While on the subject of health, and because I remember rather too well a somewhat bullying response to an interlocutor, whom you accused, as I recall, of having ‘problems’ many months ago, I suggest that you might look at the website Intact America, where it is explained cleartly why circumcision is not necessarily a good idea. I come from a country (Britain) and live in another (Japan) where baby boys are not routinely subjected to a very painful and sometimes dangerous operation – and a very good thing, too.
It was ‘issues’, not ‘problems’. And I should also add that in general I like your blog very much; it is well-written and stimulating. But on circumcision – no; I – as a male, though not merely because of that accident – think you are very wrong, and your attitude on being disagreed with at that time was not pleasing.
Tim, You wouldn’t happen to be that interlocutor who got dissed, would ya? It just seems that you’re addressing a complete non issue in relation to the subject of health. You’re talking about what amounts to nothing more than a cosmetic procedure on males.
No I am not the interlocutor who got dissed; as to whether she still reads Mahablog I don’t know. With respect to health, circumcision is not a non-issue, as you would learn if you bothered to acquaint yourself with it. It is far from being a mere cosmetic procedure, and to say so points to a lamentable ignorance. I suggest that you, too, look up the website America Intact, and find out something about it. Women talk much, and rightly, of respect being shown to their bodies; perhaps the same respect might be afforded men, and those baby boys who are not consulted when an extremely painful and certainly not safe operation is inflicted on them for no good reason.
Tim — There is all kinds of research that says circumcision significantly reduces the risk of HIV infection, to the point that health care officials in countries with significant AIDS problems want to offer incentives to men to be circumcised. This is something you would learn if you bothered to acquaint yourself with it.
You should see a psychologist to find out why you are so obsessed with circumcision. Also, don’t come back here. Good bye.
I don’t understand why the right is so against universal health care, but dotes with such obsession upon the military.
An Apache attack helicopter costs approx. 18 million dollars per unit.
an Abrams tank costs 4.35 million per copy
an armored humvee is 150 thousand bucks, the cost to replace standard humvees in Iraq with armored humvees is estimated at 1.8 BILLION bucks.
A hellfire II missile, without the bells and whistles, costs 65 thousand bucks.
The estimated cost per troop fielded in Iraq or Afghanistan is 350 thousand dollars. This is a bunch of money to spend on elective wars.
It is akin to ignoring that melanoma becaues its duck season.
Granted, the folks at general dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing give us a lot BANG for our buck ( no pun intended), but as the mask drops to show this “recession” is indeed the great depression part deux , as more on the right become aware they have been played for stooges as the jobs and benefits continue to evaporate.
As Joanie sang; “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ’till its gone.”
Did you cut off comments on the Frank Ricci post? I can find no way to comment on it.
Yes, I did cut off comments to the Frank Ricci post, because it was beginning to attract WMFSFTs. (White Men Feeling Sorry For Themseves) I can’t deal with that today. Not up to it.
Well, That is one category (WMFSFT) that I have never been in and if I appear “white” in the pic, it may be b/c my forbearers were from Ireland & England.
Commenting here on the Ricci post. This made my day:
“All it takes is a grievance and a dream.”
Thanks for the guffaw!
The Penguin excells witht the facts about healh care in the US vs systems in other countries. It’s worh looking back on his previous posts. He’s also up on economics, which sends most normal humans running and screaming. But economics is to politics what weather is to camping. Ignore the subject at your peril. Somehow he makes sense of it for an average dummy like me; I have to read Krugman on economics 3 times sometimes to make any sense of it. A good read.
I really have to weigh in on the subject of circumcision. I gave birth to two boys and had them circumcised on the advice of my obstetrician who said it reduces the chance of infections and it’s better to do it when they’re babies than have to have it done when they’re fourteen. This was way before the time of HIV/AIDS.
Later on when I was a student nurse, I had the opportunity to observe a circumcision. It is far from a simple cosmetic procedure. The baby was restrained by the wrist and ankles. There was no kind of painkiller given to the baby, it was conscious. When the surgeon started cutting, immediately the baby started screaming and its face turned beet red. Fortunately, it didn’t last very long but the baby was crying long after it was finished. I was crying too and felt very guilty that I had submitted my babies to that torture.
Circumcision may reduce the chance of infections but it is abolutely not necessary to good health. I consider it a barbaric procedure.
Grannyeagle — I understand they’re using local and topical anesthesia for neonatal circumcision these days so the infants aren’t so distressed.
I can appreciate that some parents might choose not to have an infant son circumcised, and that’s OK with me, but I think that someone like Tim who seems to be fixated on the subject and is dragging around some sense of grievance about it is possibly suffering from psychological displacement and should get therapy to discover what’s really eating at him.
I feel like I stepped into a late 60’s edition of Playboy here with all the talk of a certain surgery.
Meanwhile, the problem of health care economics is one that keeps getting ignored by all the people focused on health care politics who keep whining “socialism!” or “tyranny!” or whatever nonsense they’re spouting. The fact of the matter is that the current system is unsustainable, and cannot be fixed via free market interventions (see link above) because the natural result is an endless upward spiral that will bankrupt the nation due to the disconnect between payment and cost. This does not happen with auto insurance or homeowner’s insurance because there is an upper bounds imposed by the replacement cost of the goods being insured, but in the case of healthcare there is no such upper bounds — your insurer can turn to you and say “$20K to repair your car is too much, here’s the $18K your car is worth, go buy another one”, but can’t say “$1M to repair your health is too much, here’s the $100K your life is worth, go buy another one.” You *can’t* buy another life — you only get one life.
Without significant and serious government intervention, our nation is going to be bankrupted by its medical-industrial complex the same way the USSR was bankrupted by its military-industrial complex. That’s just the facts.
– Badtux the Healthcare Economics Penguin
Health Care: Why Aren’t They Listening
` Apparently our elected leaders aren’t listening. It has been brought to my attention that sending emails and signing online petitions ends up being so much spam on some aide’s desk. What we need to do is go back to regular mail, i.e. snail mail. A letter costs 44 cents and a postcard is only 28 cents. Bags of mail in a representative’s or senator’s office will get more attention.
Keep your handwritten message short and to the point: such as “I’m in favor of a single payer type of health care reform”. Then just sign it and mail it.
While on the subject of health, and because I remember rather too well a somewhat bullying response to an interlocutor, whom you accused, as I recall, of having ‘problems’ many months ago, I suggest that you might look at the website Intact America, where it is explained cleartly why circumcision is not necessarily a good idea. I come from a country (Britain) and live in another (Japan) where baby boys are not routinely subjected to a very painful and sometimes dangerous operation – and a very good thing, too.
It was ‘issues’, not ‘problems’. And I should also add that in general I like your blog very much; it is well-written and stimulating. But on circumcision – no; I – as a male, though not merely because of that accident – think you are very wrong, and your attitude on being disagreed with at that time was not pleasing.
Tim, You wouldn’t happen to be that interlocutor who got dissed, would ya? It just seems that you’re addressing a complete non issue in relation to the subject of health. You’re talking about what amounts to nothing more than a cosmetic procedure on males.
No I am not the interlocutor who got dissed; as to whether she still reads Mahablog I don’t know. With respect to health, circumcision is not a non-issue, as you would learn if you bothered to acquaint yourself with it. It is far from being a mere cosmetic procedure, and to say so points to a lamentable ignorance. I suggest that you, too, look up the website America Intact, and find out something about it. Women talk much, and rightly, of respect being shown to their bodies; perhaps the same respect might be afforded men, and those baby boys who are not consulted when an extremely painful and certainly not safe operation is inflicted on them for no good reason.
Tim — There is all kinds of research that says circumcision significantly reduces the risk of HIV infection, to the point that health care officials in countries with significant AIDS problems want to offer incentives to men to be circumcised. This is something you would learn if you bothered to acquaint yourself with it.
You should see a psychologist to find out why you are so obsessed with circumcision. Also, don’t come back here. Good bye.
I don’t understand why the right is so against universal health care, but dotes with such obsession upon the military.
An Apache attack helicopter costs approx. 18 million dollars per unit.
an Abrams tank costs 4.35 million per copy
an armored humvee is 150 thousand bucks, the cost to replace standard humvees in Iraq with armored humvees is estimated at 1.8 BILLION bucks.
A hellfire II missile, without the bells and whistles, costs 65 thousand bucks.
The estimated cost per troop fielded in Iraq or Afghanistan is 350 thousand dollars. This is a bunch of money to spend on elective wars.
It is akin to ignoring that melanoma becaues its duck season.
Granted, the folks at general dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing give us a lot BANG for our buck ( no pun intended), but as the mask drops to show this “recession” is indeed the great depression part deux , as more on the right become aware they have been played for stooges as the jobs and benefits continue to evaporate.
As Joanie sang; “Don’t it always seem to go, you don’t know what you’ve got ’till its gone.”
Did you cut off comments on the Frank Ricci post? I can find no way to comment on it.
Yes, I did cut off comments to the Frank Ricci post, because it was beginning to attract WMFSFTs. (White Men Feeling Sorry For Themseves) I can’t deal with that today. Not up to it.
Well, That is one category (WMFSFT) that I have never been in and if I appear “white” in the pic, it may be b/c my forbearers were from Ireland & England.
Commenting here on the Ricci post. This made my day:
“All it takes is a grievance and a dream.”
Thanks for the guffaw!
The Penguin excells witht the facts about healh care in the US vs systems in other countries. It’s worh looking back on his previous posts. He’s also up on economics, which sends most normal humans running and screaming. But economics is to politics what weather is to camping. Ignore the subject at your peril. Somehow he makes sense of it for an average dummy like me; I have to read Krugman on economics 3 times sometimes to make any sense of it. A good read.
I really have to weigh in on the subject of circumcision. I gave birth to two boys and had them circumcised on the advice of my obstetrician who said it reduces the chance of infections and it’s better to do it when they’re babies than have to have it done when they’re fourteen. This was way before the time of HIV/AIDS.
Later on when I was a student nurse, I had the opportunity to observe a circumcision. It is far from a simple cosmetic procedure. The baby was restrained by the wrist and ankles. There was no kind of painkiller given to the baby, it was conscious. When the surgeon started cutting, immediately the baby started screaming and its face turned beet red. Fortunately, it didn’t last very long but the baby was crying long after it was finished. I was crying too and felt very guilty that I had submitted my babies to that torture.
Circumcision may reduce the chance of infections but it is abolutely not necessary to good health. I consider it a barbaric procedure.
Grannyeagle — I understand they’re using local and topical anesthesia for neonatal circumcision these days so the infants aren’t so distressed.
I can appreciate that some parents might choose not to have an infant son circumcised, and that’s OK with me, but I think that someone like Tim who seems to be fixated on the subject and is dragging around some sense of grievance about it is possibly suffering from psychological displacement and should get therapy to discover what’s really eating at him.
I feel like I stepped into a late 60’s edition of Playboy here with all the talk of a certain surgery.
Meanwhile, the problem of health care economics is one that keeps getting ignored by all the people focused on health care politics who keep whining “socialism!” or “tyranny!” or whatever nonsense they’re spouting. The fact of the matter is that the current system is unsustainable, and cannot be fixed via free market interventions (see link above) because the natural result is an endless upward spiral that will bankrupt the nation due to the disconnect between payment and cost. This does not happen with auto insurance or homeowner’s insurance because there is an upper bounds imposed by the replacement cost of the goods being insured, but in the case of healthcare there is no such upper bounds — your insurer can turn to you and say “$20K to repair your car is too much, here’s the $18K your car is worth, go buy another one”, but can’t say “$1M to repair your health is too much, here’s the $100K your life is worth, go buy another one.” You *can’t* buy another life — you only get one life.
Without significant and serious government intervention, our nation is going to be bankrupted by its medical-industrial complex the same way the USSR was bankrupted by its military-industrial complex. That’s just the facts.
– Badtux the Healthcare Economics Penguin
Health Care: Why Aren’t They Listening
` Apparently our elected leaders aren’t listening. It has been brought to my attention that sending emails and signing online petitions ends up being so much spam on some aide’s desk. What we need to do is go back to regular mail, i.e. snail mail. A letter costs 44 cents and a postcard is only 28 cents. Bags of mail in a representative’s or senator’s office will get more attention.
Keep your handwritten message short and to the point: such as “I’m in favor of a single payer type of health care reform”. Then just sign it and mail it.
Respectfully
george rudzinski