Paternity Tests

The New York Times Magazine reports on how paternity testing is changing fatherhood in the United States. The feature article, of course, leads with a poignant story:

For four years, Mike had known that the girl he had rocked to sleep and danced with across the living-room floor was not, as they say, “his.” The revelation from a DNA test was devastating and prompted him to leave his wife — but he had not renounced their child. He continued to feel that in all the ways that mattered, she was still his daughter, and he faithfully paid her child support. It was only when he learned that his ex-wife was about to marry the man who she said actually was the girl’s biological father that Mike flipped. Supporting another man’s child suddenly became unbearable.

Two years after filing the suit that sought to end his paternal rights, Mike is still irate about the fix he’s in. “I pay child support to a biologically intact family,” Mike told me, his voice cracking with incredulity. “A father and mother, married, who live with their own child. And I pay support for that child. How ridiculous is that?”…

Mike’s conundrum is increasingly playing out in courts across the country, a result of political, social and technological shifts. Stricter federal rules have pressed states to chase down fathers and hold them responsible for children born outside of marriage, a category that includes 40 percent of all births. At the same time, DNA tests have become easier, cheaper and more reliable. Swiping a few cheek cells and paying a couple hundred dollars can answer the question that has plagued men since the dawn of time: Am I really the father?

This issue has indeed puzzled humanity for thousands of years. As Aristotle reportedly put it (I cannot find the primary source):

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

Still, is there something happening today that caused the Times to deem this newsworthy? Perhaps there is. As state governments rightfully clamp down on deadbeat dads — of which my late father was one — more and more men want to know for sure whether they are indeed responsible for their child’s upbringing:

Over the last decade, the number of paternity tests taken every year jumped 64 percent, to more than 400,000. That figure counts only a subset of tests — those that are admissible in court and thus require an unbiased tester and a documented chain of possession from test site to lab. Other tests are conducted by men who, like Mike, buy kits from the Internet or at the corner Rite Aid, swab the inside of their cheeks and that of their putative child’s and mail the samples to a lab. Of course, the men who take the tests already question their paternity, and for about 30 percent of them, their hunch is right.

On the surface, this sounds incredibly depressing to someone who, like me, views marriage as a sacred, holy institution. But the sad reality is that eighteen percent of married women in the United States have cheated at least once. (The number is probably even higher since more than a few cheaters probably lied to the pollster.) One in five Americans — men and women — in monogamous relationships have cheated on his or her partner, according to the same survey. With untold thousands of dollars on the line, can men really be blamed for wanting to be sure?

This is yet another reason why American men are increasingly skeptical of marriage. Not only can wives divorce husbands for no reason and take half of their assets, courts can, as the Times article notes, also force husbands to pay for the children of the man with whom the wife cheated. Modern society has deviated so much from the natural order that chaos has resulted.

Related: The Battle of the Sexes

(Hat tip: Roissy in DC)

Chef Management

BELLEVILLE, Illinois — Since I have completed most of an Executive and International M.B.A. at two different universities in two different countries, I can now… manage the cooking of a multi-course meal using Gantt charts! I’m glad that the thousands of dollars spent are proving worthwhile.

National Debt

This is what the Economist thinks the United States should do about its increasing government debt.

Facebook Marketing

This is old news to those who, like myself, have worked in Internet marketing, but tools like Facebook and Twitter can be valuable. Here are some of the tips I’ve learned in various positions.

1. Be Yourself. Many businesses believe that they should create a Facebook or Twitter profile with the name of your company: “Acme Boxes.” This is the complete opposite of what they should do.

First, having your presence consist only of a faceless corporation is boring. The Internet has a short attention span, so everything needs to be catchy. Your identity should not be “Acme Boxes” — it should be “Bob Smith (who happens to be CEO of Acme Boxes).” Use your real name and picture. The person Facebooking or Twittering should post about all sorts of things including funny anecdotes and personal interests, not only the newest sale his company is offering. Facebook and Twitter users want to befriend interesting people, not corporations. (Billionaire and Virgin founder Richard Branson has many Twitter followers, but I bet that very few of them care what his company does on a daily basis. Branson is just a cool guy.)

The brand awareness that your company gains — after all, it is listed in your profile and occasionally discussed in your posts — comes indirectly. Be informal and fun. Leave the formal, boring communications jargon to the marketing department that deals with traditional media outlets. People who use social media frequently are young, tech-savvy, and cynical when it comes to advertising. Be a real person online — everyone can tell when someone is just there to sell something.

2. Do Not Spam. The quickest way to lose potential customers and be ignored in the social-media sphere is to put a sales pitch in your status every hour. Fewer than half of your Facebook status updates and Tweets should be related to business. Again, people want to befriend you, not your company. The Internet is viral — for better and for worse. If one person does not like you, everyone will find out soon enough. (Although, if one person does like you, everyone will know as well.) Post on a wide variety of interesting subjects. If you post something with the word “baseball,” a Twitter search for that word will bring up your post. And you might get a few baseball fans to follow you and learn about your company.

3. Be Careful. There was a line in an episode of the 1990s, American sitcom “Newsradio” that went something like: “Taking something off the Internet is like trying to take the pee out of a swimming pool.” Even if you delete an e-mail, a Facebook post, or a Twitter entry, chances are that it still exists on some hard drive or server somewhere. Especially if someone saw it, did not like it, and saved it. Just because marketing is less controlled by executive suits in the rapid-fire Information Age does not mean that anything and everything is permissible. Don’t be like the teenage girl who posted scandalous pictures of herself on Facebook only to have everyone at school see them instead of just her boyfriend. Think before you post. Even if you are not the CEO or Vice President of Communications, you still represent your company in the subconscious minds of your Internet community.

More thoughts to follow.

Annex the West Bank?

Michael Freund posits an idea in light of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ decision first to retire and then to declare statehood:

For far too long, Israel has been overly vulnerable to such machinations and games. By leaving the status of Judea and Samaria open for discussion, the Jewish state has given the Palestinians too much leeway for mischief-making and malice, which they have only been more than happy to exploit.

In light of Abbas’s latest charade, it is clear that Israel needs to put an end to this farce, once and for all.

We need to send a clear message to our foes, one that will put them on the defensive and strengthen Israel’s hand. And there is no better place to start than with our own unilateral measures, chief among them the annexation of all the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

As I wrote in a prior post in my Letters from Israel series, this is the central issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

There’s another old joke among Israels: “We want a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a country in all of the ancient land of Israel. But we can only pick two of the three.”

In other words, Israel must eventually choose one of the following options:

1. Democratic and in all of the land — but not Jewish
2. Jewish and in all of the land — but not democratic
3. Jewish and democratic — but not in all of the land

(As I detail in the post, this is the core conflict because of demographic realities in the region encompassing Israel proper, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.) Israel has yet to decide what it wants to be.

Israel is not going to annex the West Bank anytime soon, and any Palestinian declaration of statehood would go nowhere. Jordan, of course, would never take the territory back. So now I’d like to consider another option that I first heard from an American-Israeli coworker at a high-tech company: Make the West Bank like Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is a part of the United States, but it is not an official state. The island can only send a non-voting delgate to Congress, but it has a large degree of autonomous self-rule. I am not an expert on Puerto Rico’s legal status in detail, but I wonder whether something similar might be possible in the West Bank. Readers, what say you?

The Israel Lobby

Does it do more harm than good to Israel?

Value of Stamps

BELLEVILLE, Illinois — My father died two years ago, right about at the time that I was leaving Boston for Israel. Since I am back in the States on vacation, I have been going through the stamp collection that he left me. According to this website, here would be the values of some of my stamps, then and now, if they were still in mint condition (they are not):

• 1903 George Washington issue (scarlet-shield issue) — 2 cents — $20
• 1922 Statue of Liberty — 15 cents — $26.50
• 1931 Golden Gate Bridge — 20 cents — $16.50

I ran some quick calculations. The total return for these three stamps would be 9,900%, 17,600%, and 8,200% respectively. The average annual rates of return would be 93%, 202%, and 106% respectively.

This got me thinking. Since the Baby Boomers will be retiring over the next several years, they will be selling their positions in their retirement funds. As a result, the stock market might not provide its historical-average annual rate of return of ten percent anymore. So, investors, including young people, might put their money elsewhere — especially after society was spooked once again by the 50% decline in the stock market at the height of the financial crisis recently.

With these prospective rates of return on something as simple as stamp collecting, why do people still purchase stocks? Still, I write this with the standard caveat — nothing, not gold or anything else, has any intrinsic value. Everything is worth only what someone will pay for it. If no one, for some reason, would want to pay for historic stamps anymore in the future, then such an investment would be worthless.

But, now, I am curious. I’m going to look up my old baseball cards and research their rates of return.

Correction: The earlier percentages listed were incorrect because I had miscalculated them. This is why I became a writer and first went into journalism.

Clumsy Men

BELLEVILLE, Illinois — So I just saw this commercial for Yellowbook, which seems to be new name for the Yellow Pages here in the United States. [The one I watched on television seems to be a few seconds shorter than the YouTube version.]

My reaction: Yet another American commercial in which men are portrayed as idiots! The husband is incompetent. When the wife hears about his new job, she expresses no concern for his well-being. Instead, she takes out a policy to get some money in case something happens to him!

If this had been the only commercial to make men look silly, I would have laughed at the joke. But when I see such a trend over several years, it is impossible to ignore the subconscious message that women rule and men are buffoons.

Gender Discrimination

Israeli police and Western Wall officials reportedly expelled and briefly arrested a woman who was wearing a tallit and tried to read from a Torah scroll. Orthodox blogger Dov Bear states, and I agree, that the woman was doing nothing wrong under Jewish law.

As he writes:

The kotel is a place of prayer. The role of police who are stationed at the kotel is to protect people who wish to pray, such as that woman. They are not there to protect the pious from seeing permitted, but unwelcome sights. Unless that woman was creating a disturbance and interfering with the prayer of others, the police misused their authority and acted as tools of one Jewish sect at the expense of another. By arresting her they declared that thekotel is Orthodox occupied territory, rather than a shrine and a heritage for all Jews.

If anyone disagrees and can find a reasonable argument to the contrary, feel free to post in the comments.

Dual Loyalties

Many Israeli soldiers are facing a philosophical dilemma: What to do when their loyalties to the State and to the Bible (as they interpret it) conflict?

Elsewhere: Gershom Gorenberg analyzes the issue as well.

Meetings

Most meetings in the business world are useless, but if you must have one, here is how to do it.

One Year Later

Rabbi Gabi Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, were murdered a year ago during the terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Here is Chabad’s tribute to them.

A Universal Word

NEWARK, New Jersey — So I was changing planes on my way from Tel Aviv to St. Louis when I walked by a group of men outside the security gate. As I and a few other passengers walked by, they yelled, “Moneet!“

That’s the Hebrew word for taxi. I stopped, momentarily confused, and then realized that they were adapting their sales pitch to the airline that has just dropped off a group of passengers. (I had flown on El Al to the United States.) They probably knew the word for taxi in dozens of languages. Smart marketing.

The Berlin Wall

I just watched a History Channel documentary on the night — 11 November 1989 — that the Berlin Wall fell. I was nine at the time. Here is a real-politik reflection on the event by Stratfor Global Analysis.

I was too young to understand the significance at the time, but I will always remember the event in hindsight as the start of millions of people gaining their freedom over the next several years, concluding with the fall of the Soviet Union. I would have given anything to be, like Tom Brokaw, a reporter at the scene. The closest I have ever been to a historically-significant event — regardless of how one feels about it personally — was when I covered the first same-sex marriage in Massachusetts when I was editor-in-chief of Spare Change News.

I will always prefer to associate 9/11 with the fall of the Berlin Wall — when written with European dating — rather than with the terrorist attacks in New York, which happened during my last semester of college. The most important historical event to occur in one’s lifetime should be something positive.

Thomas Friedman

The New York Times columnist writes something I never thought he would say: The United States should, at least for now, give up on trying to create peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Personal Update

I will be leaving for St. Louis and Chicago in the United States on Saturday night, and I will come back to Israel two weeks later. I’ll be moving back to Jerusalem in early December, so there will be more blogging from there when I return.

The Economic Future

Every American should watch this thirty-minute, non-partisan documentary on the financial apocalypse towards which the United States is heading.

Related: Why My Generation is Pissed Off and The Upcoming Generational War

My Favorite Song of the Moment

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Red Band is a hilarious, Israeli comedy about an aging, hippie, drugged-out, American rock band that comes back to Israel after a tour in the late sixties. But here’s the catch: The band is played by puppets! The band meets famous Israeli musicians, makes fun of them, and then ends each show performing a song with them. The above clip is a medley of American rock songs performed with the Nehama Girls. Here is the lead singer smashing the guitar of Shalom Hanoch. Here is a Doors cover with Aviv Geffin. Here is the first part of the first episode of the series. The show is half in English and half in Hebrew, so people on both sides of the pond can appreciate it.

Note: There is profanity, drug references, and puppets making sexual jokes.

Nationality

In a prior post, I addressed the cultural nihilism in the United Kingdom that might be a result of the disappearance of a “British” identity (as opposed to “English,” “Welsh,” or “Scottish”). Now, after decades of immigration, the French government has unveiled a controversial “What is French?” website. I expect more of this to occur in the future.

Related: Death of the Nation-States and the The Future of the Nation-State

Economic Future

Is the primary threat to the U.S. economy inflation or deflation? Check out the presentation in this blog post. The author believes it is the latter.

Talmudic Tidbits

Pirkei Avot is the section of the Mishnah that deals primarily with Jewish philosophy and ethical living. Here is the first part, with my literal translation from the Hebrew to accompany my following commentary.

Moses received Torah* from Sinai** and handed down*** to Joshua; Joshua to the Elders [of the tribes of Israel]; the Elders to the Prophets; the Prophets handed down to the men of the Great Assembly. They**** said three things: Be cautious in judgement***, raise up many disciples, and make a fence around Torah.** (Chapter 1, Mishnah 1)

* Many English translations incorrectly translate this as “the Torah.” The Hebrew word תורה (Torah) does not have the ה in front that would make it “the Torah.” But why did the original author not write “the Torah”? The inclusion of the definite article would make it sound like the Law has a finite existence, a beginning and an end. Torah is infinite. Like God, Torah itself is אין סוף (without end).

** Why does the Mishnah not say “from God” or “at Sinai” rather than “from Sinai“? This is to remind Jews that the giving of Torah occurred at a specific place and a specific time in history. It was a REAL event. It is not an oral tradition or a myth — it was an actual event at an actual place. All Jews, present and future, were there.

*** The Hebrew neither repeats the word “Torah” nor uses the pronoun את זה (it) when referring to the handing down of Torah through the ages. The use of the pronoun would give a sense of limit to Torah just like the article ה (the) would have done. See my first footnote.

**** The pronoun “they” refers specifically to the men of the Great Assembly and not collectively to Moses, Joshua, the Elders, and the Prophets as well. The Great Assembly was the first to make rulings and issue precepts based on Torah since knowledge had become diffused by that time.

*** Courts of law are to resemble God. Courts should be neither too strict nor too lenient; they should be fair. This resembles two aspects of God as described in the mystical tradition — דין (Judgement) and חסד (Mercy) — that are balanced by תפארת (Compassion).

** Jews are supposed to guard against even approaching the breaking of Torah. For example, it is forbidden in the Bible Talmud to eat beef and dairy products in the same meal. The Oral Law — the Talmudic tradition that accompanies the Written Law in the Bible — also expanded this prohibition to include chicken so Jews are one step removed from even coming close to violating the precept. (Fish is allowed.)

Note: Most of the commentary comes from tradition sources, but a few ideas are mine. Then again, there is nothing new under the sun.

My Favorite Song of the Moment

RISHON LEZION, Israel — This is in honor of the first significant rain I have seen in months. We just entered the winter half of the year, also known as the “wet season.”

Tony Blair

The former British prime minister might not become the first president of Europe after all.

Life Under Rocket Fire

RISHON LEZION, Israel — This is what life is like forty-five minutes south of where I live:

Imagine that you are 18 years old. You have just completed high school and in a few months you will enter the army. In the meantime, you spend your time going out with friends and working to save some money – like any other typical teenager in Israel.

One afternoon, you come home exhausted from work and collapse into bed for a nap. Suddenly, in the middle of your nap you find yourself waking up to the sound of glass shattering – all over your back.

It takes you a moment to realize that the window above your bed has exploded and that shards of glass lie everywhere. Your dad comes racing in, picks you up and carries you outside to safety.

The Sderot Media Center Community Treatment Theater performed Children of Qassam Avenue in Jerusalem this week, and I would have gone if I had known about the play. As the above YouTube clips shows, the performance is a group of teenage girls showing what life is like under a constant rain of rocket fire from Hamas in the Gaza Strip. As the new school year has begun, principals have been repairing and upgrading their bomb shelters and related buildings.

Even though the number of deaths and injuries have been low, a generation of children is growing up with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Related: Letter from Israel: The Gaza Conflict

Israeli Start-Ups

RISHON LEZION, Israel — While discussing the new book “Start-Up Nation,” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach addresses why Israel is more economically viable in the long-term than oil-rich Arab countries:

Sidestepping the usual discussion of Israel as an embattled nation, [the book] focuses instead on the invincible ingenuity of the Israeli people, and their vast technological contribution to the global economy…

…as Start-Up Nation makes clear, Israel today is one of the most highly educated and technologically advanced nations on Earth, with one of the planet’s fastest-growing economies.

The time has come for world Jewry to see Israel as the place where the limitless potential of the Jewish people is finally being made manifest. All we needed was for people to get out of our way, and just look at how we thrive. And we prosper not as a self-absorbed nation but as a people who make vast contributions to all of mankind…

Many a Jew has wondered aloud why the Arabs got all the oil and Israel got none. What could God have been thinking in making despots and dictators like the Saudis and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi so insanely rich, while Israel has to struggle for every shekel it earns?

Only now to do we see the truth. Oil is the greatest curse ever to befall the Arabs.

By simply digging a hole and having money flow from the ground, the Arab states had little incentive to build universities or a hi-tech industry. And when the day comes – and it will – when the world finally finds an alternative energy source, these despotic regimes will collapse, returning to the sand from which they arose.

This isn’t rocket science. All of us know at least one rich friend whose kids don’t have to work, and who consequently became indolent. Israel has had to struggle for everything it has. No country has ever been more unjustly reviled or more continuously attacked.

Conversely, no country better inspires the world to ponder the infinite capacity of humans to rise from the ashes of despair and build a shining state on a hill.

While Rabbi Boteach is correct on a macroeconomic level, the high-tech industry on a societal level here is more complicated than he knows. There are indeed positive aspects, but there are also negative ones.

In the twentieth century, the American economy generally had stable, long-term growth because of the existence of large, national, and global companies whose purpose was to generate long-term profits and jobs by providing new products and services over time. But, as I have noticed in the several Israeli  companies where I have worked, the nature of start-ups is inherently different.

When I was working as a marketing manager, I overheard a conversation between a new hire and the chairman of the board. The chairman told the coworker that the exit strategy was to sell the company’s innovation to Google as soon as possible. The coworker rightly asked, “So, what will happen to me? Will I be out of a job?” The board chairman laughed, gave a dismissive answer, and changed the subject. (By the way, our contracts specifically stated that employees would receive no money from any sale of the company.)

As Shlomo Maital, a business columnist for The Jerusalem Report, asks in a recent interview with several Israeli business analysts (the article is not available online):

Israel’s business model was based on selling its brains, as start-ups, at inflated prices. These baby companies were “adopted” and their knowhow shipped overseas, before they could mature and create well-paying jobs and incomes for middle-class Israelis. Why has Israel failed to grow global companies in the past 10-15 years?

The interviewees responded by saying that the government needs to invest more in areas including alternative energy. But the major problem is that Israelis are a people with no patience for anything — including work life. The idea behind start-ups is not to build companies that will exist for the long-term but for the owners to get rich as quickly as possible. A classmate from my M.B.A. program once told me a story: A start-up CEO was told by a venture capitalist that the company could get $100 million if it offered an IPO the following month but that the firm could get $500 million if it waited for one year. The CEO, of course, chose the first option.

Another company for whom I worked would routinely fire employees just before three months or one year had elapsed to avoid salary increases or severance pay as mandated by our contracts and Israeli law. The stated reason for each firing, of course, was something false related to work performance. Start-ups frequently have little cash, and their existence depends on receiving future investment. So, in response, they must watch every single cost.

Smaller companies have many advantages over large ones including the ability to be quick and nimble rather than slow and bureaucratic, but they are generally more chaotic. Positions, job descriptions, and even the number of employees can change on a day-to-day basis. A long-term, stable career does not exist in this environment, especially when the owners and upper management have no patience and constantly worry about costs.

Israel has the fourth-highest level of income disparity — also known as the gap between the rich and the poor — in the world. It is not hard to understand the cause. Israel’s high-tech culture creates a few multi-millionaires whose only resulting contribution to the local economy is their increased consumer spending. Their companies and technologies are sold to Western countries, who then receive the later economic benefits. Lower-level employees move from start-up to start-up when one is either sold or bankrupt, rarely moving into upper management and receiving high salaries because the owners typically hold those positions on a day-to-day basis as well. Most other Israelis — those who are less educated or members of minority communities like Israeli Arabs — work in low-paying jobs in the blue-collar, service, or tourism industries.

Rabbi Boteach correctly notes that Israeli start-ups do benefit the world and provide the country with good branding, but Israeli society in general does not always see the benefits.