July 2006 Archives

Or we're all totally screwed.

The vast Amazon rainforest is on the brink of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate, alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year.

Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.

Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable.

Or rather, why you can only trust Wikipedia's information so much...

I'm pretty sure this is NOT the true story of the origin of Hezbollah. (Emphasis mine)

Hezbollah began as a group of homosexual muslims. They regularly met to discuss the lack of rights for gay muslims and shared recipes. Scholars differ as to when Hezbollah came to be a distinct entity. Some organizations list the official formation of the group as early as 1982 [27] whereas Diaz and Newman maintain that Hezbollah remained an amalgamation of various violent Shi’a extremists until as late as 1985 [28]. Regardless of when the name came into official use, a number of Shi’a groups were slowly assimilated into the organization, such as Islamic Jihad, Organization of the Oppressed on Earth and the Revolutionary Justice Organization [citation needed]. These designations are considered to be synonymous with Hezbollah by the US,[29] Israel[30] and Canada[31]

No doubt it will get fixed soonish, but still...

That pregnant woman who was one of the people shot at the JCF in Seattle? Very impressive individual.

According to Brendan Kiley’s report from this afternoon’s press conference, the pregnant woman who was shot at the Jewish Federation in Belltown yesterday, Dayna Klein, 37, prevented the attack from being even worse—she not only saved her baby, but ended the shooting rampage.

Prepare yourself for this story, it’s stunning. It also alters the story that had emerged to date.

The Federation is reportedly a “highly secured” building with bullet proof glass, cameras, and a locked front door. Haq hid behind a large potted plant by the entrance. When a young teenager came to the entrance he emerged from hiding, put a gun to her head, and got her to let him in the building. Kerlikowske did not know how the teen got away, but once Haq was inside he started shooting. He was armed with two semiautomatic pistols, .40 and .45 caliber guns. He also had “substantial” extra ammunition. Kerlikowske said the guns were purchased legally from two guns shops in the Tri-Cities area, with the proper waiting period (roughly ten days). They were picked up on July 27, the day before the shooting.

Contrary to previous reports, Haq told his victims not to call 911. When Klein came into Haq’s sights, she put her arm over her abdomen to protect her baby and Haq fired at her, wounding her in the arm.

Klein then dragged herself into her office and called 911. Kerlikowske said there were approximately 18 people in the building, 17 of them female. Victims were jumping out of the second-story windows, running down the halls, and hiding in broom closets.

Haq, hunting down more victims, found Klein on the phone. He told her to get off the phone. She did not. She then coaxed Haq to get on the phone with the 911 officers.

Kerlikowske reports that during the 911 call Haq “was so enraged at first.” He told the 911 officers he wanted the U.S to leave Iraq, that his people were being mistreated, and that the US was arming Israel.

Kerlikowske added that Haq: “pointedly blamed Jewish people for all of these things.”

“I don’t care if I live,” Haq said to the officers. Kerlkowske said “it was clear he was losing the rampage that drove him to do what he did.”

The 911 officers convinced him to lay down his guns, put his hands on his head, and exit the building, where he was arrested without a fight.

'I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel' /
Six shot, one killed at Seattle Jewish Federation

On the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, a man claiming he was upset about "what was going on in Israel" opened fire at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building, killing one person and wounding five women, one of them pregnant.

I had the displeasure of a very strange encounter in the BART station this morning.

First of all, I used to try to walk up the stairs in BART. Now that I'm in my 8th month of pregnancy, two very long flights of stairs is pretty daunting. So I take the escalator, but because I'm 1) still trying to get SOME exercise and 2) usually in a hurry, I walk up the escalator steps when I do so. Seems normal, right? Well...

As I was getting off BART in the city and walking towards the escalator, a man came up alongside me who seemed 1) in a hurry and 2) grouchy (he was muttering to himself under his breath, but not in a crazy way), so I instinctively let him get onto the escalator ahead of me. He was a heavyset black man with dreadlocks wearing jogging pants and a sweatshirt — seemed fairly normal.

Big mistake.

You know how you're supposed to stand on the right side of the escalator and walk on the left? This fellow stepped onto the left side and stopped dead in his tracks. Since the right side was full of people, I had no way to get around him.

So I said politely, "Excuse me, can I get by you?"

Now, lots of people stand on the left (even though they shouldn't) because they just don't know the rules. If you ask to get by them, 99 times out of 100, they'll oblige.

Not this guy. He started arguing with me instead! "Well, you should have taken the stairs if you wanted to walk up!"

I said in a louder, somewhat-less-polite-I'm-sure voice, "Excuse me, I'm pregnant. Can I please get by you?"

He still didn't move, but somebody else did, so I walked around him and up. Meanwhile, grouchy guy is talking louder. "You should have thought about it before you got on the escalator. Why didn't you take the stairs!??!"

"None of your business!" I yelled back and kept walking. He kept grumbling something I thankfully couldn't hear by that point.

When I got to the top, I yelled again, "What a gentleman!" (Sadly, or perhaps luckily, I didn't add, "I bet you really charm all the ladies with that attitude!")

I know I shouldn't let that stuff get to me, and most people are really nice about me being pregnant, but that, added to the large number of seated people who pretend I'm not there when I get onto a crowded train, really makes me think about how hostile our culture can be pregnant women.

Wait until I have a screaming child! Then the fun will really begin!

Ah, another one of those "on the one hand, thousands of scientists say global warming is happening now, on the other hand, this handful of crackpots say it's not!" news stories we all love so much...

How's this for the most lame-ass argument ever?

O'Brien criticized colleagues who he thinks are too quick to link short-term and long-term weather. He recalled that in 1988, "we had a big Midwest heat wave ... which (NASA scientist) Jim Hansen told the U.S. Senate was due to global warming." Instead, O'Brien said, the heat wave was caused by high sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.

Likewise, he said, during another recent heat wave, "they said that many people died in Chicago due to this global warming. In fact, it was due to old, poor people not being advised about (how to survive) the heat wave."

Erm... last I heard, global warming could cause surface temperatures of the seas to rise. And — am I understanding this right? Is he saying that if old poor people had gotten better advice, the heat wave wouldn't have happened? He's not saying anything about the cause of the heat wave! He is employing a straw man to avoid actually saying anything with facts in it.

When Florida sinks beneath the ocean waves, I'm gonna laugh so hard. At least in the 20 minutes before the Bay Area does the same thing.

Oh, and Chronicle? "Scientists split on heat wave cause" implies that half of the scientists think one thing, and half think something else. When you split something, it tends to be in half. Down the middle. This is NOT a 50-50 split. Only lame-asses like this joker from Florida are still making a case against global warming, and they're not making a very good one.

Following on from my previous rant, I wanted to talk about the other topic that's been on my mind — this idea that a potential child IS a child. You hear about this a lot from the pro-life movement. Abortion is killing a baby, etc., etc. You're even starting to hear the same thing about birth control. Where does this come from?

I have a theory, now backed up with experience, at least partially. Humans tend to project into the future. You get a job, you wonder where it will lead you. You meet a cute guy or girl, you wonder what it would be like to kiss him or her. After a couple of dates that seem to have gone really well, you may start picturing a lifetime with that new person whom you barely know. If a new relationship crashes and burns, you mourn the loss of your future together.

And (this is where my experience kicks in) when you get pregnant, your brain starts racing. You imagine what the baby is going to be like, and then what the toddler after the baby is going to be like, and what preschool will you send your child to, and, oh dear, public or private school? And so on and so forth.

So projecting into the future can be a good thing. While it's easy to get ahead of yourself, on the other hand, you shouldn't just plan on having a cute little baby, an attractive accessory you can play dress-up with. That baby is going to change and g-d willing, grow up, and you have to change along with him or her. Anticipating and accepting change is healthy.

But it seems that some of us get stuck. We project into the future — but only to infancy. So every pregnancy, every embryo is a baby — but ONLY a baby. (So you don't have to worrry about funding schools, or after-school activities, or worrying about them after that point. By the time they're teenagers, they'll be irredeemable sinners anyway.)

The other thing I want to say is that now that I've been pregnant myself, it really seems to me that growing another human is a gradual process. At the beginning, it was like there was an alien growth in there, but I couldn't see it or feel it — it wasn't real. Now, at seven-plus months, there's something squirming and hiccuping inside of me, occasionally stretching out and making a bump appear on my abdomen that I recognize as a foot. I lay down on my right side last night, and I swear she started kicking furiously to get me to move. I do think of her as a baby now.

But there was an earlier time when I didn't. A potential baby, sure, but I also knew that miscarriages in the first few weeks or months are fairly common, and that there was a risk of the fetus having problems. A lot has to go right between conception and birth.

I've been lucky in my life — I was never faced with the need to decide whether or not to have an abortion, because I never got pregnant before I was ready. And in this pregnancy, my tests came back OK, so I didn't have to make any hard choices this time either. But I am the product of decent schools with excellent sex education classes, and more importantly, of parents who didn't make me feel like sex was a dirty horrible thing. From a fairly young age, I had access to books, and later on, magazines (you can learn a lot from Cosmopolitan!) But a lot of women aren't so lucky.

I've had an essay slowly brewing in my head for a while, and I was reminded of it this week when President Bush vetoed the stem cell bill and then held a nauseating ceremony about it, featuring a bunch of "snowflake children" and their "adoptive" parents. "This bill would support the taking of innocent human life," declared the Dubya. (Uh, ya think maybe some of the people who've died in Iraq lately might be innocent?)

O.K., then. First of all, Dubya may not be so familiar with the poor success rate of implanted blastocysts. I wasn't either, but this blogger is, and she helpfully does the math, and between the fact that frozen doesn't take as well as fresh, and various other factors, "you'll be lucky to end up with even half a kid."

Secondly, I'm sure those children are terribly precious little moppets (oh, is that an attack of nausea coming on? Well, I am pregnant! Bring me a bucket!) but... well, they're here now. They look like they have lots more cells than an 8-celled blastocyst. Look, what I'm trying to say is, I don't think blastocysts are children. So when Bush says stuff like this:

“Each of these human embryos is a unique human life with inherent dignity and matchless value,” Mr. Bush said. Looking at the children around him, he said to loud applause, “These boys and girls are not spare parts.”

He's being emotional manipulative and full of shit. OF COURSE THE CHILDREN AREN'T SPARE PARTS. THEY'RE CHILDREN. What does that have to do with anything?

Meanwhile, as we keep hearing, blastocysts get discarded by fertility clinics all the time. They're never going to become "unique human" lives, their "inherent dignity and matchless value" is lost because they can't be used for research that could end up saving the lives of countless children (and adults, though nobody seems to care about that.)

Sure, treatments may not come soon, but this woman makes a convincing case that her son died as a result of these kinds of bans.

From the moment of Henry's diagnosis, my husband and I believed that if we made every call, pulled every string and pushed love and science to their outer limits, Henry would escape his fate. We searched for someone in the medical world who, like us, was unwilling to accept Henry's death sentence without a fight.

Our search led us to Mark Hughes, then chief of reproductive and prenatal genetics at the National Institutes of Health. He had figured out a way to combine in vitro fertilization with genetic testing before an embryo is implanted. This procedure, preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), involves extracting and testing a single cell from an eight-cell embryo. The results could allow us to know at the moment of conception that our next baby would avoid FA and be an ideal stem cell donor for Henry.

By collecting this healthy baby's umbilical cord blood -- which is typically discarded -- at birth and transplanting the stem cells into Henry, we could save him. Hughes had used PGD to screen embryos for fatal childhood diseases such as cystic fibrosis. But neither he nor anyone else had ever used PGD to save the life of a child already born.

When we began quietly pursuing PGD a decade ago, it was not on the national news or featured in fertility clinic advertisements. It was somewhere between a hope and a dream shared by a small group of doctors and families. But on Jan. 9, 1997, an article in The Washington Post reported that Hughes was violating a two-year-old federal ban on human embryo research with his work on PGD.

Under the ban, Hughes was barred from performing that work as part of his position at NIH. Refusing to abandon his research or the families who were depending on it, he set up a lab as part of an in vitro fertility program at a private hospital across the street in Bethesda. But he was considered in violation of the federal law because his work at the hospital employed NIH research fellows and used NIH equipment -- a refrigerator.

So living children get to die of diseases that can't be researched properly, or they're dragged onto a stage for a cynical exercise to showcase the president's reverence for the "culture of life."

Excuse me, I'm feeling nauseous again for some reason...

Donut peaches are good! I've been having trouble finding really flavorful peaches so far, but I bought a few of these funny squished-looking fruits a few days ago. Great flavor, small and easily removed pit. Who knew?

Spam received today:

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You had me at "penis coal with relevant saturate Jewish test tube".

This remix of hapless Senator Ted Stevens explaining that the Internet "Is A Series of TUBES!" cracked me up. And I'd just found out that you can make your own ringtones with iTunes and put them on your Treo 650.

So I did it!* And now whenever my phone rings, instead of the normal boooring tones, I will hear "{screech} — it's a series of TUBES!... {screech} — it's a series of TUBES!" I will be the envy of all my peers. Or they'll just think I'm really weird. Yeah, the latter is more likely.



*For those who care: I took the original remix song, opened it in iTunes, picked a small section of it to use as the ringtone, set the starting and ending points (which you can do in File -> Get Info -> Options), went into advanced preferences, changed the settings so songs are now imported as WAV files (must remember to change it back!) and converted a copy of the song. Then I uploaded it to a website, and then loaded it onto my phone by going to the file location with my phone's browser. It gave me the option of saving the file into "Sounds", and now it's a ringtone I can choose from the menu. And it actually took longer to write about it than it took to do it.

I live near a wonderful grocery store. Independent, locally owned, great, friendly employees, good selection, and I don't have to drive to get there. One fly in the ointment: the prices on produce are, shall we say, a mite steep. Organic nectarines were $5.39 a pound the other day. They sell mache for $5-something a bag. Ouch.

So I did something different: I got in my car, headed southeast on 580, and got off on Fruitvale. My destination: the new Farmer Joe's Marketplace. I had heard about the original Farmer Joe's for years, but inertia kept me shopping closer to home (or at Trader Joe's.)

My verdict: easy to get to, pleasant store, good produce selection, and MUCH better prices. Small avocados: four for a dollar (and not all that small, either.) Organic plums: $1.69/pound. That bag of mache? $1.89 for a bag (and that's before the 35-cent coupon was applied to it!)

Non-produce items, however, were about the same price as at Piedmont Grocery. Annalisa beans (Italian, come in glass jars instead of cans) were $1.29 a jar at Farmer Joe's as opposed to $1.25 at Piedmont. Plus, they didn't have the strange veggie bacon from Morningstar Farms which I've become addicted to (don't ask.)

Anyway, I'm sure I'll still end up going to Piedmont Grocery (no driving!) but for stocking up on fruits and veggies, I'm hitting the highway.

The other night we went to watch fireworks in Moraga. The fireworks were part of an all-day Fourth-of-July family festival organized by the town. According to their website, the headlining entertainment in the park there that day was a group called "Larry Lynch and the Mob." (No, I didn't get to hear them — we watched the fireworks from a nearby shopping mall parking lot.)

Today I was walking to BART. A church on the corner of Telegraph and 41st had a banner up advertising a special event featuring a travelling preacher whose nickname is "the One-Armed Bandit."

And I believe I've already mentioned the email I got from a maternity clothing company advertising their "Maternity Blowout Sale."

Yeeeeeeeesh....

"Putin says kissing boy's stomach was like stroking a cat", from the London Times.

Wah?

There's a guy a few blocks away in front of one of the big buildings in downtown San Francisco. You can hear him hundreds of yards away yelling what at first sounds like, "Ay-eh-eh — uh-FAH!" over and over and over and over and over and over. He has a very flat and annoying voice. He's actually apparently saying, "ABM UNFAIR!" but I had to peek at the sign he was carrying to figure that out.

Guys? You might want to find a better voice for your pickets? Otherwise, your point is being lost (and after listening to him for an hour, I'm beginning to feel strangely sympathetic towards ABM, whoever they are.)