Matters Arising

Speak to the Son

So it turns out that Vice Presidential Candidate Palin has a son.

Her eldest son.  His name is Track.

Track Palin joined the army on September 11 of last year… or around seven months before his latest sibling was born.

He got out of town.

I’m thinking that this guy Track knows the deal, and that someone should chat with him.   So… yeah…

There’s this other thing about this guy Track…  when the Anchorage newspaper ran the story about him joining the Army, they said he did so for “undisclosed reasons”. 

So perhaps some enterprising reporter can track down Track, and see what he has to say about things.

Medical Records

Are the members of the press going to scrutinize Vice Presidential Candidate Palin’s Medical Records?

Will they determine whether she is in fact the mother of her claimed fifth child?  There should be more than just a Birth Certificate.  We need to see the full history of this pregnancy.

Oh, and who really boards an airplane AFTER their water breaks, to travel for several hours, to then go off into the woods or whatever, and to give birth alone.

I mean, who does that?

Medical Records.  

The only real proof of parentage by the way is the DNA.

Yeah, let’s see that. 

Probabilities and Palin

So here is sort of a math point, using this current Babygate matter.

You start out with a highly improbable story, that the Vice-Presidential Candidate and current governor Palin is not the mother of her claimed fifth child, but the grandmother, and that Palin actually fabricated this tory, faking her pregnancy.  The actual mother of the baby, so the tale went, was Palin’s then-16-year-old daughter, Bristol.

Now such an improbable tell carries with it several premises, which at the time of the tale were unverified.

Anyway, to refute this improbable tale, the McCain campaign yesterday explained that the daughter, Bristol Palin, could not have been the mother of the previous baby, who was born April 18th, 2008, because she is actually pregnant now, in early September.

How pregnant is she?  She is claimed to be “around five months pregnant.”

Okay, so back to basic probability.    Here’s the question: does the new story make the old story less or more likely?

With the new story we have verification of several previously unproven premises:

1) That Palin’s daughter Bristol was having pre-marital sex

2) That Palin’s daughter Bristol was not using birth control, or was engaging in a form of birth control that allowed for pregnancy 

3) That Palin’s daughter Bristol was fertile.

The “big point” is whether the new story  disproves the old story by making it “impossible” or even “unlikely” or “less likely” that Bristol is the mother of both children.  For this point, one just has to look at a calendar, and understand fertility.  If you have a child on April 18th, you can in fact ovulate soon after.  As soon as two weeks, but perhaps more commonly a month after.   In either of these scenarios, you can certainly become pregnant again, and be “around five months” pregnant by September.

So this does not work as a refutation.  In contrast, the new story makes the old, rather crazily improbable story much much more likely, because it verifies some critical points.

Given all of this, why on earth would the McCain and Palin campaign put out this new story as an answer, as a refutation, to the previous story?

Only time will tell.