Yes, it’s Earth Day again, the day we’re all supposed to think about Mother Gaia and what we can do to worship her in the correctly communal and communitarian manner. One little tip for you though (stolen shamelessly from PJ O’Rourke, as most peoples’ good jokes are): Have a look at any of the various events going on around the place and give the babe/beast ratio a quick check.

Things that are fashionable, ahead of the curve, have very high babe ratios: all the good looking women are there. When there’s a preponderance of mutts and beasts you know that the cause has passed its peak and become, like politics, showbiz for the ugly. Earth Day failed the ratio check starting some three decades ago and this year won’t be any different.

However, we do have something different for this year: a concerted attempt to use children as informers on their parents.

….launching this Earth Day is Green My Parents, a nationwide effort to inspire and organize kids to lead their families in measuring and reducing environmental impact at home. Not just on Earth Day, but every day.

Oh aye, what’s Green My Parents all about then?

...a movement that activates & enlists kids to lead their families in measuring & reducing environmental impact at home & “challenge” their parents to share savings with kids.

Anybody else recognize this? Yes, that’s right, it’s straight out of the totalitarian playbook. Pretty much every foul dictatorship has used the children to tell on those parents who aren’t following the correct party line. Pavlik Morozov was the one the Soviet Union held up for praise. It is right and just that children should inform on their parents to the State: a more sickening traducement of family life it being difficult to imagine.

But of course it wasn’t just the Soviets that did this: the fascist regimes of mid 20th century Europe were just as joyous in their use of children to enforce conformity in parents. Pol Pot famously used children as informers to make sure that all did as commanded, the children even being given the power over who was executed.

The reason for all of this is of course that children are both very easy to lie to and also very easy to brainwash. Parents are, at least legally they are, competent adults and as such they’re capable of working out what is important and what isn’t. Green My Parents is actively suggesting that all should bathe in cold water, just as one of their more trivially stupid ideas. An adult would point out that returning to the medieval highly infrequent wipe with a cold rag just isn’t sensible. A child can be lied to until it actually believes that this will make a difference to the polar bears.

You’ll all have noted, at least those with school age children will have noted, the other part of this pincer movement: endless lessons in the more wacko forms of environmental nonsense and a marked lack of training in critical thinking or the evaluation of evidence. So now the brainwashed little poppets are to study you, inform and nag you and no doubt, coming soon, tell teacher that you had a hot shower.

One of the great books of the last century was George Orwell’s 1984. A book which contained a character called Parsons.

He is captured when his children claim that he repeatedly and unknowingly spoke against the Party in his sleep and he is last seen in the Ministry of Love, proud of having been betrayed by his orthodox children.

Crippled Jesus Christ on a crutch people, 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual!

Good looking man who can sing and dance is gay: well, that’s a shocker really, isn’t it? 

“I am proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man. I am very blessed to be who I am.” 

And with that Ricky Martin shocked, well, shocked almost no one really. While maiden aunts aren’t as dim about sex as everyone seems to assume (you’ve got to know something about it to remain maiden) I still doubt that there were any such even remotely unaware that Ricky was not quite as other men, that his interests were those of a minority. A vibrant, inclusive, nothing at all wrong with that minority, but a minority nonetheless. Even if his suspicious ability to boogie to a beat were not enough his twin sons born to a surrogate back in 2008 were a clue: if hetero he really wouldn’t have any shortage of those willing to bear them for him now would he?

But much more important than whether Ricky prefers to pitch and catch is that I simply don’t care. Just as I don’t care whether Rosie O’Donnell does play hide the salami or not, has to floss after sex or not. Whether Monica Lewinsky spits or swallows: these just aren’t things that interest in the slightest. As PJ O’Rourke pointed out there are times when the differences between men and women are unimportant, like when trading bonds, and times they’re important, when trying to make babies. Similarly, how consenting adults like to take their sex is simply not interesting if you’ve no desire or intention (or chance of course) to ever have sex with them. As long as Ricky pumps out the bubblegum Latino pop, Rosie keeps telling decent jokes and Monica being the butt of them we’ll all get along fine. I’m no more interested in their predilections, I should be no more interested in them, than they are in mine for middle aged women (perhaps to be correctly uxorious I should say woman there).

We all recognize that there was a time when having sexual interests outside the mainstream was indeed dangerous. Not just to careers either, I can still remember reading with astonishment a newspaper report of a Supreme Court case over whether Georgia could arrest a man for giving another a blow job. What? This absurdity even made it to the first level of the court system? Wasn’t tossed by the desk sergeant? Perhaps I shouldn’t be quite so dismissive, given that homosexuality was only legalized in England a few years after my birth but seriously, this is now 2010.

That people have different sex drives, OK, we get it. But can we please stop having these people coming out of closets? Really, seriously, it’s over. We’ve got it now and no, we don’t need yet another “role model” and we really don’t need another publicity hound taking to the media to tell us about their sexual preferences.

The New York Daily News polled their readers as to whether they already knew if Ricky was gay or not before the announcement. 84% said yes. Of course it was obvious, and only 16% agreed that they were thick as dirt. Despite the existence of People Magazine no, the media isn’t run for that dumbest 16% of the population so, sorry folks, but if you’ve not cavorted out of that closet yet just don’t bother. The Nirvana of sexual freedom really has arrived.

What’s wrong with American trade? In short, the people America has negotiating its trade agreements. One Robert E. Lighthizer, a deputy trade rep under Reagan, took to the New York Times this week to tells us all what was wrong with current and recent trade policy. What he managed to show is that if people holding these sorts of views are the ones negotiating trade pacts on our behalf then we’re all ruined.

I’ll just start with his gross misconception of the effects of VAT. His claim is that because you don’t pay VAT on exports but you do on imports then countries which have a VAT unfairly subsidize exports. This is what is known in technical circles as “insane”. A VAT is a sales tax and in the US sales taxes are not imposed upon exports and they are upon imports. Further, he claims that the US relies mostly upon income taxes for revenue while the countries that have VATs rely mostly upon that VAT. He seems not to realize that the VAT is, just like sales tax, imposed on top of all of the other taxes.

But that isn’t his really great and grand mistake. No, he’s committed the ultimate sin in the consideration of trade and production. All of his complaints are about how current trade rules make things difficult for producers and exporters. All of his desired actions are about how to make things easier for producers and exporters. All of which is entirely the wrong way to think about either production or exports.

We don’t run the economy for the benefit of producers and we most certainly shouldn’t run it for them. The aim is to give consumers the maximum possible satisfaction given current resources and technology levels. Adam Smith pointed this out so it’s hardly a new idea: the sole purpose of any and all production is consumption. So if, as Mr. Lighthizer complains, China subsidizes its exports, this is a benefit to the American consumer. Our correct answer to this is to say “Thank you, please may I have some more” (or, as Calvin Coolidge allegedly said, when the messenger delivered to the Oval Office his first paycheck as President, “Thank you. Please come again”).

All of his evidence falls afoul of this wildly incorrect viewpoint. Developing nations are growing faster than the US and therefore we shouldn’t open American markets to them. What? What has that to do with trade? The aim and point of trade is to give American consumers access to the glories of world production, not to give American producers the ability to sell to the world. All the talk of market opening offers not being made, of different labor and environmental regulations elsewhere, of again Chinese currency manipulation. They’re all entirely irrelevant.

They are, quite simply, nothing at all to do with what America’s attitude toward trade should be. That attitude is, again quite simply, that some people out there in that great big wide world are making things which are better, cheaper, different, sexier, than what is made in the US and Joe Six-Pack and his wife would quite like some of it please. And it ain’t the business of government to stand between Joe Six-Pack and what he and his wife would like. That other governments deny their own citizens the bounty of American production is an irrelevance. As the late great Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, said, just because someone else is throwing rocks in their harbors doesn’t mean we should throw rocks in our own.

And this ignorance of the very point of trade is what has made America’s trade policy so dysfunctional over the decades. That we’ve got someone arguing these things, as Mr. Lighthizer is, who was a trade rep for the country, as Mr. Lighthizer was, is simply appalling. It would be like appointing a trade union leader because he says the point of trade unions is to lower the workers’ wages. Appointing a General who said surrender is the best means of defence.

There’s a very simple point to be made about trade. Imports are going shopping. Exports are just the shit we do so we can go shopping. Unless and until America’s trade representatives understand that point then we’re always going to have an entirely dysfunctional trade policy.

I think we’ve found the secret of Paul Krugman you know. No, really, an excellent little piece in the New Yorker gives us what we need to analyze the great man. Yes, he is indeed a great man but like all of us he has his flaws and this piece gives us the necessary clues to them.

Actually, what it is: he doesn’t understand politics.

A fairly brave statement about someone who is one of the leading commentators upon politics in our day, who has worked inside the belly of the beast, and one who is clearly and obviously vastly more intelligent than you or I.

We’ll try to claim greater intelligence when we’ve got our own Nobel Prizes, shall we?

If we look back at Krugman’s work there is some excellent economics in there. And if we look at his writing there is, on top of that excellence, a man with a real gift for both writing and for explaining complex subjects so that all can grasp them (his “Ricardo’s Difficult Idea” is a masterpiece). There’s even great fun to be had in his academic work.

I’m certainly not going to try to criticise his economics…well, except for one area….for if we were to try and get into a dick measuring contest I’m the micro-penis and he’s wielding the Ron Jeremy.

However, running through that New Yorker piece is Krugman’s incredible naivety about politics and the political process. It’s laid out for us: he didn’t pay much attention to politics, he consorted only with economists, he built his career, thought about economics and not the sausage grinder of the legislatures.

His work (his writing that is, not his academic work) in the 90’s has a lot of explanation and debunking of various silly ideas floating around. He famously defended sweat shops: not because they’re good per se, but because they’re better than the alternatives on offer to those who work in them. He pointed out that higher wages do not in themselves lead to less turnover of workers, do not lead to less absenteeism and so on—as those arguing for a higher minimum wage (or even a “living wage”) argue. It is having higher wages than the others in town that does this: you offer people a better deal and you get better labor. If everyone raises wages then you don’t.

Since he’s moved to The Times he’s moved, a lot, from measuring the proposals of others to having proposals of his own. This has become much more noticeable in recent times, since Obama ascended the throne. And you can see Krugman’s frustrations being writ large.

Now whether his proposals are indeed the ne plus ultra of possible economic ideas or not isn’t the point. What he’s ignorant of is the way that politics actually works.

There’s a view that politicians are in it all for our good. Perhaps, if you dare to be cynical enough, that they’re in it for the good of those who elect them, perhaps even the interest groups that fund those election campaigns. This is the sort of naivety that disappears with most adults’ first real contact with the political classes. No, they’re not in it for us, whoever us is. They’re in it for them.

Chuck Schumer, Trent Lott, Murtha, Webb—take any politician from any part of the political spectrum. They’re in the game so that they can stay in the game. They’ll do whatever it takes to win the next election….and in the interim they’ll do whatever else they can to feather their nests. We note and expect this behavior from bankers, businessmen, the school bully and all too often from our about to be ex-spouses. There is no illogicality in noting that politicians do the same. Indeed, the failure is to expect different behavior from those who gain their jobs from our votes.

This whole, adult, view tends to come under the banner of public choice economics. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to do what is good for politicians and bureaucrats. Just like we do and just like we would if we had the opportunities that politicians and bureaucrats do.

This is the part that Krugman hasn’t absorbed yet. Assume that his ideas are wonderful, that he really does know how big the stimulus should be, how health care insurance should be reformed, how to beat Wall Street in favor of Main Street. As of course he does believe of his own ideas: then watch his frustration as the politicians don’t do what he thinks they should be doing….what is obvious to him that they should be doing. He actually trusts politicians to do the right thing by us instead of the right thing by politicians.

And that’s the error, that’s his feet of clay. His head may well be far above the clouds that shroud our own plans for the world but he’s incapable of understanding the slime and the mold that his plans depend upon for implementation. He actually thinks that politicians are trying to do the right thing.

So despite my having already lost the dick waving competition I’d suggest that there is an area of economics which Professor Krugman really does need to study. It’s that public choice theory thing, the one where we start our economics by assuming that politicians are indeed lying weasel felchers right at the beginning. The world makes so much more sense that way. It’s also so less frustrating when you see your best laid plans going the way of all mice and men, to a dusty grave, when you start with the knowledge that of course they’ll fuck it up….they’re only in it for themselves anyway.

A good place for him to start would be the Nobel Prize lecture by his fellow Laureate, James Buchanan.

There’s nothing quite like a New York Times columnist for spouting gobbledegook on matters economic: perhaps only the editorials themselves are worse. Tom “Airmiles” Friedman gives us a lovely example here:

Banks, multinationals and hedge funds often hire foreign policy experts to do “political risk analysis” before they invest in places like, say, Kazakhstan or Argentina. They may soon have to add the United States to their watch lists.

Now he’s right so far, investors really are adding the US (and the UK) to their list of places where political risk is a concern. But Tom then goes on to waffle about leadership, strong government (and the lack of it), inflation, currency matters. No, these are not what people think of as political risk, these are economic risks.

Political risk is when politicians decide that they’re going to tear up the rule of law and stick it to some company or other that they or the public don’t like. Doesn’t matter what the original deal was, what it says in the contract, yeah, let’s get ‘em! Usually of course to get a short term poll boost for said politicians while right royally screwing over the long term economic health of the country.

This happened to Shell in Russia: they invested billions in the Sakhalin oil and gas projects. Once they were actually up and producing the Russian government sucked its teeth and decided to change the rules: no, you can’t export, we’ll change the royalty rates, oooh, my, see, you’ve broken an environmental law so we’ll just force you to sell the whole project, eh? Something very similar happened to BP over their investment in TNK.

Or there’s the example of the Zambian copper mines. No one would invest there because no one could be sure what the law would be next week. So a strong deal was cut: if you change those rules you’ve got to compensate us for the investments we’ve already made. Sure as eggs is eggs of course as soon as the copper was flowing again the government tried to quadruple the royalty rate, change the corporate and income tax rates and disallow depreciation charges against tax…..and they’re still desperately trying to wriggle out of paying compensation. There’s even a little case going on in El Salvador right now. A gold mining company spent $80 million prospecting and actually found gold. Under the contract, either they are allowed to lift the gold or they have to be compensated for their exploration costs. Guess what? The government in El Salvador doesn’t want to let them mine and also doesn’t want to pay back either the costs or the fee that was paid for the right to prospect.

That’s what political risk is, that politicians are slimeballs who will never live up to their part of an agreement. But why should anyone be worried that the US should be added to a list of countries where this might be a problem? Surely we don’t have these sorts of problems?

Oh Yeah? Anyone remember how the bondholders got crammed down in the GM bankruptcy? How the President of the United States overturned the settled law of the land so that his political supporters, the unions, got a better deal than they should have done?

Or how about this one?

In 1995, when oil prices were very low, Congress tried to encourage deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by giving oil companies relief from some of the royalties they incur for producing oil and gas on public land. .....Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts hopes to put things right with a bill that would clarify the law and prevent companies from signing new leases in the gulf until they renegotiate the old ones and pay royalties that are due.

Changing the rules of the game after billions have been spent by the companies. BP, as an example, went out and spent a fortune and was able to find oil 6 miles under the Gulf: the deepest anyone has ever drilled. Now that the money has been spent and the oil company is committed, up pops a politician claiming that the rules just be changed: we didn’t really mean it you know, ha, ha, ha, just joshing. Of course we’re not going to let you keep the profits we encouraged you to go and seek, don’t be silly.

That’s what political risk is, that politicians will, well, politicians will act like politicians. Overturn contracts, rip up the rule of law, if it appears that doing so will give them an electoral advantage.

The reason that investors are now beginning to consider political risk when investing in the US? Because the US has become the sort of place where you have to worry about political risk when you invest. This is not, to put it mildly, an advertisement either for the US or for American politicians. It will lower investment and that in turn will lower the living standards of Americans in the future. But it gets votes in the short term and that’s what political risk is, see?

There are some people who can carry off this having a girlfriend in every town thing: sailors for one. There’s also a number who can’t, as Tiger Woods recently found out. Being of that age when the mid-life crisis moves one from simple envy of those who can to trying to work out quite how one can lead me to investigate.

A-Rod for example: I believe he’s something to do with what we English call “rounders”, a game we give up at 11 years of age. But apparently his inability to move on and learn cricket properly hasn’t stopped him from becoming both exceedingly rich and exceedingly famous. They might have something to do with his ability to date and then dump both Madonna, a rock star and Kate Hudson, ex-wife of one (apparently the Black Crowes drug scene was too much even for the daughter of an actress) and then move on to, as we’re told he currently is:

Alex Rodriguez is playing the field like a man possessed in the aftermath of his split with Kate Hudson, and has been on dates with a cavalcade of women in the past two weeks—including a meeting in Manhattan with old flame Madonna.

Sources tell Page Six the Yankee slugger has been seen with a pretty brunette from New York and a blond model in Miami, in addition to a secret rendezvous with the Material Girl while in town two weeks ago.

OK, so, wealth, fame and physical fitness perhaps. However, there are also other examples out there: John Mayer perhaps.

“I can text whatever I want to anybody in the world; I’m not married. I write a lot of dirty text messages to girls, and you’ve never seen any of them. Why? Because if a girl brought a dirty text message from me to the newspapers, they’d say ‘I don’t have an angle here. Someone wants to wear your ass like a hat? Big deal.”

Women as headgear doesn’t particularly entice as my own kink, middle age or not, but given that John Mayer isn’t hugely physically fit, hugely famous nor hugely rich maybe there’s a chance still?

Perhaps we can find the answer in our third example, a certain John Terry. No, none of you will ever have heard of him but in England he’s hugely famous, being captain until this afternoon of the England football side. He’s also hugely wealthy and physically fit. He did indeed have a string of lovers including, in a move that might have been unwise, the girlfriend of one of his team mates. Who he got pregnant and then procured an abortion for.

However, John Terry did not get away with it, when the news came out of his 8 sidelines there was a few days of dithering and then he was sacked as the captain. The newspapers have been full of “John Terry’s Shame” stories all week.

So of our four (fifth if we include the entirely non-famous, non-rich and non-physically fit such as your humble correspondent) two were able to get away with at least pursuing a harem fit for installation in a seraglio while two were not: John T and Tiger. What is it that marks them out as different from John M and Rod?

Perhaps it’s simply that we’re used to reading about the “loves” (the quotation marks are there because the time spans always seem far too short to support “love” unless we are using the euphemism for sex that we make when adding the word “making”) of Rod and John M in a way that we’re not of the other two? Who would be surprised to hear that either had a new girlfriend? Is it just that, that they are no longer news stories any more but olds stories?

Mr. Mayer to the microphone please:

Tiger Woods’ problems come from him being married.

Ahh, that’s it. As was John Terry of course (and as is your humble correspondent, it turns out that fame and fortune aren’t the limiting factors) and thus the failure of his plans to spread the seed.

If you think about it actually it’s all rather sweet. Quaint even: there was a time when we expected politicians to keep their promises while we accepted that a man might get a little frisky inside marriage. Now it appears that a politician is required merely not to fall over drunk while voting to keep our approval while something as mild as breaking a marriage vow is grounds for dismissal.

The last word though should go to the ex-captain, John Terry:

Terry finished the interview by saying his favorite sportsman is Tiger Woods.

Would it surprise you to hear that the New York Times has managed an economics fail? Again? No, I suppose it probably wouldn’t but you will at least be interested in finding out which part of the dismal science they’ve managed to entirely misunderstand I have no doubt.

It’s here, in one of the editorials, moaning about how big big business is:

Big Oil is so big that Royal Dutch Shell is the world’s 25th-biggest economy, bigger than Norway.

No, it isn’t. It’s not even close to that sort of level. This is entirely nonsense, nonsense upon stilts, nonsense that betrays a sad and woeful lack of knowledge about what an economy is and how we count and measure it.

The truth is that Shell is around and about the size of Luxembourg, number 68 or so on the list.

So, what is it that the New York Times has got wrong? Well, basically, they’ve looked at a few numbers, seen some that look about the same and then hared off cock-eyed to their conclusion: about what we expect from children just past the “why’s the sky blue, daddy?” stage.

The GDP of Norway is (I’m rounding everything here, just to conserve the world’s supply of digits) around $400 billion. The turnover of Shell is around $400 billion. Thus Shell is the same size as Norway, right?

No, entirely wrong. GDP is Gross Domestic Product. There are a number of different ways to think about it but the one we want here is that it is the value added in the economy over the year. What it isn’t is the turnover in the economy. Think of housing for a moment: you sell your house (umm, well, if you can at the moment of course) and someone else buys it. That’s a transaction and is it included in GDP? No, it most certainly isn’t. Total sales of houses in the US are around $12 trillion a year and the total economy is $15 trillion: whatever you might have thought of the past few years it isn’t true that housing is 80 percent of the US economy. No, the bits we include in GDP are the bits of added value: the realtors fees, the closing costs, the points you pay the mortgage broker. Yes, I know, tough to think of these as added value but to economists (a strange breed indeed) they are.

However, to get that $400 billion figure for Shell we’re not measuring value added, we’re measuring turnover. So to equate the two numbers is somewhere between the apples and pears thing and comparing apples to Rush Limbaugh: somewhere between inappropriate and surreal.

The value added at a company (and I’ll agree that there are different ways of doing this) is best represented by the profit that they make. Take all the sales, take all the costs, net them off and you’re left with that profit: the value that’s been added by incurring all those costs to make those sales. Shell’s profits are around $30 billion a year. So that’s the number that we want to equate to the GDP of a country and Luxembourg’s GDP is about $30 billion and so Shell is about the size of Luxembourg.

“But, but, wait” I can hear the confused leftist at the back of the lecture hall saying “Shell is still the size of a country and that’s bad, right?”

Well, no, not really sure that this is still bad. Shell employs a couple of hundred thousand rich world people in its business. Luxembourg employs a couple of hundred thousand rich world people in its business as a country. Why should anyone be surprised that a couple of hundred thousand rich world people produce about the same value added even if employed in different ways?

As to the New York Times editorial writers, well, next time they tell us that politicians run things better than markets, that taxes or the minimum wage should be higher, you know, the sorts of things that those arts graduates love to lecture us on, just remember that on matters economic they simply haven’t the first clue of what they’re talking about. They might know where to put, commas, and how to spell stuff but numbers clearly confuse them.

“Tiger Woods in sex rehab clinic” seemed to be all that the newspapers of my native land could talk about one day last week. If you managed to miss the more staid US dailies’ coverage of the momentous event it is simply that Tiger is hanging out at a “clinic” somewhere in Hicksville, The South, getting “treatment” for his sex addiction. I say “clinic” and “treatment” as activities seem to include “art classes, exercise and fitness regimes, shame reduction work, a spirituality group, a grief group, and yoga”. Plus sharing a room and having, horror of horrors, to have to clean it himself. This sounds a great deal more like a New Age retreat center than it does treatment for ambitious and wandering gonads—but we’ll come to that in a moment.

The next day the same papers were full of pieces about whether sex addiction is in fact an addiction. Details of the treatment do amuse: first, a ban on Tiger pleasuring himself for 90 days. The New Puritanism has gone too far if a sporting god and near billionaire isn’t allowed even to play with himself. Indeed, a complete and total ban on sex of any kind might also not be the way to convince a healthy young man to resist any cocktail waitresses who might throw themselves at him. Finally, the revelation that, unlike the others, Tiger gets maid service also raises a snigger: maid service of what?

The greatest surprise to me was that this clinic seems to be unisex: men and women with any (but obviously voracious) sexual habits are treated together—which, again, doesn’t seem likely to lead to a reduction in sexual activity. Perhaps appropriate is a story from a friend who did medical training: one young man was seen trolling for dates amongst those attending the sexual diseases clinic. When asked why, given the obvious probability that they were infectious, the response was that, well, at least the young man did know that they were up for it in theory, even if not right now.

But I think there’s a more serious observation that can be made about this whole hoopla. Sex addiction, whether it’s a disease or not (I think not), clearly and obviously transgresses the boundaries of what the society thinks is acceptable. Even in this very much less religious age, it is a sin against public expectations. And sins, even if they are simply against public expectations, need to be expiated.

Which is where other details of the treatment come in. Apparently Tiger must recount all his transgressions to his wife Elin, in sordid and excruciating detail. He must, as above, serve a period of abstinence, during which he must exercise and meditate (“mens sana in corpore sano”, no?). Then, if all of this is done successfully, he can be forgiven and welcomed back into the arms of his family and the hearts of the public. All of which sounds terribly Catholic to me really. Confession, contrition, and penance being the center of that sacrament normally called confession and all those being present in this treatment for “sex addiction”.

You might, if a cynic like me, simply assume that both the Church and the clinic have hit on the same psychological dramas that need to be played out before wives or the public will forgive. You might be more cynical and think that the clinic has simply copied a system that has worked well for a millenia or more. Or you might simply look at this and think that while organized religion is direct, the belief in a vengeful and omniscient God has declined the form of religion necessary to carry on.

And as to whether sex addiction actually exists or not we might go along with Chesterton. When people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. The idea that 90 days of enforced celibacy is the way to induce a man to be faithful on day 91 certainly counts as “anything”.