HuffPo is one of the larger sites on the net.  I think that they have people there who edit stories, but maybe not.  This gem is on the site today.  It is an essay about circumcision.  For those readers who were not around at the beginning of the Internet, there were issues on USENet that were guaranteed to start a flame war and circumcision was one of them.

The author of this post, purported to be a doctor, seems to be one of the people who learned from those flame wars.

Routine female circumcision, which has been practiced in some cultures, is completely unacceptable. Few people would argue otherwise. In fact, the United Nations has issued a decree against it. Circumcision is a form of sexual abuse whether it’s done to girls or boys.

The author wants to make a case about male circumcision and starts off with female circumcision.  To call what is done to girls ‘circumcision’ is correct in that there is ‘cutting around’, but the removal of the clitoris and labia minora is not the same as removal of the foreskin.  But she states the thing she is trying to prove, that circumcision is a form of sexual abuse, as an axiom, thinking that she is covered by referencing female ‘circumcision’ first.  Fail.  I can wrap up her entire essay in a few sentences: Circumcision is sexual abuse; if you don’t agree with me you are wrong.  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The authors biographical blurb is a gem too.

Christiane Northrup, M.D., a board-certified ob/gyn, is a visionary pioneer, beloved authority in women’s health and wellness, and the author of the ground breaking New York Times bestsellers….

Following a 25-year career in both academic medicine and private practice, Dr. Northrup now devotes her time to helping women truly flourish on all levels through tapping into their inner wisdom.  Through her exclusive Women’s Wisdom Circle, Dr. Northrup shares cutting-edge medical and lifestyle advice.

Let me see if have this straight: she practiced medicine for only 25 years?  Either she got a late start on it or she quit early.  There is more to that story than she is telling.  Visionary pioneer?  Or just another flake who couldn’t stay focussed?  Cutting-edge lifestyle advice?  Like, what kind of shoes should I wear with my bald spot?

I think that people write on HuffPo because they are trying to drive traffic to another site, and HuffPo publishes these pieces without putting them through an editing phase.  But I don’t know.

Don Imus says he’s battling stage two prostate cancer.

Imus said he got a good look at it this morning when he had his head up his ass.

Sarah Palin says Bristol is doing fine.

Palin was taking a break from governing the nation’s largest state to help Juneau’s Girl Scout Troop 32 sell cookies after the group lost all for their previous proceeds in a robbery the week before. “I read about it in the newspaper and I said, ‘Well, me and the kids have an hour on Saturday, let’s go down and help,’” she explained. “This age is so precious.”

She added, “Plus, it was only $230 dollars that was taken.  I spent ten times that on a scarf last fall.”  Bristol chimed in.  “$230 an forty five cents.  I counted.”  The governor shushed Bristol and moved away from reporters.

Keeping Bristol away from reporters is probably a good idea, especially after her last interview.

VAN SUSTEREN: I don’t want to pry to personally, but I mean, actually, contraception is an issue here. Is that something that you were just lazy about or not interested, or do you have a philosophical or religious opposition to it or…

BRISTOL: No. I don’t want to get into detail about that. But I think abstinence is, like — like, the — I don’t know how to put it — like, the main — everyone should be abstinent or whatever, but it’s not realistic at all.

VAN SUSTEREN: Why?

BRISTOL: Because — I don’t want to get into details on this.

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, no, I don’t mean personally, just big picture, not — not necessarily about you, but…

BRISTOL: Because it’s more and more accepted now.

VAN SUSTEREN: Among your classmates and kids your age?

BRISTOL: Among — yes, among kids my age.

Grandma Palin was unhappy with that, especially the B-roll where Bristol added, “Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

LOCAL and state regulations determine whether it’s legal to keep a primate pet, but April Truitt, the executive director of the Primate Rescue Center, a shelter outside Lexington, Ky., believes it’s never right.

A primate involves a much greater commitment than a cat or dog — or it should — because primates are social animals that cannot be left alone for long, and that live for decades: baboons for up to 45 years in captivity, chimps for 60 to 70. Once they have hit puberty, primates can become unpredictable and difficult to control. An adult chimp has seven times the strength of a man, Ms. Truitt says, but even a 24-pound monkey has the reflexes and agility to take down a man.

More fundamentally, Ms. Truitt believes, even the smallest monkeys are wild animals that do not belong in people’s homes.

But many prospective owners are badly informed, and, encountering adorable, docile baby primates with an eerie similarity to human infants, they find it difficult to resist.

Animal dealers, Ms. Truitt says, know that.

“The key to the trade is that these animals have to be removed at birth from the mother, put in diapers, put on a bottle and sold before they start depreciating — which they do, quicker than a Cadillac,” Ms. Truitt says. “By the age of 3, maybe 5 or 7, they reach adolescence and their hormones are telling them to do anything but take commands from humans. They are interested in dominating whatever social group they find themselves in. If it’s a human home, they often go after children first, then teenagers, then mom, and by the time they get to dad, we usually get the call.”

And it can get personal.

Chimps do, however, require some sacrifice. The family living room was given over to their cages, and after Mikey, the larger chimp, began bullying Louie, Ms. Harrison made her son give up his bedroom, just off the living room, to Mikey. Her son, relegated to a room in the basement, chose to live with his father instead.

“I didn’t think it was fair for the chimps not to be able to see each other,” Ms. Harrison explains. She starts crying and says, “I destroyed a lot of lives with what I’ve done.”

She also took a lot of hard knocks herself. In a New York hotel for a job with Mikey, Ms. Harrison was letting the chimp groom her teeth, which is to say, pick at them — a not uncommon chimp habit and an example, perhaps, of a chimp simianizing a human.

“All of a sudden I feel a severe pain on the right side of my mouth and then I felt something dripping down my face,” Ms. Harrison says. “And there was all this blood, and I look over at Mikey and here he had my tooth in his hand, roots and all. He had pulled my tooth out with one finger.”

You didn’t need that tooth anyway, right?

Mikey says, “You’ve got too many teeth.”

“She’s the love of my life. She made it until six days ago. She left me at a time where, after 18 years, she knew I’d be all right.”  Rourke was speaking about his dog who had died a few days earlier.  Let’s be clear about something: the love of Mickey Rourke’s life is Mickey Rourke.  Here is a better picture of him, showing the results of years of bad plastic surgery.

On the other hand, he didn’t refer to his dog as “my bitch”, so maybe there’s hope for him.

In the debates over women’s suffrage, some proponents argued that women should vote because they would provide an ethical balancing influence to men, who are naturally prone to immorality.  The rejoinder, voiced by Jo in Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women, is that “Men do not vote because they are good, they vote because they are men.”  In other words, it’s a right granted to them as human beings regardless of how they may or may not use it.  If I had a cup of chai for every terrible, non-competitive contest I’d seen played by men on TV, I would be awake until Christmas.  Everyone knows men’s teams play some games that suck.  Because of the double standard, no one uses those games to judge the sport or male athletes as a whole.  We need to proceed as if that were also true of women’s sports.  Of course I understand worrying that low-quality games are going to hurt the league’s image, because I worry about it too, but if we don’t treat ourselves as human beings who are allowed to have a bad day without it reflecting on womankind/africankind/queerkind or whatever, then nothing’s going to change.

My previous comments were based on a data sample of 1, so there may be some error there.

I would take one bad day, but on average, the women’s game has a lot of bad days relative to a men’s league.

Basketball, like all professional sports, is entertainment business.  There are people who are entertained by watching women play.  There are many reasons for people to be entertained.  Sometimes they are entertained even if the level of play is pretty crappy.

The game begins and suddenly my faculties are barraged with scene after scene of flailing ponytails and basketballs careening dangerously in every direction. At one point, Terry and Doris commented on the great defense each team was playing, but where I come from that isn’t called “defense”, it’s called “banging it off the rim”. The bricks were falling everywhere. Three minutes into the second half, OSHA showed up and closed down the game until everyone came back wearing steel-toed boots and hard hats.

While the whole post is pretty funny, I wondered just how accurate this description was.

Not accurate enough.

I just invested some time watching the Seattle Storm play the Sacremento Monarchs.  These teams are bad.  Stinking bad.  Just about any boy’s high school team with a winning record could school either one of these teams.

• There is no movement on offense.   Both teams seem to play a zone offense.  Any good defensive team could trap the ball very easily.
• The only offense was from spaced shooters who didn’t leave their spaces.  There was no reason to leave any shooter.  If there was a defender within 6 feet of the shooter, the ball was lucky to find the glass.
• Both teams threw the ball away like they were trying to take a dive.
• The announcer said that somebody was trying to set up a pick and roll, and it must be a different play than the one that is used by the Utah Jazz.  There was no pick, there was no roll.
• Nobody ever cut to the basket.
• Four out of five trips down the court resulted in the ball being thrown away, literally into the arms of the opponent, or a brick being thrown up as the clock ran down.

I exaggerated when I said that any high school boy’s team could school these two teams.  I have seen some men’s college games where the coach must have hired his team out to do masonry work because they were so good at hoisting up bricks.  Any team in the men’s NCAA tourney could take either of these two women’s teams.  The game would be over in the first quarter as the men’s team feasted on a trap and fast break to make the score something like 25-0.

I would like to see the Washington Huskies men take on the Seattle Storm in an exhibition game.  I think the Huskies could play just four men and it would still not be close.

In Duluth, MN, a trial is underway, Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas.   This is the first lawsuit brought by the RIAA alleging damages for file sharing music to actually go to trial.  The head of Sony litigation loosed the information that they have lost money on the suits.  The suits are brought by the recording industry against individuals.  The recording industry threatens a lawsuit and the individual often coughs up the dough, usually in the $3000 to $4000 range.  Most of the operation works through a phone bank, with thuggish callers trying to scare the be-jesus out of individuals.  It has more in common with a shakedown operation than it does a legitimate business.  Defense attorney David Toder was cross examining Sony head of litigation, Jennifer Pariser.

Toder then raised the question of the RIAA targeting the wrong people in its lawsuits. “How many dead people have you sued?” he asked, a question that was blocked after Gabriel objected. Toder then took a different tack, asking Pariser if she recognized the names of Gertrude Walton, Sarah Ward, Cindy Chan, and Paul Wilke—all innocent victims of the RIAA’s driftnet tactics.

The next line of questioning was how many suits the RIAA has filed so far. Pariser estimated the number at a “few thousand.” “More like 20,000,” suggested Toder. “That’s probably an overstatement,” Pariser replied. She then made perhaps the most startling comment of the day. Saying that the record labels have spent “millions” on the lawsuits, she then said that “we’ve lost money on this program.”

Your operation is losing money and you are alienating customers with it, and you wonder why record sales are off?

Well, duh.

The conference championship games are of interest in four cities all smaller than Milwaukee.

Ahem.

Nielsen tells a different story. The national rankings for the
four media markets are

Seattle, 13

Denver, 18

Pittsburgh, 22

Charlotte, 27

Milwaukee is 33.