You can Leave your Heart but not your Foreskin in San Francisco

If a proposed initiative gets on the ballot and passes in San Francisco, it will be illegal to perform male circumcision in the city.  ”Intactivists” as they call themselves, feel that circumcision is barbaric and violates the boy’s or baby’s right to choose to be circumcised or not.

First Amendment Freedom of Religion rights of Jews and Muslims not withstanding, opponents of male circumcision claim it is unhealthy and dangerous.  Granted, there is risk with any medical procedure.  You can choke on a toothpick while cleaning your teeth.  However, this practice is over 3,000 years old and there does not seem to be a shortage of Jews, Muslims, or any other group who has chosen to circumcise its male children, nor is there any reported lack of libido in the healthy and mentally stable males as well.

It’s so typical.  For religious reasons, parents may choose not to vaccinate their children or let them have blood transfusions.  For religious reasons, women may be required to wear thick veils over their heads that inhibit their seeing or hearing on-coming traffic.  That’s all well and good to these busy bodies, but don’t do anything that allows the boys to identify culturally with the other members of their societies.

Needless to say, the simple solution is that if you don’t want to circumcise your child, then don’t, but that’s too simple to these people.  This is simply yet another example of some people trying to dictate how others should live their lives.  Are they planning to go around examining little boys’ crotches to make sure they weren’t snipped?  Maybe they’ll use TSA gropers-in-training for the job.

In one respect, I tend to agree.  It’s the boy’s body, let him decide.  In similar fashion, however, when we consider abortion, it’s the baby’s life.  Let him or her decide, too, if the abortion should take place.

Funny, they want to stop the family from snipping a piece of skin but they’ll do nothing about snuffing out a life.

Is Metric Really Useful?

Is Metric Really Useful?

When I would go overseas, my friends were all quick to tell me the joke:

Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A: Bilingual

Q: What do you call someone who speaks many languages?
A: Polylingual (or Multilingual – both are acceptable)

Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: An American

Apparently it’s good to speak several languages and I don’t argue with that.  Even here in the US in some places knowledge of Spanish is helpful and in a few others French is handy but nowhere are they absolutely required.

So what do we Americans have over our counterparts in other parts of the world?  We speak many units of measure.  We can speak cups, miles, inches, quarts, acres, and so many more.  Others speak only metric.  What a pity to be so limited to only one measurement system.  I would hope they feel deprived.

But is metric really needed?  I mean, I drank a 12-ounce can of soda.  I filled up my car with 15.3 gallons of gasoline.  I bought a quart of milk.  I drove 9.7 miles to work. I cooked a dozen eggs. I bought a pound of butter and a 3.5-ounce candy bar.  I even flushed the toilet with one gallon of water per flush.

I did not have any even metric quantity of any of those distances, weights or volumes.  I didn’t need it.  If you’re going to buy a fractional quantity of something, what difference does it make which units we use?

I suppose for the mathematically challenged it’s good that we have a measurement system that allow you simply to move a decimal point but what does that really get us?

So what is metric good for?  Yes, you can buy a 2-liter bottle of soda but that’s about all we buy metric (legally).  The only other commodity that I know of that is sold in metric quantities is drugs.  That’s probably because international drug lords wouldn’t know a pound if it bit them in the butt.  Even gold is sold by the (troy) ounce, diamonds by the carat and oil by the barrel.

As an example of how useless metric is to the average US citizen, my one-gallon flush used 3.8 liters of water.  Why not 4?

True, we measure distances to other planets in kilometers, but that’s about it.  In reality, though, does it matter if we’re 93,000,000 miles from the Sun or if we’re 150,000,000 kilometers?  Does it really amount to a hill of beans if the speed of light (the so-called speed limit of the Universe) is 186,000 miles per second (actually closer to 186,282 but who’s counting?) or if it’s 299,792,458 meters per second?  You can’t see it happen.  And regardless if you fall 32 ft/sec2 or 9.81 m/sec2, it’s still going to hurt when you hit.

We even use light years to measure distance which is neither metric nor Imperial (the name given to the US measuring units because they were once imposed by Imperial Britain).

What good is it to buy gasoline in liters if you measure your performance in miles per gallon?  It still costs about $40 to fill my gas tank.  Perhaps it’s time to start drilling in some of the 77,000 km2 of the Alaskan Arctic Refuge (ANWR) for some of the estimated 10 billion barrels of oil we have there.