I cringed when I saw Time magazine’s cover, depicting a handsome Marco Rubio under the headline: The Republican Savior.

After all, there is no “perfect” Republican presidential candidate, and we’ll be sorely disappointed if we continually look for a “conservative messiah” to save us. However, you gotta love Rubio’s response to the cover:

We all know Michael Oher, who played for the Ravens in the Super Bowl, was the subject of the wonderful movie The Blind Side. Well, yesterday, pro-life advocate Bristol Palin posted a nice story on her blog about San Francisco 49er’s  quarterback Colin Kaepernick who was also adopted. In a pre-game interview with Dan Marino, he said being adopted was “the greatest blessing of my entire life.”

Bristol writes:

I just love this story.

We all just watched the Super Bowl and quarterback Colin Kaepernick lead his San Francisco 49ers to the game of the year.

In spite that wacky power failure, it was a great game.

But what I love is Kaepernick saying that the best thing that ever happened to him was being adopted.

Live Action News reports:

Kaepernick’s birth mother was a 19-year-old young woman who wanted the best for her son but knew that she was not the one who could give it to him. She searched for adoptive parents who would be able to love her son, provide him with siblings, take care of him financially, and expose him to her love for sports. She found the perfect match in Rick and Teresa Kaepernick when Colin was 5 weeks old. The couple, who had two healthy children and had tragically lost two sons to complications related to heart defects, were seeking to adopt a son. Colin completed their family, and his birth mother could take heart knowing that her son would grow up with everything she had wanted for him.

See the entire blog post here.

Newsmax contacted me about my opinion on the new “women in combat” decision. Here’s my response:

The media is focusing on how women in combat will affect military readiness. But no one is talking about the impact it will have on the military families whose loved ones are stationed in distant lands.

I know about the pressures military families endure because I experienced them first-hand. When my husband was assigned to a combat unit during the 2007 surge in Iraq, the only way we could reliably communicate was via instant message and text. Sometimes I wouldn’t hear for him for days and weeks. On one occasion, an entire month passed without a word.

One day, we were instant messaging when he typed the word “she.” I looked at my screen. “A woman?” I typed. A female had been temporarily transferred to his unit’s forward operating base — an unusual occurrence. My husband and I were aware of the unfaithfulness threat during deployment. His friends would come home on leave only to find their wives gone or pregnant. Some received “Dear John” letters. Others saw photos of their wives with other men on Facebook. To safeguard our marriage, I decided not to look up old flames on Facebook, not to have long personal conversations with men, and not to drink. But the idea of him being unfaithful during his service abroad never occurred to me.

He did not have an affair. During his deployment, a few women did cycle through his forward operating base. Sadly, the vast majority ended up ensnared in some sort of sexual impropriety. Fortunately, our family of four — now five — survived the deployment, and we are better off for my husband’s courageous and sacrificial decision to serve in the military. (He is a Harvard Law graduate who left his job as a constitutional attorney to serve his country.) But let’s just be honest about it. The military already has an infidelity problem. When images of David Petraeus flash across the screens of spouses left behind, images of real or imagined affairs flash across the minds of the loved ones left back home.

Please enjoy the rest of this article on Newsmax.

I went to a lecture last night at a large university in downtown Denver. Before taking my seat, I had business to attend to, so I went searching for the necessary facility. I found it, but it was no ordinary bathroom. This one was special.

I’ve heard of so-called “gender neutral” bathrooms, but have never had the good fortune to be able to use one. This was my big chance. Here, right outside the lecture hall, was one of these new, trendy water-closets that certain minorities have been fighting for. My mind went wild with anticipatory questions: What would it be like? Perhaps it’s equipped with a new, creative kind of receptacle to accommodate any of the diverse and sundry genders that might come seeking relief. Maybe it has fabulous interior decor unlike the other two kinds of bathrooms we are all used to. The possibilities seemed endless. Who knew?

So I entered, and, guess what? It was a bathroom. Just a plain ol’ bathroom with a toilet, a sink, and a paper dispenser. “Is this it?” I said to myself.

It was just like the bathroom you might find at your doctor’s office or hospital, ’cept these are unceremoniously marked “restroom.” It’s just like the one we all had in kindergarten in the back of the classroom, also known as “the bathroom” or perhaps “potty.” Boys and girls have used them for decades without the least bit of confusion, awkwardness, or embarrassment between them, save for the obvious fear of transmitting cooties. There was a one simple rule for these bathrooms shared by boys, girls, and others. 1) If someone is in there, don’t go in. 2) If no one’s in there, it’s yours. Seems like a durable and trustworthy rule of thumb for such one-holers. One would assume it would work for the one I saw last night.

But of course, a gender-neutral restroom must be something different or else they’d just call it a bathroom. So, this had me wondering why this particular university thought it was just fine to pull a fast one on the transgendered and gender-questioning students by telling them they’ve been supplied with one thing when it is clearly another.

I’m sure it’s not because the whole “gender is a rainbow-like spectrum” ideology driving such things is, as Kramer would say, “the biggest scam perpetuated on the American public since One Hour Martinizing.”

“So, what should I do?”

All of us have had that moment when a friend looks desperately in our eyes and asks for advice. There’s something very intimate and powerful about two friends sitting together trying to figure out life’s problems.

Perhaps that’s why Pauline Phillips — known to the world as “Dear Abby” — was so beloved. She doled out advice for years after her first column appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1956 and became a household name. Though we didn’t know her, we felt like she cared about the people who wrote in with questions about infidelity, love, workplace drama, and a myriad of other issues.

As a kid, I couldn’t get enough of her. Every day, I began at the back of the newspaper and worked my way forward — from Beetle Bailey, to Dagwood, to her advice column. After all, nothing is more interesting than other people’s problems. In my mind, she was a worldly June Cleaver — a feisty, yet kind maternal figure who gave wisdom freely.

But what kind of advice did she give?

In the 1950s, she advised against divorce and warned against premarital sex. But over the course of her life, she liberalized her views. The Wall Street Journal records her evolution: “In 1970, she published a reader’s letter asking whether homosexuality was a disease — as the American Psychiatric Association said at the time. ‘It is the inability to love at all which I consider an emotional illness,’ she replied.” In 1984, she referred a distraught parent of a child who claimed to be gay to Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. In 1998, she addressed concerns about her advice to gay people. “Whenever I say a kind word about gays, I hear from people, and some of them are damn mad. People throw Leviticus, Deuteronomy and other parts of the Bible to me. It doesn’t bother me.” By the time her daughter Jeanne took over her column in 2002, Abby believed divorce was perhaps a better option than letting the kids feel the acrimony between their parents in the home. Her daughter Jeanne pushed the moral envelope even further, by saying “it’s okay to be gay,” receiving an honor from the Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, advocating for same-sex marriage, and encouraging pregnant teens to visit Planned Parenthood.

#more#In other words, “Dear Abby”’s advice was always charming, winsome, and breezy, but it morphed to reflect the current mores of the nation. At the height of her popularity, her daily readership reached 100 million people making her influence incalculable. Funny how a column can hold such sway over so many people’s views.

When Ms. Phillips began writing, she chose to go by a pen name. (Her twin sister, who also had a popular advice column, went by Ann Landers.) The first part of her pen name — Abby — came from the Biblical passage: “Then David said to Abigail ‘Blessed is your advice and blessed are you.’” She borrowed the last name — Van Buren — from the 19th-century American president. In a way, her alias — and its two-part inspiration — painted a picture of the type of advice she would give over the years. Abigail Van Buren’s name — and her column — was part Bible, part politics.

Sadly, the politics won out.

Maybe blogger and Huffington Post contributor Maia James would have more time to make her bed and start those yoga classes she’s been promising herself if she wasn’t so busy freaking out about harmless chemicals.

Let’s break down her concerns. First, James declares she’s going to rid her home of a chemical called phthalates, admitting it will be difficult as phthalates are tough to avoid. She then does what all chemical alarmists do: She tells the reader that most of us “have detectable levels of phthalates in our urine.”

Indeed, for those who don’t know much about chemicals, it might sound scary to hear we’re all walking around with “detectable levels” of chemicals in us until you read that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention says “finding a detectable amount of phthalate metabolites in urine does not mean that the levels of one or more will cause an adverse health effect.” The agency also says “phthalates do not pose a health hazard because the chemical is metabolized, excreted quickly and does not accumulate in the body.”

James admits there are some good things about phthalates, saying phthalates make plastics soft — specifically,“they make IV drip bags and tubes soft.” But James quickly returns to hand wringing, breathlessly worrying that this means these chemicals are “being pumped directly into the bloodstream of ailing patients.”

What exactly is James implying with her IVdrip-bag line? Is she suggesting that for the past 20 years (the point at which glass IV bottles were replaced with plastics) the entire medical field has turned its back on an epidemic of chemical poisoning? It’s a nice little conspiracy theory, but it’s an outrageous lie designed to scare people at their most vulnerable — when they are sick.

#more#The truth is that the only thing going directly into the bloodstream of ailing patients via soft, plastic IV bags is medicine and life-saving fluids. While a miniscule amount of the chemical will leach into the IV fluid, the amount is incredibly small — so small, in fact, it’s nearly undetectable.

James makes it easy to dismiss her claims, but I’m curious what she would like to see the medical field use instead of plastic. Shall we return to glass IV bottles, which are easily broken and make movement more difficult for patients? How does James suggest hospitals store all these glass bottles and what of the added transportation costs associated with transporting fragile glass bottles? Surely James must be concerned about a potentially larger carbon footprint!

James’s most misleading statement is when she declares, without citation, that we are all in danger because we are (emphasis mine) “ingesting, inhaling, and absorbing through our skin a significant phthalate load — which quickly moves to our bloodstream.”

Here’s the much less dramatic truth (and I’ll even give you a source): While people can inhale and ingest miniscule amounts of phthalates, the CDC says “people are exposed to phthalates by eating and drinking foods that have been in contact with containers and products containing phthalates.”Even by this mode, the amount is so small that the CDC is quick to point out that it will not cause adverse health effects.”

So, why is James scared of phthalates? She says they are “now widely known to be endocrine disruptors,” yet fails to mention a few other less scary-sounding endocrine disruptors such as soy beans, peas, carrots, beans, sprouts, and celery, the estrogenic effects of which are much greater than those from synthetic chemicals (time to clean out that fridge, Ms. James!).

At the end of her piece, James cites several studies on phthalates she says back up her claim that this chemical should be avoided. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

First, James points to an extremely small Taiwanese study (only 65 participants), saying it “showed that phthalates passed from mother to fetus through the placenta affect female babies, sometimes resulting in abnormal sexual development.” But those are James’s own words, not the study’s authors’ description of the study. If you follow the link James provides in her piece,you find that the researchers only report “an association between two types of the ubiquitous chemicals and permanent changes to the newborns’ genitals that point to hormonal interference.”

The difference is subtle but important — an association is not causation. Associations are extremely easy to find (perhaps each of these Taiwanese participants wore red shirts or ate congee for breakfast, shall we blame colors and rice porridge?) but it means nothing in terms of what causes disease. Therefore, this small study hardly stands up against the significant body of evidence that shows phthalates are safe for use in common household products.

Second, James refers to a study by well-known anti-chemical activist Shauna Swan, who in 2005 suggested phthalate exposure was feminizing little boys. Yet, the National Toxicology Program has dismissed the Swan study because, as science writer Jon Entine wrote, Swan “failed to demonstrate any statistical association between DEHP [a type of phthalate] metabolites and genital development.” For another searing dismissal of Swan’s brand of science, check out Trevor Butterworth’s piece here.

The third study James highlights was conducted in 2009 on 1,000 infant boys on a common genital deformation called Hypospadias. While the study’s authors admit the pretty significant factoid that “little is known about what causes this deformity” they still point to chemical exposure — mainly phthalates — based on what the mothers of these boys were exposed to when pregnant.

So what were these women exposed to? The authors said “detergents and personal care products, such as deodorants, fragrances, nail polish and hairspray.” So, basically the products every single woman uses every single day. Yup, that sounds like sound science to me!

Interestingly, while blaming women’s beauty products, the researchers also had to admit that “hairdressers as a group analyzed separately do not have significant increased risk of having baby boys with hypospadias.”

I used to fall for these chemical scare stories. After I had my first child, I was bombarded with terrifying stories about chemicals “lurking around every corner.” It really did make me nervous, so I did something about it; I started to read the studies to which many of these activist and bloggers were linking. To my relief, it quickly became clear that most of these “studies” were nothing more than junk science being pushed by activists.

I’m actually a lot like Maia James. I’m overwhelmed. I have three very young kids, I work, and I try my best to keep us all fed and wearing clean clothes. I don’t have time for these ridiculous stories about how I have dangerous toxins laying around my house. Women — the target of many of these scary stories — need to understand that they don’t need to go to great lengths or great costs to avoid these chemicals in their everyday cleaning and beauty products. They need not search the Internet for chemical-free toys or baby bottles.

Life is short: Stop wasting your time, energy, and money pursuing a chemical-free life. Make your bed and go to yoga instead.

Late this summer, Toyota began airing a very provocative commercial in Japan for their snappy little 2013 Auris hatchback. The spot features a saucy topless model supposedly drawing our attention to the car, but of course the commercial could be hawking second-hand thumb-tacks for all the viewer cares. Only the sultry car-model exists:

Earlier this week, my kids and I pulled up to an old Jeep decorated with political stickers, some of which can provide amusing reading at red lights and some that might evoke the scene in Fried Green Tomatoes when Kathy Bates repeatedly smashed into a Volkswagen after someone stole her parking spot.

“That guy voted for Obama,” my son said, reading the stickers, which included an admonition to give bicyclists room on the road, something about world peace, and a head-scratcher which read, “Bring the Whole Baby Home from the Hospital.”

“Look at that one,” my son read. “Is that a pro-life sticker?”

“It’s actually an anti-circumcision sticker,” I explained.

“Why advertise your belief about circumcision on a Jeep?” my daughter asked.

“And why would anyone be against circumcision?” my son asked. He didn’t realize that when he was born twelve years ago in Ithaca, New York, we were under great pressure not to have him circumcised. My friends were against it, my doctor was hesitant about it, and it felt really counter cultural when we went ahead with the procedure. As we drove home last night, I explained how different things were, and they were astonished at the gaping cultural divide. When I reminded them of the way things were done in Ithaca — which I wrote about in a memoir — they said, “Really? You have to be making some of this up.”

It’s almost impossible for people in rural Tennessee to understand the way people in Ithaca perceive them and their lifestyle . . . and vice versa. Today, I came across even more evidence of this chasm of understanding between the two groups of people in this country. It feels so 2000 to describe it as “red” and “blue,” doesn’t it? By now, “us” and “them” seems sufficient. Because we are so separated from each other, it’s almost impossible for us to communicate on issues of the day. For example, a Washington Post article which discusses an effort to legally ban all forms of corporal punishment perfectly demonstrates this gap. The article explains that the new paddling prohibitionists “want to tarnish spanking’s image as a normal part of American life with a sustained behavior change campaign along the lines of the ones that cut smoking rates in half and made drunken driving a national taboo.”

In other words, since the Left has so far been unable to legally prohibit spanking, they want to stigmatize it away. Note they listed spanking in a series which includes drunk driving and smoking, even though spanking children is a way to raise children into better, more responsible adults. It feels useless to go into the so-called evidence, because the “us” versus “them” dichotomy cannot be overcome with mere numbers or statistics. But, for old time’s sakes, let’s give it a whirl.

From the anti-spanking camp:

That spanking does hurt children, and not just for the five stinging minutes that follow, has become a matter of consensus among many social scientists. Most of the studies are observational (no one has dared to bring kids in for a few laboratory whacks). But hundreds of findings have suggested that spanking correlates with a range of problems. The most often cited link is between spanking and future aggressive behavior, but research has also found that spanked children are more likely to drop out of school, suffer psychological problems and abuse their own children.

Robert Larzelere, a professor of human development at Oklahoma State University, disagreed, saying it was a chicken-egg paradox. It’s not that corporal punishment led to more aggressive kids, but that aggressive kids are more likely to need discipline. “It’s like showing a link between spending the night in a hospital and poor health,” he told the Washington Post. “They’re over-interpreting the correlational evidence.”

And other studies come down firmly on the side of spanking. An article in the Wall Street Journal described research by Calvin College’s Marjorie Gunnoe who concluded adolescents who’d been spanked as young children actually had “a sunnier outlook and were better students than those who were never spanked.”

Honestly, though, it seems fruitless to dwell on any of this research at all.

My husband David heard a lecture by Ravi Zacharias, who claimed stigma always beats dogma in the battle of ideas. “In other words,” he wrote, “through stigmatization, one can defeat a set of ideas or principles without ever “winning” an argument on the merits. We’ve seen this recently on guns. When gun advocates produce evidence that responsible gun ownership is a safe, necessary method of defense, it doesn’t matter. Guns are evil, so no empirical evidence can convince people that having them is okay. On the other side, when gay-rights advocates try to produce “evidence” that same-sex parenting is the same as — or even better than — heterosexual parenting, we don’t budge. Why? Because we believe same-sex relationships are immoral just as strongly as they believe guns are immoral. The gap between us is so large, we can’t reason our way through these issues over a cup of coffee. In fact, because we’re so geographically isolated, we can’t talk about anything over coffee. Our best arguments happen right here — in the cold, harsh world of the Internet, where isolated people sit in front of laptops without having to encounter real-world versions of the people they’re fighting on screen.

The Washington Post gave Adam Zolotor, a professor of family medicine at the University of North Carolina, the last word on spanking. Observe his use of “stigma,” when he concluded, “Most reasonable people don’t want to resolve a problem by striking someone.”

It reminded me of a moment in Philadelphia at Three Bears Park. The kids were playing after school on an autumn day, and the moms were chatting on the benches. Conversation came around to politics, and everyone began to bash conservatives. When I finally came “out of the closet” and admitted I was a Republican, they were shocked. “But you seemed so . . . reasonable,” one mother said in disbelief.

Of course, “reasonable people” do spank their children, which I’ve already written about on the Corner. In fact, my 2011 post, called “I Spank My Kids, Come and Get Me Judge Longoria,” caused quite a stir. However, things feel different to me now in 2013, after losing the White House twice with no real Republican leadership rising to meet the challenge. Instead of feeling feisty, I feel sad and resigned about the canyon of misunderstanding between the two groups. Oh, I’ll still spank my kids. And I’ll take them to church, teach them catechisms, take my son to trap practice, play dolls with my kindergartner, help my teenager create her farm-fresh egg business, and love them every day.

But instead of simply teaching them arguments about our lives and political choices, I’m also preparing them to face cultural scorn. Whether the condescension comes on the back of an old worn-out Jeep, the latest sitcom, or from the lips of their future college professors, it’s going to keep coming at them from all directions. In fact, after seven years of trying to use logic, reason, and facts to get a Republican into the White House, I realize now that — at least in part — we were simply “stigmatized” out of the Oval Office.

So now, in defeat, how do we view this cultural dynamic of stigmatization? Ideally, we’re raising children who can deal with the condescension with logic, inner toughness, and good cheer.

And maybe — just maybe — I’ll get there too.

Johnnie Moore, author of a new book called Dirty God, wrote an article on FoxNews examining how Jesus “was, is and would be a capitalist” if he were dropped into America today. He begins by writing, “It would not surprise me if Jesus recruited his disciple Matthew, Capernaum’s chief tax collector, just to get one more taxman off the street.”

Well, that goes against the oft-repeated claim that — if he were hanging out in the United States today — Jesus would be some sort of wealth redistributionist, camping in Union Square with the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Moore states three reasons for his belief.

1.  First, Jesus encouraged his followers to exclusively practice voluntary, personal charity. 

2. Secondly, in two awfully capitalistic moments, Jesus once stated outright that “a worker deserves his wages (Luke 10:7),” and delivered an entire parable praising the profitable, investment strategy of some workers while condemning the single man who didn’t make a profit as “wicked and lazy.” 

3. Thirdly, Jesus didn’t see the government as the answer to society’s greatest moral and social ills. In fact, up until the very end of his life, he fought against his own disciples who were imagining a revolution that would end in Jesus being set up as an earthly king.

What do you think? Read his full piece here.

Her name is Saige and she’s fighting against cutting funds for education!

Saige Copeland loves spending time on her grandma’s ranch, riding horses and painting. Her school made the tough choice to cut art classes, which means she’s lost her favorite subject. So when her grandma decides to organize a “save the arts” fundraiser and parade to benefit the school, Saige jumps on board. She begins training her grandma’s beautiful horse, Picasso, for his appearance in the parade. Then her grandma is injured in an accident, and she wonders what she can do to help. Can she ride Picasso in the parade and make her grandma proud? Can Saige still raise money to protect the arts at school? Author: Jessie Haas. Paperback. 128 pages. Ages 8+

I’m thankful my daughter picked Caroline for Christmas instead, whose “beloved papa” was imprisoned by the evil British during the War of 1812.

What does a father do with his infant son while his wife is away? Videographer Emio Tomeoni made this video for his wife so she could see exactly what goes on. Very funny:

The Boston Globe recently ran a list of the “Top 10 Myths About Mass Shootings” and I agreed with all of them except this one:

Myth: Students need to be prepared for the worst by participating in lockdown drills.

Reality: Lockdown drills can be very traumatizing, especially for young children. Also, it is questionable whether they would recall those lessons amid the hysteria associated with an actual shooting. The faculty and staff need to be adequately trained, and the kids just advised to listen to instructions. Schools should take the same low-key approach to the unlikely event of a shooting as the airlines do to the unlikely event of a crash. Passengers aren’t drilled in evacuation procedures but can assume the crew is sufficiently trained.

Having two kids in public schools that have participated in numerous “lockdown drills,” I’ve never once felt they were traumatized by the experience. Nor have I ever heard a parent whose expressed this opinion.

And yes, the kids do recall the lessons. My son, when he was in the fourth grade, had a substitute teacher on the day of a lockdown drill. The substitute had no idea what to do while the students were shouting at her to lock the door.

More importantly, lockdown drills are not only to prepare for unlikely events like what happened in Newtown. Schools around the country go on lockdown every day for numerous reasons, especially in situations where the police are chasing a criminal near a school. For example:

HIALEAH, Fla. (WSVN) — Authorities have lifted a school lockdown after police captured all four burglary suspects who fled into a neighborhood.

Hialeah Police were forced to lockdown Hialeah Elementary, located at 550 East 8th Street, at around 12 p.m. Friday, due to the police situation in the area. The children were never in danger, and the lockdown was ordered as a safety precaution.

Police had responded to a burglary in progress nearby when the suspects fled.

Police set up a perimeter at East Seven Avenue and Seven Street in Hialeah. When units arrived, officials said, they saw three people flee the area on foot and a female flee in a getaway car. Police captured all four suspects.

If anything, school lockdowns and making it as tough as possible for strangers to get into the school are the best ways to keep kids safe.

I’ve been spending a great deal of time in Midland, Texas, lately due to a book project, and I’ve grown to love the oil-rich town half-way between Fort Worth and El Paso. Its shrubby mesquite crawls along the ground and a very few scraggly trees decorate the dry land — dry except for the oil that makes the pump jacks move up and down all day. But being in the former president’s hometown has been a walk down a political memory lane, because everyone knows — or knows someone who knows — George and Laura Bush.

Recently, TODAY correspondent Jenna Bush Hager and her husband shared some baby news.  In the middle of the clip, the former president and first lady call in to talk about being grandparents. Will the former president be on diaper duty?   

I gave a paper in D.C. last week on the real war against women, the war against women’s fertility. The day after my talk, a man in the audience forwarded this to me. “How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society” is from The New Republic, hardly a stooge of the Bishops’ Conference.

“The scary consequences of the grayest generation” is the subtitle. As of 2010, the average age of a first-time mother is 25.4, as opposed to 21.5 back in 1970. That means a lot of women are older, much older, than the average. So, what are some of the consequences?

• The risk of birth defects associated with Artificial Reproductive Technology is larger than people realize.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 8.3 percent of children born with the help of ART had defects, whereas, of those born without it, only 5.8 percent had defects. 

• Advanced age of the mother increases the likelihood of trisomy:

The risk that a pregnancy will yield a trisomy rises from 2–3 percent when a woman is in her twenties to 30 percent when a woman is in her forties. 

In a trisomy, a third chromosome inserts itself into one of the 23 pairs that most of us carry, so that a child’s cells carry 47 instead of 46 chromosomes. The most notorious trisomy is Down syndrome. There are two other common ones: Patau syndrome, which gives children cleft palates, mental retardation, and an 80 percent likelihood of dying in their first year; and Edwards syndrome, which features oddly shaped heads, clenched hands, and slow growth. Half of all Edwards syndrome babies die in the first week of life.

• And, advanced age of the father has risks associated with it. As men age, their DNA does not replicate as precisely. Increased risks of both autism and schizophrenia have been associated with advanced paternal age.

Researchers in Iceland, using radically more powerful ways of looking at genomes, established that men pass on more de novo — that is, non-inherited and spontaneously occurring genetic mutations to their children as they get older. In the scientists’ study, published in Nature, they concluded that the number of genetic mutations that can be acquired from a father increases by two every year of his life, and doubles every 16, so that a 36-year-old man is twice as likely as a 20-year-old to bequeath de novo mutations to his children.

We are experimenting on children. We have no idea of the full impact of artificial reproductive technology or advanced parental age on our children. We want to believe that it is possible to delay conception until women are “ready” for children. Delayed childbirth was the goal of the radical feminists. We have achieved that goal, and we are doing almost anything to avoid looking at the data showing the very real problems with it. As society lurches from one disaster to the next, I think it is about time we rethink some of our premises. Was this “having it all” thing really worth what we are paying for it? And do we really have the right to make kids pay for it?

Just asking. 

My thoughts on the hook-up culture, intended for all students, male or female, straight or gay. 

I spoke at a Howard Center event on Friday in DC on “The Real War against Women.” The real war is against women’s fertility. We are allowed to participate in higher education and the labor market, as long as we agree to act like men: We agree to chemically neuter ourselves during our peak child-bearing years. We agree to place our children in daycare when they are at their smallest and most vulnerable, that is, if we are lucky enough to have children. We have taken the university and the labor market as given, and adapted our bodies to them. I say that it is time we take our bodies as the givens, and insist that the labor market and the university adapt to us and our bodies.

Alan Carlson, president of the Howard Center, also spoke. Our discussants were Charles Murray and David Brooks. I have to say, I had some anxiety about this talk. However, I decided to not think too much about my fellow panelists. I stayed focused on the twenty-somethings, staffers, interns, and free-lancers, whom I knew would be in the audience.

I was not disappointed. The audience was probably one-third under the age of thirty. And, as I looked out at them during my talk, they were all nodding in agreement with what I was saying.

The conference has been written up, so far, by the Christian Post and the Population Research Institute.

Thanks to everyone who came. The Howard Center will be publishing the paper in The Family in America, its flagship journal.

My answer to the scientists behind this study: duh.

I know not every NRO reader agrees with Kathleen Parker, but she’s spot-on today with her challenge to the president to address the epidemic of “fatherlessness” in America:

One of my great hopes for a Barack Obama administration — and thus one of my personal disappointments — was that he would use his bully pulpit to emphasize the importance of a two-parent family, and especially of fathers, to children’s well-being.

Few understand better than the president the value of a present and involved father. Much of his literary work and his examined life pertains to his own absent father. By his example, he has certainly demonstrated his own commitment to parenting — and his family is a source of pride for all Americans. But the true story of fatherlessness in this country can’t be repeated often or forcefully enough.

This is not a new story.

Children who grow up without fathers tend to fall into patterns of destructive behavior — from drug use and truancy to early promiscuity, delinquency and, in too many cases, incarceration. Children raised in fatherless homes are also more likely to grow up in poverty, which is no fault of their mothers but is a fact.

Also well-known is that these pathologies and consequences are more prevalent in the African American community where, as it happens, most children are born to unwed mothers. Is this the fault of the mothers? Absolutely not. Can a child raised by a single mother prosper? Sure, but it is the exception, including the president, that proves the rule.

Here’s another rule: You can’t solve a problem if you refuse to acknowledge it. Yet in today’s sensitive environment, to even suggest a problem that might feel offensive to some is to risk being labeled an “-ist” of some variety, followed by a public flogging.

Therefore, to suggest, as University of Texas law professor Lino Graglia recently did, that blacks and Hispanics are falling behind in education because they tend to come from single-parent families (largely mothers who are both poor and often uneducated) is pure blasphemy.

The rest here.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Give an Ethiopian child who can’t read or speak English a tablet computer and you create the next Bill Gates:

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

The rest here.

Those of us fortunate to grow up in the South always had a dog-eared copy of Southern Living on our coffee table. (It was right under the Reader’s Digest.) Well, now Southern Living is hoping to attract a younger readership with President George W. Bush’s daughter, Jenna:

Southern Living, a magazine with features on decorating fireplace mantels and profiles of former President Jimmy Carter describing how he hunts holiday turkeys, has a loyal following among middle-aged Southern women. Now it is bringing in a younger voice to attract a new readership.

Jenna Bush Hager, a correspondent for NBC News’s “Today” show and daughter of former President George W. Bush, is joining the magazine as an editor at large. She will contribute to a monthly column called Paper Napkin Interview and write for a blog called The Daily South. The Southern Living blog will also share content with an inspirational blog, The Novo Project, that Ms. Hager started with her friend Mia Baxter.

Lindsay Bierman, Southern Living’s editor in chief, said that while Ms. Hager, 31, was not hired purely because of her youth, he thought she had the right kind of enthusiasm to contribute to the magazine.

“I did get the sense that her heart is still very much in the South,” Mr. Bierman said. “I felt her passion for the South was going to translate into what she would do for Southern Living.”