Month: June 2010

Humans lead the pack:

So why don’t monkeys and apes masturbate even nearly as much as humans? It’s a rarity even among low status male nonhuman primates that frustratingly lack sexual access to females–in fact, the few observed incidents seem to be with dominant males. And why haven’t more researchers noticed such an obvious difference with potentially enormous significance for understanding the evolution of human sexuality? After all, it’s been nearly 60 years since Alfred Kinsey first reported that 92 percent of Americans were involved in masturbation leading to orgasm.

The answer for this cross-species difference, I’m convinced, lies in our uniquely evolved mental representational abilities—we alone have the power to conjure up at will erotic, orgasm-inducing scenes in our theater-like heads … internal, salacious fantasies completely disconnected from our immediate external realities.

If Aquinas were working today, masturbation would not violate "natural law" for homo sapiens; it would exemplify it. I can't remember discovering any act quite so spontaneous and quite so wonderful as masturbation. If that impulse wasn't part of my nature, what was? In my teens, it was a marvel that God had given me such an amazing source of pleasure, fantasy and excitement. And portable!

I also remember, being the good Catholic boy that I was, pondering whether it was obviously evil to the reflective conscience. The question seemed – and seems – ludicrous, etching within me my first dissent from orthodoxy, on the basis of the doctrine being self-evidently stupid. (The second was trying to believe that the Virgin Mary was physically whisked upward into the upper atmosphere – and that under papal infallibility! Strike two.)

This much we know: every priest masturbates. Because they are human beings, and the sperm has to go somewhere.

Unrepentant.

With Petraeus now running the Afghan "surge", we are back to square one: an impossible and contradictory war that requires permanent occupation to work and twelve months to succeed. Ambers, reporting the view from the White House, says it was a question of three strikes and he was out. It wasn't the insubordination; it was the indiscipline:

If there is any pattern here, it is not one of insubordination but of an acute deafness to institutional politics, a condition exacerbated by McChrystal's insular inner circle, which was used to seeing their boss being treated with complete deference. HE was the guy who went from Colonel to a four star general in six years. He was the guy who revolutionized terrorist hunting. HE was the guy who was not tainted by two taintable offenses: ignoring abuse at Camp Nama and for knowingly participating in the cover-up of Pat Tillman's death. The Pope was invincible. The Pope felt invincible. As the Secret Service agent who's sitting next to me on the Acela would tell you, a lack of discipline is the vice that pays tribute to invincibility. 

In some ways, though, Petraeus is the natural choice if you are a counter-insurgency true-believer. I'm not.

A John Derbyshire classic:

"At some level, I’ll agree, this is not our business. North of five million people have been slaughtered in the Congo this past twelve years, and nobody much (no, not me—how about you?) has lost a wink of sleep over it … [But] the Congo is nothing to me. Israel is something to me. It’s an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I’d like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.

There’s an affinity. In some tenuous sense, they are me, and I am them. The Gazans? I’ll care about them right after I start caring about the Congo."

My italics. Derb is on record saying he would never live among many African-Americans. So his racism is consistent.

After the Palin fiasco, it's good to see journalists demanding answers:

And pointing out that a candidate won't grant interviews:

Keep it up, guys. Don't give in.

… silence.

Yes, they talk a good game. But Barton will keep his top Republican spot on the House Energy Committee. More conservatives are following Rush Limbaugh's lead. And Steve King is on board:

"I think there will be a few that, like me, will agree with JB's words, and his description, and there will be a lot of others that privately agree with what he said."

How they love themselves.

Gallup checks in on the popularity of the healthcare bill. Age is a major factor:

New Gallup polling finds that Americans remain about equally divided in their reactions to Congress' passage of healthcare reform legislation earlier this year. Seniors — who were among the most widely opposed to the legislation prior to passage, given their broad satisfaction with the status quo under Medicare — have not relented in opposing the bill. And while one might expect the highly charged views of partisans to remain fixed, as they have, it is noteworthy that support among independents has not grown.

Ezra Klein has a glass-half-full moment:

The Affordable Care Act is popular among the people it will actually affect, and unpopular among the people who are worried it will harm the much-more statist health-care system they depend on. Extremism in defense of statism is no vice, but nor is it a rousing win for conservatism.

Gob-smacking even by Middle Eastern standards.