Yet another day after yet another day after an entire month of days of reproduction lectures. They’re non-ending! The organs used, the hormones generated, the rates and types of changes seen, blah blah blah etc. Who knew that a month of limitless sex could be so boring? Personally, as of yesterday I was just gone and done. But I guess it’s the talking about and not doing which makes it so because playing with ultrasound today piqued my interest a bit. As Rob says, “PUPPIES!” Which is a darn good thing because I was starting to be more excited about the Bacteriology respites than the topical anatomy and where is the sense of that? Tomorrow we begin virology. Our term doesn’t include a hands-on practical but I’m pretty sure we’ll manage to find and culture viruses on our own time. Given the ghastly illnesses rolling through the class, it should prove astoundingly easy.

Am still dog tired. Time to climb and read a book or three.

Ultrasound image of puppies c/o “scooterthecocker.com”

Robert Anton Wilson, previous thinker and provocateur extraordinaire passed on to the next hazy sphere on January 11. In honor, I borrow & repost.

From Robert Anton Wilson / Previous Thoughts

Bloomsday 2001 e.v.
16 Juno 80 p.s.U.

Schrödinger’s Jew

97 years ago today Leopold Bloom, a fictitious man, wandered the streets of Dublin, a real city; and Joyce scholars still argue about his odd odyssey. I would like to add to the confusion with a note about Bloom’s “Jewishness.”

“Is” Leopold Bloom a Jew?

Not according to Orthodox Rabbinical law, which defines a Jew as the child of a Jewish mother. Bloom as the child of a Protestant mother “is not” a Jew.

According to Nazi law, however, a Jew “is” a person with a known Jewish ancestor. Bloom as the son of Rudolph Bloom [born Rudolph Virag], “is” a Jew.

See how easily a person can “be” and “not be” a Jew at the same time?

On the third hand, most humanists define a Jew as one who believes in and practices the Judaic religion. By this definition, Bloom who neither believes in nor practices any religion “is not” a Jew. But Marilyn Monroe, who practiced and probably tried to believe in Judaism while married to Arthur Miller, “was” a Jew by that definition– for those few years, if not before or after.

Extensionally or phenomenologically, a Jew “is” somebody considered Jewish by all or most of the people he meets. By this standard the multi-ordinal Bloom “is” a Jew again.

Once more: in terms of pure existentialism a Jew “is” somebody who chooses to consider themselves Jewish. Bloom obviously doesn’t consider himself Jewish but Irish, most of the time. Only when under verbal assault by the anti-semitic Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub does Bloom define himself as Jewish ["And Jesus was a Jew too. Your god. He was a Jew like me."] Here he obviously has in mind the “known Jewish ancestor” rule, because he adds “And so was his father,” to which the Citizen replies, as a correct Catholic, “He had no father,” and Bloom, unfamiliar with that theology — logic played with deuces, eights and one-eyed jacks wild — can only pragmatically reply, “Well, his uncle then.”

But recalling the incident later, Bloom says “And he called me a Jew, which as a matter of fact I’m not.” Here he returns to his customary “believer in Judaic religion” definition.

I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call “essentialism” and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word “is.”

//Although I couldn’t find the original link for more on Korzybski’s criticisms of “isness,” the Institute Of General Semantics site does have an excellent discussion of “How to Size Your ‘Thinking Box’” by Steve Stockdale which you can reach if you click here.

It’s Burns Night - get out there and toast Scotland’s Favorite poet! Yes, you too need to stab yourself a tasty haggis, slosh it down with a bottle of cheap whiskey and wax poetic! It’s the most celebrated national holiday!

Personally, it has an additional significance as the eve we received our first round of marks. I passed! And not “just by the skin of my teeth” like I expected (although by no means “Distinctions”.) Excuse me now, I have to go tie one on! Whoooooo!

This is the face of my America, as I see it. Flawed? Sure. But a giant step closer to the country I’d want to be living in. Please get out and vote in 2008.

On Saturday, the school’s Zoological Society presented a day of lectures on Exotics medicine (which of course I attended because I don’t know about you but after a long week of lecture filled days, nothing appeals more than to using personal downtime to attend more lectures.) They were for the whole, quite frankly, pretty amazing presentations on an array of interesting challenges (dealing with rabies epidemics in wild dog and wolf populations in Africa, treating avians in veterinary medicine, cetacean rescue efforts and challenges, etc.) One of the most heartrending topics and particularly educational presentation for me (my prior knowledge on this topic being shamefully non-existent) was the efforts of Animal Asia Foundation to improve animal welfare in the bear farming trade.

As you may know, the Asiatic black, aka Moon bear , population status vulnerable, are farmed by the population of China for their bile - a potent “cold” drug used in traditional Chinese medicine to eliminate “hot” diseases of the liver and such. (According to our lecturer, ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), the active ingredient of bear bile, can be an effective treatment of Parkinson’s and Huntington’s symptoms but as the UDCA patent has yet to produce commercially viable drugs, the capitalist Western pharmaceutical field has yet to push that aspect. That the chemical compound is artificially producible is antithetical to traditional thinking and so frankly, not the solution per se or maybe yes but just a very hard sell.) Farming was introduced as a proposal to stem the poaching of bears from the wild but has failed horribly, actually increasing the bile harvest from 500 to 7000 kg per year. The conditions in which the bears are kept are truly horrific. Not only are the animals raised in painfully constricted cage conditions, a hole is gouged in their abdomen to access the gall bladder. At one point, steel tubes were used to provide permanent access, although simple more available items such as buttons and tubes could also be implemented, but now more often than not the abdomen is just cut open and provoked twice a day to “milk” the bile, creating in the bears a festering open wound. The “surgery” (performed by the farmer, not a veterinarian) has a 50% mortality rate, and the “farming” reduces the animal’s life expectancy to a 1/4 of it’s potential.

The level of passion and compassion shown during this presentation was inspiring. Clearly, his love of these creatures is completely encompassing. We were told that they, physiologically, are a wonder, built to endure long periods of hibernation and (thus?) able to rebound from remarkable extremes of cruel treatment. We were told that the bears which have been rescued can never return to the wild but are enjoying their retirement in rehabilitation. We were told that the Chinese public have no concept of animal welfare and that few people see anything WRONG with the (by my standards inhumane, torturous) conditions. In conversational review with my mother (the reason for this blog posting, thank you for the reminder) of what we had been told, she reminded me that HUMANE rarely wins in the face of the blinding allure of an extremely lucrative endeavor; when a demand is generated by those who can do, they will do.