Things that were not immediately obvious to me

I saw this excerpt (the original article is paywalled) on NRO today:

DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves…Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them. The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not… Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter…in making paternity conditional on a test rather than the say-so of the mother, it has removed from women a powerful instrument of choice.

The “gotcha” element of this is somewhat muted by the fact that the ideological viewpoint of the author (Melanie McDonagh) isn’t as clear as I’d like; while she seems to legitimately dislike(!) the idea of paternity testing, and thows around some feminist-like language, I couldn’t reliably say whether she’s using that language on her own behalf, or essentially attributing it to others. It’s pretty damn striking to see someone coming out in favor of fraud, though.

Here’s a Public Service Announcement for you. It’s harsh, but it needs to be said: Your dreams are deathly boring to everyone else.*

Now, I know this is hard to believe. As Ed Tom Bell put it in “No Country for Old Men”, when asked if his dreams were interesting: “They always is to the party concerned.” Your dreams are cooked up by your own brain, and therefore freighted with resonant imagery and associations that make them uniquely pleasing to that brain. Everyone else, lacking your peculiar neurological wiring, will wonder what the hell you’re talking about.

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I like a well-turned coda. Here are some of my favorites.

Neuromancer

He never saw Molly again.

Black Hawk Down (Film)

Major General William F. Garrison accepted full
responsibility for the outcome of the raid.

On August 2, 1996, Warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid was
killed in Mogadishu.
The following day, General Garrison retired.

Primer

Now I have repaid any debt I may have owed you. You know all that I know. My voice is the only proof that you will have of the truth of any of this. I might have written a letter with my signature, but my handwriting is not what it used to be. Maybe you’ve had the presence of mind to record this. That’s your prerogative. You will not be contacted by me again. And if you look… you will not find me.

Barry Lyndon

Epilogue

It was in the reign of King George III
that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled;
good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor,
they are all equal now.

T-Rex’s Epitaph

Here Lies T-Rex: He Tried To Eat One Of Every Animal; Hopefully That Counts For Something!

Consider this story:

The president has signaled that at the start of the new year, he will speak more directly to the country about the financial choices ahead. “If we’re going to get serious about the deficit, then we’re going to have to look at everything: entitlements, defense spending, revenues. … And that’s going to be a tough conversation,” he said.

For some reason, I suspect that Obama’s vision of “everything” is going to be mostly about “revenues” (i.e., tax hikes), a little about “defense spending” (i.e., a smaller and less-capable military) and hardly at all about “entitlements” (i.e., the massive transfer programs that are blowing a hole in the budget.)

I believe that White House strategy for the next 2 years will be:

Having cranked up spending to obscene levels during our first two years, with the aid of Democratic congress, let’s try to crank taxation up to obscene levels during the next two years, with the connivance of a suckered and/or browbeaten Republican congress.

Don’t let ’em get away with it. We don’t have a deficit problem, we have a spending problem.