Informant38

Foreskins and smegma years ago:

JOSEPH J. SCHATZ, AP writer:

A southern African radio correspondent has been receiving a flood of text messages and cell phone calls — some from offended listeners and readers.
All because Kennedy Gondwe chose to get circumcised to protect himself from AIDS, and took the British Broadcasting Corp.'s radio and Web audience through the procedure with him Friday.

-
Oddly, foreskins have been popping up right and left these last few days.
ex. 1; ex.2;
and bears, as well. Sometimes together.
This may be one of those swellings-toward-fruition that afterwards look so obvious but at the time seem at most obscurely and mysteriously connected.
For instance, who would have thought after all these years of dark and grotesque cruelty directed at young male penises by threatened but still powerful male elders and their acquiescent co-dependents, the very act of circumcision itself would be revealed as all along an example of divine mercy, at least in some cases, statistically, possibly, or recently anyway, at least in Africa, or Zambia anyway, or in some parts of it, evidently, according to some sporadically collated and unprofessionally conducted informal polls funded by theocratic delusionals.
Also David and Saul, those wild and crazy Biblical In-laws of great historical repute, temporarily somewhat out of whack with each other as well as in and out of sync with the plans of the Great, uh, You Know:

And it came to pass as they came, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, that the women came out of all cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of music.
And the women answered one another as they played, and said,
Saul hath slain his thousands,
and David his ten thousands.
And Saul was very wroth, and the saying displeased him; and he said, They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands: and what can he have more but the kingdom?
And Saul eyed David from that day and forward.
And it came to pass on the morrow,
that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David played with his hand, as at other times: and there was a javelin in Saul's hand.
And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even to the wall with it. And David avoided out of his presence twice.

The slaughter David's just then getting back from being his main pre-nup princely task - set by old King Saul in order to intrigue him on out of town, hopefully for keeps - of gathering up the foreskins of the sundry dead Philistines he's gone out there and recently killed. Probably he had some lesser individuals - slaves, immigrants, you know, to do the actual foreskin removalling - grab it, stretch it out, slice it off, pop it in the bag, hand in the bag to Prince for counting - David heads home, delivers the bags, gets the girl. Good old days.
These circumcison-as-prophylaxis-against-AIDS-(in Africa) stories seem to be on a kind of time-release lately. Every few weeks the timid journalistic cry emerges. "But it's good for you!" "Circumcision prevents AIDS!"
Never mind that a bizarre and sub-humanly cruel religious superstition/mind-control technique was officially adopted as standard modern medical practice for well over two hundred and fifty years in the erstwhile Enlightened West- with no scientific justification behind it whatsoever, none, zero.
But that's the magic! See, it was in anticipation! Just getting ready for now and stuff! End Times! What's that? Look! Over there! Terrorists!
Ah, sorry, wrong narrative.
Read the early rationalizations about anti-masturbatory effects, anti-epileptic effects, anti-disease effects - all nice projects, but none of it holds any water at all.
Stories made up by men who were already committed to cutting off the tips of young boys dicks and sucking away the blood.
It's about the psychological intimidation, hey? And it was always about that - grown men once made crazy by the acts of their elders making the young go crazy in turn, because that's how it is in the world. That's just how it is, and that's just how God wants it. Crazy, violent, cruel, and disgusting.
You don't think snipping off the end of a kid's dick when he's too young to understand any of your Godly horseshit might be actually more than a little traumatic do you?
Intimidating, humiliating - an expression of irrefutable sadistic power, out of a dynamic in which the victim holds no power at all, except the ability to scream in helpless outrage with all his being.
Another victory for the Great I Am.
And the screams of outraged infants are meaningless noise to men who are themselves borderline or full-tilt sociopathic already.
This subject has come up before - ex.1; ex.2; ex.3.
In other tangential cutting-off-your-dick news notes, the man Wolbarst quoted herein:

In 1914, erroneous medical beliefs about smegma were compounded by influential American urologist and eugenicist Abraham Wolbarst (1872–1952), who updated the demonization of the foreskin and promulgated the idea that it harboured ‘carcinogenic secretions’. Wolbarst’s lifelong crusade to promote circumcision was initially provoked as a means of countering contemporary medical concerns over the unsanitary and occasionally deadly aspects of ritual Jewish circumcision, specifically the prescribed sucking of blood from the wound. Rather than being unsanitary, Wolbarst countered that circumcision was, in fact, so sanitary that it should be imposed on all males. Wolbarst’s definition of ‘sanitation’, however, was more heavily suffused with the antimasturbation hysteria concept of ‘moral sanitation’ than concern for physical cleanliness. Referring to smegma, Wolbarst made the bigoted characterization of ‘gentiles’ of even middle-class standing as being unable to ‘pay proper attention to the cleansing of their genitals’. Wolbarst thundered in JAMA: ‘Times innumerable, in my experience, the stench arising from the confined and retained balanic secretions has been almost unbearable’, and thus ‘the argument for circumcision as a measure of hygiene must be apparent to any but a man deprived of his olfactory sense’.

was also involved in the following whatever it may have been at its clearest and most fundamental hinky-ass weirdness:

DECLARES SUICIDE LETTER ONLY A JOKE Dr. Wolbarst Says He and Wife Each Wrote One to See Who Could Do It the Better. SENT TO TIMES BY ERROR Wife's Letter Found and Mailed by a Servant -- Statement on Arrival in England. Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES. LONDON, Sept. 5 -- The liner Kronprinz "Wilhelm arrived at Plymouth this morning having on board Dr. and Mrs. Abraham L. Wolbarst, from the latter of whom THE NEW YORK TIMES recently published a letter announcing her intention to commit suicide. To a NEW YORK TIMES correspondent, who boarded the' liner. Dr. Wolbarst related the folio-wing curious story: His wife, he said, wrote the letter printed in THB NEW YORK TIMES after having read a sensational novel In which a wife Indited a missive to her husband Uireatenlng to commit suicide. Mrs. "Wolbarst. according to the doctor, suggested that each should -write a letter to see which could pen the more startling effusion. They did so. and his wife addressed hers to THE NEW YORK TIMES. Dr. Wolbarst repeatedly Impressed upon the correspondent that all this was done as a Joke, and happened some ten or twelve weeks ago. He destroyed his own letter, he said, but his wife s letter, jokingly Intended for him, was addressed to THE TIMES, and somehow or other got put away In a drawer.

Abraham Wolbarst, son of David - enemy of smegma.