EFFin' Unsound

So, thehim, Michael Medved saw a study.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just released a major study on drug use and sexual behavior that purportedly used more thorough, scientific means than ever before to get more reliable results than prior surveys.

It’s tough to believe that there might be problems cold calling people asking about their sexual activity and drug use. But good for science for figuring out how to make that work a little better.

One striking conclusion: our children appear to become sexually active at surprisingly young ages. A higher percentage reports first sex below age 15 (15.6%) than the percentage waiting till age 21 or later (only 14.7%) The biggest group experiences sex for the first time between the ages of 15 and 17.

Only 15.6%? Anyway, good for the kids. They’re waiting longer than I did. It sure didn’t feel like that in hight school.

The CDC survey also shows striking racial differences when it comes to first sexual experiences. Among “non-Hispanic whites” 13.9% become sexually involved below 15; among “Mexican-Americans” the figure is 14.3%, and among “non-Hispanic blacks,” the number is nearly twice as high – with a full 27.5% experiencing sex before age 15. Only 5.8% of blacks wait till age 21 or later for first sex, but among whites a full 15.0%– nearly three times the percentage –delay sex till the traditional age of maturity. Among Mexican-Americans, the highest percentage (16.6%) waits till age 21 for sexual initiation.

Well it seems like 14 year olds of the different races have better game than others. And in what the fuck traditions is 21 the age of maturity?

Most authorities (and most parents, certainly) would agree that sex for twelve, thirteen and fourteen year olds brings a host of problems, so it stands to reason that the much greater incidence for blacks of intimacy at these tender ages correlates with a wide range of problems in high school and even middle school. If a thirteen or fourteen year old is sexually active, for many (if not most) kids this distracting intimacy can make school that much more difficult (or even irrelevant).

Um what?

It makes sense, in other words, to help close the racial gaps in educational performance by working to help inner city teenagers to avoid early onset of sexual behavior.

Ohmygod. Someone needs to teach Medved about the difference between causation and correlation. We don’t need to fund those schools as well as suburban schools, just some lectures on not doin’ it.

One more number from the new study seems difficult to explain, or even to believe: among married people, a surprising 1.9% report that they have never had sex. If this figure reflects accurately on American reality it means that close to four million adults who are currently married still qualify as virgins.

OK, well that is a bit odd. I thought that marriages were only supposed to be sexless after a few years.

Now that Hollywood has mined comedy gold by portraying “The Forty Year Old Virgin,” the new CDC study suggests endless dramatic and humorous possibilities for a future project about “Married Virgins.” If some enterprising screenwriter hasn’t already commandeered this idea, you can hereby steal it from this blog.

I don’t think that not having sex sells quite as well.

The state Republicans are upset that Howard Dean came to town a few days ago.

Tukwila, WA… Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is visiting Seattle today on a fundraising swing. He got his majorities last year, so why is he still screaming? Maybe because his base has joined the rest of country in losing confidence in the new Democrat majorities, driving congressional approval ratings down to historical lows in a recent Gallup Poll (poll link) and to the lowest they’ve been in a decade in another (poll link). Or maybe it’s because his party hasn’t passed a single piece of their promised agenda into law – as Rahm Emanuel said on CNN recently “The Congress has to do a better job of getting things done, there’s no doubt about it.” (link to video).

Well, the Democrats have passed the minimum wage. They passed a war funding bill with timelines to finally get out. They passed stem cell research funding. They exposed the shenanigans coming from the Department of Justice. They implemented Paygo, to restore some sanity to the budget. A war funding bill that while didn’t go far enough in my estimation, at least put some checks on the President. These are important things. If the Republicans in the Senate wouldn’t be so goddamn obstructionist, we’d also see passage of the 9/11 Commission recommendations in full and better veterans’ funding. By the end of the year, we may see some real environmental legislation.

“In just six months Howard Dean’s party has become exactly what they campaigned against and it’s showing up in their low approval ratings,” said Washington State Republican Party Chairman Luke Esser. “The Democrats campaigned on ethics but kept on supporting a Congressman that the FBI found with $90,000 hidden in his freezer. The Democrats ran as fiscal conservatives but are pushing through the largest tax increase in U.S. history and ignored their own rules by creating secret earmark slush funds. The Democrats promised leadership in the War on Terror but they’ve broken their promises to implement the full recommendations of the September 11^th Commission and offer a coherent policy on Iraq. If I were Howard Dean, I’d be screaming too.”

Most of these are silly. Congressional Democrats have cut down on the amount of pork (by the way, in my lifetime more pork has been the economically conservative thing, I can’t speak to the fogies reading this). They passed the 9/11 Commission recommendations out of the House and obstructionist Republicans refused to get it out of the Senate. And oh my God, after more than 4 years, what the fuck is the Republican’s “coherent policy on Iraq”? The Democrats’ plan was spelled out pretty clearly in the piece of legislation that the president vetoed. As for William Jefferson, I believe this is the checkmate to that silliness. So yes, the Democrats didn’t kick him out of the House. There was a significant primary challenge, and he lost his committee assignments, but he won’t be kicked out until he’s actually convicted.

From the Los Angeles Times (link): “Just 27% of Americans now approve of the way Congress is doing its job, the poll found, down from 36% in January, when Democrats assumed control of the House and the Senate. 63% of Americans say that the new Democratic Congress is governing in a ‘business as usual’ manner, rather than working to bring the fundamental change that party leaders promised after November’s midterm election.”

That’s unfortunate. I suspect the best way to change that is to stand up to the Republicans more. So, Democrats, Luke Esser is giving you permission to fight harder. He’ll be disappointed with you if you don’t. And he’ll keep sending out bullshit press releases. Oh, and there are plenty of polls where Bush would be happy to be at 27% even ignoring that there are a lot more undecideds in the Congressional polls.

But shoot me now, I’m about to defend Christopher Hitchens. Sort of. I should state from the outset that I used to be quite the fan of his as one of the few people to my left with a regular column. But Goddamn did that boy pick the wrong horse with the war in Iraq. And the whole Sidney Blumenthal thing! Anyway, I’m not so much defending his new book, as making fun of Hubert G. Locke attacking it in the PI.

I missed out on the opportunity — if it can be called that — to engage in a head-to-head with Christopher Hitchens when he came to town earlier this month. He was promoting his latest book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” before what I’m told was a packed house at Town Hall. Having had to forgo the chance for a personal encounter, I have to settle for this admittedly one-sided rejoinder via the printed page.

I also have to take Hitchens on without bothering to buy and read his book. To do so, and thereby contribute to his royalties, would offend my principles, both fiscal and moral. It’s also unnecessary because, regardless of the book’s content, I can’t get beyond the absurdity of its title. The title may not be the author’s choice but it’s his book and he’s stuck with it.

Whether God is great is a proposition many would hardly find productive to dispute. It’s like arguing whether evil exists or love conquers all — statements that take us nowhere beyond affirmation or denial. Nonetheless, it’s the second half of the book title — Hitchens’ assertion that religion poisons everything — that gives me pause.

Never mind trying to figure out how it relates to his declaration that God isn’t great (most subtitles provide some explanation of the main title rather than announcing an entirely new idea — which leaves me to wonder about Hitchens’ much vaunted reputation as a writer — but that’s a wholly different matter). The problem, for me at least, is the irrationality of the claim that religion poisons everything — an irrationality that is only heightened by the evidence offered in its support.

As for that evidence, I shall have to rely on an interview with Hitchens in The Seattle Times and a much more substantive review of his book in the May 21 issue of The New Yorker. To support his claim, Hitchens subjects us to a weary recitation of all the acts of wickedness and commands to commit such that are to be found in the Bible and the Quran, along with the accustomed recounting of all the obnoxious events of the past several millenniums that have been carried out in the name of one god or another.

The problem is not just that we’ve heard all this before — and countless times over. It’s the assumption that it all takes place because people believe they have a divine warrant to do so that gives rise to several questions.

Do people behave like savages only under some divine impulse? Is religion the only human sentiment that poisons everything it touches? Suppose, for example, we were to substitute “nationalism” for religion in Hitchens’ formula. One could then compile a list of human wickedness that would rival anything the Bible has to offer — from 12 years of Nazi mayhem and the slaughter of the Pol Pot regime to the antics of the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo and what the Sudanese government is doing in Darfur. Or suppose we posit “democracy” for religion and ask the Iraqis what its impact has been on their society, or “neoconservatism” and then speculate on its influence on America’s role in contemporary world affairs.

Once we begin to catalog just how many ideas and concepts can be charged, at some time or other, with having venomous outcomes, the fatuous quality of Hitchens’ assertion becomes obvious. For his assault on religious believers, we could substitute white males or meat eaters or politicians or just about any other subcategory of the human species and come up with the same skewed results.

Hitchens could benefit greatly from the sober counsel of Gordon Allport, the renowned Harvard psychologist, who gave a series of lectures more than a half-century ago on “The Individual and His Religion.” Allport states at the outset:

“I am dealing with the psychology, not the psychopathology, of religion. The neuro-tic function of religious belief … is indeed commonly encountered, so commonly that opponents of religion see only this function and declare it to dominate any life that harbors a religious sentiment. With this view I disagree. Many personalities attain a religious view of life without suffering arrested development and without self-deception.”

Would that we could say as much for Hitchens and his anti-religious sentiments.

I’m not sure how this sentence either has anything to do with the thing that was just quoted, or how it wraps up this column. Anyway, the end.

I’m not a particular fan of the fairness doctrine, mainly because I’m not a fan of fairness. I also think there are better ways to regulate radio. Mainly make sure that there are more stalls at the marketplace of ideas: If it were up to me, no corporation could own more than 2 stations in any market. There would be a large set aside for non-commercial stations in general. Incentives for local ownership. These are much better than pretending that you have to be fair to the people at Sound Politics, like mjcstello at the public blog, for instance.

Fairness Doctrine aimed at wrong media

The right media: Flute recitals and billboards.

Hey, if the left really wanted “fairness” in Talk Radio, they wouldn’t be targeting radio at all, but the other media dominated by Liberals. It’s the very fact that the left dominates everything “not radio” that has made Talk Radio the powerful political medium it is. After all, where else can non-liberal viewpoints be expressed without the patronizing, biased, or deceptive response that those views receive on the TV networks, in the print media, and throughout our educational system? Where else can half of America tune in to get news and commentary not driven by leftist ideology and propaganda?

Yes, the other day I was reading my Wall Street journal and the ed board was making a similar point. So I turned on CNN and found Glenn Beck making the same point. So I turned on John Stossel, and lo and behold, he was making the same point. Seriously, when Robert Mak and David Postman are in love with Sharkansky, when practically every ed board in the country was encouraging war in Iraq, it was because they were liberal. When after Bush stole the election quite out in the open, every ed board and talking head couldn’t stop talking about how it was proof that the system worked, it was their liberal bias. When the media went along with impeaching Bill Clinton, hell when they spewed any lie about the Clintons for a decade, when they made up some vile shit about Al Gore, it’s because they were liberal. The other day, when the Pig’s Eye had an editorial by Tim Eyman, it was clearly because they don’t let conservatives have a voice!

I’m all for fairness in the media. The absurdity is that radio is somehow unfair. In fact, radio is the most fair medium today because it is driven by the market that forces it to give audiences what they want. If the left really is concerned with fairness in media, then break open the liberal domination of everything else. That will kill radio, but only because half of this nation will suddenly start reading papers and watching TV news again, where they won’t be preached to by liberal propagandists 100% of the time, and they can hear viewpoints from all sides of the political spectrum.

Newspapers and TV aren’t driven by market forces: Their goal is to minimize profit. Actually, the media’s (talk and other mediums) attempts to maximize profits are part of the problem: They have a bias toward the cheap; They have a bias toward press releases and opinion; They have a bias toward not offending their advertisers or owners.

But don’t wait for John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, or Barbara Boxer to find unfairness in the liberal media. Bias and filtering is just fine when it promotes the liberal viewpoint. The Fairness Doctrine might as well be called the “Silence Conservative Speech Doctrine” as far as they are concerned.

The liberal media are The Nation, Z, a few small lefty presses, Air America, Pacifica, and some blogs. Maybe Harpers and the Joe Lieberman Weekly if I’m feeling charitable. Hell, even Mother Jones went out of their way to be nice to Instapundit recently.

Shorter Tim Eyman: Anyone who thinks that the voters elect our elected officials are PIG’s.* And every law, no matter how unconstitutional deserves to be voted on, except the ones that call me names.
Shorter Stefan Sharkansky: Becoming the state’s last county to go vote by mail will surely destroy us all.

Shorter Radio Equalizer: Bill O’Reilly being invited to keynote the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ convention is proof that the media are liberal.

Shorter Pudge: The real problem with public education is that it exists.

* He actually says PIGs, but I was always taught to use the apostrophe after an acronym. As such, I’m the only person not offended by the old school Seattle M’s logo.

Object to the picture. Andrew’s Dad is upset about a flash presentation showing that the Democrats are making “the largest increase in veterans’ funding in history.” He doesn’t dispute the facts, but is opposed to a picture. Yeah, it’s a screw up, but it pales compared to the 6 year screw up of neglect of funding our vets, especially in a time of war, by Bush and his Republican lap dogs.

The Democrats Support… Someone’s Military

Well, the actual money will go to the United States’ actual vets.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s website has a flash demo outlining her positions on Rising Gas Prices, Progress For America, Appropriations Bills, which includes increase veterans funding… apparently for the Canadian military. After all that is a picture of a doctor speaking to a person wearing a Canadian military uniform.

Yes, it’s a shot from the back and the side, that has a blurry Canada written on it. A mistake fixed much more easily than the 3562 American fatalities and counting in Iraq. A mistake fixed much more easily than the 6 years of neglect of vets by this administration. If you want to tout other Democratic accomplishments interspersed with slight mistakes, let me know.

I could not make this stuff up. I wish I had to but sadly I do not.

I know, because rightie outlets never make B-roll mistakes. So remember, missing the word “Canada” small and at an odd angle makes the money for vets not count, but getting the wrong black person in your B-Roll is all right. By AndrewsDad’s logic, William Jefferson didn’t actually get indicted.

When, not if, the page gets taken down, go here for a screenshot.

Seriously, this is even newsworthy how?