Paternity Testing

Tennessee has proposed a new bill that would require mandatory paternity tests for all newborns.

OKay, on the one hand, there are a ridiculous number of children out there who are being raised by men who are unaware that their wife/girlfriend cheated on them and did not have their child, which often would indicate a desire for a divorce; also, many men are made to pay child support for children that they are not related to, nor ever made any effort to serve as a father.

Yet I believe that DNA is not important, it's intent. Once a man decides to raise a kid, he should raise that kid, regardless of the kid's actual DNA...

I don't think it should be mandatory. No way. That's a terrible invasion of privacy and automatically assumes fault on the part of the woman, plus it can give men information they don't want to have. I think it should be offered to all fathers (when the mother is not in the room) for free. They refuse it? Fine. They can never contest the paternity of the child again, because they've made that decision at that point that they don't care about DNA (and I applaud them). Even if at a later point the child is determined to be genetically unrelated, doesn't matter, they made that choice.

If they accept the test, and they are confirmed to be the father, great. If not? Well, if they immediately deny responsibility for the child, then they don't have to take it, as long as they never take on the role of father. BUt if they stay with the mother, start to raise the kid, whatever, then the paternity test will become irrelevant.

Also, once a paternity test is completed, all the DNA and records should be destroyed except for a note on the child's birth certificate. LAst thing we want is that shit on record.

Fathers should be offered one chance to know for sure, for free, with or without the mother's consent, if the child is theirs before they bond with the kid or make financial obligations towards them. One chance. That's it. And in exchange, women should get to subpoena men they believe to be the father for a confidential, free paternity test with the DNA information destroyed immediately afterwards. So women won't be left to fend for themselves, as long as they can reel off a list of all the men they slept with about 9 months earlier. Of course, you would have to require that the entire process would be completely confidential unless the man really is the father.


So in summary:

At birth, the man who thinks he is the father is offered a free paternity test. He refuses, he's the father by default, even if later he learns otherwise. He made the decision to be the father.
He accepts and it's positive, he's the father, and can never contest that.
He accepts and it's negative, he's not the father, and he can immediately sever all ties with the kid and the mom and not be held responsible. OR, he can decide to raise the kid anyway, despite that information, and will be considered the legal father even if he's not biologically related-- a relationship he then can't contest.

At any point, a mother can subpoena a guy she suspects of being a father for a paternity test. The entire process is kept discreet and if the man is not the father, he can go on his merry way and not worry about it. If he is, she can request child support from him and insist he take responsibility.

All DNA samples and anything that could be used against a person later is destroyed, as it would otherwise be self-incrimination and illegal to use it at a later point for a purpose other than it was provided for. That would be very important and have to be specifically mentioned in the law in such a way that the entire law would have to be scrapped and rewritten to get past it.

And for Pete's sake, don't make it mandatory (unless someone is attempting to skip out on the paternity checks). Make it free an readily available, sure. But not mandatory. The law should not be intruding into people's lives in that manner.

Too much of medicine is stuck in the 1950s

I have a question/idea.

I'm hoping to go into medicine. So I read a lot of people's opinions of doctors, and their mistakes, etc. You know, figure out what I should keep in mind. One thing I notice is that a lot of people complain that doctors just have a few medications that they prescribe for everything, and that medication interactions are common, especially if you're taking a lot of different meds. It's understandable; there's like a thousand plus medications on the market and doctors aren't perfect.

The thing about this, though, is, I can't help thinking it would be really easy to fix. All the doctors I've seen have a laptop they carry in to their session with me, so they can check my old medical records against my new info, update their records, etc, without having to carry in folders (they print out a hard copy later, I presume, they have files too). Anyway, they have a laptop right in front of them. Couldn't somebody come up with a program for doctors that enables them to enter a medication name and it immediately comes up with what the meds can treat, what they are normally prescribed for, their various approval ratings (government, etc), their prices, any recent recalls or class-action suits, any side-effects, and any interactions with other drugs? And couldn't that same program be modified so that a doctor could enter the diagnosis, say, "chronic joint pain," and would be immediately provided with a list of medications commonly prescribed to treat chronic joint pain? You could maybe even do a cross-referencing program so that doctors could list current medications and the ones with interactions would be eliminated from the list, for people with lots of medication (obviously unnecessary for someone who's taking only a few pills, but if you get an elderly woman with 25 medications she's on...).

Doctors could prescribe generics when people don't have sufficient insurance to cover the name-brand ones, because they would have access to the generic brand names. Of course, insured people would still get name-brands, because they've proven that the placebo effect means name-brands can work better. They could double-check prescriptions very quickly and could learn if a medication someone was on could be causing symptoms. Better care, less problems to fix down the road, insurance companies win. Better care, patients win. Slight reduction in malpractice lawsuits, happier patients, and more memory space to devote to diagnosing techniques, doctors win. Even pharmaceutical companies would benefit because they could get their lesser-known drugs out and prescribed to patients who are always getting their competitor's medication. Okay, that might be a stretch.

But in the end, if the only people who suffer are pharmaceutical companies and only in the fact that they couldn't get doctors who were quite as devoted to them due to knowing of the top of their heads that they didn't have a lot of recalls or anything, I say that's a win. I have no idea why this hasn't been created and put into widespread use yet. It's not like we don't have the ability, there are online sites that basically do the same thing, but doctors are still relying on memory (at least mine are).

If any computer programmer wants to design this and sell it for millions, feel free to steal my idea, no royalties required. I'd be benefiting as much as anyone.

Now, anyone want to tell me why this wouldn't work, or wouldn't be popular, or how my doctors are actually idiots and there already is something like this out there?

Home Schooling and the Law

So California is requiring that all homeschooling parents have teaching credentials.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, there are a lot of crazy whackjobs who homeschool their children so the kids don't have to learn about evolution or condoms. On the other, public schools can really suck, and homeschooled kids whose parents were actually trying to help the kid are going to get penalized.

Clearly there should be regulations for homeschooling. You can't just let people homeschool kids any way they want, because kids aren't able to make their own informed decisions and therefore should not be at the mercy of their parents' every whim. But teaching credentials? Nah. What I think they should have is the following:


1. If a parent wants to homeschool, they should have to register with the state, or their kid should be considered to be playing hooky. That's pretty standard.

2. The parent can't have a history of physical or emotional abuse of the child, or any other kids. Also think that's pretty standard.

3. The parent should have a high school diploma, or a GED. I know, seems like a no brainer, but apparently a very small percentage of home school parents in the US never finished high school. That's probably a good sign that they aren't qualified to teach their kids.

4. Once a year, the kid should be tested against the standards for kids in his or her year. They do better or equal to other kids their age, they can continue homeschooling. I think this is also common. These tests should also include more than just reading and writing-- if it's required learning at school, and it's not gym/art/music etc, it should be required at home. So cover English, math, and history, but also science, health (even sex ed), and basic computer studies, which are neccessary to survive in the modern world.

5. When the kid reaches middle school material (ie stuff they could theoretically have forgotten since they were in school, as opposed to your basic reading and writing and times tables), the parents should have to get a special Parent Teaching Certification. I'm not talking about holding them to the levels of normal teachers. I'm talking about giving them a test that covers the material they want to teach to the kid. They pass the test, they can teach that material. If they don't, community college classes or back to school. That way you won't get people who are unqualified teaching their kids, but it's also not like they have to know Calculus and have a master's degree to teach middle-school algebra.

6. If the kid is mentally disabled (beyond a learning disability or ADHD, I mean really disabled), the parent should have some kind of degree in working with people with disabilities. Those kids need pretty specialized education, and allowing them to be homeschooled, especially since there's no real way to measure their progress like with most kids, is asking for the system to be abused. Similarly, if the kid is blind, the parent should be able to read and create (write?) Braille and if the kid is deaf, the parent should be fluent in sign language. Now, of course, sometimes you get people who are just too disabled to ever really learn anything. If that truly is the case, like they'll never pass a toddler's mental level, then I understand not making them go into a SPED program that basically will babysit them all day. That would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. But someone with, say, Down's Syndrome can benefit a great deal from a teacher who actually understands how to work with them, rather than an unqualified parent.


And that would be it. Check on the kid once a year (every six months if you want to be paranoid) to make sure something's sticking, make sure their parent is actually remotely qualified to teach the stuff and not some hick who plans to plop their kid in front of the TV all day, and keep track of who's getting homeschooled. That's all you really need. Do it right, and your homeschool kids won't be able to get a worse education than the public school ones, and it'll probably be better. And hey, to address the social aspect, let homeschool kids join sports teams and clubs at the local high school if they want and offer lots of community programs.

But making parents have the same credentials as teachers seems a bit silly. An education course (usually part of the requirement) makes sense if you need to learn how to effectively teach many different children the same thing all at once and maximize learning. For a parent who teaches one or two kids at once, and always the same kids, it's easy to learn what teaching style the kid needs. What's more, effective teaching strategies for 25 kids are going to be very ineffective for 2 kids. This just serves to make it very challenging for parents to homeschool without addressing the real problems with homeschooling, ie, that it can be abused without anyone knowing, and that no one was enforcing the old rules.

Also, maybe, just maybe, California should try to fix the problems in the public school system before wasting time trying to micromanage home schoolers, who on average are more successful than public-school graduates?

Just saying.

Vaccination and Autism

You know what gets me about the whole antivaccine/vaccines cause autism bullshit?

Well, first of all, obviously vaccines don't cause autism, all the evidence has proved this over and over again. Besides, if it was caused by vaccines it couldn't be heritable, and it is (though not entirely). And kids still get autism even now that there's no mercury in the vaccines. Sorry, find a new scapegoat.

But even beyond that-- let's assume the autism really was caused by vaccines. Autism is a) non-contagious, b) non-deadly, and c) present in a spectrum, with most people within that spectrum perfectly capable of living a reasonably successful or normal life, although they're not really socially adept (neither am I, and I survive). Full blown autism is only about one in 1000 people. So in our hypothetical scenario, there is only a 0.001% chance that getting a vaccine will result in an autistic child.

Compare to the alternative, not getting the vaccine. Let's look at the DTP vaccine. Diphtheria has a 5-10% fatality rate in children under 5 years and a 20% fatality rate in adults over 40. Before the vaccine was invented, a person had a 0.002% chance of getting diphtheria. Also, diphtheria is a heck of a lot worse than autism (not that autism isn't horrible, but at least it doesn't involve open sores). And that is a single disease; things like pertussis, measles, and whooping cough add to the chance that an unvaccinated person will get SOME horrible illness. I mean, unvaccinated children living in our modern, vaccinated society manage to get polio, despite the fact that the virus can't easily perpetuate in a population that is immune to it.

So even using the false hypothesis that vaccines cause autism, it's STILL better to vaccinate, because an unvaccinated child has a greater chance of getting an illness that can be prevented by vaccines than a vaccinated child would have of getting autism. Also, most illnesses that vaccines prevent are far, far more painful, dangerous, and deadly than autism is, even at it's absolute worst.

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I'm not a huge fan of over-vaccination, which I define as vaccinating against things that aren't actually going to hurt you too much in the long run, like chickenpox (well, unless you're in your teens or older and never had it as a child), or things that could hurt you, but your lifestyle, age, and/or health make catching a bad case unlikely (like influenza for me, but not for my best friend, who often works with individuals who are high-risk for catching it).

But to prevent polio, diphtheria, rubella... there is no excuse for not vaccinating children against those illnesses. Not even religious objections (will God really stop a person from entering Heaven just because they got a shot? Wouldn't it be a worse sin to not get a shot, and catch and spread the illness, killing yourself and another? And can't you atone and describe yourself as some kind of martyr who was forced into it, anyway?).

Certain vaccines are a public health concern, they should NOT be optional. Even if it meant I had to take a flu shot every year, I'd support legislation that would force all parents to vaccinate their children without exception. If they object, force them to watch a movie about Typhoid Mary. When it comes to serious infectious disease, the government has a duty to restrict the rights of it's citizens enough to protect other citizens, and the more people we vaccinate against a disease, the more likely that disease will go the way of smallpox, no one will ever be at risk again, and we won't need the vaccine any more.

The only reasonable and safe way to stop the widespread vaccination of children is to continue it, even increase it, until it is no longer needed at all. Period.

Guns in our schools-- legally

Apparently Arizona is debating allowing concealed carry rights in school zones, in the wake of all the recent school shootings (and there has been a LOT lately, hasn't there?).

Honestly, this... kind of makes sense. It's really sad that we have to deal with this at all, but you know, we live in a country where it's so easy to get a gun without a permit, we kind of need people who are armed as defense.

I'm not so sure about how young this goes, though. I can see letting high school teachers and staff, even middle school teachers and staff, who have permits and are trained in gun use and safety carry weapons, but honestly, when was the last time a first grader shot up a school? They bring weapons in at that young, but they can usually be restrained/disarmed easily. I guess you could make exceptions if there was a particular danger for an individual, like the case in Oregon where a teacher sued the school district because they refused to allow her to carry a gun when she was worried about her ex husband attacking her (he had threatened to kill her).

Maybe tighten up the standards as to who can get a special permit to carry a weapon at a school? I would say that the standards there should be a little stricter, ie, psych evaluation, take classes on gun safety, and prove that you can effectively use the gun to prevent an attacker from continuing (preferably without killing them, but preventing them from using their weapon or moving). And repeat the entire process every 5 years. At the same time, they could teach potential applicants the procedure should police arrive (basically it would have to be that unless doing so would mean serious injury or death, drop to the floor, take your hand off the trigger or slide the gun over to the cops, and keep your hands where the police can see them-- aka, give them all the signs that you are completely on their side).

I doubt I could ever kill or injure something alive with a gun, but I still support gun rights-- partially because it's in the Constitution, clear and apparent, and partially because I think people should have the right to do whatever they want as long as it's not hurting anyone else. Of course, people need permits and training in use beforehand, because guns are a lot more complex with much more variety than when the Constitution was written, plus people are living closer together and we medicate the mentally unstable people instead of locking them up or trying to exorcise them (this is a VERY good thing, don't get me wrong, but it does mean that a random, dangerous person can stop their treatment and wind up on national television). So yeah, there needs to be regulation. Also, because our culture is very different and kids are less mature at the same ages, obviously kids need to be even more regulated in gun ownership than adults, and no kid should ever be allowed to have a gun in school.

As for college students, I'd say you should keep kids from having them in the dorms or bringing them on campus. If they hunt, they can buy a storage locker somewhere. It's not that I don't think college students should defend themselves against attackers, it's just that I am a college student, and I know college classes, and honestly, I'd feel safer if one loner comes to campus and I can't be defended from them than by allowing your average college student to have a gun...

On second though, better ban it for middle school teachers too. I always was amazed that my middle school teachers didn't try the "going postal" route. Clearly, destined for sainthood.

Sorry if that was rambling, what are your thoughts on gun control?

This concept of "wuv" confuses and enrages us

I know this is in Italy and I'm not supposed to be reading the news anyway, but this is ridiculous. A court in Italy decided to severely reduce a 34-year-old man's sentence for having sex with an underage (13 year old) girl because they decided there was "real love" between the pair.

First of all:

In Italy, the age of consent is 14, so this is like the equivalent of in the average US state (where consent is usually about 16) a 36 year old and a 15 year old. So sketchy, illegal technically, but don't think of it as quite the same thing legally as a 30 year old and a 13 year old in this country.

HOWEVER, the reason behind the sentence reduction was not "she was only a year away from being able to consent, so we'll reduce it on those grounds" but it was "they loved each other."

Here's the thing. The law says a 13 year old can't consent to sex, she can't consent to sex. Period. Well, she can, but it's invalid consent-- like if a completely plastered girl consents to sex, that's invalid (of course in that case, she may have had a standing consent with a guy that it was okay for him to have sex with her while she was drunk, like if they were dating. Someone who is underage could not have done that, since they have never previously been able to give valid consent). According to the laws of consent, when a person who is underage consents to sex, their words are essentially meaningless, and only affect whether or not the crime is "statutory rape" or just "rape."

And yet according to this Italian court, if the girl "loves" the man (maybe she did, doesn't matter) and he loves her, then her consent becomes valid. Despite the fact that nothing in her brain changes when she thinks she loves the man that makes her judgment better and makes her older.

Ultimately, though, what really bothers me is that this is a moral decision on the part of the judge. According to this judge, sex + love = okay, sex + no love = bad. And even though I personally agree, I don't think that that is a decision the courts should make. This is saying that a teenage girl who has sex with an older man because she thought he was hot and wanted to have sex was somehow coerced and unable to consent, but one who wanted to have sex with an older man because she felt she truly loved him was NOT coerced.

It's saying that women/girls would NEVER have sex willingly unless they loved the man and the man loved them (could also be saying the same for young men, but I doubt it; anyway, that's irrelevant). Which is not true and a moral judgment of women who have sex with people they do not love. If the judge feels that that is immoral, fine, but it shouldn't come into the courtroom. Judges should go by the law, not their own moral codes, if they live under a truly secular government, which Italy claims to have.

Technically I'm not supposed to think about this stuff, but...

I've been thinking about Israel a lot lately.

I used to think that while the Palestinians shouldn't be bombing Israel, it was wrong of the UN to give Palestine to the Jews in the first place, because someone already lived there, and that it was also wrong of the Israeli law to treat the Arabs differently than they treated Jews.

I still think that Israel needs to provide non-Jews with more rights and equality. I abhor a religious state, and while Israel is not at the level of the surrounding nations, not by a long shot, they clearly value the Jewish religion above all else. I would feel differently if, say, the Law of Return applied only to ethnic Jews, as in, people who are actually of Jewish ancestry by blood, instead of this business of "if your mother was a Jew or you converted to Judaism," which is a religious definition, not an ethnic one. I understand that Jews are persecuted worldwide and I understand the value of a homeland. I want Tibet to be returned to the Tibetans, too. But a Jewish state should be a state of ethnic Jews, not a state of Jewish religion. A blonde, white, Caucasian Jewish convert with the last name Smith is not really going to be persecuted on the same level as a dark-haired, olive skinned ethnic Jew with the last name Goldstein. What's more, the Law of Return completely ignores ethnic Jews who are not practicing, or whose mothers were not Jewish.

They also have a tendency to deny residency and immigration rights to Israeli Arabs under the pretext of preventing terrorism, and they tend to place predominantly Jewish towns before Arab towns. Not to mention the whole Dome of the Rock issue. There's a lot of racism and religious persecution, which happens every time a bunch of people who were once a persecuted minority become the majority. So I still think their laws need to change, same as I feel for most countries.

However, I've been looking at their history, and I've changed my mind about whether they should have been given the nation. Was there racism involved? Yeah, I mean, Britain didn't give up their colony in Palestine for years when the native Arabs wanted it, and then as soon as there was a Jewish majority, they gave it up. I have no doubt but that there was prejudice involved on the part of the UN. That said, even though Jews had not particular right to the land simply because their ancestors lived there, there WAS a Jewish majority when Israel was founded. They got their autonomy fairly. The expansion of the state to gain control of water sources was also reasonable. Doing it to gain Jerusalem for religious reasons or to get more land, not so much.

At this point I've basically decided that I don't support either side, but if I had to choose, I'd support Israel. They have less to do before I would consider them to be a reasonable and just nation; Palestine is basically under Shari'ah law. I think they should pull back, stop occupying surrounding territories and focus on defensive methods, and make their nation more secular. I also think that Egypt and Jordan need to open their borders to Palestinian immigration, since many Palestinians are actually Jordians and Egyptians who came to Israel when the Israelis began to develop the land and provide jobs.

But I don't think it's that easy. I think the entire region is very complicated, and both sides are at fault. And that the next time a nuclear weapon is used in war, it's gonna be on Israel.