My not-so-maternal instinct: I refuse to lie to my kids It was my younger sister’s 40th birthday party; she had just told us—her parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, niece and nephews—that she was pregnant. While she mingled with her other guests, we tittered over the news. My youngest, age 9, jumped up and down. “Isn’t it wonderful?” What? I know my father thinks my kids are great and that I am a good mother. Not even the dictionary knows what he means. That’s me! The other is answering honestly. Moms are not supposed to be honest with their kids. Finally, I said, “Oh I just tell my kids in great detail how it all works until they get bored.” Maybe I should have been slightly less honest with the moms. Bit of a killjoy, but no big deal, right? When my second son was 6, he was fixated on death. “We don’t actually know what happens after you die, right? How the knowledge of our own mortality burns! But I didn’t. Somehow, he managed to get to sleep. My sister had her baby in March. I get to be maternal because I don’t have to be the mom.
Terror Cells | Desultory Heroics Ain’t no cure for dystopian biology By Barbara Ehrenreich Source: The Baffler At around the turn of the millennium, some disturbing findings surfaced in the biomedical literature. Macrophages—immune cells whose function is to attack and kill microbes and other threats to the body—do not gather at tumor sites to destroy cancer cells, as had been optimistically imagined. By and large, medical science continues to present a happy face to the public. • Cancer cells are weak and confused, and should be imagined as something that can fall apart like ground hamburger. • There is an army of different kinds of white blood cells that can overwhelm the cancer cells. • White blood cells are aggressive and want to seek out and attack the cancer cells. But the evidence for immune cell collusion with cancer keeps piling up. A May 2014 paper in the journal Cancer Cell offers a chilling account of the macrophage–cancer cell interaction. Kill, Eat, Repeat Dystopian Biology This is madness, of course. Like this:
Always Attack the Wrong Country | Desultory Heroics By Dmitry Orlov Source: Club Orlov There are numerous tactics available to those who aim to make problems worse while pretending to solve them, but misdirection is always a favorite. In the international arena, this type of misdirection tends to take on a farcical aspect. Need some examples? When Arab Spring erupted (because a heat wave in Russia drove up wheat prices) the obvious place to concentrate efforts, to avoid a seriously bad outcome for the region, was Egypt—the most populous Arab country and an anchor for the entire region. When things went south in the Ukraine, whose vacillating government couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to remain within the Customs Union with Russia, its traditional trading partner, or to gamble on signing an agreement with the EU based on vague (and since then broken) promises of economic cooperation, the obvious place to go and try to fix things was the Ukraine. So far so good. Like this: Like Loading...
No Man’s Land | Desultory Heroics By Steven Stoll Source: Orion Magazine A chainlink fence topped with razor wire surrounds fourteen acres of thistle and grass at East Forty-First Street between Long Beach Avenue and South Alameda Street in Los Angeles. These two city blocks occupy a transitional environment of sorts. In 1986, the City of Los Angeles acquired the land from a group of owners through eminent domain, but then folded plans to build a waste incinerator when the community resisted. They did. But in 2001, one of the prior owners filed a lawsuit against the city. In the ensuing confrontation a single absentee negated the sustained labor and improvements of 350 families, representing around a thousand people, now accused of squatting. In the case of the South Central Farm, ownership for profit triumphed over use for subsistence, which, of course, is the way of the world. In 1500, no one sold land because no one owned it. Ownership is different from appropriation. Should private property itself be extinguished?
Archivist Won't Call "Torture Report" a Permanent Record Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero last week rebuffed requests to formally designate the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation practices a “federal record” that must be preserved. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy had urged the Archivist to exercise his authority to certify that the Senate report is a federal record. “We believe that Congress has made it clear that the National Archives has a responsibility — as the nation’s record keeper — to advise other parts of the United States government of their legal duty to preserve documents like the Senate Report under the Federal Records Act, the Presidential Records Act, and other statutes,” Senators Feinstein and Leahy wrote in an April 13 letter. The report qualifies for preservation as a permanent record, they said, “because it contains uniquely valuable information regarding the CIA’s detention and interrogation program under the Bush Administration,” among other reasons.
New Skin for Old Ceremony: Community Building & Space Industrialization (Prisoner of Infinity XIX) “Why industrialize space? The answer must be essentially economic. There must be important commercial operations which can be done only in space or which can be done better in space.”“Why industrialize space? The answer must be essentially economic. There must be important commercial operations which can be done only in space or which can be done better in space.” Most of the preceding material (besides the material about Edgar Mitchell in chapter XV, and barring some minor tweaking) was written back in the spring of 2013. The building is a commercially-zoned residential and was split into two parts when we bought it. One thing that was clear to me even before I bought the property was how the process of renovating an old, dilapidated, literally poison-filled house (in the early days we had to remove countless used drug needles) was a kind of psychic enactment. Writing is a way for me to live inside my mind. The author J. This book began as one thing; it is ending as something else.
Fame Is Other People Excess fame has beamed off Criss and Swier to a friend of mine, Matt Glueckert—and then to me. Glueckert, who met Swier through friends in the music business, was the subject of fleeting fan interest in 2012 after he was tagged with Swier in a beach photo posted on Twitter. Swier looked happy in it, and fans noticed: Could it mean she was actually with Glueckert and not their heartthrob? (No.) Instagram is a branding platform, and my Instagram exists to advertise to people I don’t see all that often that I am a super-fun person who does weird, cool stuff all the time. There is a constant referendum on social media on whether the famous deserve their fame. Much of the hate Swier gets is from CrissColfer shippers. In February, fans insulting Swier prompted Criss to tweet, “If you disrespect my girl, you disrespect me. Being fame adjacent is not all bad, of course: Coates acknowledges her association with Criss and Swier has drawn more attention to her art and helped her videos go viral.
How infecting carp with herpes can help save dying river systems When carp were first introduced into Australia in the mid-19th century, acclimatizing settlers hoped the freshwater fish would bring a taste of home to their food and recreational activity down under. Today, these pests are running riot across the country's waterways, seriously compromising the health of its rivers and native species. The Australian government is now moving to cut populations through the controlled release of carp-specific herpes virus, which it says is capable of killing individual fish off within 24 hours. The Murray-Darling Basin stretches through Australia's eastern states, covering 14 percent of its total land area and his home to 57 different species of freshwater fish. But with the ability to endure a range of aquatic habitats, carp has bred wildly in the past 40 years. "So this process means that the water becomes very, very muddy and unclear, and that then stops plant life from growing because they can't get enough light," continues McColl. Source: CSIRO
America's Sugar Daddies Are Voting for the Candidate You Definitely Don't Expect | 2016 What’s it like to be Sugar Daddy Warbucks? Likely white, middle-age, a Silicon Valley tech guru or some New York business tycoon with money to burn, or so says SeekingArrangement.com, which facilitates partnerships between cash-strapped coeds and wealthy benefactors. In fact, users of the site averaged a net worth of $5.2 million in 2015. One more thing in common: Most sugar daddies are feeling a “Bern”-ing sensation, according to a survey of SeekingArrangement.com users. Almost a third of sugar daddies who reported donating to a presidential campaign this year backed Bernie Sanders. Despite being card-carrying members of the 1 percent that Sanders so often rails against, 345 sugar daddies reported donating to the Vermont senator, with Donald Trump (291) and Hillary Clinton (174) as the next biggest recipients. Millionaires with private limos and corporate ties seem like odd supporters for a socialist who wants to break up big banks and raise taxes on the nation’s highest earners.
How an Ad Campaign Made Lesbians Fall in Love with Subaru Subaru’s marketing strategy had just died in a fit of irony. It was the mid 1990s, and sales of Subaru cars were in decline. To reverse the company’s fortunes, Subaru of America had created its first luxury car—even though the small automaker was known for plain but dependable cars—and hired a trendy advertising agency to introduce it to the public. The new approach had fallen flat when the ad men took irony too far: One ad touted the new sports car’s top speed of 140 MPH, then asked, “How important is that, with extended urban gridlock, gas at $1.38 a gallon and highways full of patrolmen?" After firing the hip ad agency, Subaru of America changed its approach. This search for niche groups led Subaru to the 3rd rail of marketing: They discovered that lesbians loved their cars. This was the type of discovery that the small, struggling automaker was looking for. Yet Subaru decided to launch an ad campaign focused on lesbian customers. You Are What You Drive From Subaru to ‘Lesbaru’
The European Green Belt Follows The Corridor of The Former Iron Curtain Map created by Smaack via Wikimedia The European Green Belt is the backbone of a pan-European ecological network that runs for 12,500 kilometres from the Barents Sea in the north to the Adriatic and Black seas in the south. It spans 24 countries and an immense diversity of habitats ranging from arctic tundra, boreal forests, alpine peaks, mires, bogs and lush flood plains to coastal areas and grasslands. Following the route of the former Iron Curtain, it connects 3,272 protected areas, including 40 national parks. When Winston Churchill, speaking in March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, famously stated that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent”, he surely could not have imagined that anything good could have come from it. Over 43 years later the Iron Curtain was finally raised in a series of events that included the highly symbolic opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. However threats from mining and logging remain.