A Bit of a Worry

The underside of the Space Shuttle is coated with black tiles, rather than the white ones on top.

Now this sign may be due to some brain-dead legal requirement. Or it may be a bit of a joke. But it's a bit of a worry nonetheless.

A Stroke of Genius

Seen via ImpactED Nurse, one of the most inspirational speeches I know of.



What happens when a Neuroanatomist realises she's having a stroke - so can observe stuff first hand!. At first she's excited, as of course you would be. Well, as I would be. As I was, when some weird medical stuff went down with me. Then she realises "Oh wait, I don't have time for this..." and struggles to get help as her brain becomes more and more dysfunctional, parts shutting down, and she knows what work-arounds to use as she's progressively unable to think in certain areas.

Eventually she emerges eight years later not quite the same person she was before. There have been cognitive deficits. There have also been cognitive gains, and an explosion of creativity.

Her description is the mirror-image of how I felt recovering from some anaesthesia recently, which suppressed my left hemisphere more than my right. Rather than shutting down, I was booting up. I felt no regret leaving Nirvana, though it was a nice place to be. But only to visit: I wouldn't want to live there, I have duties to perform, people to help.

It did feel odd to have arms and legs again though, to have a body. I know it's necessary, but it seems all a little... slipshod. Slapdash. A work-around that lets us interact with each other in a more meaningful way than the rather intellectual stuff elsewhere. Of course, that's just the musings of a partly-functional brain bootstrapping itself. Isn't it?

The Bad Old Days

Some quotes from the bad old days of 50 years ago:

After the lynching of two black children in Alabama and Mississippi, a Grand Dragon of the KKK said:

Obviously murder is murder, there’s no excuse for that. I think we’re seeing a backlash, in other words if you push me too hard don’t be surprised if I react. Blacks will tend to react violently if people are oppressive toward them. If blacks are oppressive toward whites, then you’ll see a violent backlash.

And a representative of the Christian White Women of America said of the Black Civil Rights movement:

I honestly think it's the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than the atomic bomb or communism.

Well, they may have. Certainly similar things were said in 1958. But nothing like that could be said today, could it? Not outside a racist chat-room. Certainly no elected official could say anything like that. Well, I thought so until recently. Now just read what some elected officials - all Republicans I'm ashamed to say - are saying now, blatantly, openly, and shamelessly:

Just Out: What is your reaction to the recent murders of out gay youth in Florida and California?

Oregon State Senator Gary George (R): Obviously murder is murder, there’s no excuse for that. Here’s what I’m saying, I think we’re seeing a backlash, in other words if you push me too hard don’t be surprised if I react. Gays will tend to react violently if people are oppressive toward them. If gays are oppressive toward straights, then you’ll see a violent backlash.

And from Oklahoma State Representative Sally Kern (R), about "The Homosexual Agenda" :

"I honestly think it's the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam."

There is another difference: in 1958, the situation was getting better. In 2008, the situation is getting worse. These people are getting bolder. And the rate of fatal provable hate crimes against transgendered and gay people has now increased to one every 8 days - most of them trangender, and one in 4, children.

Analytic and Synthetic Brains

Analytic vs Synthetic, Artificial vs Natural, Designed or Emergent....

There are two basic ways of making a system to do something. In one, you analyse what it is you're trying to achieve, then try to make something that meets one or more of those requirements, refining as you go. In the other, you have a system that meets the requirements, though you don't know the mechanism, how it does it. So you try to make something similar, and see what happens, finding out by instrumenting it what it does and how it does it.

The quest for artificial intelligence has concentrated on the first technique. Until now. The illustration to the left shows a Rat Brain neocortical column. Part of a rat's brain. An artificial one.

From SeedMagazine.com :

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain.

The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there."
...
Terry Sejnowski, an eminent computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, declared that Blue Brain was "bound to fail," for the mind remained too mysterious to model. But Markram's attitude was very different. "I wanted to model the brain because we didn't understand it," he says. "The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch."
...
The computer screen is filled with what look like digitally rendered tree branches. Schürmann zooms out so that the branches morph into a vast arbor, a canopy so dense it's practically opaque. "This," he proudly announces, "is a virtual neuron. What you're looking at are the thousands of synaptic connections it has made with other [virtual] neurons." When I look closely, I can see the faint lines where the virtual dendrites are subdivided into compartments. At any given moment, the supercomputer is modeling the chemical activity inside each of these sections so that a single simulated neuron is really the sum of 400 independent simulations. This is the level of precision required to accurately imitate just one of the 100 billion cells—each of them unique—inside the brain. When Markram talks about building a mind from the "bottom-up," these intracellular compartments are the bottom. They are the fundamental unit of the model.
...
"The simulation is getting to the point," Schürmann says, "where it gives us better results than an actual experiment. We get the same data, but with less noise and human error." The model, in other words, has exceeded its own inputs. The virtual neurons are more real than reality.
...
"We were all emotionally prepared for failure," Markram says. "But I wasn't so prepared for what actually happened."
...
This is what makes the model so impressive: It manages to simulate a real neocortical column—a functional slice of mind—by simulating the particular details of our ion channels. Like a real brain, the behavior of Blue Brain naturally emerges from its molecular parts.

"The behaviour naturally emerges from its molecular parts"... simulate the ion channels to sufficient accuracy, you get behaviour like a nerve cell. Simulate clusters of nerve cells to sufficient accuracy, and you get behaviour like part of a brain. Simulate parts of a brain with sufficient accuracy...
But there's a few practical problems right now.

In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. "We have already shown that the model can scale up," Markram says. "What is holding us back now are the computers." The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you'd need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That's about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google's servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion . But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he'll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

Wow.

"If you're interested in computing," Schürmann says, "then I don't see how you can't be interested in the brain. We have so much to learn from natural selection. It's really the ultimate engineer."

Well, I am working on evolutionary computation in my PhD; and that's because I'm interested in brains. I think we'll have to evolve, to grow true Artificial Intelligence, not design and manufacture it.

Some philosophers, like Thomas Nagel, have argued that this divide between the physical facts of neuroscience and the reality of subjective experience represents an epistemological dead end. No matter how much we know about our neurons, we still won't be able to explain how a twitch of ions in the frontal cortex becomes the Technicolor cinema of consciousness.

Markram takes these criticisms seriously. Nevertheless, he believes that Blue Brain is uniquely capable of transcending the limits of "conventional neuroscience," breaking through the mind-body problem. According to Markram, the power of Blue Brain is that it can transform a metaphysical paradox into a technological problem. "There's no reason why you can't get inside Blue Brain," Markram says. "Once we can model a brain, we should be able to model what every brain makes. We should be able to experience the experiences of another mind."
...
When listening to Markram speculate, it's easy to forget that the Blue Brain simulation is still just a single circuit, confined within a silent supercomputer. The machine is not yet alive. And yet Markram can be persuasive when he talks about his future plans. His ambitions are grounded in concrete steps. Once the team is able to model a complete rat brain—that should happen in the next two years—Markram will download the simulation into a robotic rat, so that the brain has a body.

So we should see if this path is a goer within the next two years. And we may just be able to make a self-aware creature in that time frame. And that will lead to all sorts of ethical considerations. Is a Robot Rat that can pass the Turing test at the molecular level alive? I think so. It's a Rat, implemented on different hardware. It will be able to feel pain, be frightened, crave affection... And the upshot of all this, the final goal?

But the question remains: How do you know what the rat knows? How do you get inside its simulated cortex? This is where visualization becomes key. Markram wants to simulate what that brain experiences. It's a typically audacious goal, a grand attempt to get around an ancient paradox. But if he can really find a way to see the brain from the inside, to traverse our inner space, then he will have given neuroscience an unprecedented window into the invisible. He will have taken the self and turned it into something we can see.

We will be able to make a properly instrumented version of ourselves, of our minds. One that will be able to give us understanding of ourselves, how we think and why. A Mirror of the Mind.

Singularity, anyone?

But there's another, even more exciting (albeit remote) possibility. What if it doesn't work? What happens if we can simulate in enough detail all the steps leading to Mind, and we'll have cross-checked that each step of the way - what happens if no Mind results? It wouldn't be conclusive evidence, but it would strongly suggest that Mind, that Self, is not an inescapable consequence of the brain's anatomy, the way that the Mona Lisa is an inescapable consequence of a particular arrangement of pigments and canvas. It would be evidence, not proof, but evidence, that there was something more, something we've missed. Something not physical, but metaphysical, not natural, but supernatural. It would be the first evidence for a longstanding conjecture, something that would promote it to a hypothesis. The existence of the Soul.

And wouldn't that be interesting?

Gilding the Lilly

Humans have rights. The right to privacy, for example. The right, absent evidence that they would harm their children, to see those children. The right to marry in the first place. The right not to be made figures of public scorn and derision, to be called "it" and have their very humanity denied.

Others don't have those rights. The contrast can be seen clearly at http://clipsyndicate.com/publish/video/541159?wpid=1904



From USA Today OnLine
http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/03/woman-goes-to-c.html

Jennifer Jack says she didn't realize that her ex-husband, Andrew Mireles, was a woman until after their marriage ended, according to KRIV-TV.

"It's actually a very bizarre set of facts. There's no way around that," attorney London O'Dowd tells Fox News Channel.

He says Jack was 16 when she met the 21-year-old Mireles.

"He, and with the help of his family, were able to convince her and her family and everyone around her them that she was a he," the lawyer says.

O'Dowd says his client learned the truth about her ex-husband, who has not undergone a sex-change operation, when she came across a yearbook photo of Phyllis Ann Mireles.

Mireles, however, claims that he told his wife the truth about 18 months into their relationship.

"We talked about it, discussed it and then we decided to stay together ... she decided to stay with me," Mireles tells the local Fox affiliate.

Either way, now that a judge has nullified their marriage, Jack wants the court to order Mireles to stay away from the two children they were raising

There's more (unconfirmed) detail from a (supposed) family member in the comments section (spelling as in the original)

I knew Andrew/Phyllis for 10 years I never once suspected he was a female. Andrew is a pathological liar and has carried this lie on for half his life. As far as the sex he claimed he was a hermaphidite (which was never shared with the family for privacy)and was embarassed for anyone to see him nude. He always wore a shirt and boxers and she was not allowed to touch him.
...
She did have one indiscretion during a brief seperation before they married and never thought the 1st child was anyone but Andrew's. The second child was conceived by insemination since she was unable to get pregnant. Well it would help if Andrew had all the male parts! The sperm was bought over the internet and the child was created in their home.
...
Andrew is a convicted felon for buglarizing a former employer and is on parole. His parole can be revolked now for falsifying State documents (Marriage License). Yes he served his time in a male detetion facility.
...
His family even stood at the wedding and let it go on knowing he was truly a girl. That is sick in its own way!

The complainant is an innocent flower not intimately (so to speak) familiar with male anatomy. Despite her getting pregnant before marriage, by a man not her husband. It was not having sex, it was an indiscretion. Right...

She didn't have to gild the lilly, Even if Andrew had had his Birth Certificate changed, as is possible in some states after "top surgery", even if he'd had the $100,000 "bottom surgery", the one with the 30% success rate (and so *not* required for gender recognition) , a Texas court would still have anulled the marriage. Even if the ex-wife was told all the details.

From the Court Decision in Kantaras vs Kantaras:

"Courts in Ohio, Kansas, Texas, and New York have addressed issues involving the marriage of a postoperative transsexual person, and in all cases the courts have invalidated or refused to allow the marriage on the grounds that it violated state statutes or public policy.
...
We agree with the Kansas, Ohio, and Texas courts in their understanding of the common meaning of male and female, as those terms are used statutorily, to refer to immutable traits determined at birth.
...
Our holding that the marriage is void ab initio does not take into consideration the best interests of the children involved in this case. While we recognize that the trial judge went to great lengths to determine the best interests of the children, the issue of deciding primary residential custody was dependent on the trial court's conclusion that the marriage was valid."

Source : http://www.jenburke.com/2005/02/kantaras-v-kantaras.html

Let's see... if the comment isn't bogus, this guy has served time in a male correctional facility, was married in front of his own family, and yet is still "Really a GIRL!!!!!!!!! (Shock Horror)". And HIS wife only just found out after the divorce, and two pregnancies. One of which she really, truly thought was due to him, honest.

Of course, under normal circumstances, a guy whose fiance was pregnant by another man might be less understanding when it came to actually getting married. But sometimes love really is blind. And you might expect a guy who was willing to bring up another man's child as his own might get some respect.

I'll leave aside the "buying sperm over the Internet" bit. I'm not buying it, anyway. So to speak.

So he did it twice. Now by his own admission, he didn't reveal his medical past until wayyy too late, but you can see why he might have thought a woman so evidently experienced at a young age when it came to sex might actually know that his apparatus wasn't the standard factory model on his wedding night. Assuming she waited that long, but that's a safe assumption, innocent lass as she is, honest as the day is long.

But divorce - and the usual child support - wasn't good enough for her, when things went sour. No, in order to really put the boot in, she needed to cut off his visitation rights (being unable to cut anything else off), and send him to jail for "falsifying state documents" or whatever.

But she's Human, so it's her right to do that. And the media and court system will gladly oblige. And leave two small children, children without a father, in her tender care.

I'm glad I live in Australia. Where all people are humans, not just some, and have rights.

50 Not Out

My half century.

I wondered when I was 10 what I'd be doing when I was 50 years old. 2008 seemed so far off in 1968.

Oddly enough, my predictions weren't that far off the mark. I'm still working on my PhD rather than being Dr Brain, and I don't have a large family, but close enough.

The one area I got completely wrong was where I'd be living. Wrong planet. No Moonbase One for this little Zoe. And I think that if ever I'm to make it, I better start learning Mandarin.

"In German - Or Englisch
I know how to Count Down.
And I'm learning Chinese"
said Werner Von Braun

sì..sān..èr..yī..LING

Or maybe I'll go the cryonics route, live forever or die in the attempt. We'll see. Life is still full of exciting possibilities.

You Do What You Have To Do

Being a parent is an awesome responsibility. Being a parent is hard. But for those of us who are Intersexed or Transsexual, it's often becoming a parent that's hardest. Having the wrong shaped genitalia is very uncomfortable, but for those of us lucky enough to have a working reproductive system, we should consider ourselves lucky that pregnancy's not completely impossible, as it is for so many of us.

Transition usually means becoming sterile, if you aren't already. I was - my reproductive system was effectively wrecked early on in my unusual change. It had been marginal before, requiring technical intervention for pregnancy; but within a few weeks of the first symptoms showing, an exam by an endocrinologist showed my reproductive glands were dysfunctional. To be brutal, they were "soft and shrunken". My childbearing - or the equivalent - days were over.

The pillar that had sustained me all those years, since age 15, had collapsed. I never considered not transitioning after that - never even gave the idea a thought until I was actually on the operating table, when I thought it would be a really good idea to review things, just in case there was anything I'd missed. Or rather, would miss. There wasn't. Even though at that stage I had no idea just how wonderful normality would feel....

As I said, transition usually means becoming sterile. But not always.
From Advocate.com:

This whole process, from trying to get pregnant to being pregnant, has been a challenge for us. The first doctor we approached was a reproductive endocrinologist. He was shocked by our situation and told me to shave my facial hair. After a $300 consultation, he reluctantly performed my initial checkups. He then required us to see the clinic’s psychologist to see if we were fit to bring a child into this world and consulted with the ethics board of his hospital. A few months and a couple thousand dollars later, he told us that he would no longer treat us, saying he and his staff felt uncomfortable working with “someone like me.”

Understandable in some ways. Reprehensible in others. Here is a couple who are willing to take "heroic measures" in every sense of the world, just to have a child. If ever anyone met the definition of "fit parents", they do.

How does it feel to be a pregnant man? Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child—I am so lucky to have such a loving, supportive wife. I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family.

The details are different, but you know what? I know how he feels.

I've Actually Done This

But only when I was really, really tired.

Money Quote

From the much-misquoted Dr Milton Diamond, Biased-Interaction theory of psychosexual development: "how does one know if one is male or female?"

Prenatal programming and biasing work through alterations of the nervous system; thus can be said to reflect brain sex. During prenatal development the nervous system, the brain in particular, is programmed along a track that is usually concomitant with the development of other sex appropriate structures like genitals and reproductive organs. The brain, however, as in other Intersex conditions, can develop along one sex/gender path while other organs develop along another. Put simply, the brain can develop as male while other parts of the body develop as female. Further, it is important to recall that the developing nervous system controlling gender-linked behaviors is more sensitive to certain stimuli than are the tissues forming genitals and thus can be modified while the genitals are not. I think that transsexuals are intersexed in their brains.

Exactly.

Then there's this PDF diagram, which supposedly is satirical, though I've not found any area where it wasn't completely correct. It even gives references.

Global Terrorist Incidents

A World Map showing them. Updated every 5 minutes or so.

Childhood Memories

My parents are the couple in the lower left of the screen at 01:28, with my mother laughing her head off at 01:29-01:30. My sister is the teenager next to her, the one with the "Supremes" style hairdo, and is visible throughout much of the video.



And I'm the kid whose head is just visible in the extreme lower-left of the frame at 0:27 of that one, visible in the clip from 00:14. Of course I had short hair then....

In 1970, it was not unreasonable for such a marvellous toy robot to cost $100 million to build - especially since it was a generation old, indicating a construction date around 1945. Yes, I know it was supposed to be a social comment on the cost of the high-tech used in the Vietnam War, still going at the time, as well as the cost of the Opera House itself, but still...

Now I have my own little boy, and time has caught up with me. I turn 50 in just a few days. And I've given my son several robots that do rather more than that wonderful toy that would have cost $100 million of 38 years ago. As I thought I would, way back then. I didn't count on my female puberty being delayed until I was 47, nor that I would have to be my child's father, not his mother. They were, if not carefree, happy days. Ignorance was bliss.

I'm sorry that my father never saw his grandson - my Daddy died in 1993, and I have yet to gather enough emotional fortitude to visit his grave. I was the strong one during that period, and for several months after, when it was needed. It was only when the pressure of duty was off that I fell apart, and I haven't gotten quite together even now. Besides which, my son takes up all of my time. That's the way it's supposed to work. You pass on the marvellous toys, and maybe even improve them on the way.

And more after that

At Dakota Voice.

And yet more

Once more into the Breach, Dear Friends!

At Dr Warren Throckmorton's, TransCanada, Canadian Sentinel, ColossiansThreeSixteen....

*SIGH* When will it end? Not in my lifetime. So much ignorance, so little time. So many repetitions, giving the same data, correcting the same old misconceptions. Sometimes I'll reach a hundred like this, sometimes only one - or none. But every little bit helps, every little bit increases the odds of getting better legislation, greater human rights, more understanding, and yes, more sympathy. Not as in "Pity poor little me", but sympathy as in "I never knew...". Empathy. That's what's required in the long term, if we get that, the rest will naturally follow.

Today's Battle

At Newsbusters. Excelsior, etc.

Sometimes you just have to laugh, the situation, the extent of the hatred and persecution is just so surreal. Most is just from ignorance though, so is treatable.

Family

Picture (C) 2008 ACP Publications and may not be copied without permission - license to me is for personal use only



In Transition, you usually lose everything. But not always. And Marriages may change, but deep friendship and sisterhood remain. And always, always the love of a parent for her child.

Neural Dimorphism and Discrimination

Or in other words, Boys and Girls aren't just different between their legs, they differ between their ears too.

From Science Daily :

What was once speculation is now being confirmed by scientists: the brains of women and men are different in more ways than one.

Discoveries by scientists over the past 10 years have elucidated biological sex differences in brain structure, chemistry and function. “These variations occur throughout the brain, in regions involved in language, memory, emotion, vision, hearing and navigation,” explains Larry Cahill, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

While women and men struggle to communicate with each other and ponder why they don’t think and react to things in similar ways, science is proving that the differences in our brains may have more serious implications beyond our everyday social interactions.

That's a "Pop sci" view. The more abstruse articles sound something like this:

Sex differences in neural processing of language among children. Douglas D. Burmana, Tali Bitanc and James R. Bootha. Neuropsychologia. doi: 10.1016 / j.neuropsychologia.2007.12.021.

Abstract. Why females generally perform better on language tasks than males is unknown. Sex differences were here identified in children (ages 9–15) across two linguistic tasks for words presented in two modalities. Bilateral activation in the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri and activation in the left fusiform gyrus of girls was greater than in boys. Activation in the left inferior frontal and fusiform regions of girls was also correlated with linguistic accuracy irregardless of stimulus modality, whereas correlation with performance accuracy in boys depended on the modality of word presentation (either in visual or auditory association cortex). This pattern suggests that girls rely on a supramodal language network, whereas boys process visual and auditory words differently. Activation in the left fusiform region was additionally correlated with performance on standardized language tests in which girls performed better, additional evidence of its role in early sex differences for language.

I try on my blog to give a view somewhere between the almost content-free but easily read PopSci, and the fact-filled but intellectually indigestible academic paper. (And parenthetically, note the young ages of the experimental subjects - this stuff happens before the gross changes to neuro-anatomy that occur with puberty. The functional difference is apparent before changes detectable at autopsy happen.)

One can take this dimorphism too far though.

It's undisputed that Swedes are taller, in the main, than Japanese. Yet no-one would exclude a 6ft 4" Japanese from a Basketball team because they were "too short", yet include a 5' Swede because "Swedes are tall". But we are constantly confronted with women being excluded from professions which are traditionally male, and the reverse. People differ, and just because most men have certain capabilities dictated by sex-specific neurology that most women lack, and the reverse, that doesn't mean we shouldn't treat everyone as individuals on their merits.

I've been accused of being an "essentialist" on several feminist blogs, simply because I've pointed out the scientific evidence of sexual dimorphism in the brain. I'm interested in the subject only partially because of my own unusual medical history, as a computer scientist of course I'm interested in the way we think, why and how. I'm also active in several groups, encouraging young women to become engineers and computer scientists, traditional male occupations. This is because neurology might explain why about 30% of engineers should be female, but can't explain why only 8-12% are in actuality. No, the fact that there isn't a 50/50 mix is not purely because of Male Patriarchal Privilege. But no, the fact that many young women are discouraged and dissuaded from taking up careers they are both interested in, and have talent for, is not because "men are better at it than women are". Having been on both sides of the fence (as it were), I'm acutely aware of the social sanctions that many women face in professional life. I'm the classic experiment, "take one person, and if they were perceived as male, see how they were treated, then with exactly the same qualifications and professional record, see how they were treated if they were female". I was an intellectual feminist before, though I had doubts as to the extent of the problem. Now, having experienced the difficulties myself, I realise that if anything, the problems were understated - though perhaps not as understated as the difficulties men face in some areas, difficulties that even they don't see they suffer from. They're lesser, but they exist. As regards my Feminism now, this time it's personal, and I have the facts behind me.

Gender is not purely a social construct, though much of the behaviour patterns we associate with gender specificity are. Both social construction and biological differentiation play roles. Too often we have two sides, one claiming that gender doesn't exist as an objective phenomenon outside social science (and by corollary, transsexual people don't actually exist except by social fiat, or as dupes or agents of the Patriarchy), while the other claims that men are men, women are women, and transsexual people don't exist, only the insane, the deluded, or those making a perverse political statement. Caught in the crossfire are those who see the gender binary as something quite real, but only as a really good approximation, not an Absolute and Universal Truth . People who are searching for facts, regardless of political or even theological consequences. And in a few cases, people whose narratives and accounts of their existence are denied by both sides simply because they are not in accordance with either view in its entirety. People whose very existence others find... inconvenient. If we're lucky, they ignore us. If not, they erase us.

And all this just from a minor glitch in neuro-anatomy, probably just a hormonal imbalance during the first trimester of gestation, and certainly something that happens to a proportion of the population quite naturally. Jeez, what a mess.

Today's Battle

At California Catholic Daily again. It's nice to have such politeness, other places can get a little rough.

The Neighbourhood

The Earth/Moon system as seen from the vicinity of Mars.

Why We Fight

From Wikipedia :

Why We Fight is a series of seven propaganda films commissioned by the United States government during World War II to demonstrate to American soldiers the reason for U.S. involvement in the war. Later on they were also shown to the general U.S. public to persuade them to support American intervention.

Now I'd really like this blog to have a bit less activist content. I'd rather be blogging about the Space Programmes that will get Humanity to the stars - or at least the local neighbourhood out to the Oort cloud - in the next millenium or two. I'd prefer to blog about speculations on Cosmology, what the Universe is, along with humour, wit, and the endless fascination I have with this particular segment of the Multiverse. Sometimes measuring the marigolds (as to me that makes them even more wondrous), sometimes just pondering their beauty.

I've just spent a month of my life with some of the most wonderful people on the planet.

Looking at it objectively, consider a gathering of women comprising: A sound tech from Los Angeles; An NCO in the Canadian Armed Forces; A former US Artillery Officer and Tall Ship Sailor from Philadelphia; A world-renowned GeoScientist from Hawaii and her Fabulously talented Architect partner; A trainee nurse from Boston with a profoundly autistic teenage son; A Rocket Scientist from Australia; an on-call Radio-Tech with the ability to debug broadcasting antennae across the whole of North America from her cell-phone; a Radiographer from New England; I mean, this is a group that would be considered spectacular over-achievers anywhere else. Some of the kindest people on the planet too, and the most courageous. They had to be, as so many like us don't survive to middle-age. Why were they there, having travelled anything from hundreds of kilometres to halfway round the planet? To give support to two of their number who were having major surgery. They were there out of Love.

Why do such as we fight? Because of this :

A boy of 10 has been found hanged at his South Yorkshire home after telling his mum he wanted to be a girl.
Tragic Cameron McWilliams had already asked for permission to wear make-up, and been teased after he was found wearing his half-sister's knickers.

His desperate mum Kelly McWilliams told a Doncaster inquest she had bought him girls' underwear to wear in private, but had refused his requests to be allowed to wear make-up.

She said: "It was apparent he was unhappy and said he wanted to be a girl. He did like girls' things."

And this:

Lawrence “Larry” King was shot to death and the media thought that you didn’t need to know about it.

Larry, as you might have now learned, was fifteen and in his junior high school computer lab when Brandon McInerney, 14, followed through on a previously declared threat and shot King.

The mainstream media apparently didn’t think that you needed to know that King had recently come out as gay and had started to wear lipstick, mascara, earrings, and a pair of particularly fierce high heeled boots.

The first LA Times article on the shooting made no reference to Larry’s sexual orientation, or his manner of dress. When the mainstream media first reported the murder, it was stated that the violence stemmed from a “personal dispute” between the two boys.

And because of all the outright lies, distortions, and hatred spouted out by the "Concerned Women of America", "Traditional Values Alliance", and other supposedly conservative groups that are far more interested in gaining funds through Sensationalist misinformation and deliberate falsehood than in genuine conservative issues. Falsehoods that maliciously propagate ignorance, with tragic results to loving families. Falsehoods that lead to children dying, and I'm unable to forgive them for that while those groups still continue their mendacity. But we don't fight alone.

Youth groups across the country began holding marches in King’s honor. Details of his death was spread virally on youth-dominated, Facebook.

Old Chooks like me who get utterly incandescent with rage at the way children are dying to line others' pockets are encouraged and heartened by the younger generation. For all their faults, they're better than we were in some ways at that age, and I think their children will be better still.

I'm Back

Normal Blogging will commence shortly.

In the meantime....

After the Montgomery County Council in Maryland added color to a law banning discrimination in public accommodations, citizens soon became aware that the new law would allow quadroons and octaroons who are confused about their racial identity to use the segregated bathroom or public shower facility of their choice. Theresa Rickman is director of Citizens for Responsible Government, the citizen group that launched a petition drive to have that law overturned.
Matt Barber, CWA's Policy Director for Cultural Issues, spoke with Theresa about the petition drive and the intimidation her volunteers faced from activist niggers in the county.

A Blast From the Past? The Bad Old Days of the KKK? Something from 1908 perhaps?
Not As Such, though I changed a few of the words to show just how deeply offensive the CWA is being here. The original was published on February 29th 2008.

"She-male" by the way is not only deeply offensive, but indicates the user has an unhealthy interest in a particular category of perverse pornography. The term is never found outside that genre.