hard to keep clean in a trench), circ became mainstream more as a preventive med thing than an act of religious faith.

Typically, we (allegedly) must also factor in that a few men will face some consequence from being intact as an excuse to circumcise. Those many many men who take good care of themselves are not to be rewarded for their common sense and ability with an intact body. They are to sacrifice for the good of the few who will be delinquent or incompetent in their hygiene. After all, parents can’t know in advance if their son will practice good hygiene, and they can’t teach him good hygiene. Why assume that he will figure it out? There’s only so much a parent can do. Obviously. Being the good parents they are, they should opt to have his genitals cut, even though it exposes him to the risk of surgery. They’re responsible in a way he could never be.

From GruntDoc’s entry about amputating a finger:

Only after telling myself several times that this was actually no longer a finger was I able to take the sharp implement and cut off most of a finger.

How similar is the descent from reason that permits a doctor to remove the healthy, functioning foreskin from his patient at the request of his patient’s parents?

Turned back by force, not turning back by choice.

In his column today, Michael Gerson wrote a disheveled mess on our society’s improvement, allegedly at the hands of government and morals.

On cultural issues, conservatives have been ambushed by hope. …

We’ve had 8 years of hope and 7 years of compassion from our government. The primary results we have to show for it: oral sex in the Oval Office, a never-ending war based on lies, discriminatory laws and amendments, torture by Americans, and a national debt that grows by $500,000,000,000 per year. I’ll accept the word “ambushed”, although we should know better by now. But I’d nix the nonsense about “hope” and government policy.

Still, there’s no amount of change that Gerson can’t attribute to hope expressed through government:

First, societies can, over time, recognize their own self-destructive tendencies and reassert old norms — not just arresting decline but even reversing it. Many Americans, for example, have seen the damaging effects of divorce on children — sometimes from the firsthand perspective of their own childhoods — and divorce rates, especially among upper-income couples, have fallen. …

I’d like to see his data on this. Does staying in a bad marriage harm children? Is it all about the children, or about the sanctity of marriage? Argue either, but don’t mix the two without admitting as much. Rather than seeing divorce rates decline because we’ve seen the harm it does to children, it requires an easier assumption that the age when individuals get married suggests that they’re more mature and developed into people who understand themselves and can co-exist in a stable relationship. Correlation is not causation.

Gerson continues:

… Over the decades the social wreckage of drug use has become undeniable — and the social judgment on this practice has shifted from “stylish rebellion” to “suicidal idiocy.” In many cases, our culture has benefited from the natural healing mechanism of simple sanity¹.

It’s also undeniable that much of the social wreckage is a direct result of government action against drug use, not the drug use itself. The blame does not rest entirely with the user. Surely the moralizer can accept his share.

Also, among my peers, drug use, particularly marijuana, is not seen as stylish rebellion or suicidal idiocy. It’s seen as fun and harmless, a conclusion derived from multiple experiences. I have not tried any recreational drug, as I’ve written before. I don’t even drink. But I understand that my preference isn’t necessarily everyone else’s.

Still, hope overcomes:

Wehner and Levin find that the law of unintended consequences, unlike the law of gravity, admits large exceptions.

Stop and re-read that sentence. I have no doubt that Gerson wins the Internets’ “Stupidest Statement of the Day” award.

What Wehner and Levin actually wrote in their essay, “Crime, Drugs, Welfare — and Other Good News“, the basis for Gerson’s argument²:

There will always be unintended consequences, but even these need not always be for the worse, and the prospect of such unintended consequences should not paralyze us from taking action.

Unintended consequences can be positive. I don’t think there’s any half-intelligent person who would deny this. But they are unintended. Gerson seems so determined to enact government solutions that he’s willing to pretend that it’s possible to design perfect government policies – with only lollipops and rainbows – if we just have enough hope about what government can do. The mere suggestion is absurd but more so the practice, as evidenced by the handiwork of politicians throughout history.

There’s a name for Gerson’s essay: the Care Bear Stare.

¹ Gerson should be a little more consistent about the “healing mechanism of simple sanity”. I recall him actively embracing insanity in June.

² Unlike Gerson, Wehner and Levin seem to place less emphasis on government’s role, noting that the declining divorce rate only appears among the well-educated, upper-income couples. Gerson’s logic implies that poorer people with less education don’t care about the harm to their children. No doubt, he can think of a government program or twenty that might fix that.

More Joe Isuzu than Apple Macintosh

Andrew Sullivan questions the wisdom of using the format of Apple’s recent Mac campaign to promote government over the free market. The ad:

I guess the Center for American Progress thinks it’s being hip with this ad, but I’m too busy focusing on the propaganda, as if the argument for smaller government centers around a selfish desire to screw over as many people as possible if it can earn any extra profit. Right.

But the government is a force for good. It is wise. Need proof? From the Center for American Progress’ front page, a story on farm subsidies:

Many of these subsidies distort prices, encourage overproduction, and leave small farmers in some of the world’s poorest countries unable to compete in agriculture—a critical sector of the global economy for sustainable development and poverty reduction.

The supposedly benevolent government is creating this through its power to pick winners and losers. It’s irrational to think the answer is to make the government more encompassing in the belief that more money and more power will somehow make it more honest and less destructive. Picking small winners is still picking winners.

We must break the law to defend the law.

In its editorial today, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board demonstrates its abandonment of liberty in favor of authoritarianism and reverence for acting tough. It’s not necessary to go beyond the opening to know that the editors have lost all intellectual credibility:

Democrats welcomed Michael Mukasey as a “consensus choice” for Attorney General only weeks ago, but incredibly his confirmation is now an open question. The judge’s supposed offense is that he has refused to declare “illegal” a single interrogation technique that the CIA has used on rare occasions against mass murderers.

Why the mock scare quotes on illegal? If it’s just one interrogation technique, presumably among many, why worry if it gets singled out and prohibited? Assuming that waterboarding amounts to torture, does it matter how many times it’s been used, or how awful the alleged mass murders committed by the tortured?

But the editors can’t help themselves:

… [All of the Democratic Presidential candidates would] disqualify a man of impeccable judicial temperament and credentials merely because he’s willing to give U.S. interrogators the benefit of the legal doubt before he has top-secret clearance.

Since when do government officials get the benefit of the doubt before prisoners? Last I checked, the government must prove guilt. Until it does, the accused is presumed innocent. It’s quite the anti-conservative stance to trust government first and only.

But it’s possible to give some credibility to the stated position. Judge Mukasey hasn’t reviewed the documents. That means he can’t and shouldn’t rule on whether or not specific U.S. interrogators have engaged in torture. That would be for later inquiry. However, it is possible to state whether or not waterboarding as an interrogation technique constitutes torture, absent any details or facts from alleged instances of its use.

Could there be a clearer demonstration of why voters don’t trust Democrats with national security? In the war against al Qaeda, interrogation and electronic surveillance are our most effective weapons. Yet Democrats have for years waged a guerrilla war against both of these tools, trying to impose procedural and legal limits that can only reduce their effectiveness. Judge Mukasey is merely collateral damage in this larger effort.

The editors are no doubt aware that the question is not the validity of using interrogation and electronic surveillance to uncover threats to the United States. The misdirection is telling about their character, but I’m more concerned with why they would be so opposed to procedural and legal limits. Effectiveness over costs? If that’s your position, be honest and agitate for a police state. You’ll argue what you want without falsely smearing opponents.

There are a few more informative points in the editorial:

Most important, [Mukasey’s] discretion serves the American people by helping to keep our enemies in some doubt about what they will face if they are captured.

Right, because if we say we don’t torture, then they won’t waste time preparing for torture. They’ll spend more time planning ways to kill every American. That’s time they now spend figuring out ways to avoid folding after being ~~tortured~~ interrogated. See, being forthright that we’re moral and humane would mean we lose.

What’s really at stake here is whether U.S. officials are going to have the basic tools required to extract information from America’s enemies.

U.S. officials have always had sophisticated (i.e. not basic) interrogation tools required to extract information. Those sophisticated tools were developed using our intelligence and reliance on the credibility of the information extracted. But the might-is-right crowd have dismissed intelligence in favor of brute force. When you’re too stupid to understand that sophisticated psychological techniques are more effective, you begin to think that torture is good and should be considered a basic tool.

But about that information:

Yet those interrogations have generated “thousands of intelligence reports.”

Thousands of intelligence reports… hmmm. How many of those proved accurate and how many proved to be a say-anything-please-make-the-torture-stop fiction that wasted U.S. resources in pursuit of a dead-end?

As for waterboarding, it is mostly a political sideshow. The CIA’s view seems to be that some version of waterboarding is effective in breaking especially tough cases quickly. Press reports say it has been used only against a few high-value al Qaeda operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Zubaydah.

The CIA does not dictate what is and is not a legal interrogation method in the United States, alleged effectiveness notwithstanding. But that doesn’t matter, right? We only use it on deserving individuals. See, those who ~~have been convicted of crimes in a court of law~~ deserve it. Moral relativism, anyone?

It is possible to be serious on the threat facing our nation from enemies without getting hysterical and dismissing the reason our country exists as a quaint relic of the past.

Insert random, relevant Orwell reference here.

It’s a fairly effective standard by now that I’m against whatever the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board agitates in favor of. I’d never surrender critical thinking and dismiss its essays without reading the arguments. But if I did, I’d be wrong less often than I’d be right.

For example:

As the Bush Administration winds down, one of its main tasks is preserving Presidential war-fighting powers against poaching by a hostile Congress and expansive judiciary. On this score, last week’s Senate “compromise” on warrantless wiretaps is at best a mixed achievement. In return for Congress’s blessing to continue this surveillance, the White House is ceding some of its Constitutional authority to unelected, unaccountable judges.

Presidential war-fighting powers apparently include the ability to ignore the Fourth Amendment. I missed that in the text of the Constitution, but I’m sure it’s there. Maybe it’s in the Ninth Amendment. Oh, wait…

I do love the mention of unelected, unaccountable judges. Anyone who supports President Bush in his quest for a dictatorial reading of the Constitution has no business challenging anyone as unaccountable, but set that point aside. Judges are certainly accountable to the Congress. And should they really be elected? Opening the rule of law to politics isn’t a particularly conservative position. Of course, the Journal’s editors aren’t really conservatives, in the limited government sense, so the talking point in place of an argument is unsurprising.

On the topic of telecom companies complying with warrantless government requests for information:

The larger principle is whether private individuals or companies should be punished for doing their patriotic duty when requested to do so by the government.

And we’ve reached the point where I stop taking them seriously. We all have a patriotic duty to serve our government. I can’t imagine a more un-American concept.

In the wake of 9/11, President Bush and the Attorney General asked the telecom companies to cooperate in what they told the companies was a legal program.

September 11th? Check. Blind faith in the benevolence of President Bush? Check. Government is always right? Check.

For centuries, the common law presumption has been that private parties should have legal immunity if they comply with such requests.

This sounds suspect, but I’m not an attorney. Wouldn’t companies have attorneys smart enough to request warrants? If they don’t know or ask, they should be immune simply because the government asks? This doesn’t sound correct.

In the absence of evidence that the government’s request is illegal, private actors should be given the benefit of the doubt for cooperating.

Again, obedience should be the default. It’s interesting that the government should always be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Don’t we have our republic specifically because we figured out that such an assumption was foolish?

Of course, if we’re using the preposterously low “in the absence of evidence” as our guide, shouldn’t the telecoms have asked the government to produce a warrant? Wouldn’t the absence of a warrant (“Don’t you worry about that”) be the absence of “the absence of evidence” that the government was engaging in shenanigans?

Imagine a society in which everyone refused such requests for fear of being sued: No airplane passenger would dare point out suspicious behavior by another passenger, and no subway rider would speak up about a suspicious package.

I wonder what they’ve named their straw man. They have to have named him by now, because I’m sure he’ll be around for a long time. It would be tedious to constantly say “hey, you, straw man”.

The airline passenger should and would point out suspicious behavior, but how did that get involved here? The issue is whether the government may instigate – without a warrant – an investigative search of data for alleged suspicious behavior. Set the scenario honestly. The government is going to the individual/company, not the other way around.

[The bill] includes a six-year sunset provision, which makes no sense against a terror threat that is likely to continue for decades.

A decades-long war. Hmm, why would anyone be concerned about setting aside a key Constitutional amendment to give the president broad powers? Gosh, I’m confused.

The great irony here is that, in the name of checking “secret” Presidential power, Congress is giving enormous authority to judges who will also make decisions in secret and never have to answer to the voters.

Unchecked, the president (in general, but President Bush, definitely) would make this decision in secret. When would he answer to voters for his secret exercise of this alleged power? I’m supposed to feel better with less oversight, as long as the kept-in-the-dark voting public can vote with information it doesn’t have? The Constitution is up for a vote?

Yet if the President won’t protect the Presidency, who will?

If the president won’t protect civil liberties, who will? If the Congress won’t protect civil liberties, who will? If the courts won’t protect civil liberties, who will?

Effective HIV prevention does not involve distorting facts.

I saw this Richard Holbrooke essay on HIV when it appeared a few weeks ago. Nothing in it warranted¹ specific comment from a circumcision perspective that hasn’t been said repeatedly. This is all he offered:

A viable prevention strategy would encompass education and counseling, free condoms, female empowerment, more male circumcision, and abstinence.

Implement four of those five suggestions and number four becomes irrelevant. Or, if you’re in an intelligent mood, replace more male circumcision with more personal responsibility. Life has consequences, even with circumcision. (At the very least, insert voluntary adult between more and male.)

Today, thanks to Daniel Halperin and his essay in today’s Washington Post, I must reference Mr. Holbrooke. Halperin opens with praise for Holbrooke’s stance that we need to reduce the number of new infections before we can suggest any progress. Fair enough, with quibbles, but it’s stunning how quickly Halperin will abandon the logic he demonstrates here:

The most rigorous study yet conducted, a randomized trial from Zimbabwe published last month in the journal AIDS, found an increased rate of HIV after people underwent testing and counseling compared with those who did not, though the increase was not quite statistically significant. The London-based researchers noted that some other studies similarly have found “disinhibition,” or a worsening of behavior, among people who learned they were not infected. While it might seem intuitive that knowing one’s HIV status and, ideally, receiving good counseling would lead to behavior change and reduced risk, the real-world evidence for this conventional wisdom is still unclear, especially for the large majority who test negative.

With what other strategy might disinhibition be a problem?

As Holbrooke noted, circumcision has indisputably been proven to prevent HIV. It reduces the risk of male infection during intercourse by at least 60 percent and, unlike a condom, cannot be forgotten during a moment of passion. Nearly all of 15 studies conducted throughout Africa found that most uncircumcised [sic] men would want the service if it were affordable and safe, and even more women prefer it for their partners and children.

Holbrooke did not state in his essay that circumcision prevents HIV. If he had he’d be spreading untruths, but he chose not to, speaking of ways to reduce the transmission. To be fair, I suspect prevent is a fill-in as a less awkward way for Halperin to say reduced risk. This distinction is important, though, because prevent has stronger implications. Only abstinence prevents sexually-transmitted HIV. Because there are lives involved, this topic deserves more care with words.

It appears – not indisputably, when looking at all data – that (voluntary adult) male circumcision reduces the risk of female-to-male² transmission by up to 60 percent³, not at least. Why the distortion, if not to promote a preferred solution?

Returning to the potential problem of disinhibition in HIV, the real-world consequences of our actions should never be dismissed as a factor the way they are in the circumcision debate. But circumcision advocates already dismiss that in their rush to portray adult males as too irresponsible, so better to address Halperin’s statement in his own context. A condom can be forgotten. True. But it can also be intentionally abandoned because (voluntary adult) male circumcision “prevents” HIV. (See how important words can be in this topic?) Could that possibly lead to disinhibition? Does Halperin believe that circumcised men can engage in unprotected sex and not become HIV infected if they skip a condom only once?

Time to revisit Halperin’s next sentence and put the emphasis where it should be:

Nearly all of 15 studies conducted throughout Africa found that most uncircumcised [sic] men would want the service…

Which studies contradict the belief that men want circumcision? Of those men who do not want it, is it reasonable to assume that some of the infants now being circumcised would not want it?

Remind me again how only people who believe that males (and females) should be protected from medically unnecessary surgery are passionate – in the frothy, derogatory sense – about circumcision. Lying and selective omission of data are the actions of a passionate circumcision advocate.

¹ Also from the Holbrooke essay:

… Anthony Fauci, the famed director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has stated the case in dramatic terms. Speaking in July at an international conference, Fauci said: “For every one person that you put in therapy, six new people get infected. So we’re losing that game.” He went on to say, “Clearly, prevention must be addressed in a very forceful way.”

Draw from that what you will, but the evidence suggests what kind of force too many people prefer to “prevent” HIV.

² Notice how Halperin wrote “male infection”, not “female-to-male infection”. The latter is correct, as no study has shown that (voluntary adult) male circumcision reduces male-to-male infection. He’s speaking of Africa, where heterosexual transmission appears to be the primary route of infection, but public health advocates like Halperin are rather quick to justify routine infant circumcision for potential benefits it has not been demonstrated to potentially offer. Unfortunately, male-to-male is the primary transmission method in the United States, not female-to-male. But promoting circumcision conforms to our cultural obsession, so it allegedly passes such semantic omissions.

³ The reduction in risk appears to be up to 60 percent when studies on long-term transmission risk are ended early. There is a lag between infection and testing positive. This period is also the most infectious for HIV transmission. Halperin acknowledges this. Might this matter, especially in light of disinhibition?

Not only does he think to the left, Robert Reich can’t see to the right.

I’m extra-ashamed today that I ever voted for someone who would give Robert Reich any job involving economic policy. From his blog today (emphasis mine):

No candidate for president has suggested that the nation should raise the marginal tax rate on the richest beyond the 38 percent rate it was under Clinton (it’s now 35 percent, but the richest of the rich, as I’ll explain in a moment, are paying only 15 percent). Yet new data from the IRS show that income inequality continues to widen. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are earning more than 21 percent of all income (the data are from 2005, the latest the IRS has examined). That’s a postwar record. The bottom fifty percent of all Americans, when all their incomes are combined together, is earning just 12.8 percent of the nation’s income.

This is an incomplete picture, and I’m sure Reich knows it. Look at the full picture using the same tax data Reich uses, but fails to link:

[I don’t know why this image won’t appear. I’m looking into it, but until then, the link works.]

Click to enlarge

On their 21.2 percent of all income, the top 1 percent pay 39.38 percent of all taxes. On their 12.8 percent of all income, the bottom fifty percent pay 3.07 percent of all taxes. Those number are in the above table. Strangely, they’re in the column immediately to the right of the column Reich uses to select his data. Reich is intellectually dishonest.

Looking further at the tax tables, consider:

Click to enlarge

Aside from the brief blip of President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, the tax burden for the top 1 percent of income earners has steadily increased since 1980, more than doubling in 25 years. The tax burden for the bottom 50 percent of income earners has steadily decreased since 1980, more than halving in 25 years. Still, Reich has the gall to write this:

If the rich and super-rich don’t pay their fair share of this tab, the middle class will get socked with the bill.

How are the top income earners not paying their fair share? They do not receive ~~handouts~~ benefits in anywhere near the proportion that middle- and low-income earners receive from their tax dollars, yet they’re still cheating the rest of America? Reich is a liar.

There is much more to analyze from Reich’s entry, but it’s the usual nonsense. Head over to Greg Mankiw, from whence the link came, for a brief synopsis of Reich’s idiotic redistributionist tax proposal.

Wow.

I’m sure the Left wouldn’t politicize this office.

How far off the rails we’ve gone:

The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.

Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

Why do we need an Office of Population Affairs? Since when is it a right to have everyone else pay for you to have (mostly) consequence-free sex? I don’t recall seeing that in the Constitution as a federal power.

The furor, of course, will be about Orr’s presumed position on birth control versus abstinence, as she seems to be an ideal political bone to toss to the social conservative base, as if this will suddenly improve our nation’s morals.

Update: I do not want to remove this because it was here when I first posted the entry. But I can’t find a link to this alleged statement from Orr, via Think Progress. Until I can verify, the quote shouldn’t be here. See comments for more explanation. ~~See this rundown at Think Progress, via John Cole. Particularly this (emphasis in original):~~

In a 2000 Weekly Standard article, Orr railed against requiring health insurance plans to cover contraceptives. “It’s not about choice,” said Orr. “It’s not about health care. It’s about making everyone collaborators with the culture of death.”

Wonderfully intellectual, no?

~~Something in Orr’s past intrigues, similar to her position above.~~

From the Washington Post article:

In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. “We’re quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease,” said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.

I support the goal to stop requiring insurance to cover it, although I would aim for a full reversal rather than just for federal employees. Government should not mandate coverage for any particular service or product. Still, within her limited scope here, Orr gets a temporary pass.

However, she’s an intellectual joke if she wants to pander that fertility is not a disease, by which I think she means “it’s not worth covering under insurance”. There are more ways than just heterosexual, missionary-position intercourse to create a family, and none of them are any less moral or Godly. There are many people who need fertility services and want that coverage. The market should decide whether or not it’s covered.

Even if it’s just normal, boring contraceptive services, government has no justification for interference. Since people need and want these services, there is inevitably a market for it, at some price. Maybe that price isn’t conducive to a deal for some services, but that’s economics, not theology. Covering it shouldn’t be mandated, but it shouldn’t be prohibited, either, which is what I think social conservatives want.

This is the problem with the Bush administration specifically, and politics in general. It can’t ever do the right thing for no other reason than it’s the principled action. It can’t control itself from using its own subjective, selfish reasons. Occasionally it’ll hit the correct bullseye, but usually there are intended consequences that are incorrect. Shameful.

P.S. Think Progress bolds Orr’s “fertility is not a disease” comment without reflecting on the validity of such a mandate for insurance. That’s probably an indirect comment on what Think Progress believes about that validity, but I’m not familiar enough with the site to draw a definitive conclusion.

Who dreams of being Rich Uncle Pennybags?

The National Association of Broadcasters issued a press release yesterday, quoting NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton:

“XM and Sirius have spent upwards of $20 million trying to bamboozle the Beltway into believing that a monopoly is good for consumers. Yet when you cut through all the distortions displayed by XM and Sirius, you are left with one undisputable fact: Never in history has a monopoly served consumers better than competition.”

The NAB conveniently leaves out any facts to corroborate this bold statement. I’m not interested in challenging it directly, because the basic gist is fine if unrevealing. Competition is good. I believe that. I just wish the NAB believed it.

The existence of press releases and lobbying demonstrate that the NAB knows that it competes with satellite radio. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t spend millions to defeat this merger. It is not acting solely in the best interest of consumers. Incentives matter, and here the incentive is to reduce the strength of all providers of competing technology.

I rarely listen to terrestrial broadcast radio anymore. There is a sameness that is pre-packaged and unimaginative. It’s simply not interesting. I’d rather listen to the artists I enjoy and discover new artists through friends, blogs, and iTunes. Even the limited broadcast offerings I enjoy are available as podcasts, which demonstrates that terrestrial broadcasters agree with the Sirius-XM view of the radio industry’s competition model.

Satellite radio didn’t turn me away from NAB’s clients. Sirius and XM existed when I went looking for an alternative. To be fair, I don’t listen to the music channels on Sirius that often. The repetition of a limited playlist exists there, as well. Maybe it’ll cost Sirius my subscription in the future. Maybe they’ll change. But for now, it has Howard Stern, which is what I want.

The NAB’s press release includes a list of groups and lawmakers opposing the proposed merger, which is its only support for the validity of its position. It takes a little more than that, unfortunately. Instead of putting out pointless press releases calling for competition with a list of politicians, it could actually query those politicians and ask why they abhor the Constitution’s First Amendment, as just one action in the interest of consumers. Or does the NAB not actually care about consumers as much as it cares about remaining partnered with politicians to limit its need to compete?

If you have ears, allow something rational to pass through them to your brain.

In what can only be described as the most bizarre pro-circumcision editorial you’ll ever read, Hilary Bainemigisha urges men in Uganda to get circumcised to fight HIV. There are soccer metaphors and a weird belief in the penis as the “author of life”. All of it is idiotic, and the circumcision claims are irrational, as usual, including a recitation of the “circumcision is the best HIV prevention strategy” myth. There’s even a claim that men should get circumcised, no wait, get the facts and decide for yourself, then get circumcised. And then we’re graced with this, which is supposed to show how necessary circumcision is:

A study in the 12 months before the population survey revealed that 32% of HIV-positive women and 22% of HIV-positive men had sex with non-regular partners in the past year. 34% men and 5% women who were HIV-positive had sex with more than two partners. Of these, only 16% men and 17% women used condoms. And among discordants (where one partner is positive and the other negative), 5% used condoms consistently.

I’m beginning to wonder if people really are this stupid and blind to reality. If you have unprotected sex with multiple partners and a significant percentage of those partners are already HIV-positive, you will become HIV-positive. It is inevitable. Yet, the author asks:

Is this the environment you and your sons want to swim through with an uncircumcised [sic] tail?

If I were you, I would look at my penis, look at all the male members of my family and think about the five million who die annually of HIV. Then I would mobilise all of us, at whatever age, to get to hospital. I would also vow to afford the same protection to any newly born son to the family.

Not only is he indifferent to what he’s just demonstrated, he’s now lumped male children into the push for circumcision based on studies that looked exclusively at voluntary adult circumcision. If you’re going to live in your own world, devoid of facts, you might as well throw in a lack of ethics, I suppose.

Also, I’m proposing a new maxim. The trustworthiness of the circumcision proponent decreases exponentially with each euphemism for penis. If you can’t be mature enough to write penis instead of tail, you do not deserve to be taken seriously¹.

But remember, circumcision does not make you invincible. It only improves your escape chances by 60%. You still need to move along with the Abstinence Be Faithful, Use a Condom (ABC) approach, if you want to see your grandchildren.

No kidding. So why is it so difficult to understand that with the ABC approach, the risk of HIV is reduced for all, including intact males?

Finally, I call upon our female population to add a voice to my plea.

Find a way of getting men off their behinds to face the knife. The tool in question belongs to you as much as it belongs to men and had it not been for you, there would not be need to circumcise it.

First, see my new maxim in relation to tool².

More importantly, no, the man’s penis doesn’t belong to his partner (or should I say “partners”, given the statistic offered and ignored). Just like a child’s penis does not belong to his parents. We do not accept such thinking for men wishing to change the bodies of their female partners or daughters. The same must hold true for the author’s contention.

Update: The original version of this entry incorrectly referred to Hilary Bainemigisha using the pronoun she. It’s been corrected. I apologize for the confusion.

¹ To the extent that anyone proposing circumcision to prevent HIV should be taken seriously.

² I find member most common, which is the best proof of the immaturity on this issue.