Sperm donors may win biological sweepstakes

The New Neo Posted on by

For all of humankind’s history, men have been rivals for the favors of women, and a huge part of that competition (at least in the biological sense) has been to foster the birth and survival of their own offspring. If you believe in natural selection—and I do—that struggle for progeny has favored the growth of certain characteristics in men, ones that are more likely to lead to what we might euphemistically and archaically call the spreading of their seed.

Now a relatively new phenomenon, artificial insemination by sperm donor, may end up skewing the situation at least a little bit (more if current trends continue). At the very least, it has led to some potential problems for the offspring involved. The strange fact is that there are no legal limits in the US on the number of women who can be impregnated by one donor, and some donors have racked up some rather high numbers.

This article mentions one donor who is known to have been the biological father of 150 living children. That’s a sobering thought, especially when you consider that the donor does not know who his children are and has nothing whatsoever to do with them. And for the children themselves it poses some conundrums, not the least of which is that they face a possibility of meeting their own half-siblings and falling in love with and even marrying and having children with them, without knowing they are so closely related to their own spouses.

One way to reduce this problem is to legally limit the number of children a sperm donor can father. But this would only affect the future; it’s of no assistance to the children who are already alive. Some of them have already been helped by the establishment of donor registries to connect donor families. This has had the added benefit of sharing information about inherited diseases and the like. It also has a strange but understandable side-effect:

Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together ”” they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group.

Ah brave new world, that has such people in it!

New presidential polls

The New Neo Posted on by

The most interesting thing to me in this article about a recent NBC/WallStJournal poll isn’t Obama’s approval rating, which is low but still surprisingly high at 44%. What drew my attention instead was this:

While Perry appears to be the candidate to beat in the GOP field, he’s not as strong as Romney or a “generic” Republican when pitted directly against Obama. According to the poll, Perry would lose to Obama in a projected match-up, 42 percent to 47 percent.

By comparison, Romney and Obama are statistically tied, 45 percent to 46 percent. Meanwhile Obama would lose to a “generic” GOP candidate, 40 percent to 44 percent.

The direct match-up figures can mean one of two things. We may be dealing with the old conundrum that the more conservative Republican candidate (in this case, Perry) is favored to win the nomination, whereas the less conservative candidate (Romney) appeals to a broader group and is more likely to win the election.

Or, this alternative: right now Perry does less well than Romney in the election because most voters know who Romney is and are just getting to know Perry. Of course, since Perry appears to be the new Sarah Palin, male version—at least in the eyes of the MSM—as more of the non-Republican voters get to know Perry via the press, the more they may grow to hate him.

It’s also of interest that the generic Republican does the best against Obama. The candidates we imagine are almost always better than the ones we have.

Although the Republican field is large, the only candidates who have substantial support right now are Romney and Perry, so it’s shaping up to be a two-man race. If Sarah Palin enters, it will become a three-man (in the metaphoric sense) battle, and the conservative vote will most likely be split between Palin and Perry. My sense is that her entry would sew up the Republican nomination for Romney.

Aside from the presidential candidates’ numbers, the poll has some other stats. The number of people who think we’re headed in the wrong direction keeps climbing steadily, and is now at 73%, although 50% still approve of the way Obama has handled foreign policy. Figures for general approval of Democrats and Republicans aren’t too different from each other, with 11% strong approval and 22% some approval for Democrats, and 8% strong approval and 24% some approval for Republicans. If there were a proposal on the ballot to defeat every single member of Congress in one fell swoop, 54% say they’d vote for it. The percentage of respondents who give Obama a very poor rating on “being honest and straightforward” took a leap sometime between spring and fall of 2009 and has not significantly declined since; likewise with ratings of his leadership and a few other characteristics.

It is quite startling (at least to me), that respondents are far more focused on bringing down the deficit than on helping the economy. When asked which of the two Congress and the president should focus more on now, even though one action may be at the expense of the other, 56% said the deficit and 38% said the economy (there’s a rumor that Paul Krugman was in the latter group). What’s more, these relative proportions haven’t varied all that much since June of 2009.

Additionally, more people have become convinced that the economy hasn’t bottomed out yet, not fewer: 72% now think there’s worse ahead compared to 21% who think we’ve already seen the nadir (as opposed to the Nader, whom we’ve also already seen), and the former number has been climbing quite steadily in the last two years while the latter number has declined. More people are against the recent debt ceiling raise than are for it (40 to 22), and a large percentage of people dislike the way the negotiations over it were handled (71 to 6) .

Lest you think this poll was somehow more skewed than usual in favor of Republicans, and that this might account for some of its slightly more conservative findings, it doesn’t seem to have been: 43% of respondents had voted for Obama vs. 34% for McCain, with 2% “not sure” (who are they???) and 17% not voting (I wonder why such a high percentage of non-voters were included, although I’ve certainly got some theories about it). The total number of Democrats was higher (39% to 34%), and they had a stronger lean to the Democratic Party, than the Republicans did to the GOP.

Of course, polls are always suspect and at best are a mere snapshot in time. But this one was awfully interesting.

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Happy Labor Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

Labor Day is the bookend on the opposite end of summer from its holiday beginning, Memorial Day.

July Fourth is its early peak, with the promise of many long light-filled days ahead. But Labor Day is summer’s last gasp, the moment I dreaded as a child because it marked the finish of vacation and the start of the school year. Spiffy new clothes, a shiny bookbag, freshly sharpened pencils, and the promise of beautiful autumn leaves’ arrival were nice. But they couldn’t make up for the fact that a new school year was beginning. Where oh where had the summer gone?

Now let’s celebrate the fact that we don’t have to worry about that anymore—except, perhaps, for the teachers among you.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy Labor Day! Barbecues, picnics, parades, beach, just hanging out in your yard, whatever you desire. “Labor” itself—as in the labor movement, the die-hard union people—may not be having such a happy one, though. Obama has failed them, at least so far. And my Labor Day wishes for the unemployed is that they find jobs soon.

[NOTE: The beginning of this post is an excerpt from a previous post.]

Fonda: Jane and Roger and Tom and Che and…

The New Neo Posted on by

Che, you ask? Jane Fonda and Che?

Well, sort of. According to a new biography of Fonda being published in early October, some time in the early 70s she “supposedly confided during a feminist consciousness-raising session, ”˜My biggest regret is I never got to f*** Che Guevara.’”

By now she may have accumulated a few more regrets, although I’m not at all sure any of them would be political ones. Aside from her more famous betrayals of this country during the Vietnam era, she has been both the perpetrator and the recipient of various personal betrayals. She left her 18-month-old daughter with first-husband Vadim. She had many affairs, as did her husbands. And as far as f***ing goes, she may not have f***ed the trendy Guevara, but she certainly was f***ed over by Vadim, Tom Hayden, and others. Hayden in particular sounds like a piece of work.

Fonda sounds like a person continually looking for what Milan Kundera has called circle dancing. She tried to find it in men and in causes (with Hayden it was men with causes). Here’s Kundera on the general subject:

Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory. Madame Raphael had cut the picture out of the magazine and would stare at it and dream. She too longed to dance in a ring. All her life she had looked for a group of people she could hold hands with and dance with in a ring. First she looked for them in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then among the Trotskyites, then in the anti-abortion movement (A child has a right to life!), then in the pro-abortion movement (A woman has a right to her body!); she looked for them among the Marxists, the psychoanalysts, and the structuralists; she looked for them in Lenin, Zen Buddhism, Mao Tse-tung, yogis, the nouveau roman, Brechtian theater, the theater of panic; and finally she hoped she could at least become one with her students, which meant she always forced them to think and say exactly what she thought and said, and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.

In Jane’s case, best stick to exercise videos and acting.

Horowitz plays

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things that most fascinates me here (aside from the obvious virtuosity of Horowitz’s flying fingers) is the remote quality of his face. It’s as though he is observing his fingers from a greater distance than usually separates the head and the hands. He’s the controller, they are his minions. It struck me in the final third of the video that he resembles a master puppeteer, watching from behind the scenes the effect that his marionettes (the hands and fingers) are creating.

Then there’s a priceless moment right after he finishes, when he allows himself to demonstrate just a smidgen of satisfaction:

Oh, and I’m not sure of the date of the recording, but I’m pretty sure he was very old.

From Wiki:

Oscar Levant, in his book, “The Memoirs of an Amnesiac,” wrote that Horowitz’s octaves were “brilliant, accurate and etched out like bullets.”…[Horowitz] frequently played chords with straight fingers, and the little finger of his right hand was often curled up until it needed to play a note; to Harold C. Schonberg, “it was like a strike of a cobra.”

Rating the decades

The New Neo Posted on by

Ronald Brownstein thinks that the recent ten-year stretch—the one that’s been going on since 9/11—is the worst America’s been through since the Civil War and then the Great Depression.

I disagree. I think that the decade beginning some time in the late 60s (let’s choose 1968, for instance) and ending with the close of the Carter administration was the worst since then. True, the years I’m referring to constitute a bit more than a decade. We can tweak the length a little, but the principle remains.

Those years began with two dreadful assassinations (RFK, Martin Luther King) and riots in the streets of many cities, which lasted through the early 70s. The Vietnam War was incredibly divisive and disturbing and caused bitter rifts that have lasted until today. A president refused to run again when he might have, and another was forced out of office in scandal after his vice-president was booted (over a completely separate scandal). The upshot was that we had our first appointed president ever. At the same time, society was being disrupted by rapid changes in mores regarding the family and morality that pitted children against their parents and vice versa. Later, the economy went south and stayed there for quite some time. The whole thing ended with the ignominious Iran hostage crisis.

Have I forgotten anything? Probably, but I don’t think so. I lived through those times, and though I was personally happy (they coincided, for example, with my getting married and setting up a household for the first time), I think the mood of the country was dreadful. Curious whether you agree: those of you who are old enough to know, how would you compare those years with these?

[ADDENDUM: The music was awfully good, though, wasn’t it?]

Scions of fame unite, you have nothing to lose but your names (sort of)

The New Neo Posted on by

Now here’s a wedding:

This Sunday, David Lauren, son of legendary designer Ralph Lauren, and Lauren Bush, granddaughter of President George H.W. and niece of President George W., will join forces in holy matrimony.

One of the burning questions that has been resolved is what the bride will now call herself. Eschewing “Lauren Lauren,” she will become “Lauren Bush-Lauren.”

A better choice than Lauren Lifshitz, I’d say.

Not a bad-looking duo, either: