JayB

I believe this is because with Viagra you are attempting to correct something that doesn't work. With birth control you are trying to stop something that is natural. Similar to the fact that insurance generally doesn't, for instance, cover Rogaine to stop balding. I would really like to believe that, but it just isn't true. First of all, most ED is a natural side effect of aging. Second of all, birth control is a normal activity that most countries like ours follow. (And that's good--it'd be tough to support 8 kids for every family). I think if you read a little on the incredible battle that it took for women to get birth control pills covered, you'll see that there is more than just your theory at work here. There have also been amazing battles that women fought just to get something back to normal again. For example, the legal fights over getting an implant after having a breast removed due to cancer were bitter. Isn't this simply returning something back to normal? I wish I could remember the name of the book I read that researched the battles fought over different coverages. Issues that only affected women were far more common and took much much longer to win than issues that only affected men. I am happy to see that trend starting to change. You mean like the current disparity between the funding available for breast and prostate cancer research? Prostate cancer is a slow growing cancer that usually affects men in their geriatric years. Breast cancer affects younger women and is often deadly at a faster rate. It makes more sense to put more money into the second group. (as a side note: my father has prostate cancer, my mother has breast cancer. I can say that emotionally they are both devastating. I don't wish to dismiss the problem in one group; but if we don't have money to fix everything, it makes sense to help the group that will benefit the most. In this case, getting another 40 yrs of life is worth more than another 10.) I agree that this is the reason why we spend more on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research, and this rationale makes sense to me - but it doesn't support the contention that the claim that women's health issues have been the subject of an intentional, wide-ranging, and systematic neglect because no one cares about women, we value women's lives less and always have, the self-serving medico-patriarchy can't look beyond it's own interests, etc. I think in most cases men simply made better "animal models" for most medical research because no one had to worry about their drug candidate turning into the next thalidomide if they included women of child bearing age in the drug study, hormonal fluctations that might complicate the analysis, etc. Sins of omission versus sins of commission.

Contrary opinion from "Prospect Magazine"* "The question of what to do in Iraq today must be separated from the decision to topple Saddam Hussein four and a half years ago. That decision is a matter for historians. By any normal ethical standard, the coalition's current project in Iraq is a just one. Britain, America and Iraq's other allies are there as the guests of an elected government given a huge mandate by Iraqi voters under a legitimate constitution. The UN approved the coalition's role in May 2003, and the mandate has been renewed annually since then, most recently this August. Meanwhile, the other side in this war are among the worst people in global politics: Baathists, the Nazis of the middle east; Sunni fundamentalists, the chief opponents of progress in Islam's struggle with modernity; and the government of Iran. Ethically, causes do not come much clearer than this one. Some just wars, however, are not worth fighting. There are countries that do not matter very much to the rest of the world. Rwanda is one tragic example; and its case illustrates the immorality of a completely pragmatic foreign policy. But Iraq, the world's axial country since the beginning of history and all the more important in the current era for probably possessing the world's largest reserves of oil, is no Rwanda. Nor do two or three improvised explosive devices a day, for all the personal tragedy involved in each casualty, make a Vietnam. The great question in deciding whether to keep fighting in Iraq is not about the morality and self-interest of supporting a struggling democracy that is also one of the most important countries in the world. The question is whether the war is winnable and whether we can help the winning of it. The answer is made much easier by the fact that three and a half years after the start of the insurgency, most of the big questions in Iraq have been resolved. Moreover, they have been resolved in ways that are mostly towards the positive end of the range of outcomes imagined at the start of the project. The country is whole. It has embraced the ballot box. It has created a fair and popular constitution. It has avoided all-out civil war. It has not been taken over by Iran. It has put an end to Kurdish and marsh Arab genocide, and anti-Shia apartheid. It has rejected mass revenge against the Sunnis. As shown in the great national votes of 2005 and the noisy celebrations of the Iraq football team's success in July, Iraq survived the Saddam Hussein era with a sense of national unity; even the Kurds—whose reluctant commitment to autonomy rather than full independence is in no danger of changing—celebrated. Iraq's condition has not caused a sectarian apocalypse across the region. The country has ceased to be a threat to the world or its region. The only neighbours threatened by its status today are the leaders in Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran....." Rest of article here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9804 *"Britain's intelligent conversation Prospect was launched in October 1995 by its present editor David Goodhart, a senior correspondent for the Financial Times, and chairman Derek Coombs. The aim was to launch a monthly that was "more readable than the Economist, more relevant than the Spectator, more romantic than the New Statesman," as Sir Jeremy Isaacs subsequently described Prospect. Prospect has acquired a reputation as the most intelligent magazine of current affairs and cultural debate in Britain. Both challenging and entertaining, the magazine seeks to make complex ideas accessible and enjoyable by commissioning the best writers, editing them vigorously and packaging their work in a well designed and illustrated monthly."

I think the use of public roadways presents a special case in favor or regulated behaviour. The ubiquity of this public resource, and the inherent and immediate danger posed by moving vehicles and the very high monetary and human cost of accidents necessitates a higher standard safety regulation than do most other activities in life. Most folks would not support allowing a government which turns a blind eye towards auto makers who make inherently unsafe cars. Much of this type of regulation aims to prevent injuries should an accident occur, but not necessarily accidents themselves. Similarly, seatbelts also do not prevent accidents, they mitigate injuries should an accident occur, yet there are many who object to drivers taking some of the regulatory burden that auto makers have shouldered from the beginning. If the state can (popularly) mandate automobile safety features, it seems fair that it may also require drivers to use those features. I don't think that compulsory seatbelt or helmet laws are egregious enough abridgements of freedom to warrant a sustained outcry, and I think that the "public" can make a case that since "it" is bearing the costs associated with the exercise of the said freedoms, "it" has a right to impose constraints on the manner in which they are excercised. It's not the weakness of the argument, but the strength that is a concern to me when it comes to "the public" applying the same reasoning to what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to the excercise of freedoms in a manner that has implications for an individual's personal health since these will by definition have implications for the costs borne by a health-care system owned, paid for, and financed by the public. These may not be insurmountable hazards, but they're worth considering, especially by a group of people who spend a great deal of time engaged in behaviors that most of "the public" view as frivolous at best, and unjustifiably reckless at worst.

For me it's not what you believe that matters as much as why you believe it, and with regards to the stance you take or the criticisms that you level at a particular action or administration that matters as much as what your motives are for doing so. Some more thoughts on Patriotism, by the man responsible for the "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." line. If you read the entire essay, I don't think that you can argue that his point was that anyone who claims to be motivated by patriotism is by definition a scoundrel, which is what those who often quote this line from Johnson seem to think. You can read it all here: http://www.samueljohnson.com/thepatriot.html Or not. Here's some excerpts, some of which you may agree with, some of which you may not. I think it's one of the better essays of the subject in the English language.: "Some claim a place in the list of patriots, by an acrimonious and unremitting opposition to the court. This mark is by no means infallible. Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion. A man may hate his king, yet not love hius country. He that has been refused a reasonable, or unreasonable request, who thinks his merit underrated, and sees his influence declining, begins soon to talk of natural equality, the absurdity of "many made for one," the original compact, the foundation of authority, and the majesty of the people. As his political melancholy increases, he tells, and, perhaps, dreams, of the advances of the prerogative, and the dangers of arbitrary power; yet his design, in all his declamation, is not to benefit his country, but to gratify his malice." "A man sometimes starts up a patriot, only by disseminating discontent, and propagating reports of secret influence, of dangerous counsels, of violated rights, and encroaching usurpation. This practice is no certain note of patriotism. To instigate the populace with rage beyond the provocation, is to suspend publick happiness, if not to destroy it. He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace. Few errours and few faults of government, can justify an appeal to the rabble; who ought not to judge of what they cannot understand, and whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion. The fallaciousness of this note of patriotism is particularly apparent, when the clamour continues after the evil is past." "As war is one of the heaviest of national evils, a calamity in which every species of misery is involved; as it sets the general safety to hazard, suspends commerce, and desolates the country; as it exposes great numbers to hardships, dangers, captivity, and death; no man, who desires the publick prosperity, will inflame general resentment by aggravating minute injuries, or enforcing disputable rights of little importance. It may, therefore, be safely pronounced, that those men are no patriots, who, when the national honour was vindicated in the sight of Europe, and the Spaniards having invaded what they call their own, had shrunk to a disavowal of their attempt, and a relaxation of their claim, would still have instigated us to a war, for a bleak and barren spot in the Magellanick ocean, of which no use could be made, unless it were a place of exile for the hypocrites of patriotism. Yet let it not be forgotten, that, by the howling violence of patriotick rage, the nation was, for a time, exasperated to such madness, that, for a barren rock under a stormy sky, we might have now been fighting and dying, had not our competitors been wiser than ourselves; and those who are now courting the favour of the people, by noisy professions of publick spirit, would, while they were counting the profits of their artifice, have enjoyed the patriotick pleasure of hearing, sometimes, that thousands have been slaughtered in a battle, and, sometimes, that a navy had been dispeopled by poisoned air and corrupted food." "It may be doubted, whether the name of a patriot can be fairly given, as the reward of secret satire, or open outrage. To fill the newspapers with sly hints of corruption and intrigue, to circulate the Middlesex Journal, and London Pacquet, may, indeed be zeal; but it may, likewise, be interest and malice. To offer a petition, not expected to be granted; to insult a king with a rude remonstrance, only because there is no punishment for legal insolence, is not courage, for there is no danger; nor patriotism, for it tends to the subversion of order, and lets wickedness loose upon the land, by destroying the reverence due to sovereign authority. It is the quality of patriotism to be jealous and watchful, to observe all secret machinations, and to see publick dangers at a distance. The true lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears, and to sound the alarm, whenever he perceives the approach of mischief. But he sounds no alarm, when there is no enemy; he never terrifies his countrymen till he is terrified himself. The patriotism, therefore, may be justly doubted of him, who professes to be disturbed by incredibilities...Still less does the true patriot circulate opinions which he knows to be false."

I believe this is because with Viagra you are attempting to correct something that doesn't work. With birth control you are trying to stop something that is natural. Similar to the fact that insurance generally doesn't, for instance, cover Rogaine to stop balding. I would really like to believe that, but it just isn't true. First of all, most ED is a natural side effect of aging. Second of all, birth control is a normal activity that most countries like ours follow. (And that's good--it'd be tough to support 8 kids for every family). I think if you read a little on the incredible battle that it took for women to get birth control pills covered, you'll see that there is more than just your theory at work here. There have also been amazing battles that women fought just to get something back to normal again. For example, the legal fights over getting an implant after having a breast removed due to cancer were bitter. Isn't this simply returning something back to normal? I wish I could remember the name of the book I read that researched the battles fought over different coverages. Issues that only affected women were far more common and took much much longer to win than issues that only affected men. I am happy to see that trend starting to change. You mean like the current disparity between the funding available for breast and prostate cancer research?

There does seem to be something different about Blackwater though. This is a company that gets paid by the US government to train people to do a job that the US government, by it's own statements, does not perform. It's a job, in fact, that the US government pays the private company to perform. So the government pays a private company to train personnel so they can work for the private company fulfilling contracts for the government. There's a peculiar closed-loop aspect to this thing that just looks... bad. Blackwater has hooked onto a perpetual-motion gravy train, and the US taxpayer is funding it. I have some serious reservations about this model as well, but if the conversation is limited to which is more expensive in a narrow, accounting sense, then I don't think that the argument that paying former SF/Seals/Delta guys to do the job at some multiple of what their active duty counterparts make is less expensive can necessarily one that can be dismissed out of hand when you look at all of the costs associated with creating one of their equivalents inside the millitary.

So, how old are you Fairweather (KKK and a few others)? 42 or under? If so, exactly why aren't you serving in Iraq? If you're older, and have kids, have you or are you going to encourage them to enlist if the are of age or as soon as they come of age? Again, you folks talk a lot of shit, but when and where do you back it up with your life and that of your family? So - when there's a megaslaughter occuring somewhere in the world that could be averted or constrained through the use of force, as in Rwanda, the Balkans, or Darfur - I take it that you recuse yourself from the conversation since you won't personally be there manning the lines? How about when discussing humanitarian relief in the wake of the Tsunami? If you aren't going to be there putting your hands to work, then you aren't qualified to persist in the conversation? As far as this chickenhawk business goes - the only people who *are* qualified to take that particular line are people who volunteered at a time when war was either imminent or ongoing. Fighting because you were drafted doesn't negate your service or heroism, but it does limit the extent to which you can bait people who - like you - did not volunteer to do so. As for the non-veterans who are playing the chickenhawk card, what acts of voluntary sacrifice and sustained valor have you engaged in that qualify you to question anyone else's bravery, exactly? I may not agree with the argument that if you are not personally exposed to the risks inherent in a particular action - whether it be apprehending criminals, fighting fires, rescuing stranded climbers, etc - then you have not business commenting on it, but I can at least understand where the sentiment comes from when the people who *have* borne the risks associated with that particular activity are doing the talking. What I can't fathom is someone who hasn't been there on whatever front line we are talking about being shameless enough to appropriate someone else's risk, valor, bravery, and peril and pretend as if it were their own in an effort to bait people who their *own* character and deeds give them no basis whatsoever to critique, much less talk shit to.

What do you weigh these days? 175? [KK, not Muffy]

"yea - the training is expensive, and the US taxpayer has paid it! BW are all ex-military, all trained at US expense, but BW reaps the profit. Another excellent example of the efficiency of the marketplace." As others have pointed out, this is hardly confined to the likes of Seals, SF, etc - or the millitary for that matter. Doctors, nurses, any graduate of a state college, anyone who has attended a public school, and so on.

I'm not sure, but that seems kind of immaterial with respect to my concerns about what could happen when the expenses associated with unhealthy behaviors give the government the motive, when it already has the means (nationalized health care) to prohibit a broader scope of behavior which harms no one other than the individual who engages in it (I realize that we're already there with regards to drug policy, but I don't see this as an argument for expanding these powers). I'm sure that they have a higher percentage of smokers, so it would be interesting to see how they address that in their policies.

I grew up with a set of encyclopedias, a dictionary, and about fifty years worth of National Geographics on the bookshelves next to my bed, and developed a similar habit. Still prefer the hard-copy format as I'm more likely to stumble over something while flipping through pages than in a directed search.

Unbelievable. Hey wait a minute here... Do we really want the government in our lives this way? Now they are the nanny who has to tell us over and over again that we need to eat right and move around? I don't think that is their responsibility, is it? I want my health plan to cover my docs and my meds. I'd like it if it (or my company) would help with my gym membership--or at least let me use my FSA/HSA to pay for it. But I don't need them telling me that I shouldn't get fat--especially after they deduct part of my pay check. Given that the "we bear the costs of your behavior, so we have the right to regulate it" argument has brought us compulsory seat-belt and helmet laws, it's not a stretch to imagine that there are those who would seek to use the same argument to grant the government the right to do the very things that you mention. Whether the government would actually do so is an open question, and it would be interesting to learn more about how other countries have managed to reconcile the imperative to cut costs with the necessity of maintaining personal freedoms that might be curtailed or regulated by the state - from what you eat to what you weigh. I'd have no problem with a private company rewarding healthy behaviors with lower premiums, and punishing unhealthy ones with higher rates, but placing a coercive power of this magnitude in the hands of the state seems fraught with quite a few more risks.

Just got "Fear of Knowledge" by Paul Boghossian. You might like it. ""His analysis is something of a tour de force: subtle and original enough to attract the attention of professional philosophers but accessible enough to be read by anyone with an interest in the subject. The result is one of the most readable works in philosophy in recent years."--Wall Street Journal

If you want to compare costs honestly, you have to factor in all of the costs associated with the recruitment, training, equipment, benefits, etc associated with developing equivalent capacities in the millitary. In the case of the guys that work at Blackwater, these dollar amounts are likely quite substantial. Say what you will about the ethical or strategic wisdom of this move, but it's not clear that paying these guys an hourly rate thats 6-8X what a soldier with an equivalent skill set would make, for a few months at a time, is necessarily more expensive than increasing the size of the millitary by the amount necessary to get an equal number of equally skilled personnel on the ground. In the case of the Seals, SF, etc - I am not sure what the figures actually are, but of the subset of all personnel that are even selected for the training, I imagine well below half actually make it through to the end, and this has to be factored in as well.

I vote for your award winning distel-hotdog-Choda-Fejas-annabelle picture for TEH GRAFICS...

Maybe Fejas can bring a boom box and play some Counting Crows! ROOOOOUND HEEEERE! Who's bringing the nihilists?

Nice effort, but a touch conventional for my tastes. I think you can do better.

I think that your analysis neglects both the thought-controlling capacities inherent in pictographs, and the nefarious influence which the head flint-knapper and club-maker (both of whom stood to profit handsomely from a perpetual state of conflict) exerted on tribal decision making.

Was the "him" in question John Howard?

Fill in the blanks....

I don't think he was wrong to issue such a warning, any more than George Washington was wrong to warn against "entangling alliances" in his farewell speech, but I don't think the fact that any particular admonition appears in a presidential address necessarily means that it should be considered an axiom from that point forward, nor do I think that anyone who argues that his remarks constitute a prophetic articulation of a foregone conclusion can make a compelling argument to this effect. Seldom is any president right about everything, no matter how noble, wise, or distinguished he may be, so one can take issue with particular statements, or argue that a particular threat didn't materialize in the manner in which he envisioned, without that constituting a wholesale dismissal of his judgement, character, etc. This statement of mine will no doubt prompt a fit of zeal in at least one of our regular posters that which will summon forth a mad ghoulash of miscellaneous quotes, citations, and figures that they've been aggregating somewhere in the depths of their brain for a solid 20 years, which they will subsequently attempt to pass off as a serious argument which demonstrates conclusively that the US is, in fact, languishing under the yoke and everlasting dominion of the dreaded M.I.P. Please pardon me in advance if I can't summon the interest necessary to engage in a point-by-point rebuttal, and settle for a bit of light and oh-so-easy mockery instead.

Trot that batch of tropes in front of Party insiders and you're likely to watch them become either angry, or consumed with laughter as they pondered the sheer magnitude of this conceit. Give some credit where credit is due here, amigo. The PRC conquered Tibet in 1951, when the direct value of Sino-American trade was effectively zero, a level from which it hardly budged for the next thirty years at least.

"Actually, the only thing that rankles me about your retort is its very archness. Why go for substance when you can waft in and out the door as incisively as a crampon sporting Capote? Why indeed?" I have it on good authority [we're talking the bulls-eye of an infinite series of concentric circles of authority, with this individual representing the geometric center of the said eye, here] that the manufacturer of Twinkiesoften complains that the average consumer is too quick to dismiss their nutritional value, when a thorough scouring of their contents would reveal that each serving actually contains trace amounts of no less than three - that's right *three* essential vitamins, and if it weren't for the lies, distortions, and mis-characterizations put forth to discredit the Twinky the average man on the street would be far less likely to dismiss them out of hand as health food.

Hint: It's not the Tibetans that are being sneered at when the topic of the bumper stickers is brought up.

"Can anyone conceive of a society resembling Orwell’s 1984?" You mean like the former Soviet Union? China circa 1945-1985? The North Korea of today? Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge? There's a certain commonality that connects this and other real-world dystopias, and it's...why.. its the...unfettered power of multinational corporations and the military industrial complex...