Author: Tony

Who dreams of being Rich Uncle Pennybags?

The National Association of Broadcasters issued a press release yesterday, quoting NAB Executive Vice President Dennis Wharton:

“XM and Sirius have spent upwards of $20 million trying to bamboozle the Beltway into believing that a monopoly is good for consumers. Yet when you cut through all the distortions displayed by XM and Sirius, you are left with one undisputable fact: Never in history has a monopoly served consumers better than competition.”

The NAB conveniently leaves out any facts to corroborate this bold statement. I’m not interested in challenging it directly, because the basic gist is fine if unrevealing. Competition is good. I believe that. I just wish the NAB believed it.

The existence of press releases and lobbying demonstrate that the NAB knows that it competes with satellite radio. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t spend millions to defeat this merger. It is not acting solely in the best interest of consumers. Incentives matter, and here the incentive is to reduce the strength of all providers of competing technology.

I rarely listen to terrestrial broadcast radio anymore. There is a sameness that is pre-packaged and unimaginative. It’s simply not interesting. I’d rather listen to the artists I enjoy and discover new artists through friends, blogs, and iTunes. Even the limited broadcast offerings I enjoy are available as podcasts, which demonstrates that terrestrial broadcasters agree with the Sirius-XM view of the radio industry’s competition model.

Satellite radio didn’t turn me away from NAB’s clients. Sirius and XM existed when I went looking for an alternative. To be fair, I don’t listen to the music channels on Sirius that often. The repetition of a limited playlist exists there, as well. Maybe it’ll cost Sirius my subscription in the future. Maybe they’ll change. But for now, it has Howard Stern, which is what I want.

The NAB’s press release includes a list of groups and lawmakers opposing the proposed merger, which is its only support for the validity of its position. It takes a little more than that, unfortunately. Instead of putting out pointless press releases calling for competition with a list of politicians, it could actually query those politicians and ask why they abhor the Constitution’s First Amendment, as just one action in the interest of consumers. Or does the NAB not actually care about consumers as much as it cares about remaining partnered with politicians to limit its need to compete?

I hope Philadelphia isn’t built on swampland.

Remember when I wrote that Washington is “the swamp where Philadelphia’s October dreams go to die”? That was just over one month ago, when the Phillies pushed back into the playoff race. Again. But this time we escaped the Washington swamp, winning 3 of 4 games. That puts us here, tied with six games to play in the regular season.

Just like last year, when we fell short.

I’ve entered the lottery for the right to purchase playoff tickets. Again. I’d like to believe that we’re positioned well, since we face the Braves and Nationals at home, while the Padres are on the road. We’ve dominated in the NL East this year, but playing the spoiler is a huge motivator. Also, the Braves are only three games out, so a sweep of us could put them in the mix. I may go insane if this season ends like every other pennant race involving the Phillies this decade.

Go Phillies!

“Unlawful personal injury” is an excellent description.

This is a step in the right direction:

A regional appeals court in Frankfurt am Main found that the circumcision of an 11-year-old Muslim boy without his approval was an unlawful personal injury.

According to the court, circumcision can “be important in individual cases for the cultural-religious and physical self-image,” even if there are no health disadvantages involved. So the decision about whether or not to go through with a circumcision is “a central right of a person to determine his identity and life.”

The penis belongs to the individual, not the individual’s parents or society. That’s as it should be, although the court failed to rule on an age minimum. The answer should be birth, although I don’t hold out much hope in the short-term for that lucid conclusion. Also, some of the court’s reasoning was silly.

The court suggested, in part, that it was a punishable offense to subject one’s child to teasing by other children for looking different.

That wouldn’t translate to the United States, where we have warped views of what it means to look different, how a person should decide to value the opinion of others, and whether or not those decisions belong to the individual or his parents. It’s also bad legal reasoning, since children would then have a “right” to fashionable clothing, for example, if his friends might laugh at him otherwise. Still, I applaud the basic outcome of the ruling. The court seems to have understood that forced circumcision is wrong.

A Correction and Further Proof

I’ve noted the correction in the original entry, but yesterday I incorrectly identified the author of the referenced editorial as a female. Hilary Bainemigisha is a male. The article did not make it clear, but I shouldn’t have made the mistake.

Thankfully, in submitting my entry, Digg user actics linked to a blog entry from the 4th International AIDS Society. The entry that actics used to (easily) figure out Mr. Bainemigisha’s gender is quite telling, given the irrationality Mr. Bainemigisha’s editorial endorsed. The setup:

[Dr Andrew Grulich of Australia’s National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research] said doctors in one well-run Kenyan circumcision study detected a slight but statistically significant increase in HIV infections among circumcised men at the end of the study, when they seemed to have become overly confident that circumcision would protect them completely from HIV and did away with using condoms, despite the warnings of the study organisers. Despite the slight increase in the number of circumcised men who became infected with HIV, it should be noted that overall, far fewer of the circumcised men became infected, in comparison with the control group of uncircumcised men.

The first sentence is the key, but it’s amazing how readily people are to focus only on that second sentence (which has its own problems, when considered in context).

But at 50% protection, there is nothing better than circumcision right now for men.

OK, condoms work brilliantly. But people don’t use them. (For example, Ansbert has two children, so presumably he didn’t use condoms at least twice in his life. And look at all those men, circumcised or not, who were told to use condoms and didn’t in the Kenyan study.)

The example of fathering children is irrelevant, and the “look at all those men” doesn’t mean what is interpreted here. But don’t worry, it gets worse.

With circumcision, a man doesn’t have to remember!

Without condoms and monogamy, he will still get HIV. With condoms and monogamy, circumcision is unnecessary.

So many want to have so much faith in circumcision that they abandon all rational consideration of the facts to make the story conform to the predetermined solution. It’s just as easy to believe in unicorns, but that doesn’t make unicorns real. Common sense has a place in medicine.

Thanks go to Digg user actics for this useful help. I shouldn’t have made the mistake on Mr. Bainemigisha’s gender. It’s been corrected. But my analysis didn’t depend on the journalist’s gender; it remains. Individuals who think like Mr. Bainemigisha and Esther Nakkazi, who wrote the blog entry discussed here, are being irrational.

If you have ears, allow something rational to pass through them to your brain.

In what can only be described as the most bizarre pro-circumcision editorial you’ll ever read, Hilary Bainemigisha urges men in Uganda to get circumcised to fight HIV. There are soccer metaphors and a weird belief in the penis as the “author of life”. All of it is idiotic, and the circumcision claims are irrational, as usual, including a recitation of the “circumcision is the best HIV prevention strategy” myth. There’s even a claim that men should get circumcised, no wait, get the facts and decide for yourself, then get circumcised. And then we’re graced with this, which is supposed to show how necessary circumcision is:

A study in the 12 months before the population survey revealed that 32% of HIV-positive women and 22% of HIV-positive men had sex with non-regular partners in the past year. 34% men and 5% women who were HIV-positive had sex with more than two partners. Of these, only 16% men and 17% women used condoms. And among discordants (where one partner is positive and the other negative), 5% used condoms consistently.

I’m beginning to wonder if people really are this stupid and blind to reality. If you have unprotected sex with multiple partners and a significant percentage of those partners are already HIV-positive, you will become HIV-positive. It is inevitable. Yet, the author asks:

Is this the environment you and your sons want to swim through with an uncircumcised [sic] tail?

If I were you, I would look at my penis, look at all the male members of my family and think about the five million who die annually of HIV. Then I would mobilise all of us, at whatever age, to get to hospital. I would also vow to afford the same protection to any newly born son to the family.

Not only is he indifferent to what he’s just demonstrated, he’s now lumped male children into the push for circumcision based on studies that looked exclusively at voluntary adult circumcision. If you’re going to live in your own world, devoid of facts, you might as well throw in a lack of ethics, I suppose.

Also, I’m proposing a new maxim. The trustworthiness of the circumcision proponent decreases exponentially with each euphemism for penis. If you can’t be mature enough to write penis instead of tail, you do not deserve to be taken seriously¹.

But remember, circumcision does not make you invincible. It only improves your escape chances by 60%. You still need to move along with the Abstinence Be Faithful, Use a Condom (ABC) approach, if you want to see your grandchildren.

No kidding. So why is it so difficult to understand that with the ABC approach, the risk of HIV is reduced for all, including intact males?

Finally, I call upon our female population to add a voice to my plea.

Find a way of getting men off their behinds to face the knife. The tool in question belongs to you as much as it belongs to men and had it not been for you, there would not be need to circumcise it.

First, see my new maxim in relation to tool².

More importantly, no, the man’s penis doesn’t belong to his partner (or should I say “partners”, given the statistic offered and ignored). Just like a child’s penis does not belong to his parents. We do not accept such thinking for men wishing to change the bodies of their female partners or daughters. The same must hold true for the author’s contention.

Update: The original version of this entry incorrectly referred to Hilary Bainemigisha using the pronoun she. It’s been corrected. I apologize for the confusion.

¹ To the extent that anyone proposing circumcision to prevent HIV should be taken seriously.

² I find member most common, which is the best proof of the immaturity on this issue.

Will Democrats challenge or fold?

John Cole’s position on the nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General is the best I’ve read:

And so on and so forth. Again, confirmation is probably the right thing to do, but I would do it with some opposition, because the despicable bastards on the right will just expect you to let him continue the popular Bush policy of ‘DOING WHATEVER THE FUCK WE WANT’ should he be greenlighted without opposition.

And George Will’s column in today’s Washington Post is exactly the opposition necessary given this president’s absurd Constitutional claims. Primarily, this, in the form of questions for Mr. Mukasey:

The Bush administration says “the long war” — the war on terrorism — is a perpetual emergency that will last for generations. Waged against us largely by non-state actors, it will not end with a legally clarifying and definitive surrender. The administration regards America as a battlefield, on which even an American citizen can be seized as an “enemy combatant” and detained indefinitely. You ruled that presidents have this power, but you were reversed on appeal. What do you think was the flaw in the reasoning of the court that reversed you?

I’ve read that civil libertarians are unlikely to find reasons to agree with Mr. Mukasey’s approach. The American “enemy combatant” example alone is enough for me to be aghast at his concern for our Constitution. His inevitable push for more “tools” in the president’s never-ending war is scary, too. Unlike what the Wall Street Journal prefers us to believe, Mr. Will understands the Attorney General’s job.

Attorneys general serve at the pleasure of the presidents who choose them but swear to uphold the Constitution.

The Constitution should be held above mere politics. I have no faith that it will be before January 2009.

Sen. Obama’s class warfare isn’t refreshing.

For all the talk about a change in the politics of the Left signaled by the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, I’d expect to see change rather than the same class-based stupidity.

“In our new economy, there is no shortage of new wealth,” he told the Tax Policy Center. “But wages are not keeping pace…This isn’t the invisible hand of a market at work. It’s the successful work of special interests. For decades, we’ve seen successful strategies to ride anti-tax sentiment in this country towards tax cuts that favor wealth, not work. And for decades, we’ve seen the gaps in wealth in this country grow wider, while the costs to working people are greater.”

I wish that Sen. Obama meant the perverse nature of tax incentives and the inefficient complexity of the tax code because that would be a conversation worth pursuing. Instead, he’s doing little more than imitating John Edwards.

Sen. Obama seems to believe that U.S. income taxes are regressive, so he’s advocating $80 billion in tax cuts for “work”. This is in a system in which the bulk of the burden is already carried by the group allegedly “favored” so much in Washington. That $80 billion has to come from somewhere, so that’ll be from “wealth”.

I guess I should be grateful such a rebel is running for high office.

For specific analysis of Sen. Obama’s plan, I recommend this entry by Chris Edwards at Cato @ Liberty. For example:

Third, Obama proposed special tax breaks for seniors, which would take 7 million more elderly completely off the tax rolls. But that would inject a very unfair element of age discrimination into the tax code. Old folks are already taking young folks to the cleaners in terms of federal fiscal policy. Obama would make the injustice worse, yet he had the chutzpah to claim in his tax speech: “It’s time to stand up to the special interest carve outs.”

Vote for Sen. Obama and you too can have other people pay your share.

$8,965,000,000,000

Who needs to act responsibly when that can be pushed off to another generation day?

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told Congress on Wednesday that the federal government will hit the current debt ceiling on Oct. 1.

He urged quick action to increase the limit, saying it was essential to protect the “full faith and credit” of the country, especially at a time of financial market turmoil.

Wouldn’t the “full faith and credit” of the country be better protected by not spending more money than we have?

This request isn’t unusual, since it happens every year or so when the Treasury has to follow the law at the same time our elected representatives are spending recklessly the fruits of redistribution. Remember this from March 2006:

“I know that you share the president’s and my commitment to maintaining the full faith and credit of the U.S. government,” [then-Treasury Secretary John] Snow said in his letter to leaders in the House and Senate.

Our script is stuck on stupid, apparently.

To put this in perspective, the debt ceiling was $5.95 trillion when President Bush took office. The Senate Finance Committee recently approved a new debt ceiling of $9.82 trillion. Just shy of $6 trillion in debt in more than 200 years. Just over $3 trillion more in under 7 years, with a new request for the ability to accrue another $900 billion. Heckuva job.

For those who enjoy war, everyone is a potential enemy.

I agree with Andrew Sullivan in describing President Bush as “a fucking disgrace”, based on this recap of the president meeting with a group of sycophants conservative journalists at the White House:

President Bush may have been most emphatic though when it came to the topic of “those left wing ads” attacking General Petraeus. The president brought the infamous New York Times MoveOn ad up without prompting, saying of his reaction to it: “I was incredulous at first and then became mad.”

“It is one thing to attack me — which is fine,” the president said. But the president’s view the attack on Petraeus as “an attack on men and women in uniform.” [sic somewhere in there]

As usual, our president sees the world only in black or white, and his view is concerned with the petty rather than the important. I don’t feel safer knowing this, even though I think Kathryn Jean Lopez expects us all to applaud the president’s irrational mind.

For bonus points, the blog entry at The Corner has an ad in the sidebar that asks “Why is MoveOn attacking Rudy Guiliani?” The answer: “Because he’s their worst nightmare.” Schoolyard egotism is not mature statecraft.

Maryland Court rules in favor of discrimination.

For anyone who still thinks the anti-same-sex marriage amendments and proposals of the last several years were motivated by anything other than bigotry, consider today’s news from Maryland’s highest court:

A divided Court of Appeals ruled that Maryland’s 1973 ban on gay marriage does not discriminate on the basis of gender and does not deny any fundamental rights, and that the state has a legitimate interest in promoting opposite-sex marriage.

I’m sure the reasoning to get to “legitimate interest” for denying equality is faulty, but I’ll leave that analysis to other bloggers. Instead, I want to focus on this:

“Our opinion should by no means be read to imply that the General Assembly may not grant and recognize for homosexual persons civil unions or the right to marry a person of the same sex,” Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr. wrote for the four-judge majority, which also included Judges Dale R. Cathell, Clayton Greene Jr. and Alan M. Wilner.

It’s a cop-out because our rights are not decreed by legislatures, as the Court seems to be implying. However, the Court is definitely saying that the legislature may offer rights beyond the (incorrect) boundary for marriage it has set. That quote is easy enough to interpret.

“I think it was the legitimate response,” [Delegate Don Dwyer, R-Anne Arundel] said. “They did as other states have done and ordered the legislature to act.”

Dwyer, one of the General Assembly’s most conservative members, said he plans to introduce a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, as he has three times in the past, “to make sure we have the insurance to make sure this will not come up again in the future.”

The Court ruled in agreement with Dwyer’s¹ position. It’s temporary in my opinion, but his side has won. He can’t accept that as vindication. He has to make certain that gays and lesbians in Maryland never get full access to their rights. That’s what bigotry looks like.

¹ Del. Dwyer’s made appearances here in the past on this issue. In January 2006, he sought to impeach Circuit Court Judge M. Brooke Murdock for ruling that same-sex marriage restrictions violate the Maryland Constitution. Once an activist legislator, always an activist legislator, apparently.