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In the NYT, Carl Zimmer covers a topic I went over a few years ago in Taki’s Magazine:
Fathered by the Mailman? It’s Mostly an Urban Legend
Carl Zimmer
MATTER APRIL 8, 2016Five days a week, you can tune into “Paternity Court,” a television show featuring couples embroiled in disputes over fatherhood. It’s entertainment with a very old theme: Uncertainty over paternity goes back a long way in literature. Even Shakespeare and Chaucer cracked wise about cuckolds, who were often depicted wearing horns.
I’d say “especially” rather than “even.” Who is related to whom is an extremely fundamental topic and thus comes up all the time in the most important literature, such as Oedipus Rex. Similarly, Hamlet revolves around Hamlet’s fear that the prince’s uncle-stepfather might decide to make his own heir with Hamlet’s mother. (This gets confused in stagings because the character Hamlet appears to have been originally intended to be about 16 years old, suggesting his mother was in her still fertile 30s. But Shakespeare, feeling his oats, expanded Hamlet’s role into the biggest, most spectacular one in English literature, so we assume Hamlet is about 30, which makes the role a rite of passage for youngish star actors, such as, recently, Benedict Cumberbatch. But this adjustment in Hamlet’s age reduces the prima facie plausibility of Hamlet being worried about his mother cuckolding him out of his inheritance.)
But in a number of recent studies, researchers have found that our obsession with cuckolded fathers is seriously overblown. A number of recent genetic studies challenge the notion that mistaken paternity is commonplace.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Maarten H.D. Larmuseau, a geneticist at the University of Leuven in Belgium who has led much of this new research.
The term cuckold traditionally refers to the husband of an adulteress, but Dr. Larmaseau and other researchers focus on those cases that produce a child, which scientists politely call “extra-pair paternity.” …
It wasn’t until DNA sequencing emerged in the 1990s that paternity tests earned the legal system’s confidence. Labs were able to compare DNA markers in children to those of their purported fathers to see if they matched.
As the lab tests piled up, researchers collated the results and came to a startling conclusion: Ten percent to 30 percent of the tested men were not the biological fathers of their children.
Those figures were spread far and wide, ending up in many science books. But the problem with the lab data, Dr. Larmuseau said, was that it didn’t come from a random sample of people. The people who ordered the tests already had reason to doubt paternity.
Dr. Larmuseau and other scientists developed other methods to get an unbiased look at cuckoldry.
In a 2013 study, Dr. Larmuseau and his colleagues used Belgium’s detailed birth records to reconstruct large family genealogies reaching back four centuries. Then the scientists tracked down living male descendants and asked to sequence their Y chromosomes.
Y chromosomes are passed down in almost identical form from fathers to sons. Men who are related to the same male ancestor should also share his Y chromosome, providing that some unknown father didn’t introduce his own Y somewhere along the way.
Comparing the chromosomes of living related men, Dr. Larmaseau and his colleagues came up with a cuckoldry rate of less than 1 percent. Similar studies have generally produced the same low results in such countries as Spain, Italy and Germany, as well as agricultural villages in Mali.
Keep in mind, though, that most cultures in the Eurasian world and Islamic North Africa evolved intense social measures to reduce cuckoldry. Mali is on the cultural border between Islamic North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. I would not suggest generalizing from this one study in Mali to sub-Saharan Africa as a whole without a lot more research.
Also, there may well be a class differential. A study in Mexico found a five time higher rate of paternal misattribution among the lowest class than in the highest class. (The lyrics to A Boy Named Sue might help explain this if it turns out to be a general phenomenon.)
As I wrote in Taki’s Magazine in 2013, however, we need to be careful in kicking percentages around because you’d get different percentages depending upon who gets asked what under different circumstances. Methodologies matter:
A more subtle issue in making sense of the wide range of estimates is the question of “misattributed by whom?” The odds of getting the biological father’s identity wrong are least likely for the mother, next lowest for the presumed father, then the child, and highest among outsiders.
For example, studies based on medical crises where the child’s life is at stake might come up with estimates closer to the mother’s misattribution rate. Pediatric cancer clinics are experienced at making it clear to mothers that they can’t afford to waste time and engage in distracting soap operatics by testing men who only think they are the genetic fathers.
On the other hand, a casual assumption by a child’s, say, schoolteacher of who the student’s genetic father might turn out to be wrong much more often than in, say, a private consultation between a mother and her doctor.
After all, there are a lot of complicated life histories out there:
To get some sense of the potential variety of “non-paternity events,” note that three of the seven most recent presidents went by different surnames at some point in their lives:
Barry Soetoro (Obama), William Blythe III (Clinton), and Leslie King III (Ford).
David Maraniss, the Washington Post editor who wrote the most exhaustive Obama biography, found several Indonesians who had known Obama in Indonesia, including some former in-laws, who more or less believed complicated theories about how Obama could be genetically Indonesian.
“‘Every time I had sex with my wife, I imagined it was my mother I was kissing otherwise I couldn’t perform’: In love British mother, 51, and son plan to have BABY after she broke up his marriage”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3529572/I-m-love-son-want-baby-Mother-falls-son-gave-adoption-32-years-ago.html
” Kim West, 51, fell pregnant aged 19 and gave birth to her son Ben Ford
Her son was given up for adoption and they were reunited two years ago
The pair say they were both sexually attracted to each other after meeting
Ford left his wife Victoria so he could be with his mother in a relationship
Pair are now planning to marry and are wanting to have a baby together”
I’ve heard it suggested that Hamlet’s real fear is that Claudius cuckolded Hamlet’s father….which means that his uncle is actually his father….
When your dad is your uncle, that's called a duncle. Or, in a story about spy craft in the Appalachians, 'The Man From D.U.N.C.L.E.'
A Boy Named Sue? In that song the boy knows who his father is, goes looking for him, and knows him on sight–and the man admits to it right away (at least when he can catch his breath after his boy starts beating him to death). Don’t know what that song has to do with the wrong father…unless you’re making a joke.
Future Onion article:
Maury Povich Retires, Claims “No Longer Gives A Rat’s Ass Who Fathered Whom”
RE: Hamlet,
“He that hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popped in between th’ election and my hopes” (5, 2, 69-70) : Although the King’s son normally succeeded to the throne, Denmark was an elective monarchy in Shakespeare’s time. Hence, it was possible for someone other than the heir to assume the throne.Which is what Claudius does in the play.
The Hamlet story comes from Saxo Grammaticus's Danish History, a compendium of old Danish legends. You will find many tales of nephews dispossessed, often with a lot of bloodshed, by uncles who wanted the throne in Saxo, as well as other old sagas. Similar situations involving brothers and cousins turn up in old sagas, eg Beowulf, Hrolf Kraki (both refer to the same set of Danish rulers), Earls of Orkney, Heimskringla, etc.
Elective monarchy had a long run, the Holy Roman Emperors were elected, and it was pretty open to talent. IIRC Henry VIII of England (yeah, the one with all the wives) threw his hat in the ring on one of those elections. Mostly one royal family had a lock on the job.
The alternative was to simply rule that each royal prince got a fair share of the kingdom, an appanage. The Merovingian Frankish kings did so, which eased tensions and allowed more manageable units, but also upped the number of squabbling principalities. Charles Martel pulled then all under his rule just in time to deal with the jihadi threat.
Where's a sword-wielding Frankish monarch when you need him?
Meanwhile, in today’s news…
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/08/justin-welby-dna-test-reveals-my-secret-father-was-sir-winston-c/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/08/winston-churchills-right-hand-man-and-an-affair-to-shake-the-est/
This is what another archbishop of England said about the recently married prince William:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8481736/Royal-wedding-Archbishop-backs-William-and-Kates-decision-to-live-together-before-marriage.html
Might have something to do with a generalised lack of commitment to paternal modes of behaviour / genetic investment strategies in the folkgroups in the U.S. South-West?
Are we at peak cuckoldry yet?
After Anal Rape, Left Wing Activist Felt ‘Guilt And Responsibility’ His Migrant Attacker Was Deported
Hey, a 1% chance of being a cuckold is enough for society to be obsessed with a possibility. Cuckoldry is genetic death. It’s sort of like how a 1% chance of death seems like a big deal.
Movie director Matthew Vaughn discovered he wasn’t son of Man from UNCLE star Robert Vaughn, he was, instead, an English lord.
In certain social milieux, “cuckoldry” is not only common, but encouraged by child support laws. I once heard two black girls talking to each other about how one of them would identify the father of the child she was carrying. When one asked who the father was, the other honestly answered that she had no idea, but she had to name someone in order to get the welfare.
In California, if a man is named the father in a paternity action, he only has a few months to confirm or deny fatherhood before he is permanently stuck with paternal responsibility no matter what. A day late and it doesn’t matter; he’s legally the father end of story. Must be pretty rough on guys who left the state to take a job elsewhere and then missed the letter.
Interesting how the President thing worked out. Does having a promiscuous mother correlate with ambition and sometimes success in life?
My fiancee works in the state's bureau of child support enforcement (she hates most of the conniving women she has to deal with daily, and does what she can to help out the guys...lest anyone suspect I'm involved with a Feminist harridan), and according to her, the law in South Dakota (and several other states) is that if you are married to a woman at the time she gives birth to any given child, that kid is legally your responsibility. DNA evidence is simply irrelevant.
Whenever I have the misfortunate of seeing Barry Sotero's lantern-jawed beard, er, I mean wife, excuse me, pardon, the last word that comes to mind is "success."
Jefferson's offspring through Sally Hemings have done well.
Lincoln, well, became Lincoln.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams (Strom Thurmond's daughter) seems to have turned out well.
Obama didn't do too bad.
Of course, some people think Jesus is the greatest of them all.
Carl Zimmer is being intentionally Aspergerian-nerdy-logicky to the point of stupidity.
Yes, the probability that a male in the general population is cuckolded is quite low — but Zimmer ignores that being cuckolded is a Talebian negative Black Swan (Stork?) event.
Sure, the probability is trivial, generally speaking- but if it happened to you the impact on your life is anything but trivial – not to mention, your reproductive fitness is effed.
Hence, we have all sorts of biological and cultural safeguards against it, hence Shakespeare thought it an important topic.
And Michael Lindsay Hogg, a British film director, discovered that he was Orson Welles’ son.
There are remarkably few accounts of famous men who were the secret sons of other famous men. One fairly well-documented one is that the painter Delacroix was the secret son of the diplomat Talleyrand. But I can’t come up with that many other examples.
Check out this old table Razib posted:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2009/03/paternity-rates-by-population/#.VwhhYfkrKUk
Even when paternity confidence is high, DNA testing reveals that about 10 percent of American blacks are NOT the father.
I don’t have a link, but I thought the famous Dr. Masters estimated the cuckholdry rate as 10 percent.
Wasn’t Martin Van Buren the son of Aaron Burr?
Tug McGraw and some famous country singer – don’t know if he is any good, the kid’s big hit was a sentimental songfest (something about living your life and fishing at sunset and being happy in the moment – I love country music but I have low tolerance for sappiness). Which means that retired MLB all-stars, a rather small group of about a thousand men, have at least one father of a famous “secret son” amongst them. I think there was a WWI general who had a bastard son who founded his country’s James-Bond-like secret service, and at least one genial 19th century poet – I forget which – found out late in life his actual father was a syphilitic but philoprogenitive member of a Northern European royal family. Also, one of the Renaissance popes was the secret father of one of the best-known (chaste but friendly) beauties of her day (I know this from having recently watched the magnificent movie about Michelangelo with Charlton Heston in the starring role).
O.T.O.H. Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners), society hostess and friend (no innuendo!) of one of Steve's fave authors, Evelyn Waugh, almost certainly was the daughter of Henry (cough) Cockayne-Cust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cust
The final paragraph is interesting re scurrilous claims (or are they?), Lady Diana Cooper maybe knew things re Margaret Thatcher's mother's parentage. It's almost like the Conservative Party can't believe that their best aren't aristocratic. Alan Clark of the Diaries fame related in one entry a rumour that Mrs T's mother must have been with some aristocrat, instead of her father, Councillor Roberts, because she has, "very slim ankles".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lindsay-Hogg#Early_life_and_parentage
Most of what I personally saw was that of a desperate, single white guy who hooks up with a woman who has a couple of kids.
Very stupid. The kids will never accept him, the mother is just using him for extra income and a place to park her brood. It gets worse if the father was a genetic miscreant. IOW a alky, drug addict, prone to violence, not too bright.
If you want to start a family, then have one of your own, not a ready made one.
Still I knew of a few guys who ended up taking care of another man’s kid. Usually the GF was sleeping around with different guys along with the guy she was going steady with. The guys were too wimpy to walk out when they found out.
I made the point about the y chromosome lineages back in 2005:
https://davidcollard.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/historical-rates-of-cuckoldry/
Tim McGraw wasn’t all that secret of a son of Tug McGraw.
delete
We should have mandatory paternity testing at birth, just to be sure.
But Shakespeare, feeling his oats, expanded Hamlet’s role into the biggest, most spectacular one in English literature, so we assume Hamlet is about 30
Isn’t it actually stated somewhere in the play that Hamlet is 30? That certainly confused me. Claudius is king, so he can have anyone he wants, yet he goes after the mother of a 30-year-old man? And he does it out of LUST?
There's also a suggestion in the play that marrying Gertrude played a role in gaining the election for Claudius:
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we—as ’twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole—
Taken to wife.
(1,2, 1-14)
So reasons of state may have also played a role
There's no accounting for taste...
But isn’t.
But isn’t."
A 1% chance of death isn't a big deal? That entirely depends on the time period in question. Over the next fifty years? Maybe not. Over the next two hours? That's a different matter.
That doesn’t seem right. The child is surely the least likely to know. Outsiders are more likely than the child to know, and probably more likely than the cuckold. Cuckolds are cuckolded because of their obliviousness.
I see your point, but from the perspective of the little Tuglet, whose last name was Smith throughout his childhood, he was the son of Mr Smith, and grew up believing his Dad was the guy named Smith, according to Wikipedia and the sources that Wikipedia cites (which could be completely wrong, of course). According to Wikipedia – which is often wrong – at 11 he saw some certificate in a box his momma did not hide from him successfully enough, which showed that the rich famous “tug mcgraw” was his real Dad, but out of commendable loyalty to Mr Smith he did not really believe it – so that is 11 years of being genuinely a “secret son” , and after 7 years of kind of knowing that Mr Smith was not really his dad, at 18 he met his real Dad, and believed it. These things used to be complicated. I also used to be a “Mets fan”, but there have been just too many dirtbags on that team for me to still feel that way (I guess every other mature person feels the same about the teams they used to be a “fan” of). Still want the Mets to win every year, but realize that it just doesn’t matter, in the scheme of things.
One thing that a DNA test would not detect is when a man is infertile, and secretly or not his wife sleeps with a close male relative. Or even just someone who looks a lot like him. And in a small town in Belgium or whatever, a random guy who looks like the husband may have the same patrilinial ancestor.
1% is still kind of high. It means about 1 in 3 of us have an egg someone in our family tree just going back to the great-great grandparent generation.
Thoroughly confused.
Very stupid. The kids will never accept him, the mother is just using him for extra income and a place to park her brood. It gets worse if the father was a genetic miscreant. IOW a alky, drug addict, prone to violence, not too bright.
If you want to start a family, then have one of your own, not a ready made one.
Still I knew of a few guys who ended up taking care of another man's kid. Usually the GF was sleeping around with different guys along with the guy she was going steady with. The guys were too wimpy to walk out when they found out.
The problem is that the chick with kids was probably never married to the biological father. Men who marry college educated divorced women seem not to face the same issues.
Largely irrespective of the degree of formal education, it makes a huge difference whether the woman was previously married to the child's father (and subsequently divorced, or widowed for that matter), or whether she was (probably) just some floozy who got casually knocked up. We can speculate on the reasons for this, but statistics bear it out.
How was it secret at all? I would think anyone who saw the names just presumed it to be so. Surely, I did.
Isn't it actually stated somewhere in the play that Hamlet is 30? That certainly confused me. Claudius is king, so he can have anyone he wants, yet he goes after the mother of a 30-year-old man? And he does it out of LUST?
The final version of Hamlet has a couple of references to Hamlet being 30, which was the age of Shakespeare’s leading man, Richard Burbage, when he played Hamlet. But there’s an earlier version of Hamlet that implies he is sixteen.
http://princehamlet.com/chapter_1.html
The final version implies he’s a 30 year old grad student, which seems plausible to moderns, but probably sounded weird in 1601.
My guess is that Burbage was probably about 24 when (if) he played Romeo as a late teen, but by the time Hamlet rolled around about a half dozen years later he looked too old. Moreover, Romeo is a show-offy youthful role (Mercutio even more so), while Hamlet is absolute peak young maturity.
So the lines about Hamlet being 30 are very good for its popularity on the stage because it gets everybody excited about which fairly young but very famous actor Will Play Hamlet Next? (Right now, the answer is Oscar Isaac.)
But the plot works even better if Queen Gertrude is, say, 33.
Perhaps the only actor who might have done justice to Hamlet while still a teenager himself in real life was Orson Welles, but I can’t tell whether he ever got the chance. (We also have the assumption that Hamlet is slender, and Welles rapidly filled out.)
Auden once observed that that's the problem with the character. Everyone (men, women, the young, the elderly, etc) identifies with him.
In contrast, virtually no one identifies with Lear. Olivier once remarked that he only started to understand the character once he was an old man himself.
It was, as I have seen it in his life,
A sable silvered.
Christian Bale. Years ago, I saw some kid in a movie and thought his performance was so good that I hoped he never acted again. I was sure he could never equal much less surpass his work in that movie. It was Bale in Empire of the Sun.
After Anal Rape, Left Wing Activist Felt ‘Guilt And Responsibility’ His Migrant Attacker Was Deported
More like peak Poz. Literally.
Do we?
Hamlet is explicitly 30 in the final version, but …
From Wikipedia:
However, a case has been made[3] that at an early stage in Hamlet—with its apparent history of multiple revisions—Hamlet was presented as a sixteen-year-old. Several pieces of evidence support this view. Hamlet attends the University of Wittenberg, and royals and nobles (Elizabethan or medieval Danish) did not attend university at age 30. Additionally, a 30-year-old Prince Hamlet would clearly have been of ruling age. Given his great popularity (mentioned by Claudius), this would raise the question of why it was not he, rather than his uncle, who was elected to succeed to the throne upon the death of King Hamlet.
The line about the length of the Gravedigger’s career does not appear in the First Quarto of Hamlet; in that text Yorick is said to have been in the ground only twelve years. Furthermore, in Belleforest, possibly one of Shakespeare’s sources for the story, it is said that Amleth has “not attained to man’s estate.” And in the original spelling of the Folio text, one of the two authoritative texts for the play, the Gravedigger’s answer to how long he has “been a grave-maker” reads “Why heere in Denmarke: I haue bin sixeteene heere, man and Boy thirty yeares..” “Sixteene” is usually rendered as “sexton” (a modernization of the second quarto’s “sexten”), even in modern texts that take F1 as their “copy text.” But modernizing the punctuation—a normal practice in modernized texts—renders “Why heere in Denmarke: I haue bin sixeteene heere—man and Boy thirty yeares.” In other words, this reading suggests that he has been a grave-digger for sixteen years, but that he has lived in Denmark for thirty. According to this logic, then, it is the Grave-digger who is thirty, whereas Hamlet is only sixteen.
… Another theory offered is that the play was originally written with the view that Hamlet was 16 or 17, but since Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed, and not read, these lines were likely changed so Burbage (who was almost always the protagonist in Shakespeare’s plays) could play the role.
I could imagine Shakespeare punning on sixteen/sexton in his usual acid victim / literary genius free associative manner, figuring that he’d eventually get around to working out what common meaning sixteen and sexton must have, but then giving up on it later.
Why would any family wind up with the surname Teufel (Devil)?
Yes, the probability that a male in the general population is cuckolded is quite low -- but Zimmer ignores that being cuckolded is a Talebian negative Black Swan (Stork?) event.
Sure, the probability is trivial, generally speaking- but if it happened to you the impact on your life is anything but trivial - not to mention, your reproductive fitness is effed.
Hence, we have all sorts of biological and cultural safeguards against it, hence Shakespeare thought it an important topic.
He’s a Leftist who has done things like tweet his hope that the Ebola virus would give Euro-Americans their just desserts for stealing the Indians’ land. In this case, he provides cover for aggression. No surprise.
Consider this convoluted story of cuckoldry and other sexual misconduct among the upper classes:
Simon Raven could have made one of his novels out of it.
Any significant cuckoldry produces zero in male support — you get an entire male cohort of nothing but PUA.
Tim Teufel (second baseman on the 1986 Mets team) had one of the great quotes of baseball history. After missing an easy ground ball at second base in the first game of the 1986 series, he was asked by the typical type of gossipy newspaper reporter how he felt about that. He said he wished he caught it, of course,but he was going home after the interview, and there was simply no chance that his little kids could imagine thinking any less of their Dad because he missed one stupid ground ball, and they would all expect him to win the next day, because he was their Dad. Pretty good quote for a guy in his 20s. As for the surname Teufel, my guess – after having checked a few online sources – is that in Germany a half-millennium ago it was a nickname for clever and energetic people, and at the time it seemed to have little or nothing to do with the infernal and completely negative meaning. By the way, the moment I realized the Mets had a history of dirtbags was the same moment I realized every other team had the same type of history – my previous comment about figuring that out was not anti-Met, it was merely pro-reality.
Tim Teufel did very well in his career against Jim Gott.
Isn't it actually stated somewhere in the play that Hamlet is 30? That certainly confused me. Claudius is king, so he can have anyone he wants, yet he goes after the mother of a 30-year-old man? And he does it out of LUST?
Well, as I mentioned upthread, there is a theory that Gertrude has been been involved with Claudius for a while, and that Hamlet may be his son.
There’s also a suggestion in the play that marrying Gertrude played a role in gaining the election for Claudius:
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we—as ’twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole—
Taken to wife.
(1,2, 1-14)
So reasons of state may have also played a role
Hamlet is supposed to be set in the late middle ages, so somewhat feasible, since from what I remember the Plantagets were marrying off their children in their tweens..
But I never felt the theme of inheritance to be especially strong in the stagings I’ve seen in Hamlet, if anything his Uncle seemed to take a paternal interest in him before Hamlet goes off the rails..
"this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
* Sadly, we didn't get to Robert Downey Jr. in a Mel Gibson produced Hamlet in the early 200s.
The story makes the most sense if you assume that Shakespeare was coming into his late 30s prime, out of control with more literary talent than anybody in history, so aspects of Hamlet keep growing unexpectedly into greatness, which throws off of ther aspects of the play.
“
But isn’t.”
A 1% chance of death isn’t a big deal? That entirely depends on the time period in question. Over the next fifty years? Maybe not. Over the next two hours? That’s a different matter.
It's difficult to assess such a choice properly when one is not actually faced with it and taking it seriously, mind you. You'd also have to account for the value of money to him, subjectively.
Every time I clap my peepers on the Kardashian whorehouse, I am struck by the obvious genetic distinction between the tallest one and the two shorter swarthy ones. Obviously the mom who drove Bruce Jenner insane was cucking her prior hubby, since the terrible trio has as little in common physically as Hoss and Little Joe.
In California, if a man is named the father in a paternity action, he only has a few months to confirm or deny fatherhood before he is permanently stuck with paternal responsibility no matter what. A day late and it doesn't matter; he's legally the father end of story. Must be pretty rough on guys who left the state to take a job elsewhere and then missed the letter.
Interesting how the President thing worked out. Does having a promiscuous mother correlate with ambition and sometimes success in life?
So you have unprotected sex with a female and then don’t stick around to make sure she’s not pregnant? Rough on the guys indeed.
1% is still kind of high. It means about 1 in 3 of us have an egg someone in our family tree just going back to the great-great grandparent generation.
[Or even just someone who looks a lot like him. And in a small town in Belgium or whatever, a random guy who looks like the husband may have the same patrilinial (sic) ancestor.]
Thoroughly confused.
“…which means that his uncle is actually his father…”
When your dad is your uncle, that’s called a duncle. Or, in a story about spy craft in the Appalachians, ‘The Man From D.U.N.C.L.E.’
RE: Hamlet’s enormous popularity with actors,
Auden once observed that that’s the problem with the character. Everyone (men, women, the young, the elderly, etc) identifies with him.
In contrast, virtually no one identifies with Lear. Olivier once remarked that he only started to understand the character once he was an old man himself.
I’ve never understood why so many productions insist on a blond Hamlet. We’re never actually told the color of his hair. And there is textual evidence that he might be a brunet. Cf Horatio’s description of King Hamlet’s beard:
It was, as I have seen it in his life,
A sable silvered.
Interesting to know the Archbishop of Canterbury, who will likely crown Prince Charles as the King is a bastard.
This is what another archbishop of England said about the recently married prince William:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8481736/Royal-wedding-Archbishop-backs-William-and-Kates-decision-to-live-together-before-marriage.html
Yes, the probability that a male in the general population is cuckolded is quite low -- but Zimmer ignores that being cuckolded is a Talebian negative Black Swan (Stork?) event.
Sure, the probability is trivial, generally speaking- but if it happened to you the impact on your life is anything but trivial - not to mention, your reproductive fitness is effed.
Hence, we have all sorts of biological and cultural safeguards against it, hence Shakespeare thought it an important topic.
Shakespeare probably thought it was an important topic because of the crucial importance of inheritence in upper class, pre-industrial society. However, passing on your genes doesn’t seem to be quite as important to a lot of men today. Take sperm donation for example. A surprisingly high number of middle class males are quite happy for their partner to be impregnated with another man’s sperm. Similarly, in countries where you don’t get paid to donate sperm, like Britain and Australia, there is a modest shortage of sperm donors. From a genetic perspective, this is a wasted opportunity for a man to pass on his genes with minimal parental investment. However, for cultural and sexual reasons, a lot of males aren’t that keen on donating sperm to women they have never meet.
Surely that's only if you know you're infertile? Numbers can't be that high.
I wonder if Steve's ever read Ranulf Fiennes "Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a Voyage Round My Family" - the story of the Fiennes, Twiselton and Wykeham families since his forebear Charles Martel. Generally a tale full of male 'doers' (conquering Jerusalem, co-ordinating opposition to Charles I, fighting on battlefronts from Hastings (on the wrong side) to Crecy (on both sides) to North Africa (right side), and marrying heiresses galore.
But for a few years in the late 18th-early 19th century the family provide scandalous plot material for their relation Jane Austen. One Twistelton, Lord Saye and Sele, marries his parlourmaid, his son gets back to form and marries the daughter of the East India Company chairman, who is given to extravagant entertaining and house (well, castle) furnishing. Hubby sells off land to keep her funded, is described as 'weak' (although in the non-domestic sphere he is a soldier who puts down the Gordon riots) while his wife is 'romantic'.
Son leaves school and elopes with an actress, at which point Jane Austen's family stop doing am dram at the rectory. Actress has adulterous affairs and produces a bastard, son divorces, divorce hearings make for much society gossip. Daughter elopes at 16, marries and her adulterous affair makes for yet more scandal.
"I am proud to say I have a very good eye for an Adultress, for tho' repeatedly assured that another in the same party was She, fixed upon the right one from the first!" - wrote Jane on meeting her for the first time.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3402005/Has-swaggering-divorcee-really-fathered-800-children-claims-Britain-s-prolific-sperm-donor-boasts-true-samaritan-reckless-egomaniac.html
That would be Major General Sir Stewart Menzies, Head of M.I.5, (S.I.S.) in WW2 who didn’t exactly quash rumours that he was the illegitimate son of King Edward VII. Almost certainly untrue, though.
O.T.O.H. Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners), society hostess and friend (no innuendo!) of one of Steve’s fave authors, Evelyn Waugh, almost certainly was the daughter of Henry (cough) Cockayne-Cust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cust
The final paragraph is interesting re scurrilous claims (or are they?), Lady Diana Cooper maybe knew things re Margaret Thatcher’s mother’s parentage. It’s almost like the Conservative Party can’t believe that their best aren’t aristocratic. Alan Clark of the Diaries fame related in one entry a rumour that Mrs T’s mother must have been with some aristocrat, instead of her father, Councillor Roberts, because she has, “very slim ankles”.
O.T.O.H. Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners), society hostess and friend (no innuendo!) of one of Steve's fave authors, Evelyn Waugh, almost certainly was the daughter of Henry (cough) Cockayne-Cust. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cust
The final paragraph is interesting re scurrilous claims (or are they?), Lady Diana Cooper maybe knew things re Margaret Thatcher's mother's parentage. It's almost like the Conservative Party can't believe that their best aren't aristocratic. Alan Clark of the Diaries fame related in one entry a rumour that Mrs T's mother must have been with some aristocrat, instead of her father, Councillor Roberts, because she has, "very slim ankles".
British female aristocrats tended to marry young and then have “an heir and a spare” policy regarding long term fidelity: e.g., Prince Charles’ two sons with Lady Di are clearly his. But the royal couple turned out not to be compatible in the long run.
In California, if a man is named the father in a paternity action, he only has a few months to confirm or deny fatherhood before he is permanently stuck with paternal responsibility no matter what. A day late and it doesn't matter; he's legally the father end of story. Must be pretty rough on guys who left the state to take a job elsewhere and then missed the letter.
Interesting how the President thing worked out. Does having a promiscuous mother correlate with ambition and sometimes success in life?
There is no correlation. Both of Obama’s possible fathers were intelligent professional men. His family provided him with an elite private education. He was going to do well at something.
There is a documentary called Prodigal Sons. One of the subjects finds out that he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth. I don’t think it is cuckoldry related however.
about Hamlet being fat, I learned that from a crime mystery short story by Isaac Asimov … I wonder if the Good Doctor wrote “Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare”; “Asimov’s Guide to Bible” is very enjoyable … I’ve got other very nice books written by mathematics/science minded people written about “humanist” subjects, like Martin Gardner’s “Annotated Alice” (Lewis Carroll) and a book by a Dutch mathematician, about his friend M.C. Escher and his works …
Isabel II of Spain’s offspring Alfonso XII, the ancestor of later and present Spanish monarchs, was universally believed to be the son of the naval lieutenant Puig, not of her doll-like and highly inbred husband the Infant Don Francisco de Asís. But I am not aware of any genetic test having been done on their descendants to confirm or infirm the belief.
I find cuckoldry and half-black people interesting.
Sarah Valentine (PhD Princeton) found out in 20s that she is half-black. She wrote a tortuous essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that is unfortunately now behind a paywall. http://chronicle.com/article/When-I-Was-White/231347
Actor David Paladino didn’t confirm that he was half-black until his mid 20s. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/214/family-physics
In her documentary Little White Lie, Lacey Schwartz recounts that she didn’t check race when applying to Georgetown and was admitted as a black student based on her application photo.
In the 1940s a man abandoned his family after his wife had a half-black baby. The now grown woman believes that she is fully white.
Try the link below
https://web.archive.org/web/20150708015219/http://chronicle.com/article/When-I-Was-White/231347/F
Are you so sure about Prince Harry? I thought that there has been speculation that his biological father was a bodyguard with whom Diana admitted to having an affair. Temperamentally and physically, he seems quite different to me than Prince William.
Now I always knew Harry was of the official lineage because when he and his brother were looking at all the flowers left for Diana after her death, from the back, his head and the way his hair fell, were just like Edward VIII King that abdicated. You don't have to be a Royal Watcher (I'm not) to notice that. Just have to notice photos. One of the things that is strongly hereditary is the way your hair grows and falls.
Auden once observed that that's the problem with the character. Everyone (men, women, the young, the elderly, etc) identifies with him.
In contrast, virtually no one identifies with Lear. Olivier once remarked that he only started to understand the character once he was an old man himself.
Lear reads great, but it’s not put on very often.
I vaguely remember Asimov’s story about Hamlet being fat.
It’s interesting that he’s usually pictured as tall and slender. I wonder how long that has been a tradition?
I’m all for scientific analysis of the actual rates of paternity hanky-panky but this story got cleared by the NYT desk for one reason: pandering to the post-70s sentiment among Carrie Bradshaw-idolizing North American housewives, who buy all the magazines and watch the most TV, that female libido is inherently innocent and virtuous like Gaia or fluffy clouds or sunflowers, and is only being restrained from achieving some, I dunno, “liberation” by the fiendish machinations of Ye Patriarchy. In this dumbed down society there can be no honest acknowledgement of the liabilities from the behavior of sluts, similar to the damage caused by cads but also different; basic honesty is inhibited at every turn by the cadres of pampered 3rd-wavers hissing at any traditional view of morality that does not uniformly assign evil to men while exonerating women for anything and everything, anywhere, any time — Because Sugar And Spice. Needless to say this protocol places no restraint of trade over the makers of the catty soap operas and gynoporn novels that average women actually enjoy.
Cumberbatch is descended from an owner of black slaves his mother advised him to change his name in case he got sued by descendants of his ancestor/s property.
Dianna wasn’t allowed good looking bodyguards, but that apparently did not stop her. Anyway the resemblance is not to that bodyguard (killed in a motorcycle accident) but to to army officer James Hewitt and taken with the admitted (by both of them) fact that she had a affair with him for years it very likely Hewitt is Harry’s dad.
The not entirely inappropriately named Alexander Cockburn provides too much information. http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/7177/king-george-vi%E2%80%99s-other-stuttering-performance
Hamlet’s soliloquy would be ridiculous from a teenager, but the unlikeliness of a fortysomething mother is something people, including Shakespeare, of those times may not have understood.
From a medieval teenager, the words are still Shakespeare-level sophistication, but I might expect a teen of that era, who had been of the upper class and given an expensive education laden with Christianity and the classics, and of a precocious mind and dark temperament as Hamlet is, to have the potential to think in such terms.
It's still dramatic license, but it's not as nutty as it would be if set in a modern high school.
And remember what royal teens were then up to- shagging, marrying, fathering, warring, risking death. Edward IV, the main leader of the Yorkists, was about 18 when he took up the leadership of the family cause. Nineteen when he became king the first time. After 20 years more of sporadic strife, on and off the throne, he died at 40. He appointed his brother Richard [the future Richard III] to raise troops for him when the latter was 11. Richard held an independent army command at 17. Richard, himself king 1483-85, was defeated and dead at 32. By then he may have looked as old as Ian McKellen, but he was much younger than the actor who played him on the big screen [who was then 56].
Would Shakespeare and his time not have understood the unlikeliness of the fortysomething mother? They may not have been able to explain it, but they'd have ample experience and evidence for it. Kings certainly knew to shop as young as they could.
we need a word for multiple baby daddies …. which animal ?
“A surprisingly high number of middle class males are quite happy for their partner to be impregnated with another man’s sperm. ”
Surely that’s only if you know you’re infertile? Numbers can’t be that high.
I wonder if Steve’s ever read Ranulf Fiennes “Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a Voyage Round My Family” – the story of the Fiennes, Twiselton and Wykeham families since his forebear Charles Martel. Generally a tale full of male ‘doers’ (conquering Jerusalem, co-ordinating opposition to Charles I, fighting on battlefronts from Hastings (on the wrong side) to Crecy (on both sides) to North Africa (right side), and marrying heiresses galore.
But for a few years in the late 18th-early 19th century the family provide scandalous plot material for their relation Jane Austen. One Twistelton, Lord Saye and Sele, marries his parlourmaid, his son gets back to form and marries the daughter of the East India Company chairman, who is given to extravagant entertaining and house (well, castle) furnishing. Hubby sells off land to keep her funded, is described as ‘weak’ (although in the non-domestic sphere he is a soldier who puts down the Gordon riots) while his wife is ‘romantic’.
Son leaves school and elopes with an actress, at which point Jane Austen’s family stop doing am dram at the rectory. Actress has adulterous affairs and produces a bastard, son divorces, divorce hearings make for much society gossip. Daughter elopes at 16, marries and her adulterous affair makes for yet more scandal.
“I am proud to say I have a very good eye for an Adultress, for tho’ repeatedly assured that another in the same party was She, fixed upon the right one from the first!” – wrote Jane on meeting her for the first time.
Polybabydadic
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=polybabydadic
To clarify, according to the Left, the plight of the 2% of men who happen to be gay is so important that we must remake society so they can have fabulous cakes.
The 1% of men who are cuckolded, however, are too insignificant and they should suck it up and spend 18 years of their lives and resources raising another man’s child.
The much less than 1% of men who think they are women are also so significant that society must be remade so they can pee in a woman’s bathroom.
Steve is right. There’s no logical consistency. It’s only who/whom.
It’s a problem for productions that Hamlet’s uncle tends to act pretty avuncular toward him in the opening acts. If Hamlet is a 30 year old Garrick-Booth-Barrymore-Olivier-Gielgud-O’Toole-Kline-Gibson-Branagh-Hawke-Law-Cumberbatch-Isaac* type, why isn’t the upstart king worrying more about a challenge from the charismatic rightful heir? The politics make more sense if Hamlet is 16, but then teens don’t go around saying:
“this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o’er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
* Sadly, we didn’t get to Robert Downey Jr. in a Mel Gibson produced Hamlet in the early 200s.
The story makes the most sense if you assume that Shakespeare was coming into his late 30s prime, out of control with more literary talent than anybody in history, so aspects of Hamlet keep growing unexpectedly into greatness, which throws off of ther aspects of the play.
But the ideas aren't that inaccessible in themselves, and perhaps a depressed, aspergery, sensitive and high-IQ teen who had just gone through a medieval prince's schooling [and although my recall on this is poor, isn't there a hint he had seen battle?] could come up with the ideas to indicate his rage and despair.
Translated into the [mild] idiom of our age: "Life sucks. Everybody is always telling me to look at the beauty of nature, but what a filthy and dangerous dump the world is. The sky may sometimes be blue but it's always raining around me. And how come nobody notices how unhappy I am, and why are they all so stupid? People are all liars and cheats and worth nothing."
It's actually a bit Holden Caulfield.
But isn’t."
A 1% chance of death isn't a big deal? That entirely depends on the time period in question. Over the next fifty years? Maybe not. Over the next two hours? That's a different matter.
I suppose we could ask him how much he’d want to be paid (if he survives) to throw three dice and be killed immediately if it came up either three sixes or three ones, which I think would be just under a 1% risk of death (0.92%), unless my maths is rustier than I think.
It’s difficult to assess such a choice properly when one is not actually faced with it and taking it seriously, mind you. You’d also have to account for the value of money to him, subjectively.
Can you help me out here–is Poz short for ‘HIV positive’, or is there more to it than that? It seems to have taken on additional meanings.
I would agree with the premise except we moved three times and still had the same mailman, whom I thought was Asian, because everyone called him, Long Dong the Mailman.
https://goodbyeamericainaphoto.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/spot-the-cuck-having-second-thoughts/#comment-6928
Snopes, this is not. The woman pictured was in a relationship with White man (see left photo) then out pops mystery meat infant. Biodad was apparently her Yoga instructor. Potential husband gets smart and gets lost.
The classic ”Once you go black, you’re a single mom!”
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, horrified to find out he is not, as he has been trumpeting, of Jewish parentage, but was fathered by Winston Churchill’s private secretary Sir Anthony Montague Browne.
https://www.rt.com/uk/339027-archbishop-canterbury-father-revealed/
Archbishop Welby’s mother is still around, she is called Lady Williams of Elvel (really).
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/27/archbishop-canterbury-justin-welby-warns-not-demonise-immigrants-michael-fallon-swamped
http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-first-jewish-archbishop-of-canterbury-heads-to-israel/
https://www.rt.com/uk/339027-archbishop-canterbury-father-revealed/
Archbishop Welby's mother is still around, she is called Lady Williams of Elvel (really).
YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/27/archbishop-canterbury-justin-welby-warns-not-demonise-immigrants-michael-fallon-swamped
http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-first-jewish-archbishop-of-canterbury-heads-to-israel/
“Dr. Larmuseau and other scientists developed other methods to get an unbiased look at cuckoldry.”
Have they reached out to the RNC?
OK, not into Shakespeare….so a mailman is delivering his door to door route and when he gets to one house he is greeted by the lady of the house who is wearing a sheer negligée. She opens the door, takes him by the hand and leads him upstairs to the bedroom, where she proceeds to undress him and ride him to exhaustion. She gets off of him, tells him to shower, dress and meet her downstairs in the kitchen. Totally stunned, he follows her instructions. Soon he is seated at the kitchen table watching the women busily cooking. The woman turns and says that the envelope on the table is for him He opens it and finds five dollars inside. He is now even more confused. Soon the woman places a heaping dish of scrambled eggs, home fries, toast and bacon in front of him, pours both a cup of coffee and sits down across from him. The mailman looks at her and says…” This was all nice, but I don’t understand what is going on.” The woman sips some coffee and says….” I told my husband that you were retiring and that we should do something for you. He said ‘fuck him and give him five bucks’……breakfast was my idea.”
In California, if a man is named the father in a paternity action, he only has a few months to confirm or deny fatherhood before he is permanently stuck with paternal responsibility no matter what. A day late and it doesn't matter; he's legally the father end of story. Must be pretty rough on guys who left the state to take a job elsewhere and then missed the letter.
Interesting how the President thing worked out. Does having a promiscuous mother correlate with ambition and sometimes success in life?
“In California, if a man is named the father in a paternity action, he only has a few months to confirm or deny fatherhood before he is permanently stuck with paternal responsibility no matter what. A day late and it doesn’t matter; he’s legally the father end of story. Must be pretty rough on guys who left the state to take a job elsewhere and then missed the letter.”
My fiancee works in the state’s bureau of child support enforcement (she hates most of the conniving women she has to deal with daily, and does what she can to help out the guys…lest anyone suspect I’m involved with a Feminist harridan), and according to her, the law in South Dakota (and several other states) is that if you are married to a woman at the time she gives birth to any given child, that kid is legally your responsibility. DNA evidence is simply irrelevant.
I googled poz the other day and it did indeed start out meaning HIV-positive, but has since taken on other meanings. My take was that the poofters (can I still say that?) use it to mean everything they do not like about the modern world.
Worse in California. You don’t have sex with ANY woman and are declared to be the father. Whether you “stick around” after the non-event is immaterial. Not opening your mail is all it takes to make you a father.
“The problem is that the chick with kids was probably never married to the biological father. Men who marry college educated divorced women seem not to face the same issues.”
Largely irrespective of the degree of formal education, it makes a huge difference whether the woman was previously married to the child’s father (and subsequently divorced, or widowed for that matter), or whether she was (probably) just some floozy who got casually knocked up. We can speculate on the reasons for this, but statistics bear it out.
"He that hath killed my king and whored my mother,
Popped in between th' election and my hopes" (5, 2, 69-70) : Although the King's son normally succeeded to the throne, Denmark was an elective monarchy in Shakespeare's time. Hence, it was possible for someone other than the heir to assume the throne.Which is what Claudius does in the play.
You could say it’s an older trope. Early Germanic kingship tended to be “elective”, the nobles picked a leader from among the men of the royal clan. It didn’t have to be the old king’s son, it could be a brother or a cousin, whoever seemed to be the best leader. This meant there was often fierce competition between uncles and nephews over the spoils, since they took such elections personally.
The Hamlet story comes from Saxo Grammaticus’s Danish History, a compendium of old Danish legends. You will find many tales of nephews dispossessed, often with a lot of bloodshed, by uncles who wanted the throne in Saxo, as well as other old sagas. Similar situations involving brothers and cousins turn up in old sagas, eg Beowulf, Hrolf Kraki (both refer to the same set of Danish rulers), Earls of Orkney, Heimskringla, etc.
Elective monarchy had a long run, the Holy Roman Emperors were elected, and it was pretty open to talent. IIRC Henry VIII of England (yeah, the one with all the wives) threw his hat in the ring on one of those elections. Mostly one royal family had a lock on the job.
The alternative was to simply rule that each royal prince got a fair share of the kingdom, an appanage. The Merovingian Frankish kings did so, which eased tensions and allowed more manageable units, but also upped the number of squabbling principalities. Charles Martel pulled then all under his rule just in time to deal with the jihadi threat.
Where’s a sword-wielding Frankish monarch when you need him?
Researching the subject 30 years ago in grad school, I discovered an English medical study of WWII-era paternity based on birth certificate/hospital records (Blood type? Rh? Eye color? Can’t remember now.) from which the researchers estimated a 15-25% paternal misattribution rate.
That was my first pre-Internet nibble on the red pill. Wartime makes strange bedfellows.
… and then there’s this guy:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3402005/Has-swaggering-divorcee-really-fathered-800-children-claims-Britain-s-prolific-sperm-donor-boasts-true-samaritan-reckless-egomaniac.html
In California, if a man is named the father in a paternity action, he only has a few months to confirm or deny fatherhood before he is permanently stuck with paternal responsibility no matter what. A day late and it doesn't matter; he's legally the father end of story. Must be pretty rough on guys who left the state to take a job elsewhere and then missed the letter.
Interesting how the President thing worked out. Does having a promiscuous mother correlate with ambition and sometimes success in life?
“Interesting how the President thing worked out. Does having a promiscuous mother correlate with ambition and sometimes success in life?”
Whenever I have the misfortunate of seeing Barry Sotero’s lantern-jawed beard, er, I mean wife, excuse me, pardon, the last word that comes to mind is “success.”
W.F.,
You’re right that “A Boy Named Sue” is not the right song for this thread.
Could be that our buddy Steve hadn’t actually read the lyrics and was thinking of some other classic cheatin’ woman song.
Kenny Rogers had two hits about that: “Lucille” and “Ruby”.
But Gary Stevens’ hit, “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)” should be played in the background to help elevate the discussion around here, and maybe interested parties should even conduct some actual field research at a fine establishment tonight.
The Double Wide Bar in Dallas might be a worthy place to start . . .
RE: Uncertain ancestry,
The paternity of Abraham Lincoln’s mother is uncertain*. Lincoln used to speculate about the origins of his extraordinary abilities. One theory that seemed to appeal to him was that his grandfather was a Virginia aristocrat.
John Buchan’s novel The Path of the Kingexplained Lincoln’s leadership qualities by arguing that he was descended from a royal bloodline:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1966/1966-h/1966-h.htm
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Lincoln
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Hanks_Lincoln_heritage
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/joeljmiller/2012/12/abraham-lincoln-and-the-bastard-jesus-christ/
A more scholarly work on Jesus's fatherhood was done by Prof. Schaberg for which she faced some ridicule.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Illegitimacy-Jesus-Theological-Interpretation/dp/190504884X
But, it is more accepted now. Professor Tabor has written on Jesus genealogy:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Jesus-Dynasty-History-Christianity/dp/074328724X
Another analysis is by Prof. Ehrman:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Jesus-Became-God-Exaltation/dp/0061778184
What became of the allegation that Slick Willy’s putative father can’t have been, because his service records showed that he was abroad at the time the child must have been conceived?
Is this now accepted? Has it been exploded?
In a group where paternal investment is required one would expect selection to drive male behavior towards detection/avoidance of likely cuckolders … and thus its incidence should be low in that group.
Dr Johnson famously thought that Lear was just too shattering to be endured more than once.
My fiancee works in the state's bureau of child support enforcement (she hates most of the conniving women she has to deal with daily, and does what she can to help out the guys...lest anyone suspect I'm involved with a Feminist harridan), and according to her, the law in South Dakota (and several other states) is that if you are married to a woman at the time she gives birth to any given child, that kid is legally your responsibility. DNA evidence is simply irrelevant.
That’s the standard legal principle: “pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant”.
Wagner thought the same of “Tristan und Isolde”. Fortunately or not, most people are made of coarser stuff.
The Hamlet story comes from Saxo Grammaticus's Danish History, a compendium of old Danish legends. You will find many tales of nephews dispossessed, often with a lot of bloodshed, by uncles who wanted the throne in Saxo, as well as other old sagas. Similar situations involving brothers and cousins turn up in old sagas, eg Beowulf, Hrolf Kraki (both refer to the same set of Danish rulers), Earls of Orkney, Heimskringla, etc.
Elective monarchy had a long run, the Holy Roman Emperors were elected, and it was pretty open to talent. IIRC Henry VIII of England (yeah, the one with all the wives) threw his hat in the ring on one of those elections. Mostly one royal family had a lock on the job.
The alternative was to simply rule that each royal prince got a fair share of the kingdom, an appanage. The Merovingian Frankish kings did so, which eased tensions and allowed more manageable units, but also upped the number of squabbling principalities. Charles Martel pulled then all under his rule just in time to deal with the jihadi threat.
Where's a sword-wielding Frankish monarch when you need him?
Tanistry tends to disappear in a stabler and more organised state of society than that of ancient Ireland, and the election of a monarch becomes a formality. Such it became even in the Holy Roman Empire if a son of the Emperor was extant, as when Francis I wasted his money on standing against Charles V.
I have never exactly seen a source for when the French monarchy ceased to be elective- in the most de jure sense, probably well into the high middle ages.
The Capetians followed the strategy of making sure they always had just enough sons and having an heir formally named a sort of junior king while the predecessor lived, and their heredity held out for nearly 400 years, by which time cemented the idea that the king of France was always the eldest male of the eldest surviving line of unbroken male descent of the heirs of Hugh Capet. Once the English, with their notion of succession through the female line [they were still Capetians in female line to Edward III] were seen off in the Hundred Years War, this customary law held true until the Revolution.
Any member of the medieval German royal/imperial houses would have killed for that level of durability.
The German dynasties warred constantly to hold their multiple crowns together, and sold off royal powers over time to cement their competing claims, and always in the end suffered heredity failure either by reproduction, election, or both. By the time the Hapsburgs managed it, the empire was not what it started as.
The French royals in 987 were elected to an already bare-bones crown, and clung to it for dear life for 4oo years until the idea there could be any other dynasty seemed insane, rebuilding royal power slowly. Masterful long-game, despite some mistakes along the way.
Apropos of tanistry, let me put in here a vote for the legitimacy of Macbeth as king of Scots/Alba, and against Shakespeare for maligning this great Scotsman.
It’s always been obvious that the false paternity percentages thrown around by fearful males on the web were much overblown. If you read someone like the ridiculous ‘Roissy’ — an absurd character who has somehow gotten a bit of internet micro-celebrity — this topic of false paternity is an obsession inflated to the level of paranoia. There’s some deep psychological stuff going on there in terms of the fear of women and fear of the responsibilities of fatherhood. Rather than bring those fears to consciousness they are displaced on to a paranoia about the woman cheating you of your sperm by claiming another man’s child is yours. From the irresponsible bachelor perspective paternity is scary but not because it’s another man’s child you’re raising. It’s because the woman and the child will have a real, powerful, and life-changing claim on you.
The paternity of Abraham Lincoln's mother is uncertain*. Lincoln used to speculate about the origins of his extraordinary abilities. One theory that seemed to appeal to him was that his grandfather was a Virginia aristocrat.
John Buchan's novel The Path of the Kingexplained Lincoln's leadership qualities by arguing that he was descended from a royal bloodline:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1966/1966-h/1966-h.htm
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Lincoln
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Hanks_Lincoln_heritage
Lincoln was so affected by his mothers illegitimacy that he took solace from the story of Jesus:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/joeljmiller/2012/12/abraham-lincoln-and-the-bastard-jesus-christ/
A more scholarly work on Jesus’s fatherhood was done by Prof. Schaberg for which she faced some ridicule.
But, it is more accepted now. Professor Tabor has written on Jesus genealogy:
Another analysis is by Prof. Ehrman:
Traditional cuck: Not knowing that your wife done it. About child of another man.
New cuck: Knowing that your wife does it and liking it. About sex, not child, with another man.
The Royal Family would never have left that question in the air.They’ve had it tested. Apparently Prince Henry was quite disappointed to find he was not the son of the man suspected, and was actually Charles’. Charles had to break the news to him. It was a difficult time for all.
Now I always knew Harry was of the official lineage because when he and his brother were looking at all the flowers left for Diana after her death, from the back, his head and the way his hair fell, were just like Edward VIII King that abdicated. You don’t have to be a Royal Watcher (I’m not) to notice that. Just have to notice photos. One of the things that is strongly hereditary is the way your hair grows and falls.
The paternity of Abraham Lincoln's mother is uncertain*. Lincoln used to speculate about the origins of his extraordinary abilities. One theory that seemed to appeal to him was that his grandfather was a Virginia aristocrat.
John Buchan's novel The Path of the Kingexplained Lincoln's leadership qualities by arguing that he was descended from a royal bloodline:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1966/1966-h/1966-h.htm
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Lincoln
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Hanks_Lincoln_heritage
What abilities? Sharing a bed with a man? Chickening out of a duel after one of the satirical poems he was known to circulate anonymously was taken umbrage at? (Lincoln kept his mouth shut bout other peoples private lives thereafter). There was never a chance of the South winning that war.
Thatcher was supposed to have been fathered by a top Tory (laughable). Napoleon III was supposed to be a Rothschild’s child
From "First Note on Abraham Lincoln," by Gore Vidal, The Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1981:
Sarah Valentine (PhD Princeton) found out in 20s that she is half-black. She wrote a tortuous essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that is unfortunately now behind a paywall. http://chronicle.com/article/When-I-Was-White/231347
Actor David Paladino didn't confirm that he was half-black until his mid 20s. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/214/family-physics
In her documentary Little White Lie, Lacey Schwartz recounts that she didn't check race when applying to Georgetown and was admitted as a black student based on her application photo.
https://youtu.be/qxHLpgYwcVY
In the 1940s a man abandoned his family after his wife had a half-black baby. The now grown woman believes that she is fully white.
https://youtu.be/dI9Kl4PLZs4
Sarah Valentine (PhD Princeton) found out in 20s that she is half-black. She wrote a tortuous essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that is unfortunately now behind a paywall.
Try the link below
https://web.archive.org/web/20150708015219/http://chronicle.com/article/When-I-Was-White/231347/F
In California, if a man is named the father in a paternity action, he only has a few months to confirm or deny fatherhood before he is permanently stuck with paternal responsibility no matter what. A day late and it doesn't matter; he's legally the father end of story. Must be pretty rough on guys who left the state to take a job elsewhere and then missed the letter.
Interesting how the President thing worked out. Does having a promiscuous mother correlate with ambition and sometimes success in life?
Interesting theory.
Jefferson’s offspring through Sally Hemings have done well.
Lincoln, well, became Lincoln.
Essie Mae Washington-Williams (Strom Thurmond’s daughter) seems to have turned out well.
Obama didn’t do too bad.
Of course, some people think Jesus is the greatest of them all.
Poz is slang among edgy alt-righters for “degenerate.”
My grandfather was married thrice. He cheated on his first wife with his a woman named Betty. During their affair, she had her second child. Her husband once saw my grandpa’s brother at a bar, thought it was my grandpa and assaulted him.
Anyway, Betty’s husband died and grandpa divorced his wife and married Betty. They sent the older child away and my grandpa adopted the younger one. Eventually Betty died and my grandpa married my grandmother.
Isn't it actually stated somewhere in the play that Hamlet is 30? That certainly confused me. Claudius is king, so he can have anyone he wants, yet he goes after the mother of a 30-year-old man? And he does it out of LUST?
Some dudes have a thing for cougs.
There’s no accounting for taste…
But you sure as hell don't marry either one.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/27/archbishop-canterbury-justin-welby-warns-not-demonise-immigrants-michael-fallon-swamped
http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-first-jewish-archbishop-of-canterbury-heads-to-israel/
“We Jews will be resented for our leading role in making Europe multicultural.”
The NYT seems hell bent on publishing stories disproving what ordinary people call common sense.
The phrase “Who’s your daddy?” has interesting cultural connotations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_your_daddy%3F_(phrase)
This song
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/michaeljackson/billiejean.html
repudiates alleged fatherhood.
My fiancee works in the state's bureau of child support enforcement (she hates most of the conniving women she has to deal with daily, and does what she can to help out the guys...lest anyone suspect I'm involved with a Feminist harridan), and according to her, the law in South Dakota (and several other states) is that if you are married to a woman at the time she gives birth to any given child, that kid is legally your responsibility. DNA evidence is simply irrelevant.
Those conniving woman stories should make for interesting screenplays, or otherwise find a home to entertain and inform. They could provide the basis for a Derbyshire-like Talk.
It’s my understanding that autosomal DNA testing, which compares over 700,000 markers, can establish this pretty conclusively nowadays.
The paternity of Abraham Lincoln's mother is uncertain*. Lincoln used to speculate about the origins of his extraordinary abilities. One theory that seemed to appeal to him was that his grandfather was a Virginia aristocrat.
John Buchan's novel The Path of the Kingexplained Lincoln's leadership qualities by arguing that he was descended from a royal bloodline:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1966/1966-h/1966-h.htm
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Lincoln
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Hanks_Lincoln_heritage
Lots of people like to imagine that they are descended from royalty, Indian braves, etc. but the reality is often much more mundane. Likewise, people like to attribute magical leadership qualities to royal lineages but the reality is often quite disappointing, which is one big reason why dynastic leadership fell into disfavor. The fact that many European royal lineages were highly inbred didn’t help. However, as the US begins to resemble a third rate S. American country, we now find that Presidential candidates are increasing selected from the wive, sons and brothers of former Presidents.
Considering how few people are famous, how few people are secret sons and how few of those ever find out the true identity of their father, I’d say it is remarkable how many there seem to be who hit all three points and whose father was famous too.
Prince Harry surely does look an awful lot like James Hewitt. And doesn’t seem to resemble Charles either physiognomically or behaviorally.
Great picture comparison here:
http://dotconnectoruk.blogspot.ca/2009/06/prince-charles-not-harrys-real-father.html
The aristocracy married their sons off to American millionaires daughters in many cases. Churchill and MacMillan mothers for example.
Shermer has pointed out that the middle and upper classes's willingness to believe that rates of "parental misattribution" are far higher than they are among their kind as a classic example of an urban legend.
Yet Shermer however notes that the middle class also willfully ignore far more persuasive evidence among the poor and in polygamous and less developed societies perhaps out of a notion of political correctness or an inability or unwillingness to grasp the insights of evolutionary biology.
But doing so requires ignoring the enormous popularity of "Who's your daddy" tabloid talk shows among the lower classes and how common billboard advertizing for Paternity legal services are in urban neighborhoods.
So perhaps the middle and upper classes really do obsess themselves with issue of legitimacy while the lower classes are more likely to accept illegitimacy as a fact of life.
http://www.identigene.com/news/featured-item-1
http://articles.philly.com/1998-01-08/living/25749800_1_dna-paternity-testing-paternity-test-fees
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1999-08-15/news/9908140521_1_dna-paternity-testing-dna-diagnostics-center-blood-test
In Chicago these billboards are often located near the 24 hour shipping/delivery/taxi/postal centers.
For every urban cuckold beta male who busts his ass working the night shift is is the club stud serial baby daddy who is the issuer of multiple cuckoo eggs.
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2011/01/only-23-kids-deadbeat-black-dad-called.html
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2015/07/i-didnt-even-do-nothing-samuel-dubose.html
My question is does planned parenthood keep any confidential records of what percentage of women list extramarital or outside relationship sexual activity as a rational for seeking an abortion???
Rothschild was one of the few men not suspected of being the father of Napoleon III.
Yes. And that is why historic cuckoldry rates are low in those societies. But yes, we need more data from sub-Saharan Africa.
That’s why the surname/Y-chromosome method is so powerful. It removes these problems and gives us a idea of the total rate going back for some time.
Hate to break it to you, but not all people who have the same surname belong to the same (legal) male line.
Chelsea Clinton is likely Webster Hubbell’s daughter.
Let’s see…..grows up in rural poverty, becomes a successful (largely self-trained) lawyer, leads the USA to victory in the Civil War, and was a master of English prose
From “First Note on Abraham Lincoln,” by Gore Vidal, The Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1981:
Lincoln was a great man, but we have all known prodigies that came from seemingly nowhere. There is no reason to believe Lincoln wasn't just another natural outlier, instead of believing that Lincoln's mother was fathered by Erasmus Darwin or Josiah Wedgwood or Louis XV of France or George Washington or whomever-you-please-because-Gore-Vidal-says-so.
Michael Shermer of Skeptics Magazine has written about cuckoldry.
Shermer has pointed out that the middle and upper classes’s willingness to believe that rates of “parental misattribution” are far higher than they are among their kind as a classic example of an urban legend.
Yet Shermer however notes that the middle class also willfully ignore far more persuasive evidence among the poor and in polygamous and less developed societies perhaps out of a notion of political correctness or an inability or unwillingness to grasp the insights of evolutionary biology.
But doing so requires ignoring the enormous popularity of “Who’s your daddy” tabloid talk shows among the lower classes and how common billboard advertizing for Paternity legal services are in urban neighborhoods.
So perhaps the middle and upper classes really do obsess themselves with issue of legitimacy while the lower classes are more likely to accept illegitimacy as a fact of life.
http://www.identigene.com/news/featured-item-1
http://articles.philly.com/1998-01-08/living/25749800_1_dna-paternity-testing-paternity-test-fees
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1999-08-15/news/9908140521_1_dna-paternity-testing-dna-diagnostics-center-blood-test
In Chicago these billboards are often located near the 24 hour shipping/delivery/taxi/postal centers.
For every urban cuckold beta male who busts his ass working the night shift is is the club stud serial baby daddy who is the issuer of multiple cuckoo eggs.
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2011/01/only-23-kids-deadbeat-black-dad-called.html
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2015/07/i-didnt-even-do-nothing-samuel-dubose.html
My question is does planned parenthood keep any confidential records of what percentage of women list extramarital or outside relationship sexual activity as a rational for seeking an abortion???
Maybe, just maybe cuckoldry is rare because men obsess about it.
The tone of the article is structurally similar to the anti-vaxxer movement. Few people get measles, so why bother with vaccination?
And even if you personally don’t get measles shots/think about cuckoldry, there is still a herd effect.
That was his point or were you referring to patronymic names versus occupational or location names? The former being definitively tied to a common patrilineal ancestor (Usually, not always, who knows how many different Jens led to Jensens) and the latter almost never.
And in a place like the US you have the Anglicised names to deal with, both the older Irish tradition of changing your name to an English one with either a similar meaning or similar pronunciation and the same practice extending to many European immigrants once they arrived in the US.
You might be able to control for this by analysing a large enough pool from a common name to find the prominent y chroms and then assume the ones with very small frequency are due to infidelity/adoption/illegitimacy and the ones that aren’t come from the name having several founders.
It’s not like it’s very likely the same guys with the same y chrom lineage were cuckolding another y chrom lineage repeatedly to the extent that their lineage reached something approaching parity with the original, except maybe clan warfare, in which case why did they keep their defeated enemies name? You would assume the ones due to this would be varied and thus small in individual frequency though maybe large in total with the real progenitor(s) being the plurality if not the majority. Though I’m sure somebody can give an example where it would happen, I wouldn’t think it very common. Maybe if a name reached a very small number.
I think he was raised with a different surname and didn’t learn the truth until he was somewhat older – similar to Liv Tyler, who was originally raised to believe that her father was Todd Rundgren.
The key point is that neither Todd Rundgren nor Tim McGraw’s stepfather were cuckolds in that they suffering from an illusion. Both knew they were not the father. Rundgren stepped in to provide stability for Liv because her mother was basically a groupie and Tyler was a then a serious drug addict. Rundgren used the term “White Lie”. Being a millionaire rock star record producer affords one some leeway in one’s personal life.
Or Chertoff.
In California, if a man is named the father in a paternity action, he only has a few months to confirm or deny fatherhood before he is permanently stuck with paternal responsibility no matter what. A day late and it doesn't matter; he's legally the father end of story. Must be pretty rough on guys who left the state to take a job elsewhere and then missed the letter.
Interesting how the President thing worked out. Does having a promiscuous mother correlate with ambition and sometimes success in life?
The number one priority for saving civilization, is fighting back on “diversity” and specifically ending the immigration insanity that is fixin’ to simply destroy the nation. But that’s required to even have a chance–sort of just treading water.
After that, if conservatives are actually going to roll things back and have a shot at saving Western civilization, they are going to need to face up to and reign in the destruction unleashed by empowering women to loot men.
— Default to 50-50 custody and no-child support. By default each spouse has the kids half the time and pays for them during that time. No money changes hands. End the financial incentives for women to blow up their families. Blowing up your family *should* be painful. If a women stops having sex and taking care of her husband … she shouldn’t expect to see a dime of his paycheck. And she has no right to deprive him of his children. Either spouse blows up the marriage–50-50 for everything.
— Mandatory DNA testing. Dads don’t pay for kids that aren’t theirs. Period.
— No paternal responsibility for children outside wedlock (unless a signed contract). Re-establish marriage as the norm for raising kids. If a woman wants paternal support, she should damn well convince some guy to marry here … then have his kids. (If a guy, wants to assume parental support–great. But there should be no assumption of this outside marriage. Women are supposed to be “responsible for their bodies” which includes not getting pregnant.
Do those three things and i think the ship would start to right itself pretty darn quickly.
~~~
For guys like me who were around–as kids–when2nd wave feminism was gathering steam, one of the claims voiced was that it was just women asking to be responsible for their own lives. The image projected was that women were going to be free of male control, but in turn were going to give up the feminine privileges of paternalism and simply be responsible for themselves. Being young and clueless … it sounded pretty reasonable–freedom and personal responsibility.
(Yeah, i know, it now sounds terribly naive to have given that any credence!)
Needless to say … that isn’t how it’s turned out. Rather women have been empowered to do whatever the hell they feel like doing …. and feel entitled to have men pay for it–alimony, child support, welfare, soft government jobs, mandatory birth control coverage, morning-after (or even months after) “rape”, affirmative action, etc.
The promised era of women actually taking *responsibility* for themselves seems as endlessly far off and ethereal as the mirage in the desert.
Sounds harsh, but it's reality. Makes me pretty angry to see Pope Francis paying lip service to feminism while keeping women out of authority in the Catholic Church. Abject hypocrisy. Make women priests and bishops and put them in charge of the Church and see how long it lasts!
Same goes for the elites. If I could craft a suitable punishment for them for what they've done to us, it would be to put their wives and lovers in a position of total supremacy over them and all their possessions. That's what they've done to us, after all, to the severe detriment of our women and children I might add.
There's no accounting for taste...
For fun, cougars can’t be beat. Grannies are another proposition.
But you sure as hell don’t marry either one.
Yess, but then again the President of the United States and the current Canadian PM are said to be cuckoo eggs too, that is, if you think Obama Sr ever thought Jr. was his in the first place.
Is this now accepted? Has it been exploded?
I’ve read that it was a doctor that his mother worked for in Arkansas.
Obama certainly looks a lot more like Frank Marshall Davis than Obama Sr., although he looks an awful lot like Malcom X too. I hadn’t heard that about the Trudeaus. Justin does resemble Pierre to some degree.
I think Harry has grown to look more like Charles over time and less like Hewitt.
“Perhaps the only actor who might have done justice to Hamlet while still a teenager himself in real life was Orson Welles, but I can’t tell whether he ever got the chance.”
Christian Bale. Years ago, I saw some kid in a movie and thought his performance was so good that I hoped he never acted again. I was sure he could never equal much less surpass his work in that movie. It was Bale in Empire of the Sun.
Usually, boy actors are exceptionally boyish looking so they can be older than their apparent screen age: DiCaprio, for example, is a babyfaced guy who is also a great movie star. But Bale, on the other hand, has always been a normally handsome guy who always looks about his real age.
But "Empire of the Sun" bombed at the box office and Christian Bale didn't get much of a career boost from it.
It's adapted from an autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard by Tom Stoppard, but much of the movie is taken from a handful of pages in the book.
There are a lot of very Stoppardian moments in movie. Stoppard in his early plays like After Magritte had developed this technique of "real surrealism" where he displays some highly implausible tableau and then backtracks to show you the fairly mundane reasons behind the scene. But Stoppard mostly played this for laughs, while "Empire of the Sun" is full of astonishing scenes for which the explanation is: The Biggest War of All Time.
In an interview, Stoppard asserted that most Stoppardian moments in the movie, such as the amazing kamikaze sequence, weren't actually in his script. Stoppard said his imagination doesn't work on that big budget of a scale. He attributed them to Spielberg (or, I might add, whomever Spielberg hired to scriptdoctor Stoppard's work). The movie serves as sort of Spielberg's giant budget tribute to Stoppard; but there aren't that many people who like both Stoppard and Spielberg, so the Venn diagram of "Empire of the Sun" fanatics is small.
Women have the vote. None of this will ever change as long as that’s the case. Women should never have been given the franchise, but perhaps that’s an inevitable characteristic of democracy: politicians endlessly expand the franchise until it’s meaningless.
Sounds harsh, but it’s reality. Makes me pretty angry to see Pope Francis paying lip service to feminism while keeping women out of authority in the Catholic Church. Abject hypocrisy. Make women priests and bishops and put them in charge of the Church and see how long it lasts!
Same goes for the elites. If I could craft a suitable punishment for them for what they’ve done to us, it would be to put their wives and lovers in a position of total supremacy over them and all their possessions. That’s what they’ve done to us, after all, to the severe detriment of our women and children I might add.
I was going to correct you, but then I saw that you already corrected yourself.
Christian Bale. Years ago, I saw some kid in a movie and thought his performance was so good that I hoped he never acted again. I was sure he could never equal much less surpass his work in that movie. It was Bale in Empire of the Sun.
I thought Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” was the greatest movie of the 1980s. Spielberg auditioned hundreds looking for the best boy actor in Britain, and as of 2016 it seems pretty reasonable to think he found him in Christian Bale.
Usually, boy actors are exceptionally boyish looking so they can be older than their apparent screen age: DiCaprio, for example, is a babyfaced guy who is also a great movie star. But Bale, on the other hand, has always been a normally handsome guy who always looks about his real age.
But “Empire of the Sun” bombed at the box office and Christian Bale didn’t get much of a career boost from it.
It’s adapted from an autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard by Tom Stoppard, but much of the movie is taken from a handful of pages in the book.
There are a lot of very Stoppardian moments in movie. Stoppard in his early plays like After Magritte had developed this technique of “real surrealism” where he displays some highly implausible tableau and then backtracks to show you the fairly mundane reasons behind the scene. But Stoppard mostly played this for laughs, while “Empire of the Sun” is full of astonishing scenes for which the explanation is: The Biggest War of All Time.
In an interview, Stoppard asserted that most Stoppardian moments in the movie, such as the amazing kamikaze sequence, weren’t actually in his script. Stoppard said his imagination doesn’t work on that big budget of a scale. He attributed them to Spielberg (or, I might add, whomever Spielberg hired to scriptdoctor Stoppard’s work). The movie serves as sort of Spielberg’s giant budget tribute to Stoppard; but there aren’t that many people who like both Stoppard and Spielberg, so the Venn diagram of “Empire of the Sun” fanatics is small.
Usually, boy actors are exceptionally boyish looking so they can be older than their apparent screen age: DiCaprio, for example, is a babyfaced guy who is also a great movie star. But Bale, on the other hand, has always been a normally handsome guy who always looks about his real age.
But "Empire of the Sun" bombed at the box office and Christian Bale didn't get much of a career boost from it.
It's adapted from an autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard by Tom Stoppard, but much of the movie is taken from a handful of pages in the book.
There are a lot of very Stoppardian moments in movie. Stoppard in his early plays like After Magritte had developed this technique of "real surrealism" where he displays some highly implausible tableau and then backtracks to show you the fairly mundane reasons behind the scene. But Stoppard mostly played this for laughs, while "Empire of the Sun" is full of astonishing scenes for which the explanation is: The Biggest War of All Time.
In an interview, Stoppard asserted that most Stoppardian moments in the movie, such as the amazing kamikaze sequence, weren't actually in his script. Stoppard said his imagination doesn't work on that big budget of a scale. He attributed them to Spielberg (or, I might add, whomever Spielberg hired to scriptdoctor Stoppard's work). The movie serves as sort of Spielberg's giant budget tribute to Stoppard; but there aren't that many people who like both Stoppard and Spielberg, so the Venn diagram of "Empire of the Sun" fanatics is small.
I’ll go even further and say that Empire of the Sun is the best Steven Spielberg movie (or perhaps his only great movie).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9S41Kplsbs
It's difficult to assess such a choice properly when one is not actually faced with it and taking it seriously, mind you. You'd also have to account for the value of money to him, subjectively.
Well 0.926% but close enough.
From "First Note on Abraham Lincoln," by Gore Vidal, The Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1981:
Victory was assured as all historians agree and shown by the victory attained by a hardly mobilised North. An achievement would have been preventing that war, which if Lincoln’s gifts were as great as you claim, he might have done. I say “might, because Lincoln actually spent most of his first 100 days dispensing sinecure offices, but he couldn’t even organise his own marriage. According to the book Lincoln the Unknown, he chose to spend several months of the year practicing law on a circuit that kept him living separately from his wife. Lincoln was struck by his wife in front of others on multiple occasions.
Lincoln abused his prerogative as challenged to set a series of outrageous conditions for the duel (broadswords over a fence which either man ). Legalism in action. You must have loved the ending of Hateful Eight. Here is a real letter, to his bed sharing buddy http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm
My vote goes to JAWS. Ibsen’s Enemy of the People meets Moby Dick.Plus, it has one the greatest monologues in cinematic history:
Usually, boy actors are exceptionally boyish looking so they can be older than their apparent screen age: DiCaprio, for example, is a babyfaced guy who is also a great movie star. But Bale, on the other hand, has always been a normally handsome guy who always looks about his real age.
But "Empire of the Sun" bombed at the box office and Christian Bale didn't get much of a career boost from it.
It's adapted from an autobiographical novel by J.G. Ballard by Tom Stoppard, but much of the movie is taken from a handful of pages in the book.
There are a lot of very Stoppardian moments in movie. Stoppard in his early plays like After Magritte had developed this technique of "real surrealism" where he displays some highly implausible tableau and then backtracks to show you the fairly mundane reasons behind the scene. But Stoppard mostly played this for laughs, while "Empire of the Sun" is full of astonishing scenes for which the explanation is: The Biggest War of All Time.
In an interview, Stoppard asserted that most Stoppardian moments in the movie, such as the amazing kamikaze sequence, weren't actually in his script. Stoppard said his imagination doesn't work on that big budget of a scale. He attributed them to Spielberg (or, I might add, whomever Spielberg hired to scriptdoctor Stoppard's work). The movie serves as sort of Spielberg's giant budget tribute to Stoppard; but there aren't that many people who like both Stoppard and Spielberg, so the Venn diagram of "Empire of the Sun" fanatics is small.
I would have preferred a lot of Ballardian moments in the movie. The book was good. The movie, eh, not so much.
From "First Note on Abraham Lincoln," by Gore Vidal, The Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1981:
Gore Vidal? Oh come on now.
Lincoln was a great man, but we have all known prodigies that came from seemingly nowhere. There is no reason to believe Lincoln wasn’t just another natural outlier, instead of believing that Lincoln’s mother was fathered by Erasmus Darwin or Josiah Wedgwood or Louis XV of France or George Washington or whomever-you-please-because-Gore-Vidal-says-so.
Lincoln was a great man, but we have all known prodigies that came from seemingly nowhere. There is no reason to believe Lincoln wasn't just another natural outlier, instead of believing that Lincoln's mother was fathered by Erasmus Darwin or Josiah Wedgwood or Louis XV of France or George Washington or whomever-you-please-because-Gore-Vidal-says-so.
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin got switched at birth in the hospital on 2/9/1809.
No British authority has recognized Matthew Vaughn’s father’s claim to the earldom of Oxford, so his father is technically not a lord. Even if the father were so recognized, Matthew Vaughn would not be eligible to inherit the title because he was born illegitimate.
The Earl of Oxford? Does that make Matthew Vaughn Shakespeare’s descendant?
Largely irrespective of the degree of formal education, it makes a huge difference whether the woman was previously married to the child's father (and subsequently divorced, or widowed for that matter), or whether she was (probably) just some floozy who got casually knocked up. We can speculate on the reasons for this, but statistics bear it out.
I think it’s pretty obvious that a woman with a propensity to get knocked up rather than marrying before having children is less likely to produce offspring with a low time preference.
http://uominiedonnevip.myblog.it/wp-content/uploads/sites/287657/2015/01/Harryhewitt.jpg
Dianna wasn't allowed good looking bodyguards, but that apparently did not stop her. Anyway the resemblance is not to that bodyguard (killed in a motorcycle accident) but to to army officer James Hewitt and taken with the admitted (by both of them) fact that she had a affair with him for years it very likely Hewitt is Harry's dad.
The not entirely inappropriately named Alexander Cockburn provides too much information. http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/7177/king-george-vi%E2%80%99s-other-stuttering-performance
Hamlet's soliloquy would be ridiculous from a teenager, but the unlikeliness of a fortysomething mother is something people, including Shakespeare, of those times may not have understood.
Hamlet’s soliloquy would be ridiculous from a modern teenager, even one who had seen a fair degree of trouble in his life. His education and his world would not likely prepare him to process events into those ideas.
From a medieval teenager, the words are still Shakespeare-level sophistication, but I might expect a teen of that era, who had been of the upper class and given an expensive education laden with Christianity and the classics, and of a precocious mind and dark temperament as Hamlet is, to have the potential to think in such terms.
It’s still dramatic license, but it’s not as nutty as it would be if set in a modern high school.
And remember what royal teens were then up to- shagging, marrying, fathering, warring, risking death. Edward IV, the main leader of the Yorkists, was about 18 when he took up the leadership of the family cause. Nineteen when he became king the first time. After 20 years more of sporadic strife, on and off the throne, he died at 40. He appointed his brother Richard [the future Richard III] to raise troops for him when the latter was 11. Richard held an independent army command at 17. Richard, himself king 1483-85, was defeated and dead at 32. By then he may have looked as old as Ian McKellen, but he was much younger than the actor who played him on the big screen [who was then 56].
Would Shakespeare and his time not have understood the unlikeliness of the fortysomething mother? They may not have been able to explain it, but they’d have ample experience and evidence for it. Kings certainly knew to shop as young as they could.
"this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"
* Sadly, we didn't get to Robert Downey Jr. in a Mel Gibson produced Hamlet in the early 200s.
The story makes the most sense if you assume that Shakespeare was coming into his late 30s prime, out of control with more literary talent than anybody in history, so aspects of Hamlet keep growing unexpectedly into greatness, which throws off of ther aspects of the play.
To be fair, probably no teen and few men in any age would come up with words half that poetic to express such ideas, and few teens and almost as few men could even come up with the ideas in any form able to spoken aloud. The words are Shakespeare’s, and words like that do not come merely with age and experience.
But the ideas aren’t that inaccessible in themselves, and perhaps a depressed, aspergery, sensitive and high-IQ teen who had just gone through a medieval prince’s schooling [and although my recall on this is poor, isn’t there a hint he had seen battle?] could come up with the ideas to indicate his rage and despair.
Translated into the [mild] idiom of our age: “Life sucks. Everybody is always telling me to look at the beauty of nature, but what a filthy and dangerous dump the world is. The sky may sometimes be blue but it’s always raining around me. And how come nobody notices how unhappy I am, and why are they all so stupid? People are all liars and cheats and worth nothing.”
It’s actually a bit Holden Caulfield.
Thinking about it, I'm kind of bummed by the guys who are probably too old now to play Hamlet: Fassbender, Bale, Downey Jr. I'm an Andrew Garfield fan, so I'd like to see him in it, but there's probably not much demand.
Good points.
I have never exactly seen a source for when the French monarchy ceased to be elective- in the most de jure sense, probably well into the high middle ages.
The Capetians followed the strategy of making sure they always had just enough sons and having an heir formally named a sort of junior king while the predecessor lived, and their heredity held out for nearly 400 years, by which time cemented the idea that the king of France was always the eldest male of the eldest surviving line of unbroken male descent of the heirs of Hugh Capet. Once the English, with their notion of succession through the female line [they were still Capetians in female line to Edward III] were seen off in the Hundred Years War, this customary law held true until the Revolution.
Any member of the medieval German royal/imperial houses would have killed for that level of durability.
The German dynasties warred constantly to hold their multiple crowns together, and sold off royal powers over time to cement their competing claims, and always in the end suffered heredity failure either by reproduction, election, or both. By the time the Hapsburgs managed it, the empire was not what it started as.
The French royals in 987 were elected to an already bare-bones crown, and clung to it for dear life for 4oo years until the idea there could be any other dynasty seemed insane, rebuilding royal power slowly. Masterful long-game, despite some mistakes along the way.
Apropos of tanistry, let me put in here a vote for the legitimacy of Macbeth as king of Scots/Alba, and against Shakespeare for maligning this great Scotsman.
But the ideas aren't that inaccessible in themselves, and perhaps a depressed, aspergery, sensitive and high-IQ teen who had just gone through a medieval prince's schooling [and although my recall on this is poor, isn't there a hint he had seen battle?] could come up with the ideas to indicate his rage and despair.
Translated into the [mild] idiom of our age: "Life sucks. Everybody is always telling me to look at the beauty of nature, but what a filthy and dangerous dump the world is. The sky may sometimes be blue but it's always raining around me. And how come nobody notices how unhappy I am, and why are they all so stupid? People are all liars and cheats and worth nothing."
It's actually a bit Holden Caulfield.
Yeah, Hamlet makes more sense in a lot of ways as a 16 year old, but the world wants to see youngish superstar actors in the role, not teens.
Thinking about it, I’m kind of bummed by the guys who are probably too old now to play Hamlet: Fassbender, Bale, Downey Jr. I’m an Andrew Garfield fan, so I’d like to see him in it, but there’s probably not much demand.
This is what another archbishop of England said about the recently married prince William:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8481736/Royal-wedding-Archbishop-backs-William-and-Kates-decision-to-live-together-before-marriage.html
I think the Archbishop is better off with the taint of bastardry that comes with his having illegitimate accomplished establishment genetics, rather than legitimately having the sketchy grifter genetics from his supposed crypto-Jewish father.
tl;dr – Better to have good genetics and an illigitimate reputation, rather than bad genetics and a legitimate reputation.
A personal statement from the Archbishop of Canterbury
What has changed? The Archbishop’s belief that he had Gavin Welby’s genetics has changed to the knowledge that he has had Sir Anthony Montague Browne’s genetics. What hasn’t changed? The underlying reality that his entire life the Archbishop has had Sir Anthony Montague Browne’s genetics.
“Although of course you end up becoming yourself” — David Foster Wallace