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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
You’ve just had a baby boy! You’ve brought him home from the hospital, you’re getting into that routine of late night feedings and too frequent diaper changes, and you think, “Hmmm. What this situation really needs is for someone to take a pair of scissors to this little rascal’s penis.” I don’t get it. But apparently, home circumcisions are a thing, and there are “professionals” (using the term loosely) who are so committed to their hobby of chopping up baby penises that they’ll resign from regular work to commit to the practice.
As part of the BBC investigation, an actor phoned up Dr Siddiqui and asked him to conduct a home circumcision on their baby. He agreed, in direct contravention of his GMC ban. Since then, and after discovering he had been exposed by the BBC, Dr Siddiqui has resigned from his NHS job. The astonishing consequence of that resignation is that it now allows him to resume conducting circumcisions, which it appears he fully intends to do.
Yes, you did read that correctly. Circumcisions are completely unregulated in the UK, and anyone – you, me or the local barber – can set up a business cutting off baby boy’s foreskins at a hundred quid a pop. Any doctor under the employ of the NHS, however, is bound to the regulation of the GMC and the Quality and Care Commission. A circumcision conducted in a hospital, with anaesthetic and surgical implements is carefully controlled and subject to monitoring and audit. A circumcision conducted on a kitchen table or in a community centre is completely unregulated. There are more regulations surrounding the piercing of an ear than the surgical amputation of a foreskin.
Weird. You know, if a guy made a habit of going around kissing baby penises, he’d be locked up on the spot, but add some sharp knives and olive oil to the process, and suddenly it becomes an honored and respected traditional folk practice that must be allowed to continue without interference.
He’s doing it again. This time he cites Frontpage Magazine…and we could stop right there. That’s ranting neocon loon David Horowitz’s organ (word chosen deliberately) for presenting contrived and fallacious arguments against academics, leftists, feminists, and anyone with a conscience. Facts do not disturb Horowitz’s crusade, ever. I was at a talk he gave at St John’s University in which he claimed persecution by the liberal university (which allowed him to speak, no problem) and made the paranoid argument that the liberal professors wanted to stop students from hearing his words…which led to a student standing up in the Q&A to mention that his entire Peace Studies class was there, and that the professor had dismissed her class and asked them all to attend.
So, yeah, Frontpage Mag — we’re talking lunatic far right ratbags on parade. Just the source says “Pat Condell is a right-wing racist.”
But worse, what is the article he’s citing? A hit piece titled “Gypsies, Camps, and Thieves”, all about the horrible Roma and their filthy, welfare-sucking, child-stealing ways, calling them “sticky-fingered, labor-allergic newcomers”. That part is worth quoting in full. It’s from a section complaining about an article by Helen Pidd on the plight of the Roma.
Yes, she affirmed that Page Hall is a mess: “rubbish fills the gutters, and stained mattresses and sofas are piled up in gardens”; there are garbage bins “crawling with maggots”; garden furniture is being nipped out of people’s yards and garments stolen off of clotheslines. But Pidd preferred to close her article by focusing our attention not on the hundreds of sticky-fingered, labor-allergic newcomers who have turned Page Hall into a toxic- waste site, but on a handful of exceedingly unrepresentative gypsies whom she somehow managed to track down: a factory worker who told her he wants his kids “to be lawyers and doctors”; two teenagers who also said they have career aspirations; and, finally, a 10-year-old (always end with a kid!) who had “already picked up a South Yorkshire twang” and wants to be “a paid interpreter.” This was activist journalism with a vengeance, utterly and willfully blind to the basic realities of gypsy culture.
How dare she point out that poor people can have aspirations and ambition! We all know that the “reality of gypsy culture” is that they’re all shiftless thieves, so finding examples of Roma with the same ideals as Good White British Folk is simply “activist journalism”!
It’s standard far right bigotry, blaming the poor and oppressed for their poverty and oppression. And Pat Condell approves of it.
In an interview with Larry King, Sylvia Browne, the world’s worst psychic, predicted when she would die.
KING: OK. Do you know when you’re going to die?
BROWNE: Yes. When I’m 88.
Woops, wrong again. Sylvia Browne has died at age 77.
Read Jon Ronson’s article on Browne. Oh, what the world is now missing…
That’s all I need, another reason to cower at home in terror of the perils of the real world. Maryn McKenna imagines our Post-Antibiotic Future, that time when bacteria have more thoroughly evolved to resist our medicines — and you’ll be frightened after you read it, too.
Before antibiotics, five women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite. Three out of ten people who contracted pneumonia died from it. Ear infections caused deafness; sore throats were followed by heart failure. In a post-antibiotic era, would you mess around with power tools? Let your kid climb a tree? Have another child?
“Right now, if you want to be a sharp-looking hipster and get a tattoo, you’re not putting your life on the line,” says the CDC’s Bell. “Botox injections, liposuction, those become possibly life-threatening. Even driving to work: We rely on antibiotics to make a major accident something we can get through, as opposed to a death sentence.”
Bell’s prediction is a hypothesis for now—but infections that resist even powerful antibiotics have already entered everyday life. Dozens of college and pro athletes, most recently Lawrence Tynes of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have lost playing time or entire seasons to infections with drug-resistant staph, MRSA. Girls who sought permanent-makeup tattoos have lost their eyebrows after getting infections. Last year, three members of a Maryland family — an elderly woman and two adult children — died of resistant pneumonia that took hold after simple cases of flu.
She does offer some slight hope for the future.
What might hold off the apocalypse, for a while, is more antibiotics—but first pharmaceutical companies will have to be lured back into a marketplace they already deemed unrewarding. The need for new compounds could force the federal government to create drug-development incentives: patent extensions, for instance, or changes in the requirements for clinical trials. But whenever drug research revives, achieving a new compound takes at least 10 years from concept to drugstore shelf. There will be no new drug to solve the problem soon—and given the relentlessness of bacterial evolution, none that can solve the problem forever. In the meantime, the medical industry is reviving the old-fashioned solution of rigorous hospital cleaning, and also trying new ideas: building automatic scrutiny of prescriptions into computerized medical records, and developing rapid tests to ensure the drugs aren’t prescribed when they are not needed. The threat of the end of antibiotics might even impel a reconsideration of phages, the individually brewed cocktails of viruses that were a mainstay of Soviet Union medical care during the Cold War. So far, the FDA has allowed them into the U.S. market only as food-safety preparations, not as treatments for infections.
MORE SCIENCE. MUCH MORE.
But don’t worry! It’s not the fault of the visionaries, like Sebastian Thrum, who have been promoting the use of Massive Open Online Courses. No, we know where the problem lies: in those darn students.
After low performance rates, low student satisfaction and faculty revolt, Thrun announced this week that he has given up on MOOCs as a vision for higher education disruption. Thrun told Fast Company that the experiment failed because the students were not “ideal”. The “godfather of free online education” says that the racially, economically diverse students at SJSU,“were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives…[for them] this medium is not a good fit.” It seems disruption is hard when poor people insist on existing. Thrun has the right to fail. That’s just business. But he shouldn’t have the right to fail students like those at San Jose State and the public universities that serve them for the sake of doing business.
The article makes two major points: that MOOCs neglect issues of class and race and therefore are poor educational tools for precisely the people who would benefit most from free education resources, and we’ve been experimenting on poor and diverse students with these machine-based cheap teaching methods.
Man, I wish all of my classes were stocked with nothing but ideal students.
It’s grading time up here in the chilly North; we’ve got midterms we’re plowing through, and finals will come up in less than a month, and the students are all getting anxious. This is Minnesota, though, where we greatly value our emotional equilibrium, and our language emphasizes subtle distinctions that would more typically provoke a greater range of expression than you might find in New York or the South. This is also true of our practice of giving grades.
Perhaps you are visiting Minnesota, or are newly enrolled in one of the schools here, or are perusing a transcript from a Minnesota student, and you find yourself confused by our traditional folkways. Here then is a useful translation table from standard academic A-F grades to the more nuanced expressions we use around here.
| Academic | Minnesotan | Translation |
| A | Not too bad. | You’ve done excellent work, but we wouldn’t want you to get too cocky now. |
| B | You betcha. | I am vaguely happy about your progress. |
| C | That’s nice. | I am not at all impressed, but I’m not about to say that to your face. |
| D | That’s interesting. | Are you from Iowa, perhaps? Or maybe Wisconsin? We don’t do things like that around here. |
| F | That’s different. | I am struggling to express my profound revulsion in a way that won’t immediately incite conflict. |
(Note: C, D, and F grades may be emphasized with the modifier “sure”. “That’s sure different,” for instance, is a much stronger statement. It is not a good thing.)
Just as a general rule, Minnesotans value an affect as flat as the prairies up around Fargo/Moorhead, and must be read with an appreciation of delicate motor skills. A slightly raised eyebrow, for instance, has the same emotional impact as a Brooklynite screaming obscenities at you and making rude gestures.
This can sometimes have a devastating retroactive effect on visitors, once they realize how Minnesotan minds work. You know that nice little lady at the Mall of America who gave you cookie samples and greeted you with that lovely sing-song accent and smiled at you? The tightness of that smile, once you know how to read a Minnesotan, may have actually meant “I will make you dance the blood eagle and drape your bowels from the rafters, foreign scum!”
I am not a native Minnesotan, but my mother was born here. And let me tell you, it’s only many years after the fact that I realized how angry I’d sometimes made her when I was a child.
There was a creeper caught in Chicago.
A 70-year-old Tinley Park man accused of using dandelions to try to lure four Grissom Middle School children into his car last month…
Why? What horrible thing was he trying to do with these kids?
…told police he was actually trying to teach them about creationism.
Gaaaah! Well, it could have been worse, much worse. But it’s still rather awful that he was trying to poison those kids’ minds.
Police caught up with the man on Nov. 5, based on descriptions the children provided of him and his vehicle.
Asked about the incident, the man said he’d recently returned from a seminar debunking Darwinism. He said he wanted to share the information he’d learned that proved the theory of evolution "is false" with neighbors and children.
Now I’m curious, though. What creation seminar was this that drove a good Christian to drive about, trying to lure children into his car?
And why did the police just let him go?
