The Dish

Catherine Nixey looks at over-the-counter paternity tests:

Precise statistics on human infidelity are hard to come by. What evidence there is tends to indicate that human lovebirds are little better than their feathered counterparts. In 1970 a group of researchers looking into blood groups tested the blood types of inhabitants in a block of flats in Liverpool. They were startled to see that their results indicated a paternal discrepancy of 20-30%. Thinking, perhaps unfairly, that this might be something to do with Liverpudlians, they moved south and repeated the test, only to find similar results. In 1984 a group of scientists in Nottingham looked at women seeking fertility treatment because their husbands were sterile. Despite their husbands’ sterility, 23% of the women managed to become pregnant before receiving treatment.

Other studies have produced a more comforting picture. Recent research in Sweden and Iceland found rates of non-paternity between 1% and 2%. But while these figures may be reassuring in one sense, scientifically they are far from comforting. The disparity between them is enormous. Clearly large-scale, randomised testing is needed to find reliable average levels of non-paternity. The results would not just be interesting but useful in areas such as heritable diseases. There’s just one problem: such tests could be a source of considerable distress. As a result, much of the information that is available on paternity has emerged, like the 1970 Liverpool study, as a by-product of studies with other aims.

Polly Vernon took a magnifying glass to modern infidelity last month. The Babies trailer via Kottke.

The Heritage Foundation clearly sees no link. Canada is freer than the US, they claim.

Freddie DeBoer deflects Will Wilson's post:

[N]ot only does the giraffe not know how to understand electron spin; it does not know that there is such a thing as not knowing how to understand electron spin. It's not just that the giraffe can't answer the question, but that its limited consciousness is incapable of realizing that such a question might be posed. What might be the case, but we can't know, is that there are problems that we are similarly unaware of. If you'll forgive me for invoking Donald Rumsfeld, there are known unknowns– the reconciliation of relativistic gravity with quantum mechanics; the Riemann hypothesis– but there might also be unknown unknowns, things that we don't know we don't know. If this were true, it would undercut what Will is saying; it shouldn't surprise us that with time we solve the problems we apprehend, but it also shouldn't surprise us if there are questions we aren't even aware are questions. (You can add a "yet" to the end of that, if you're inclined.)

Wilson takes the point and salvages his larger argument.

I stopped short at David Carr's piece yesterday on the Palin marketing industry. His points on how this media celebrity can generate huge amounts of income from completely integrity-free media are, of course, well-taken. Palin has indeed cleaned up, thanks mainly to Roger Ailes and his fixation on ratings, and HarperCollins, whose soul was mortgaged years ago. She has a TV clip-show. She can read a Teleprompter well, which is about the only thing her college degree – sports journalism – qualified her for. She knows how to project cheeriness and peppiness and goshdarnit schtick. And all these have a place in the market and even in national discourse. No one would give a damn if the GOP hadn't decided to place this pageant-winner as a potential president in the last election; or if there weren't a real likelihood of her running for serious public office at the same level in 2012.

With any luck, the money will keep her from the Oval Office. But here's where I stopped dead in my tracks reading David's piece. This sentence:

I’m from Minnesota, which is sometimes considered the southernmost tip of Alaska, and her way of speaking in credulous golly-gee may have been off-putting to some, but there is a kind of authenticity there that no image handler could conjure.

Whatever else Palin is, she is not authentic.

Her flimsy record of public service has been festooned with so many lies and delusions and fantasies on her part it beggars belief. Her book is self-evidently the product of a dangerously delusional fanatic. She poses as a "real American" from the heartland, yet she has done everything in her power to escape that heartland and find refuge in celebrity. 

If anyone is phony in American culture, it is Palin. And those who profit off her. They have a right to do that, as she has a right to invent a past and an identity and a politics from minute to minute. But please drop the idea that she is authentic.

The only thing authentically American about her is her total lack of scruples in making a living. But she won't admit that either.

A report on where the US Catholic church sometimes dumped its child-rapist priests – Alaska.

Jessica Dweck applauds Adriana Bertini’s condom-wear:

Bertini’s collection aims not to foment a revolution in ready-to-wear fashion but to destigmatize condoms and promote the message that these life-saving devices should be as basic and necessary as a simple pair of jeans. And if all this creative do-goodery wasn’t enough, she’s also protecting the environment by reusing pounds of [factory-rejected condoms, a] synthetic material that would otherwise end up in landfills or in the air as greenhouse gas.

Detail of one of Bertini's dresses from her Flickr account. More images of her dresses at her website. They can be bought here.

With John Paul Stevens "likely to retire by the end of the month," Ambinder reads the tea leaves:

The legal cognoscenti believes that [Elena] Kagan, the solicitor general, has the inside track, with some folks swearing that Obama has already decided on her, and that he'll simply go through the motions again. It's not unreasonable to assume that Obama had his SCOTUS picks mapped out from the beginning of his presidency: the guy is a student of the Court, and he has a very particular theory of the types of justices that would best ensure that his vision for the court is appropriately articulated.

Sotomayor's pick was about changing the narrative. The second pick will be about adding some intellectual creativity to the mix. One reason he might not pick an appeals court judge this time is that appeals court judges tend to constrain themselves to precedent a bit more than Obama believes is necessary, while long-serving district court judges, or academics, are likely to be more expansive in how they approach the job.

Dylan Matthews worries that Obama won't pick someone liberal enough. Benen senses a filibuster.

The Right Track Number seems to have moved a little lately with the economy:

"The tragedy is that in the name of resisting the internal deterioration of faith and the corruption of the world around them, many Christians–and Christian conservatives most significantly–unwittingly embrace some of the most corrosive aspects of the cultural disintegration they decry. By nurturing its resentments, sustaining them through a discourse of negation toward outsiders, and in cases, pursuing their will to power, they become functional Nietzscheans, participating in the very cultural breakdown they so ardently strive to resist," – James Davison Hunter, To Change the World.

This OKCupid post on age and political affiliation is pinging around the blogs. Wilkinson reminds readers to "be careful not to confuse cohort effects with life-cycle effects" i.e. that "older people’s politics look a lot different from younger people’s not so much because they are older, but because they are part of a different generational cohort." His thumb-sucker:

Democratic-leaning libertarian young adults are the primary “liberaltarian” constituency. They are to my mind who liberaltarianism is intended for. Liberaltarianism or libertarian-liberal fusionism is not about some ridiculous practical political coalition between Larry Kudlow and Bill Galston. It is about building a coherent, appealing,  practical ideological identity for all those libertarian-ish young folks who don’t want a damn thing to do with the party of old, angry religious white people.