The news in general has been bad but I thought that Rebs email from yesterday was a little ray of sunshine.

Circumcision??? What a dangerous platform. Instead of properly educating people about the methods HIV is contracted, what it does to your body, and how you can easily avoid it… let’s empower stupidity and let a bunch of retards use the line “No, it’s okay! I’m SAFE – I’ve been circumsized!”

I searched for these studies. What I found was statistically insignificant survey studies that leaped to wild conclusions without requiring the data to rule out other explanations for the results.

Using that kind of scientific method, I could look at our tech support department and determine:
Black people are more likely to smoke cigarettes than people of other ethic backgrounds.

Looking at the people in our department:
100% of the African Americans smoke cigarettes.
Only 10% of everybody else smokes cigarettes.

Sure, those numbers could also be written 1/1 and 1/10, but that’s not all that convincing that way.

It’s like science! Only different.

Hey, this methodology is a convenient little trick. I could also make this wild claim:
Krispy Kreme is 10x more likely to cause diabetes in African Americans than other ethnicities.

Sometimes, on Fridays, instead of bagels, we get donuts. Our one black guy always eats a donut or two. He has diabetes. Everybody else usually eats a donut or two. None of them have diabetes. Therefore having extra melanin and eating Krispy Kreme causes diabetes.

Except, then I would get to be on Penn & Teller’s BULLSHIT program on Showtime.

Sometimes a hypothesis is difficult to test. When dealing with human beings, you have two big challenges to scientific method. One, is ethical – it’s much harder to get a lab setup with disposible humans to perform experiments on, than it is to do so for other animals. Eventually people notice that kind of atrocity and make you stop. The other, since you won’t be likely to have a controlled laboratory environment, is the absolute lack of a good control group. There are thousands of variables in any experiment. With humans going about their everyday lives, there are millions of uncontrolled variables.

I have yet to hear of any valid scientific justification for circumcision. It’s a weird religious ritual. Sure, God works in mysterious ways, but why would he care to have you cut off the foreskin of little boys? It’s a little bit wacky.

But most of the circumcisions in the US are done out of cultural, not religious, reasons. People think it is what you are supposed to do. It’s a craziness that is ingrained in the collective American psyche. Unjustifiable, fervent believers will grasp at any straw to inflict their belief system on others.

Now I’ve gone on ranting about something when you had wanted to turn away from the doom and gloom and have good, happy news, instead.

Okay… let me think for a moment. We had pizza today from Knockout pizza – and tomorrow we get the same thing for free for lunch!

I got shampoo and conditioner in the mail yesterday, and my hair smells nice.

We’re going out with friends for Mongolian BBQ tomorrow night! Yummy fun!

If you want more, these folks can do it better