Year: 2013

Razib Khan debunks the myth “that in 10 percent of cases paternity is misattributed”:

[V]ery high estimates of cuckoldry come from databases of disputed paternity, which are obviously going to be a biased sample. A more thorough survey suggests that there is a wide variation in misattributed paternity across populations.

He points to a German study which estimates nonpaternity in Germany at roughly one percent:

The sample consists of the families of children who require bone marrow transplants. The authors note two important conditions: 1) the details of the results as they might relate to paternity are not divulged, 2) none of the parents refused to be typed. Since susceptibility to childhood cancers are evenly distributed across the population the biases introduced in other surveys presumably do not apply to this situation.

A reader at TPM puts his finger on it:

Neither side in this putative civil war has been willing to reckon honestly with the consequences of the Bush administration for the country (substantively) or the Republican Party (politically). Both do their best to present their views to the public as if the last Republican President had never existed. This has left both groups of activists somewhat unmoored; in politics, you talk ideology and principles when you can’t brag about accomplishments, because voters are a lot better at relating the latter to their own lives.

Since neither the Tea Party types or the big donors and the campaign operatives working for them are thinking of repudiating a Republican administration that lost two wars and wrecked the economy, they are left to air their differences on issues no one besides campaign junkies cares about. The self-styled conservatives complain that Rove and his people say mean things about them; the moneybags wing is dedicated to recruiting candidates who will avoid gaffes. Big deal.

This was also clear in the Hagel hearings. When you have a party that hasn’t been able to repudiate the worst administration in modern times, and actually still attempt to hail it as some kind of achievement with respect to Iraq or Afghanistan or the debt, you cannot persuade anyone you have changed, or want to change.

Someone in the GOP needs to take Bush-Cheney apart, to show how they created the debt crisis we are in, by throwing away a surplus on unaffordable tax cuts, launching two unfunded wars, and one new unfunded entitlement. They need to take on the war crimes that has deeply undermined the soul of the United States. They need to note the catastrophic negligence that gave us the worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor (9/11) despite being warned explicitly in advance, accept weak and false intelligence to launch a war they were too incompetent to fight or win, sat back as one of the worst hurricanes all but took out a major city, and was so negligent in bank regulation that we ended up with Lehman and all that subsequently took place.

These were not minor errors. They were catastrophic misjudgments which took an era of peace, surplus and prosperity and replaced it with a dystopia of massive debt, a lawless executive branch, two unwinnable wars, and a record of war crimes that had their source in the very Oval Office.

When will the Republicans hold themselves accountable for the things that have persuaded so many that this bunch of fanatics and deniers are unfit for government? When will they speak of Bush and Cheney and repudiate them?

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty, 2009)

Libraries around the country are expanding their offerings beyond books – “residents can now check out seeds.” Luke Runyon reports from Basalt, Colorado:

In a corner of the library, Stephanie Syson and her 4-year-old daughter, Gray, are just finishing a book with a white rabbit on the cover. When Gray approaches the knee-high shelves filled with seed packets, she zeroes in on a pack labeled “rainbow carrots.” “We just read two books with bunnies in them, so we’ve got bunnies on the brain,” Syson says. Syson flips through a wicker bin labeled “carrots” and offers other varieties to Gray, like “atomic red” and “cosmic purple.”

Here’s how it works: A library card gets you a packet of seeds. You then grow the fruits and vegetables, harvest the new seeds from the biggest and best, and return those seeds so the library can lend them out to others. … [Library director Barbara Milnor] says that while a library may seem like an odd location for a project like this, seeds and plants should be open to everyone. That makes a public library the perfect home for a seed collection.

From Jeff Masters’ latest:

The weight of all that heavy snow on rooftops will create the danger of roof collapses. In addition to the heavy snow, the storm will bring coastal wind gusts over hurricane force, and moderate to major coastal flooding. During the peak of the storm, Friday night into Saturday morning, snowfall rates of 2 – 3″ per hour can be expected. …. The combination of heavy snow and high winds will make travel extremely dangerous or impossible, with near-zero visibility in white-out conditions. The snow and high winds are likely to cause many power outages.

Looks like NYC could get some serious snow:

The Lede is live-blogging the blizzard. A useful NYT snowfall guide for select east coast cities is here. The sort of scenes you might be seeing soon:

(Photo of Nemo from NASA)

One of Conor’s explanations for why drones don’t get more attention:

Many conservatives are ideologically committed to the proposition that the president should be almost totally unconstrained in the realm of foreign affairs. As a result, many of Obama’s most questionable behavior is ignored by the conservative press — and it is also ignored by the subset of the “establishment media” that uses partisan conflict to determine what to investigate, rather than making independent judgments about what is important to cover.

Pareene nods:

The media are “soft” on Barack Obama on the subject of foreign policy because Republicans can’t object to the worst and most controversial foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration, and most elected Democrats won’t. If Lindsey Graham and Dianne Feinstein agree, then for the purposes of the Sunday shows there’s no “debate” to be had. When liberal senators like Ron Wyden object to administration actions, it’s just not considered as important or newsworthy as Republican objections to perceived liberal actions by the administration.

Jon Hurdle reports [NYT] on an “unusual program” run by the Temple University Hospital:

[Cradle to Grave] brings in youths from across Philadelphia in the hope that an unflinching look at the effects that guns have in their community will deter young people from reaching for a gun to settle personal scores, and will help them recognize that gun violence is not the glamorous business sometimes depicted in television shows and rap music. … In a 2010 paper published in the medical journal Injury, Dr. Amy J. Goldberg, the hospital’s chief of trauma and surgical critical care, and others cited data showing that students’ inclination toward violence decreased after participating in the Cradle to Grave program.

Prison Culture lost sleep over the report:

[O]n the same day that the Times published their article about the Cradle to Grave program in Philly, Ta-Nehisi Coates was featured on the opinion page writing about the trauma of gun violence for inner city youth. … [He] beautifully articulates the sense of foreboding and routine trauma that he and some of his peers carried with them growing up in an inner city community.

What good would it have done to take a young man like Coates into a hospital emergency room to see severed limbs and gun shot wounds? Wasn’t he already experiencing enough anxiety, worry, and pain? Isn’t he already surrounded by the fear of premature death? Why isn’t our focus to provide grief counseling and healing circles for young people who feel that they are living under siege?

Chait calls Republican moderates “totally gutless”:

Moderate Republicanism is a secret creed — a set of beliefs that is expressed anonymously, but lacks any public standing to openly engage in a battle of ideas within the party. There are plenty of Republicans who secretly disdain the crankish and bigoted ideas that flourish in right-wing media and have come to be accepted as gospel by the rank and file, but there is almost no public questioning of them.

Did you know that the Pope has 1.5 mil followers and only follows 8 people, all of whom are himself? @pontifex

— Jay Wexler (@SCOTUSHUMOR) January 31, 2013

Antonio Casilli floats the Pope a few tips on how to use Twitter after his first month on the platform. Since only 10% of feedback was positive, he encourages Benedict to actually engage his critics:

[Y]ou are used to trolling, because you and your predecessors all throughout the centuries have been the target of some form of it. Of course, back then it went by other names: heresy, blasphemy, apostasy… Assuredly, the tone and contents of the negative comments conveyed on Twitter were not dissimilar from long-lasting criticisms of the Catholic church: sexual misconduct, clerical corruption, opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the divinity of Christ or apostolic dignity, and so on.

Indeed, it would be too easy – and historically inaccurate – to declare that trolls are the modern versions of past heretical thinkers such as Girolamo Savonarola, Giordano Bruno, Martin Luther. It would also mean betraying the Roman Catholic Church’s intentions as to the way of dealing with them. Your digital analysts have been adamant about that: these negative comments will not prompt your condemnation. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, as the old adage goes – and for once, nobody will have it.