Month: June 2007

Josh Claybourn returns to the question of cell-phones, polls and Ron Paul’s campaign. They do affect pollling data, as Pew has demonstrated here, and certainly by enough to affect a primary election. Cell-phone-only voters are also markedly different than landline voters:

The National Health Interview Survey found them to be much younger, more likely to be African American or Hispanic, less likely to be married, and less likely to be a homeowner than adults with landline telephones…

According to the most recent government estimate, more than 25% of those under age 30 use only a cell phone. An analysis of young people ages 18-25 in one of the Pew polls found that the exclusion of the cell-only respondents resulted in significantly lower estimates of this age group’s approval of alcohol consumption and marijuana use.

That makes intuitive sense to me. And it would mean a slight under-estimation of someone like Ron Paul’s support.

Since my recent posts on infant circumcision (here and here), I’ve learned a lot more about the subject. If you can bear a glimpse at the reality of this gruesome procedure, check out this YouTube. Some things I have learned: the majority of circumcisions do not use anaesthetic. Babies are strapped into a restraint, keeping their legs apart, and their arms and abdomen down, because when they have their penises sliced open, they scream and struggle. And this:

Because a baby’s prepuce is usually naturally adherent to the glans (this is true of both males and females), it must first be torn away in order to perform the circumcision. The doctor applies clamps and inserts the nose of a pliers-like instrument to tear away the foreskin from the glans.

If parents tore the skin off their infants in any other part of the body, they’d be arrested for abuse. The great unmentionable, of course, is that religion, not medicine, is behind this practice – Judaism and Islam, to be precise. Many secular men, in other words, bear the scars of someone else’s religion on their own bodies for life. (I should add, as I have written before, that female genital mutilation is exponentially worse. It removes a girl’s sexual pleasure, rather than simply scarring and numbing it.) One commenter on Jeff Goldstein’s blog put one rationale for it this way:

Further proof that God exists: he mandates a ritual that tones down the male sex drive, if only by a little, to help men become more godly instead of more carnal.

A survivor of a botched circumcision writes:

I am forty years old and never realized that my penis was terribly mutilated during my circumcision until 10 years ago. I hadn’t seen too many other men’s penises up close so I just assumed that the scars and layers of missing skin on my glands was a normal variation. A doctor informed me that the jagged edge of my crown, the gouges in my glands and the missing layers of skin on my glands was the result of a doctor butchering me during my circumcision. He said that my parents should have sued.  I thought “my parents” were the ones that had it done to me. What about my rights?  What about my right to sue? I was the one who was butchered. How many men are out there like me?  How many don’t even know that their penises aren’t normal?  And even if they cut me by the book, I would still consider it mutilation because part of me was cut off, altering me for life, without my consent. What about my body my choice?

That’s only for women, apparently.
 

In Iran, the oppression intensifies. Whether this is a sign of strength rather than weakness among the theocratic elite is open to debate.

"If we authorize gay marriage in the state of New York, those who want to live and love incestuously will be five steps closer to achieving their goals as well," – Democratic New York state assemblyman, Dov Hikind. In some sort of act of pique, Hikind says he is considering introducing legislation to legalize incest. Wiki’s profile of Hikind can be read here.

The full video is now online. Gruesome – but probably more propaganda than reality. Still, it’s a chilling reminder that al Qaeda has a secure base of operations in Pakistan, our "ally". And they want to use that base to murder Westerners. Sounds very much like September 10, doesn’t it?

Cooler? Just be careful at the prom:

Forget the clicker: A new technology in Japan could let you control electronic devices without lifting a finger simply by reading brain activity. The "brain-machine interface" developed by Hitachi Inc. analyzes slight changes in the brain’s blood flow and translates brain motion into electric signals.

A cap connects by optical fibers to a mapping device, which links, in turn, to a toy train set via a control computer and motor during one recent demonstration at Hitachi’s Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, just outside Tokyo. "Take a deep breath and relax," said Kei Utsugi, a researcher, while demonstrating the device on Wednesday.

Germany gets the cable channel that focuses on the next boomer fixation: death, i.e. theirs.

A critique of Obama. Somewhat undermined by this sentence:

Obama’s weaker showing among lesser-educated and lower-earning people is partly because many people are not yet following a race in which voting doesn’t start for seven months.