Shield of doubt, Spear of truth

Armistice Day, Veteran's Day,  Poppy Day! And the war is not over. The war against certainty, intolerance, ambition and hubris in ON. Armistice Day has itself been a trigger for intolerance, conformity and tribalism. My echoed advice for today is to pause whatever you are doing at 1100hrs local time and take one minute to remember people who died so that you have the freedom to do whatever you want at 11 am on a Wednesday in November. It just takes a minute of your reflective time, just 10 or 15 breaths, and then you can go on with your day. It's a little thing, that might do some good for your soul and can do no substantive harm - like wearing a mask in the shops.

As promised 24 hours ago there was a joint meeting last night of the Wexford Science Café and the Wexford Science Festival: Going Viral: The Trials & Tribulations of COVID-19. Just over 30 people registered for the event - and turned up; and there may have been extra rellies on the same sofa at homes across the county. It was well timed because our symposium occurred mere days after the announcement of a new vaccine, which trials suggested might be 90% effective. We spent a little time discussing / explaining the details of this trial and how "90%" was arrived at. We didn't get down to detail-detail like 90±???% but the talk did lurch off towards the politics of the timing of the announcement - just after and not before the US Presidential Election was more-or-less decided.

But the take-home for me was a call to arms by scientists to other members of their tribe to start making the voice of reason heard. That requires the marshalling of evidence, the sifting of data, the integration of results, to make conclusions that are useful [and utilitarian, greatest good for the greatest number, if you are me, ymmv] in the current crisis. If we don't speak, then other voices will fill the vacuum with emotive appeals to nonsense, woo-wah and demonization. This is not to say that there isn't a mort too much specious certainty and drum-banging by some of those who wear the white coat. As soon as you hear Professor Gruyère getting ranty about masks, you may suspect that the evidence for masks is as flimsy as my bandana. That's what people do when they are certain but the data is weak - they raise their voices. Do wear the mask though, it's a little thing, pour encourager les autres.

Silver lining front. This pandemic is a threat an opportunity to mobilise our thoughts and articulate our considered findings about items on the agenda which are actually far more difficult to handle: climate change, extinction, bloody tribalism.  Bloody tribalism aka othering starts with homelessness and direct provision: it is only a quantitative difference between emergency accommodation in the Gresham Hotel and Hotel Rwanda. 

Evidence only, folks. The problem is that evidence accumulates and it is often contradictory, especially if the sample is small because the bean-counters have only authorised a half-arsed study. But whatever the difficulties and hard work, we need a holistic solution: one which allocates the effort, the money, in some sort of rational way [utilitarian, if you can bear it, is a place to start]. Otherwise, we will win the battle, against Covid-19, but lose the War on Cancer, say. And holistic bean counters have a role: it is a waste of money leasing wards from private hospitals if there is no budget to hire repatriating medical staff.

I was sufficiently inspired by some of the articulate science as a way of knowing advocates last night that I left a zoom-comment "I have my Spear of Truth and Shield of Doubt, I just need a horse". Before lights-out, The Beloved, who was about her own business during Going Viral, asked how it had gone . . . and what we were going to do next. That puts a finger on the pulse! We don't need another talking shop if it serves only as catharsis. Action is required from me, and you. Then I had a dream about arriving at the Pearly Gates and accounting for my actions. I doin' a'righ'. Insofar as The Blob is a voice of reason and science, then I might have put in my Gladwellian 10,000 hours on the project. If that work is at the minimum wage (and it's not worth more!) then €100,000 has been thrown into the scales against the windmills of woo-wah.

My mention of horse brought to mind Roy Campbell's thrashing of fellow South African writers for being cosy self-regarding cherries on a seething cake of apartheid:

You praise the firm restraint with which they write –

I'm with you there, of course:

They use the snaffle and the curb all right,

But where's the bloody horse?

le Brave des Braves

"The Bravest of the Brave" aka Le Rougeaud from his ruddy complexion died this day 201 years ago. Maréchal Michel Ney [R at the height of his powers] came from Sarrelouis / Saarlouis on the border between France and Germany. The town is currently in Germany but has been shuttled back and forth between the superpowers to East and West over the last 500 years. Michel was born in 1769 into a family of francophone coopers who were also fluent in the local dialect of German. You had to be bilingual if you wanted to have a working business or needed to argue the toss with your neighbour about his over-hanging apple tree.

Trained to boredom as a notary and civil servant, he ran away for a soldier's life at the age of 18 and joined the French Hussars. Not having blue blood or an escutcheon, he was excluded from the officers' mess in the army of Louis XVI but he achieved promotion through the ranks because he was bright and willing and carried himself with confidence. When the monarchy fell, the new egalitarianism allowed him to win his commission as an officer. He travelled all over Europe from Lisbon to Moscow over the course of the next 28 years. In the Peninsula War he as c-n-c of the rear-guard as La Grande Armée retreated from Portugal to the Pyrenees, he dextrously won time for the rest of the French so that the retreat didn't disintegrate into a rout. Ney was conspicuously courageous in his leading from the front like my name-sake and distant rellie who died at the head of his regiment at the crossing of the Nivelle - almost the last engagement of the Peninsula war. He fought at Borodino [prev] and was the 'last frenchman to leave' Russian soil, again leading the rear-guard in the holocaust that was the Retreat from Moscow in 1812.

As leader of the Marshall's Revolt, Ney was instrumental in persuading Napoleon to throw in the towel and go with dignity, but no army, to exile in Elba in April 1814. Ney then swore allegiance to the reinstated monarch although his position was always that his loyalty was to La France rather than to the personality at the top of the pyramid.  A year after arriving at Elba, Napoleon was on the move again beginning the 100-days campaign that culminated at Waterloo on 18th June 1815. When the news arrived in Versailles that Napoleon had landed on french soil, the government dispatched Ney to stop his previous Chief and turn him back.  In a super-romantic encounter at Auxerre, Dan O'Herlihy Ney is unable to shoot or capture Rod Steiger the Emperor and rurns his coat again.  Here's take two [2002] of the same episode.

Ney was a key figure in the Waterloo Campaign, unable to follow through at the Battle of Quatre-Bras [16 June 1815] and leading a super-romantic but unsupported and ultimately ineffectual cavalry charge at Waterloo [18 June 1815]. Ney had 5 horses shot under him on the field of Waterloo. Running out of horses, he led a final hopeless advance of the infantry with the words "Venez voir comment meurt un maréchal de France!" but Death was not interested in taking him at that time. There are those who put much of the blame for the outcome of Waterloo on poor Michel's shoulders.  But the Waterloo Campaign could not have been won. There is no way that Europe was going to come to any accommodation with France with Napoleon as head of state. Losing Waterloo - which was in Wellington's own words "A damned close-run thing" - would have deferred defeat until the next battle. Napoleon, ever the optimist, was on a hiding to nothing, as we say in Ireland.

The end of Marshall Ney is too sad. Ney was a soldier's soldier but detested by politicians of all stripes and was about the only name on a list of traitors: as defined by those who had thrown in their lot with Napoleon. There is a distinct sense of Voltaire's quip "Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres." about another another country and another time when a senior officer - Admiral Byng - was shot by his own side in questionable circumstances.  At Ney's trial, his lawyer had a cunning plan for evading conviction because Sarrelouis was then part of Prussia and so the French court had no claim on a foreign citizen. But Ney was unbending in his loyalty to France "Je suis Français et je resterai Français!" Poor chap seems only to speak in exclamations! Condemned to death, he was shot [L by Jean-Léon Gérôme] outside the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris on 7th December 1815. Of course he faced the firing squad with open eyes and gave them the command to fire! Chapeaux bas!

A Russian officer who expressed delight at the end of an old enemy was stripped of his rank by the Emperor Alexander Александр Павлович I. That kind of romantic chivalry about warriors on the other side is still about. There's a famous story about the William Callaghan, the Captain of the battleship USS Missouri, who in April 1945 insisted on giving an honourable burial to the top half of Setsuo Ishino a kamikaze pilot who had just crashed into the side of his ship.

Black box

You know of course that the black box [R] with which we all familiar isn't black. If there's a disaster involving tonnes of aviation spirit and lots of flammable material then the default background is going to be charcoal. Here, I've created a portmanteau phrase to indicate a box to be ticked for ethnic diversity.  Damn but I hate tokenism! Suits, who haven't a clue don't really care about ethnic diversity or inclusivity, know that they must do something about the optics: so they appoint an Equality Officer to review all the official documents from their institution.
Problem: Too many white faces?
Solution: retake some of the photos to include just enough people of colour [✓], wheel-chairs [✓], BLTs [✓], women  [✓] to meet a more or less arbitrary threshold for right-on'ness.

I won't suggest that minorities are seen as a threat but they certainly aren't considered an opportunity. I'm thinking of appointing myself MLO - Minority Liaison Officer. You might think that is an outrageous bit of cultural appropriation - I am, after all, The Patriarchy personified: white, straight, grey, male, propertied, [over]-educated. Then again, then again . . . to have a silver-back laying about him insisting on fairness, equality, affirmative action . . . and giving up half his salary pour encourager les autres; that might make people take notice. It is a fact of Western life that folk listen to people like me as they don't listen to those slightly mythical "black lesbian single-parents". In October, for example, I was one of only 5 out of 800 employees who saw a workshop on Gender Pronouns as an opportunity . . . rather than a threat an irrelevance that could eat into my lunch-break.

I'm getting these ideas above my station because I was invited to view a propaganda video from an Institute of Technology which presumably is an attempt to recruit more, and better quality, students to sign up on the CAO forms: bringing fees and bums on seats to the IT. Have you gorra couple of minutes? Chekkit out and ask yourself - if I was 18 [or 38] and got the points, would I spend four years of my life there?

Here's my feedback: Nice. Earnest. Monochrome: O'Reilly, Nolan, McNamara, Dunford (blokes featured first, women in second place tsk). Devereux (Up Wexford!), Mynhardt (best tan), Scott, Kavanagh. In fact, disregarding the 4M + 4F stars, not a single person of colour features even in the background. Next edition please to feature some New Irish: Abdelhakim, Gregan, Щу́кин, Tadema, Wang. On the way to get a cup of tea a few days ago, I bumped into the VP Student Affairs [or os she the Colonel of Corporate Strategy? - a Suit anyway] and said I knew just the bloke for their next video. I've known him for 2.5 years; over the telephone you'd know him as 'good school' Midlands, without the voice you'd say Africa; he's funny, self-deprecating, symmetrical, ambitious, helpful. He's the only Irish who has tried some French on our Erasmus students from Montpellier.  Put him and his Polish-Irish pal in the next propaganda video together with the two Dub Dubliners they hang out with. They're a stitch! They'd go viral and we'd be batting away a wave of New Irish applicants for the next three years.

The Competition. Are you more taken by

• Athlone IT; allusive not hectoring, has black student [R ✓]
• The Blanch: 'students' gurning to indicate how happy they are in West Dublin
• IT Carlow: see above
• Cork IT: career focussed education but a BLT flag [✓] features early
• Dundalk IT: short! [✓] exemplar student [XX ✓]; like in Carlow
• Sligo IT: gott in himmel - they only care about making drones for the economy
• IT Tallaght: 6m36s = 5 mins too long; President has suit but no neck
• Tralee IT: hey, a girl with purple hair [✓] and several with cotton head scarves [✓✓✓].
• Waterford IT: cartoons, emphasising how cheap it is in Waterford

Next life, I'm off to IT Heidelberg or Coimbra U, it has got to be more fun there.

19 Floréal II

"Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme."

This is the way the French state the Law of the Conservation of Matter which they tend to call, with some chauvinistic justification, le Loi de Lavoisier.  Tout se transforme also sums up the state of French politics in the final years of Lavoisier's life.

Lavoisier hears doorbell

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was a Parisian aristocrat (it's all in the "de") who inherited a mort o' money when his mother died. He was also sharp as a tack, observant, careful and questioning. Instead of spending his money on the dhrink or debauchery, he devoted his life to science, not least science in the support of the state.  He lived for nearly two decades in a grace-and-favour house in the Royal Arsenal and greatly improved the quality of French gunpowder by sourcing better ingredients and standardising the production process. Notably, he converted part of the house to a scientific laboratory where he investigated a range of chemical and biological conundrums. That's when he wasn't out in the field helping to carry out the geological survey of France in Alsace-Lorraine.

Where to start?  You couldn't cover all his contributions to science in a trifling 1000 words on a blog. But he remains in the history books because of his discovery of the element oxygen - indeed the name oxygène he gave to this most active part of 'air' - the acid generator - is what has stuck for most of us in science, Although some languages prefer a German rather than a Greek root - zuurstof in Nederland or Sauerstoff across their Eastern border. The story of the discovery is a corner-stone of Thomas Kuhn's iconic 1962 investigation of the history and process of science "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".  At the same time as Lavoisier was tricking about in the Royal Arsenal, the great English chemist Priestley was carrying out a similar series of experiments showing, for example, that the respiration common to all living things is chemically the same as burning logs in a fire: "la respiration est donc une combustion," as Lavoisier put it.  Priestley and Lavoisier agreed on that; but their understanding of what was happening at a molecular level was diametrically opposite.  Priestley held to a theory that combustion involved the release of a substance called phlogiston - which was obvious to all thinking people - you just have to see flames issuing from a log to appreciate this.  Lavoisier started out by agreeing with this theory but gradually made a volte-face and twigged that combustion was actually the addition of something (oxygen) to the burning material.  This not so o.t.a.t.p because you can't sit on your sofa and watch - you have to get off your arse and start measuring things (temperature, weight), really carefully, and recording the results and meticulously keeping records and repeating and repeating your experiments.  Science is Hard.  Insofar as people know anything at all about the History of Science, they tend to get snitty about Priestley and his pathetic adherence to an outmoded doctrine. It is easy enough to be smug if you have 20/20 hindsight but in the context of the time and what was known back in 1780, phlogiston explained a lot and in an internally consistent way. Here is a sensible and insightful look at the controversy and its resolution.

It must have been exciting times scientifically.  But it was also an interesting time politically, with the revolution in France shaking to the core people's certainties about what was possible socially and religiously.  Lavoisier shed his "de" and high-falutin' hyphenated first name, left his house in the Royal Arsenal and tried to look like Citoyen Lavoisier but his embedded association with the Ancien Régime was too much for people who were dwarfed by his intellectual achievements. When he was brought before a revolutionary tribunal, the judge dismissed an appeal that Le Grand Fromage should be let alone to continue pushing the frontiers of science with his experiments: "La République n'a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes".  A few years earlier Voltaire had responded to the execution of English Admiral Byng on his quarter-deck with the quip "il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres".  History is only as useful as its reflection of what we see in today's mirror. Hands up anyone who can name a republic that would happily incarcerate if not actually execute a scientist today because s/he was dissing the dominant religion.

Antoine Lavoisier was tried, condemned and executed all in the day called Arroche 19 Floréal II, exactly 220 years ago. Every day of the year had been given a name by the logical obsessives of the French revolution:  plants, tools, animals and minerals were all commemorated in a vain effort to supplant the idea that every saint had his/her day. 19 Floréal was dedicated to Arroche  Atriplex hortensis which we call saltbush or Orache.  Saltbush or mountain spinach is eminently edible and you are exhorted to go and find some: it's much more interesting than reg'lar spinach and a fit dish to remember a man who was much more interesting than reg'lar scientists.

As the contemporary brilliant mathematician and astronomer Lagrange put it: "Il ne leur a fallu qu’un moment pour faire tomber cette tête, et cent années peut-être ne suffiront pas pour en reproduire une semblable."  In other words: decapitation is forever, which is as good an argument against the death penalty as you're likely to find.  What a waste.

Banged up in chokey

Monica O'Connor, doyenne of the Home School movement, was arrested on Wednesday as the relentless juggernaut of the state ground through the process of bringing its citizens into line. I call her doyenne [footnote] with a touch of irony because she is currently, in a famous for fifteen minutes sort of way, the highest-profile home educator in Ireland. If you read the comments to the press reports, you may be struck by how often people use Monica's predicament to gallop off in all directions each on his own hobby-horse.  Moaning on about the wasting police time, the salaries of government ministers, [not] needing the government to look after our children, pointing out the logical inconsistencies, moral turpitude and plain silliness of other commenters without applying the least critical evaluation to their own shoutiness.  I'm going to join in the melée now with some barely connected thoughts only tangentially relevant to the case of The Tullow Wan.

The Home Ed movement is made up of families who, by definition, go their own way. It is financially burdensome because they get no support from the state which is happy to spend €4,600 each year on average to get a child through primary school and €7,600 for the shorter period in secondary education.  I think this is a fair representation of the true costs to me-the-taxpayer based on 526,000 primary school pupils with an all primary expenditure bill of €2.465bn and 327,000 secondary school students with a bill of €2.522bn. We the home educators should not expect that sort of money into our fists, because of the fixed costs (building maintenance, head office, the minister's mercedes etc.) but the average at the coal-face teacher serves maybe 30 pupils for a salary North of €30K, so a grant of €1,000 p.a. for each home educating child might be seen as fair.  And we'll undertake the building maintenance and use our own limo to haul the youngsters to ballet, music, drama, nature-study, the library, the National Butter Museum, and soccer.  Breda O'Brien, Ireland's regular public face of home ed, made the subsidy point about 15 years ago in her Irish Times column.

This is only the cost to the government! Every parent in Ireland has to pay extra for a rucksack of text-books and most schools require a specific uniform where a jumper costing €5 in JC Penneys is miraculously transformed into a €50 garment by the addition of 5sq.cm of logo on the left breast. You might really like to get the contract to write, print and supply half a million books every year - only cousins of Ministers of State need apply. And you may like to imagine how, if The Teacher costs €1000 per child, what happens to the other €'000s in the Dept of Education's allocation. Paper-shufflers in head office, inspectors, inspectors of inspectors, the minister's dacha in the country???  In terms of bangs for bucks, it doesn't seem very efficient.  But these bureaucratic monsters tend to acquire their own momentum and inertia. They've spent so much on education that everyone must use the resources that have been provided, hence there is no impetus to support people who choose to paddle their own canoe.  And what it looks like (from the inside of the Home Ed community) is that The Man is making a bullying example of this family in Tullow so that weaker vessels will sign their kids up to the normal system. Like Voltaire said about the execution of Admiral Byng  "il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres"  It's as if we were all told that we'd all have to buy two cars because the National Roads Authority had spent so much on motorways.  It's like that already with television: Ireland requires the payment of a TV licence fee that supports the state broad-caster RTE.  You're allowed not to have a TV but you have to report the absence of the instrument every year to the Post Office: failure to report is itself an offense. We really need to ask which aspects of government we need or desire and how much we are prepared to spend to get them.  Monica and Eddie have helped us start to ask these questions: let's continue to unzip the body-bag and see what really lies inside.  Let's go back to SCOTUS Justice Louis Brandeis and demand "the right to be let alone".  A society rich in diversity is our best hope for an uncertain future.

Almost everyone agrees that Education is a good thing but there is an underlying assumption that it is an active process: being either delivered to passive receptacles but W.B. Yeats quashed this conceit long ago "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." The fall back is that educators somehow give kids the energy of activation. Then they become somewhat self-directed or at least self-disciplined enough to knock off the tasks assigned by their teacher so that they can knock off the tasks set them by an examiner.  But this is nonsense.  If you let kids alone [shut up and get out of the way] they will follow their innate curiosity to find out what they need to know - this model works really well for the first six years of life and then mysteriously disappears <not!> when the child goes to school.  When Dau.I and Dau.II were growing up we said we'd throw in the Home Ed towel at any stage if they wanted to go to school, but we felt that every year, every week that we kept them out of the mill would stand to their self-esteem and their unfettered desire to learn. With each passing year, as they grew up straight and tall, our self-doubt and anxiety fell away.  One hopeful sign is that it is now called the Department of Education and Skills, to indicate that we need to nurture, cherish, value, encourage and train those who are not academically inclined.  It's probably just optics but it's looking in a sensible direction.

Monica seems to have been released from jail at 1pm having been admitted at 9am. She must have been let out for good behaviour.

[footnote definitions of doyenne: a woman who has a lot of experience in or knowledge about a particular profession, subject, etc. Merriam-Websters . . . the senior member of a group, profession, or society; the oldest or most respected of a group Collins.
the form of words in the Collins definition has the unfortunate effect of making me think of "the oldest profession", and I don't think any Irish Home Educators are supporting their family in that way]

No: you're mad, not me

John and Alicia Nash are dead. just two out of the 30,000+ people who will be killed in road traffic accidents this year in the USA.  The rate of RTA fatalities [worldwide] is going down both in absolute terms and more so in relative terms as the number of people and vehicles on the roads is steadily climbing along with their carbon emissions. It is about 3x safer on the roads now than in 1940 [R].  The cops in New Jersey were quick to report that neither Nash was wearing a seat-belt and so they were flung from the taxi in which they were returning home from the Airport along the New Jersey Turnpike.  I've advocated that these things should be made public pour encourager les autres with regard to safe behaviour in and about vehicles.  Still it's better to neglect your seat-belt than to be txtn yr pals while at the wheel. The obits show that the film streamlined the Nashes' life a bit by ignoring the fact that Alicia divorced John in 1963 when the madness all got too much and she remarried him 38 years later. For me the point is that John Nash was supported and tolerated by his wife and their Princeton community for a helluva long time because he was a once-and-future genius. That tolerance of The Different could be much more widely expressed. Indeed we should celebrate, cherish and nurture difference because same-old same-old is not going to get our planet out of the nice mess humanity has gotten it into.

Where had the Nashes been?  They'd been to Norway to pick up a half share of the NOK7,000,000 [€750,000ish] Abel Prize which recognizes outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics. The citation for 2015 talks about their contribution to partial differential equations, of which the easy explanation by Alex Bellos won't be either easy or interesting unless you have a degree or two in mathematics.  We met John and Alicia before on The Blob in a review of A Beautiful Mind the film of the book by Sylvia Nasar. I then had some important things to say about letting the mad alone. If you start the meds, or the Electro-convulsive therapy [alternative positive view], let alone some gung-ho brain surgery, then you are likely to be committed to more and more of the same until the well runs dry or you run out of money.  Nash believed that he thought himself well as his endocrine equilibrium changed with age. “I emerged from irrational thinking, ultimately, without medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging,”  Very few of us would have the patience to let things hang for 3 decades until they [maybe] got better.  And we have a very low tolerance threshold for people talking to themselves in public.  I think this is a recent phenomenon as medicine has taken on a supermed mantle that everything can be cured: even things that should be let alone.  In the run up to the Marriage Equality Referendum there has been some retrospective about how homosexuality was 'treated' when it was considered to be an illness a short generation ago. Alan Turing anyone? They still talk about the Turing Test as a lynch-pin of our understanding of Artificial Intelligence. We talk less about Turing's Testes which were rendered 'confused' by judicial injections of artificial estrogen.  Aaaargh, retrospective rage!  Further back in time, today is the anniversary (28 May 1936) of Turing submitting for publication his ideas on the Turing Machine.  This was a key gedankenexperiment / thought-experiment in the maturation of computer science: on the back of a few envelopes Turing laid out how all computers would work. iPhone anyone?

In the run-up to the Referendum, a bright child asked his teacher,"Miss, after we free the gays, who will we help next?".  Let's rephrase that: After we let homosexuals just get on with what seems right and appropriate to them, let's look at doing the same for a rattle of mental illnesses: ADHD for starters.  There may be a condition or a syndrome called ADHD but I know that it is massively over-diagnosed among children who are just not happy sitting quietly waiting for instructions in school - possibly because that is so boring and unchallenging. There are people alive today who were physcially and psychologically abused for being left-handed. It is far too easy to tsk tsk about the past - it is harder but necessary now to look sharply at our unconsidered certainties about where normal ends. Back in the Hippy 1970s R.D. Laing maintained "Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world" and "Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair." He campaigned against the over-drugging of the 'mad'. It was difficult to hear him shouting that crisp labelling of conditions led to too much money was being diverted to Big Pharma. It was easier to dismiss him as a Marxist; then his 1983 confession in a broadcast interview that he and his parents had had disturbing mental 'episodes' conveniently provided an excuse for him being effectively struck off the register by the British General Medical Council.  If we feel so uncomfortable about our treatment of mental illness that we never see lunatics abroad in society, then it is likely that our diagnosis and treatment of mental illness is needlessly cruel, destructively normalising, riotously expensive . . . and wrong. 

The sin in him

In 1984 in Ireland there were a couple of famous cases where young women were treated despicably because they were got with child outside of holy matrimony.  Joanne Hayes was able to escape the full vindictiveness of the Law by the fluke that a dead baby, of which she was believed to be the mother, turned out to be totally incompatible w.r.t. the ABO blood groups. Anne Lovett was less fortunate and finished up dead along with her child, at least partly because her community lacked compassion for her condition. For reasons that will surprise no woman born in the 20thC, the man in the got with child equation was effectively given a get out of jail free card. In 20thC Ireland the burden of sin was distinctly asymmetrical . . . still is.

One of the few cases where a rich and powerful man was hounded for illicit paternity concerns Charlie Chaplin. In 1941, when she was 22 and an aspiring actress Joan Barry [L] started a sexual relationship with Chaplin, then 52 and a magnate in the movie business. Two years later after an up-and-down on-and-off relationship, Barry give birth to a daughter. The child's grandmother sued Chaplin for paternity, the case came to court, Chaplin was declared guilty and required to support the child. Fair enough, except that, as with the Kerry Babies case, that child, that mother and that father made a genetically impossible triad. Chaplin was Gp O; Barry was Gp A and the child was Gp B. As I showed the other day, the exclusion table [below] says that Chaplin and Barry could have Gp A kids or Gp O kids but couldn't have created the child's B antigen no matter how hard they went at it.

It turned out that genetic evidence was not admissible in California courts at the time so Chaplin's best line of defense couldn't be considered by the jury but in some ways the whole procedure was a show trial pour encourager les autres not to support communist Russia as Chaplin was alleged to have done. It is, of course, ironic that the USSR was allied with the USA in the middle of its Great Patriotic War Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́. The other irony is that one of the reasons the FBI feared and hated Stalinist Russia was because of its predilection for show trials. The third irony is that, in the most famous case of a powerful bloke being made responsible for an illegitimate child, it definitely wasn't his child.