In the City of Brotherly Love

Sidra went to Philadelphia with Janis this year for the winter holiday. And, for some reason, she's taken up talking about herself in the third person. Let's hope it's just a fad.

So far, so fun. More. Later.

Shame, shame, shame

I.

I wake up to NPR in the morning, which, as an aside, makes for some funny dreams sometimes. The morning I woke up hearing that Iranian immigrants -- and others from predominantly Muslim nations -- were being detained upon arrival at INS offices to undergo registration of some sorts (followup to the WTC/Pentagon attacks on 9/11/2001) here in southern California, made me wish I was still dreaming. Alas, no.

The official reason for their detainment? Suspected visa violations. Suspected.

Are terrorists going to step forward and register themselves? Name...place of residence....occupation? Terrorist. Would you spell that, please?

Probably not, kids.

France seems to have a much more realistic response: French Council for the Muslim Religion. Maybe it's time for the US to take a page from that book.

II.

deep resentful sigh

Y'know, in every religion or society there are stone cold wackos.

Assuming that everyone else in that group is an enemy because of the actions of certain extremists -- why, that's just stupid. If I did that, I'd have to believe that all Christians are evil.

Would't I?

More people, in my country, have been killed by Christian extremists of one kind or another than died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

• Salem, Massachusetts -- 20 dead for witchcraft
• Estimates of the pre-contact Native American population of the Americas, all completely unscientific, range from 15 to 60 million. The Native population of California alone went from 85,000 to 18,000 between 1852 and 1890. "Well, at least they died Christian". I'm so relieved.
• The trans-Atlantic slave trade -- at least, at least 6 million. Boy, my mind's at ease over the states of their souls, too. Phew.
• The American South -- By 1918, at least 3,224 people were murdered by lynching, possibly many more.
• Over 2000 anti-gay assaults were reported in the United States in the year 2000. That's just in one year. How many of them were by self-identified Christians?

That "thou shalt not kill" thing, that doesn't apply to you. Heavens, no. That love your neighbor as yourself thing -- oh, not you. Jesus didn't mean you.

Oh, but Sidra, these cases aren't just about religion. You could argue that some of the examples of larger scope were only condoned by Christians or their dogma. "Only". So, perhaps I'm stretching a bit to make my point. Or maybe not. How many perpetrators of these crimes considered themselves actively Christian? Even good and godly? God-fearin' Bible-thumpers? Extremists acting in the name of their god? How many of the perpetrators believed it was OK with God to do this? How many cited scripture to their victims? Thought it was acceptable to beat, threaten and intimidate?

Say...that sounds like inflicting terror doesn't it?

And of course, it's not just in my country, kids. Why, no! The Christian Bible touts over a million dead in its pages. Scotland killed in the hundreds, thousands and possibly tens of thousands, as witches. Depending on which argument you believe, Hitler was Christian.

So....we should round up all white male Christians over the age of 16 in America and detain them, one way or another.

'Cause they are obviously a dangerous terrorist threat. To me, to you, to everybody.

biblio:

• CNN:OKC
• Lynching in America
• Crime Library: Witch Trials
• Hall of Remembrance: Current Death Toll
• Hall of Remembrance::FAQ


• Selected Death Tolls for Wars, Massacres and Atrocities Before the 20th Century
• Adolf Hitler - Christian, Atheist, or Neither?
• Beyond the Anti-Gay Statistics

Out-Of-Body Cancer Therapy

My god, this is smart.

"For the first time, cancer has been treated by removing an organ from the body, giving it radiotherapy and then re-implanting it. The out-of-body operation allows doctors to administer high doses of radiation to widespread tumours without affecting other organs."

"By explanting the organ, we could give a high and uniform dose to all the liver, which is impossible to obtain inside the body without serious risk to the patient," says Tazio Pinelli, a physicist who coordinated the work together with liver surgeon Aris Zonta.

read more...

Thanks to Kim, for the tip!

Screeching Halt
Crossfire:

James Carville: "Why is it that the attorney general of the United States [John Ashcroft, who can't even win an election when running against dead people -- sidra] gives an interview to a magazine that hails the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and he says we don't do enough to promote the image of the Confederacy? The current president of the United States goes to South Carolina and refuses to take a stand on the symbol of the Confederate flag flying over the capital. You don't think black people get that?"

That crashing noise was me, going from 150kph to 0 in 3ms.

I'm sorry, they did what? what? What?? Do these people live on the same planet as me?!

It is laughable, laughable, to look someone in the eye and pretend that melanin has anything to do with, well, anything, save their likelihood of getting a sunburn. What is that kind of attitude, if not shiningly, magnificently, STUPID? And you want to promote the image of the socio-political entity that thought this was peachy-keen, not to mention the losing side of a civil war? Say again?

biblio:
Crossfire
TalkLeft::Ashcroft, Southern Partisan and Those Who Opposed Him
Attorney general nominee refuses to condemn white supremacist magazine 2001.
Ashcroft whistles Dixie

LaRouche Says: Confederate-Sympathizer Ashcroft Cannot Be Confirmed as U.S. Attorney General 2000

Cool!

On NPR's All Things Considered, The WASPs: Women Pilots of WWII.

"The half-hour documentary begins in the early 1940s when the Army Air Force faced a dilemma: It needed thousands of newly assembled airplanes delivered to military bases, but most of America's pilots were overseas fighting the war. To solve the problem, the government launched an experimental program to train new pilots - the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. Drawn from more than 25 hours of interviews and archival tape, the documentary The WASPs presents an oral history of the pioneering program and pilots."

Also on All Things Considered:

"Author Richard Conniff set out to study wealthy people the way Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees. In his findings, he compares his subjects to members of the animal kingdom -- baboons, reptiles and other beasts. Tuesday [12/17/2002] on All Things Considered, Conniff discusses his book The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide. "

Both of these (quite different, yes) sound equally thrilling.

Book Reviews

Being a lazy bum, I'm migrating all of my book reviews from my older site to this one and basically just blogging them. Maybe this way I'll keep up doing them easier. I do *like* writing book reviews...it's just...the time.

Read some if you like.

The Thing About Nukes, Is

When you drop them, you're dropping them on yourself. There is nowhere on this planet you can go to escape the effect of a nuclear weapon.

Let that sink in for a minute.

You're dropping them on yourself.

When I was in school, we were introduced to the horrifying yet vaguely elegant concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. They nuke us, we nuke them, everybody dies. The underlying idea expressed, intentionally or not, was that both sides always toss nukes at each other. Both sides.

The thing is, you don't need "The Evil Empire" to nuke the US for the US to feel the effects of a nuclear weapon. All you need is for anyone, anywhere to lob 'the bomb', and everyone, everywhere gets to pay the price.

Contaminated water. Contaminated air. That means contaminated livestock, grain, and soil. Radiation sickness for those close enough -- and cancer for you. Fallout is no respecter of political boundaries.

Doesn't have to be mutual, but it's always assured.

So, let me offer up a dismayed raspberry at defense strategies that involve the phrase "nuke 'em".

This Weekend's Accomplishments

1. Another viewing of Harry Potter. You realize, once LOTR:TT comes out, we're screwed.
2. Amused security guard at mall....check. (Or at least, bemused. See previous littering rant)
3. Sent "The Sacred Wine" off to Realms of Fantasy to join all the other hopefuls on their slushpile.
4. Practiced guitar. Beg pardon, my parent's families are from Tennessee and Kentucky, that's "practiced gi-tar". Thank yew. I bought a guitar and how-to book recently. It's been fun. The brand? "Cheap". Surely you've heard of it.
5. Final edit on "My Daughter, The Martian", my submission to the current quarter's Writers of the Future contest. Need stamps.
6. Tatted Christmas doily for brother's family...check.
7. Got address(es) for fruitcake order...check.
8. Watched 8 episodes of Babylon 5: S1, the new DVD set that came out recently. (Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, bay-bee.)
9. Finished Dicken's Dombey and Son. I have an urge to write a screen adaptation. I'm going to suppress it, at least for a while.
10. Fooled ya. No #10. Oh, wait!! Watched last ten minutes of the film "The Prophecy" and yelled "Good god, that's Viggo Mortensen" at the screen, once I recognized him. Wouldn't have made any sense if I'd done it before, now would it?

The Straw That Broke The Camel's Back

So, last night, aside from helping Janis buy a copy of "Hard Day's Night", I almost got securitified, under the not-unreasonable-given-the-available-data conclusion that I might be about to get in my car, and drive off drunk. I was not, of course.

[This friends and neighbors, is an example of the start-in-middle writing technique, whereby I pique your interest, and then back up to the beginning of our tale.]

Let me back up. (See? Did you see how that worked? Go over it again if you like. I'll wait. It's no trouble.)

(...Ready? Great.)

It pisses me off to no end when a complete stranger decides to use the bed of my truck as a trash receptacle. Why, you ask?

First, it demonstrates a complete lack of consideration for other people's property. Namely, mine. Second, if you dump your trash in my truck, you have no way of knowing whether I will dispose of it properly, which means you've just littered, and thus demonstrated a complete lack of consideration for the environment as a whole, which is all our property, where "our" means every member of every species on this planet. Amazingly enough, that includes the Litterbugus Ignoramus. (Tell me, just as an aside, what is so damn attractive about shitting where you sleep?)

Now, my reaction is colored somewhat by the fact that my back is killing me and I'm upset about my work, and I can only talk about being upset about my work for SO long before it gets terribly boring for all concerned, including me. I've said what I have to say, endless repetition isn't making me feel any better.

So the opportunity to rant about the lack of consideration for others seemingly prevalent in modern American society by virtue of some asshole dumping a soda can in the bed of my truck was the perfect thing. Thus, I picked up the can in question, and proceeded to rant, more or less to the open air of the parking lot as whole. (Janis, wisely, just got in the goddamn car.)

Mostly done with my rant, which involved the realization that there were no trashcans nearby and I was going to have to

a: put this refuse in the front of the truck (to make sure it doesn't get blown away), and toss it out later;
b: walk back over to one of stores, or the dumpster behind the movie theatre, and throw it away immediately;

I turned back to the open door of my truck, CAN STILL IN HAND, and realized I'd attracted the attention of some chap in a windbreaker walking past. Naturally, being a fucking Good Samaritan myself, I thought he was worried I was having some kind of car trouble, and told him "Don't mind me, I'm just --"

pissed off at a seeming triviality

"About to get in your car and drive drunk?" He supplied.

At this point the clue brick hit. Say, this is a beer can, and that's a security person from the mall. Well, how do you like them apples?

The rest of the story doesn't even proceed as you'd expect. By the time we're at the edge of the parking lot, heading for the dumpster, the conversation shifted abruptly from a discussion of my wishful thinking regarding the consideration of others to the lack of leadership ability evidenced in President Bush's past history, particularly regarding his ability or lack thereof to keep his daughter's (underage) drinking under control.

Hey, how's that for a segue? And it wasn't even mine.

It was, in fact, even fortunate that I was trailed by a mall security officer to the dumpster to throw away this tiny piece of aluminum offal, because the dumpster turned out to be about 8 feet high and...well....I'm not. I'm not exaggerating, my fingertips didn't reach up to the underside of the dumpster cover.

By this point, or hopefully well before, said security officer realized I was quite serious about this not being my can, and hadn't been drinking myself. Now that I was safely labelled as "weird, but only dangerous to litterers", we parted company and I headed back to my truck.

Now, at about this point, this is where you say, "Sidra, isn't that a lot of energy for one little can someone dumped in the bed of your truck? Aren't you overreacting?"

Yes, I am. Happily and deliberately. But not as much as you think.

There is in fact a third statement to make regarding the seemingly trivial act of tossing some small piece of trash in someone's vehicle. It has two parts.

1. You may do it once, as a very rare occasion. But as the owner of the truck, I am treated as a trash can a minimum of 4 times a year, easy. Usually much more.
2. It is in the little things that we define our character, as individuals and as a culture. You say, with such a tiny act, that others do not matter to you, whether they are strangers in a line somewhere, or peoples of neighboring nations who share the same water supply as you. You say to posterity and to the whole world around you, a big fat "Fuck You". How self-centered can you get?

Please, don't answer the question with a demonstration.



Securitified: origin Sidra Vitale, meaning unknown, but related to the realization that you have no clear idea what legal obligations a security officer employed by a mall labors under. And that, for better or worse, said officer's undivided attention has now been directed at you.

The Point

"Then, I must have one, too."

Every once in a while, childhood just reaches up and smacks you. I didn't have much of a childhood. By that, I mean, I remember very little. The reasons are various. Many of the things I do remember are intimately tied to music.

Rehearsing for a recital with the choir director.
Singing in a parade in Waikiki. Yes, Hawaii.
Us running the light board for a rehearsal of La Boheme.
Struggling to pick out the melody to "Time In A Bottle" on the piano in the basement.
Jerry on the bass guitar.
Mannheim Steamroller, Fresh Aire I-IV.
Susan and Scotty, flute and strings, respectively, in the same basement, years before.
Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The quintessential music of my childhood.
Singing Neil Diamond's "African Trilogy". Elementary, junior and high school choirs, all the matching bands, and 3 different languages. Hot damn.

Not last, and definitely not least, Harry Nilsson's The Point. A cross between animated musical, fairy tale, and something else, I am amazed to find it again, in the La Jolla Tower Records, just lying in wait for me, 3000 miles and many years from that initial joy of singing about "a whale who grew so old, he decomposed..."

Age has not withered my affection. My love for "Think About Your Troubles", "Me and My Arrow", and all the wonderful tracks on this album, will never fade.

How often do you get to sing about whales decomposing?

"Chamber of Secrets" Viewings

4, as of Nov 30, 2002. That number will continue to rise as a cold front moves into the region, causing hail, frogstorms, and attacks by wombats dressed as Christmas elves.

Well. Maybe not the wombats.

Long Weekend

And it was. In a nice way. I have much to say, just not in a blog. Personal-epiphany type stuff (don't you hate those?). So, instead, let's just be endlessly amused over the flack Australia is getting for their PM sounding like Pres. Bush.

Tee-hee-hee! In all seriousness, however:

"The horror of terrorism such as the Bali bombing that killed 89 Australians and nearly 100 other people was understood [or, gosh, the WTC attack -- sidra], but countries must act within international law, Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman Marti Natalegawa said."
"Fortunately, states cannot willy-nilly flout international law and norms," he told the Australian Associated Press. "We have to work within the system. In the fight against terror, no country can act above the law and norms."

Damn. Straight.

All The Things You Hate About Cloning

Or, I suppose, all the things I hate.

I watched the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "The Sixth Day" the other day on cable. [Allah bless cable TV.] It was better than I expected, and I'm often a fan of Ahhhhnuld action movies with a little humor, so it wasn't like I had the bar set exceptionally low, here. There were a few moments, though, where I felt less like I was watching an action flick and more like I was watching some poorly articulated propaganda on the subject of human cloning. Propaganda in the quasi-religious "against" column.

Human cloning has existed since, well, ever. Yep. It's not new. Everytime you look at a set of identical twins, you're looking at a clone. One egg. Two people. Identical material. One of these eggs is a clone of the other. Can you tell which? Now, I'm a twin myself, of the "fraternal" variety, which means there were two eggs fertilized at the same time. We're brother and sister and just happened to be born within an hour of each other. Identical twins and other one-egg sourced tuples are clones, physical duplicates that grew to maturity.

Yes, Virginia, identical twin = clone.

This seems to be the thing that trips people up when they think about cloning, especially in this flick. The thing is, they're not really thinking about cloning bodies, they're thinking about making copies of a single human consciousness. That's what the characters in the movie argue about. That's not the same thing as cloning.

So, in this film, AS's character's dog dies, and his wife tries to get him to have the pet replaced via cloning -- copying, more precisely -- to spare their daughter the pain of the animal's loss. He bleats around that he doesn't want some soulless "thing" in his house, and provides the excellent argument that their daughter has to learn about death, and it being a natural part of life and all that.

Now, the magic step here in the movie is the completely-glossed-over ability to copy the animal's consciousness and implant it in a new, cloned body. And that's where the "soulless" bleating comes in. It isn't the copying of the animal's genetic material and growing of a new animal from that material that is a problem, it's the copying of the animal's mind.

If you make a copy of a cell, you haven't done anything more than make a copy of that cell. Using existing methods (dividing a cell in mom's womb), you can divide a fertilized human ovum into two ova, and come up with two separate people roughly nine months later. We know this from experience. Two. Separate. People. If you happen to believe that people have souls, then most likely you believe that identical twins are in possession of one soul each. Not that one twin has a soul and the other doesn't. How is it any different, then, to have the cell-division into 2 or more ova occur in a petrie dish instead of a human womb?

So, if you can sit there and assert that if I have a egg of matching genetic material to myself constructed mechanistically, nurture it in my mother's womb, and let her give birth to a new individual with the same genetic material as me -- birthing my identical twin, umpteen years later -- that this new individual cannot have a soul, than you cannot ooh and aaah over the next set of insane-number-tuplets in Kansas somewhere, and say "don't their souls look so cute!" Because it's the same act, just separated by time. My identical twin, separated by 30 years or born 5 minutes after me, is her own person.

The arguments regarding cloning in "The Sixth Day" are misleading, or more properly, misstated. They're about copying human consciousness, not genetic material. If you can point a machine at my eyes and record everything in my mind, then you've made a copy of me. (In the process, you've also suggested I don't have a soul in the Western sense, that I no longer have a unique, indefinable something, because it's been copied. Oh, and we haven't even touched on the other magic process in this film, the one by which my twin-separated-in-time can develop to physical maturity and not, like every other identical twin, have accumulated her own self-awareness and consciousness.)

Ahhhnuld's character in "The Sixth Day", of course, gets embroiled in a plot and winds up, unbeknownst to him, copied. The copy process involves a clone with a copy of his consciousness, i.e., an exact duplicate of the main character. Who is the "real", and who is the duplicate? It's the fact that there's a duplicate that is a problem, not the fact that a body of the same genetic material exists. I mean, that's just a twin. People have those all the time.

Paraphrased Thought For The Day

If you were doing it right, you wouldn't need to worry about size.


paraphrased from memory, courtesy of Ava Chin's "Jook Sing and The Dragon", in Dick For A Day

Thought On Iraq

Salman Rushdie has things to say, and say well. Go read it.

This I agree with. This expresses my ambivalence about Iraq, my pro-regime-change stance, my anti-unilateral-US-action stance.

I don't want war, as a rule. War is an atrocity by itself, that turns living, thinking human beings into "others", preparatory to trying to convince you that it's OK to kill them. And yet, violence, well-applied, can also do more good than harm under the right conditions.

I don't want the US to wage war, on Iraq, because of allegations -- allegations -- of terrorist connections. What I want is for the global community to follow through all the way to "force as necessary" to apply its resolutions. What I want, is a US-supported war of liberation in Iraq. Either one of those are reasons that could make me proud of our action.

If we go to war with Iraq, what will it be for? What will be our stated mission? By what meterstick do we measure success or failure? When will we know it's over? As Rushdie points out, war on Iraq is not the same thing as war on al Qaeda, and the whole shift in attention from Afghanistan to Iraq sure does feel like someone changing the subject.