Santa died for your Mastercard

And, on a somewhat lighter note, those crazy West Coast fruitbars really know how to ring in the holiday season. Since we’re in… well, not exactly a recession, but perhaps a gentle downturn in the world markets with the possibility of DOOOM, DOOOM I SAY! (Sorry bout that), I thought I might post a little incentive to get people to file those returns early and take those kiddies to Disney World instead of paying of their debt.

Well, no, I don’t really mean that. Pay off the debt first, ya morons. You’re the reason the market is shaky.

In the meantime, for all you responsible borrowers and spenders out there, remember His Love for you as you head out to the mall to cleanup on the sales in mid-February. Santa may not be around anymore, but if He was, He would have wanted you to buy chocolate.

Good times.

And, if that wasn’t enough fun with blasphemy, I’ve added a new link to the blog roll, from Normal Bob Smith. I love that guy.

Economy, war, Brittanywatch, economy, war, dems fighting, etc…

Something to break up the newsday a bit here. It seems like nobody in the media is talking about abortion at the moment, so as a public service announcement, I figured I’d toss up a useful guidebook to anyone who might find themselves needing to know the facts about abortion. Or who might be in need of a good laugh, albeit a somewhat grim one.

Kem’s Guide to Having an Abortion

1. Abortion is a more civil form of population control. If you are positively commited to being a good parent, and you know you have both the drive and the ability to see it through, go for it. More power to you. If you can’t, then do everyone a favor, and don’t. Have the good sense to use birth control as a far, far better option, but don’t be afraid to abort a mistake.

2. If you think you have what it takes, but don’t have sufficient funds (i.e., your decision to raise a child will mean living off of government funds, no matter which way you slice your budget), think very, very hard about your decision. Make sure you have a support network that doesn’t involve prostitution, stripping, drug dealing, pimping, gambling, or any combination of the above. Make sure you can make it, and you won’t wind up on the street with your child. Have a plan.

3. If you’ve done the math (and trust me when I say that not everyone can), and found that it’s possible to have a child and stay out of debt, and are determined to make it, then go to it. Otherwise, abort the baby. If you aren’t able to do the math and set goals to get yourself to where you want to be– honestly, what kind of a parent/role model will you be?

4. Adoption is always an option; but the number of children who need good homes so far exceeds the number of families who are willing and able to provide for them as to make the option of having a child just so your newborn baby can be adopted… cruel. Realize that your cute healthy white baby will always win over the starving Malaysian three-year-old.

5. Consider the family that may be formed if you decide to keep the baby, and make damned sure you won’t be condemning yourself and your baby to a day-to-day existence that belongs on an episode of Jerry Springer. Think very hard about whether or not you would like to look at yourself in the mirror 10 years down the road if your life belonged on Jerry Springer.

And a final comment, in case my opinion on this isn’t absolutely crystal clear: it’s absolutely horrifying to me that a state will tell a young woman who could not possibly afford to have a child that she must pay something well beyond her means to end a pregnancy– but they’ll pay the shot and put her on wellfare if she has the kid. Just yuck. That’s a horrifying policy from an economic standpoint.

Save the Redheads: An Argument for Eugenics in the Global Village

Okay, so I’ll admit… this isn’t actually a blog post so much as it is an opportunity to show off the fruits of my labor. The following .doc was brought to you courtesy of my genetics course, which required a helluva long paper for a 100 level course. That’s alright. If there’s one thing I can do, it’s ramble.

For those interested in the rhetorically juicy parts, just skip to the last three paragraphs. In the event of a real blog post, those would have been it. This concludes my test of the paper uploading network. Anyone caught attempting to pass this work off as their own will be caught and tortured in concordance with my own personal ethics when it comes to those sorts of things, which I can only promise are brutal. So don’t try it, ‘k?

Enjoy!

[deleted because I'm capricious and cruel like that]

Fun with fertility options

Had some interesting issues to toss around in my genetics class this week dealing with some of the more creative ways that people are going about making babies nowadays. First up on the chopping block was the question of whether or not it’s ethical for the widow of a soldier who has fallen in combat to use a sperm bank to have the baby that she always wanted to have with her husband, but never got a chance to. Sperm banks are, apparently, completely unregulated. “Successful” births don’t necessarily mean that the baby survived. Further complication: is the child eligible for benefits if the widow chooses to have a child with her, well, for lack of a better description, dead husband? We’ll assume for the moment that the necessary deposit was made for postmortem family planning ahead of time. A similar case did actually go before the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1995, and the SSA’s original refusal to provide benefits to the wife was reversed by the courts.

Against all of my instinctive objections to bringing new life into the world and then relying on federal aid to support that child, I’m going to have to say that I side with the rights of the widow on this one. It’s a responsible decision to wait until the family unit is stable to have kids, and without that “security measure”, I’m concerned that young couples might (read: do) choose to conceive right before deployment (or while home on leave), when the time really isn’t right for it. Best to wait until after the hoped for safe return of the spouse, and plan the pregnancy afterwards. I do think that it’s reasonable to demand significantly higher insurance premiums from the would-be parents who take advantage of this technology, though. Compared with the costs of raising a child, the increase in premiums would be small… but it would help pay into the system if their children did come up with birth defects. Microarray analysis on the children could be performed at the parent’s will, to see if they might qualify for a reduction in premiums after the child is born. There would have to be a rider on this stating that the insurance companies would not be allowed to raise the rates if this test turned up with issues tied to the process, though.

Some other bioethical issues tied to sperm banks and various means of tweaking the process of conception brought up were whether or not sperm would be used for monetary gain. Interesting issue….

Let’s say I’m Murphy Brown, and I want to have a child who has a solid genetic background, but I haven’t been able to find a donor who I feel is capable of providing that. Is it necessarily wrong for me to pay extra for gametes from a Nobel Laureate? I don’t think so. Smart kids rock, and raising them is fun.

And the final issue that we covered was ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection), which is used in situations where the father would like to pass on his gametes, but take a pass on giving the baby AIDS. (It’s also a way for couples who are fighting low sperm counts to cheat the system, because it bypasses the gauntlet course the boys typically have to run through.) I’ll leave out all the fun details about disruption of the meiotic spindle and nondisjunction (in English: risk of Down’s Syndrome and other bad things that happen when chromosomes don’t act the way they should) and simply say that the risk of birth defects with this technology is surprisingly just about the same as the risk of birth defects in a normal conception– with one exception. Microdeletion on the Y chromosome (a problem for about 10% of infertile males) can cause male children to turn up infertile later in life.

I realize that infertility is devastating to people who really want to have a child, but it’s something that occurs naturally as well. Given the choice of having a baby with AIDS or a baby that can’t have babies when he grows up, I’m thinking that the choice is remarkably simple. It’s also possible that the child could wind up having no problems whatsoever. Another solution (and one that genetic counselors actually recommend) is to go for the sperm that carry the X instead of the Y. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but two X’s are better than one X and a potentially faulty Y.

In any case, we can predict, but we can’t guarantee. Life is annoying like that. I really don’t have a problem with this technology being used, and I think that the lessons we learn from studying it far outweigh the risks that parents take in using it. I would, of course, prefer that they choose to adopt– but if they insist on doing it the “old fashioned way”, I’m willing to support them. <Insert standard disclaimer about increased cost of health insurance and mandatory microarray analysis at birth in order to secure a reduction in the premium here.>

I guess a final note that I would add is that parents who choose to use fertility treatments shouldn’t foreclose on this option. There are plenty of ways to be important in the life of a child that don’t involve actually having children of your own. I wish that our species as a whole would start looking at this as a possible solution to some of the more pressing problems in our global community instead of assuming that the “right” to be a parent is something that everyone should want to exercise.

I wouldn’t change my mind about my decision to have my daughter if I went back in time and had it to do over again, but I’m certain that there are people on this planet who had children thinking that this was the road to happiness, and found that it wasn’t. This, to me, is a profound tragedy, and it’s one that our society as a whole doesn’t deal with all that well.

Anti-war protests and tax dollars

A little background first… (link)

SOLIDARITY APPEAL: Defend Tukwila Teachers Threatened with Termination for Antiwar Student Walkout

Nov 26, 2007
By Tukwila Teachers and Students Solidarity Committee

*Urgent Call for Solidarity*
Defend Teachers Threatened With Termination for Antiwar Student Walkout
BRIEF BACKGROUND:
On November 16th, over 1,000 students in Washington State walked out to protest the war in Iraq and the presence of military recruiters in public schools. Students at Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington organized and 150 walked out, saying “Money for Schools, Not War.”

Foster students rallied at the school flagpole, marched down to the I-5 overpass, and then marched to the Tukwila City Hall. The march and rally were student generated and entirely peaceful.

In reaction the Tukwila School District has done the following:

• Suspended one Social Studies teacher, Brett Rogers, who supported his students in a student generated democratic movement
• Threatened administrative action against five other teachers
• Threatened to discipline students for exercising their First Amendment Right to free speech

And now for a good-old-fashioned rant. Regardless of your position on the Iraq war, I think everyone can agree that high schoolers taking an interest in politics is good. I think we can also agree that educators, particularly educators who teach subjects like… say… social studies should be encouraging their students to form opinions and be passionate about them. Apathy is the greatest enemy of Democracy, and it reigns supreme in our high schools.

So, at a time in my life when I’m feeling personally just a wee bit frustrated by the system, I get a link from a friend of mine who teaches in the Seattle area, and it frankly pisses me off (the teachers involved are his friends from his old school, and he’s not the sort of guy to keep his mouth shut in the face of stupidity– but it would still piss me off even if I had no emotional connection to anyone involved). I remember when L.A. was burning in the wake of the Rodney King trial. Many of us wanted to walk out in support for all of the people who had ever been wrongfully beaten down by the system, whose pleas for a revision in the way that justice is carried out were met with a deafening silence. I remember how mad I was. I suspect that kids today, many of them with fathers and mothers who are out on extended tours, have already come home in a casket, or (more common, certainly) have come home missing crucial parts of their psyche, their body, or c) all of the above, have very strong feelings about Iraq. At least I hope they do, goddamnit. I know I would if I were that age today.

One day, folks. We’re not talking about a massive campaign to shut down the school, we’re talking about one day’s worth of our tax dollars going to help our kids understand that their voices count… that their enthusiasm and desire to make a difference are contagious and important.

If you feel the same way about this, I’d encourage you to drop a line to the school administrators and defend these kids’ right to learn something important about civil disobedience. “We don’t want to hear you, and we don’t want you to teach kids that they should be heard” simply isn’t the message that I feel we should be paying taxes to promote.

Thanksgiving, the root of all passion

I spent a long train ride home today thinking about how grateful I am for the good things in my life, and how I choose to give back what has been given to me. Typical holiday thoughts brought on by the not so typical start to a Thanksgiving Day (Grandma going on dialysis for kidney failure) and a trip down memory lane, courtesy of my step-dad (once removed by divorce, but always a pillar in my life for his gentle courage and wry wit). We didn’t have to take a detour through my old neighborhood… I had my nose buried in my textbooks, and didn’t even notice that we had pulled up to the apartments where I spent the years 3-6 at, living with my single mom who struggled to get by and still provide a good childhood for me in spite of our poverty. So, of course, I took some pictures. The tree-lined street was like an old friend, with many happy childhood memories of being on the back of the bicycle with the sun shining down through the leaves on the way home.

Oak Park and Downtown Chicago, 2007

It’s odd thinking back to the way the world looked when you were 6. Everything was a possibility, something that you might do someday when you were big enough to finally do things. The world was full of demands, but there was a promise in every sunset– an awareness that life is beautiful.

It’s so easy to lose that in the day-to-day chaos that makes up Life in these United States. You need a sense of humor about the whole circus to stay sane… but I wonder if sometimes the ironic defensive crust that we all develop as life knocks us around is actually less productive than that simple childhood wonder about where you will be five years from now. There’s something to be said for sitting still and feeling the sun on your face and being very much alive, unafraid of what the future holds, completely open to what the moment has to offer and simply happy to be there to experience it.

Giving 110% of everything you have in you to the goal of having a fantastic life, and making it as rich as possible in every way…

Now there’s something to be thankful about.

If I had a hammer…

I’d a hammer out justice. Instead, I’m studying up on divorce law so I can come to the table well prepared. I listen to my dad talk about COBRA protection and what not as if he’s done this all before (which, of course, he has… 3 times), and I realize that I need to know a lot more about divorce before I explain why these terms are well within my rights. Now, in my completely unbiased opinion, whatever I bring to the table should be signed. But in the real world, I recognize that there may be a bit of a negotiating process. That’s alright. I’m tough, but I have to know what the hell I’m talking about. I like my in-laws. They’re good people. We both want what’s best for their son and their granddaughter–but there’s something inherently wrong with the fact that I’m actually divorcing the in-laws, not my husband. Yeesh.

Papers are all drawn up, now all I have to do is learn the language so I can sell them. I’ve got the book, and I’ve got the time. I get the super sharp haircut tomorrow, and start working out at the YMCA every day. 45 minutes on the eliptical is equal to at least one good therapy session.

Schadenfreude

Is it so wrong?

I don’t think so, either. Apparently, my soon-to-be ex sure as hell doesn’t. Last Tuesday night, I asked for a divorce. I got back to the house on Wednesday of last week to find this picture waiting for me, as well as a hell of a mess to pick up all over the house. Now the mess is nothing new, but the picture and the accompanying note (which reads “Reminded me of the *NEW* you, thought you should have it!”) were just a little bit of extra emotional abuse that I certainly didn’t need. The caustic remarks about how I was going to fall on my ass, and that he couldn’t wait to see how miserable I was five years from now, actually telling the cats that they were going to need to nag me because I wasn’t going to ever change their litter box etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Emotionally damaging bullshit. But then what really unhinged me is that Thursday night, I get a call that no mother should ever get. I won’t go into details because I’m not quite that sadistic, but suffice it to say that I absolutely came unglued. Spent the whole weekend oscillating between Stage V and Stage IV clinical depression. Panic attacks, borderline psychotic episodes while at work… I actually had someone end a call with me by saying, “have another five cups of coffee.”  I’m used to being one of the best damned reps in the center on any issue… needing 40 minutes offline to reset all of my passwords because my short-term memory has been temporarily rendered out of service = a new experience for me.

(And yes, that is a very disturbing picture of a woman licking a knife with her face sliced in half– no other reason other than he can’t draw faces with both sides proportioned correctly… in this case, though… yikes.)

So, when he came by to pick up some more of his stuff and take it back to his mom and dad’s place, I told him that the divorce papers were already drawn up and that the language in those papers was extremely strong. I told him that if he didn’t agree to it, I could empty out my IRA to sue for emotional abuse and neglect. I could be a serious bitch about the whole thing, and get an order of protection out on him– the works.

Instead, I’m being the reasonable ex-wife who is agreeable and willing to work with him on making sure that our daughter is happy. But when he went to take the box of stuff back out to the car, he tripped, the box spilled, and the dragon that he was going to fix up (wings broken in 3 places) broke in 4 or 5 more places. Tee hee.

And you know, it’s wrong of me to think that’s funny. I know this in my heart. He’s going through a rough time, and he’ll have a very hard time finding a woman as good as me. (Modest, too.) But you know what? I don’t care. It’s Schadenfreude, and I’m entitled. ♥

On a slightly more personal note

Life can be pretty intense sometimes. In the past week, I’ve had to go through more emotional pain than any mother should ever have to endure. I relied on the Bible to get me through it for God’s sake, and I’m a militant atheist. That shit aint right!

But seriously, though. My daughter is with my in-laws, and she’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. My husband? We’ll see. Depends on whether or not he’s willing to finally grow up and take responsibility for his life. I hope he is, because divorce is tough on kids, and she needs to see him succeed.

For any women out there who are currently in unhappy relationships and who may be reading these words written from a survivor who has just finally sliced my way out of the belly of the beast that is depression and anxiety, I would encourage you to recognize that you are stronger than you think you are. If you are not happy, you are the only one who can fix it. Recognize it, find your support networks, and fight for it. You are worth it. It will get worse before it gets better, but it will get better. If I can do it, without meds, by myself under unimaginable circumstances, so can you.

But meds really do help. Off to the doctor tomorrow to go get myself lined up for better living through pharmaceuticals for a while and take a well deserved rest while I piece my life back together again.

Some final closing thoughts for anyone who hasn’t heard this before… from the novel Dune by Frank Herbert:

“I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.”

Some more mindless blather about religion

A recent discussion with a classmate had me delicately responding to the assertion that “believing in” evolution/speciation is just as much a leap of faith as belief in an Intelligent Designer. When life gets to be hectic, I like talking about these things. The discussions (provided that the participants aren’t both on the same page) are always interesting, and sometimes present a good opportunity for verbal sparring. Since I’ve been doing a lot of verbal sparring of the not-so-very-much-fun type lately, I figured I’d dig this up for reflection.

Classmate: At my religious college we learned that similarities of structure simply are artifacts of a single Creator/Designer – so there is nothing in DNA that can prove to a holder of such a view that evolution of species actually occurred

Response: I would cautiously put forward the notion here that religious colleges pay people who can get science to agree with religion, and they don’t particularly care if what they teach falls into the realm of pseudoscience (nor are they generally qualified to judge whether or not something that sounds good is actually accurate). Without going too terribly in depth into how I feel about this (because it truly makes me very angry), I just want to say that these sorts of claims should be taken with a grain of salt. I respect your right to believe what you believe how you want to believe it. I have a good friend and mentor in the business world who honestly believes that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and while a part of me would love to sit down and talk science with him, another part of me respects his right to simply not have that conversation with me. If he wants to, he can, and I’ve told him so. I’ll wind up handing him a few books and just asking him to think about them, because I know from personal experience how tough those conversations can be.

Same thing holds true, here. If you’re interested in exploring these ideas, I’ll toss a few things your way to see whether they take root. If you do not want to go there, I’m cool with that, too. I do think that college is a time to challenge what you’ve been taught and see if it holds true for you. This would be particularly true in a hard science course that teaches you something which fundamentally contradicts other things that you’ve been taught.

I’ve yet to meet the person who has done serious reading (i.e., not psuedoscience) into evolution of the species that does not “believe” it occured. The theory is every bit as solid as the theory that allows us to put rovers on Mars and shoot pictures of Saturn like this one. In fact, we understand evolution of the species a great deal better than we understand gravity.

Classmate: but for those who have already concluded from other evidence or world view that evolution occurs, then DNA analysis can provide useful clues to what has changed when and how species are related.

Response: The great thing about good science is that everyone benefits from it, regardless of whether or not they “believe” in it. It’s a system built on the premise that our understanding of the world is approximate, but that some approximations are better than others. Over the last 5,000 years of civilization (and particularly in the last couple of centuries) we have developed some very good approximations, or theories. In the scientific world, “theory” is not a pejorative term.

Evolution of the species is one of the most elegant ones out there. It’s a far cry from the crystal spheres and the planets going around the earth model that some pseudoscientists make it out to be.