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.

Gotta Love those Numbers

We know that most statistics are bogus in one way or another.  Oh, the margin of error might be 2.73844692% or some other just about as valid number, however the truth is not in the numbers but rather in the questions asked or the data chosen for the report.  I’d like to take two examples that I feel are very suspect, both from last Friday’s (Feb 18, 20110 USA Today.

The first one entitled “Late Mortgage Payments Declined” began:

The Mortgage Bankers Association said 8.2% of homeowners missed at least one mortgage payment in the October-December quarter.  The figure, adjusted for seasonal factors [emphasis mine] improved from 9.1% in the previous quarter.

My question is, how does one reasonably seasonally adjust late mortgage payments?  We see it every month with the phony labor statistics where unemployment is “seasonally adjusted”.  Is it that if you don’t have a job in the wrong season that you’re not really unemployed?

Either you made your mortgage payment or you didn’t.  Is it OK not to pay your mortgage during the late months due to holidays?  Is is OK not to pay your mortgage during summer when you might be on vacation rather than paying your mortgage?  What is it?  If you know, please post a reply here.

The other problem was with an article entitled “Most consumers OK with new bulbs,” which tries to prove that the Republicans are wrong to try and repeal the phase out of 100-watt incandescent light bulbs.

According to the study, most Americans are “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the new compact florescent (CF) or light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs so what’s the beef?  The article implied that the Congress was wasting its time on this subject and therefore by extension were in favor of frying the planet and hasten Global Warming.  They couldn’t say that with winter being as cold as it is, so they have to imply it.

The problem I have here is that the questions merely asked about the performance of the new bulbs.  One should be satisfied if one turns on the light switch and the light comes on.  However, the people were not asked how they felt about being forced to spend upwards of 10 times the cost of the old bulbs for a new one.

The people were not asked how they felt about needing at least 5 years on some of their bulbs to break even due to the increased cost versus energy savings.

The people were not asked how they felt when a 7-year CF didn’t last even 2 years before it needed to be replaced,thus never realizing the energy cost savings.

The people were not asked how they plan to dispose of these poisonous mercury-containing bulbs that cannot be thrown out in the normal trash or even discarded in recycle bins.

The first article mucks with the numbers by scrubbing the data.  The second article asks a question that is meaningless to the true issue at hand and thus drawing a false conclusion.

The sad thing is that we have to read the newspaper as critically as they should have been when they wrote their articles.

What can you expect, however, from the liberal media?

Free Speech Kill Switch

Late last year Congress introduced a bill to allow the President to turn off the Internet when there is a “significant cyber threat”.  The bill died in committee when Congress adjourned.  Lately, the bill has had a resurgence of support.

Interestingly enough, the legislation was resurrected the same day that Egypt killed the Internet in its country to quell protests against Mubarak’s government.  Also interestingly enough, the bill was reintroduced by a Republican, Susan Collins of Maine.  Republicans are the supposed Bastions of Liberty in the face of the raging incrementalism of Socialism that is overtaking our country.

Perhaps what Ross Perot (and others) have said about the mainstream Republicans and the Democrats not having “a dime’s worth of difference” between them is not so far off.  Senator Collins, of course, does not have the Tea Party to answer to as she was last elected in 2008 and won’t be up for re-election until 2014, two years after the Mayan Calendar recycles, so maybe the world will end by then.

According to Senator Collins, it allows “the government to work with the private sector” when the country is faced by cyber terrorism.  Now, let me ask, when has Big Brother ever “worked” with anyone?  In the face of a cyber terror attack will they call committee meetings or create some joint fact finding commission to determine the threat level?  Heavens, no!  It took the Gulf Oil Spill Commission six months to determine that BP (and others) screwed up.  On the contrary, some Internet Czar will have the power to mandate a “temporary” shut down of segments of the Internet on his or her command.

Why is this bad?  Would not our banking and power grid be at risk if there was a true cyber attack?  Probably yes.  However, giving the Government the power to kill electronic communication is not the answer.

If certain sectors need protecting, then they should put in their own protection.  If it’s in the interest of the banking community to have better electronic protection, they should spend some of the bailout money on protecting their systems and networks rather than giving millions of dollars of that money in bonuses to overpaid executives.

Put the banking community on its own subnet that can be segregated from the rest of the Internet.  You know the military is on its own subnet.  There’s no way we could execute any war if Obama or any other President hit the kill switch on the Internet.  Do the same with the power grid and any other segment that needs to be protected.

This is, however, what the bill’s proponents suggest will be the case.  But which human can determine if any part of the Internet is under attack and what to do about it quickly enough?  When computers can send thousands of messages each second, would a person notice before it’s too late?  Would a human know which sectors to shut down or would it be just “safer” to shut down everything while a committee figured out what the problem was?  Put the software to detect attacks where the systems are that might be attacked.

The danger, as I see it, is yet one more step at eroding our Constitutional rights.  Giving anyone the ability to shut down parts of the Internet is, in my opinion an unconstitutional attack on the First Amendment that prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Shut down the Internet and you cannot send an e-mail to your Congressperson or Senator.  Shut down the Internet and you cannot electronically assemble with your friends or colleagues.   Shut down the Internet and bloggers (I admit this entry is somewhat self-serving) cannot criticize the ability of the Government to shut down the Internet.

Giving anyone in Government the ability to shut down any kind of communications is just “one small step for eroding freedoms, one giant leap for totalitarianism.”

Oh, it will be for our own good.  Simply ignore the fact that there is a technological solution to this technological problem.  Like all good Socialists, the bill’s supporters believe that only the Government can solve this or any other problem.

This is yet one more proof that we’ll never conquer artificial intelligence until we first overcome natural stupidity.

Location, Location, Location, or is it Spin?

I recently received our local yellow rag newspaper.  You know, the one that is simply a delivery vehicle for grocery and other store store ads that allows them to bypass paying the Post Office to deliver them.  They also come with no coupons so they really are a waste of time.

Usually I simply pull it out of the plastic wrapper and then throw it directly into the recycle bin and discard the plastic with the rest of the trash.  I do try to be green about it but definitely come short of letting it substitute for my Charmin.

This time, however, the headline caught my eye.  It simply read, “Building permits surge in Wake Forest.”  According to the crack journalist who compiled the story permits for residential buildings were up 86% in 2010 over 2009.  Wake Forest must be the happenin’ place to be!

Fortunately you only had to read the second paragraph to find out that this 86% increase was over the 14-year low of 2009. Those of you who follow this blog know that statistics can be deceiving.  “Figures never lie but liars figure”, right?  Sadly, you have to get to page 6N, very near the end of the article to see that the almost 400 permits last year was down over 60% from the peak in 2005, so don’t everyone come running here looking for work.

So how do we take this?  86% over continued decreases don’t bring us up out of the water, however an 86% increase is much better than a 10% decrease.  And, if these homes are more reasonable and affordable, they probably will sell well to those who truly can afford them.

If builders, bankers, agents and buyers can work together responsibly, we can all make this local housing upturn successful.  Perhaps the model can be repeated elsewhere.  Jobs and growth without government bailouts.