You know how outraged your were on behalf of the Jews and Muslims in Germany? You forgot the follow up.

       The New York Times (and many others) took notice last month when a local court in Cologne ruled that circumcision of underage boys was tantamount to grievous bodily harm and should be forbidden.  Adult men would, naturally, be able to choose their own religions and are permitted to do what they wanted with their foreskins.  This ruling regarded a case where a Muslim 4 year old, in accordance with a Muslim tradition, was circumcised.  Although the child was circumcised by a doctor and under proper conditions, mistakes were made, and the child was wounded and suffered excessive bleeding. 
       Of course, this ruling was very controversial.  Jewish tradition dictates that male infants be circumcised on the eighth day after birth, and the German government tried to wipe all Jews off the face of the earth a mere 70 years ago.  The ruling was also tough to take for Germany's largest immigrant group, Muslim Turks, who even if they may have been born, raised, and educated in Germany, speak perfect German and little to no Turkish, are often considered to be and treated as outsiders.  It's a very difficult subject.  Does this ruling imply that Germans want to protect all children in Germany, even Jewish and Muslim children, or is it proof positive that Germany wants those who are not Christians to pack up and leave?  The New York Times had a Motherlode section about it.  They even had a Room for Debate column about it with opinions by a few doctors and other very important people.  The commenters completely lost it, as naturally internet commenters are known to do.  A variety of opinions from "religious liberty should be protected - they are trying to kill all the Jews again" to "circumcision is mutilation, good for the Germans" were expressed.  Then The New York Times published a tug-at-your-heartstrings piece about this family suggesting that now Jews and Muslims in Germany are not going to be able to get their children circumcised in hospitals, by doctors under sterile conditions and covered by health insurance, that they will instead resort to getting their sons' foreskins removed by shady practitioners in back alleys - as unlikely as that seems.
       Good for The New York Times for covering this issue and discussing it.  But they forgot the end of the story.  Which is that German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that circumcision and religious freedom would be protected.  She said that Jewish and Muslim culture would be safe and welcomed in Germany.  The lower house of parliament passed legislation saying that Jews and Muslims could circumcise their sons.  Yet somehow, after all that worrying, The New York Times did not cover these important developments.  This oversight upsets me because I believe The New York Times is giving the American public an incorrect view of Germany and the condition of German Muslims and Jews in the 21st century.  I think the paper should have alerted their readership that all the worrying should be over. 
       But before I go, I would like to address the ruling itself.  We cannot forget that a German court in a major city did say that, before the age of consent, non medically necessary circumcision should be considered child abuse.  Many people see this ruling as an attempt to criminalize Jewish and Muslim cultural traditions, normalize Christian and secular German society, and make Jews and Muslims feel unwelcome.  That may be part of it, but I don't think it's the main reasoning behind the original ruling.  I believe that the ruling was an indication of two phenomena:  the increasing unpopularity of circumcision in general and the German tendency toward defending the rights of the child over the rights of the parents. 
       I'm not an expert on family life in Germany, I certainly haven't lived here long enough.  But it seems to me that there is absolutely no contest between a parent's rights and a child's rights in this country.  German parents cannot homeschool their children, the Germans believe that all children have a right to go to a school with curricula that have been subject to review by someone other than their parents.  Although religious schools are always an option, they still have to be approved.  German parents are not allowed to spank their children.  German children can only be given names that are on a very extensive list of approved names.  The name must be appropriate, a genuine name and not a random noun or adjective, and must reflect the child's gender.  What if mom is Chinese, dad is German, and the couple want to give their son a Chinese name that's not on the German list?  Fine - but rest assured the Germans will be checking with the Chinese consulate to make sure that the name is an appropriate name in China for a male.  In other words, you can't name your child Apple, Moon, or Gi'zelle in Germany.  Americans see these things, typically, as parents not having the right to educate, discipline, and name their children how and what they want.  Germans see it as protecting the right of the child to be educated properly, be free from violence, and be given a proper and dignified name.  It's just a different way of looking at things, and I can see the merits of both sides.  It's one thing to let an adult change his name to Tree Bark Ass Face as long as you insist that, as a kid, his legal name will be something like Arthur.  It's also another thing to let an adult man have a healthy piece of skin removed as a religious rite as long as his parents didn't have the right to do it to him when he was a baby. 
       The other phenomenon I think played a part in the original ruling is just the fact that circumcision just isn't as popular as it used to be, even among populations that used to be its strongest supporters.  Most of the American men of my generation were circumcised.  Many members of my generation of Americans are having children now, and not as many of the sons are circumcised as their fathers.  As it is among the rest of Americans, circumcision popularity is falling among American Jews.  On top of the fact that I know a few Jewish parents who have decided not to have their sons circumcised, there is an online community.  More and more people just feel a little weird about removing something healthy and natural from their sons genitals, even if it's a tradition (religious or secular) to do so, and even if they know many perfectly happy and sexually content men who were circumcised as infants.  The vast majority of Jews and Muslims still circumcise their sons, but it'll probably be a little less popular every year.
       I certainly can't see into the future, but it sure looks to me like the practice of circumcision may have peaked in popularity.  My guess is that after (and this could be decades) the population will stop really circumcising its sons very much, then doctors will start discouraging it, and it will slowly be legally restricted in various areas to boys over 16 or so, and then only with the written recommendation of a religious leader or something.  But for now, the religious rite of infant circumcision is protected in Germany.  Way to go, New York Times, you got us all wound up and upset and then totally missed the conclusion.

Drunk Australians

       Chuck Klosterman is off to a bang up start as the new writer of The Ethicist column.  In his column of July 6, 2012, Exit-Row Exigencies, an Australian man writes in to ask if it is ethical for a passenger seated in an airplane's exit row to get blindingly intoxicated.  Klosterman essentially says it's not great - but it's so not a big deal because the chance that the intoxicated man will be the only person on a plane who can open a door and that he will be too blotto to do so is infinitesimal. 
       Fair enough, Chuck - but what he actually included in this little answer was, "From a practical standpoint, I would trust an intoxicated Australian more than most sober Americans."
       Apparently there is no editor at the illustrious New York Times who has the know how to say, "Chuckie-baby, your tongue-in-cheek jab at sober Americans does not actually help answer the man's question, is in all kinds of poor taste, and shows just how amazingly unfunny you can be."

You're asking the wrong question about the boys

       New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks column, Honor Code, of July 5th, 2012 discusses the achievement gap between boys and girls.  Brooks describes how males are falling behind in a variety of subjects and attend and graduate college in far smaller numbers than do females.  Brooks worries that boys who don't fit in to the current sharing and sitting still culture are given Ritalin and told they are bad kids.  The real answer, accord to the non-teacher Brooks, is for schools to celebrate, "Not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose." 
       Forgive me, dearest David, but do you actually remember school?  School is all about winners and losers!  Yes, there are friends in school.  But from the first day of pre-kindergarten, school is about who wins the spelling bee, who makes the honor roll, who has the coolest backpack, who makes the basketball team, who gets the solo in the school musical, who gets a date to the dance.  What did you study in history class?  Because I learned about military victories - not how everybody just got along in some giant love-in.
       But I digress, that's not my real issue with David Brooks' column.  First of all, the achievement gap has been discussed in numerous news articles for years and years.  Somebody points out about how boys are falling behind girls in reading, college attendance, perfect posture, whatever.  The other side points out that at age 14, girls may be better at analyzing poetry about daffodils, but it's the boys who are going to have higher powered jobs and making more money 20 years later.  Nobody ever gets anywhere. 
       I think that the media keeps having the same discussion, and it's the wrong one.  I don't think that boys are falling behind girls, at least not in the way everybody keeps describing.  I don't think it's relevant to compare boys to girls in this way.  I think we should be comparing boys to other boys. 
        Sure, female college students outnumber male college students - overall.  But males students outnumber female students at Harvard Business School.  If you look at the most competitive programs, the achievement gap disappears.  There were 82 Rhodes Scholars in 2012, 40 were women, 42 were men.  The achievement gap was nowhere to be seen.  When it comes to who owns commercial and licensed patents, only 5.5% are owned by women.  Now let's look at the far end of the spectrum, specifically people on death row awaiting execution for a capital crime.  At the end of 2011, less than 2% of prisoners scheduled to be executed were women. 
       My point is that males are not falling behind females.  Young women are just taking advantage of educational opportunities their grandmothers may not have had.  Young men aren't falling behind young women.  Young men are becoming more stratified.  Young men go to elite business schools, and they get into gang fights.  They become millionaires, and they become deadbeat dads.   And most of the ladies are somewhere in between those two extremes.
       A few other things have happened to American society since this so called "achievement gap" started getting some attention.  The first is the growing percentage of Americans (mostly American men) behind bars since around 1980.  This isn't because crime is out of control so much as due to mandatory long sentences for drug crimes.  When a man is in jail, his children suffer tremendously.  Perhaps, although I have no figures to back this up, his sons suffer most of all without a male roll model.  Additionally, American society itself has become financially far more stratified than in previous decades.  If a young man can't rely on a secure, well-paying manufacturing job to provide for a family (as he possibly could have in 1955) he may see little use in straightening up and flying right. 
       Boys aren't falling behind girls.  They are just mirroring what is happening in society as a whole.  A few of them will win the science fair, and many more will just drop out.  And the average is slipping.  When compared to the more middle-of-the-road females, boys are, on average, dropping.  Much the way the average American household income doesn't have the same buying power it did in 1975, the average school boy's test scores are going down.  If you want to see boys do better in school, maybe it would be helpful if the adult men weren't in prison.  Maybe it would be helpful if the adult men could make a decent wage at a reasonable job. 
       Yes, David Brooks, I agree with you.  Schools do need a culture change.  But schools don't need to focus on celebrating toughness and physical exertion and winning - they already do that.  The message to a group of 12 year olds should not be:  any one of you could be the next President/founder of facebook/rock star.  The message should be:  with a little hard work and playing by the rules, even if you aren't the best at math/baseball/spelling, you'll still be able to get a decent job and have a good life.  And (here's the tricky part) it has to be true.
      

Maybe you'll understand student loans one of these days, NYT

       The New York Times ventured again into the student loan abyss with a June 27th editorial, The Deal on Student Loans.  Basically, the Times used the editorial to fuss at congress for not figuring out sooner how to keep the current student loan interest rate at 3.4% instead of climbing back up to 6.8%.  Naturally, Republicans and Democrats had to bitch at each other until the 11th hour before finally figuring out how to do what needed to be done, and the loans will stay at 3.4% for another year and another D vs. R showdown.
       Fine - it's a grand thing that the student loan interest rate is staying at 3.4%.  Groovy.  Still not the real problem.  The real problem is that college costs WAY MORE than it used to.  College costs have grown much, much faster than inflation.  MUCHMUCHMUCHMUCHMUCH faster.  My alma mater (and again, I am very devoted) will cost current students, assuming they need to buy an occasional textbook or new pair of underpants, a quarter of a million dollars for 4 years.
       When will we say too much?  When will parents say, "You know what, I'm going to give my child a quarter of a million dollars to buy a Subway's Sandwiches franchise instead of sending him to college, and let's see how he compares to that philosophy major in 10 years."  I know that college graduates earn more money than those who are not college graduates.  But at some point, the financial drain of college will start to be more than the financial rewards of going to college.  At some point, college graduates will suffer buyer's remorse.  At some point, smart kids will stay out of college because it is honestly an intelligent decision to do so.  At some point, smart parents will convince their smart kids not to go to college because they are honestly making smart decisions.  That day would suck - and let's hope this trend can be stopped before we get there.
       As one NYTimes commenter calling himself E. T. Bass beautifully summed up the problem:

STILL MISSES MAIN POINT

Interest is one thing. C-o-s-t in the big deal. Until costs are restrained -- most of this is just useless.

C-o-s-t.