Holy Prepuce!

Crime.org - God Hates Scammers - c/o MikeMann.com

2011-07-07T15:24:00.002-04:00

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.

Recent beach-goers may have been scratching their heads, however, at the unusual message currently saturating the floating and airborne media:

Crime.org
God Hates Scammers
c/o MikeMann.com

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.

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.

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, Crime.org is the private mouthpiece of Mr. Mann, and it is a tour de force of crazy.

“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.”

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.

Mr. Mann’s ex-wife, we are told, is a “serial homewrecker” as well as

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 MARRIED men with unsuspecting wives……in Tennessee.)

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.

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 Adyayan Trust, 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[the Manns’ teenage daughter, whose name I will not repeat here].com, and www.[Mrs. Mann’s full name, which I also will not repeat here]IsEvil.com.

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.”

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.)

Mr. Mann’s 10,616-word Google Docs diatribe 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.”

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!”

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.

I shall end this post the way Mike Mann ends everything he writes on the Internet: 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.

Timely Questions for Reverend Harold Camping

2011-05-20T13:57:00.001-04:00

Dear Reverend Harold Camping:

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 press accounts of your discovery:

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.

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!

I do have a couple of questions, though.

No, I’m not going to ask “what about Daylight Saving Time.” Please. 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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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 world time zone map, 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.)

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.

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.

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?

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.

Tampering

2011-05-17T15:24:00.001-04:00

Welcome to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University! Thank you for attending this ‎year’s Senior Executives in State and Local Government 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. ‎

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.
‎
‎Background: 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. ‎

‎Problem: In your house is a $100,000 check from the same developer and a boatload of cash.‎

‎Question One: Circle the correct answer. You should / should not have the following telephone conversation:‎

‎Your Wife:‎ Oh, is it the box with the liquor?‎

‎You:‎ Yeah, and, it... Yeah, and look in another box. You'll see a check in there. Yeah, that's right.‎

‎Your Wife:‎ Yes, there's a check in there.‎

‎You:‎ Okay. Tear it up. That's the only thing you have to do. Now go down... You..., you got the money?‎

‎Your Wife: ‎Yeah, wait a minute. I got the cash. Do you have that cash down in the basement still too?‎

‎You:‎ Yes.‎

‎Your Wife: ‎Okay, I gotta move that too. Where do you want me to move it?‎

‎You:‎ 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...‎

‎Your Wife:‎ Whatta you want me to do with the check?‎ You hear 'em banging?‎

‎You:‎ Tear up the check and..., um..., and, and um..., and... , and um, tear it up. Just..., just tear it up.‎

‎Your Wife:‎ They're saying FBI Jack.‎

‎You:‎‎ Yeah, I know... , I know. That's why I'm telling you. [Developer A] set me up.‎

‎Your Wife:‎ You want me to put it down the toilet?‎

‎You:‎ Yes.‎

‎Your Wife:‎ You want me to flush it?‎

‎You:‎‎ Yeah, flush that.‎

‎[The sound of a toilet flushing in background.]‎

‎Your Wife:‎ All right. Now whatta you want me to do?‎

‎You:‎‎ Go downstairs and get...‎

‎Your Wife:‎ I'm tellin' 'em I'm not dressed.‎

‎You:‎‎ Yeah, tell 'em you're not dressed. You will be dressed in five minutes then you open...‎

‎Your Wife:‎ Okay, and I have the cash.‎

‎You:‎‎ Okay. Leave that little cash. That's okay. That's a little bit... , a little cash. Put it in your underwear.‎

‎Your Wife:‎ I have it in my bra. And what about...‎

‎You:‎‎ Huh?‎

‎Your Wife: ‎... that other cash though?‎

‎You:‎‎ Um, [unintelligible].‎

‎Your Wife:‎ You gotta tell me what to do with it Jack.‎

‎You:‎ Leslie.‎

‎Your Wife:‎ What do you want me to do with this money? They are banging?‎

‎You:‎‎ Put... , put... , put...‎

‎Your Wife:‎ What do you want me to do with it?‎

‎You: ‎‎... put it... , put it in your panties and walk out of the house.‎

‎Your Wife:‎ No, but I mean all this cash Jack.‎

‎You:‎ Put it...‎

‎Your Wife:‎ I got the one from down...‎

‎You:‎‎ Put it in your panties Leslie.‎

‎Your Wife:‎ Oh my God. Okay.‎

‎You:‎‎ 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?‎

‎[Upon entering the home, FBI agents search your wife’s person and ‎recover $79,600 ‎in United States currency from her underwear and bra.]‎

‎Question Two: Fill in the blank. County Executive Johnson pled guilty this afternoon to extortion, ‎conspiracy, and tampering with ___________.‎

‎Question Three: 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 __________.‎

Gilbert Gottfried and the Discourse on Disaster

2011-03-28T15:03:00.004-04:00

A Portrait of Gilbert Gottfried with a Dead Aflac Duck
on His Head by Dan Lacey (www.faithmouse.com).
Used with permission of the artist.

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.

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.

I suspect that Gottfried ran up against an unwritten rule of comedy: disaster jokes are not allowed to have identifiable authors.

The re-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 Challenger. Elliot Orring’s “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster” (1987) collects fourteen such examples, and I found no more than a handful unfamiliar twenty-five years after the Challenger 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 Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes” (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.

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.

When these jokes seem to rise from the zeitgeist, the telling itself can become the primary gag, the observational meta-joke that human beings are sick bastards who find this funny. 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.

But when Gottfried tweets Japan jokes as a professional comedian, there’s him and there’s us. We have no ownership, no liability as the kind of people who think this stuff up. He’s the sick bastard who finds this funny, we’re decent folk who need to take a stand against this trash.

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.

Looking through Gottfried’s tweets, 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:

I asked a girl in Japan to have sex with me. She said “okay, but you'll have to sleep in the wet spot.”

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.

Here is the best of the lot:

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."

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?

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.

Indeed, the imagery invoked softens the joke by substituting masonry for human flesh. Elliot Orring points out that a defining feature of the Challenger 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 Challenger 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.”

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 Challenger 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.

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.

I’m a tough crowd.

Maryland Marriage Equality: Some Noteworthy Secular Objections

2011-03-09T14:09:00.008-05:00

To: Honorable Members, Maryland House of Delegates

From: Holy Prepuce

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.

I did. As the hearing was not transcribed, I have taken it upon myself to distill for you some highlights.

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.

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:

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.

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.”

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.

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.

5. The Greeks allowed homosexuality, and they were conquered by the Romans. The Romans allowed homosexuality, and they were overrun by barbarians. The same thing could happen in Maryland.

Fatti maschil, Parole femine, Honorable Members.

HP

Splashdown the Second

2011-03-02T14:42:00.003-05:00

Back when I sometimes used to write this blog--i.e. 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 revealed and discussed the pregnancy and upcoming delivery here, announced the birth within 24 hours, and even declared a paternity leave from blogging, which I subsequently violated.

My present-day negligence in updating Holy Prepuce! 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.)

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.”)

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.

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 think 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.

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 first?” I still haven’t decided whether the satisfaction of saying “no” was worth the preceding 750 milliseconds of agonizing condescension.

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 Hoarders 2055, Now In Holovision: “Citizen, you are out of compliance. Only 11 cubic meters of personal effects are permitted within ClimoDome.”

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!”

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.”

Why Aren't There More Scott Roeders? (Or, Why Most People Won't Kill Abortion Providers, Even If South Dakota Makes It Legal)

2011-02-15T17:23:00.008-05:00

The Internet is ablaze today with reports of a South Dakota bill that would "legalize murder of abortion providers." An examination of H.B. 1171 leaves me of two minds as to whether the bill is insidious or just poorly drafted, and whether the Mother Jones 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?

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?

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.

Yet since 1977 there have been only 8 murders and 17 attempted murders 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.

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.

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.

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.

In a 2008 essay for the Times 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."

As one example, Whyte examines abortion. Imagine, he suggests, a network of government slaughterhouses in which a million children are exterminated each year.

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.

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. . . .

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.

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.

I suspect that most people don't kill abortion providers because in their heart of hearts they intuitively recognize that fetuses are not 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 are subject to that level of protection.

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.

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--Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist is perhaps the best known--but they are too elaborate to persuade many but the already-persuaded.)

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 could 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.

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.

Post-Polling Pornucopia

2010-11-08T21:18:00.010-05:00

It’s time for another Holy Prepuce! 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,” Evolution & Human Behavior 31 (2010): 442-446. 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.

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. . . .”

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.”

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.

As it happens, the authors tell us, pornography is custom-made for the male brain:

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.”

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 genre--“typically depicts women engaging in casual sex without investment.”

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.”

The authors next detail their research methods, which utilize Google Trends 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:

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.

And the results?

[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.

A key purpose of Holy Prepuce 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.

One such limitation is that backers of winning candidates

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.

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.”

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,

[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.

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 may be reached through his laboratory at Villanova University, so please feel free to ask him for the remaining seven.

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.

"The Mosque at Ground Zero"

2010-07-30T11:07:00.009-04:00

“Stop the mosque at Ground Zero,” screams the right-wing Internet campaign!

Newt Gingrich 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.”

As has Sarah Palin: “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.”

We can quibble, of course, about whether 45 Park Place is “at Ground Zero,” whether Cordoba House 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 is a “Ground Zero Mosque” and can be legally prohibited, then prohibiting it could be the right thing to do.

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:

Newt and Sarah, let us assume arguendo 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:

1. No general moral right exists to build a house of worship on one’s own land; or

2. Such a general moral right exists, but it does not apply in this case because:

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

b. Islam is a profane religion, and to allow a mosque on the “hallowed ground” of 9/11 would therefore profane the dead; or

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

d. All Muslims bear collective guilt for 9/11, and as a result have forfeited this general moral right; or

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.

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.

Unless of course, they don’t, and they’re just pandering.

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.

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.)

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.”

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."

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.

Unless of course, it doesn’t, and they’re just pandering.

UPDATE: a conservative friend pointed out to me that the Anti-Defamation League has come out against Cordoba House 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.

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.

A Prisoner’s Dilemma and a Scottish Verdict: The Strange Case of Robert Wone

2010-07-08T10:34:00.011-04:00

If I am tardy in updating Holy Prepuce!, it is because I have squandered my available Internet time obsessively following trial updates at WhoMurderedRobertWone.com. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Third, the closest approximation to the "Scottish Verdict" of "not proven" that one will likely find in an American court: As fans of Wilkie Collins or Arlen Specter 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."

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.

Excerpts from Judge Lynn Leibovitz's Order acquitting the throuple leave little doubt that she would have found "not proven," had that verdict been available:

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."

My Criminal Law professor once observed 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.

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 list of items recovered from Dylan Ward's bedroom:

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.

The civil trial awaits…

Adam Wheeler, Conceptual Artist

2010-06-01T19:00:00.002-04:00

Why can't prosecutors understand that indicted "Harvard Faker" Adam Wheeler is in reality a conceptual artist of the highest caliber? Ignorant accusations painting Wheeler as a simple fraudster who conned his way into Harvard malign his genius burlesque on the follies of elite academe.

For evidence of Wheeler's true purpose, one need look no further than the pastiche e-mail sent to his fellow transfer students upon their arrival at Harvard:

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.

Who except a newly-arrived transfer student, overwhelmed at her good fortune to be accepted at a school where people actually talk like that, would not recognize this as the tongue-in-cheek drivel of a satirist impostor?

A con man seeking a Harvard degree might have started 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 oeuvre 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:

1. The ego validation of a wunderkind-at-my-institution is so intoxicating that elite scholars will swallow the most outrageous fabrications in support of that narrative;

2. The scholarly output of elite academe is for the most part complete bullshit.

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.

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 requested a local interview at Bowdoin. 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.

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.

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.

If the resume in Wheeler's Rhodes application is anything like the one he submitted for an internship at The New Republic, 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 Mappings, Unmappings, and Remappings, abstracted as follows:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

I call on Massachusetts' esteemed judiciary to put an end to this assault on the First Amendment. Free Adam Wheeler!

An Open Letter to danah boyd (an Ethnographer Who Does Not Capitalize Her Name)

2010-05-03T08:01:00.007-04:00

Dear Dr. boyd:

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."

Now, if I may, a small anecdote:

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 not get to call yourself 'Essence' in the recital program of an Arnold, Missouri dance school."

Essence came vividly back to mind some twenty years later, as I encountered the following sentence in an October, 2009 CNN.com article:

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.

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.

And you do. Visitors can learn that you legally changed your name to "danah michele boyd" as the result of a "mental tangent" in which you pondered:

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?

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.

What interests me more is that your "mental tangent" was an outgrowth of an earlier decision to stop capitalizing the pronoun "I":

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.

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.

Here is the list of people who get to spell their names without capitalization:

1. Celebrity poets of the 20th Century

2. Lesbian Vegetarian Canadian country music stars

3. Postmodern chroniclers of the Black female experience in America

Oh, I'm sorry... it looks like "ethnographers of social media" is not on the list.

Yours Sincerely,
Holy Prepuce

Wisconsin County Celebrates Send-a-Sex-Ed-Teacher-to-Jail Week

2010-04-07T14:35:00.003-04:00

Just when you thought the forces opposing sensible sex education couldn't stoop any lower, the self-described evangelical District Attorney of Juneau County, Wisconsin sends this letter 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:

[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.

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."

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.

The School District in Fact Has the Ability To Remotely Activate the Webcam

2010-02-18T13:42:00.007-05:00

In case you were still in denial that we are living in a futuristic dystopia, the Holy Prepuce invites your review of this class-action complaint filed Tuesday in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and brought to H.P.'s attention by longtime reader Superfecta.

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

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.

All seemed well and good until the plaintiff, Harriton High School student Blake J. Robbins, was taken aside by an assistant principal who

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.

Upon questioning by Robbins' father, the assistant principal

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.

Not surprisingly, Robbins and his parents think this practice violates their rights under the Fourth Amendment and various privacy laws, not least because

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.

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 seventh graders being arrested for writing on their desks.

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 watching.

Brown

2009-12-07T15:20:00.006-05:00

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.

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 Brown."

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.

(If you're curious, "Oriental" is supposed to be offensive because it divides the world into Occident (West, from the Latin occidere, "to set") and Orient (East, from the Latin oriri, "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.)

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."

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."

***

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."

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"?

Really what those signs should say is "look, I know a word in Spanish!"

Mainely Bigots / Pope to Anglican Chauvanists: Come to Papa

2009-11-04T19:57:00.006-05:00

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?

Let me explain.

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.

But, people: to get in your car and drive down to the community center for the express purpose 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.

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.

But, again, people: to join a religion specifically because 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.

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?

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."

Jesus Christ.

Porn, Hookers, and Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code

2009-09-22T23:00:00.010-04:00

To: Holy Prepuce! Readers
From: Holy Prepuce
Re: Deductibility of Your Prostitution and Pornography Expenses Under Section 213 of the Internal Revenue Code

Question Presented

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.

Brief Answer

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.

Analysis

A recent decision of the United States Tax Court, Halby v. Commissioner, T.C. Mem. 2009-204 (Sept. 14, 2009), is squarely on point. The facts, as recounted in the opinion, are as follows:

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.

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.

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.

The IRS subsequently disallowed certain medical expense deductions claimed on Halby's 2004 and 2005 income tax returns:

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.

Halby filed a petition in the Tax Court, challenging the IRS's determinations.

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.

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."

Halby "d[id] not argue that section 213 and the regulations thereunder allow a deduction for these costs." Rather, he

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.

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:

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.

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.

The Tax Court further ruled that Halby was liable for an accuracy-related penalty, because he

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.

Halby has since told Forbes Magazine 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.'"

Conclusion

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.

Please let me know if I can be of further assistance on this matter.

H.P.

Kathleen Parker in the Monkey House

2009-08-13T19:50:00.006-04:00

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.

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 (S.465 and S.466) and re-introduced this year (H.R. 1989, H.R.2911, and S.1150).

And then.

The Medicare reimbursement provision got rolled into Section 1233 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."

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 August 12 column, 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."

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 the column for yourself to see how she connects the dots. No, it won't make any more sense.

Of course, Parker is not saying 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, as far as she knows.

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 not mandatory -- 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."

No, Kathleen, one may not 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."

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!"

The Monty Hall Problem Meets The Bachelorette

2009-08-02T16:42:00.012-04:00

Last Monday evening inexplicably found the Holy Prepuce attending a Bachelorette 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.

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.)

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.

But then, I had a brainwave: Jillian must switch. Why? The Monty Hall Problem, of course.

Imagine that Jillian is a contestant on Let's Make a Deal. 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 Let's Make a Deal contestants were required to take home the livestock, and if so, whether they took proper care of it.)

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.

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.

People usually get this wrong because they remain fixated on the one-in-three a priori 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.

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 here, 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 must 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.

On The Bachelorette 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 The Bachelorette is subject to Let's Make a Deal-like constraints. A contestant on Let's Make a Deal 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.

For the sake of analysis, let's take the final two Bachelorette 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.

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.

Assume also that Jillian's subconscious 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.

Until Reid shows up, Jillian's conscious mind has been driving her decisions. The rules of The Bachelorette 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.

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."

How do we know that Kiptyn is a goat? Let's make another assumption here: out of fairness, the same Bachelorette 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 Bachelor, the assumption is not unreasonable.) Jillian's subconscious thus has the power to "open" either Reid or Kiptyn by causing Jillian not 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"; ergo Kiptyn is a goat.

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.

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.

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 Let's Make a Deal.

This has been the nerdiest Rose Ceremony ever.

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 the new HP! Facebook page 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.

The DOMA Brief, Part Two

2009-07-07T09:30:00.003-04:00

My June 21 post, 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.

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.

As you may remember, this is about a legal brief 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 moral 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The key thing to understand about the Full Faith and Credit objection is that it does not turn 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.

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.

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 Catalano 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.

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.

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.

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 Loving v. Virginia 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.

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 howling. 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.

I nonetheless agree with Joe Subay of Americablog (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. That is the talking point the marriage equality movement should be pushing.

The Secret Life of the American Teenager

2009-06-29T09:30:00.005-04:00

I've been working on a lengthy and pedantic follow-up to last Sunday's post 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.

First, Molly Ringwald is in it. Molly Ringwald!

Second, remember Olivia Hussey who played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet? 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.

Third, the season opener incorporated the following sequence of events:

Scene 3: 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.

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 totally going to crash.")

Scene 7: 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.

Scene 8: 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!"

Yes!

No, Obama Did Not Compare Gay Marriage To Incest and Pedophilia

2009-06-21T09:00:00.004-04:00

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 defend the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (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" (Salon), "invoke[] incest and people marrying children" (Americablog), or "compar[e] [U.S. Rep. Jared Polis's] loving relationship with [his] partner, Marlon, to incest."

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 the brief. 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."

The brief answers this contention in part as follows:

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. See 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. See, e.g., Catalano v. Catalano, 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"); Wilkins v. Zelichowski, 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); In re Mortenson's Estate, 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").

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 bad policy, but it is certainly a 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.

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 Wilkins may have been no older than the bride. Marriage between first cousins, while icky 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 Catalano, would be widely condemned in the U.S. today, but again, the brief is not saying that gay marriage is morally comparable to uncle/niece marriage.

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.

This is why no one ever invites me to appear on MSNBC.

Easter Monday

2009-04-13T17:22:00.010-04:00

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.

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 nailing each other to crosses. 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 government health advisory 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 discovered among the penitents, being crucified under an assumed name.

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.

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:

[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.

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.

In other news on the Easter-related themes of corporeal punishment, resurrection, and redemption, I would direct your attention to:

This article 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.'"

The reference, in this article, 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?

This article 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."

Lay On, McGruff

2009-03-04T13:53:00.007-05:00

McGruff the Crime Dog, monomaniacal biter of crime and criminals alike, was sucker-punched in the face on Saturday before an audience of horrified children in our nation's capitol.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

As it happens, the past few days have not seen a distinguished showing for public transit operators. The National Transportation Safety Board announced 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 de rigueur in passenger rail investigations, the train's conductor tested positive 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."

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 an actual locomotive.

On the Origin of Vaccine-Autism Fundamentalism, by Means of Unnatural Credulity -or- the Preservation of Ill-Favored Ideas in the Struggle for Reason

2009-02-18T14:57:00.015-05:00

Last Thursday, a special federal court ruled in three test cases 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.''

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.

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 Beagle, 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.

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.

But subsequent analysis has revealed the conclusions drawn from timing of onset to represent a simple post hoc 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.

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.

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.

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 offspring 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.

Gay Teen Monster Truck Driving Curfews

2009-01-26T14:14:00.005-05:00

The Holy Prepuce never expected to use "irony" and "monster trucks" in the same sentence, but how's this? Following January 19th's fatal accident at the Tacoma, Washington Monster Jam, rival monster truck promoter George Eisenhart dismissed safety concerns about his upcoming Motor Sports Monster Truck & Thrill Show, telling Madison, Wisconsin's WKOW "This is our 16th year, and I wish I had a big piece of wood to knock on right now, but we have not had an incident besides a gal slipping in the aisle at another location." Days later, Eisenhart was crushed to death by a monster truck.

While I'm busy making light of vehicular tragedies, I have to say that although Allstate's Parent-Teen Driving Contract may be an excellent idea, I wonder how an organization whose business depends on the sensible use of statistics could attempt to pass off the following:

Assuming that the average teen is awake no more than 18 hours per day, warning that half of all fatal accidents happen in a 9-hour period is equivalent to grousing that 40% of workplace absenteeism occurs on Mondays and Fridays. And when we factor in that most teens spend a good part of their other 9 waking hours in school, we are led to the inescapable conclusion that 3PM to Midnight is a remarkably safe time to drive. The obvious solution is immediate repeal of teen driving curfews nationwide, so that teens can take care of essential business at night and stay off the road during the 8AM bloodbath.

If an insurance company can't manage the non-risible use of statistics, there is little hope for the rest of us. I am reminded of my college's gay & lesbian student association, which--I swear to God--ran simultaneous poster campaigns proclaiming "One in Ten People Is Gay" and "Two-Thirds of Child Molesters Are Straight."

Gaza

2009-01-07T17:47:00.010-05:00

You know what I think we should do to solve the crisis in Gaza? I say we get a whole bunch of 747s and take out all of the seats so they can hold 1000 people each. Then we land them at Gaza Yasser Arafat International Airport (GZA), and when the stairways drive up we have a State Department official come out of each plane with a big stack of Green Cards. And then anybody who wants to can get on the planes, and we fly them all to Montana or Wyoming where we give them a big chunk of federal land that is twice the size of the current state of Israel, and everybody gets a brand-new doublewide with water/sewer hookup and premium cable.

Because you have to figure that despite all the rhetoric, a good percentage of Gazans have got to be saying to themselves, "Dude, death to Israel and all that, but this sucks. I'm living 6 to a room, my ass is full of shrapnel, and my mom wants me to blow myself up over some orange grove my grandfather supposedly owned in '48. In America, they have this shopping mall with a roller coaster right inside the goddamn food court. And also they have these chairs where you put in a dollar and the chair gives you a massage, but nobody even uses them because you can sit in the one at the Brookstone for free. And there are these machines that mix Coke with crushed ice and you drink it with a straw, but it's a special staw that opens into a little spoon at the bottom so you can scoop the ice out instead if that's what you want to do. Whereas here, the electricity works three hours a day and Hamas confiscated my spoon. Also, in America, there's this MTV show called 'A Double Shot at Love,' where twelve straight guys and twelve lesbians all live in the same house with these bisexual twin sisters. And every week the twins have to eliminate some of the guys and some of the lesbians, and at the end the winners and the twins have a big double wedding in a hot tub. Dude, screw orange groves."

I'm just saying.

With Bonus CD-ROM!

2008-12-25T13:30:00.000-05:00

The Holy Prepuce has been remiss of late in updating this blog, but hopes to make it up to you with this last-minute holiday gift suggestion, discovered while visiting the Saint Louis Science Center:

That's right, it's the Columbia Accident Investigation Report with Bonus CD-ROM!

Friend of the Court, Heiress of the Almighty Eternal Creator

2008-11-24T09:47:00.001-05:00

Throughout the campaigns for and against California's execrable Proposition Eight, faithful HP! reader FearlessLeader compiled the crème of supporters' virulent, idiotic, and unintentionally hilarious statements on her blog Fundamentally Flawed. There was little I could add. But now that the briefing is underway in the California Supreme Court challenge, I must bring your attention to this amicus curiae submission filed by one "D.Q. Mariette Do-Nguyen, Heiress of the Almighty Eternal Creator."

Although not an attorney, Ms. Do-Nguyen has done a respectable job of formatting her brief in accordance with typical appellate practice. The Brief begins with the required statement of amicus' interest in the matter: Ms. Do-Nguyen explains that she is "[a]cting on behalf of the Almighty Eternal Creator, who is holding sole ownership to His creations, all planets, including the earth and everything above, below and on it, myself as His heiress...."

Do-Nguyen then provides a Statement of Facts, which informs the court that

Through elections and appointments, Global government leaders and officials are selected by the Almighty Eternal Creator to serve the people.... Without any exception, all human souls are created by the Almighty Eternal Creator! All souls arrive at the time of conception. The power of human souls works through male sperm and female eggs to form human physical bodies!... Earth is a copy of Heaven and this means all things must exist in the spiritual realm before coming down to earth, such as the three branches of global government: the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. These three branches must have rules and regulations that must pass by an executive of the Almighty Creator’s laws.

The Statement of Facts goes on to explain that the A.E.C. forbids gay marriage because he has "ordered human souls to be fertile and multiply, fill the earth with human natural bodies!" (For similar reasons, the A.E.C. also takes a dim view of in vitro fertilization and abortion.)

Do-Nguyen transitions to an Argument, in which she explains that the courts of California do not have the authority to reverse the A.E.C.'s ban on gay marriage. She illustrates her contention with the following example:

Example: If an individual attempts to assassinate the State of California's Governor or the United States President, and the person got caught, surely the person would be charged with attempted murder of the State of California's Governor or the President of the United States, and jurors would sentence him to prison without parole or to capital punishment in accordance with established laws.

At this point, Do-Nguyen departs from orthodox formatting to include a section entitled "Consequences After Each and All Actions." Here she explains the genesis of her decision to submit an Amicus brief:

After a night full of dreams, before dawn of November 11, 2008, before I woke up in the morning, the Almighty Eternal Creator ordered me, saying, "You explain to them the consequences that follow each and all actions. Once they understand, they will listen!"... [T]he Almighty Eternal Creator instructed me to explain the consequences in writing and file with the California Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court, as well as the United States Federal court regarding certain individuals and government agencies for each and all actions. He seriously emphasized that world government leaders and high-ranking officials are like religious leaders and officials, and they must assist each other to comply with the Laws of the Almighty Eternal Creator/sole Owner of the earth and human race.

In particular, Ms. Do-Nguyen appears to be concerned with "the consequences" of "people exercising their free-will rights for wrong purposes." These incorrect exercises of free will include not only homosexuality and abortion, but also the war in Iraq, Eliot Spitzer's interstate transportation of a prostitute, the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, the U.S. Supreme Court's establishment clause jurisprudence, and an ongoing plot by George Bush and the CIA to "rob monies from innocent people after intercepting the telex transfer."

The negative "consequences" of these actions include the present financial crisis, Bill Clinton's coronary artery bypass surgery, an unspecified illness suffered by Sandra Day O'Connor, and global warming.

Do-Nguyen returns to traditional format with a Conclusion, in which she urges the Justices to uphold Proposition Eight, thereby rendering their souls eligible to "receive an energy supply directly from the Creator." (By contrast, striking down the Proposition would result in receipt of "an energy supply 'indirectly' from God, through a destructive channel known as the Devil or Satan.")

When she is finished, Do-Nguyen further complies with the rules by attaching a Certificate of Service listing all parties and their attorneys, and affirming that she has mailed a true copy of her brief to each. She also includes the following language, which I intend to incorporate into all my future Certificates of Service:

I declare that I am, and was at the time of the service hereinafter mentioned, at least 18 years of age and not a party of the above-entitled action. I am an heiress to the Almighty Eternal Creator, and I am fully God and fully human. My natural business mailing address is 9450 Mira Mesa Blvd. B417. San Diego CA 92126.

S. palin / D. melanogaster

2008-10-27T10:00:00.000-04:00

The Holy Prepuce agrees with Sarah Palin that we should not fund any more fruit fly research. Fruit flies couldn’t possibly present a useful model for human biology unless both were descended from a common ancestor--maybe through some process by which species change over millions of years as a result of random mutations leading to traits more or less likely to result in successful reproduction. But since we know that God created humans and fruit flies in their present forms approximately 6000 years ago, it would be foolish to waste money on such nonsense. Especially if it's happening in France.

Smartass Gets a Toaster

2008-09-29T09:00:00.001-04:00

Mrs. P and I recently became proud owners of a T-Fal Avante Deluxe two-slice apparatus, and as a public service I thought I would reproduce, with annotations, portions of the instruction manual:

After a week of staring expectantly at that cardboard box, hoping for breakfast, I'm glad I finally consulted the instructions.

What?! And I bet you're going to tell me this "bread" is "sold separately."

But... but... you just told me I had to...?!

Not strictly an "instruction" (unless you are the toaster), but reassuring nonetheless.

This is generally how it works with toasters on Planet Earth, yes.

But how am I going to clean this fellow if I can't put him under the faucet? Wait, I know: the dishwasher!

Damn. Are you sure?

Curses!

This requirement excludes two of the three persons in my household.

toast \'tōst\ v.t.: to render (as bread) crisp, hot, and brown via a process of heating and drying.

Welcome Comics Curmudgeon Readers!

2008-08-26T11:43:00.002-04:00

Wow--the Comics Curmudgeon gives me one shout-out for my Anti-Anthony Facebook Flair, and Holy Prepuce receives over 200 hits by 11AM! That's almost as many hits as I get in an entire weekend from Saudi Arabian users Googling "gay prepuce."

The Facebook links on the Comics Curmudgeon post seem to work for some readers and not others (apparently something to do with the transition to "New Facebook"); alternate links that should work are here and here.

Now that you've found your way to Holy Prepuce, please take a look around, maybe try out the random toke or topic links at left, and if you enjoy HP's sensibilities, please consider subscribing to the feed or joining the email list!

Aggravated Menace 2 Second Life Society

2008-08-25T07:55:00.001-04:00

Holy Prepuce! seems to have taken a sober turn of late, which was never my intention. Just as I was preparing to subject the readership to more of the same (in this case a response to Linda Hirschman's Slate op-ed on reclaiming the morality of abortion in the Democratic platform), the Internets coughed up this thing of beauty.

The arrest of 33-year-old Kimberly Jernigan for attempted kidnapping, burglary, and "aggravated menacing" brought my original conception of Holy Prepuce! back to light. And that conception was to provide an outlet by which you, the reader, could gain insight into the astonishing range of expression given by fellow citizens to what Justice O'Connor once described as "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Jernigan's recent journey into the mystery of existence began when she met a 52 year old Delaware man in the virtual universe of Second Life. This being Second Life, naturally the gentleman did not manifest himself in middle aged, mid-Atlantic human form, but rather as a lion. Based on my limited exposure to Second Life, day-to-day existence consists principally of participants selling each other virtual jewelry, then furiously bonking on "SexGen beds" during global warming seminars at virtual ski lodges. So it should come as no surprise that Jernigan and her leonine acquaintance soon commenced a romantic--and sexual--online relationship.

All was well and good until the couple agreed to meet in the real world ("First Life"?) and the flesh-and-blood Jernigan proved not to the King of Beasts' taste. Not a woman who gives up easily, Jernigan hatched an ingenious plan: she would kidnap her ex-lover, teach him the error of his ways, and start a new life with him "out West." For reasons not made clear in news accounts, Jernigan's initial attempt to abduct her ex at gunpoint from his Pennsylvania workplace proved unsuccessful. Her second attempt, which involved posing as a local postal worker, also failed. (Media accounts differ as to whether Jernigan is legitimately employed as a postal worker in her native Durham, North Carolina.)

Events came to a head on August 21st, when the former beau returned home from work and was startled to find a laser sight illuminating his chest. By the time police arrived, Jernigan had fled, leaving behind a pair of handcuffs, a roll of duct tape, and an adorable Corgi mix named Gogi, whose snout Jernigan had unceremoniously duct-taped shut. Borrowing a page from Jack Ruby's playbook, Jernigan had apparently brought the dog to the scene of the crime, then improvised after she realized his barking might foil the plot.

An all-points bulletin went out for Jernigan's 2008 Kia Rio, which Maryland state troopers eventually spotted at I-95's Chesapeake House rest stop. A BB gun and laser-sight-equipped Taser were recovered from the vehicle, and Jernigan was arrested following the classic "brief struggle."

My delight at these events is of course marred by concern for Gogi, who had the misfortune to be caught up in humiliating circumstances far beyond his understanding. (Fortunately the Delaware SPCA reports that Gogi is none the worse for wear following his ordeal, and is no doubt available free to a good home.) But Jernigan's saga revisits many beloved Holy Prepuce! themes, of which I had lost sight during this recent political bent:

On this last point, may I just add that while I applaud the technical achievement, whichever animator programed Second Life to allow human/lion sexual intercourse really needs a different hobby.

The Politics of Fear -or- America Celebrates We Can't Take a Joke Day, courtesy of The New Yorker

2008-07-14T21:24:00.001-04:00

In case you've spent the last 24 hours under a rock, below you will find "The Politics of Fear," the upcoming New Yorker cover by Barry Blitt.

In a display of monumental disingenuity, some members of the national news media are pretending not to recognize this image for what it is: a tongue-in-cheek depiction of certain idiotic beliefs currently bouncing around the right-wing echo chamber. Specifically: that Barack Obama is a Muslim (Mr. Obama shown sporting a dishdasha and taqiyah); that Michelle Obama is a Black radical who rails against "whitey" (Ms. Obama depicted with Afro); that the Obamas' celebratory fist-bump on June 3rd in St. Paul was a "terrorist fist-jab" (fist-bump featured at center of image / Ms. Obama wearing camouflage pants, combat boots, Kalashnikov, copious ammunition); that Obama sympathizes with al Qaeda (portrait of Osama bin Laden); and that the Obamas are unpatriotic (Stars and Stripes burning in fireplace). The blindingly obvious--and profoundly sad--message of this cartoon is as follows: some Americans are so mind-bogglingly bigoted and uninformed that they believe this idiocy.

Who knew that quatorze juillet was also We Can't Take a Joke Day in America? Reading news, blogs, and comment threads throughout the day, I have become increasingly despondent at the the vigor with which my fellow citizens insist on demonstrating their collective lack of any sense of humor. To rescue myself from this despondency, I have attempted to distill their commentary to four key objections, which I will now endeavor to answer as self-appointed defender of Mr. Blitt and the magazine.

1. How could The New Yorker make such libellous implications about the Obamas?

As stated above, where this objection comes from members of the national news media, it is surely disingenuous. I find it inconceivable that one could work for a media organization of national scope and be unaware of The New Yorker's editorial orientation. If you are a left-wing journalist, you probably read The New Yorker. If you are a right wing journalist, The New Yorker is well-known enemy territory. Is it remotely possible that this fiercely intellectual, resolutely pro-Obama publication would not only tack 180 degrees but also embrace the lunatic slurs of the Right's imbecile caucus? The image is satire, and anyone from Rush Limbaugh to Amy Goodman pretending not to understand that is insulting our intelligence.

Where this objection comes from someone else, that person is clearly unfamiliar with The New Yorker--not in itself a crime--but also rather dense: if we cannot hear the screams of "satire" as Old Glory burns in the Oval Office fireplace beneath a portrait of bin Laden, we are a nation struck deaf indeed with literality.

2. Okay, I get it, but lots of people won't, and so it will just fan the very rumors it is mocking.

I don't buy this. If there is still someone out there who a) has never heard that the Obamas are America-hating Black separatist Muslim terrorists, but b) would believe as much if he heard it--is it really very likely that the cover of The New Yorker will provide his first exposure to those ideas? I'm guessing that such fellows do not figure heavily in The New Yorker's subscriber base. Of course, the image has been disseminated widely in both mainstream media and the blogosphere, but anyone frequenting these outlets already has access to either the rumors, the truth, or both.

3. This is so racist.

No, it's not racist, and it's not even ironic-making-fun-of-racism-racism-that's-actually-still-racist. Given that Muslims can be of any race, the only racially specific elements of this image are Michelle Obama's Afro and, arguably, the fist-bump. But those elements are not included to say "ha ha, look at Black people's funny hair and greeting rituals." They're not even included to say "ha ha, look at the stereotypes White people have about Black people's hair and greeting rituals." Rather, those elements allude to specific accusations leveled at the Obamas--the Afro evoking a particular "radical Black activist" image cultivated by, e.g., Black Panther Angela Davis, and the fist-bump of course referring to the pair's much-discussed Minnesota greeting. The right's coöption of each concept is fair game for satire, and it's not clear how Blitt could have depicted them in a non-racially specific way.

4. I get it, but the fact that people are bigoted idiots is not funny; it's pathetic.

It is pathetic, and the most pathetic part of it is that we live in a society where almost no one, including Barack Obama, has the guts to stand up and say "shame on you, America, for making 'Muslim' into a slur" instead of "no, I swear to God I'm a Christian." But what makes life livable and humans interesting is our capacity to weep at the Holocaust Museum one day and scream with laughter at The Producers the next. If you don't believe that something can be both pathetic and funny, I will direct you to a syllabus beginning with Aristophanes, and continuing through Shakespeare, Chaplin, Brecht, Emmet Kelly, and The Sopranos. If you've completed my assignments and still object to this magazine cover, I will present you with the complete Family Circus and we will just have to agree to disagree about the nature of humor.

Carlin

2008-06-30T09:26:00.001-04:00

It is said that you first confront your own mortality when a parent dies. Thankfully, my actual parents are very much alive, but with George Carlin's passing last week, the Holy Trinity of my youth has lost its final member. Carlin, Johnny Carson, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.--if I needed to know what was worth thinking about and what to think about it, these were the guys to start with.

I could not have been more than 10 years old when my father took me down to the used record store to buy my first Carlin LP. I memorized Toledo Window Box within days, even though, in retrospect, I must have understood no more than half its content. I was like the British audience hearing Bob Hope's "motel" punchline--they didn't know what a motel was, but they laughed because the joke was over and they knew Bob Hope was funny. I knew Carlin was funny because of what he said about God, farts, and urinals; if I didn't know what he meant by "Ho Chi Minh Trail" or "bong", I knew the material was good enough to land me in the Principal's office when I repeated it, and that one day I would figure out why.

Years later in Constitutional Law, we read Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation. I concluded that ten year old boys can have two types of fathers in this world, and Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine provides the litmus test. Some fathers file FCC complaints when their sons hear it on the radio; some fathers buy their sons the album. I was fortunate enough to have the latter, and the person I am today is in no small measure the result.

And What.

2008-05-27T09:48:00.000-04:00

Hoo-boy. Last week I blog about coming out as a Hillary Clinton supporter, and the very next day she comes out with that thing about RFK. So to answer one of the questions posed in the comments, no of course I don't defend Clinton's statement.

But actually, the media reaction was a perfect example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. If those words had come from anyone else, they would have been a gaffe, a clumsy and unfortunate example of the valid historical point that primary contests can change unexpectedly well into the summer. But because it came from Hillary Clinton, Ruthless Homicidal Maniac, everyone acts like it was a call to arms for Ku Klux Klan sharpshooters.

Last week's post set a record for number of responses received. A few came in the comments, many more by email. So I thought I'd follow up by responding to the most frequent categories of feedback:

1. But she voted for the war!

Okay, let's turn back the clock to 2002. The executive branch of government is engaged in wholesale distortion of intelligence, sending no less a luminary than Colin Powell to the floor of the United Nations to demonstrate how Saddam Hussein is supposedly stockpiling chemical and biological weapons, and briefing Senators on Iraq's capability of delivering such weapons to the Eastern United States in drone aircraft. The United States has for ten years been strong-arming the UN into a sanctions regime against Iraq that is making us a pariah among erstwhile allies because of the effect it's having on Iraqi civilians, so something clearly has to give. The Bush administration asks Congress to pass H.J.Res. 114, authorizing the use of force to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions regarding Iraq." Note that Bush does not ask for permission to invade Iraq, overthrow its government, and install an American Viceroy; nor does he ask for permission to do so without an exit strategy, nor does he ask for permission to hang around for five years as referees and target practice in a civil war.

Hillary Clinton, the elected representative of the people of New York--which 13 months earlier had experienced first hand what destruction delivered by air to the Eastern United States looks like--is one of 535 people who have to make a decision that, based on the situation as they understand it, will have grave consequences whichever way they vote. And yes, Clinton knows her vote will have personal political consequences -- something you'd hope an elected representative would consider. And so, along with a 58% majority of Democratic Senators (including former Presidential candidates Dodd and Biden), she votes in favor of the Resolution.

Meanwhile, an Illinois state legislator named Barack Obama makes a speech against the same resolution. Obama represents Chicago's overwhelmingly Democratic 13th Legislative District, so the speech has almost zero political consequences. The speech has exactly zero practical consequences, since last time I checked, the war powers of the United States are not vested in the Illinois General Assembly.

Do I wish Clinton (and 373 other lawmakers) had voted against the resolution? Of course. I bet she does, too. Would it have stopped the Bush Administration from invading Iraq? Probably not. How would Barack Obama have voted, if he'd been U.S. Senator from Illinois in 2002? No idea.

2. But her claims to be winning the primary popular vote are laughable.

I agree. It's disingenuous and I wish she'd stop. To me her best argument is the one I've outlined -- that if she can beat John McCain in electoral votes and Obama can't, the superdelegates ought to make her the nominee.

3. But she ran those horrible "3 AM phone call" commercials.

Is it somehow off limits for a Presidential candidate to promote herself as the more capable leader in times of national crisis? Isn't that part of the job description for President?

Comparisons of this ad to Lyndon Johnson's execrable 1964 "Daisy" ad, and the 2006 Republican "These Are the Stakes" Al Qaeda spots are inapposite. Johnson's ad implied that Barry Goldwater was actually going to start a nuclear war. The 2006 ads implied that Democrats' softness on terrorism would lead to calamity. Clinton's message was just that if the phone rings at 3 AM, she would be the better person to answer it--not that its ringing would be somehowObama's fault.

4. But I disagree with the methodology of electoral-vote.com; take a look at www._________.com, which comes out the other way.

Entirely possible. And also possible that different polls will have different results in August. As I say, if it turns out in August that Clinton demonstrates a significant electoral vote lead over McCain and Obama doesn't, superdelegates who prefer a Clinton presidency to a McCain presidency may vote for Clinton. If there are enough of them, Clinton could wind up as the nominee. That's why she shouldn't drop out.

5. I voted for Hillary, too!

And you're not alone. As predicted, a good number of you came out of the woodwork in response to my post.

6. But we can't have Billary in the White House again -- Bill will try to run everything!

This one drives me to distraction whenever I hear it. Does no one remember the origin of "Billary" in the 1992 election? The implications were that a) Bill Clinton was insufficiently masculine to be President because he was married to an attorney, rather than to Mamie Eisenhower; and b) a power-mad career woman like Hillary Clinton would dominate her husband and wind up as an unelected co-President.

Now we are told that Hillary Clinton couldn't possibly be strong enough to stand up to her husband, who will dominate her and wind up as an unelected co-President. So which is it?

7. But you can't really think that Clinton is losing just because people won't vote for a woman?

I don't think it's that simple. To be sure, there is an anti-woman voting bloc, but it's probably balanced out by the anti-Black bloc and by "it's time" Clinton voters who would have supported Obama against any male candidate (the latter bloc being in turn balanced by "it's time" Obama voters who would have supported Clinton against any White candidate). My point was rather that our public discourse has tolerated a level of sexism in anti-Clinton invective that (thankfully) never would be permitted in terms of overt anti-Obama racism. These gendered personal attacks on Clinton have made it acceptable to hold irrationally negative views of Clinton as a human being, centered around supposed personality traits that would be seen as neutral or even positive in male candidates. So while Obama is treated as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, Hillary Clinton is Lady MacBeth. And it's these notions of character that may make the difference in a contest where the candidates agree on 95% of the issues.

8. But she's for the gas tax holiday, and "all the economists" say it won't work.

You're right.

9. But Clinton was the Democratic power brokers' Annointed One -- I can't vote for her on principle.

What, you think Obama, out of roughly 3500 Democratic state legislators nationwide, was chosen at random to speak at the 2004 Democratic National Convention? If it's grass-roots you're after, I can get you a deal on Ron Paul buttons.

10. But she's just pandering to blue collar voters.

a. She and Obama both, with their anti-NAFTA populism. "All the economists" also say so.

b. If you're talking about the campaign appearances that have won her resounding victories in Kentucky and West Virginia -- if it were any other politician, he or she would be "seeking out an underrepresented demographic and speaking to its concerns." But because it's Hillary the Cynical, Power Hungry Bitch, she's "pandering."

That's all folks--next post, I promise, it's back to creationist baristas and Internet-controlled sex toys.

Yes, I Voted for Hillary Clinton. And What?

2008-05-22T16:36:00.006-04:00

Sunday brunch found the Holy Prepuce on a Brooklyn street where the gentrification ratio of square to triangular awnings is still about 50:50. My companion, a surgeon, and I, a lawyer, met in a decidedly square-awninged establishment -- two members of the Barack Obama demographic in an outpost of creeping Obama country. Yet I found myself engaged, not for the first time, in an awkward dance: the coming-out of secret Hillary Clinton supporters. It starts with equivocal, tentative inquiries, and ends with the delight and relief of weary countrymen discovering each other while lost in a faraway land.

In hushed tones, we spoke of bewilderment at our peer group's wholesale ingestion of the Obama Kool-Aid, of our of bafflement at what "change" we were supposed to "believe in," and of our distaste for the calculation of an obviously brilliant man to run an anti-intellectual campaign of revival meetings. We grumbled over the media's penchant to spin any Clinton statement, however self-evident or innocuous, into coded race-baiting -- while laughing off (or participating in) the myriad, explicitly gendered attacks on Clinton's persona. Mostly, we lamented that the woman we think would make the more electable candidate and better President will not likely get to be either. All the while, I suspected eavesdropping diners of incredulity that a respectable establishment would serve such class traitors as ourselves.

Why have I been afraid to admit publicly that I want Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States? Have I been worried that my friends would desert me as an irretrievably racist war-monger? Anyone who knows me can't believe those things. Maybe it's just been easier not to correct the innumerable friends who have assumed in their emails ("we won Iowa!"), online status messages ("10,000 Grave Diggers for Hillary Clinton"), and general conversation that my ticket for the bandwagon was stamped long ago.

But Sunday's brunch has brought me to a critical mass of comings-out, and given me courage to think that there are other Clintonophiles lurking among the denizens of our over-educated demographic. So now I'm outing myself to the world. The Holy Prepuce is an Ivy League educated, East Coast urban professional, and he voted for Hillary Clinton. So there.

Now, as the only Clinton supporter you know, Dear Reader, I'm going to answer your question: should Clinton drop out of the race? Here's what I have to say about that:

Neither candidate will have enough pledged delegates to win, so the nomination is up to the superdelegates. The incessant suggestions that the superdelegates must "honor the popular vote" are nonsensical -- if superdelegates are supposed to rubber stamp the popular vote, what is the point of having superdelegates?

Despite media reports of x superdelegates for Clinton and y superdelegates for Obama, interviews and press releases are not the same as actual votes at the convention. When it comes time to cast their votes, superdelegates will have to ask themselves four questions: (1) Who would make the better President; (2)Who is more likely to beat John McCain; (3) Who is it publicly expedient -- e.g. to honor the primary popular vote -- to support; and (4) Who is it personally expedient to support? (While we may question the legitimacy of #4, this is politics, and politicians are a necessary evil thereof.)

Statements of support right now are probably based on a combination of #1 and #4, with increasing bits of #3 thrown in. But as the convention draws nearer, responsible superdelegates will need to take a hard look at #2. To do this, they will need to examine the polling data on electoral vote outcomes. As we learned in 2000 (and 1824, 1876, and 1888), it's electoral, not popular votes that matter. If either Democrat can beat McCain handily, then #2 is of little importance. But if the margins are small, or if one or both candidates actually trail McCain in the data, it's pretty hard to deny that #2 trumps the other factors. A losing ticket honoring the primary popular vote will not do the Democrats much good.

Indeed, elevating factor #2 above the primary popular vote is arguably the key purpose of superdelegates. They are intended as a countermajoritarian check on primary voters' penchant for selecting George McGoverns -- candidates pleasing to Democrats but unelectable in November. Is Obama the next McGovern? And could the superdelegates deliver a winning ticket by handing the nomination to Clinton? Take a look at the current (May 22) Obama vs. McCain and Clinton vs. McCain match-ups on Electoral-Vote.com. Obama trails McCain by 43 electoral votes; Clinton leads McCain by 99.

Will these numbers be the same in August? Will the superdelegates have the courage to overturn the popular vote? It's too early to say at this point. Which is exactly why Hillary Clinton should stay in the race.

Eliot Spitzer Swallows

2008-03-10T22:46:00.002-04:00

Okay, two things I want to say about Eliot Spitzer and the Emperors Club investigation:

First, it's not the prostitution that pisses me off. As long as the world contains human females, evolved to mate selectively, and human males, evolved to mate indiscriminately, money will change hands for nookie. Criminalizing the exchange just ensures that the industry will be run by criminals.

I wouldn't go to a prostitute myself; partly because I am married, which I interpret to preclude all extracurricular schtupping, whether fee-based or charitable, and partly because I don't find barely concealed contempt all that sexy. But I don't think it should be illegal, and if the same testosterone that fueled Spitzer's ambitious rise to power fuels multi-thousand-dollar sessions as "Client-9" at the Mayflower Hotel, that should concern no one but Mrs. Spitzer. It certainly should not concern the U.S. Attorney's Office.

But if it's going to be illegal, Spitzer ought to have had at least the decency to refrain from the very conduct for which he sent people to jail as New York's Attorney General. So as I say, it's not the prostitution, it's the hypocrisy that gets me exercised.

With that out of the way I want, second, to direct your attention to the criminal Complaint in the Emperors Club investigation. According to the Complaint, the website www.emperorsclubvip.com

ranked the prostitutes using a ranking system from one to seven diamonds, and charged hourly rates according to the assigned ranking. For example, according to the Website, the Emperors Club charged $1,000 per hour for a three-diamond prostitute, and $3,100 per hour for a seven-diamond prostitute.

The question that comes to mind is whether one could really articulate seven meaningfully distinct strata of prostitutes to justify such a granular rating system. Given a double-blind presentation, could a connoisseur accurately distinguish a four-diamond hooker from a five?

The Complaint goes on to inform us that emperorsclubvip.com

offered the Emperors Club's most valued clients "membership" in the "Icon Club," a status which allowed the clients to access restricted areas of the Website and permitted them to schedule appointments for illegal prostitution services with the most highly-ranked prostitutes whose fees started at $5,500 per hour.

So in fact there were at least eight Emperors Club prostitute ranks, and quite possibly more, given that the fees of the most highly-ranked prostitutes "started" at $5,500. This raises the same question as before, but, more fundamentally... fifty-five hundred dollars an hour?

Now, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of sex. On the list of things I like, it's right up there with chocolate ice cream and amusement parks, and I dare say it even beats out the fantasy of owning my own Slurpee machine. But (ignoring for the moment my above disclaimer) there is no one-hour act, no matter how skillful, original, or debased, for which you could convince me to pay $5,500. Not to two women. Not even to identical twins.

What on earth could possibly justify such a fee, Eliot? Do these women have a second vagina or something? Jesus Christ, Alan Dershowitz doesn't charge that much.

High Stakes Softball at the FDOC • Brokeback Mountain ≠ Sodomite Recruiting Video

2008-02-25T12:35:00.002-05:00

In a fit of nerdiness, the Holy Prepuce has added to the site a "random toke" feature. For those readers insufficiently puerile or pretentious to interpret H.P.'s direct allusion to drug culture and oblique reference to French obscenity, this means that if you click in the left-hand column where it says "[c]lick here for a random toke on the Prepuce," the site will redirect you at random to a prior Holy Prepuce post. (Feed and email subscribers will need to visit the website to make this work.)

But enough of the past -- what is tickling the Holy Prepuce right this minute? First, this article concerning "a startling list of alleged abuses and crimes" at the Florida Department of Corrections. The inmate abuse, kickbacks, and misuse of public funds are nothing remarkable for a state prison system. But worthy of note is FDOC's innovative personnel policy: the awarding of promotions based on home runs hit in the inter-departmental softball league! And how did department employees react to this policy? Why, just as anyone would adapt to an environment in which career advancement depends on slugging ability: steroids. Oh yes, and apparently each game was followed by an orgy.

Second, Heath Ledger's hasty addition to this year's "let's play John Williams music under a montage of everyone who's died since the last Oscars" reminds H.P. of the always-reliable Westboro Baptist Church, which picketed the actor's memorial services because of his role in Brokeback Mountain. According to WBC, Ledger's portrayal of a gay cowboy has rendered him a "fag enabler" and condemned him to an eternity of torment in Hell. (As this site has noted before, WBC believes Ledger will have a lot of company there, most recently the victims of the Northern Illinois University shootings, smitten by God because of a 2000 NIU "conference for fags . . . headed by some preacher who had a sex change operation.")

The thing that H.P. has never understood about the religious and other anti-gay opposition to Brokeback Mountain is this idea that the movie is some kind of recruiting commercial for gayness, ready to lead young Christian men astray. But if we take the film's plot as a sort of road map for the gay life that awaits young recruits, what is the take-home message? Basically that (warning: spoiler) your one carefree summer of mountaintop sex will be paid for with a lifetime of broken dreams, divorce, alienation, and either violent death or a middle age lived out in a ramshackle trailer, talking to your dead lover's cowboy shirt. This is an advertisement for the ways of Sodom?

Holy Quid Pro Quo

2008-01-22T09:05:00.000-05:00

Friday night found the Holy Prepuce channel surfing over to the Christian Broadcasting Network membership telethon. My interest in Pat Robertson's flagship media organ had been piqued by Robertson's Charles Foster Kane-worthy plan to buy the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, presumably in order to shut down its critical coverage of him. (Among other topics, the Virginian-Pilot has exposed Robertson's non-profit Operation Blessing as a front for his commercial diamond mining enterprise.)

The segment in progress as I tuned into the telethon concerned the proprietor of a Florida-based Karaoke entertainment company, who attributed his growing success to the favor of Jesus Christ. A few years ago, this fellow had been nearly bankrupt. God had spoken to this man and told him to spend his last dollars not on, say, rent, but instead as a "seed offering" to CBN. Sure enough, within a few months the karaoke business took off, and three short years later he employed eighteen DJs and a fleet of as many mobile karaoke units. And all because he had "sown" his cash with CBN--a practice he now continued through tithing, which he emphasized was "not about the money, but about obedience."

Following a brief intermission of typical telethon fare (donation thermometer rising, bells ringing, operators cheering) a new segment began. This vignette concerned a young couple who had been scrounging to make ends meet. But after sending one dollar, just one dollar to CBN, the wife found a ten dollar bill in the laundry. She sent this money to CBN, and three weeks later, her grandmother's estate settled (it had been tied up in the courts for over a year) and she received $10,000. God then spoke to the husband "in that way that God speaks to you," and directed that 10% of this windfall be "sown" with CBN. Flash forward one year, and the couple now lives in a beautiful home, with new cars, a thriving business, etc., etc.

Occasionally the program would cut away to a segment about the relief work performed by Operation Blessing in some developing nation, but clearly such details about what CBN planned to do with the money were secondary to the monetary payback the almighty had planned for viewers who would only pick up the phone and "seed."

This was not the first time I had encountered the sow/reap metaphor from a Christian "ministry"--I have received several appeals in the mail from an Arizona outfit known as the Don Stewart Association, promising me "an Unveiling of Money Blessings" if I would "stretch [my] faith and Prove God with a Seed Faith Gift of $30." One of the mailings even included a packet of oil, with which I was instructed to anoint my "purse or wallet, some financial papers, or bills."

But something else struck me as familiar about CBN's appeal--a feeling that I had seen all of this before on cable television. And then it dawned on me where: those "No Money Down" real estate infomercials! The plot lines were nearly identical: an impoverished protagonist makes a small investment, and through some mysterious process (the details of which are never very clear), winds up rolling in dough. The visual elements are interchangeable--well-coiffed white people in big houses with oversized furniture, interspersed with cutaways of expensive cars driving along the ocean. Of course, the paths to riches being sold are different--I'll leave it to the reader to predict whether slipping Jehovah a sawbuck for some Karaoke bookings has greater prospects for success than hitting up complete strangers for seller-financing--but the central concepts are the same.

Part of me feels that anyone credulous enough to believe the creator of the entire universe will go to bat for them in probate court if they send $20 to some cable channel deserves to go broke. But another part of me, the part with empathy for those less fortunate, wishes there were a way to shut down these con men who wrap themselves in the mantle of spirituality while shaking down the desperate for their last dollars.

I am all for religiously-based charitable appeals when there is some trace of theological content to the request. If you want to get on the air and ask for money to feed the children of Madagascar because that's what Jesus would have done, more power to you (assuming the money goes where you say it will.) But the telethon I saw was strictly a dollars-and-cents proposition: lay a C-note on God (who doesn't handle cash directly, so CBN will gladly accept it on his behalf), and the big guy will hit you back with a grand. If CBN's message were directed at rich people, I would shrug and say a fool and his money are soon parted. But when it is so obviously targeted at people struggling to ends meet, I say it's nauseating.

Steroids / We ID Under 27

2007-12-26T11:58:00.000-05:00

I say screw it, let baseball players take all the steroids they want. Is juicing any more unnatural than forgoing all productive activity to spend four hours a day in a weight room and another eight practicing a game? Isn't that "cheating" compared to the 99% of human history in which athletes were amateurs who spent their days farming, smithing, or soldiering?

And if it's about setting examples for kids, do you really want your child's role model to be some jock who gave up any hope of an education for the one in ten thousand chance of making it to the big leagues? If you want to scare a kid straight, don’t show him some steroids-make-your-dick-fall-off public service announcement. Show him the 40-year-old shortstop on the AA team bus, screaming down his cell phone that this month's paycheck won't cover his child support either.

Yesterday at the Seven-Eleven, while fumbling for my American Express (yes, I had the $1.01 in cash, but there are few things more satisfying than buying a Slurpee on credit and thinking "this is exactly why we have a subprime mortgage crisis,") I saw this familiar sign:

Now here's my question: if the Seven-Eleven clerk is so gifted that he can distinguish on sight a 26-year-old from a 27-year-old, can't he tell a 20-year-old from a 21-year-old? And if he can, why does he need to ask for ID? And why is he working at the Seven-Eleven, when he could make a killing down on the boardwalk hustling "Stump the Wizard"?

"May Affect Individual Salvation"

2007-11-17T10:52:00.000-05:00

Vote for a pro-choice politician and burn in Hell. So said the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at this week's annual meeting. (Technically, the Bishops said such voting "may affect individual salvation," but we all know that's intellectual theologian code for pitchforks and eternal roasting.)

Guys, this is so not playing fair. By all means, go ahead and encourage the faithful to vote consistently with Roman Catholic teachings on abortion. There are perfectly logical arguments available as to why Catholics should vote for pro-life politicians. For example, if one believes that humans are ensouled from conception, and that the ensouled have a God-given, inviolate right to life, it's easy to see how this right could outweigh any maternal interest in reproductive autonomy and could require not only abstaining personally from abortion, but also voting to proscribe other citizens' acts that are tantamount to murder. I reject the supernatural premise of this argument, and independently reject its conclusions, but it's certainly a fair argument to raise among believers.

What seems unfair to me is to threaten voters with catastrophic supernatural consequences for not towing the line. Threatening catastrophic Earthly consequences for political decisions is one thing--voters can presumably evaluate for themselves the chances that impeding the Bush administration will result in "the smoking gun . . . be[ing] a mushroom cloud." But to suggest that Jesus is peering around the curtain at your Diebold Accuvote TSX--and will cast you into the abyss if you touch "Giuliani"--crosses a certain line.

Because, really, how can any pro-choice argument hope to prevail in this version of Pascal's wager? As long as one believes there is any non-zero probability of eternal punishment for voting pro-choice, the disutility of such a vote registers at infinity. The utility of a pro-choice vote--in support of rights exercisable only during the finite human lifespan--is necessarily lower.

To be fair, the Bishops also encouraged voting against evils such as racism, and there is a lot to like in the Church's social policy positions on poverty. I do consider it my ethical duty to vote for poverty relief and against racism. But I'll thank you, Conference of Bishops, to let me get there without supernatural threats of eternal torment.

October Omnibus

2007-10-19T17:20:00.000-04:00

Where have you been, Holy Prepuce? Just when O.J. comes back to amuse us, the H.P. disappears from the scene and isn’t here to provide his weekly guidance as to fundamentalist coffee bars, 50-foot Kings of Pop, and menstruation cinema for the developmentally disabled.

I have several excuses. Having joined an improv comedy troupe, reproduced, and changed jobs within a span of months, clearly the logical follow-up was to take on teaching a law school class. Leaving little time for sleep, these activities necessarily foreclose most blog-related activity.

Devoid of hits from its RSS-savvy regular readership, this site instead lies fallow to gather the search engine tumbleweed. For your interest, here are the twenty most recent search terms that have brought visitors to Holy Prepuce!:

prepuce play, all women have periods, kiddypics, long prepuce, remote sexual stimulation, girls-gone-wild vomit-comet, spiderman and itty bitty friends, itsy schwartz, somali wild ass, prepuce stimulation, remote controlled sinulator sex toys, how many holes between a woman's legs, sex toy remote control internet, beautiful prepuce, kiddyvids, control sex toy over the internet, control your sex toy over the internet, prepuce gay, prepuce extra long, now I know all women have periods

Mostly I’ve been thinking. What have I been thinking about? Well, first, this story. Not so much about the legal question it poses--it strikes me that when you fly 3200 miles to engage in a three-day bondage and discipline session in the home dungeon of a man you met on the Internet, then allow yourself to be stuffed overnight in a closet, wrapped in plastic and duct tape, and left to breathe through a plastic straw inserted in your leather hood, you probably assume the risk that the straw will fall out.

What interests me more is that the Rolodex of AP reporter Denise Lavoie includes such personages as "Vivienne Kramer, a board member of the New England Leather Alliance," and "Susan Wright, a spokeswoman for the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom." Now, I'll allow that a reporter might easily locate these officials via their respective organizations' websites. Less clear is how Ms. Lavoie just happened to get in touch with one "Brian Plant, a bondage and sadomasochism practitioner from Kansas."

What else have I been thinking? I’ve been thinking we’re pretty screwed as a species when the man who cracked the code of DNA, arguably the most important insight into our natural history ever achieved, goes around saying that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really." Not to mention his follow-up qualification that he hoped everyone was equal, even though "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true."

Fortunately, I’ve been unwittingly doing my part to subvert white culture since I first whistled to the strains of "Paperback Writer"--as was recently explained by polygamist prophet (and recently-convicted accomplice statutory rapist) Warren Jeffs:

I was watching a documentary one day, and on came these people talking about a certain black man. In the program it was revealed that this black man was homosexual, immoral, on drugs -- the worst kind of person. And then it showed the modern rock group, the Beatles. It showed them as pingy-pangy, unnoticed, useless people nobody would hire. And so the manager of their group called in this Negro, homosexual, on drugs, and the Negro taught them how to do it. And what happened then? They went worldwide. And all other music has followed that pattern, the most famous of what we call the rock groups. So when you enjoy the beats, the rock music -- maybe even toned down with an orchestra -- you are enjoying the spirit of the black race. And that's what I emphasize to the students. And it is to rock the soul and lead the person to immorality, corruption -- to forget their prayers, to forget their God. And thus the world has partaken of the spirit of the Negro race, accepting their ways.

Finally, since USA Today published this graphic on yesterday's cover...

... I've been thinking, "why don't I have that button!?"

In-Transit Booty

2007-09-01T11:44:00.000-04:00

Blogging about Senator Larry Craig presents many of the same difficulties as blogging about former Astronaut Lisa Nowak: how does one add value to the best thing that has ever happened? A conservative Senator who has consistently scored 100% on every anti-gay organization's voting scorecard gets busted in an airport men's room for toe-tapping out a gay sex solicitation to an undercover cop... where do you go from there?

Well, naturally I can provide you with the cover image, above, from this week's Washington Hispanic, because the whole story really is even better in Spanish.

But to be serious for a moment, what I can say is this: if by some fluke it turns out that Craig is telling the truth: that he is completely innocent but pled guilty fearing the consequences of going to trial, I have little sympathy. For the past 30 years, law-and-order conservatives like Craig have been ratcheting up criminal penalties and enacting wholesale transfers of power from judges to prosecutors, to the point that the average "trial penalty" (the difference in sentencing outcome between those arrestees for a given offense who plead guilty and those convicted at trial) has reached, by some estimates, 600%. In joining the tens of thousands of Americans who enter strategic but false guilty pleas each year, Craig would be reaping only what he and his ilk have sown.

Now, that out of the way, I have four additional comments.

1. Any time you find yourself explaining to the police that you employ a "wide stance when going to the bathroom," you probably need to rethink many of the choices you have made in the last twenty-four hours.

2. If any portion of the "Passenger Security Charge" I pay for every flight segment is underwriting gay sex stings in airport men's rooms, I would like to request a refund. If people are really lining up to suck off Members of Congress underneath the stall dividers at MSP International, who am I to stop them?

3. This whole thing just confirms all the stereotypes about male versus female attitudes toward sex. Can you imagine a woman looking to have sexual relations with a complete stranger next to a toilet?

4. According to the police report, the restroom in which Craig was arrested is a frequent venue for sexual activity. Craig was between flights, which suggests that the facility in question was through security and thus available only to ticketed passengers. Does this mean that travelers in the know are purposely routing themselves through Minneapolis for in-transit booty? And at what cost to the economy?

Runner-Up Teachers in Space

2007-08-08T14:06:00.000-04:00

Too young to wax nostalgic for the Kennedy Assassination, my generation's childhood "I remember where I was when..." moment was of course the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion that claimed the life of "Teacher in Space" Christa McAuliffe.

I recall processing through my elementary school hallway that January day, past a line of younger students abuzz with the news: "the Space Shuttle blew up!" "Oh, sure," I chuckled, "and that teacher got killed." My disbelief was forgivable, in light of the popularity afforded to the dead-teacher motif in schoolyard humor. (Viz. such classic ditties as Joy to the World, the School Burned Down (And All the Teachers Died) and the redoubtable Glory, Glory, Hallelujah, Teacher Hit Me With a Ruler cycle.)

Flash forward nearly 22 years, and McAuliffe's original backup, Barbara Morgan, is preparing to fly on Shuttle Endeavour this evening. One must allow Morgan props on her cojones, given the 100% historical casualty rate for Teachers in Space.

As the launch approaches, more than half of the 119 original Teacher in Space program finalists have gathered at Cape Canaveral. According to a CNN feature, many of the finalists since "have worked in the aerospace industry, created space camps and established schools with a focus on science and technology." Gail Klink, a finalist from Ohio, has built a two-decade strong career as a motivational speaker on the subject of "launching your life."

I may be the worst person in the world for saying this, but doesn't it seem like the Challenger blowing up was the best thing that ever happened to these people? If the mission had gone off as planned, the Teacher in Space program would have been forgotten in a matter of months as the expensive publicity stunt that it was, a new coat of paint on a manned space program long since bereft of any credible scientific purpose.

And this field of also-rans would have been packed back off into obscurity with their commemorative plastic orbiters. Nobody would still be paying $39.95 to hear some Reagan-era runner-up explain why her honorable mention in a Cold War propaganda contest should inspire the audience to follow their dreams of mortgaging the house and starting that scrapbooking business.

Check your O-rings, Barbara Morgan; careers are waiting to be reborn from your solid rocket fuel flames.

Outlet Malls and the Universal Studios Florida Principle

2007-07-11T22:50:00.000-04:00

This post comes to you from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home of surf, sand, salt-water taffy, and three massive incarnations of the Tanger Factory Outlet Mall.

So here's my thing about outlet malls. Once upon a time, when clothes were actually manufactured in the United States, clothing companies would sometimes operate "factory outlets" that sold overstock or imperfect items. (The distinction between "irregulars" and "seconds" eludes me now, but any bargain hunter of a certain age can fill you in.) These stores were either adjacent to a factory or else in low-rent rural areas, and the savings in transportation or rent made the sale of cut-rate merchandise workable.

Outlets didn't for the most part advertise their existence beyond their immediate geographical reach. A few billboards along the highway drew in enough shoppers to clear merchandise that, after all, existed only as a byproduct of quality control and overly optimistic production. Discovering a new outlet while on vacation carried with it a certain smug satisfaction.

But over time, demand for the outlet shopping experience--and, presumably, for the attendant smugness--mushroomed beyond the limited supplies of imperfect goods and factory-adjacent retail spaces. Indeed, these supplies dwindled as offshoring shuttered domestic factories and rendered the cost of bringing defective merchandise to market unjustifiable.

Fortunately for the outlet industry, we Americans are highly amenable to what I term the Universal Studios Florida Principle. The Principle is an entrepreneurial maxim holding that commercial exploitation need never be subverted by reality. The origin of the name should be familiar enough: by 1990, the "back lot" tour of Universal Studios was so popular that Universal built a second movie studio in Florida just so that people could tour it. And it was a huge success! Universal's gamble--that the marketability of a studio tour would in no way depend on the authenticity of the studio toured--paid off in spades.

Following this Principle, enterprising manufacturers and real estate developers created special "outlet" clothing lines for the major brands, to be sold at purpose-built "outlet malls" across the country. Tanger is the largest chain, with 32 locations in vacation spots coast to coast. Another successful chain is The Mills Corporation, with 15 properties each called "[Name of City] Mills." The names evoke quaint New England factories, steeped in local history, lovingly rehabilitated for modern bargain hunting convenience. (The malls are, of course, nothing of the sort.)

Shoppers throng to such establishments, unaware that as with every other modern apparel purchase, they are being spoon-fed an illusion of value in which $40 appears a rational price for $1 worth of fabric, 25¢ worth of labor, and $1.50 worth of shipping from Bangladesh.

I am one of these shoppers.

Custom Holy Prepuce! Google Toolbar Button / Sikh Dream in Baltimore

2007-06-22T23:45:00.000-04:00

Folks, I know it has been a while since your last pull on the old Holy Prepuce! lever, and for that I apologize. To tide you over, I present you with a new toy and a puerile delight.

The new toy is a nifty Holy Prepuce! custom Google Toolbar button that I geeked out and created.

Just click on this link to install it. (If you don't already have Google Toolbar, the link should install that first-- the toolbar itself is a pretty cool joint.) Once the button is installed, you can click on it to visit Holy Prepuce!, you can use it to search for HP! posts containing whatever text you enter in the search box,

or you can click on the adjacent arrow to pull down a menu of the last 25 posts.

Select a post, and there you shall be.

Now, for the puerile delight, I give you this article that I found in the May 25 edition of our local "India This Week." (Just read the first sentence.)

As Mrs. P. remarked, "I don't think that's what they meant."

Still More Creationism Museum Fun: Barista Wanted (The Damned Need Not Apply)

2007-06-06T09:01:00.000-04:00

The Answers In Genesis Creation Museum is open at last! From previous posts, you will know of my fascination with this institution. The finished product has by all accounts exceeded my expectations. Animatronic tableaux feature human children frolicking alongside dinosaurs; videos demonstrate how metaphorical interpretations of Genesis lead inevitably to internet pornography and abortion.

And the really excellent news is that the museum is seeking a qualified barista. Faithful reader Eliza R. alerted me to this opening at the Museum's "Noah's Cafe." The key job responsibility is the preparation of "fine coffee and other related gourmet beverages," including espresso, latte, and something called "Frappes Chai." As one might expect, other duties include working the register, clearing dishes, and taking inventory.

But the ability to discharge these functions is hardly the sole qualification. Along with her resume, an applicant must submit a "creation belief statement," "salvation testimony," and a written confirmation of her agreement with the museum's Statement of Faith.

Exactly what must one believe in order to serve up a skinny half-caff at Noah's? Some key elements are as follows:

"No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record"

"The only legitimate marriage is the joining of one man and one woman. God has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of marriage"

"The Noachian Flood was a significant geological event and much (but not all) fossiliferous sediment originated at that time"

"Those who do not believe in Christ are subject to everlasting conscious punishment."

Nice. When I visit the museum (and I will), perhaps the successful applicant will kindly leave some room in my mocha. It sounds like there's no extra charge for a shot of eternal damnation.

Paring Down The Prepuce II / Fred Phelps Sings!

2007-05-25T09:29:00.000-04:00

Astute readers may note that today is Friday. More astute readers may note that today's post is thus two days late on the every-Wednesday schedule that this blog has followed for most of its existence. This is by design, because I have decided to downshift Holy Prepuce! from a weekly to a whenever-I-damn-well-feel-like-it-and-no-whining-because-it's-free schedule.

This change will, of course, inconvenience those among you who visit the blog on the web each Wednesday for your weekly toke. Your dedication makes me happy with each mid-week spike on the usage stats, and I apologize. But I can promise that if you sign up for the email service, or subscribe to the site feed, updates will be yours as they happen.

Two factors have influenced this decision. First, I am starting a new job and so will have different demands on my time and the predictability thereof. Second, I have come to realize that arbitrary self-discipline is overrated; and it is sometimes OK to peel off the gimp mask and whisper the safeword.

Now then:

The mad, mad world of virulent anti-gay Christianism got a little more fun Wednesday, when a student at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University was arrested for cooking up a batch of homemade napalm in preparation for Falwell's funeral. Mark David Uhl allegedly planned to use the explosives against the Rev. Fred Phelps and his congregants from the Westboro Baptist Church.

Westboro Baptist, you may remember, is the organization that attends gay funerals toting banners with such charming slogans as "AIDS cures fags," and "Fags die, God laughs." The group also protests at productions of The Laramie Project, and maintains an online clock ticking off the days that Matthew Sheppard, the young gay man on whose murder the play is based, has been in Hell.

More recently, the church has taken to protesting at the funerals of U.S. service members killed in Iraq, on the theory that God smites soldiers out of hatred for America's tolerance of homosexuality. Of course, there can be little doubt that Phelps' vitriol stems from his own repressed homosexuality, since no human being in history outside of a Queer Studies department has spent as much time obsessing on the subject of gayness.

In any event, Westboro Baptist announced that it would protest at the funeral of Jerry Falwell. Now, you might think that Phelps would be a fan of Falwell, fellow travelers as they were on the anti-gay hate-mongering circuit. But there you would be wrong. According to Phelps, Falwell "split Hell wide open the instant he died" because he espoused "false doctrines like 'God loves everyone,'" and believed in free will. (Phelps is an old-school Calvinist and as such believes in strict predestination.) So, Westboro planned a protest, Falwell supporters planned a counter-protest, and Mark David Uhl planned to napalm the whole thing.

But all of this is old news for finger-on-the-pulse information mavens such as Holy Prepuce! readers. What may interest you more is something I discovered while browsing through Westboro Baptist's website, GodHatesAmerica.com. (Lest you think the church insular, it also maintains GodHatesCanada.com, and GodHatesSweden.com.) No, it's not their list of the recently-damned-to-Hell; although that is certainly informative, including as it does Coretta Scott King, Gerald Ford, and all 31 Virginia Tech shooting victims.

What caught my eye--and ear--is that Westboro Baptist has a choir. And you will be pleased to know that this august ensemble has made its recordings available on the Internet! So as a public service and for your listening enjoyment, I present Westboro Baptist's adaptations of several patriotic standards. (Clicking on a title will launch the corresponding .mp3 recording.)

Original	Westboro Baptist Version
God Bless America	God Hates America
Proud to Be an American	Ashamed to be an American
This Land is Our Land	This Land is Fag Land
America the Beautiful	Wicked Land of Sodomites
The United States Marine Corps Anthem	Semper Fi Semper Fags

Classic!

Supreme Streaming Vids

2007-05-16T09:38:00.001-04:00

Speaking of Internet video, the US Supreme Court has entered the YouTube generation by including digital access to videotaped evidence in an opinion. In Scott v. Harris, No. 05-1631, the Court rejected the plaintiff's claim that a police officer had violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizure by ramming his car into a ditch during a chase. In response to a dissent, the Court stated:

JUSTICE STEVENS suggests that our reaction to the [police chase] videotape is somehow idiosyncratic, and seems to believe we are misrepresenting its contents. . . . We are happy to allow the videotape to speak for itself. See Record 36, Exh. A, available at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/video/scott_v_harris.rmvb.

And, sure enough, the armchair jurists among us can follow that link, watch the police chase go down, and make up our own minds about its reasonableness.

Scholars are buzzing about this use of the Court's website and its larger implications for judicial transparency, inclusive democracy, etc., and that's all fine and good. But I'm just psyched because, sooner or later, the Court has got to take another obscenity case.

"All Women Have Periods" Redux

2007-05-09T19:06:00.000-04:00

Update from last week's post: Reader email and the comment from Carrie have forced me to reexamine the obvious and perplexing fact that the protagonist of last week's menstruation training film appears to have Down Syndrome.
In bringing the video to my attention, reader Jennifer G. commented that "why the viewer-stand-in character is a MUCH-too-young girl with Down Syndrome is just one of the many questions this film inspires."

So I did a little digging and it turns out that there is a reason Jill looks the way she does, and that everyone in the film speaks in simple repetition. It turns out that this film, entitled All Women Have Periods, was created for the express purpose of teaching menstrual hygene to developmentally-disabled girls. And now I feel kind of like a jerk for making fun of it.

But... Jennifer G. is right, the film does still raise numerous questions. For example, why does the family have a trapezoidal bathroom? Is their universe missing the tampon particle? Why does Jill's 30ish sister Susie still live at home? Why does Susie regard the adhesive strip's peel-off backing with such contempt? According to Jill, she and her mother "were talking yesterday . . . about periods," yet today her mother explains--seemingly for the first time--what periods are, who gets them, and what to do about them. So what material did she cover yesterday? And why aren't girls with Down Syndrome allowed to know the word "vagina?"

Well, believe it or not, there exists an All Women Have Periods Study Guide. And while it does not necessarily provide guidance on the above questions, it does contain the complete screenplay, should you wish to stage a dramatic reading.

Period Cinema

2007-05-02T09:15:00.000-04:00

The Holy Prepuce likes to think of this space as occasionally educational, and thus fancies himself something of an educator. As with any educator, the demands of outside life sometimes intrude on HP's curriculum development. This week is such an occasion.

But if HP's elementary school teachers taught him anything about pedagogy, it was this: lesson plans are pretty much optional so long as you can thread an 8MM Bell & Howell. If one spotted Mrs. Garvey throwing back Schlitz drafts at Pantera's Pizza of an evening, it was a good bet that the A/V cart would once more lurch its way into class the following morning.

Holy Prepuce! therefore presents you with this classic health education reel, sent in by astute reader Jennifer G. (Email subscribers: you may have to visit the blog online if your email interface does not support embeded video.)

It is comforting to know that, even as American society threatened to come apart at the seams over Vietnam and the sexual revolution, it was still possible to make a film about menstruation without once uttering the word "vagina."

Girls Gone Wild in Zero G

2007-04-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

Attention images.google.com searchers: By means of some algorithm that I do not understand, this humble blog post has become a top result for Google Images searches on the term "Girls Gone Wild." I have not seen a spike in traffic this large since the time I ran a post entitled "Kiddypics & Kiddyvids," detailing the bust of a rather-indiscreetly named Internet chat room. While I wish that my musings on religion, consumer culture, and the law could garner the same degree of interest as those on smut, I am happy for any increase in readership, and hope you will bookmark, fave, subscribe, or otherwise return to Holy Prepuce!

For those of you who are not late night cable television viewers (read: not new parents), and thus may not have seen the new "Girls Gone Wild" commercial, I am here to inform you that the latest installment of that oeuvre features a zero-gravity sequence.

Between community service sessions for his use of underage girls in previous videos, GGW impresario Joe Francis seems to have come up with the idea of sending some nubile young ladies and a camera crew aboard a "vomit comet." For those of you unfamiliar with aeronautics, this is an airplane that attains brief periods of freefall by executing a series of parabolic arcs. Typically this technique is used for astronaut training or scientific experiments, but in this instance the mission was essentially that of all previous GGW shoots: record the young "mission specialists" removing their tops, giggling, and fondling one another.

It's often said that the space program has led to some of the greatest technological developments for terrestrial use, and, after Velcro and Tang, this one clearly ranks near the top of the chart. It does, however, tend to detract from the pretense that the women featured in GGW are just ordinary mardi gras / spring break / fraternity party attendees who spontaneously expose themselves whenever they see a video camera. While it is possible that this group of young women would just happen be aboard the same flight as the GGW camera crew, would just happen to find themselves so overwhelmed by the experience as to spontaneously disrobe, and would just happen simultaneously to discover their long-suppressed same-sex desires, it does begin to strain credulity.

Hydrothermal Vent Community as Metaphor

2007-04-18T01:01:00.000-04:00

In case you were under the impression that life had any particular meaning or unifying purpose, consider this: scattered throughout the Earth's oceans are hydrothermal vents, underwater geysers spewing forth superheated water at temperatures approaching 400 degrees C. Geologic structures known as "chimneys" form as minerals precipitate from vented fluids and come in contact with ocean waters. And on these chimneys develop complex ecosystems of highly-adapted species, ranging from chemosynthetic bacteria to giant tube worms.

Such organisms differ drastically from neighbors even short distances away, because the typical bottom-dweller is adapted to temperatures around 0 C and--rather like us--to water that is not suffused with hydrogen sulfide. Travel between distant hydrothermal vents is impossible for many species, which cannot tolerate the frigid water and lack of chemosynthetic materials. Hence, some chimneys are isolated enough that they have become virtual Galápagos islands of the deep--closed communities of genetically-isolated species found only in that particular ecosystem.

So one of these vent communities can form and operate more or less independently for eons. Bacteria covert hydrogen sulfide and methane into organic compounds (the undersea equivalent of photosynthesis) from within their symbiotic tube worm and giant mollusk hosts, small crustaceans eat the bacteria, larger crustaceans eat the smaller crustaceans, and the cycle of life goes on.

But it turns out that hydrothermal vents operate more or less at the whim of sub-seafloor volcanic systems. So all it takes is one undersea volcanic eruption to divert the flow of magma and shut down the vent overnight. And then it's all over for the vent community--everybody's dead within days. Kind of makes you think.

Wired Wednesday II: YouTube Drug Cartel Threat Videos

2007-04-11T22:43:00.000-04:00

Six months ago, I reported on the alarming trend of internet affronts spawning real life violence. The morals of that post were, in brief, as follows: 1) do not allow your picture to appear on somebody else's boyfriend's Myspace page, if there is any chance his girlfriend's neighbor is a hitman; and 2) if you get into an argument during a multiplayer online game, do not provide your antagonist with your street address to "settle this in person."

To those morals I would now add the following: if you're a popular Mexican crooner, consider staying out of the narcocorrido, or "drug trafficker's ballad" genre. If you must record one, do not make a video mocking a particular drug cartel and threatening to kill its leaders. And if you do make such a video and it gets pirated on YouTube about a thousand times, and then the cartel you mocked starts posting explicit YouTube threat videos against you, consider cancelling your public appearances for a while. Valentín Elizalde didn't, and he paid the price. In fact, you can leave out most of the details and state the moral more generally thus: if a Mexican drug cartel goes to the trouble of making a YouTube video about how it's planning to kill you, that's often a clue that a Mexican drug cartel is planning to kill you.

Matzo Lab Bust / The 50-Foot Robot King of Pop

2007-04-04T21:52:00.000-04:00

Looking back over the past few posts, I realize that I've been harping on some pretty heavy shit. First Ladies dying in the White House, smokers snuffing it before they can collect their pensions, families of slain police officers viewing graphic simulations of police officer slayings, racist tribal elections, Iraq . . . It's as though I had forgotten that the world is still, at base, a Zippy the Pinhead comic full of carefree aesthetic delights, free to be savored by all takers. In order to restore some balance, I would like to bring two items to your attention.

First, inspectors in Spring Valley, New York recently busted an illicit backyard matzo lab operating out of a converted school bus. Rabbi Aaron Winternitz had been running the operation for the last three Passovers, ever since he bought the derelict vehicle and installed an oven, a human-powered wheat mill fashioned from a stationary bicycle, and, more problematically, an unauthorized gas line from his house. The purpose of the gas line is unclear, since the matzo oven itself is wood-fired--as attested to by the shoulder-high stack of firewood surrounding the vehicle.

Not surprisingly, local officials found the combination of a massive open-flame oven, stacks of combustible wood and dried wheat, and do-it-yourself natural gas fittings problematic when operating 10 feet from a residential structure. Spring Valley matzo futures no doubt traded up on news of the reduced supply; at peak production, the bus was capable of turning out 100 lbs of product per day.

Second, Michael Jackson has announced plans to build a 50-foot robotic effigy of himself in Las Vegas. According to press reports, the device will wander through the surrounding deserts shooting laser beams out of its eyeballs. This is all fine and good, but I know where I'm not taking my 50-foot robot twelve-year-old boy.

John Edwards: I'm Going to Be the Jerk That Says It

2007-03-28T09:55:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be the jerk that says it. If John Edwards is elected President, there is an 85% percent chance that the United States government will be led by a man coping with the final illness and death of his wife; a man who will become the single parent of two grieving pre-teen children.

It's not a pleasant thing to say, and the national media isn't saying it. Since Elizabeth Edwards' announcement that her breast cancer has metastasized to a rib and possibly a lung, coverage of John Edwards has fallen almost exclusively within five narratives. The first two are human-interest stories: (1) John Edwards is a jerk for not dropping out of the race, and (2) John Edwards is so courageous for not dropping out of the race. The third and fourth narratives concern the political horse race: (3) John Edwards will be too distracted to campaign/fundraise effectively, and (4) Sympathy or admiration for John & Elizabeth Edwards will lead to a boost in voter/donor support. Only the fifth narrative concerns Edwards' fitness for the job of President--as opposed to presidential candidate--and only in simplistic terms: (5) By remaining in the race, John Edwards has shown himself to be dedicated and courageous, and these are good qualities for a President.

Coverage of Elizabeth Edwards has centered around the usual things polite people say when they find out someone has incurable cancer: that she's brave, that she's always been a fighter, that there are medical advances every day, that statistics are just statistics and there's no reason in the world she can't be in the 15%, etc.

If your boss, best friend, or bus driver told you that his wife had metastatic breast cancer, it would be entirely fitting to say these sorts of things and leave it at that. You would never dream of asking "so, what effect do you think her near-certain death will have on your job performance?" But John Edwards is not running for bus driver, he is running for President of the United States. And he didn't tearfully confide his wife's illness to us over lunch; the Edwardses announced it at a specially-convened press conference, to a national media that would not have shown up if the former Senator were not seeking the nation's highest office.

To my mind, our national discussion of Elizabeth Edwards' illness must move beyond politeness and face some cold, unpleasant facts: namely, that most people suffering from stage four breast cancer today will die before January, 2013; that most people whose spouses die experience incapacitating grief for an unpredictable period of time; that children the age of Emma Claire and Jack Edwards (currently 9 and 7) who lose a parent typically require a tremendous amount of attention from their surviving parent; and that the modern Oval Office may well demand 1461 days of its occupant's undivided attention.

I am not suggesting that anyone categorically eliminate Edwards from consideration because he is likely to become widowed while in office. Other men have been widowed while President: John Tyler in 1842, Millard Fillmore in 1853, and Woodrow Wilson in 1914. Andrew Jackson's wife died three months before Jackson took office in 1829, and Chester Arthur's wife died only a year before the Garfield assassination made Arthur president in 1881. All of these men served out their terms (some with greater distinction than others) and historians can judge the effect that bereavement had on their presidencies.

We may perhaps conclude that the benefits of Edwards' abilities and policies outweigh the risk of his becoming incapacitated with grief while President. But to weigh these benefits and risks, we must first be willing to talk about them. The American media has for the most part abandoned covering the substance, rather than the contest, of elections; so discussing the benefits may have been a lost cause all along. It seems that squeamishness has precluded any intelligent consideration of the risks.

The Defined Benefits of Tobacco

2007-03-20T09:06:00.000-04:00

The Supreme Court's recent decision in Philip Morris USA v. Williams, while a temporary victory for the liability-beleaguered tobacco industry, brought to mind one of my favorite pet conspiracy theories.

In 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against nine tobacco companies, alleging massive civil racketeering violations involving a decades-long conspiracy to misrepresent the health risks of smoking while marketing to children. The most recent ruling in this case is a 1683-page screed by U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, detailing a half-century's deadly mendacity.

In the midst of all this, I began to wonder: why would our nation's corporate rulers allow their bought-and-paid-for government to attack an industry that they had paid through the nose with 50 years' campaign contributions to keep out of FDA regulators' hands?

But then I came across an interesting statistic: in 1985, 89% of Fortune 100 companies offered "defined benefit retirement plans." That's fancy-talk for the kind of pension arrangement your grandfather had: come home from World War II, get a job and keep it for 40 years, then retire to Florida on the company's dime. By 2004, that figure had fallen to 50%, and most of those plans were available only for existing employees. Start almost any job now, and the risk and responsibility of your 401(k) is on you.

And then it all became clear. What is the great social utility of tobacco? Most of us can smoke it for about 50 years--from our teens into our sixties--with minimal effect on productivity. And then, a year or two past retirement age, tobacco flips a little switch inside of us, and our pension liability disappears conveniently from the balance sheet.

For as long as worker longevity remained a drain on the bottom line, it was worth corporate America's investment in government to keep tobacco cheap and unregulated. But as labor lost its bargaining power, the companies found a more direct way to shed their longevity-risk-hedging burdens--dump pensions in favor of today's "defined contribution" plans. Now that shareholder value maximization doesn't turn on whether retirees kick the bucket at 68 or 98, buying off the government produces little return on investment.

Holy Prepuce! Is 1, but So 2.0 / Concerns of Police Survivors

2007-03-14T01:38:00.000-04:00

This week marks (more or less) the first anniversary of Holy Prepuce! I like to think that the blog has evolved over these months; that it has become less about Deaf pageant winners hit by trains, and more a forum in which my views on habeas corpus and remote control internet sex toys are equally at home. Whatever this space's raison d'être, I thank you, faithful readers, for being along on the ride.

In honor of the anniversary, I have upgraded the joint to take advantage of some Blogger 2.0 features. (Having been honored as Person of the Year for my contributions to Web 2.0, it seemed a fitting way to mark the occasion.)

In addition to making cosmetic changes, I have retrofitted previous posts with "topic" designations, and provided a handy sidebar roster of these categories. So if, for instance, you want to skip over everything to do with Religion or Culture and get right to the Smut, just click on the appropriate link and Smut you shall have.

Blogger 2.0 also generates a stand-alone comments feed, which is http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

If you add this feed to your home page or feed reader, you can follow the lively comments discourse as it goes down. You can also add the feed to Feedblitz, and receive the comments daily by email. (If you don't already receive Holy Prepuce! posts by Feedblitz, you can set that up by clicking on this link -- check out a preview here.)

As always, the main blog feed is http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default And of course you can still read the blog at http://holyprepuce.blogspot.com, but that is so Web 1.0.

As my blogging time has been devoted to these administrative concerns, my actual content this week will be limited to this slim slice of the Prepuce:

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund recently held a news conference to kick off its fundraising drive for the planned National Law Enforcement Museum. On hand for the press to play with was a planned exhibit, a device known euphemistically as a "use-of-force training simulator." This is basically a more sophisticated version of such arcade favorites as Hogan's Alley and Police Trainer 2.

The Washington Post described the simulator experience as follows:

You're a cop. You've been summoned to an alley behind a strip mall that's a known drug hangout. You hail a man and two women lounging by an old car.

The man, a beefy guy in a plaid work shirt, gets belligerent and starts toward you. One of the women grabs his arm to hold him back, and as you focus on them, the other woman slips a pistol from her pocket and opens fire.

Bang. You're dead.

Now, I enjoy a game of Virtuacop 3 as much as the next man, but wasn't this news conference put on by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund? Is is possible that contributors to the fund might have become such owing to a "bang, you're dead"-type scenario involving a close family member?

Indeed, the Post reports that

Also present was Jean Hill, president of Concerns of Police Survivors, which supports families and friends of slain police officers. Hill is the mother of Barry Hill, a 38-year-old Harris County, Tex., deputy sheriff, who was shot seven times and killed while trying to arrest a car thief Dec. 4, 2000.

I wonder how Ms. Hill felt about the demonstration?

Museum planners also used the news conference to announce that the project "will feature a table bearing a manikin on which a simulated post mortem will be projected from overhead cameras."

I'm guessing they did one of those on Barry Hill, too.

Cherokee Bigots, Cherokee Tribe, So Proud...

2007-03-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

I had always assumed that the venerable American passtime of Sticking It To The Black Man was pretty much a white man's game. But last Saturday's special tribal election proves that our Cherokee neighbors are well in on the action.

First, some background (and maybe this is something you learned in school, but I certainly didn't): It turns out that back in the day Cherokees--both individuals and the tribe itself--owned slaves. Not only that, but the tribe fought for the Confederacy. As a sovereign nation, the tribe had to sign its own peace treaty with the Union at war's end, and that treaty required the tribe to absorb its former slaves as tribal citizens.

Flash forward a quarter century to the early 1890s, when the Federal government, "Indian giver" par excellence, was busy yanking back Indian Territory and turning it into something called "Oklahoma." In order to parcel out reservation land in proportion to population, the government established the Dawes Commission and charged it with taking a census of tribal membership.

The census was conducted in keeping with two other proud American traditions: (1) undercounting blacks to screw non-blacks out of some benefit (viz. the three-fifths compromise), and (2) the "one-drop" definition of blackness. As a result, tribe members of pure Cherokee or mixed Cherokee and white (only) blood were counted as "Cherokees by blood," but tribe members with any black ancestry were counted as "freedmen."

The Dawes Commission census did not change who was a Cherokee for internal purposes, however; that was still determined under the 1866 peace treaty. So from the time of emancipation up until last weekend, the Cherokee Nation included black and part-black citizens. Not that there were so many black Cherokees anymore; CNN estimates around 2800. But that was 2800 too many for 3/4 of the Cherokee electorate, who on Saturday voted to amend the Cherokee Constitution so as to exclude the freedmen.

I guess the moral of the story is that we should give up on expecting people who have been shafted by the system to learn from the experience and refrain from shafting others. Cherokee Principal Chief Chad "Corntassel" Smith--formerly a professor of Indian Law at Dartmouth--sees the issue somewhat differently. He told the Washington Post that deciding who gets to be in the tribe is "a basic, inherent right," one for which the Cherokees had "paid very dearly."

A lot of folks felt the same way about their lunch counters, Chief.

Support the Troops!

2007-02-28T23:59:00.000-05:00

The recent House of Representatives debate on the nonbinding Iraq War resolution was long on rhetoric and duration, and short on pretty much everything else. The one conclusion I was able to pluck from the bluster is this: our national discourse on the war has been hijacked, at the highest level, by a slogan. "Support the troops!" Whether yea or nay on the resolution, practically every speaker had to recite his or her "support" for the troops. Indeed, the phrase infects the resolution text itself "(1) Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq."

We see it on bumper stickers, yard signs, and lapel pins. "Support the troops!" But what on Earth does it mean? Do I support the troops? Well, financially I sure do--their room, board, and housing gets withheld from my paycheck every two weeks, and the bill for what I'm not paying now will go to my children and grandchildren, with interest. But I'm guessing that's not what the banner on the overpass means.

Does it mean I'm not supposed to spit on them, Vietnam-style, in airports? Fair enough, I don't do that--I think most of us are over the idea that every nineteen-year-old kid in a uniform is a baby killer with personal responsibility for Pentagon policy. (Interestingly, the military justice system doesn't seem quite so progressive--it hung the enlisted staff of Abu Ghraib out to dry with nary a stain on the epaulettes of commanders who authorized the same sexual and religious humiliation techniques across multiple facilities.)

Perhaps "support" is meant in the sense one "supports" English football teams, as in "I support Manchester City, he supports Arsenal"? Are we meant to rush out and buy a new Army "kit" every time they change the camouflage design, then get into pub fights with insurgency supporters and slash their tires every time we lose a street battle?

Seriously, though... I "support" the troops in the sense that I don't want them to get killed. I want them to get letters from home and Xboxes and dental care. I don't want them to come home missing arms and legs--living two miles from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I've seen enough limbless soldiers in the supermarket these past few years for any one lifetime.

But wanting to see your fellow human comfortable and alive is something quite different from blind support of whatever fool errand the government happens to have sent him on. At least, that's the way I see it. Others argue that one can't "support" the troops without "supporting" their mission, and since the failure of a military mission typically involves a lot of soldiers getting killed, I suppose they have a point.

In truth, so long as "support the troops" remains on church signs and baseball caps, it doesn't much matter what meaning we ascribe to it. I can think it means "don't spit on soldiers," you can think it means "don't question the government," military families can be happy to read it, and we all can go home and watch our all-Anna-Nicole-all-the-time cable news.

But when the slogan infects a Congressional debate--and worse yet, hogties a coequal branch of government from exercising its constitutional function as a check on the executive--we've exited the realm of feel-good virtue. The notion of "supporting our troops" has made any serious proposal to cut off funding for the war a political non-starter. Americans believe--or so Congress seems to think--that our soldiers would view being sent home as a personal betrayal. Worse yet, the war's backers insinuate that a halt in funding would not bring the troops home, but rather leave them in the field without supplies or reinforcements. And so the resolution focuses on the sideshow of the President's "surge" of 20,000 troops, while pandering shamelessly to those who so "support" the 140,000 already in Iraq that they will not question the reasons for their presence.

American Relics

2007-02-21T18:10:00.000-05:00

$1,500,000 is a lot of money--about the lifetime wages of the average American worker. But it seemed to me a fair price for the handwritten manuscript of George Washington's 1783 speech resigning his military commission.

This document is a relic not only of the man, but of an historic moment cementing the American principle of civilian rule over the military. In the hands of the State of Maryland, it is also a physical reminder of the most notorious event to occur in the state's historic Capitol Building--at that time the Capitol of the United States. The draft contains Washington's own edits, revealing, for example, that he replaced "I here deliver my commission" with the humbler "offer," and that he deleted the words "final" and "ultimate" from his "farewell,"--perhaps foreshadowing his return to public life as the nation's first President.

Yes, I thought, the State's commitment of $1,500,000 was a fine reflection of our values.

But then I discovered that bidding on Britney Spears' hair begins at $1,000,000.

Habeas-Free Island Prison, 1660s-Style

2007-02-14T08:29:00.000-05:00

So here's an interesting historical tidbit for you, dating from the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1661: Once Charles II and the monarchists were back in power, they naturally wanted to round up their key enemies for imprisonment and torture. Standing in their way was the pesky writ of Habeas Corpus, which threatened to provide an avenue of judicial review for these extra-legal detentions.

The Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, had a solution: build an offshore prison, beyond the jurisdictional reach of English courts. Yes, it went against nearly four hundred years of English legal tradition, but these Puritans were dangerous religious fanatics! These were the worst of the worst--men who did not recognize the ordinary rules of civilization; a new type of enemy against whom the old niceties were ineffective and for whom new procedures would need to be created. And so Lord Clarendon shipped these enemies to the Channel Islands, where the Great Writ could not reach them.

Sound familiar? The difference is that, back then, when people actually gave a shit the architect of this offshore "black hole" detention strategy was removed from office. Clarendon was impeached by the House of Commons in 1667 and spent the rest of his life exiled to France. The outrage over Clarendon's actions led Parliament to pass the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, prohibiting, among other abuses, "illegal imprisonments beyond the seas."

Not that anyone pays attention to this history stuff.

Flight Status: Flight Risk

2007-02-07T07:41:00.000-05:00

Rule # 1 of successful blogging: add value to information. To justify his bandwidth, the blogger must create, discover, or improve knowledge. And so I am faced with a problem. Clearly, today's post must be about yesterday's NASA love triangle fiasco. The problem is that the story already exists, everyone already knows it, and, definitionally, one cannot improve on the most awesome thing that has ever happened.

No, there is no point in going over the details of how Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak, Navy Captain and mother of three, became the rival of space program engineer Colleen Shipman for the affections of fellow Astronaut Bill Oefelein. Nor how, after learning that Shipman would take a commercial flight from Houston to Orlando, Nowak drove the 850 miles to intercept her, wearing a diaper to avoid bathroom breaks. Nor... no wait, must go over that one: wearing a diaper.

And there's no need to describe how Nowak, sporting a wig and trench coat, pepper-sprayed Shipman in the Blue Satellite Parking lot of Orlando International Airport. Nor how police found Nowak stuffing the wig, trench coat and a BB gun into a trash can, while carrying a duffle bag that contained $600, a brand-new steel mallet and buck knife, and "3-4 feet of rubber tubing." Nor that Nowak had apparently ridden a shuttle from the airport's LaQuinta Inn, where police would later search her car and discover latex gloves, Shipman's itinerary as printed from Oefelein's computer, detailed maps of the airport grounds, and a list of items including the wig, the knife, and something called "ammo 9."

What can I possibly add to this? Oh sure, there's the obvious "flight risk" joke, which I thought myself pretty clever to have come up with until Jay Leno used it last night.

At least I can be helpful and provide you with links to the important documents: the initial charging affidavit, the second charging affidavit (not thinking the attempted murder is going to stick, guys), and Shipman's affidavit in support of her application for a protective order.

And, for what it's worth, a few observations: First, this story is made all the better by the fact that its players are not just among the scores of "Astronauts" that NASA trains but never puts in space. Nowak flew on Discovery last July and is considered an expert in operating the shuttle's robot arm, and Oefelein piloted the same orbiter just two months ago. Fewer than 500 human beings have ever flown in space, and two of them are involved in a love triangle that necessitated the use of rubber tubing, a steel mallet, and the LaQuinta Inn airport shuttle.

Second, the common denominator in all sensational crime seems to be poor problem-solving skills. Take Scott Peterson's problems, for example: failing marriage, affairs, mounting debt. Good problem-solving skills solution: get a divorce, declare bankruptcy. Scott's solution: tell new girlfriend he was a globe-trotting widower, kill Lacy two weeks later and dump her body in the Berkely Marina during a Christmas Eve "fishing trip," then phone new girlfriend from New Year's Eve candle-light vigil for missing wife, claiming to be in Paris. I can't say what would have been the best solution to the Nowak/Shipman rivalry, but I'm guessing it didn't involve diapers.

Third, speaking of diapers, I might point out that Nowak benefited from years of NASA research into adult waste collection garments. The story of space flight is in many ways the story of human excrement containment engineering. When Grissom and Young blew the hatch after a week in space on the first Gemini capsule, a rescue diver actually passed out from the stench. But today, an Astronaut can drive non-stop from Houston to Orlando swaddled in odor-free absorbency.

Finally, how cool must it have been for Officer William Becton, no doubt used to filling out "unemployed" or the like on his charging affidavit forms, to type in the following:

Monkey Helper Guidelines / More Y Chromosomes Than Allowed

2007-01-31T23:39:00.000-05:00

Work busy, baby fussy, yet the Holy Prepuce cannot neglect his readers and so offers two quick tokes on the Prepuce pipe:

First, you will be pleased to know that your Transportation Security Administration, ever prepared for all contingencies, has promulgated guidelines for the safe and efficient screening of "Monkey Helpers" at security checkpoints. Lest you be concerned that these useful simians are exploiting their cuddly winsomeness to jeopardize our freedom, rest assured that if a handler/monkey pair sets off the metal detector, "both the handler and the monkey must undergo additional screening."

Handlers can likewise feel secure in the knowledge that Transportation Security Officers "have been trained to not touch the monkey during the screening process." But bad news for our bashful, incontinent monkey friends: the Officers "may require that the handler take off the monkey’s diaper as part of the visual inspection."

Second, Asian Games competitor Shanti Sounderajan recently was stripped of her silver medal from the women's 800 meter sprint after failing something called a "gender test." An Indian athletics official explained that the test had revealed Sounderajan to possess "more Y chromosomes than allowed." This raises the intriguing question of precisely how many Y chromosomes a participant in the women's 800 meter sprint is permitted to have. Expert readers are free to set me straight, but I would have assumed the limit to be, um . . . zero?

SafeFit Baby in Sight Laser Beam Eye Discipline

2007-01-24T06:23:00.000-05:00

As our newfound domestic bliss does not afford much free time for composition, I shall provide only the following quick update for the week:

From our gift registry, we received a clever item known as the SafeFit Baby In Sight Back Seat Mirror. The idea is to install it on your back seat, align it with your rear-view mirror, and thereby keep an eye on your rear-facing baby. (Exactly what you are supposed to be worried that your unsupervised infant would get up to while straitjacketed into a five-point restraint is not specified, but no one ever went broke overestimating the paranoia of new parents.)

It all sounded fine and good until I looked at the diagram for installing the thing, and discovered that we had inadvertently registered for a corporeal punishment aid for evil Supermen:

Aaaaaa!

Guest Blogger

2007-01-17T00:52:00.000-05:00

Faithful Readers:

As my paternity leave continues, I shall pass along the following communication from Chapka, one among your number. Chapka is the editor-in-chief of Mousehold Words, a free web project that allows subscribers to experience nineteenth century novels in their original, serial format. Readers receive the novels' serial parts via periodic emails--it's rather cool and worth checking out.

--H.P.

Dear Holy Prepuce,

Congratulations on your recent event, and I hope you're enjoying your well-deserved bloggeregnum. While you're out, I've been forced to surf the internet without your expert guidance, and I thought you and your readers might be interested in a few of the stranger things I've run across.

Here's a pop quiz. Which of the organizations listed below have established a web presence?

a) The Prohibition Party, founded in 1867 with a platform of banning alcohol sales in the United States;

b) The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873 and most famous for marching on saloons in the nineteenth-century run-up to Prohibition;

c) The Universal Zetetic Society, founded in the 1880s to promote the ideas of Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who believed, according to Wikipedia, that "the earth is a flat disk centered at the North Pole and bounded along its southern edge by a wall of ice, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars only a few hundred miles above the surface of the earth";

d) The Catholic Legion of Decency (CLOD), founded in 1933 to achieve "the purification of the cinema" and which effectively censored film production through the 1950s by persuading theaters not to show films which received its "C" rating;

e) The Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, founded in 1542 to supervise the trial and execution of heretics; or

f) The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by self-declared psychic Madame Blavatsky to promote the study of Aryan scriptures and the belief in reincarnation, Atlantis, universal consciousness, and the idea that the number seven controls the universe in various odd ways, but most famous for sparking the Victorian interest in table-rapping, ectoplasm, spirit writing, trance experiences, and the séance as we know it today?

The answer is, of course: All of the above. Not even the wing nuts and lost causes of the past ever really disappear; they’re out there, and now, like everybody else, they're on the web as well.

a) The Prohibition Party not only maintains a web presence, but by their own report have actually elected candidates as recently as the 2004 elections (although at least some of these were elected in officially nonpartisan elections). Their 2004 platform calls for the abolition of the income tax and the Federal Reserve system, a universal voucher system for schools, and a return to the gold standard (really!). It also calls for a complete ban on the production or sale of tobacco and continuing the current ban on marijuana. However, oddly enough, it does not call for--well--prohibition. Instead, the Prohibition Party's official platform states that:

Until the liquor traffic is eradicated, we call for the alcoholic beverage industry and its products to be placed under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration . . . We favor maintaining the nation-wide legal drinking age of 21, and we favor establishing a level of taxes on alcohol equal to the social costs of repairing the damage caused by alcohol. Our program of leadership, legislation, and education . . . will result in a change in societal attitudes toward supporting prohibition of the manufacture, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverage products.

At least they noticed that without "a change in societal attitudes," things didn’t work out so well the last time.

b) The WCTU has also moved into the twenty-first century with the establishment of their web presence; they’ve also expanded their horizons beyond demonizing Demon Rum. Their web site now includes sections condemning tobacco, gambling, pornography, and gay marriage, as well as alcohol and illegal drugs--including separate entries for "marijuana" and "hemp," the latter of which warns:

The drug legalization lobby is currently targeting farmers, such as tobacco growers, in an attempt to persuade them to grow hemp, a crop which would not be profitable. This is a cruel hoax similar to the legalizers' efforts to persuade sick patients to smoke marijuana as a "medicine."

The web site also features "fun rooms," which sound promising but are in fact composed entirely of allegedly "fun" facts for children about how drinking a beer will KILL YOU. There's also an essay contest: grades 4, 5, and 6 are encouraged to write about how they should "Always Avoid Alcohol," while grades 7, 8, and 9 get the wishy-washier "Be Aware of Club Drugs." If they weren't already, I’m sure they will be by the time they finish researching their essays.

c) Having gone through several incarnations and a few periods of inactivity, the Universal Zetetic Society was revived in the twentieth century as the Flat Earth Society. The FAQ at the web site explains that the Flat Earth theories haven’t been proven yet because "The government prevents people from getting close enough to the Ice Wall [that surrounds the south 'pole'] to take a picture" of it. However, there's a touching underlying optimism in the idea, also mooted in the FAQ, that "all the world governments . . . only appear to be disorganized to make the conspiracy seem implausible."

In the Zetetic world, the sun and moon are each giant spotlights, 32 miles in diameter. The spotlight effect explains why some parts of the earth are light and some are dark at the same time…because if a spotlight isn’t shining right at you, of course, you can’t see it. Sad to say, the forums are very active, and several users appear to be perfectly serious; one recent topic ("Footballer Arrested to Hide Fake Moonwalk") claimed that O.J. Simpson’s legal troubles were engineered by the government as retaliation for his appearance in the 1978 Mars-landing-hoax film Capricorn One. No doubt co-star Sam Waterston will be arraigned for murder himself any day now. Waterston’s trial will then, of course, form the basis for an upcoming episode of Law & Order.

d) The organization once known as CLOD has now been subsumed into the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office of Film and Broadcasting. They have an archive of over 8,000 film reviews, with information about whether each one is "troubling" or "offensive." As the former CLOD lost the leverage over the industry it had in its heyday, it became less and less radical, and its advice became milder. However, the archive includes films rated all the way back to 1933; although some of the original ratings appear to have been softened, this still leads to some odd juxtapositions. For example, the original 1967 film The Producers gets an "O" rating for "offensive," but the 2005 musical remake merely gets an A-III "adults only" rating, and is even described as "perhaps acceptable for older adolescents."

e) Another renamed but not forgotten Catholic organization, the Inquisition is now known as the "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith," and rarely sets even the most inflammatory heretics on fire anymore. Its most famous Prefect in recent years has of course been Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI. The Inquisition's official web site is, sadly, kind of boring. Their current mission apparently involves "promot[ing] in a collegial fashion encounters and initiatives to spread sound doctrine and defend those points of Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and unacceptable doctrines," which is in my opinion an improvement over the old "let’s expel the Jews and execute the Protestants."

f) The Theosophical Society splintered into a number of competing groups after the death of Madame Blavatsky. The original highest-profile branch, led by nineteenth-century birth control activist Annie Besant, has a web site at www.ts-adyar.org. However, the American branch, the Theosophical Society in America, has the slickest web site. The web site takes the Scientology approach, focusing on the "duty of altruism" and the importance of helping your neighbor, rather than the history of Atlantis and Lemuria and the other more esoteric aspects of Madame Blavatsky’s historical-philosophical worldview. However, the crazy stuff is still there if you dig a little further into the site’s "online study materials":

The second root race . . . existed during the Oligocene epoch, some 34 million years ago. . . . In terms of consciousness, this race concentrated on activity, beginning to organize its bodies into vehicles of active expression by which to influence its environment. This race is said to have been androgynous, combining male and female characteristics, and to have reproduced by a process called "sweating." Partway through the third root race, about 18 million years ago, when human bodies had become fully physical, the sexes were separated. The evolutionary purpose of this third race was the development of emotion. It lived a life of impulse, with mind at first incipient but not developed. The mind was activated and given structure, but was still relatively quiescent. (From Theosophy: An Introductory Study Course [warning: large PDF], by John Algeo.)

Crazy, yes, but still a lot more fun than anything in the WCTU’s alleged "fun rooms."

Sadly, there do not appear to be any current web sites for the Levellers, the Bull Moose Party, or the Hanseatic League. But I’m still looking…

Sincerely,

Chapka

Jesus is Lord of Metropolitan DC, MD, VA

2007-01-10T18:24:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know I'm supposed to be on paternity leave from blogging, but I could not resist sharing the following creed, which I spied on a bumper sticker in the parking lot of the local CVS:

The only theory I could come up with was that this is some sort of starter doctrine for new converts to Christianity. You know, for those people who really want to join up, but are finding the Lord-of-the-entire-universe thing a little hard to take on all at once? I guess the churches figured, "well, let's start them off with something manageable; something still pretty vast and important, but nothing the layman can't flip through in his ADC Road Atlas."

I'm hoping to see that car again--I hear there's an opening for Lord of the entire Mid-Atlantic Region, and I'm pulling for Jesus to get the promotion.

Splashdown!

2007-01-03T06:22:00.000-05:00

The Holy Prepuce & Mrs. P. have reproduced! Little Miss P. is healthy, lovely, and already displaying a propensity for snarky, pseudointellectual blogging. Having engaged in enough generative activity for the week, H.P. announces a brief paternity leave, and, with apologies, leaves his readers to make sense of the world on their own until next time.

Demagogues United for the Real America

2006-12-27T00:49:00.000-05:00

If the mid-term election results proved anything, it was the fallacy of the red state / blue state "two Americas" theory hyped by the media since 2000. November taught us that if a 60/40 victory constitutes a landslide, then our most powerful political element is the vast ideological center. Pleasing "the base" on either side is useful, but races are won and lost on the shifting alliances of the pragmatic.

Despite this lesson, certain members of Congress are already out of the gate for 2008 with old-school demagoguery calculated to energize the "real America." Take, for instance, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA). Goode could not remain on the sidelines while the right-wing media lambasted incoming Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) over the planned use of a Koran at his ceremonial swearing-in next month. Never mind that the event is a photo-op, the actual oath being taken en masse and without any religious texts. And never mind that Ellison would not be the first to use a book omitting the New Testament--Hebrew Bibles and the Book of Mormon have served the purpose without incident. The good Rep. Goode felt the need to warn his constituents that

if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. . . . I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

Goode later fretted to the press that if immigration is not restricted, we may have "a majority of Muslims elected to the United States House of Representatives."

Addressing this last point first, if we assume that Goode believes naturalized citizens usually vote for their coreligionists, he must therefore believe that America is in danger of absorbing enough Muslims to outnumber our roughly 200 million Christians. I wonder how he squares this projection with the usual anti-immigration bogeyman: the tidal wave of illegal Latinos necessitating (and apparantly taking jobs on) the Southern border fence project. Last time I checked, most of these folks tend to be, um, Christian.

With regard to the proposal that Ellison be required to use a Bible, I suppose Goode has probably heard that Article VI of the pesky old Constitution forbids religious tests for office. (And indeed permits an affirmation of office, rather than an oath--an option exercised by Presidents Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover.) But then, politicians of Goode's stripe have never been too concerned about Constitutional restrictions on theocratic government.

One might pause, though, to consider the reason behind the use of religious texts in oath-taking. The whole idea of an oath is that it is a promise of especial solemnity, one on which the obligation to make good goes beyond the ordinary ethics of keeping one's word. Swearing on a sacred text is meant to invoke divine judgment on the oath-taker's later fealty to the promise. In earlier times, Roman Catholics swore by placing their hands on a cloth used to cover the Eucharist, quite literally swearing a "corporeal oath" on the body of Jesus Christ. So if the point of Ellison's swearing an oath of office is to make a really, really important promise to do a good job--one that he had better not break, or else--then maybe it would make sense to let him use the book he believes sacred? It seems like swearing on the New Testament for a non-Christian is rather akin to swearing with one's fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, in the Senate, the confirmation of federal district court appointee Janet Neff is on hold because Judge Neff, currently on the Michigan Court of Appeals, had the audacity to attend a neighbor's same-sex commitment ceremony in Massachusetts. This was not a same-sex wedding, mind you; it took place in 2002, before the Supreme Judicial Court legalized gay marriage in the Bay State. Nor did Judge Neff preside at the ceremony; even had same-sex marriages then been legal in Massachusetts, a Michigan judge would have had no authority to perform one.

Such distinctions do not matter to Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), eying a presidential run in 2008. Mere attendance at such a Satanic function is enough to taint Neff, never mind that she is a Bush appointee and already vetted by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Brownback has put a hold on Neff's nomination until such time as her confirmation hearing can be re-opened for testimony regarding her role in the ceremony, her legal views on same-sex unions, and her ability to rule impartially on the issue.

I had not realized that bias-by-association was such a concern in judicial confirmations, but now I'm worried for my own future. If I'm ever nominated to the federal bench, I'll have to explain my attendance at my cousin's public high school graduation back in 1987. I distinctly remember it opening with a prayer, and I suppose I'll have to defend my ability to rule impartially on Establishment Clause issues. Oh yes, and lately I've been seen frequenting an obstetrician's office. This is only a guess, but I'll bet that sometime in her training the good doctor has performed an abortion.

At least I could testify honestly that neither of these associations took place in Massachusetts. You know, Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts.

Person of the Year!

2006-12-20T01:24:00.000-05:00

Oh ye of little faith, who daily email to say, "Holy Prepuce, you will never be Time Magazine's Person of the Year," come now and repent! For as "Me," and thus, in the second person, "You," I am one of the select few chosen for this year's recognition.

Not only am I capable of anteceding a pronoun, but I would count myself a member of the "new digital democracy," to which this "You" refers specifically. As a blogger, I am apparently one of "the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing," one who "will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

For all of you spoil-sports who say the editors copped out by naming such a large class of people, I would point out that the choice is not without precedent. Time named "the American Fighting-Man" in 1950, "the Hungarian Freedom Fighter" in 1956, "U.S. Scientists" in 1960, the entire world population under age twenty-five in 1966, "Middle Americans" in 1968, and all American women in 1975.

But this recognition of the great "You" of "Web 2.0" or whatever we choose to call the Internet these days has got me thinking. And what am I thinking about? That's right--porn. Because it occurs to me that Time is the same publication that in 1995 reported 83.5% of online content to be pornographic. Yes, the study on which that article was based has since been discredited, and a more recent estimate puts the number closer to 1%, but still and all, nobody can deny that there is an awful lot of smut out there.

Which means that, into the company of Gandhi, De Gaulle, Pope John XXIII, and yours truly, Time is impliedly placing the purveyors of "Sapphic Erotica," "Couples Seduce Teens," and "Big Sausage Pizza." The final site--I swear to God I'm not making this up--is devoted entirely to photo vignettes featuring unsuspecting pizza delivery men who arrive at girls'-nights-in, and are subsequently persuaded to introduce their members through the product.

I--we--stand on the shoulders of giants.

Guidelines for Those Who Wish to Record Their Child's Birth on Film

2006-12-13T00:45:00.000-05:00

As the arrival of young Miss P. draws near, I thought it might be of interest to share with you the hospital's policy on cameras in the delivery room:

Some couples may wish to photograph or videotape the delivery in the LDR room. The hospital is sensitive to this desire and has developed guidelines for those who wish to record their child's birth on film:

Video cameras are to be used only for an uncomplicated vaginal delivery.
If the mother requires an anesthesiologist, any procedure performed by that physician (such as placement of an epidural anesthetic) is not to be photographed or videotaped. It is important, and in the patient's best interest, that these physicians be allowed to concentrate on these delicate procedures without the intrusion of being photographed or videotaped.
If a physician or nurse is required to perform any procedure on the infant after delivery (such as suctioning or emergency resuscitation), that person may not be videotaped or photographed for the same reasons.

"In the patient's best interest" is here used in the same sense that my credit card company axed most of my free benefits "in an effort to serve me better." But then, I suppose it would be indecorous for the guidelines to read, "our malpractice carrier has advised us that, with respect to the procedures most likely to leave you paralyzed and your baby a vegetable should we fuck them up, it is in our best interest that your husband not stroll out with Plaintiff's Exhibit A in his camcorder."

The Unauthorized Practice of Law

2006-12-06T23:25:00.000-05:00

Earlier this week, I was watching a live webcast of oral arguments in Conaway v. Deane, Maryland's same-sex marriage case. You can read the briefs here and watch the video archive here, in case you're interested. I happened to leave the webcast running through the next case, In the Matter of the Application of --- for Admission to the Bar of Maryland. (The applicant's name, along with the video archive, are online, should you care to look for them--my spider/legal sense tells me it's unnecessary to repeat them here.)

The Court of Appeals of Maryland, like most state high courts, is in charge of admissions to the state bar. While the day-to-day work is delegated to the Maryland Board of Bar Examiners, anyone denied admission by the Board has the right to argue his case before the Court.

In this instance, the gentleman's application had been denied on a Board finding that he had engaged in the unauthorized practice of law in Maryland. (The domestic violence, not paying child support, and revocation of his Florida license didn't help.) But he had a defense to this allegation: he hadn't really been practicing law. Yes, his two-person law firm bore the applicant's name, and yes, he did see clients. But, he claimed, his Maryland-licensed partner was handling all the legal work. Pending admission, the applicant claimed, his sole function at the firm was to lay hands on the clients and heal them through the power of Jesus Christ.

I kid you not.

Kidney Swap Taxation

2006-11-29T22:33:00.000-05:00

Just in case you were wondering what it is we lawyers think about all day, have a look at this article by Villanova Law Professor James Maule.

It seems that a recent trend among transplant surgeons is to arrange "kidney swaps" among couples who are themselves blood-group incompatible.

The scheme works something like this: let's say Stuart and Frank, strangers to each other, each need a kidney. Stuart's wife Sally and Frank's wife Franny are willing donors, but can't give a kidney to their husbands because of blood group mismatches. Franny, however, is the correct blood group for Stuart, and Sally is the correct blood group for Frank. So the transplant program matches up the two couples, sticks Franny's kidney into Stuart and Sally's kidney into Frank, and everyone goes home happy. It's an innovative solution, not without ethical question marks, but a pretty cool idea all around.

And while the doctors are busy saving lives, what are we lawyers up to? Why nothing less important than figuring out whether the IRS should assess income tax on the exchange!

Indeed, Professor Maule believes the operation should be taxable:

These are not gifts, because each has conditioned donation on getting something in return. Each has a basis of zero in the exchanged kidney. Each has an amount realized equal to the fair market value of a kidney. The like-kind nonrecognition rules do not apply because it's not a trade, business, or investment activity. No other non-recognition provisions are relevant. There's no exclusion applicable to the transaction. The lack of cash is not an obstacle to the taxation of bartered exchanges. . . . There's no charitable contribution deduction because no charity receives the kidneys. The substance over form doctrine treats the exchange as a swap of kidneys between the two women, each then making a gift to her husband.

Lest you think tax professors completely heartless, you will be relieved to know that Maule does offer some hope for these patients-cum-entrepreneurs: they should be able to deduct the medical expenses from the transplant! So we can all enjoy Christmas this year after all, as long as we do not forget (as Maule takes care to remind us), that such expenses may be written off only insofar as they exceed 7.5% of adjusted gross income.

We All Feel Like That, Reggie, Now and Then

2006-11-22T00:01:00.000-05:00

"What?" you ask, constant reader, "you went all the way to England and didn't bring me anything back? Not even a recently declassified World War II-era communiqué between Britain's ambassador to Moscow and the Foreign Office?" Soothe thyself, fair friend, I have not forgot thee. Behold:

If the image is a bit difficult to decipher, here is a transcription:

H.M. EMBASSY
MOSCOW

Lord Pembroke
The Foreign Office
LONDON
6th April 1943

My Dear Reggie,

In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt.

We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when spring is upon us, but few of us would dare to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.

Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr,
H.M. Ambassador.