Author: VD

The NYT on paternity testing>:

In the most recent case to make headlines, Ms. Frey went to court to set aside the paternity judgment against the man who was paying child support for her 4-year-old daughter and attached the results of a DNA test that showed the girl’s father was actually someone else. Gloria Allred, the lawyer for Ms. Frey, said her client had believed “in good faith” that the man paying child support was the girl’s father and argued that while women obviously have the responsibility to establish who the father is, so do men.

“Any man who’s alleged to be the father of a child born outside of marriage is entitled to take that DNA test” to establish paternity, she said. “If he did not take the test, then he needs to take responsibility for his failure to do so. He shouldn’t blame the mother.”

Of course, if men did begin taking paternity tests as a matter of course, the caterwauling of women afraid of having to support their bastard children by themselves would probably lead the feminist-fearing politicians to pass laws declaring that the first man whose shadow fell upon the child will be held financially responsible for it.

I find it more than a little ironic that despite the constant feminist declarations that a) women are fully equal to men in all ways, and b) fathers are an unnecessary child-rearing option, that the administrative family “courts” inevitably find that a man, any man, regardless of his relationship to the child, is required to provide financial support.

If we as a nation ever decide to get serious about the darkening demographic future, both divorce and abortion will be banned, a social stigma will be attached to women working and all children will be tested for their paternity at birth*. This won’t happen, since our quasi-democracy is an inherently reactive system, so the inevitable collapse of the Equalitarian Society will likely lead towards something significantly less protective of potential mothers and more exploitive and controlling of them.

*This will likely happen first, as the insurance companies will surely demand it in order to aid their genetic screening.

From Editor & Publisher:

Just days after it ran an editors’ note–under pressure from outside and within–that sort of admitted it had erred in a blast at Fox News’ Gerald Rivera during the Katrina tragedy, The New York Times finally ran a full correction on Sunday, on its editorial page, for a miscue by columnist Paul Krugman, while announcing a new policy on noting errors on that page.

Krugman had three times previously admitted getting wrong part of his Aug. 19 column about media recounts of the 2000 Bush-Gore race, but critics kept claiming that he still hadn’t gotten it quite right. Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins wrote on Sunday that it had turned into a “correction run amok.”

After publishing his third correction on the Web, Krugman asked Collins, she wrote, “if he could refrain from revisiting the subject yet again in print. I agreed, feeling we had reached the point of cruelty to readers. But I was wrong. The correction should have run in the same newspaper where the original error and all its little offspring had appeared.”

One shudders to think how many trees would perish in the service of correcting Paul Krugman’s many errors were any of the New York Times editors to know the first thing about economics. I spotted six notable errors within the first three chapters of one of his books when I was researching the chapter on him for my profitable, but unpublishable Media Whores: Courtesans and Charlatans of the American Commentariat.

Actually, if anyone has an interest in that, I can post a chapter or two here.

Last Week: 10-4. Season: 27-19. Fantasy: 2-1.

W-Cincinnati Bengals over Houston Texans
W-Tampa Bay Buccaneers over Detroit Lions
W-Indianapolis Colts over Tennessee Titans
W-New Orleans Saints over Buffalo Bills
W-Baltimore Ravens over New York Jets
W-Atlanta Falcons over Minnesota Vikings
Carolina Panthers over Green Bay Packers
L-Jacksonville Jaguars over Denver Broncos
L-Seattle Seahawks over Washington Redskins
San Francisco 49ers over Arizona Cardinals
W-Philadelphia Eagles over Kansas City Chiefs
L-Dallas Cowboys over Oakland Raiders
W-New York Giants over St. Louis Rams
L-New England Patriots over San Diego Chargers

These picks are still subject to change. I’m not sure about Dallas over Oakland, I need to look into the Eagles’ injury situation a little more and I’ve probably got the Carolina-Green Bay game too low. I’ve yet to speak to my partner Chokechain too, and he’ll surely have some insane insights that I’d do better to ignore.

It seems to me that the lightweights have all but taken over the conservative media. Set aside the historical absurdities of Malkin and the overt inanities of Shapiro, consider today’s National Review Online. There are a grand total of twelve articles cum columns on its homepage. Of these, one is dedicated to the Grand Theme of the present administration, the war. Two are dedicated to Katrina. There is one generally silly piece that appears to deal with media bias and one long stream of rumblings – including some eyebrow-raising praise for the Old Left – from the resident curmudgeon, John Derbyshire. Two columns on Tom Delay’s travails, one solid piece disemboweling the logic of static tax models and no less than four (4!) television and movie reviews.

Furthermore, The Corner is filled to the brim with a discourse that is not remarkably deeper than what one might expect at an MTV-related blog, minus the vulgarities and nUsp33k. I was almost embarrassed to be reading it, and I regularly write about fantasy football!

Now, there are several possibilities here. As the Fraters Libertas-nominated official columnist of the National Organization for Women, I would be remiss if I did not point out that NRO now has a woman editor, and as everyone knows by now, I expect female intellectuals to be rather more interested in the latest revelations from the idiot box and People Magazine than in such small and passing matters as death, war and taxes. (Knowing that this statement will cause some inadvertant panty-bunching, I went back to look at who wrote what and discovered that the only three pieces written by women are those focused on – hold your breath – the Oliver Twist movie, the Truman Capote movie and the Geena Davis TV show. If I’m such a stupid mysogynist, then why are my baseless suspicions always confirmed so readily?)

However, I suspect that the embrace of silliness on the part of NRO is more than the current editing-by-chick from which it suffers. The more insidious problem is that conservatives have been betrayed by their standard bearer, so they are in a period of doubt as to what conservatism even means these days. Hence the coining of new modifying adjectives, the appearance of neo-compassionate, strong government, pragma-conservatives and inevitable falling away of the true conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and Ann Coulter.

I find it very interesting that while the three most popular WND writers – Pat, Ann and me – regularly excoriate the Bush administration, the “leading” conservative publication is largely silent on the negatives, preferring instead to focus on the rapidly decreasing number of positives when it’s possible and blathering on about ephemeral trivialities when it’s not.

Or perhaps it’s too many years of weak opposition, after all, successfully engaging the liberal Democratic line these days doesn’t exactly require a mind honed like a katana made by a Japanese swordmaster. All I know that I don’t regret giving up my NR Digital subscription last year. I didn’t do it out of anger or even annoyance, it was simply the realization that I’d accumulated twelve weeks worth without once feeling the desire to read one.

My mind may not be clean, but at least it’s not full of fluff. Forget the Lesser Evil… Cthulhu in 2008!

Israel wants to put the US military in action:

The United States and its allies must act to stop Iran’s nuclear programs — by force if necessary — because conventional diplomacy will not work, three senior Israeli lawmakers from across the political spectrum warned yesterday. As a last resort, they said, Israel itself would act unilaterally to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear arms.

Here’s the question. If a nuclear Iran is a serious and direct threat to Israel – and I’m not arguing that it isn’t – why is it the United States’ responsibility to deal with it? Israel clearly has the ability to deal with the threat, as its lawmakers readily admit, so why should the responsibility devolve upon Americans?

Blessing Israel, as Christians are called to do, does not involve blind obedience to Israeli lawmakers anymore than giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s requires paying taxes one does not owe.

The reality is that nuclear technology is very close to being beyond the control of the nation-state. While this is somewhat frightening, as chaotic periods of historical transition are usually quite unpleasant, the truth is that it is actually likely to increase individual freedom in the long term. As Carroll Quigly points out in his insightful Tragedy And Hope, the cheap and ready availability of military-level weapons technology to the masses has always had the tendency to decrease the ability of central governments to use force to oppress their people.

The problem lies in the governments’ inevitable attempts to retain the upper hand, which can often be quite violent. I do not think it is an accident that it should be at this time of a teetering status quo that the leaders of Australia, the UK and the USA should be publicly making noises about using their militaries to suppress civil liberties in their countries.

It seems we live in interesting times, unfortunately.

We apologize for the recent service outage. Although it somehow seems to escape nearly everyone’s attention, I do have a Real Job which occasionally necessitates blogging downtime. The reason I do not ever write about it is that, as with the Destroyer in Macroscope, the intellectual content would sear your brain, albeit from utter boredom instead of a conceptual mind-scrambler.

I did, however, spot a nice used Ferrari on offer today as I was out and about. It was an elegant grey beast, but not nearly flashy enough for my liking. Let’s face it, if you’re going to drive Italian, you’ve simply got to be obnoxious about it.

National Review reviews the anti-Hillary Clinton commercial:

In the glorious future, with the issues so perfectly framed, “Democrat” and “liberal” have withered away, and everyone presumably knows that their choice is between upright, sincere independents (like Allen) and icy, extremist Republicans. Ah, to dream.

Liberals are serious about human rights in this world too. Working out a subplot, Allen’s aides keep reminding her about the Nigeria situation: In accordance with sharia, Nigeria is about to put a woman to death for committing adultery. Allen is concerned.

Throughout, Allen is shown confidently ordering around generals and positioning aircraft carriers (see, this is why stereotypes are bad). And as Commander limps through its 38th minute, she brings the Nigerian ambassador to a Joint Chiefs’ meeting and proceeds to illustrate how the Marines will storm his country if the woman isn’t released immediately.

While many people labor under the idea that the world would be a more peaceful place if women were in charge, I have my suspicions that the opposite is likely true. I don’t think we should have invaded Iraq simply because the Ba’ath dictatorship got its kicks by going Fargo on its citizens, but there apparently there are more than a few women who fantasize about sending in the Marines because a country applies a law supported by one-sixth of the world’s population to a single individual.

Fortunately, Hillary will probably be too occupied with oppressing the American citizenry to bother playing Global Mommy, although it is true her spiritual godfather was able to invade countries and slaughter civilians at the same time. Perhaps her total lack of a maternal instinct will be one plus for the Lizard Queen as president.

Is there anyone here who actually plans to watch this show? I certainly don’t.

A Jay Nordlinger reader exposes Dan Brown yet again:

My colleague Christopher Howse has pointed out that you can tell that The Da Vinci Code is rubbish just by its name. Students of art refer to the man in question as ‘Leonardo’, ‘Da Vinci’ being simply the identifier of his town of origin. So Dan Brown’s title is the equivalent of a book about Jesus being called Of Nazareth. [That is much better than my “of Orange” example.] To be fair, though, these things do not follow a common rule. A friend of mine who had done a thesis on Correggio applied for an art history fellowship at a well-known university. One of those interviewing him for the post asked, ‘So where did Correggio come from?’ My friend replied truthfully, ‘From Correggio.’ He sensed at once that he should have spared his questioner’s blushes. He failed to get the fellowship.

I never consciously thought about it that way, but it might be one reason why I could never bring myself to bother reading The Da Vinci Code despite the fact that I’ll cheerfully plow through the complete John Norman or Patrick O’Brien in a matter of weeks. I’m no literary snob, but one does have to draw a line somewhere… although I rather feel as if I’m biting the hand that doesn’t exactly feed me, but does toss me a few treats now and then, considering that Pocket has amassed a fair amount of the coin of the realm thanks to Mr. Brown.

From the Washington Times:

President Bush yesterday sought to federalize hurricane-relief efforts, removing governors from the decision-making process. “It wouldn’t be necessary to get a request from the governor or take other action,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday. “This would be,” he added, “more of an automatic trigger.”

Mr. McClellan was referring to a new, direct line of authority that would allow the president to place the Pentagon in charge of responding to natural disasters, terrorist attacks and outbreaks of disease.

I wonder how long after this law passes there will be a terrorist attack that sets off the automatic trigger. Six months? Six days? At some point, even the most naive, pro-government American has to seriously consider that perhaps the administration is enacting laws such as these with a specific purpose in mind.

But, of course, who could question the good intentions of George Bush after he said that the philosopher who had influenced him most was “Christ”. Now, it is certainly not for me to judge another man’s heart, but I always harbor a certain amount of skepticism about self-professed Christians who nevertheless seem to avoid the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth like the plague.

On an increasingly tangential note, I also wonder, when Paul repeatedly warns that the Church will be attacked by many enemies within, why Christians spend so little effort contemplating who those treacherous wolves in sheep’s clothing in their own local church might be.