tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-249375082024-03-13T14:39:11.945-04:00Holy Prepuce!<i>Holy Prepuce!</i> is a blog I wrote from 2006-2011 on such topics as Astronauts, Culture, Law, Lunatic Kidnapping Plots, Marriage Equality, Questionable Behavior, Religion, and Smut.Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.comBlogger131125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-4671155807960712182011-07-07T15:24:00.002-04:002011-07-07T15:36:09.381-04:00Crime.org - God Hates Scammers - c/o MikeMann.com<div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vg6sh_LVzI0/ThYFe7ChHFI/AAAAAAAAAY0/3vY3a3_OOGA/s1600/crime.org.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" m$="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vg6sh_LVzI0/ThYFe7ChHFI/AAAAAAAAAY0/3vY3a3_OOGA/s1600/crime.org.jpg" /></a></div>Summer in the mid-Atlantic means trips to the Delaware shore, with all the saltwater taffy and skee-ball the Holy Prepuce can eat. And no afternoon at Rehoboth Beach would be complete without the quaint commercialism of the billboard boats and airplane banners hawking the latest Grotto Pizza two-for-one or $1.75 Nattys Ladies’ Nite in Ocean City. <br />
<br />
Recent beach-goers may have been scratching their heads, however, at the unusual message currently saturating the floating and airborne media: <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Crime.org <br />
God Hates Scammers <br />
c/o MikeMann.com</div><br />
Who is the mysterious, eponymous Mike Mann, to whose online care the Almighty has entrusted this message of condemnation? And who are the “scammers” meriting the awesome domain name “Crime.org,” not to mention all this expensive promotion? Two questions; two mad, mad rabbit holes.<br />
<br />
Mike Mann is evidently someone whose marriage did not go well, and whose divorce went worse. Other problematic relationships in Mr. Mann’s life appear to involve his father, stepmother, sister, brother-in-law, ex-girlfriends, Rabbi, divorce lawyers, psychiatrists, childhood acquaintances, and homeowners’ association members. <br />
<br />
You might assume that a high-value domain name like Crime.org would belong to a nationwide crime prevention or victims’ rights organization. But there you would be wrong. As it turns out, <a href="http://crime.org/">Crime.org</a> is the private mouthpiece of Mr. Mann, and it is a <i>tour de force</i> of crazy. <br />
<br />
“If you love America and her freedoms you came to the right place,” visitors learn upon arrival. In the 5800+ words that follow, visitors also learn Mr. Mann’s opinions on the various people and organizations that have “scammed” him over the years, as well as his thoughts on child rearing, “phony mystics,” the First Amendment, and most of all the Montgomery County, Maryland, family court system, which according to Mr. Mann constitutes “a horror movie of a vicious, insanely greedy, malpracticing, white, suburban, ignorant group of completely self-absorbed elitist self-entitled phony professionals ceaselessly attacking someone else’s wallet and family to proudly proclaim their lying group narrative and stolen cash.”<br />
<br />
5800 words are only the beginning, because at various points throughout his screed Mr. Mann includes hyperlinks to Google Docs files featuring additional, self-contained sub-screeds. <br />
<br />
Mr. Mann’s ex-wife, we are told, is a “serial homewrecker” as well as<br />
<br />
<blockquote>vindictive, hormonal, jealous, greedy, psychopathic, idiotic, violent, [a] bona-fide rage-o-holic: (And just maybe factually in the closet, menopausal, drunk, [a] compulsive pathological liar, [a] huge blabbermouth, unemployable, ineducable, unconscionable, unintelligible, filthy, overindulged, overfed, overcompensated, self-entitled, coddled, dramatic, pretentious, undisciplined, completely unaccountable, wasteful,—and [someone who] sleeps with <u>MARRIED</u> men with unsuspecting wives……in Tennessee.)</blockquote>That the Manns’ divorce was less than amicable can be verified externally. A bit of internet sleuthing leads one to the Maryland Judiciary’s public docket for the Manns’ case, containing some 260 entries within which the word “contempt” appears 30 times, the word “incarceration” appears 5 times, and the words “Motion To Enjoin and Restrain Plaintiff from Engaging in Threatening, Harassing and Disrespectful Behavior Towards [his daughter’s] Court Appointed Therapist” appear twice. <br />
<br />
Oddly, a more cogent recitation of Mr. Mann’s side of the divorce story, authored by one “Tiffany Reynolds,” appears on the website of the <a href="http://www.adyayan.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19:project-1&catid=2:projects&Itemid=5">Adyayan Trust</a>, an Indian NGO with no obvious connection to Mike Mann. Crime.org appears not to be Mr. Mann’s first attempt to air his divorce-related grievances online. Still indexed on Google, although sadly defunct, are www.save[<i>the Manns’ teenage daughter, whose name I will not repeat here</i>].com, and www.[<i>Mrs. Mann’s full name, which I also will not repeat here</i>]IsEvil.com.<br />
<br />
Other revelations on Crime.org: a Dewey Beach masseuse and the proprietor of a Maryland dance studio (presumably both Mr. Mann’s ex-girlfriends) are, in fact, whores; the Rabbi and Cantor at a prominent Washington, D.C. synagogue are likely pedophiles; Mormons get a bad name but are actually very little trouble and high performers; and Mr. Mann’s former divorce attorneys are “like the Washington Generals basketball team lining up to take it from behind from the Harlem Globetrotters.”<br />
<br />
Despite his lifelong abuse at the hands of family members, clergy, government, and members of the learned professions, spot number one on Mr. Mann’s shit list is reserved for a certain Mr. B, a board member of the North Indian Beach Community Association. (As above, because Crime.org will no doubt appear as Exhibit One in a number of soon-to-be-filed defamation suits, I shall not repeat full names here.) <br />
<br />
Mr. Mann’s 10,616-word <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a9yx8yEjoRFalSCtS1MLcNTNj_Jcl1awVA8Qkhcp4ww/edit?hl=en">Google Docs diatribe</a> against Mr. B. and the “puppet government” NIBCA is difficult to follow, but the upshot seems to be that various people want to stop various other people from building new houses, driving vehicles on the beach, and opening or closing roads. Mr. B’s position in these matters is contrary to the position of Mike Mann, and for this transgression he is outed on Crime.org as “[p]ervert [Mr. B] . . . sexual predator [Mr. B.] who dominated many workspaces and illegally unconsentually sexually assaulted, and permanently traumatized many young professionals in unsuspecting Rehoboth Beach businesses on many occasions over a long period.” <br />
<br />
What I find most delightful about Crime.org is the disconnect between the effects Mike Mann presumably imagines it will have on readers and the actual reaction it is likely to elicit from any sane, WiFi-equipped beach-goer curious enough to bite. You can just imagine Mr. Mann watching from the boardwalk as the summer’s first billboard floated by, gleefully mouthing “yes! Yes! YES! Now it can be told! Now revenge is mine!”<br />
<br />
What’s so delicious is his evident lack of insight that, far from settling scores and shaming the “scammers,” Crime.org succeeds only in making Mike Mann look like a lunatic. A lunatic with a media budget, mind you, and assets to settle an upcoming barrage of lawsuits, but a lunatic all the same.<br />
<br />
I shall end this post the way Mike Mann ends everything he writes on the Internet: <i>I will never stop cussing, screaming and documenting the truth, it’s the first amendment, if you don’t like it go live in China or Saudi Arabia.</i></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-58517225906100306392011-05-20T13:57:00.001-04:002012-08-04T07:56:11.474-04:00Timely Questions for Reverend Harold Camping<div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2K0Q9KbQCDk/Tdaf_vbqgTI/AAAAAAAAAYw/EjyhnvJIVsM/s1600/Holy+Prepuce+Rapture+Time.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2K0Q9KbQCDk/Tdaf_vbqgTI/AAAAAAAAAYw/EjyhnvJIVsM/s320/Holy+Prepuce+Rapture+Time.jpg" width="249" /></a></div>Dear Reverend Harold Camping:<br />
<br />
You must be very busy, what with the Rapture coming tomorrow and all, but I’m hoping for just a minute of your time. Actually “a minute of your time” is exactly what I want to ask you about. Because what’s really extraordinarily clever about your Bible calculations is that you’ve not only figured out God’s super-secret plan to Rapture the Earth on May 21, 2011, but also that he’s going to do it one time zone at a time. According to <a href="http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/18/tick-tock-goes-the-doomsday-clock/?hpt=C1">press accounts</a> of your discovery:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>the massive doomsday earthquake will start at the International Date Line before moving west. New Zealand . . . will get hit first – at 6 p.m. local time. And then that wave of destruction will roll around the world, wreaking havoc at 6 p.m. in each time zone.</blockquote><br />
Not only was it smart of God to come up with that cool plan for phased destruction--I mean, Rapturing the whole Earth at once would be kind of unwieldy, especially the Christian parts where there are so many souls to collect--but it’s especially neat how he wrote down the whole plan in code all those thousands of years ago in the Bible. Pretty funny that he tried to throw us off the trail with that whole “but of that day and hour knoweth no man.” He sure fooled me, but he didn’t fool Harold Camping!<br />
<br />
I do have a couple of questions, though.<br />
<br />
No, I’m not going to ask “what about Daylight Saving Time.” <i>Please.</i> Obviously because God knows everything, he knew that we humans were going to invent Daylight Saving Time, so he factored that into his Bible code.<br />
<br />
And same goes for the whole time zones / standard time concept. Sure, in Biblical times and for practically all of human history time was reckoned locally based on the position of the Sun. But again, I’m sure God foresaw that one day there would be railroads, telegraphs, and a corresponding need for uniformity. And because His plan was to Rapture Boston and Cincinnati at exactly the same moment, instead of the 52 minutes apart that 6 p.m. would occur in those cities if we still used “Local Apparent Solar Time” like Abraham and Jesus, God just coded that into the Bible, too.<br />
<br />
But here’s the thing. Not to second-guess God or anything, but actually doing it the old fashioned way would kind of make more sense. Because you can totally see how a continuously moving wave of destruction, travelling at an equatorial velocity of just over 1500 feet per second so as to hit each spot at “true” 6 p.m., would work.<br />
<br />
Whereas the whole-time-zones-at-a-time model presents some difficulties. Take for example a town that straddles the Texas / New Mexico border. When the Doomsday earthquake flattens everything on the Texas side, will it be made up of some kind of special shockwaves that know to stop at the state line? And what if it turns out that I’m one of the saved, and I get Raptured while straddling the border? Do I risk the right half of my soul being “left behind” for an hour?<br />
<br />
And actually, speaking of Daylight Saving Time, did God make clear how your calculations should deal with places that don’t observe it? Like if I’m in Arizona do I get an extra hour, even though Armageddon is already in full swing due North in Utah? But if I step onto the Navajo reservation, which does observe Daylight Saving Time, then I’m toast? What if I’m a member of the Hopi nation, so my land is within the Navajo reservation, but my tribe keeps with the rest of Arizona in not observing Daylight Saving Time? Supposing I’m off the reservation at 5:15, and I want to get home before the Rapture to make sure I didn’t leave the oven on? Will God understand that I’m only passing through Navajo land to get to the Hopi section, and give me the extra 45 minutes? <br />
<br />
Even apart from Daylight Saving issues, it seems like the Rapture is going to have to do some jumping around. If you look at a <a href="http://www.worldtimezone.com/">world time zone map</a>, it’s pretty complicated. For all kinds of political reasons you’ve got places where it can be 6 p.m. already even though somewhere to the East still calls it 5 p.m. (Or 5:30 or even 5:15.) <br />
<br />
And then you’ve got places like Kashmir, where no one can agree whether it’s part of India (GMT + 5:30) or Pakistan (GMT + 5:00). Do the Hindus get Raptured half an hour before the Muslims? I mean, I understand they’re all going to Hell anyway because they haven’t accepted Jesus, but it would be useful to know.<br />
<br />
Also what about at the South Pole? By convention, Amundsen Scott Station uses New Zealand time, but technically speaking the Pole is in every time zone. From what I’ve heard, that place can become a den of iniquity for the “winter-over” crew, owing to the gender imbalance and prolonged isolation in darkness. So the schedule on which their souls will be called to account is not just an academic question.<br />
<br />
And of course there’s the International Space Station to consider. Here we see why it was definitely smart for God to choose standard instead of solar time. Can you imagine if he had to Rapture the astronauts 16 times in one day?! My only question is whether He’ll use Greenwich Mean Time, which the station normally follows, or adjust for the crew’s current temporary shift to Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Mission Elapsed Time. Your Bible calculations take that into account, right?<br />
<br />
I would appreciate the courtesy of a prompt response to these questions, preferably by 6 p.m. tomorrow. 6 p.m. my time, I mean.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-10793067642710034982011-05-17T15:24:00.001-04:002011-05-17T15:30:08.468-04:00Tampering<div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MymFczp1Sxw/TdLHAE4HENI/AAAAAAAAAYg/Zi8OnMRMZzs/s1600/fbi_wiretap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MymFczp1Sxw/TdLHAE4HENI/AAAAAAAAAYg/Zi8OnMRMZzs/s200/fbi_wiretap.jpg" width="200" /></a>Welcome to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University! Thank you for attending this year’s <a href="http://ksgexecprogram.harvard.edu/Programs/sl/overview.aspx">Senior Executives in State and Local Government</a> intensive summer program. As you know, the program is based around real-life case studies of government officials like yourselves exercising their problem solving and decision making skills. <br />
<br />
So let’s jump right in with a little quiz to get a feel for the skills you and your colleagues may already bring to the table. Our quiz is based on a case study of Jack B. Johnson, former Prince George’s County, Maryland County Executive, and his wife, Councilmember Leslie Johnson.<br />
<br />
<i>Background:</i> You are County Executive in a large suburban county bordering on Washington, D.C. You have just accepted $15,000 in cash from a real estate developer, when two FBI agents burst into the room with a search warrant and seize the money. You get into your County vehicle, activate the emergency lights, and start driving toward home. Your wife calls your cell phone and tells you that FBI agents are banging on the door of your house. <br />
<br />
<i>Problem:</i> In your house is a $100,000 check from the same developer and a boatload of cash.<br />
<br />
<i>Question One:</i> Circle the correct answer. You should / should not have the following telephone conversation:<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> Oh, is it the box with the liquor?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Yeah, and, it... Yeah, and look in another box. You'll see a check in there. Yeah, that's right.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> Yes, there's a check in there.<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Okay. Tear it up. That's the only thing you have to do. Now go down... You..., you got the money?<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife: </b>Yeah, wait a minute. I got the cash. Do you have that cash down in the basement still too?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Yes.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife: </b>Okay, I gotta move that too. Where do you want me to move it?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Put it in... Put it in your um, put it in your bra and walk out or something with it. I don't know what to do with it. Um...<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> Whatta you want me to do with the check? You hear 'em banging?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Tear up the check and..., um..., and, and um..., and... , and um, tear it up. Just..., just tear it up.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> They're saying FBI Jack.<br />
<br />
<b><b>You:</b></b> Yeah, I know... , I know. That's why I'm telling you. [Developer A] set me up.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> You want me to put it down the toilet?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Yes.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> You want me to flush it?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Yeah, flush that.<br />
<br />
[<i>The sound of a toilet flushing in background.</i>]<br />
<br />
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A55cWEY3X7w/TdLHAbfQwwI/AAAAAAAAAYk/f_jSf2aj8uI/s1600/Prince+Georges+County+Maryland.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-A55cWEY3X7w/TdLHAbfQwwI/AAAAAAAAAYk/f_jSf2aj8uI/s200/Prince+Georges+County+Maryland.jpg" width="200" /></a><b>Your Wife:</b> All right. Now whatta you want me to do?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Go downstairs and get...<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> I'm tellin' 'em I'm not dressed.<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Yeah, tell 'em you're not dressed. You will be dressed in five minutes then you open...<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> Okay, and I have the cash.<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Okay. Leave that little cash. That's okay. That's a little bit... , a little cash. Put it in your underwear.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> I have it in my bra. And what about...<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Huh?<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife: </b>... that other cash though?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Um, [unintelligible].<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> You gotta tell me what to do with it Jack.<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Leslie.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> What do you want me to do with this money? They are banging?<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Put... , put... , put...<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> What do you want me to do with it?<br />
<br />
<b>You: </b>... put it... , put it in your panties and walk out of the house.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> No, but I mean all this cash Jack.<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Put it...<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> I got the one from down...<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Put it in your panties Leslie.<br />
<br />
<b>Your Wife:</b> Oh my God. Okay.<br />
<br />
<b>You:</b> Yeah, stuff it in your panties. Yeah, tell 'em you were in the bathroom. Right? I'll be home in a minute too. Okay. And then just... , and then just open the door and sit down. Okay?<br />
<br />
[<i>Upon entering the home, FBI agents search your wife’s person and recover $79,600 in United States currency from her underwear and bra.</i>]<br />
<br />
<i>Question Two:</i> Fill in the blank. County Executive Johnson <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/crime-scene/post/jack-johnson-pleads-guilty/2011/05/17/AFIofq5G_blog.html">pled guilty</a> this afternoon to extortion, conspiracy, and tampering with ___________.<br />
<br />
<i>Question Three:</i> Fill in the blank. When FBI agents are investigating you for official corruption and have a warrant to search your house, there’s a good chance they have also tapped your __________.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-54012513960585014142011-03-28T15:03:00.004-04:002012-08-04T07:56:11.472-04:00Gilbert Gottfried and the Discourse on Disaster<div style="text-align: justify;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SG_NciD5XdA/TZDZ6XgJqDI/AAAAAAAAAYU/1AtL2K47mPQ/s1600/Gilbert+Gottfried+With+Aflac+Duck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" r6="true" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SG_NciD5XdA/TZDZ6XgJqDI/AAAAAAAAAYU/1AtL2K47mPQ/s320/Gilbert+Gottfried+With+Aflac+Duck.jpg" width="255" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><em><span style="font-size: xx-small;">A Portrait of Gilbert Gottfried with a Dead Aflac Duck </span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: xx-small;">on His </span></em><em><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Head </span></em><span style="font-size: xx-small;">by Dan Lacey (</span><a href="http://www.faithmouse.com/"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">www.faithmouse.com</span></a><span style="font-size: xx-small;">). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Used with permission of the artist.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">As the world confronts escalating conflict and looming nuclear disaster, the Holy Prepuce has been ruminating on a more consequential matter: the Gilbert Gottfried sacking. </div><br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Why, exactly, did “tweeting” a series of earthquake / tsunami jokes get Gottfried summarily canned as the voice of AFLAC? Gottfried, after all, famously broke the ice at a post-9-11 Friar’s Club roast by recounting “The Aristocrats,” the classic improvised litany of incest, scatophilia, and a rotating menu of other horribles. So it’s not as if AFLAC was allergic to controversial material. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">I suspect that Gottfried ran up against an unwritten rule of comedy: disaster jokes are not allowed to have identifiable authors. </div><br />
The <i>re-</i>telling of disaster jokes is permissible because they are both ubiquitous and anonymous. Anyone of my generation could tell you, for example, how we knew Christa McAuliffe had dandruff, what “NASA” stands for, and why there were no showers on the <i>Challenger</i>. Elliot Orring’s “<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/dr_eret/coursearticles/Elliott_Oring_Jokes.pdf">Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster</a>” (1987) collects fourteen such examples, and I found no more than a handful unfamiliar twenty-five years after the <i>Challenger</i> explosion. Some were undoubtedly adapted from prior maritime or aviation accidents; several I have since heard re-purposed for Princess Diana or 9-11. Folklorists collect this material: Bill Ellis’s “<a href="http://www.temple.edu/english/isllc/newfolk/wtchumor.html">A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes</a>” (October 5, 2001) identifies twelve discreet “cycles” addressing a range of events including the Kennedy assassination, the Jonestown suicides, and the Lockerbie PanAm 103 bombing.<br />
<br />
The universality of these jokes allows us to rationalize their creation as an instinctive defense mechanism with a plausible genesis in evolutionary psychology. The impulse to detach from tragedy through humor serves as a counterbalance to our empathy and attachment, traits essential to social animals but paralyzing if unchecked in times of crisis. Laugh today about yesterday’s sabre-tooth tiger attack and you pull yourself together to hunt mastodon, eat, and live to pass along your genes.<br />
<br />
When these jokes seem to rise from the zeitgeist, the telling itself can become the primary gag, the observational meta-joke that <i>human beings are sick bastards who find this funny.</i> It works because we’re all in this together: I’ve heard this one, you’ve heard that one, someone like us must have come up with this; everyone’s responsible so no one is. <br />
<br />
But when Gottfried tweets Japan jokes as a professional comedian, there’s him and there’s us. We have no ownership, no liability as <i>the kind of people who think this stuff up.</i> He’s the sick bastard who finds this funny, we’re decent folk who need to take a stand against this trash.<br />
<br />
I also think Gottfried is a victim of the Comedian On Twitter syndrome. Social media’s low-cost marketing comes at a price for comedians: fans expect free, instant funny. And so the temptation is to brain-dump ideas that might otherwise never see the light of day.<br />
<br />
Looking through <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-10-worst-gilbert-gottfried-tsunami-jokes">Gottfried’s tweets</a>, and putting aside any question of taste, most of them are poorly constructed and don’t really work as jokes. A few would be salvageable with editing. One or two seem to stand on their own:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>I asked a girl in Japan to have sex with me. She said “okay, but you'll have to sleep in the wet spot.”</blockquote><br />
This would be a decent mid-set gag, a supplemental laugh on an established subject. It trades on a mixing of taboos: sex and disaster, but in an understated, minimally-graphic fashion. It turns on clever incongruities of type, number, and scale. And it’s a rather sweet homage to its “sleep in the wet spot” precursor jokes, those Sexual Revolution-era meditations on negotiating casual sex and its aftermath in that brave new gender-equal world.<br />
<br />
Here is the best of the lot: <br />
<br />
<blockquote>I was talking to my Japanese real estate agent. I said “is there a school in this area.” She said “not now, but just wait."</blockquote><br />
The central equivocation is actually a stroke of genius: the ambiguity in meaning is possible only in the apocalyptic conditions of this specific moment. Delivering the punchline in the agent’s voice furthers the uncertainty: Does she intend the meaning we perceive? If so, does she take Gottfried’s question so literally as to assume a flotsam schoolhouse would meet his needs? What is her attitude toward the catastrophe if she is breezily offering its consequences as a selling point? <br />
<br />
The fundamentals are also solid: a classic setup-line-punchline, with a strong core incongruity between mundane and extraordinary elements. I award bonus points for the dependence on visual imagination, generating dual meaning through reliance on imagery highly specific to the present moment when footage of the deluge is seared into our collective consciousness. <br />
<br />
Indeed, the imagery invoked softens the joke by substituting masonry for human flesh. Elliot Orring points out that a defining feature of the <i>Challenger</i> disaster was the “shield[ing]” of “the view of that human disaster miles above the earth . . . by flame and the opaque wall of the shuttle cabin,” whereas “beyond these speakable images of flame and falling debris lay the imaginable but unspeakable images of horrific trauma and mutilation.” Many <i>Challenger</i> jokes operated, Orring argues, by “forc[ing] us to confront what lies behind the speakable media images that are created or manipulated for our consumption.” <br />
<br />
The disaster in Japan was not so antiseptic: cameras covered every angle of the destruction, making blanket censorship of death impossible. Gottfried’s text in some fashion works the reverse of a <i>Challenger</i> joke. Instead of laying bare an obscured mayhem, it renders the devastation more palatable by focusing on a cartoonish inanimate object, without speculation as to what could lie inside. <br />
<br />
Pre-Twitter, Gottfried might have crossed out five of his ideas, tried the rest at a small club on a Tuesday night, and wound up with the “school” bit as the one piece of usable material. It’s an excellent joke, standing alone, whose merits may render the subject matter forgivable. But by surrounding this pearl with an unvarnished barrage of lesser attempts, Gottfried came across as desperate for laughs, and his use of the subject exploitative.<br />
<br />
I’m a tough crowd.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-25964509980105989272011-03-09T14:09:00.008-05:002011-03-11T10:20:48.517-05:00Maryland Marriage Equality: Some Noteworthy Secular Objections<div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gNP3mCrFbFM/TXfPo72AZ5I/AAAAAAAAAYE/QId5GqZA7s8/s1600/Maryland%2BState%2BHouse%2BHoly%2BPrepuce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gNP3mCrFbFM/TXfPo72AZ5I/AAAAAAAAAYE/QId5GqZA7s8/s320/Maryland%2BState%2BHouse%2BHoly%2BPrepuce.jpg" width="215" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;">To: Honorable Members, Maryland House of Delegates</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">From: Holy Prepuce</div><br />
In anticipation of Friday’s vote on the marriage equality bill, you will no doubt desire the benefit of public comment on the measure. Not all of you were able to attend the bill’s House Judiciary Committee hearing. Committee hearings are streamed on the Internet, but surely no one but an obsessive-compulsive state government groupie would record the audio, transfer it to his MP3 player, and listen to all 8+ hours. <br />
<br />
I did. As the hearing was not transcribed, I have taken it upon myself to distill for you some highlights. <br />
<br />
The standard arguments for and against same-sex marriage are so well-worn that there is little point in going over them again. And while some rather novel religious arguments were offered, all fall within the familiar heading that God wants you to vote No and you’d really do better not to piss off God. <br />
<br />
Instead, I bring to your attention some of the more original and surprising secular arguments marshaled by opponents, because you may not have thought of these:<br />
<br />
1. If the bill passes, the Eastern Shore will be forced to secede from the state of Maryland. Quite possibly Western and Southern Maryland will secede also.<br />
<br />
2. A marriage can involve many things, such as holding hands, going hiking, or watching football. The word “homosexual” describes just one thing: sex. To talk about “homosexual marriage,” just because a husband and wife can have sex and two men can also have sex, makes no more sense than to talk about about “hand-holding marriage,” “hiking marriage,” or “football marriage.”<br />
<br />
3. The availability of marriage will cause gay couples to move to Maryland. Because gay couples can’t have children, their children can’t grow up to become Maryland taxpayers. Therefore Maryland’s tax revenue will suffer -- something we can’t afford in this recession.<br />
<br />
4. If we have same-sex marriage in Maryland, nine- and ten-year-old boys in public schools will be taught to urinate on each other for sexual gratification. <br />
<br />
5. The Greeks allowed homosexuality, and they were conquered by the Romans. The Romans allowed homosexuality, and they were overrun by barbarians. <i>The same thing could happen in Maryland.<br />
<br />
Fatti maschil, Parole femine</i>, Honorable Members. <br />
<br />
HP</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-64882759330766118712011-03-02T14:42:00.003-05:002011-03-02T17:54:35.461-05:00Splashdown the Second<div style="text-align: justify;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-fA_R9yGV0dE/TW6bxmEwLiI/AAAAAAAAAYA/lZyJF7yL0pY/s1600/Holy+Prepuce+Salvador+Dali+Geopoliticus+Child+Watching+The+Birth+of+the+New+Man.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" l6="true" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-fA_R9yGV0dE/TW6bxmEwLiI/AAAAAAAAAYA/lZyJF7yL0pY/s320/Holy+Prepuce+Salvador+Dali+Geopoliticus+Child+Watching+The+Birth+of+the+New+Man.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Back when I sometimes used to write this blog--<i>i.e.</i> before Facebook’s News Feed came along as a lower-effort portal for the transitory contents of my brain--Mrs. P. had a baby. I <a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/2006/08/having-baby-changes-everything.html">revealed</a> and <a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/2006/08/public-idiot-1-beautiful-people-have.html">discussed</a> the pregnancy and <a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/2006/12/guidelines-for-those-who-wish-to.html">upcoming delivery</a> here, <a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/2007/01/splashdown.html">announced</a> the birth within 24 hours, and even declared a paternity leave from blogging, which I subsequently <a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/2007/01/jesus-is-lord-of-metropolitan-dc-md-va.html">violated</a>. <br />
<br />
My present-day negligence in updating <i>Holy Prepuce!</i> has resulted in this two-month delayed announcement that the House of Prepuce has again reproduced! P2 is delightful, charming, and a more-or-less patient companion to her sister, now four and self-appointedly in charge of infant care. (The cat’s maternal instincts have also been activated, and require some supervision owing to the mismatch in texture between human baby skin and feline tongue.)<br />
<br />
A question for parents with a baby and an older child: when you are out and about with just the baby and a stranger starts fussing over him/her, do you experience a compulsion to work your older child into the conversation? (Example: “I’ve never seen one so tiny!” “Neither had I. Her big sister weighed 9 pounds!” Or: “He looks so warm in that [car seat accessory].” “I know, I wish I’d had one when his brother was a baby.”)<br />
<br />
This kept happening to me on days when I’d drop Little Miss P. at day care and then head out on errands with P2. At first I wondered if I was unconsciously sticking up for Little Miss P, as in: why should the baby get all the attention? Except that Little Miss P. knows how to work rooms like a lobbyist, so that’s never been a top concern. <br />
<br />
Further self-observation suggested that my conduct was rather more vain than magnanimous: My subconscious mind simply couldn’t abide the patronizing way people talk to first-time parents. Or, more to the point, it couldn’t stomach the patronizing things that my paranoia led it to believe people might <i>think</i> about me, on the assumption I was a first-time parent. So it was making sure that everyone understood this baby wasn’t my first rodeo.<br />
<br />
In light of this revelation, I resolved to face down my demons, accept kind words about the baby at face value, and not give in to compulsion. So when the cashier at the Hallmark Store cooed “how old is she?” I simply replied “five weeks.” Whereupon the grinning woman inquired--clearly certain of an affirmative answer--“is she your <i>first</i>?” I still haven’t decided whether the satisfaction of saying “no” was worth the preceding 750 milliseconds of agonizing condescension.<br />
<br />
Speaking of my older daughter, Little Miss P. has evidently inherited the hoarding gene that runs in my family. It started with a ban on recycling any of the several dozen drawings she produces weekly, and has escalated to the point where we must absolutely retain forever the plastic box her toy camera came in. When the cleaning lady threw Little Miss P.’s “sticker pile” away, forgivably mistaking this linty collection of formerly-adhesive material for trash, a near-crisis ensued. A secure location for Sticker Pile II was immediately scouted, to ensure this catastrophe would never, ever be repeated. I fear my daughter will one day be featured on <i>Hoarders 2055, Now In Holovision</i>: “Citizen, you are out of compliance. Only 11 cubic meters of personal effects are permitted within ClimoDome.”<br />
<br />
Something else: everyone’s favorite thing to tell you when there’s a newborn around is “support the head!” And it’s true that babies are born with minimal neck strength, so their heads flop around if you don’t support them. People get really worked up about this: “Hold her head!” “Make sure you’ve got her head before I let go!” “Be careful of the head!” <br />
<br />
And that seems like good advice, although it’s never really specified what will happen if you don’t follow it. You know what you never hear on the 11 o’clock news? “Tragedy struck the family of a local newborn this evening, after police say a careless visitor failed to support its head.”</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-32931098423023238012011-02-15T17:23:00.008-05:002011-02-15T17:54:57.978-05:00Why Aren't There More Scott Roeders? (Or, Why Most People Won't Kill Abortion Providers, Even If South Dakota Makes It Legal)<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bkzsYQdzh6s/TVsCjedMZGI/AAAAAAAAAX4/UqRUPHGcq74/s1600/Scott%2BRoeder%2BHoly%2BPrepuce.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 194px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bkzsYQdzh6s/TVsCjedMZGI/AAAAAAAAAX4/UqRUPHGcq74/s320/Scott%2BRoeder%2BHoly%2BPrepuce.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5574051772295308386" /></a>The Internet is ablaze today with <a href="http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/south-dakota-hb-1171-legalize-killing-abortion-providers">reports of a South Dakota bill</a> that would "legalize murder of abortion providers." An examination of <a href="http://legis.state.sd.us/sessions/2011/Bill.aspx?File=HB1171HJU.htm">H.B. 1171</a> leaves me of two minds as to whether the bill is insidious or just poorly drafted, and whether the <i>Mother Jones</i> Article is a dire warning or irresponsible scaremongering. Regardless, the episode brings to mind a larger question that has often nagged me: Why aren't there more Scott Roeders?<br /><br />Imagine that a mass murderer of children, one who openly admits his intention to go right on killing, is loose in your community. And imagine that your government not only has failed to prevent the slaughter, but perversely has enshrined in law this killer's right to murder. Would you not be morally justified in ending this man's rampage by killing him? Indeed, if presented with the opportunity to kill him, would you not be morally negligent in permitting him to go on living and murdering more children each day?<br /><br />Scott Roeder, as you may recall, murdered Wichita, Kansas abortion provider George Tiller in 2009. Listening to Roeder explain at his sentencing why he killed Tiller, it is clear that his actions made perfect sense in light of a belief professed by him and millions of Americans. That belief: A fetus is a human being with the same right to life as you or I, and killing a fetus is murder. If you believe that, then you believe that to kill George Tiller was to stop a mass murderer against whom the government could do nothing.<br /><br />Yet since 1977 there have been only <a href="http://www.prochoice.org/pubs_research/publications/downloads/about_abortion/stats_table2009.pdf">8 murders and 17 attempted murders</a> of American abortion providers or clinic staff--fewer than one such incident per year. Which is why I don't believe that Americans believe what they say about abortion.<br /><br />The moral right to use deadly force in defense of another is recognized almost universally. And although the law limits this privilege to situations of immediate peril, surely that restriction has no moral force when its premise--that government (e.g. police) will step in given time--is untrue. Some abortion opponents who condemned Roeder fell back on the old standard that you can't kill in the name of "respect for life," but if you really believe that George Tiller was a serial killer on the verge of striking again, this is akin to saying that out of "respect for life" police ought not to have shot Charles Whitman as he picked off passers-by from the University of Texas bell tower.<br /><br />We are not morally obligated to prevent every harm that may befall another. But if we know where a serial killer lives, works, and worships, to stand by while he strikes again and again would be an indefensible omission. If you believe about fetuses what Scott Roeder believes about fetuses, then killing abortion providers is not only justified, but virtuous and perhaps morally imperative.<br /><br />And yet it happens so rarely. Why? Fear of punishment, lack of opportunity, and cognitive dissonance in light of apparently conflicting moral duties may provide partial explanations. But I don't think these rationalizations alone--or indeed primarily--explain the scarcity of such killings.<br /><br />In a <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article4761159.ece">2008 essay</a> for the <i>Times</i> of London, philosopher Jamie Whyte suggests that the apparent persistence of Christian belief, which he regards as "pre-Enlightenment gobbledegook," has a simple explanation: people don't actually believe it. Rather, he argues, people who profess Christian beliefs "are expressing their hopes rather than their beliefs--substituting 'I believe' for 'I wish' in the unconscious endeavour to convince themselves." "The real test for genuine belief," Whyte argues, "is not what people say, but what they do. To believe something is to be disposed to act upon it. The vast majority of Western Christians fail this test."<br /><br />As one example, Whyte examines abortion. Imagine, he suggests, a network of government slaughterhouses in which a million children are exterminated each year.<br /><br /><blockquote>It is a horrifying idea. Anyone who believed it to be happening would surely rise up against the regime, with violence if necessary. . . . To do nothing . . . would display despicable moral complacency.<br /><br />Yet British Roman Catholics allegedly believe that such slaughter is really happening. They claim that humans have immortal souls from conception, and that killing a foetus is no less murder than killing a ten-year-old. . . .<br /><br />If they believe what they claim to, they are no better than those who turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities. But I do not think they are that wicked. It is just that they don't really believe the things they say about foetuses and immortal souls.</blockquote><br />I don't know that I would go so far as to conclude that Christians don't believe in Christianity. But I do take Whyte's point that most people who believe abortion to be murder act in a manner inconsistent with that belief. In America, there are no government-run abortion clinics. But there are individual abortion providers who, it would seem, believers in fetal equality should regard as justified, and even morally imperative targets for assassination. And like Whyte, I suspect that most people's unexpressed beliefs about fetuses can be discerned from their illogically peaceable behavior.<br /><br />I suspect that most people don't kill abortion providers because in their heart of hearts they intuitively recognize that fetuses are <i>not</i> equal to born human beings. The magnitude that individuals assign to the fetal life-right may differ signifcantly. (If you think you place it at zero, imagine abortions were free but contraceptives cost 25 cents per month. Would you find no moral problem in foregoing contraception solely because aborting would be cheaper?) But by not acting like Scott Roeder, nearly everyone reveals they believe the right falls somewhere below the level meriting defense by deadly force. And to believe that is to accept that fetuses have a lesser right to life than you and I--because our lives <i>are</i> subject to that level of protection.<br /><br />If nearly everyone believes this, why will so many not admit it, even to themselves? I suspect it is because they at some level recognize their intuition is fatal to the anti-abortion cause. It is self-evident that citizens of a free society possess a strong interest in exercising bodily autonomy without government interference. It is further obvious that women can have powerful motivations to abort. Among the most universal are escaping the continued agonies of pregnancy and childbirth--for all women a physical toll, for some the risk of intra-family violence or social opprobrium; and, for the many who know they could not bear to surrender an infant to adoption, the avoidance of undesired parenthood.<br /><br />If a fetus had a life-right equal to yours and mine, these interests and motivations would be of little consequence to the anti-abortion position. No matter how strong a pregnant woman's interests in obtaining an abortion, short of saving her own life few would say those interests justified the killing of a being with rights exactly equal to the woman's own. (There are arguments defending abortion even assuming fetal equality--<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=o5peQpgSTTIC&pg=RA1-PA63#v=onepage&q&f=false">Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist</a> is perhaps the best known--but they are too elaborate to persuade many but the already-persuaded.)<br /><br />But to admit that the fetal life-right is less than equal with your own is to admit that the morality of abortion is complex, and susceptible at best to a case-by-case balancing of interests. If that is true, then justly-administered state prohibition of abortion is hopelessly impractical. Such an admission also risks acknowledging that the true magnitude of the fetal life-right <i>could</i> be so low that a woman's interest in bodily autonomy--regardless of her other motivations--is always sufficient to outweigh it. If so, the government could not justly prohibit abortions even case-by-case.<br /><br />Many Americans claim to believe abortion is the same thing as murder. Their refusal to stop it by violence suggests to me they know it isn't. Thankfully, there are very few Scott Roeders.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-61020808006386103002010-11-08T21:18:00.010-05:002012-08-04T07:57:19.100-04:00Post-Polling Pornucopia<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TNiw8faq5OI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/olQKa6ZMwRk/s1600/Holy+Prepuce+Post-Polling+Pornucupia+1.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 154px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TNiw8faq5OI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/olQKa6ZMwRk/s200/Holy+Prepuce+Post-Polling+Pornucupia+1.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5537370295124026594" /></a>It’s time for another <i>Holy Prepuce!</i> Research Update, where the cutting edge of academic endeavor is distilled, digested, and regurgitated for your special edification. Today’s offering: “Changes in Pornography-Seeking Behaviors Following Political Elections: An Examination of the Challenge Hypothesis,” <a href="http://www65.homepage.villanova.edu/patrick.markey/pornandelections.pdf">Evolution & Human Behavior 31 (2010): 442-446</a>. In this article, authors Patrick & Charlotte Markey answer the burning question of whether backers of successful political candidates consume more internet pornography post-election than do supporters of losing candidates.<br /><br />The authors begin with some background about the “Challenge Hypothesis,” which suggests that “testosterone levels in males tend to rise during competition . . . [to] support various reproductive behaviors . . . . Interestingly, individuals do not even have to be directly involved in a competition for their testosterone levels to be affected; spectators can experience similar changes. . . .”<br /><br />The effect has been documented among male supporters of winning sports teams. A recent study also “found that following the 2008 US presidential election men who voted for the winning candidate (Barack Obama) had higher testosterone levels after the election than men who voted for a losing candidate.”<br /><br />Thus, the authors hypothesize, “[a] sexual behavior that might shift following the winning or losing of a competition is the seeking of visual–sexual stimulation (e.g., pornography),” and following an election we should expect to see higher rates of pornography seeking in states that backed the winning side.<br /><br />As it happens, the authors tell us, pornography is custom-made for the male brain:<br /><br /><blockquote>Men’s interest in pornography is typically attributed to men’s evolved interest in sexual variety and multiple partners. As noted [in prior research], men tend to fantasize about a place where “sex is sheer lust and physical gratification, devoid of more tender feelings and encumbering relationships, in which women are always aroused, or at least easily arousable, and ultimately are always willing.” </blockquote><br />And where is that special man-place? Why in the magical world of porn, of course, which--as helpfully explained for those (presumably female) readers unschooled in the <i>genre</i>--“typically depicts women engaging in casual sex without investment.”<br /><br />For those wishing to experience this “pornography” for ourselves, the authors explain that it is available in “a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, film and video,” but advise that “however, currently, one of the most prevalent means of distributing pornography is the internet.” Readers unfamiliar with technical matters are offered the further suggestions that “[b]y simply typing a few keywords into a search engine (e.g., Google) it is extremely easy to search for pornography on the internet,” and “[f]or example, a person might type in the word ‘porn’ or ‘sex’ into the Google search engine when attempting to find pornography.”<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TNixN8wMTnI/AAAAAAAAAXY/rF-p9_hFxUM/s1600/Holy%2BPrepuce%2BPost-Polling%2BPornucupia%2B2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 134px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TNixN8wMTnI/AAAAAAAAAXY/rF-p9_hFxUM/s200/Holy%2BPrepuce%2BPost-Polling%2BPornucupia%2B2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5537370595056701042" /></a>The authors next detail their research methods, which utilize <a href="http://www.google.com/trends">Google Trends</a> data from the 2004, 2006, and 2008 US elections, data which can be drilled down on a state-by-state basis to determine the frequency of particular searches in a given time period:<br /><br /><blockquote>The internet service WordTracker was used to determine which keywords individuals tend to use to search for pornography. . . by first providing WordTracker with a seed word relevant to pornography. For the current study the researchers simply used the word “porn.” WordTracker then searched the top 100 websites that rank highest on search engines for the term “porn” and extract[ed] additional keywords utilized by these sites. From this analysis, the 10 most frequently occurring, non-domain-specific, pornography keywords (e.g., “xvideos,” “boobs,” “tits,” etc.) were selected for the current study. . . . Google Trends was then utilized to determine the popularity of these pornography keywords.</blockquote><br />And the results?<br /><br /><blockquote>[T]he week after the 2004 presidential election Red states (i.e., the states that voted for the winner of the election) had marginally higher RSVIs [relative search volume indices] for pornography keywords than Blue states . . . . [T]he week after the 2008 presidential election Blue states (i.e., the states that voted for the winner of the election) had significantly higher RSVIs for pornography keywords than Red states . . . . [For the 2006 mid-term election], a regression analysis was conducted to examine whether or not traditionally Blue states (coded 2) had higher RSVI scores than swing states (coded 1) which had higher RSVI scores than traditionally Red states (coded 0). Consistent with the . . . hypothesis, a significant linear trend was found.</blockquote><br />A key purpose of <i>Holy Prepuce</i> Research Update is to stimulate ongoing inquiry. For that reason I hope some among my readership will take up the authors’ exhortation for further research directed at some limitations of their study.<br /><br />One such limitation is that backers of winning candidates<br /><br /><blockquote>might have simply been happier and more likely to desire sex . . . [i]n other words, . . . changes in voters’ moods rather than testosterone levels [may] explain the observed changes in pornography-seeking behaviors[, a]lthough . . . previous research is somewhat mixed as to the relations between mood, interest in pornography, and masturbation.</blockquote><br />Hence, “[i]t is hoped that future research might provide a more complete understanding of the mediators that explain why pornography-seeking behaviors tend to change following political elections.”<br /><br />Another limitation is that Google Trends does not track the gender of users, and so it “would be informative for future researchers to utilize a different methodology that allows for the assessment of gender.” Nevertheless,<br /><br /><blockquote>[g]iven the frequency that males use the internet to search for pornography . . . and the keywords used in the current study to operationally define pornography searchers (e.g., “boobs,” “tits,” etc.), it seems likely that the observed findings were driven by males.</blockquote><br />And if I may suggest some avenues of further investigation myself: First, although revealing only “xvideos,” “boobs,” and “tits,” the article promises that “[a] complete list of the 10 keywords utilized for the current research is available from the first author.” Professor Markey <a href="http://www65.homepage.villanova.edu/patrick.markey/markey.html">may be reached</a> through his laboratory at Villanova University, so please feel free to ask him for the remaining seven.<br /><br />Second, as a resident of a blue state, I am proud to note that although red-staters displayed “marginally” higher pornography-seeking behavior after Bush’s 2004 reelection, we blue-staters delivered a “significantly” higher number of porn searches following Obama’s win in 2008. I theorize the following relationship: voting Democratic is but one manifestation of our depraved and comprehensive libertinism. Prospective testers of this hypothesis are invited out here to Gomorrah for a site visit.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-78177881178583054052010-07-30T11:07:00.009-04:002010-07-30T21:29:34.594-04:00"The Mosque at Ground Zero"<div style="TEXT-ALIGN: justify">“Stop the mosque at Ground Zero,” <a href="http://sioaonline.com/?p=443">screams</a> the right-wing Internet campaign!<br /><br /><a href="http://www.newt.org/newt-direct/no-mosque-ground-zero">Newt Gingrich</a> has weighed in: “Building this structure on the edge of the battlefield created by radical Islamists is not a celebration of religious pluralism and mutual tolerance; it is a political statement of shocking arrogance and hypocrisy.”<br /><br />As has <a href="http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=24718773587#!/note.php?note_id=411073718434">Sarah Palin</a>: “This is not an issue of religious tolerance but of common moral sense. To build a mosque at Ground Zero is a stab in the heart of the families of the innocent victims of those horrific attacks.”<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TFLtDQy04jI/AAAAAAAAAXA/osz7xyrnuCA/s1600/Ground+Zero+Mosque+Protester+2.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 266px; FLOAT: right; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499718735276335666" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TFLtDQy04jI/AAAAAAAAAXA/osz7xyrnuCA/s320/Ground+Zero+Mosque+Protester+2.jpg" /></a>We can quibble, of course, about whether 45 Park Place is “at Ground Zero,” whether <a href="http://www.cordobainitiative.org/?q=content/cordoba-house-new-york-city">Cordoba House</a> will be a “mosque,” and whether it constitutionally could be prohibited. But arguing about these points may be counterproductive, because to do so risks conceding that they matter. It gives credence to the idea that if this <i>is</i> a “Ground Zero Mosque” and can be legally prohibited, then prohibiting it could be the right thing to do.<br /><br />Gingrich and Palin certainly seem to think stopping Cordoba House is the right thing to do. Here is what I would like to ask them:<br /><br />Newt and Sarah, let us assume <i>arguendo</i> that Cordoba House is “at Ground Zero,” that it is a "mosque," and that it legally could be prevented. Please tell me which one or more of the following statements you agree with:<br /><br />1. No general moral right exists to build a house of worship on one’s own land; or<br /><br />2. Such a general moral right exists, but it does not apply in this case because:<br /><br />a. Islam--the religion as a whole in all its variants--was responsible for 9/11, and a mosque at the site of 9/11 would therefore profane the dead; or<br /><br />b. Islam is a profane religion, and to allow a mosque on the “hallowed ground” of 9/11 would therefore profane the dead; or<br /><br />c. Islam is the enemy of the United States, and it is therefore an act of surrender to allow a mosque at the site of an enemy attack; or<br /><br />d. All Muslims bear collective guilt for 9/11, and as a result have forfeited this general moral right; or<br /><br />e. Not all Muslims bear collective guilt for 9/11, but because 9/11 was committed in the name of Islam, to become or remain a Muslim is implicitly to approve of 9/11, an immoral belief that forfeits the general moral right.<br /><br />I’m sure that Gingrich and Palin would deny believing any one of these statements, if each were put to them in isolation. But if they are sincere in calling for the project to be stopped, they must believe at least one.<br /><br />Unless of course, they don’t, and they’re just pandering.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TFLs8UnzwMI/AAAAAAAAAW4/zLqksEBaiWY/s1600/Ground+Zero+Mosque+Protester+1.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 146px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5499718616044781762" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TFLs8UnzwMI/AAAAAAAAAW4/zLqksEBaiWY/s320/Ground+Zero+Mosque+Protester+1.jpg" /></a>There is a separate line of argument in the anti-mosque talking points, which holds that whether or not Cordoba House can be stopped by its opponents, the builders should have the “sensitivity” not to build it. The idea being that so long as some Americans, particularly survivors of the 9/11 dead, are offended by the construction of Cordoba House, its builders have an ethical obligation to prevent that offense by cancelling the project.<br /><br />The difficulty is, though, that to take offense at the building of a “Ground Zero Mosque,” one must logically believe one or more of statements 2a, 2b, or 2c. If Islam as a whole is not responsible for 9/11, is not a profane religion, and is not the enemy of the United States, then a “Ground Zero Mosque”--unless built in explicit celebration of the attacks--is not offensive. (A 9/11-celebrating mosque would of course be a different story, but so would a 9/11-celebrating ice cream stand or waterslide.)<br /><br />So those who advance the sensitivity argument on the basis that they personally take offense are merely affirming their beliefs in statements 2a, 2b, or 2c, with the added implication that “even a Muslim should recognize these things about his religion.”<br /><br />But what most intrigues me about the sensitivity argument is those who purport to raise it only on behalf of others. Such a person says in essence to the builders, “look, you and I both know that your entire religion is not profane, not the enemy, and not responsible for 9/11. But these people... they're hurting. They’ve lost loved ones, they've been through a trauma--if they believe those things about Islam, let's not rub their noses in it."<br /><br />After all, the general proposition--that looking out for people’s feelings is usually the right thing to do--is uncontroversial. But could this duty really extend to respecting others’ feelings when they are born from prejudice? Even if the prejudice is against you? That seems a step too far. Which is why I have my suspicions that, from people who have thought it through, the “sensitivity” argument in the end reduces to a general condemnation of Islam.<br /><br />Unless of course, it doesn’t, and they’re just pandering.<br /><br />UPDATE: a conservative friend pointed out to me that the Anti-Defamation League <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jIAKwCdoMt7G6zhtxk_sLnhp1xJwD9H9MFRO3">has come out against Cordoba House</a> as well, and he asks whether I am “implying that it is acceptable for a civil rights organization such as the ADL to be against the mosque, but it is not acceptable for conservative politicians to take that stand?” To answer in no uncertain terms: no. I was unaware when I wrote this post of the ADL’s position, which I find equally unsupportable, and indeed more troubling coming as it does from an organization dedicated to fighting anti-religious bias.<br /><br />I would put the same questions to ADL director Abraham Foxman. And in particular, to his statement that “building an Islamic center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain--unnecessarily--and that is not right,” I would respond as follows: Explain to me, Mr. Foxman, why a victim would feel pain at the building of an Islamic center unless he believes that “Islam”--all of it--is the same entity that carried out 9/11? And assuming you can’t, tell me why it is “not right” for the builders of Cordoba House to ignore those victims’ bigotry.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-56666104295264560102010-07-08T10:34:00.011-04:002010-07-08T11:06:18.365-04:00A Prisoner’s Dilemma and a Scottish Verdict: The Strange Case of Robert Wone<div style="text-align: justify;">If I am tardy in updating <i>Holy Prepuce!</i>, it is because I have squandered my available Internet time obsessively following trial updates at <a href="http://whomurderedrobertwone.com/">WhoMurderedRobertWone.com</a>. The blogosphere is saturated with theories of this crime, so rather than offering my own, I'm going to tell you three things I find extraordinary about the murder of Robert Wone and the subsequent acquittal of Joseph Price, Dylan Ward, and Victor Zaborsky on charges of obstruction and evidence tampering.<br /><br />First, quite obviously, the facts: It is not every day that the General Counsel of Radio Free Asia is found stabbed to death in a million-dollar townhouse occupied by a polyamorous "throuple" and filled to the brim with S&M equipment. Nor do most killings present such Poirot-worthy puzzlers: the bloody knife that didn't match the stab wounds; the near-absence of blood; Wone's unexplained needle marks and seeming paralysis at the time of his stabbing, yet no sign in the toxicology results that he had been drugged; the discovery of Wone's own semen--and no one else's--in his rectum.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TDXkXYDHslI/AAAAAAAAAWg/p-cqTZb1pJU/s1600/prisoners-dilemma.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 169px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TDXkXYDHslI/AAAAAAAAAWg/p-cqTZb1pJU/s200/prisoners-dilemma.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5491546410891850322" /></a>Second, the throuple's unlikely success at a variant on the classic Prisoner's Dilemma: The circumstances of Wone's death and the throuple's behavior suggested, but did not prove, that each of the three was involved in either the killing or the cover-up. One has to assume that police and prosecutors offered each man more lenient treatment if he would rat out the other two.<br /><br />Each man therefore knew that staying silent meant freedom if the other two kept mum, but decades in prison if either one squealed. On these odds, a game theorist would surely advise that the optimal strategy was to talk. Yet none of the men did, even as the government escalated its game of "chicken" by prosecuting all three for obstructing justice. The throuple's mutual loyalty had great rewards--as, presumably, did their successful acts of obstruction and tampering--all were acquitted of both offenses, and none has been charged with murder.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TDXoOgyVF4I/AAAAAAAAAWw/TYRj7wSeVQc/s1600/The+Scottish+Verdict.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 206px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TDXoOgyVF4I/AAAAAAAAAWw/TYRj7wSeVQc/s320/The+Scottish+Verdict.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5491550656665032578" /></a>Third, the closest approximation to the "Scottish Verdict" of "not proven" that one will likely find in an American court: As fans of <a href="http://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_lawlady.htm">Wilkie Collins</a> or <a href="http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/02/12/senate.statements/specter.html">Arlen Specter</a> well know, a Scottish jury can acquit for lack of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but express its conclusion that the defendant most likely committed the crime by voting "not proven" rather than "not guilty."<br /><br />American juries deliver verdicts of "not guilty" without explanation of their reasons, so they have no formal mechanism by which to acknowledge an acquitted defendant's likely guilt. Only in the rare circumstance that a defendant elects to be tried by a judge alone--as the throuple did in this case--does the trier of fact issue written findings in a criminal case.<br /><br />Excerpts from Judge Lynn Leibovitz's <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/33715531/Judge-Lynn-Lebovitz-Verdict-Final-Order-06292010">Order</a> acquitting the throuple leave little doubt that she would have found "not proven," had that verdict been available:<br /><br /><blockquote>From the beginning, this case has been a test of the meaning of the reasonable doubt standard of proof. . . . As an initial matter, I am persuaded by the trial evidence in its totality, and I find, that the murder of Robert Wone was not committed by an intruder unknown to the defendants. . . . The government has thus presented powerful evidence to support its claim that Robert Wone's murderer was either one of the defendants, or someone known to them who was able to enter without breaking. . . . I am persuaded . . . that Mr. Price very likely tampered with and altered the murder weapon, and that he lied about his conduct in this regard to police with obstructive purpose. . . . I find that it is very likely Mr. Price altered or destroyed evidence at the scene with the specific intent to reduce its value as evidence in the imminent investigation. . . . Some of the most persuasive evidence in the record supporting the government's position is the demeanor and conduct of the defendants. From the beginning, each one of them . . . displayed a demeanor wholly at odds with what anyone would expect from an innocent person whose friend had just been murdered tragically and violently in his home. . . . It is very probable that the government's theory is correct, that even if the defendants did not participate in the murder some or all of them knew enough about the circumstances of it to provide helpful information to law enforcement and have chosen to withhold that information for reasons of their own. Nevertheless, after lengthy analysis of the evidence I conclude that the government has failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the essential elements . . . . My focus on the difference between "moral certainty" and "evidentiary certainty" in this case is probably cold comfort to those who loved Robert Wone and wish for some measure of peace or justice, and I am extremely sorry for this. I believe, however, that the reasonable doubt standard is essential to maintaining our criminal justice system as the fair and just system we wish it to be. I cite the wisdom of English jurist William Blackstone that it is "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."</blockquote><br />My Criminal Law professor <a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/2006/04/insanity-defense_28.html">once observed</a> that he felt most proud to be an American the day John Hinckley was acquitted, because on that day he learned that a jury will acquit even a man who shoots the President of the United States on national television if the law says he is not responsible for his actions. And I have to say that I am similarly pleased to live in a country where a judge can be all but certain that one or more of the men before her is a murderer, yet acquit when the government has failed to prove the only crimes with which they are charged.<br /><br />Having endeavored to say something intelligent about the Wone matter, I am now entitled to deliver what you've all been waiting for (and if you found this post in a Google search, what most likely contains your keywords): the Metropolitan Police Department's <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/11824221/Affidavit-in-Support-of-an-Arrest-Warrant-Dylan-Ward">list of items</a> recovered from Dylan Ward's bedroom:<br /><br /><blockquote>racks, shackles, metal and leather collars, wrist/ankle restraints, mouth gags, black spandex hoods, assorted clamps and clips, black clothes pins, an enema kit, metal penis rings, penis vices, assorted metal chains with locks, studded penis bindings, dildos, butt plugs, nipple suction devices, a[n] electrical current/shock device, a device designed to force the wearer to drink another's urine[,] . . . . various books relating to inflicting pain on others for purposes of sexual gratification, inflicting electric shocks on others for pleasure and pain, enslaving others for sexual gratification, manuals concerning sadomasochistic practices, books dedicated to bondage practices and the like. Many of these books contained passages highlighted by the reader.</blockquote><br />The <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/11824233/Estate-of-Robert-E-Wone-Katherine-Wone-vs-Joseph-Price-Victor-Zaborsky-Dylan-Ward">civil trial</a> awaits…</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-66287159502490064932010-06-01T19:00:00.002-04:002010-06-02T11:31:07.224-04:00Adam Wheeler, Conceptual Artist<div align="justify"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TALfuGFDRhI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/gejqapL_VGs/s1600/Adam+Wheeler+Holy+Prepuce.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 256px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/TALfuGFDRhI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/gejqapL_VGs/s320/Adam+Wheeler+Holy+Prepuce.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5477186079834719762" /></a>Why can't prosecutors understand that indicted "Harvard Faker" Adam Wheeler is in reality a conceptual artist of the highest caliber? Ignorant <a href="http://www.middlesexda.com/press-release-archive/former-harvard-student-arraigned-on-larceny-identity-theft-falsifying-documents-and-related-charges-in-connection-to-widespread-fraud-scheme/">accusations</a> painting Wheeler as a simple fraudster who conned his way into Harvard malign his genius burlesque on the follies of elite academe.<br /><br />For evidence of Wheeler's true purpose, one need look no further than the <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/5/18/wheeler-school-high-caesar/">pastiche e-mail</a> sent to his fellow transfer students upon their arrival at Harvard:<br /><br /><blockquote>My own, brief, assessment of my character is that I am sententious, crypto-tendentious, slightly pedantic with a streak of contrarianism, a fascination with any pedagogical approach to Shakespeare, and a decent sense of humor . . . . [I view sports as] . . . a neighborhood faux-pas of epic proportions. . . . [At MIT], I was, to put it poorly, suckled upon the teat of disdain. That being said (fortified by a reflexive snort), I was inspired thereby to apply to Harvard, where the humanities, in short, are not, simpliciter, a source of opprobrium.</blockquote>Who except a newly-arrived transfer student, overwhelmed at her good fortune to be accepted at a school where people <i>actually talk like that</i>, would not recognize this as the tongue-in-cheek drivel of a satirist impostor?<br /><br />A con man seeking a Harvard degree might have <i>started</i> as Wheeler did, posing as a frustrated MIT comp lit major seeking a transfer up Mass Ave. But from there on, the paradigm fits Wheeler's <i>oeuvre</i> not a bit. In a virtuoso display of commitment to character, Wheeler immersed himself in the rôle of a comically incompetent hustler, planting a series of over-the-top "blunders" in service of two conceptual theses:<br /><br />1. The ego validation of a <i>wunderkind</i>-at-my-institution is so intoxicating that elite scholars will swallow the most outrageous fabrications in support of that narrative;<br /><br />2. The scholarly output of elite academe is for the most part complete bullshit.<br /><br />Where a con man would have upgraded his pedigree to include some regional prep school outside the usual Harvard orbit, Wheeler brazenly selected Phillips Andover, where the college counselors are on Harvard Admissions' speed-dial. A con man would have forged not-quite-perfect SAT reports and transcripts; Wheeler awarded himself a perfect 1600 and straight As. The latter detail was particularly well-selected: MIT freshmen do not receive letter grades in their first semester.<br /><br />Like Wheeler, a con man might have forged references from MIT professors--but a con man would have signed them with the names of actual MIT faculty. Wheeler signed the names of professors at Bowdoin College, the school that suspended him in 2007 for academic dishonesty. A con man claiming to attend MIT would have shown up to be interviewed in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Wheeler <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/education/19harvard.html">requested a local interview at Bowdoin</a>. When the interviewer inquired what an MIT freshman was doing in Brunswick, Maine during the academic year, Wheeler explained that he was assisting a Bowdoin professor with a book.<br /><br />Once into Harvard, an institution from which one can easily graduate without once coming under adult scrutiny, a con man would spend the next three years laying low. If not quite up to the academic task, he would plagiarize or otherwise cheat to the least extent necessary to achieve passing marks. Another Wall Street analyst would be minted, with no one the wiser.<br /><br />Wheeler's project required a different approach. As the climax of his performance, Wheeler applied for a Rhodes Scholarship, the most prestigious in the English-speaking world. True to form, Wheeler forged recommendations from Harvard professors, forged a Harvard transcript showing perfect grades, and--a master stroke--submitted a resume largely cribbed from chaired professor James R. Russell.<br /><br />If the resume in Wheeler's Rhodes application is anything like the <a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/Wheeler-redacted.pdf">one he submitted</a> for an internship at <i>The New Republic</i>, it boasts of Wheeler's mastery of French, Old English, Classical Armenian, and Old Persian. It also details his six invited lectures, including "From Parthia to Robin Hood: The Armenian Version of the Epic of the Blind Man’s Son (Köroghlu)" and "The Body in the Garden: The Metapoetics of Husbandry from More to Marvell." The resume promises two forthcoming books, including <i>Mappings, Unmappings, and Remappings</i>, abstracted as follows:<br /><br /><blockquote>Critical work that has attempted to explain the experience of geographical and textual space in modern writing has focused predominantly on the map as an analytical tool of orientation that makes formal writing structures legible. My dissertation, however, articulates a positive and generative potential in the experience of getting lost. Disorientation, then, allows us to come to terms with the difficulty of modernist literature from the ground level--to view these works not as an abstraction seen from the "God’s eye" perspective that is implicit in most maps, nor a teleological outcome of the Enlightenment seen from retrospect. By restoring the experience of disorientation, I argue that getting lost becomes a radical discourse that reflects back to us how we orient ourselves--what we pay attention to as we move through physical space and how we construe meaning as we move through a text from page to page.</blockquote>This is obviously complete nonsense. But no less obvious is Wheeler's artistic message in submitting it: it is exactly the sort of nonsense liable to garner a scholarship from a fawning Rhodes committee.<br /><br />As was no doubt Wheeler's design, the Rhodes application proved a bridge too far. The inevitable investigation revealed not only his antics in gaining admission to Harvard, but a plagiarized Junior thesis for which Wheeler had been awarded the Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarship. Rather than face disciplinary proceedings, Wheeler withdrew from Harvard.<br /><br />But in an audacious epilogue, Wheeler began his transfer routine anew, applying to both Yale and Brown. In a letter of recommendation from Harvard's McLean Hospital, Wheeler praised his work in an internship for which he had in fact been rejected after submitting a falsified application. To his principal letter of recommendation, Wheeler signed the name of the very Harvard dean who had confronted Wheeler with his Rhodes fabrications.<br /><br />Alas, my profession is one of philistines, and instead of lionizing Wheeler's artistic contributions, the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office charged him with four counts of larceny, eight counts of identity fraud, seven counts of falsifying an endorsement or approval, and one count of "pretending to hold a degree."<br /><br />I call on Massachusetts' esteemed judiciary to put an end to this assault on the First Amendment. Free Adam Wheeler!</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-85741461379726904192010-05-03T08:01:00.007-04:002010-07-08T13:52:07.092-04:00An Open Letter to danah boyd (an Ethnographer Who Does Not Capitalize Her Name)<div style="text-align: justify;">Dear Dr. boyd:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/S97DlOaWbgI/AAAAAAAAAVc/ooKTqp_6pJQ/s1600/lowercase+i+one.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/S97DlOaWbgI/AAAAAAAAAVc/ooKTqp_6pJQ/s200/lowercase+i+one.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5467022041965555202" /></a>Congratulations on achieving position #1 in the "Social Media Ethnographers" tab of every reporter's Rolodex. As April's Facebook F8 conference approached, I predicted an electronic avalanche of danah boyd, and the media did not disappoint. Your ubiquity is confirmed to me not only by Google News search but also, no doubt dearer to your heart, by re-posted snippets of your wisdom bubbling through my Facebook "stream."<br /><br />Now, if I may, a small anecdote: <br /><br />I once attended the recital of an Arnold, Missouri dance school, and discovered that one of the older girls had listed herself in the program as simply "Essence." Essence was in several numbers, and for each one the billing read something like, "Mary Jane Jaworski, Erin O'Sullivan, Joanne Simmons, Essence." And I have to say, Essence was a pretty good dancer. But instead of thinking "how nice for this girl that she dances so well," all I could think was "you do <i>not</i> get to call yourself 'Essence' in the recital program of an Arnold, Missouri dance school." <br /> <br />Essence came vividly back to mind some twenty years later, as I encountered the following sentence in an October, 2009 <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/13/social.networking.class/index.html">CNN.com article</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name, said she watched the class divide emerge while conducting research of American teens' use of social networks in 2006.</blockquote><br />Any insights I might have been developing on the subject of the article (socioeconomic stratification in social media use) flew through the windshield as my attention screeched to an abrupt "wait, what?" A quick reversing, then, again: "Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name." It was now time for me to Google you, because anyone who "does not capitalize her name" to the point of instructing a CNN reporter that she "does not capitalize her name" must surely maintain a personal website on which she she explains why. <br /><br />And <a href="http://www.danah.org/name.html">you do</a>. Visitors can learn that you legally changed your name to "danah michele boyd" as the result of a "mental tangent" in which you pondered: <br /><br /><blockquote>What's in a name? What's its worth? Why is it so valuable that it is to be capitalized? Down this path, i started thinking about names as descriptors versus separate entities. Isn't a name simply another unique adjective for me? A label? I am not my name; my name is simply another descriptor of me. Should i weight that descriptor as anything more valuable than the other adjectives used to describe me?</blockquote><br />Well, danah, to begin with: no, your name is not "simply another unique adjective" for you. As it happens, names are not adjectives at all. They are proper nouns, which we capitalize in English probably to reflect the special attention that humans like to pay to other humans, the places they live, the groups they form, and the unique objects they create. Surely an ethnographer of social media knows that.<br /><br />What interests me more is that your "mental tangent" was an outgrowth of an earlier decision to stop capitalizing the pronoun "I":<br /><br /><blockquote>I was always bothered by the fact that the first person singular pronoun is capitalized in english -- i always thought it was quite self-righteous. . . . Ever since i was a kid, i was told that the world does not revolve around me, yet our written culture is telling me something entirely different. . . . i gave up on giving it such a special level of importance -- it is referring to me, right? I thought an attempt at minimalizing the individualization could start at home.</blockquote><br />In order to test the sincerity of your belief that "the world does not revolve around" you, I suggest an experiment. First spend ½ hour or so poking around CNN.com. Then report back as to how many other names appearing on that site require explanatory parentheticals in order for editor, reader, and reporter to clarify that pretension, rather than slovenly proofreading, is at work.<br /><br />Here is the list of people who get to spell their names without capitalization:<br /><br />1. Celebrity poets of the 20th Century<br /><br />2. Lesbian Vegetarian Canadian country music stars<br /><br />3. Postmodern chroniclers of the Black female experience in America <br /><br />Oh, I'm sorry... it looks like "ethnographers of social media" is not on the list. <br /> <br />Yours Sincerely,<br />Holy Prepuce</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-48965208300046935522010-04-07T14:35:00.003-04:002010-04-07T14:45:11.965-04:00Wisconsin County Celebrates Send-a-Sex-Ed-Teacher-to-Jail Week<div align="justify">Just when you thought the forces opposing sensible sex education couldn't stoop any lower, the <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/90020507.html">self-described</a> evangelical District Attorney of Juneau County, Wisconsin sends <a href="http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/host.madison.com/content/tncms/assets/editorial/f/22/48a/f2248a6e-41e1-11df-b6bb-001cc4c03286.pdf.pdf?_dc=1270602454">this letter</a> to county school board members and district administrators. In his correspondence, DA Scott Southworth offers his "review" of Wisconsin's new sex education guidelines. And what friendly advice does the good District Attorney offer? Only that teachers who follow the guidelines might just wind up in the pokey courtesy of, well, Scott Southworth:<br /><br /><blockquote>[I]f a teacher instructs any student aged 16 or younger how to utilize contraceptives under circumstances where the teacher knows the child is engaging in sexual activity with another child--or even where the "natural and probable consequences" of the teacher's instruction is to cause that child to engage in sexual intercourse with a child--that teacher can be charged [with contributing to the delinquency of a child.] The teacher need not be deliberately encourage the illegal behavior: he or she only need be aware that his or her instruction is "practically certain" to cause the child to engage in the illegal act. Moreover, the teacher could be charged with this crime even if the child does not actually engage in the criminal behavior. Depending on the nature of the child's behavior, the teacher could face either misdemeanor or felony charges with maximum punishments ranging from 9 months of jail to up to six years of prison.</blockquote><br />If it weren't so despicable, Southworth's transparent threat would be amusing. Later in the letter he warns that the new guidelines "may expose your district to civil litigation." This is so not only because parents will sue for the "sexual assault, unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, emotional trauma, etc." that will inevitably result from learning how to use contraceptives, but also because "the ACLU of Wisconsin has previously made it clear that it wants to monitor sex education programming in Wisconsin Schools."<br /><br />Beautifully, it is Southworth himself whose conduct has most likely bought the taxpayers of Juneau County an ACLU-funded lawsuit. Ordinarily, one can't sue to prohibit a future prosecution. You need to demonstrate a substantial likelihood that you personally will be targeted, and most people can't show that. But when a teacher shows up with a letter in hand from the DA saying "if you follow the new state law I will put you in jail," I think she's going to get her day in court.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-70632537285941384772010-02-18T13:42:00.007-05:002010-02-18T14:07:57.554-05:00The School District in Fact Has the Ability To Remotely Activate the Webcam<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/S32NrZPATPI/AAAAAAAAAVE/N3vc0wWAFgw/s1600-h/Holy+Prepuce+Eyes.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 194px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/S32NrZPATPI/AAAAAAAAAVE/N3vc0wWAFgw/s200/Holy+Prepuce+Eyes.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439659701581139186" /></a>In case you were still in denial that we are living in a futuristic dystopia, the Holy Prepuce invites your review of this <a href="http://craphound.com/robbins17.pdf">class-action complaint</a> filed Tuesday in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and brought to H.P.'s attention by longtime reader <a href="http://superfectablog.com/">Superfecta</a>.<br /><br />According to the complaint, defendant Lower Merion School District this year instituted a "one to one laptop computer initiative," issuing each high school student with a personal laptop computer so as to<br /><br /><blockquote>enabl[e] an authentic 21st-Century learning environment . . .[,] enhance[] opportunities for ongoing collaboration, and ensure[] that all students have 24/7 access to school based resources and the ability to seamlessly work on projects and research at school and at home.</blockquote>All seemed well and good until the plaintiff, Harriton High School student Blake J. Robbins, was taken aside by an assistant principal who<br /><br /><blockquote>informed minor Plaintiff that the School District was of the belief that minor Plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in minor Plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the School District.</blockquote>Upon questioning by Robbins' father, the assistant principal<br /><br /><blockquote>verified . . . that the school district in fact has the ability to remotely activate the webcam contained in a student's personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam, all without the knowledge, permission or authorization of any persons then and there using the laptop computer.</blockquote>Not surprisingly, Robbins and his parents think this practice violates their rights under the Fourth Amendment and various privacy laws, not least because <br /><br /><blockquote>many of the images captured and intercepted may consist of images of minors and their parents or friends in compromising or embarrassing positions, including, but not limited to, in various stage of dress or undress.</blockquote>Without knowing about the whole remote-activated-webcam aspect, one might legitimately wonder why educational dollars are being used to hand out free laptops to residents of Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs. Surely the money would be better spent in, say, Kensington or Strawberry Mansion. But with these new revelations, it starts to make sense. Aside from better teachers, newer textbooks, and functioning buildings, what do rich kids in America get that poor kids don't? Answer: the luxury of attending schools instead of mini-prisons equipped with metal detectors, rent-a-cops, and zero-tolerance policies that result in <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/18/new.york.doodle.arrest/index.html">seventh graders being arrested</a> for writing on their desks. <br /><br />Obviously this inequality needed to be remedied by equivalently striping Harriton High kids of their dignity and privacy, but in a manner less offensive to Main Line aesthetics. Harriton kids can come to school safe in the knowledge that their gym bags won't be x-rayed, and that their marker doodling will be remedied with Windex rather than handcuffs. But... Teacher is <i>watching</i>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-8208715545160075922009-12-07T15:20:00.006-05:002010-07-08T13:52:07.098-04:00Brown<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/Sx1kD4csDCI/AAAAAAAAAUs/iKaYKytbUWw/s1600-h/Holy+Prepuce+Brown.png"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 250px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/Sx1kD4csDCI/AAAAAAAAAUs/iKaYKytbUWw/s320/Holy+Prepuce+Brown.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5412592345024302114" /></a>When did "Brown" become the new thing that we self-important intellectuals are supposed to call everyone who is not of predominantly European, African, and/or East Asian origin? I don't actually object to the term as such. Assuming that we are not going to abandon anytime soon the project of categorizing people by racial or ethnic origin, "Brown" does a fairly good job of conveying American social attitudes toward the people it describes: not subject to the disabilities of Blackness, but not afforded the privileges of Whiteness, either. What bugs me is that everyone around me started using the word without explanation or acknowledgement, as if they had received a universal memorandum so unassailable in its logic as to preclude further discussion.<br /><br />I did not receive this memorandum. Rather, I distinctly recall coming across the term by accident, in the unprepossessing forum of an "Ask Amy" column. Amy's correspondent complained that her mother disapproved of the writer's boyfriend: "the problem? He is Brown and I am not." There was "Brown" in the Washington Post, a daily newspaper of national reach, as if the term had been in common usage since Dr. Johnson retired to Gough Square. While I could puzzle out the writer's intention from the context, I felt entitled to a footnote, a word of explanation from the Post's copy desk to the effect of "attention readers: by virtue of Style Manual revision 234B, persons of other than predominantly European, African, or East Asian origin will henceforth be referred to as <i>Brown</i>."<br /><br />I am only a little annoyed because this reminds me of what happened with the word "Asian." When I was a kid, everybody called people of East and South East Asian origin "Oriental." Self-important intellectuals called them "Oriental"; "Orientals" called themselves "Oriental." And then it was decided that the term should change to "Asian." The switch started on the East Coast--at the time I was applying to colleges, everyone I knew in the Midwest still said "Oriental," but I was scolded for using the term while on a college visit in the East. And I've used the word "Asian" ever since, not because I believe that even one person in ten knows why "Oriental" is offensive, but because saying it makes you sound like a redneck. My change in usage, and everyone else's, has made the transition self-reinforcing: anyone under the age of 70 who uses the term "Oriental" today is either unusually sheltered or being deliberately provocative.<br /><br />(If you're curious, "Oriental" is supposed to be offensive because it divides the world into Occident (West, from the Latin <i>occidere</i>, "to set") and Orient (East, from the Latin <i>oriri</i>, "to rise") with it being Eurocentric to label someone as being "from the East," thereby implying that the speaker's society is located at the central reference point. Ask your Asian friend in the next cubicle over if she knew that.)<br /><br />But the abandonment of "Oriental" has resulted in a net loss of linguistic specificity, because, again, assuming that categorizing others by ethnicity is an inescapable part of human experience, "Oriental" had a less ambiguous reach than "Asian." Today, when I say "Asian," the listener must decode whether I'm just using the substitute terminology for people we both grew up knowing as "Oriental," or whether I really could be talking about someone of Sri Lankan or Kazakhstani origin. And if I'm talking to a British person, they must guess whether I am translating for their benefit to the British meaning of "Asian," which refers to people of Indian subcontinental ancestry. In America, of course, such people are now "Brown." <br /><br />And so, much as it vexes me, I too have caught myself saying "Brown." All I want to know is, who gets to decide these things? To whom have we ceded the power to crawl inside our brains and reprogram our labels for the world outside? No, don't answer that question. I fear the response will include a citation to an academic journal of which the title ends in "Studies," and an article making repeated use of "unpack."<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">***</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />On a related note, can I just take this opportunity to question the assumption held by many American office workers that Latino janitors don't know the English word "trash"? Whenever people in my office want to dispose of something too large to fit in a standard trash can, they tape a sign to it that says "basura."<br /><br />Now, if you moved to another country and took a job where a significant part of your job responsibilities included collecting trash, don't you think that within the first day or two you'd probably pick up the word in that country's language for "trash"?<br /><br />Really what those signs should say is "look, I know a word in Spanish!"</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-59409976836568586062009-11-04T19:57:00.006-05:002009-11-04T20:14:04.456-05:00Mainely Bigots / Pope to Anglican Chauvanists: Come to Papa<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SvIkctmfhoI/AAAAAAAAAUk/6Ai6qzBO_Rg/s1600-h/Maine+State+Seal.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 250px; height: 315px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SvIkctmfhoI/AAAAAAAAAUk/6Ai6qzBO_Rg/s320/Maine+State+Seal.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400418978866628226" /></a>The Holy Prepuce hereby suspends his blogging hiatus to deliver an important message to (1) voters who repealed Maine's same-sex marriage provision on Tuesday; and (2) Anglicans accepting the Pope's invitation to a special Catholic "communion" featuring Anglican liturgy but none of those pesky women priests, gay bishops, or same-sex blessings. The message is: What the Hell is wrong with you people?<br /><br />Let me explain.<br /><br />We're all busy, and there are lots of good causes out there, so I don't expect that everyone is going to carry a sign or staff a phone bank for marriage equality. I'm even willing to say that if there were a ballot initiative to create (rather than repeal) a marriage equality law, I'm OK with people who don't care much about the issue staying home and not voting. And I recognize that there is a principled conservative objection to the process by which marriage has been judicially redefined in Massachusetts, Iowa, and, before Proposition 8, California.<br /><br />But, people: to get in your car and drive down to the community center <i>for the express purpose</i> of voting against marriage equality -- for this there can be no excuse. There is no objection to marriage equality that does not, in the final analysis, reduce to anti-gay animus.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SvIjycHPzSI/AAAAAAAAAUc/R5lTV6STsTk/s1600-h/Anglican+Church.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 238px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SvIjycHPzSI/AAAAAAAAAUc/R5lTV6STsTk/s320/Anglican+Church.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5400418252617665826" /></a>Now, as to the Anglicans. There are plenty of acceptable reasons to remain or become a Roman Catholic. If you were raised a Catholic, and that's your family heritage and culture and for those reasons you stay in the church in spite of, or without really thinking much about, the whole women-can't-be-in-charge-and-gays-will-burn-for-their-sins thing, that's fine by me. If you were raised in another religion, but after a process of spiritual discernment you come to believe in Roman Catholic theology, and you join in spite of the aforementioned issues, more power to you.<br /><br />But, again, people: to join a religion specifically <i>because</i> it forbids women clergy and condemns homosexuals -- that's not OK. And it won't do for you to hide behind the claim that you sincerely believe God forbids women priests and homosexuality. Otherwise we enter a world of complete ethical relativism, where any chauvinism imaginable may be absolved by the profession of faith in its divine origin.<br /><br />Furthermore, by defecting to Catholicism, what exactly are you saying about core Protestant beliefs? Suddenly the Pope is infallible, transubstantiation and the immaculate conception are real, and justification is by works as well as faith? All those Huguenots got slaughtered, all those Belfast pubs blown up for nothing?<br /><br />Perhaps we are witnessing the birth of a new Christian ecumenicalism: "Let's put aside our differences and focus on the core beliefs that unite us: men are in charge, and gays are going to Hell."<br /><br />Jesus Christ.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-70091411847148084852009-09-22T23:00:00.010-04:002009-09-23T08:07:50.734-04:00Porn, Hookers, and Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code<div style="text-align: justify;"><br />To: <i>Holy Prepuce!</i> Readers<br />From: Holy Prepuce<br />Re: Deductibility of Your Prostitution and Pornography Expenses Under Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code</div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Question Presented</b></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">You have asked me to advise you as to whether your prostitution and pornography expenditures can be claimed as medical expense deductions pursuant to Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code, assuming they exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross incomes. </div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Brief Answer</b></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">No. The United States Tax Court views such expenditures as "personal expenses not intended to treat any medical condition." Furthermore, IRS regulations prohibit deduction of fees for "illegal operations or treatment." Claiming such deductions may also result in assessment of an accuracy-related penalty.</div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SroO1UFnqsI/AAAAAAAAAUM/xe91k8Jiye8/s1600-h/Holy+Prepuce+Tax.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SroO1UFnqsI/AAAAAAAAAUM/xe91k8Jiye8/s200/Holy+Prepuce+Tax.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5384632613562985154" /></a> <br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Analysis</b></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">A recent decision of the United States Tax Court, <i><a href="http://www.ustaxcourt.gov/InOpHistoric/HALBY.TCM.WPD.pdf">Halby v. Commissioner</a></i>, T.C. Mem. 2009-204 (Sept. 14, 2009), is squarely on point. The facts, as recounted in the opinion, are as follows:<br /><br /><blockquote>Petitioner [William G. Halby] is a lawyer admitted to practice in New York State. Petitioner resided in New York at the time he filed his petition.<br /><br />During 2004 and 2005 petitioner frequented prostitutes in New York. Petitioner did not visit these prostitutes as part of a course of therapy prescribed by his doctor, nor did petitioner ask his doctor to prescribe any sort of sex therapy. Petitioner kept track of these visits in a journal. The journal included the date, the name of the “service provider,” and the amount. Petitioner did not discuss these visits with his doctors afterwards to determine their impact on his health.<br /><br />During 2004 and 2005 petitioner purchased pornography and books and magazines on sex therapy. Petitioner also recorded the dates and amounts of the purchases in his journal.</blockquote>The IRS subsequently disallowed certain medical expense deductions claimed on Halby's 2004 and 2005 income tax returns:<br /><br /><blockquote>The $73,934 disallowed by respondent [IRS] for 2004 included:(1) $2,368 for medical books, magazines, videos, and pornographic material; (2) $65,934 for prostitutes; and (3) $5,632 in bank and finance charges incurred in connection with loans used to pay for the claimed medical expenses. . . . The $47,024 disallowed for 2005 included: (1) $5,005 for books, magazines, videos, and pornographic materials; and (2) $42,152 for prostitutes.</blockquote>Halby filed a petition in the Tax Court, challenging the IRS's determinations.<br /><br />The IRS argued that Halby was "not entitled to deduct amounts paid to prostitutes because such payments were illegal and petitioner has not provided substantiation as required by section 1.213-1(h), Income Tax Regs." Section 1.213-1(h) requires that taxpayers substantiate medical expense deductions by listing for each expense the payee name, payee address, date, and amount. Upon IRS request, the taxpayer must also produce an itemized invoice, identifying the patient, type of service rendered, and specific purpose thereof. <br /><br />The IRS further argued that Halby was "not entitled to a deduction for amounts paid for books on sex therapy and pornographic material because those amounts were incurred for petitioner’s general welfare." <br /><br />Halby "d[id] not argue that section 213 and the regulations thereunder allow a deduction for these costs." Rather, he<br /><br /><blockquote>point[ed] to book and magazine articles about the positive health effects of sex therapy and argue[d] that [the court] should allow him a deduction despite the illegality of his conduct or the fact that petitioner’s doctor did not prescribe this treatment.</blockquote>At the outset of its holding, the Tax Court noted that "[t]ax deductions are a matter of legislative grace, and a taxpayer has the burden of proving that he is entitled to the deductions claimed." Finding that Halby had not met this burden, the Tax Court ruled in favor of the IRS, reasoning as follows:<br /><br /><blockquote>Section 1.213-1(e)(1)(ii), Income Tax Regs., provides that a taxpayer is not entitled to a deduction for any illegal operation or treatment. Petitioner’s payments to various prostitutes were personal expenses not prescribed by a doctor and not intended to treat a medical condition. Petitioner is not entitled to deductions for these amounts.<br /><br />Petitioner is likewise not entitled to deductions for amounts paid for books and magazines on sex therapy and pornography. The purchases were not for the treatment of a medical condition but were instead personal items. Sec. 1.213-1(e)(1)(ii), Income Tax Regs.</blockquote>The Tax Court further ruled that Halby was liable for an accuracy-related penalty, because he<br /><br /><blockquote>did not have reasonable cause or a reasonable basis for claiming the deductions at issue. Petitioner has been an attorney for 40 years and specialized in tax law. Petitioner should have known that his visits to prostitutes in New York were illegal and that section 213, the regulations thereunder, and caselaw do not support his claimed deductions.</blockquote>Halby has <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/17/prostitution-taxes-deductions-personal-finance-lawyer.html">since told Forbes Magazine</a> that he plans to appeal, "focusing on what he said was an argument he made in legal briefs but which the judges didn't discuss: The U.S. Constitution contains a right of privacy that protects consensual sex whether paid or not." He also told Forbes that the "pornographic materials . . . now fill[] 'shelf after shelf in my apartment.'"</div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><b> Conclusion </b></div> <br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Readers, your proposed course of conduct is unsupported by the Internal Revenue Code or IRS regulations. Although I understand that your prostitution and pornography expenses this year are likely to be considerable, I strongly advise that you do not claim them as deductions on your 2009 individual income tax returns.<br /><br />Please let me know if I can be of further assistance on this matter.<br /><br />H.P.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-64842803704702607342009-08-13T19:50:00.006-04:002009-08-13T20:25:17.843-04:00Kathleen Parker in the Monkey House<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SoSs-97maFI/AAAAAAAAAT8/2R5NDvi4Xzg/s1600-h/Holy+Prepuce+Euthanasia.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SoSs-97maFI/AAAAAAAAAT8/2R5NDvi4Xzg/s200/Holy+Prepuce+Euthanasia.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5369606853508884562" /></a>Talk about no good deed going unpunished! For several years, a bipartisan coalition of legislators has introduced various bills that would provide a tiny expansion of Medicare coverage: authorizing reimbursement for "advance care planning consultations." These are sessions in which a physician counsels patients about end-of-life topics such as hospice care, living wills, and life-sustaining treatment orders.<br /><br />Many physicians already provide such consultations, and some are reimbursed by private insurance. But for Medicare patients, the availability of this advice is dependent on the charity of overworked primary care physicians, or the ability of community organizations to provide it free of charge. Proposed legislation that would have reimbursed such consultations under Medicare was introduced on a bipartisan basis in 2007 (<a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-465">S.465</a> and <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-466">S.466</a>) and re-introduced this year (<a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-1898">H.R. 1989</a>, <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-2911">H.R.2911</a>, and <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-1150">S.1150</a>).<br /><br />And then.<br /><br />The Medicare reimbursement provision got rolled into <a href="http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h3200/text?version=ih&nid=t0:ih:2825">Section 1233</a> of America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, the massive healthcare reform bill currently before the House of Representatives. And as quickly as you can say "insane industry-generated talking points," screaming protesters at town hall meetings were denouncing Section 1233 as a program of mandatory euthanasia-promotion straight out of Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome to the Monkey House." <br /><br />The accusation is pure madness, of course, one to which no responsible journalist would give credence, right? Ah, but enter Kathleen Parker, professional Moderate Conservative and reasoned editorialist for the Washington Post Writers' Group. In an <a href="http://www.postwritersgroup.com/archives/park090812.htm">August 12 column</a>, Parker sets her trademark tone by opening with "We do need to turn down the rhetorical heat... let's assume that no one wants to kill off old people." But then she explains that "the debate is over whether these consultations are conclusively voluntary -- and the bill... is vague enough to cause concern."<br /><br />Parker's evidence that the bill is murky on whether G-men will haul Granny to the Ethical Suicide Parlor for a "consultation"? (1) Medicare would pay for consultations every five years, except more frequently if a patient's condition has worsened; (2) The consultation could include formulation of "an order regarding life-sustaining treatment"; (3) Depending on state law, nurse practitioners and physician's assistants could be reimbursed for these consultations; and (4) The Secretary of Health and Human Services would be required to develop "quality measures" on end-of-life care and advanced care planning. Yes, I'm leaving out the nuance of Parker's argument. Yes, you should read <a href="http://www.postwritersgroup.com/archives/park090812.htm">the column</a> for yourself to see how she connects the dots. No, it won't make any more sense. <br /><br />Of course, Parker is not <i>saying</i> that Section 1233 really mandates pro-suicide rap sessions at the adult day center, just that "people instinctively (and correctly) fear bureaucracy -- especially in matters of life and death... and have a right to demand clarity." To paraphrase Hillary Clinton on Obama's secret devotion to Islam, Parker is telling us that Section 1233 isn't really about killing seniors, <i>as far as she knows</i>.<br /><br />Fortunately, Parker has a solution: "A simple amendment to HR 3200 would do much to cool tempers. All that's needed is specific language saying that these end-of-life consultations are <i>not mandatory</i> -- either for physicians or patients -- and that there would be no penalty, either in coverage or compensation, for declining to participate. In the absence of such language, one may reasonably assume otherwise."<br /><br />No, Kathleen, one may <i>not</i> reasonably assume otherwise. Point me to an instance in which the Medicare reimbursability of a service has been interpreted to make that service mandatory, and maybe you'll convince me. And while you're at it, explain to me how Congress could enact your proposed amendment without simultaneously amending every other provision of the Medicare statutes to clarify: "this service is not mandatory, either." <br /><br />Besides, if the anti-reform bloviators paid attention to their own rhetoric, they'd realize they have little to worry about. Most of the enforced euthanasia will never happen. Like all other medical services, it will be "rationed" by the "bureaucrats who come between you and your doctor." It's like the borscht belt gag about the restaurant: "the food was terrible -- and such small portions!"</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-72225580022159269242009-08-02T16:42:00.012-04:002009-08-05T09:19:34.728-04:00The Monty Hall Problem Meets The Bachelorette<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SnYUKY6xXbI/AAAAAAAAATU/C3doKJY8hKM/s1600-h/Holy+Prepuce+Lets+Make+a+Deal.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 171px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SnYUKY6xXbI/AAAAAAAAATU/C3doKJY8hKM/s320/Holy+Prepuce+Lets+Make+a+Deal.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365498174778727858" /></a>Last Monday evening inexplicably found the Holy Prepuce attending a <i>Bachelorette</i> viewing party. In a turn of events that almost merited its billing as "the most dramatic Final Rose Ceremony ever," previously-eliminated bachelor Reid Rosenthal returned unexpectedly to the program.<br /><br />Reid's arrival greatly surprised bachelorette Jillian Harris, who had just dispatched finalist Kiptyn Locke and was about to declare her love for alpha male Ed Swiderski. (In the post-feminist world of reality television, the distaff may choose its betrothed, even sampling candidates' sexual talents along the way, but the marriage proposal must come from the spear.)<br /><br />My fellow viewers expressed differing views as to whether Jillian should dump Ed for Reid. I had no opinion as to the gentlemen's relative merits, having seen too few episodes to form one, and was disappointed at my inability to participate in the exercise.<br /><br />But then, I had a brainwave: Jillian <i>must</i> switch. Why? The Monty Hall Problem, of course.<br /><br />Imagine that Jillian is a contestant on <i>Let's Make a Deal</i>. The host, Monty Hall, shows her three doors, and tells her there is car behind one of them. Behind the other two are goats. (As a child, I often wondered whether losing <i>Let's Make a Deal</i> contestants were required to take home the livestock, and if so, whether they took proper care of it.)<br /><br />Jillian chooses door #1. Monty, who knows where the car is, opens door #3, revealing a goat. Monty now gives Jillian the options of standing by her selection of door #1 or switching to door #2. Assume that under the rules of the show, Monty must always open an unpicked door, must only reveal a goat (not the car) in doing so, and, regardless of where the car is, must always offer the opportunity to switch doors. Assume also that when Monty has a choice of doors to open--i.e. when both unpicked doors contain goats--he is required to choose at random.<br /><br />The question: should Jillian stay with door #1, should she switch to door #2, or does it make no difference? The answer, which nearly everyone gets wrong, is that she should switch to door #2. Doing so doubles her chance of winning the car.<br /><br />People usually get this wrong because they remain fixated on the one-in-three <i>a priori</i> odds of the car being behind any particular door. Opening a door doesn't change where the car is, they reason, so the relative odds of it being behind #1 or #2 remain what they were: even.<br /><br />The conclusion that switching makes no difference fails to recognize the conditional probabilities that kick in with the new information conveyed by Monty's choice. Formal explanations are discussed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Probabilistic%20solution">here</a>, but put simply, where a contestant has chosen door #1, Monty has only a 50/50 likelihood of opening door #3 if the car is behind door #1, but <i>must</i> open door #3 if the car is behind door #2. Hence, Monty's choice to open door #3 is twice as likely to signify a car behind door #2 as it is to signify a car behind door #1.<br /><br />On <i>The Bachelorette</i> Jillian isn't trying to pick a car, she's trying to pick the perfect husband. But unlike in normal life, where she would have the opportunity to choose from many men encountered over a number of years, her choice on <i>The Bachelorette</i> is subject to <i>Let's Make a Deal</i>-like constraints. A contestant on <i>Let's Make a Deal</i> can't go hunting for free cars wherever and whenever she wants, she must take her chances right now, with the three doors before her.<br /><br />For the sake of analysis, let's take the final two <i>Bachelorette</i> episodes as a single "game." Thus, we'll treat Jillian's decisions to eliminate Reid and Kiptyn as a single event, i.e., the selection of Ed out of three possible suitors.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SnY42NfdxLI/AAAAAAAAATs/RLBysfT2wAM/s1600-h/Holy+Prepuce+The+Bachelorette+Jillian+Harris.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SnY42NfdxLI/AAAAAAAAATs/RLBysfT2wAM/s320/Holy+Prepuce+The+Bachelorette+Jillian+Harris.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5365538510044251314" /></a>We're allowed to do this because of my next assumption, which is that Jillian's conscious mind has become confused. It did an OK job of whittling the field of bachelors down to three, but the exhausting whirlwind of travel, green-room liquor, and sudden stardom has negated its ability to choose intelligently among the finalists. Jillian's selection of Ed is based on irrelevant heuristics, as was the order in which she eliminated Reid and Kiptyn.<br /><br />Assume also that Jillian's <i>subconscious</i> mind is unaffected; that it wants what's best for Jillian and knows which one of the three men is right for her. But being subconscious, it can't fully direct Jillian's decisions. It can only cause her to consider, or not consider, certain courses of action.<br /><br />Until Reid shows up, Jillian's conscious mind has been driving her decisions. The rules of <i>The Bachelorette</i> require that she eliminate a prescribed number of bachelors in each formalized Rose Ceremony, and she has dutifully complied. But with Reid's return at the emotional climax of the series, the producers have changed the rules unexpectedly. Jillian's guard is down, and her subconscious mind seizes the opportunity: it makes Jillian consider taking Reid back.<br /><br />Jillian's subconscious mind is Monty Hall. Jillian thought she had made a one-time choice (Ed) among three "doors." Her subconscious has presented her with a second chance at one of the "doors" (Reid) after exposing the third "door" (Kiptyn) as a "goat."<br /><br />How do we know that Kiptyn is a goat? Let's make another assumption here: out of fairness, the same <i>Bachelorette</i> producers who changed the rules to permit Jillian a second chance at Reid would also allow her a second chance at Kiptyn. In other words, when Reid walked onto the set, Jillian could have said, "I know I don't want Reid, so if I get a do-over, I'll think about using it on Kiptyn." (Given the Molly / Melissa switch on the last <i>Bachelor</i>, the assumption is not unreasonable.) Jillian's subconscious thus has the power to "open" either Reid or Kiptyn by causing Jillian <i>not</i> to reconsider him. And just as Monty Hall is not permitted to eliminate the car, presumably Jillian's subconscious isn't going to "open" the perfect husband and subject Jillian to the pointless cruelty of choosing between goats. Jillian doesn't think about a Kiptyn do-over; Kiptyn is "opened"; <i>ergo</i> Kiptyn is a goat.<br /><br />A final assumption: Reid's reappearance is sufficiently destabilizing that it compels Jillian at least to consider dumping Ed. Jillian's subconscious can't force her to think of no one but Ed, even if it believes that he is the perfect husband. Jillian's conscious mind must make the choice between Ed and Reid.<br /><br />So, should Jillian switch to Reid? The Monty Hall Problem tells us yes. Given Jillian's initial choice of Ed and Reid's return, it is two to one that the "opening" of Kiptyn signifies that Reid is the "car"--the perfect husband.<br /><br />Unfortunately (SPOILER ALERT, in case the finale is still queued on your TiVo), Jillian does not switch, and is now engaged to Ed. She has settled for an ill-suited marriage, life's ultimate game of <i>Let's Make a Deal</i>.<br /><br />This has been the nerdiest Rose Ceremony ever.<br /><br /><i>Note to Facebook readers: If you reached this post by following a link from the Facebook profile of HP!'s secret identity, please note that this is the last blog post that I will be linking to my profile. To keep my blog in your Facebook "Stream," please visit <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Holy-Prepuce/116907330982">the new HP! Facebook page</a> and click on "Become a Fan." If you do, you will continue receiving the content you demand on topics such as religion, culture, lunatic kidnapping plots, game shows, and smut. An explanation of why I'm re-anonymizing the blog and making it "opt-in" is on the new page.<i></i></i></div><i><i></i></i><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-50920481682358744232009-07-07T09:30:00.003-04:002010-02-18T16:46:59.186-05:00The DOMA Brief, Part Two<div style="text-align: justify;">My <a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/2009/06/no-obama-did-not-compare-gay-marriage.html">June 21 post</a>, taking issue with accusations that the Obama administration had drawn a moral equivalence between gay marriage and incest or pedophilia, generated quite a bit of discussion on the Facebook page of HP's secret identity. This post adapts and expands some of my responses to those comments.<br /><br />Why do I have such a bee in my bonnet about what I termed the "shrill and intellectually dishonest talking points" containing these accusations? It is because I think that marriage equality is a central civil rights issue of our day. And I think the creation and repetition of these talking points by some within the marriage equality movement has the potential to undermine the movement's credibility. The appearance that we are not prepared to discuss this issue in an intellectually serious way saps the force of our legitimate objections to the government's brief, and more generally fuels the stereotype of liberals as reflexive parrots who don't check our facts or think through the consequences of what we say. I am also a believer in intellectual honesty for its own sake, and it concerns me that these talking points may have been cynically promoted by lawyer-activists who are intentionally misleading the general public to create sensationalist outrage. <br /><br />As you may remember, this is about a <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/16355867/Obamas-Motion-to-Dismiss-Marriage-case">legal brief</a> in which the government defended the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) against Constitutional challenge. Reaction focused on a citation to three cases in which marriages valid in one jurisdiction were not recognized in another. Two dealt with marriage between relatives, one dealt with different minimum ages for marriage. I argued that two of the three cases dealt with neither "incest" nor "pedophilia" as those terms would commonly be understood in America today. One case did involve a marriage (between adults) that--although legal in the place and time performed--would today be viewed as unacceptably incestuous by most Americas. But this case, like the others, was cited in a context that to my reading drew no <i>moral</i> comparison to gay marriage. The bottom line of my post was that "[t]here are so many legitimate reasons to dislike this brief that we don't need to be inventing more."<br /><br />As I see it, there are at least five legitimate criticisms of the brief. These include, first, the Obama administration's choice to defend the Constitutionality of DOMA at all. While it is true that the Department of Justice ordinarily defends all current statutes against attack on Constitutional grounds, there are rare exceptions and this ought to have been one of them. Second, the tortured position that DOMA does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in the provision of federal benefits. Clearly it does so--it renders married gays and lesbians ineligible for federal rights and benefits to which married heterosexuals are entitled. Third, the position that DOMA was not "born of animosity toward the class of persons affected," when anti-gay animus was so obviously a major factor in its enactment. Fourth, the suggestion that "promoting traditional marriages" or saving taxpayers money via discrimination against a particular minority are legitimate governmental objectives. Fifth, the unnecessarily narrow view that a law restricting the rights, benefits, and recognition of marriage does not burden the fundamental right to marry so long as it does not prevent marriages themselves. <br /><br />Given the importance of making clear the above objections, I think it has been counterproductive to dominate the discussion with the dubious claim that the brief smears gays and gay marriage by comparing the latter to incest or pedophilia. So let me try to explain at more length why I think the government drew no such moral comparison. First, to be clear, the brief contains no explicit comparison. (You might not know this from the media and Internet.) So if there is a comparison, it is necessarily an implicit one. To evaluate that contention, we need to consider the specific arguments to which the government was responding when it cited those cases.<br /><br />DOMA does two quite distinct things. Section 2 allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. Section 3 sets the federal government’s definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, thereby denying federal recognition of same-sex (or polygamous) marriages. <br /><br />The Constitutional objections to these provisions are also quite distinct. The objection to Section 2 is that it violates the Constitution's Full Faith & Credit clause, which requires that “full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state." In other words, the objection goes, the Constitution requires that any marriage performed in state A must be recognized in state B. The objection to Section 3 is that it violates the Constitution's Equal Protection or Due Process clauses, by treating gays and lesbians differently as a class than other people with respect to the federal rights and benefits attendant to marriage, or by burdening their fundamental rights to marry.<br /><br />One useful way to think of the distinction between the two objections comes from the way Constitutional Law is typically taught in law schools. The first course, "Con Law I", deals with national powers and federalism. That is, what powers does the federal government have, what powers do state governments have, and what is the interaction between these two sets? Most students find this course dull. The second course, "Con Law II", deals with individual rights. These are the sexy issues that make the headlines: free speech, religion, abortion, and, of course, gay marriage. Most students find this course interesting. The Full Faith and Credit objection is a Con Law I argument; the Equal Protection / Due Process objection is a Con Law II argument. <br /><br />The key thing to understand about the Full Faith and Credit objection is that it <i>does not turn</i> on the question of whether gay marriage is a good thing, whether homosexuality is a moral thing, or whether discrimination against gay people is a bad thing. It simply says that once state A decides who is allowed to get married there, state B can't refuse to recognize those marriages, and Congress can't change that.<br /><br />And it was solely in the context of responding to the Full Faith and Credit objection that the three cases were cited. The government's response was that the Full Faith and Credit clause has always been understood to incorporate traditional Conflicts-of-Laws principles. It argues that one such principle is that a state need not recognize an out-of-state marriage that, as a matter of public policy (as opposed to some technical requirement like whether the application must be notarized), would not be permitted in-state. The cited cases illustrate this principle. Thus the only comparison being drawn between same-sex marriage and marriage to a relative or a minor is that all are currently subject to differing policy-based restrictions in various states. There is no implicit moral comparison, because the relative morality of these marriage categories is irrelevant to the Full Faith and Credit argument.<br /><br />By comparison, if the cases were cited in the Equal Protection / Due Process sections of the government’s brief, I would interpret this as an implicit comparison. To vastly oversimplify half a semester of Con Law II, the key inquiry in any such analysis is what level of "scrutiny" should be applied to a law that treats groups of people unequally. The higher the level of scrutiny applied to laws affecting your group, the more likely you are to win an argument that those laws are unconstitutional. The question of whether or not homosexuality is a morally neutral innate characteristic like race or gender is central to the question of whether a heightened scrutiny must be applied to laws that discriminate against gays and lesbians. Had the government cited <i>Catalano</i> in this section, I might conclude that it believes men who want to marry their boyfriends are morally equivalent to men who want to marry their nieces, and that laws discriminating against each group should be judged with the same low level of scrutiny. But it did not.<br /><br />Now, the additional accusation is made that even if the government makes no explicit or implicit comparison by citing these cases, doing so is its coded way of telegraphing anti-gay animus, because the cases touch on traditional slurs made against gays and lesbians. Otherwise, why choose cases that deal with such unpleasant subjects? Well, for one thing, cases about non-recognition of out-of-state marriages are pretty much all going to deal with age and consanguinity. Other than sexual orientation, these are the only policy-based marriage restrictions that currently differ from state to state. <br /><br />Furthermore, what slurs exactly are being implicated here? Gays and lesbians are attracted to their (adult) relatives? I've never heard that one. Gay men molest little boys? That's a classic, to be sure, but it seems like there are more effective ways to invoke that stereotype than citing a case about the legal-in-most-states marriage of a sixteen year old girl to a husband of indeterminate age. So while it’s possible that the government consciously chose these cases as a signal to the good ol’ straight boy judge that the plaintiffs should lose because gays are all perverts, I think it more likely that it selected these cases because there weren’t a lot of others to choose from on this issue. <br /><br />One point raised by several commentators is that another historical "policy-based" restriction on marriage was the prohibition on interracial marriage. If this Conflicts-of-Law argument suggests DOMA doesn't violate the Full Faith and Credit clause, they say, doesn't it just as easily suggest that the clause would allow a "racial DOMA" permitting states not to recognize interracial marriages performed elsewhere? And doesn't this show that the argument is bigoted and incorrect? I would say yes, and no. It's not clear that a Full Faith & Credit objection to a "racial DOMA" would be any more or less valid than the objection raised to the actual DOMA. Certainly <i>Loving v. Virginia</i> was not decided on that basis, even though potentially available (the Lovings were prosecuted in Virginia for their Washington D.C. interracial marriage, under a criminal statute that the Supreme Court struck down on Equal Protection and Due Process grounds.) The real premise of this argument is that sexual orientation and race should be treated alike; that anti-same-sex marriage laws should be viewed through the same Constitutional lens as anti-miscegenation laws. I happen to agree, but this is squarely an Equal Protection / Due Process premise, properly aimed at Section 3 of DOMA and at the state marriage laws themselves. Indeed, it's a premise that, if accepted by the courts, would render Section 2 of DOMA meaningless, and the Full Faith and Credit objection moot.<br /><br />Finally, although I think the Obama administration should not have defended the Constitutionality of DOMA, I also think some recognition should be given that such exceedingly rare exceptions are not made lightly. One only has to turn the situation around to see the concern. Suppose, for example, that the current Democratic Congress were to pass sweeping civil rights measures, elevating sexual orientation to the status of race and gender with respect to employment, housing, and public accommodation. If a Republican administration came to power and decided not to defend those statutes, we liberals would be <i>howling</i>. And we would be just as angry, if not angrier, if this hypothetical administration adopted the middle ground that some have suggested the DOJ do here: write a half-assed brief not raising any arguments that might offend a core constituency. So while I disagree with Obama’s judgment, I think it’s a bit naïve to pretend it was an easy call to make.<br /><br />I nonetheless agree with <a href="http://www.americablog.com/2009/06/word-about-barack-obama-and-lawyers-in.html">Joe Subay of Americablog</a> (one of the "cynical lawyer-activists" I take issue with above) that “[f]or some, the decision whether to defend or oppose DOMA is purely a legal exercise. For many of us, it's our lives.” And it’s precisely this direct impact on the core of peoples’ lives--in a way that directly implicates rights I think the Constitution protects--that makes me disagree with Obama’s judgment call. <i>That</i> is the talking point the marriage equality movement should be pushing.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-8407453490712263952009-06-29T09:30:00.005-04:002009-06-29T09:49:20.718-04:00The Secret Life of the American Teenager<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SkI6thENEMI/AAAAAAAAATM/zTb5FCvt3h0/s1600-h/secret-life-of-the-american-teenager_cast.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 226px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SkI6thENEMI/AAAAAAAAATM/zTb5FCvt3h0/s320/secret-life-of-the-american-teenager_cast.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5350903860914098370" border="0" /></a>I've been working on a lengthy and pedantic follow-up to <a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/2009/06/no-obama-did-not-compare-gay-marriage.html">last Sunday's post</a> about the Obama administration's brief in defense of the Defense of Marriage Act. But in the meantime, I'm going to tell you why I love "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," which returned to the ABC Family Network last Monday.<br /><br />First, Molly Ringwald is in it. <i>Molly Ringwald!</i><br /><br />Second, remember Olivia Hussey who played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's <i>Romeo and Juliet?</i> Well, her daughter India Eisley is in it, and she plays exactly the kind of sarcastic middle school girl I would be if I were a middle school girl.<br /><br />Third, the season opener incorporated the following sequence of events:<br /><br /><u>Scene 3</u>: Grace, abstinence-'till-marriage-pledged evangelical Christian, has not spoken to her father since he became angry at her announcement that God won't mind after all when she has sex with her boyfriend Jack. She's on the phone with her mother and brother, who are in the car after dropping the father off at the airport. Expository dialogue reveals that the father, not seen to this point, is taking off on a private plane to render medical aid in a third world country. Grace, who is sprinkling flower petals on her bed in preparation for Jack's arrival and the imminent loss of her virginity, refuses to call her father and apologize before the plane takes off.<br /><br />At this point it is obvious to anyone watching that John Schneider (Bo Duke from "The Dukes of Hazzard") has not returned for a second season in his role as Grace's father, and the plane is going to crash. (Mrs. P: "Dude, the plane is going to crash." Holy Prepuce: "The plane is <i>totally</i> going to crash.")<br /><br /><u>Scene 7</u>: Grace, no longer a virgin, delivers the most frank, mature, and empowered address about adolescent sexuality ever spoken on American television. She is happy, fulfilled, in love with her boyfriend, at peace with herself and God. Coming from this character, it is a stunningly bold alternative example for a generation made to feel dirty and fearful about its sexuality by abstinence-only curricula and the Promise Keepers.<br /><br /><u>Scene 8</u>: Jack comes downstairs. Grace's mom and brother enter, crying. The plane has crashed. Jack announces that he and Grace have just had sex. Grace comes downstairs. Grace's brother, who has Down Syndrome, says (of their deceased father), "you killed him!"<br /><br /><i>Yes!</i></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-71635589953056631132009-06-21T09:00:00.004-04:002010-02-18T16:46:59.187-05:00No, Obama Did Not Compare Gay Marriage To Incest and Pedophilia<div style="text-align: justify;">The Holy Prepuce is as much of a pro-gay-marriage lefty as the rest of you, and was just as disappointed that the Obama administration chose to <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/16355867/Obamas-Motion-to-Dismiss-Marriage-case">defend the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act</a> (DOMA) in court. So it is only out of loving concern that I say unto you: people, let's dial back on the shrill and intellectually dishonest talking points. No, the government did not "compare [gay] love to incest and pedophilia" (<a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/17/gay_rights/">Salon</a>), "invoke[] incest and people marrying children" (<a href="http://www.americablog.com/2009/06/obama-justice-department-defends-doma.html">Americablog</a>), or "compar[e] [<a href="http://theblade.net/web/1761">U.S. Rep. Jared Polis's</a>] loving relationship with [his] partner, Marlon, to incest."<br /><br />I, too, was outraged that the Change-Master-in-Chief had authorized such retrograde libel until (unlike, I suspect, many of the pundits) I actually sat down and read <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/16355867/Obamas-Motion-to-Dismiss-Marriage-case">the brief</a>. The language at issue responds to the argument that Section 2 of DOMA, exempting states from recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, violates Article IV, Sec. 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires that "full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state."<br /><br />The brief answers this contention in part as follows:<br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>Both the First and Second Restatement of Conflicts of Laws recognize that State courts may refuse to give effect to a marriage, or to certain incidents of a marriage, that contravene the forum State's policy. <u>See</u> Restatement (First) of Conflict of Laws § 134; Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws § 134. And the courts have widely held that certain marriages performed elsewhere need not be given effect, because they conflicted with the public policy of the forum. <u>See, e.g.</u>, <u>Catalano v. Catalano</u>, 170 A.2d 726, 728-29 (Conn. 1961) (marriage of uncle to niece, "though valid in Italy under its laws, was not valid in Connecticut because it contravened the public policy of th[at] state"); <u>Wilkins v. Zelichowski</u>, 140 A.2d 65, 67-68 (N.J. 1958) (marriage of 16-year-old female held invalid in New Jersey, regardless of validity in Indiana where performed, in light of N.J. policy reflected in statute permitting adult female to secure annulment of her underage marriage); <u>In re Mortenson's Estate</u>, 316 P.2d 1106 (Ariz. 1957) (marriage of first cousins held invalid in Arizona, though lawfully performed in New Mexico, given Arizona policy reflected in statute declaring such marriages "prohibited and void").</blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As far as I can tell, the only comparison being drawn here is that all three restrictions on whom one may marry (opposite sex, over a particular age, beyond a certain degree of consanguinity) are questions of "policy." A state's requirement that your spouse be someone of the opposite sex may be <i>bad</i> policy, but it is certainly <i>a</i> policy. The brief is not suggesting any moral equivalence between gay marriage and marriage to relatives or minors. Nor is it terribly obvious how there could be even an implicit comparison, as it would be of no relevance to the narrow point being made.<br /><br />And even if the government were suggesting such a comparison, describing at least two of these cases as being about "pedophilia" or "incest" is a little overblown. Marriage at age 16 is permitted with parental consent in the majority of U.S. states, and for all we know from this brief, the groom in <i>Wilkins</i> may have been no older than the bride. Marriage between first cousins, while <i>icky</i> and perhaps "incestuous" from a genetic standpoint, is commonplace in many cultures and indeed perfectly legal in about half of the United States. Certainly it is not what most people are referring to when they talk about "incest." I will grant you that marriage between an uncle and a niece, as in <i>Catalano</i>, would be widely condemned in the U.S. today, but again, the brief is <i>not</i> saying that gay marriage is morally comparable to uncle/niece marriage. <br /><br />So while I'm squinting hard between the lines for the subtext where the Obama administration suggests that gays only want to marry so they can move into to your cul-de-sac and molest their children while yours watch, I'm just not buying that it's there. There are so many legitimate reasons to dislike this brief that we don't need to be inventing more.<br /><br />This is why no one ever invites me to appear on MSNBC.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-60676466422338150052009-04-13T17:22:00.010-04:002009-04-13T18:10:58.505-04:00Easter Monday<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SeOygcvMAYI/AAAAAAAAATE/xp21Ad4YANc/s1600-h/Life+of+Brian+Holy+Prepuce.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 172px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SeOygcvMAYI/AAAAAAAAATE/xp21Ad4YANc/s200/Life+of+Brian+Holy+Prepuce.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5324295455021728130" border="0" /></a>The Holy Prepuce would like to make clear that, should he ever be nailed to an object, he does not want the anniversary celebrated as "Good" anything.<br /><br />This year, as every year, Christians around the world celebrated Good Friday with reenactments of the Biblical Crucifixion. And, again as every year, residents of Bulacan Province in the Philippines took things just that one step further by actually <a href="http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=456850&publicationSubCategoryId=206">nailing each other to crosses</a>. The ritual is a perennial journalistic standby: it's easy to schedule coverage, it's always photogenic, and typically there's some hook. Last year's hook was the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7305522.stm">government health advisory</a> warning penitents to receive tetanus vaccinations, to ensure that they self-flagellate only with "well-maintained" whips, and to disinfect their four-inch nails prior to hammering them through each others' hands and feet. More comprehensive health warnings, such as "don't nail yourself to crosses, you crazy bastards," apparently went unspoken. This year's angle was the revelation that Jewish Australian comedian John Safran was <a href="http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25319107-5013404,00.html">discovered among the penitents</a>, being crucified under an assumed name.<br /><br />Every now and again, I like to do some original reporting for this blog, so I asked the one person I know in the Philippines what she thought about the practice. Her comments suggest that middle class Manilans have approximately the same relationship to Bulakenyo crucifixion as most Americans have to Appalachian Pentecostal snake handling: it's deeply weird, it's faintly embarrassing that people in other countries know about it, and they've only ever seen it on TV.<br /><br />My source, who prefers not to be named out of fear at what she described as a reflexive tendency toward "butthurt" against public criticism of Filipino cultural institutions, went on to say the following:<br /><blockquote><br />[M]y only opinion on the matter, with my limited knowledge on the subject, is "Holy SHIT that's gotta hurt." I mean, they use real nails and shit. (I always change the channel.) But for a more insightful opinion for your piece, I'll actually quote my Dad, who had some interesting comments when they showed it on TV: these people go through all of that excruciating physical pain every year, then they go home and beat their wives and children, gamble, drink, steal, and engage in all sorts of debauchery.<br /><br />They're probably in it for the attention they get from the townspeople, like, "Wow, you're so brave and self-sacrificing." I think it takes the concept of the act of confession, in Catholicism, and then magnifies it hundredfold, so these people think that if they just commit to this torture once every year, it makes up for the less godly things they do the other 364 days, in God's eyes.</blockquote><br />In other news on the Easter-related themes of corporeal punishment, resurrection, and redemption, I would direct your attention to:<br /><br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/31/inmate.sex/">This article</a> on Alabama judge Herman Thomas, indicted for (among other things) allegedly checking male inmates out of jail, taking them to a specially-furnished storage room near his chambers, and "forcing [them] to expose their buttocks to 'paddling and/or whipping.'"</li><br /><li>The reference, in <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/08/teens.life.sentence/index.html">this article</a>, to the "National Organization for Victims of Juvenile Lifers." The NOVJL website does not disclose the source of its funding, but one suspects that like many "victims' rights" groups, NOVJL is a front organisation for the Corrections Corporation of America or the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. (Both lobby aggressively against bad-for-their-business reductions in incarceration.) But seriously, what kind of an asshole joins a group specifically founded to advocate continued sentencing of 13-year-olds to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole?</li><br /><li><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/30/AR2009033002931.html">This article</a> on a Maryland plea bargain, under which all charges will be dropped in case of the victim's resurrection. Said a spokeswoman for the Baltimore State's Attorney's Office: "This would need to be a Jesus-like resurrection. It cannot be a reincarnation in another object or animal."</li></ul></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-44116817832832893002009-03-04T13:53:00.007-05:002009-03-04T15:08:48.411-05:00Lay On, McGruff<div style="text-align: justify;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/Sa7XiCnVttI/AAAAAAAAASs/EKlufcRTsBw/s1600-h/McGruff+Holy+Prepuce.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 165px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/Sa7XiCnVttI/AAAAAAAAASs/EKlufcRTsBw/s320/McGruff+Holy+Prepuce.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5309417990533789394" border="0" /></a>McGruff the Crime Dog, monomaniacal biter of crime and criminals alike, was <a href="http://www.dcexaminer.com/local/crime/Metro-bus-driver-takes-bite-out-of-McGruff-the-Crime-Dog-40558982.html">sucker-punched in the face</a> on Saturday before an audience of horrified children in our nation's capitol. <br /><br />As a retired costumed character (three summers as Bugs Bunny at Six Flags, if you must know), the Holy Prepuce is familiar with occupational hazards of that job. Along with heat stroke and hyperventilation, having the crap beaten out of me was a risk knowingly assumed each time I cinched up the "bib" and chin strap.<br /><br />Assault on costumed characters is a universal phenomenon. Perhaps the perpetrators act out of simple revulsion at excessive cheerfulness, but I suspect the motivations are more complex. Surely there is an element of transferred rage: at parents who encouraged the belief, humiliating in retrospect, that costumed characters are "real"; at life and time themselves, which stole away forever the fantastical world of early childhood. The awful realization--that the internationally famous anthropomorphic animals who visit the local amusement park especially to hug you are actually just sweaty college kids--could drive anyone to disillusioned violence.<br /><br />For my own part, I accepted the blows as penance for the prostitution I was committing. Here was Bugs Bunny--whose antics embody the triumph-by-wits of the Greatest Generation's ethnic lower middle class--transmogrified into a mute child-hugger. The middle-schoolers pummeling my gut may not have understood the deeper significance of their vigilantism, but in my own self-flagellatory way I hoped they one day would.<br /><br />Such pre-teen boys (usually in groups) are the dominant perpetrators of these assaults, and the attack on McGruff would not have been newsworthy had the culprits fit that demographic. But in a delightful turn of events, McGruff's clock was in fact cleaned by on-duty WMATA bus driver Shawn Brim, 38. According to a police report, Brim "climbed out of the bus, adjusted both sideview mirrors and then slugged McGruff in the face with his closed fist . . . . McGruff staggered, children screamed and the crime dog's attacker jumped back into the bus and drove off . . . [as a] call of an assault on a police officer went out over the police radio."<br /><br />Brim was later charged with simple assault on McGruff's human occupant, D.C. Police Officer Tyrone Hardy. The decision to charge simple assault, rather than assault on a police officer, raises an interesting legal question: to commit "APO" in most jurisdictions, the defendant must know that the victim is a police officer. Does socking McGruff the Crime Dog count? The person inhabiting McGruff turned out to be a real-life police officer, but the role could as easily be played by a civilian. Except where the victim is a plainclothes officer, the knowledge element of APO is usually open-and-shut because of the police uniform. Would McGruff's oversize blues count? The government's restraint in charging Brim means we'll never know--at least not until the next McGruff beat-down.<br /><br />As it happens, the past few days have not seen a distinguished showing for public transit operators. The National Transportation Safety Board <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jlpXYU0HBY3i6AtK1R59AV_9qGzQD96N64B00">announced</a> that throughout a September 12, 2009 California commuter rail trip that ended in 25 fatalities, engineer Richard Sanchez had been text messaging an unidentified teenage boy, sending his final message only 22 seconds before colliding with a freight train. (As is <i>de rigueur</i> in passenger rail investigations, the train's conductor <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j3Z45uDic1fZCfx8hT1T0-Qqd0cwD96MKSQG0">tested positive</a> for marijuana.) Sanchez's texts revealed that the boy had ridden in an engine cab four days earlier, and that Sanchez planned to let the boy drive the train later that day: "I'm REALLY looking forward to getting you in the cab and showing you how to run a locomotive . . . I'm gonna do all the radiotalkin' ... ur gonna run the locomotive & I'm gonna tell u how to do it."<br /><br />Had Sanchez survived the collision, he might have become the only adult ever busted for electronically suggesting that a minor "run [his] locomotive" while talking about <i>an actual locomotive</i>.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24937508.post-28091747642898323692009-02-18T14:57:00.015-05:002010-07-08T13:53:58.420-04:00On the Origin of Vaccine-Autism Fundamentalism, by Means of Unnatural Credulity -or- the Preservation of Ill-Favored Ideas in the Struggle for Reason<div align="justify"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SZxoxTKUgYI/AAAAAAAAASU/CuoG-oswGGM/s1600-h/Vaccine+Protest+Holy+Prepuce.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304229657302040962" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 150px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 200px" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SZxoxTKUgYI/AAAAAAAAASU/CuoG-oswGGM/s200/Vaccine+Protest+Holy+Prepuce.jpg" border="0" /></a>Last Thursday, a special federal court <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i5qHH2OdrDMQkErloXqYD-HZAcHwD96A8SO05">ruled in three test cases</a> that the petitioners' autism did not result from the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine. Finding that the petitioners' families had been "misled by physicians who are guilty . . . of gross medical misjudgment," the court denied compensation and decried the evidence for a vaccine-autism link as "bad science conducted to support litigation rather than to advance medical and scientific understanding.''<br /><br />The decision's release on Charles Darwin's 200th birthday was fortuitous, the "vax/aut" crowd having not a little in common with the fundamentalists who so despise the father of evolutionary biology. Like fundamentalists, vax/aut proponents have become so invested in the truth of their particular idea that they ignore, rationalize, or attack as fraudulent any evidence to the contrary. Evidence in favor of their idea is distorted and endlessly repeated, and gaps in the evidence for alternative ideas are treated as further proof.<br /><br />I suspect that fundamentalists' ire for Darwin goes beyond evolution, and stems as much from the approach to knowledge for which he stands. Setting out on the <i>Beagle</i>, Darwin held an idea common among 19th century Anglicans: that modern plants and animals descend from nearly identical ancestors created by God at the beginning of the world. But when Darwin's observations in the Galápagos suggested an alternative hypothesis, one that better fit the newly available evidence, he abandoned the old idea. This methodology for approaching ideas--evaluating them for explanatory success and then refining or discarding them in light of new facts--poses an existential threat to the entire project of fundamentalism.<br /><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SZxpVuUuGZI/AAAAAAAAASk/ijoDIp_UH1M/s1600-h/Charles+Darwin+Holy+Prepuce.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 120px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iOnUk_WuH7E/SZxpVuUuGZI/AAAAAAAAASk/ijoDIp_UH1M/s200/Charles+Darwin+Holy+Prepuce.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5304230283068709266" /></a>The genesis of the vax/aut hypothesis was not in itself irrational. Certain forms of autism tend to manifest around the age at which most children receive MMR. And mercury, an ingredient in the vaccine preservative thimerosal, is known to cause neurological damage in vastly larger quantities.<br /><br />But subsequent analysis has revealed the conclusions drawn from timing of onset to represent a simple <i>post hoc</i> fallacy. The incidence of autism turns out to be the same among children receiving vaccines with and without thimerosal, or receiving no vaccinations at all. And here is where the vax/aut enthusiasts show their fundamentalist stripes. Like the contrarians who insist the moon landing was faked and Snapple is sterilizing African-Americans, vax/aut types are unmoved by the evidence.<br /><br />It's not that vax/aut believers aren't sympathetic--many are parents of autistic children and understandably yearn for any explanation of the otherwise inexplicable devastation wrought upon their families. Often they have been seduced by cure-peddling quacks and book-hawking celebrities.<br /><br />But the vax/aut faithful provide red meat to the "anti-vax" movement: parents who refuse to vaccinate their children and think you shouldn't either. The obscenity of this movement's attack on perhaps the greatest public health achievement in history is stupefying. A campaign to reinstitute open sewers or ban refrigeration could scarcely threaten greater violence to the general well-being.<br /><br />Tragically, anti-vaxers may be validating Darwin as we speak. More than survival or even reproduction, the traits most favored by natural selection are those that ensure an organism's <i>offspring</i> survive to reproduce. If credulity is a heritable trait, forgoing vaccination is an excellent way to boost the odds your children won't pass it on.</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"><p></p>
<div align="justify"><i>© 2006-2011. Visit </i><a href="http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com">Holy Prepuce!</a> <i>to read and post comments and for copyright disclaimer. Or "like" </i>Holy Prepuce!<i> on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/#!/HolyPrepuce">Facebook.</a></i></div></div>Holy Prepucehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13412338463895874903noreply@blogger.com7