Month: November 2010

For some reason, I missed this data point in the summer:

Circumcision rates for newborn boys in the United States dropped steadily and markedly over the past 4 years, based on the largest review of U.S. rates ever done. Circumcision rates fell from 56% in 2006 to 33% in 2009.

That's close to a collapse, which is very heartening, and why I'm ambivalent about a ballot measure like one proposed in San Francisco that would criminalize MGM. But this makes sense:

“Tattooing a child is banned as a felony and circumcision is more harmful than a tattoo,” said Schofield, who believes religious traditions should change. “People can practice whatever religion they want, but your religious practice ends with someone else’s body,” said Schofield. “It’s a man’s body and…his body doesn’t belong to his culture, his government, his religion or even his parents. It’s his decision.”

Stan Collender hasn't been won over:

The plan calls for a substantial reduction in federal employees.  A reduction in employees generally results in the government relying on more outside consultants to get the work done but, in addition to the recommended reductions-in-force, Bowles-Simpson also calls for a significant cuts in the use of contractors.

The combination of those two seems to indicate that the now smaller number of federal employees will have to do everything that was done before, that is, that they will have to be much more productive. But Bowles-Simpson also calls for a three-year freeze on federal employee salaries and that almost inevitably means an increasing number of federal workers will quit.   That will reduce rather than increase productivity as new and less experienced workers replace the more senior folks who will have left for greener pastures.

In other words, Bowles-Simpson projects substantial savings based on the expectation that a less experienced and much smaller federal workforce will be more productive and just as effective than the more experienced and larger workforce it replaces.  That makes absolutely no sense.

A reader writes:

Hey man, you gotta call this cat out. No one should be allowing a 4-year-old to help in the trimming of weed. I understand it's not a lot of weed, and I'm a huge stoner, and whatever. My old man grows a small batch of herb for himself and whatever … I get it, it's not that bad. But your 4 YEAR OLD?! That's just not cool.

I know weed is decriminalized in Massachusetts, but it's still illegal, especially to grow. As far as I can tell, the guy pretty much wants his daughter to slip up in an "inappropriate place" and remark that her daddy grows "medicine". It's just not smart on his part. And it's just – c'mon buddy, she's FOUR!  Have a little class! This is an ADULT product, like alcohol. That's the argument we're all trying to make here. Massholes like this are the reason people say stoners are criminals.

Agreed.  (Though Masshole's a new one.)

In a jeremiad against the TSA, Will Wilkinson puts them in perspective: 

I have found the submissiveness and docility of the American people in the face of the state's pointless molestation incredibly discouraging. I think this is one of those subjects that demands we step back, take a deep breath, and consider with a clear mind just how phenomenally idiotic the government's policy of increasingly invasive degradation really is. Law-abiding travellers, who pose approximately zero risk of terrorism, and offer no ground for reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, must run this gauntlet of abasement because airplanes were once made the instrument of mass death. The odds of being a victim of terrorism on a flight are approximately 1 in 10,408,947—rather less than the 1 in 500,000 odds of getting killed by lightning. 

But nope. Who cares? Doesn't matter! Instead the government ramps up their time-consuming campaign of harassment. Is the idea that if we are not made to feel ashamed, we will not be made to feel safe? I can't figure it out. The TSA is like my dog. Once he spied a rabbit by a tree in our yard as we came in the back gate. Now, whenever we come through that gate, he freezes and stares bullets at the spot by the birch where a bunny once sat. To a first approximation, there is never a rabbit there, and any special effort devoted to detecting one there is wasted. I have tried to explain this to Winston. But the poor dog, a genius of premature inductive inference, just won't believe me. I find this a little annoying, but he's a dog, it only takes a second, and he doesn't fondle my upper thigh.

Jon Stewart makes the case for an alternative:

He sides with the leader of a foreign country against the president of the US on an issue of great diplomatic significance. Cantor, of course, directly supports Israel's continued occupation and colonization of the West Bank and uncontrolled settlement construction. And just as significant as Cantor's direct attempt to undermine his own president by siding with a foreign leader is that foreign leader's agreement to meet with him in order to advance the cause of Greater Israel.

There are no parallels with this kind of direct undermining of the president on foreign policy that I can think of. Am I wrong?

Bulworth joins Chait as a liberal progressive backing Simpson-Bowles. Here he is on social security.

A mini-manifesto by E.D. Kain, who has stopped clinging to certainty:

I think doubt is a much maligned, much misunderstood thing; perhaps because people never really embrace it, never really try to understand why it might be – in and of itself – a positive force, but instead find ways to extinguish it utterly. Doubt is cast in our society as a malfunction, something to overcome, something broken. I don’t see it that way anymore. Yes, some people become mired in it, become paralyzed by indecision – there are reasons we have phrases like “wracked with doubt” or “mired in doubt” and so on and so forth. But doubt is not the same thing as uncertainty. “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again.”

Certainty is an alluring trap; the temptation of intellectual or spiritual pulls us under, riptide-like, into its soporific current. A release from our uncertainty is a powerful tonic. It explains the Tea Party, the socialist revolutions of the 20th century, American exceptionalism, and essentially progressivism writ large. And our certainty only increases as the subject matter becomes more complex and our expertise (or faith in expertise) becomes more precise….

I distrust all complex systems including government, and if anything, my foray into contemporary liberalism has made me distrust government more than ever. I am not reflexively anti-government, of course, but I distrust it plenty, as I do all complex, entrenched institutions. But the question of liberal/conservative is secondary to doubt and certainty.

That is why I tried to frame a resuscitation of genuine conservatism around this "doubt-certainty" axis rather than a "right-left" one in The Conservative Soul. Kain also notes that "I tend to abhor movement politics, cringe at the faux certainty of those good team players so quick to shut down debate – and sometimes, every now and then, envy the certainty of these movements and their followers." I'm with him on all fronts, of course, although I do not envy the unnerving false certainty of others but rather miss the comforting false certainty of my youth. This struck home:

My belief in free markets has similarly developed out of my doubt: I doubt that markets will always or even often provide optimal results, but I doubt more the central planner or the protectionist. I am certain of our individual stupidity but more afraid of the state’s massive, collectivized stupidity. I am not ideologically a free marketeer, really. It is only, like democracy, the least worst option of the bunch. And I believe in societal safety nets because I doubt the beneficence of my fellow man – or of myself, for that matter.

The question, collectively, is whether Americans can ever grasp this kind of temperament, whether there is something about the American experience that privileges certainty and fundamentalism over doubt and faith. I think there is a space for the truly conservative temperament – and largely it remains in the practical common sense of the entrepreneur, the frontiersman, the individual who knows he is attempting something radically new in new territory and that this requires a certain practical humility in the face of the world. Mercifully, the constitution's myriad checks on getting anything done quickly allows even a more usually restless, ideological and certain populace to survive its own enthusiasms.

On a personal level, though, Kain speaks to me, as does one of his commenters, Kyle Cupp:

I can strive for knowledge of truth without ever needing certainty to support my endeavor. If I need anything, it is hope, hope that what I’m pursuing is the truth, and hope that all of us stand, walk and search within its light, even and especially in our disagreements.

Amen.

(Photograph: Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

Is she incapable of acknowledging the real world? In her latest stunt, she brought cookies to a Christian school. She was protesting what she described thus in two tweets:

“Hmm…may bring cookies to my PA school speech tmrw to make a pt “PA mulls ban on cake/cookies/candy@ school parties.. http://bit.ly/dvoI6d.” “2 PA school speech; I’ll intro kids 2 beauty of laissez-faire via serving them cookies amidst school cookie ban debate;Nanny state run amok!”

She followed through, bringing cookies to the school. And I guess, fair’s fair, if you want to make a point about government over-reach. The problem is: the policy she opposes doesn’t actually exist. The story in the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was not accurate, as even the paper conceded in a correction:

The Pennsylvania Board of Education is strongly disputing the Tribune-Review’s report and Palin’s characterization of the proposal. Executive Director Adam Schott told CNN the story is “just not true.” The Tribune-Review has since retracted its original story, and posted this correction on Tuesday:

“A story on page B1 of Monday’s Tribune-Review incorrectly portrayed the Pennsylvania State Board of Education’s proposed nutrition guidelines for school parties. The board is examining regulations to encourage schools to serve more nutritious foods. There are no mandates to do so.”

I’m also told that Palin also mentioned in the speech that Bristol also accompanied her and Todd on what New York magazine called a “possibly fictitious” 3,000 + mile road trip in a motor-home from Alaska to L.A. I don’t have time or the necessary masochism to listen to the entire speech myself, but if anyone can confirm that nugget, I can add it to the “odd lie” canon. I have long since given up much hope that reporters will actually try to nail this story down, even though it would be quite simple to figure it out.

Larison notes:

It isn’t to the credit of moderate Republicans that they favor Romney so heavily, but Romney has always been the obvious candidate for them for a lack of viable alternatives. What I find intriguing about the extent of moderate Republican support for Romney is that it exists despite Romney’s desperate effort to reject everything he ever did that once made him appealing to moderate Republicans. Perhaps moderate Republicans put their hope in Romney’s later reversion back to what he was in the early 2000s, or perhaps they assume that Romney doesn’t really believe the hard-line rhetoric he’s spouting these days. 

Conor wants moderates and the tea party to rally behind Gary Johnson instead. In our dreams.

(Photo: Tim Sloan/Getty.)