Category: DNA

Mom’s day 2015

I suppose I should wish a Happy Mother’s Day to all of us who bore the pangs of motherhood (or got drugs, or whatever).  This year the media emphasis seems to be on the shadow mother – the narcissist, the abuser, the drunk, the enabler, the critic, the destroyer of hopes, the ‘where is the other 1 %’ when you brought home a nearly perfect score (my fOlks only did this to me once and I could tell they were joking, thank my native wit), the flirt (or outright lecher), the “fetch me my pills” mom, the wiped out by chronic illness mom, the woman who never complains about anything but dashes herself against maternal martyrdom and a husband or partner who grinds her into pieces, the mom with no boundaries, no common sense, no decency, no good moods, no good habits, who’s so full of superstition and fear and anger and bitterness and ill health and fear of germs and hypocrisy and materialism that she wrecks all the little lives she births, and every single one of those children must pupate and transform under someone else’s eye, or perforce on their own, with varying degrees of success.

True maternal love is efficient.  It doesn’t snag on the flaws of the mother, but on the needs of the child.

Yeah, thinking about motherhood.  Thinking about Kima. And Pat Murphy’s The Falling Woman.

1.8 hours on the ‘pap last night.  My eyes are still refusing to completely unstick and open. No words yesterday. I am still in a very strange mood, not bleak but blank.

I am very happy with my new dental work now that it has settled in.  Paul’s predicting that the ceramic crown won’t last too long, but I’m feeling positive.

The CT scan was so trivial I hardly wanted to mention it.  I get results at the end of the month.

Tomorrow Paul and I and the kids (unless Paul stays down south because the flying is awesome) get together for an ‘after everything has gone on sale’ Mother’s Day. We’ll be potlucking at Planet Bachelor.

Keith complained to me last night.  I won’t be specific.  I will say “Oh my sweet summer child. The human heart is complicated no matter your affectional preferences!”

Colonialism rant

The crowning achievement of colonialism is how it has tapped into the human genome to recycle itself. The finely woven threads, the self-repairing structures of racism and sexism, fear of the other, the urge to destroy that which is experienced as diseased and loathsome, they all belong to colonialism, which I am now going to conflate with the human tendency to devalue other human beings based on feelings of disgust rather than facts. Now science brings us the truth behind the experience of conservatism, that it is based in physical disgust.

This disgust results in things as various as the relentless offering of young men to death in warfare, and old men fighting against young women guarding their fertility as they see fit in consequence. Generation after generation of old powerful men, in whatever culture and of whatever colour, offer young men into the maw of war and conquest, having dragged them from their parents’ arms and essentially from the mother’s womb. Kind people on the sidelines weep with loss as this happens generation after generation.

I have been struggling all my life with this fundamental flaw in human nature, the place where the sociability of human beings, which is quite remarkable, breaks down. Now I see it. It is in the rock-crusher of our capacity to feel deep, emotional, physical disgust that we are broken into pieces and fed into colonialism. It seems circular, and it is. There is a constant value, circulating in the human genome, of persons who feel disgust more readily, inbuilt and coiled in every cell. They will, being of a certain neurotype, congregate, and then they will amass resources and make of their disgust a common, noble reason to make war on anybody on the outside of the group.

Jesus God.

22 ways rapists hurt men

  1. They reduce the number of women interested in sex.  Then they blame women for not being available.  They drag you along for that ride.
  2. They damage women physically and sometimes give them long term health problems which your taxes help pay to ameliorate.
  3. They spread diseases.
  4. They make men who don’t rape look bad by association.
  5. They use men who don’t rape as camouflage.
  6. They can sometimes leave psychological damage resulting in some women have a hard time being open and honest about their sexuality.  Some women vomit, cry or go limp during consensual sex because they’ve been raped.  If they won’t tell you why, it can leave you devastated about your own sexuality.
  7. They are convinced that women deserve to be raped, and con younger men who look up to them into believing the same thing. That younger man could be you, your brother, your son.
  8. They mess with your reality, your life, your future and your trust by raping women you love and continuing to be your ‘friend’. THIS HAPPENS WAY MORE THAN MEN REALIZE.
  9. They are the men who invented the friendzone, and try to convince you that the way out of the friendzone is rape.
  10. They tell women you love that no-one will believe them as they rape them, with the end result that the women you love will lie to you about what’s happened to them, by omission.
  11. They hurt people and spread the blame across all men.
  12. They expect you to stick up for them if they are caught.
  13. They trick you into agreeing if they say she deserved it, so you can be reduced to their level of selfishness.
  14. They gloss over how much of rape is rape PLUS child abuse PLUS mental cruelty PLUS messing over the reproductive futures of the women they rape, and possibly, as a consequence, you.
  15. They honestly believe that what they are doing is merely ‘having sex’, ‘getting laid’; their inability to feel remorse or consequences mars the relationships between and among men.
  16. They prop up the notion that sex is something women have that men want, rather than sex being a continuum of desire / consent / ability / availability.
  17. They misuse science to prop up their belief systems and turn up the volume when they are repeatedly proven wrong, to the point that any evidence that rape is not a ‘natural state of affairs’ gets shouted down.
  18. They turn men who don’t rape into faceless villains.  It’s hard to be the hero in your own life when you’re the bad guy in literally thousands of other lives.
  19. They kill the ability to be sexually spontaneous in some women, one of whom may end up being your partner.
  20. They rape your sisters, daughters, mothers and friends.
  21. They kill discourse by threatening rape to women who say things that irritate or refute them.
  22. They make it possible for human trafficking for sexual slavery to occur by making rape part of the breaking in process, hurting every close family member of the victim.

Eric Idle has put new words to the Galaxy song

Herewith transcribed from the Beeb home site

 

Just remember you’re a tiny little person on a planet
In a universe expanding and immense
But life began evolving and resolving and dissolving
in the deep primordial oceans by the hydrothermal vents
Our earth which had its birth almost 5 billion years ago
from out of a collapsing cloud of gas
through life which is quite new and eventually led to you
in only 3.5 billion years or less
Deoxyribonucleic acid helps us replicate
and randomly mutate from day to day
we left the seas and climbed the trees
and our biology’s
continued to evolve through DNA
We’re 98.9 percent the same as chimpanzees
whose trees we left three million years ago
to wander swapping genes out of Africa which means
we’re related to everyone we know ( spoken: “o ‘ello luv!”)
Life is quite strange
Life is quite weird
Life is really quite odd
Life from a star is far more bizarre
than an old bearded bloke they call God
So gaze at the sky and start asking why
you’re even here on this ball
for though life is fraught, the odds are so short
You’re lucky to be here at all!

And every word of it is true

I am Allegra Sloman, and I subscribe to this management decision.

An extremely rare kitty photo for Jeff.

Glenn Close has her genome mapped.

Snails are gonna eat Florida.  Here’s a pic of and article about the critter in question.

When is a species extinct?  You’d think it’s a dopey question, but apparently it is not.

Aggressively massaging its books. Great expression for part of what preceded the collapse of Lehman.  And since there’s been no meaningful regulatory reform, it could all happen again, how very cyclical.

Yes, that Nascar crash was no accident.  To keep ratings high, the Nascar management is encouraging it.  Hope nobody dies.

Yesterday I made spare ribs, and that, candidly is about it.  I hope to have a marginally more productive day today.

I thought today was Pi Day, but apparently there’s some dispute about that.