Hope

Josie Long ‏@JosieLong  Nov 9

Why is this happening?

From here on in, I will only refer to ISIS as Al-Qaeda separatists. They are not 'Islamic', and they are not a 'State', and they certainly do not belong to Iraq or the Levant. I will not collude with their delusions of grandeur. They are a bunch of criminals so depraved, that even Al-Qaeda has distanced themselves from them.
They are an international hodge podge of power hungry, arrogant, criminals, united in the search for money, power and degradation and mass murder of civilians. They use religion as a smoke screen, a red herring to pull ordinary folk off the scent of their real intent. They have nothing to do with faith. The longer the general public is fooled by this, the longer it will take to deal with the real problem.

Their 'fighters' get paid at least double the monthly wage of an Iraqi soldier. Where is this money coming from?

They have weapons, that some states can not buy. Where did they get the money? Why is the arms industry selling to them?

They have actively sought to attack, take over, then somehow continue to run gas and oil fields. They have taken over most of the gas and oil plants in Syria, and at least 5 in northern Iraq. How are these plants still running (random untrained crazies are not going to be capable of this)? Who is buying the oil?
Interestingly, the price of oil internationally has gone down corresponding with the above take overs of natural resources. There are suggestions that this oil is being sold cut price, going over the border to Turkey, and being sold on to progressively bigger corporations.
Buying this oil is effectively fuelling the conflict. Why is there not an international response to ban the buying of illegally sourced oil by the corporations? Why is there not an international boycott to these murky practices that fund this international criminal activity?

This is about money, power and degradation. This has never been about religion. There is an element of cult like practices in some segments, and atrocious lack of rational thought, but this isn't the bigger picture, they are not the big fish. The longer we are fooled by their rhetoric, and believe their narrative, the longer this will go on, and the worse this will get.

They are an international mafia like corporation.
A lesson from history - Al Capone wasn't put away for murder. He was put away for tax evasion.
At this stage, we don't really know who the real 'Al Capones' are, but the income streams are increasingly clear.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/video/release-video-bodies-captured-soldiers-083038368.html

'Asian College Bubble'

The 'Asian college bubble' applies to other ethnicities too!!

'Britain is losing its sense of decency when it comes to the disabled'

• By Sharon Brennan
• Tuesday, 17 July 2012 at 4:00 am

Worcestershire county council has just announced its proposal to shut away disabled people in care homes for the rest of their lives – openly admitting that it is a policy based on finances not necessarily on the individual’s health or care needs.
Called the Maximum Expenditure Policy, the council has stated home care will be capped at the level of what it would cost for that person to live in a residential care unit. The disabled person would then be forced to live in a care home, or find private funding for his or her additional care needs.
The council’s consultation on this proposal fails to declare how many people this might effect, what the financial cap might be or if private funding or charitable support is at all feasible for the people it will effect.  However a new report, Past Caring, published by the research team at the WeareSpartacus campaign group, has estimated that people who need over six hours care a day, or three hours from two carers simultaneously, will be faced with spending the rest of their lives shut away, isolated from families, friends and with the prospect of employment extremely low.
If this were to happen, there couldn’t be a clearer confirmation that disabled people are now seen as second class citizens, so irrelevant to society that local communities no longer have need for them.
With the number of disabled hate crimes reported to the police up by 14 per cent since 2010, it seems that the constant cry of “scroungers” and “benefit cheats” has now permanently affected the public’s view of disabled people. Before we are even able to have a fair discussion on what should be cut and by how much, campaigners have a battle to convince people that the genuinely disabled neighbour, work colleague or distant family member they know is not an aberration but the norm. Stats published by the Department of Work and pensions show that the combined fraud level for both Incapacity Benefit and Disability Living Allowance is just 0.8 per cent, yet the battle is almost lost – disabled people are regarded with suspicion, viewed with sceptical eyes as to whether their illness really is as bad as they say. And so the cuts keep coming – the politicians recognising an easy target when they see one.
Charity after charity has implored the Government to rethink the cumulative effects of its cuts, showing that they fall disproportionately on disabled people, pushing a group, a third of which already live in poverty, into dire financial circumstances and social isolation. But the Government refuses to listen.
Back in February the House of Lords passed several amendments to the Welfare Bill which included increasing the time people are allowed to claim contributory-based Employment and Support Allowance (the new Incapacity Benefit) from one year to two. But the Government used an archaic parliamentary process called Financial Privilege to overturn these changes, sticking stubbornly to its agenda by declaring they couldn’t afford to fund the amendments.
However, by May money was suddenly found by Osborne to alleviate the impact of a Child Benefit cut for higher rate tax payers – pushing back the earning threshold from £43,000 to £60,000 before this benefit is removed completely. And only last week in Prime Minister’s Questions Cameron reiterated his commitment to not means testing free bus passes and winter heating allowances for pensioners. Apparently this is a Government that will appease its core electorate even at the cost of what is fair.
As a country we cannot ignore this ethical crisis any longer. Bar bringing in euthanasia, these cuts to the disabled will be felt on the public purse. The cost of appeals alone against incorrect Employment and allowance benefit decisions are estimated to be running at £80 million and rising. The NHS is already seeing the effect of a crisis in community care as 66 per cent of NHS managers polled report a rise in demand for health services as a result of local authority funding cuts.
And what of the moral implications? Much has been said recently of rebalancing society away from the greed of chasing money at any cost. We cannot rebuild a fairer Britain, with a sense of what is decent at the heart of our communities, if we willingly allow some of the most vulnerable people to be pummelled by politicians with policies that turn the clock back thirty years and cleanse our streets of disabled people. These are normal, decent people – it is you and your family if misfortune came your way.
Instead of outlawing this local council’s suggested moves, the Cabinet actually approved plans for the council to consult on this appalling proposal. No wonder the Government quietly announced a delay on the publication of its disability strategy, as clearly all its practical policies fly in the face of its apparent desire to allow disabled people to live “fulfilling” lives. If Worcestershire council gets away with this then a precedent will be set: as other councils look to manage their budget they will have received a clear signal that disabled people are not on anyone’s political agenda – do with them what you will.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/07/17/britain-is-losing-its-sense-of-decency-when-it-comes-to-the-disabled/

Articles on Islamophobia

We mustn't allow Muslims in public life to be silenced

Even in polite society, fear-mongering, negative stereotyping and abuse are now out of control – as I know from bitter experience

• 
• • Mehdi Hasan
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 8 July 2012 21.00 BST

'You can now say things about Muslims, in polite society and even among card-carrying liberal lefties, that you cannot say about any other group or minority.' Photograph: Sion Touhig/Corbis

Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist? Extremist, maybe? Welcome to my world. It's pretty depressing. Every morning, I take a deep breath and then go online to discover what new insult or smear has been thrown in my direction. Whether it's tweets, blogposts or comment threads, the abuse is as relentless as it is vicious.
You might think I'd have become used to it by now. Well, I haven't. When I started writing for a living, I never imagined I'd be the victim of such personal, such Islamophobic, attacks, on a near-daily basis. On joining the New Statesman in 2009, I was promptly subjected to an online smear campaign, involving a series of selectively edited videos of speeches I'd delivered in front of groups of Muslim university students several years ago. I was accused of being a "secret" member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and a "dangerous Muslim shithead" in the "same genre" as the Nazis. The post that sticks in my mind is from the blogger who referred to me as a "moderate cockroach" whose Islamic faith was "no different from the Islam of Abu Hamza, Abu Qatada, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Anjem Choudary or any of the 'tiny minority' of Islamic terrorists who believe that Islam must dominate, no matter what the cost".
Three years later, as I leave the New Statesman to join the Huffington Post UK, little seems to have changed. "Huffington Post's new UK political director brings pro-Iran baggage," screamed the headline on the Fox News website back in late May. My "baggage"? I once publicly praised a fatwa from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, forbidding the production of nuclear weapons. Shame on me! Another ultra-conservative US news website, the Washington Free Beacon, referred to me as the "HuffPo's house jihadi".
The mere mention of the words "Islam" or "Muslim" generates astonishing levels of hysteria and hate on the web. As one of only two Muslim columnists in the mainstream media – the other being the Independent's Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – I have the dubious distinction of being on the receiving end of much of it. In August 2011, for instance, I wrote a light-hearted column in the Guardian on Ramadan, examining how Muslim athletes cope with fasting while competing. The article provoked an astonishing 957 comments, the vast majority of which were malicious, belligerent or both. As one perplexed commenter observed: "There is much we might criticise Islam for … but to see the amount of hatred being spewed on this thread on an article about something as innocuous as fasting really makes one wonder." Indeed.
And it isn't just pieces about Muslims. A recent interview of mine with the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, elicited the following response: "Get out of my country, goatfucker." How many other political columnists have to deal with such "feedback"? And how many of my fellow pundits in the British media get death threats in the post, warning them that "there will not be 1 live Muslim left in Europe when we have finished"?
From my perspective, the British commentariat can be divided into three groups. The first consists of a handful of journalists who regularly speak out against the rising tide of anti-Muslim bigotry – from the Telegraph's Peter Oborne to a bevy of Guardian columnists, including Jonathan Freedland, Seumas Milne and Gary Younge.
The second consists of those writers, such as the Mail's Melanie Phillips, the Telegraph's Charles Moore and the Spectator's Douglas Murray, who see Islam and Muslims as alien, hostile and threatening. Phillips has referred darkly to a "fifth column in our midst"; Murray has said "conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board".
But it is the third, and perhaps biggest, group that concerns me most: those commentators who boast otherwise impeccable anti-racist credentials yet tend to be silent on the subject of Islamophobia; journalists who cannot bring themselves to recognise, let alone condemn, the growing prevalence of anti-Muslim feeling across Europe – or acknowledge the simple fact that the targeting of a powerless, brown-skinned minority is indeed a form of racism.
I'm a fan of robust debate and I'm not averse to engaging in the odd ad hominem attack myself. This isn't a case of special pleading, on behalf of Britain's Muslims, nor do I think my Islamic beliefs should be exempt from public criticism. But the fact is that you can now say things about Muslims, in polite society and even among card-carrying liberal lefties, that you cannot say about any other group or minority. Am I expected to shrug this off?
The truth is that the fear-mongering and negative stereotyping is out of control. I've lost count of the number of websites that try to "out" every Muslim in public life as an extremist or Islamist of some shape or form. The promotion of Sayeeda Warsi to the Conservative frontbench in 2007 provoked the influential ConservativeHome website to describe her appointment as "the wrong signal at a time when Britain is fighting a global war against Islamic terrorism and extremism". Labour's Sadiq Khan, the shadow justice secretary, was accused of holding "extremist" views after he called for a "more independent foreign policy" and was spuriously linked to Hizb ut-Tahrir. In April, Labour peer Lord Ahmed was suspended from the party after he was falsely accused of having put a £10m bounty on Barack Obama's head (the suspension has since been lifted).
If Muslims such as Warsi, Khan, Ahmed and me are all secret extremists, who are the moderates? That, of course, seems to be the implicit, insidious message: there aren't any. But if those of us who try to participate in public life and contribute to political debate are constantly painted with a broad brush of suspicion and distrust, then what hope is there for the thousands of young British Muslims who feel alienated and marginalised from the political process? I used to encourage Muslim students to get involved in the media or in politics, but I now find it much harder to do so. Why would I want anyone else to go through what I've gone through? Believe me, Muslims aren't endowed thicker skins than non-Muslims.
To say that I find the relentlessly hostile coverage of Islam, coupled with the personal abuse that I receive online, depressing is an understatement. There have been times – for instance, when I found my wife curled up on our couch, in tears, after having discovered some of the more monstrous and threatening comments on my New Statesman blog – when I've wondered whether it's all worth it. Perhaps, a voice at the back of my head suggests, I should throw in the towel and go find a less threatening, more civilised line of work. But that's what the trolls want. To silence Muslims; to deny a voice to a voiceless community. I shouldn't have to put up with this abuse. But I will. I have no plans to let the Islamophobes win. So, dare I ask: who's with me?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/08/muslims-public-life-abuse?commentpage=all#start-of-comments

Owen Jones: Islamophobia - for Muslims, read Jews. And be shocked

Imagine our alarm if nearly half the UK population said they believed that 'there are too many Jews'

Friday 13 July 2012 

To be a prominent Muslim means suffering a daily diet of bigotry and even outright hatred. This week, Mehdi Hasan – who, other than my colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, is Britain's only prominent Muslim journalist – wrote of how, every day, he is attacked as a "jihadist" and a "terrorist". He has been described as a "dangerous Muslim shithead", a "moderate cockroach", and worse. The message from his critics is clear: Muslims have no legitimate place in public life.

Mehdi Hasan was right to speak out, but it must not be left to Muslims alone to take on this bigotry. A tide of Islamophobia has swept Europe for many years, and – shamefully – all too few have taken a stand. Even many who regard themselves as "progressives" have either remained silent or even indulged anti-Muslim prejudice. It's time for Muslims and non-Muslims alike to join forces against the most widespread – and most acceptable – form of bigotry of our times.
Think I'm exaggerating? Consider that the far-right's main target of choice is no longer Jews or black people: it's Muslims. The BNP portrays itself as a crusade against the "Islamification" of Britain; in the 2010 election, it launched a "Campaign Against Islam". Its leader, Nick Griffin, describes Islam as "wicked" and a "cancer", and has blamed Muslims for problems such as drugs and rape. The English Defence League stages frequent – and often intimidating – street rallies protesting against Muslims.
But anti-Muslim prejudice isn't simply confined to the far-right fringes. I attended a Stockport sixth form with a large Muslim student population. The reality of their lives is all but airbrushed out of existence. When they appear at all, it's generally as fanatics, extremists or a community somehow "harbouring" dangerous extremists. (When do Britain's whites face the absurdity of being called on to crack down on far-right fanatics supposedly in their ranks?) One study took a selection of newspapers in a single week: 91 per cent of reports featuring Muslims were negative.
One of my Muslim fellow students was Dr Leon Moosavi, fast becoming a national authority on Islamophobia. He battles against the widespread denial that anti-Muslim prejudice is a problem. But consider that, in one poll conducted by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 45 per cent of Britons agreed that "there are too many Muslims" in Britain. Imagine if nearly half the population admitted to believing that "there are too many Jews" in Britain: how loud would our alarm be?
Of course, it is not just a British problem: the poison of Islamophobia has infected Europe's political mainstream. According to a Pew Research Center survey, nearly six out of 10 Europeans believe that Muslims were "fanatical", and half believed they were "violent". As here, the European far-right aims fire at Muslims above all other groups. In the Netherlands, an anti-Muslim party led by Geert Wilders is the third largest in parliament. Wilders compares the Koran to Mein Kampf, calls Islam a "Trojan Horse" in Europe and demands that the country's 850,000 Muslims be paid to leave the country. Wilders doesn't languish on the fringes: the current Dutch cabinet depended for two years on his party's support.
Or take sleepy Switzerland, where the Swiss People's Party (SVP) is the biggest party in the country's Federal Assembly. The SVP won a referendum on the banning of minarets, which the party's general secretary described as "symbols of Islamic power". During the vote, Geneva's mosque was repeatedly vandalised. Farhad Afshar, the president of the Coordination of Islamic Organisations, had no doubt what signal was sent by this vote: "that Muslims do not feel accepted as a religious community". But it gets even darker than that. In June, the Zurich-based SVP politician Alexander Müller was forced to stand down after tweeting: "Maybe we need another Kristallnacht… this time for mosques." The parallels with anti-Semitism could not be more overt.
In France – where recently 42 per cent polled for Le Monde believed that the presence of Muslims was a "threat" to their national identity – a record number voted for the anti-Muslim National Front in April's presidential elections. Denmark's third largest party is the People's Party, which rails against "Islamisation" and demands the end of all non-Western immigration. The anti-Muslim Vlaams Belang flourishes in Flemish Belgium. But those who take a stand against Islamophobia are often demanded to qualify it with a condemnation of extremism. When is this ever asked of other stands against prejudice? When we condemn anti-Semitic hate, must we criticise repressive Israeli policies in the same breath? It would be absurd – they are completely separate issues, and indeed millions of Jews across the world oppose the actions of Israel's government.
Anti-Muslim hate is a European pandemic. I'm proud to stand with Mehdi Hasan and other Muslims facing Islamophobia. But – I implore, I beg fellow non-Muslims – stand with them too, before this hatred spirals further out of control.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-islamophobia--for-muslims-read-jews-and-be-shocked-7939392.html

Kids react: Bullying

A YouTube series that shows a group of children viral videos, and records their reaction. This episode was of more serious nature than their usual programs. I am struck by the maturity of the children.

If any child is getting bullied, and happens to read this:
As cliched as it sounds - do not suffer alone. You are not the first, and unfortunately, nor will you be the last to be bullied. Tell someone. Someone you trust. Different people will deal with bullying in different ways. For a few years in school I was bullied. It was awful. I felt like it would never end. I told teachers, which meant it stopped for a while, then would restart. I wish I went to different teachers. It only ended when I answered back (thanking them for their taunts - that they didn't expect). Now these are memories from a previous time. You will get over it.

More importantly, if you are witness to bullying, do not stay silent. Your silence contributes to the bullying. You are in a position of power. Your silence gives the bullies power to continue what they are doing to whoever they wish. But your voice will take away this power. Speak up. Tell a teacher in private. They won't say who told, and you maintain your anonimity, and thus prevent this from occuring.

If you are the bully. Take a long hard look at yourself. You may be hurting. Or hurting others may temporalily make you feel better about your self. But I'll warn, life has a funny way - what goes around, comes around. There is nothing brave, big or remotely popular about being mean. Others will dislike you for it, and will forever remember you in a bad way. You do not need to be like that. Being nice doesn't mean being weak. It just means being nice. You will feel good about yourself when you are caring and polite towards others. It's hard work to get that point from where you are now. You will need to rebuild trust with others. But in the long run, is well worth it.

And if a teacher is reading this - take bullying seriously. Those 'little' disagreements are part of a bigger picture, having a long term impact on the children in front of you. They will carry through those memories and experieces into adulthood. You are in a position of great responsibility helping to raise society's next generation of young adults. Some of my best teachers instilled a sense of social responsibility in myself and my peers. Some of my worst teachers took no interest in even the teaching itself.

Highly recommended film...

Skin - currently on BBC iplayer - so watch it online while you can.

Based on the true story of Sandra Laing. Born to white Africaans parents, but her appearance was mixed race - all during apartheid era South Africa.

Makes one angry to think what humans do to each other.

'Doctor Talk to Me'

Doctor Talk to Me - An article from the New York Times from just over 20 years ago. An editor, turned patient, gives his viewpoints and experiences. He lays out his prejudices, reflects on them, and what he would have wished to have and see in an 'ideal doctor'. This is very much one man's perspective, and obviously not reflective of all people. He makes some interesting points, made me notice some aspects that I previously did not think particularly important (e.g. having 'style'), although there are some points that I completely disagree with. But, overall it does make for a reflective and thought provoking read, and it was very brave, and even honourable, of him to write and share such an honest piece of his personal experiences and musings.
The bits I've put in bold are pretty much parts I would have highlighted or underlined if this were in a book.

pdf

By Anatole Broyard; Anatole Broyard is a former editor of The New York Times Book Review
Published: August 26, 1990

When, in the Summer of 1989, I moved from Connecticut to Cambridge, Mass., I found that I had difficulty urinating. I was like Portnoy, in ''Portnoy's Complaint,'' who couldn't fornicate in Israel. I had always wanted to live in Cambridge, and the thought passed through my mind that I couldn't urinate because - like Israel for Portnoy - Cambridge was a transcendent place for me.

When my inhibition persisted, I began to think about a doctor, and I set about finding one in the superstitious manner most of us fall back on: I asked a couple I knew for a recommendation. To be recommended, for whatever unreasonable reasons, gives a doctor an aura, a history, a shred of magic. Though I thought of my disorder as a simple matter - prostatitis is common in men of my age - I still wanted a potent doctor.

I applied to this particular couple for a recommendation because they are the two most critical people I know: critics of philosophy, politics, history, literature, drama, music. They are the sort of people for whom information is a religion, and the rigor of their conversation is legendary. To talk with them is an ordeal, a fatigue of fine distinctions, and I wanted a doctor who had survived such a scrutiny.

They could only give me the name of their internist, who referred me to a urologist. The recommendation was diluted, but it was better than none, so I made an appointment to see the urologist in a local hospital. The visit began well. The secretary was attractive, efficient and alert. She remembered my name. I was shown into a pleasant office and told that the doctor would be with me in a few minutes.

While I waited, I subjected the doctor to a preliminary semiotic scrutiny. Sitting in his office, I read his signs. The diplomas I took for granted; what interested me was the fact that the room was furnished with taste. There were well-made, well-filled bookcases, an antique desk and chairs, a reasonable Oriental rug on the floor. A large window opened one wall of the office to the panorama of Boston, and this suggested status, an earned respect. I imagined the doctor taking the long view out of his window.

On the walls and desk were pictures of three healthy-looking, conspicuously happy children, photographed in a prosperous outdoor setting of lawn, flowers and trees. As I remember, one of the photographs showed a sailboat. From the evidence, their father knew how to live - and by extension, how to look after the lives of others.

Soon the doctor came in and introduced himself. ''Let's go into my office,'' he said, and I realized that I had been waiting among someone else's effects. I felt that I had been tricked. Having already warmed myself to the first doctor, I was obliged to follow this second man, this impostor, into another office, which turned out to be modern and anonymous. There were no antiques, no Oriental rug and no pictures that I could see.

From the beginning, I had a negative feeling about this doctor. He didn't seem intense enough or determined enough to prevail over something powerful and demonic like illness. He had a pink, soft face and blue eyes, and his manner was hearty and vague at the same time, polite where politeness was irrelevant. He reminded me of a salesman with nothing to sell but his inoffensiveness.

I didn't like the way he spoke: it struck me as deliberately deliberate, a man fixed in a pose, playing doctor. There was no sign of a tragic sense of life in him that I could see, no furious desire to oppose himself to fate. I realized, of course, that what I was looking for was extravagant, that I was demanding nothing less than an ideal doctor, yet isn't that what we all want?

In the end, it didn't matter whether my reading of this particular man was just or unjust - I simply couldn't warm up to him. Choosing a doctor is difficult because it is our first explicit confrontation of our illness. ''How good is this man?'' is simply the reverse of ''How bad am I?'' To be sick brings out all our prejudices and primitive feelings. Like fear, or love, it makes us a little crazy. Yet the craziness of the patient is part of his condition. I was also aware of a certain predisposition in myself in favor of Jewish doctors. I thought of them as the trouble-shooters -the physicians, lawyers, brokers, arbiters and artists - of contemporary life. History had convinced them that life was a disease. My father, who was an old-fashioned Southern anti-Semite, insisted on a Jewish doctor when he developed cancer of the bladder. A Jewish doctor, he argued, had been bred to medicine. In my father's Biblical conception, a Jew's life was a story of study, repair and reform. A Jewish doctor knew what survival was worth, because he had had to fight for his. Obliged to treat life as a business as well as a pleasure, Jews drove hard bargains. To lose a patient was bad business. In his heart, I think my father believed that a Jewish doctor was closer to God and could use that connection to ''Jew down'' death.

This other, all-too-human doctor took me into an examining room and felt my prostate. It appeared to me that he had not yet overcome his self-consciousness about this procedure. Back in his office, he summed up his findings. There were hard lumps in my prostate, he said, which suggested tumors, and these ''mandated'' further investigation. He used the word ''mandate'' twice in his summary, as well as the word ''significantly.''

But he was the only urologist I knew in Cambridge, and so, a few days later, I allowed him to perform a cystoscopy, a procedure in which a small scope was inserted through my urethra up to my prostate and bladder. During surgical procedures, doctors wear a tightfitting white cap, a sort of skullcap like the one Alan Alda wears in ''M*A*S*H*.'' To this, my doctor had added what looked like a clear plastic shower cap, and the moment I saw him in these two caps, I turned irrevocably against him. He wore them absolutely without inflection or style, with none of the jauntiness that usually comes with long practice. He wore them like an American in France who affects a beret without understanding how to shape or cock it. To my eyes, this doctor simply didn't have the charisma to overcome or assimilate those caps, and that finished him off for me.

I want to point out that this man is in all likelihood an able, even a talented doctor. Certainly, I'm no judge of his medical competence, nor do I mean to criticize it. What turned me against him was what I saw as a lack of style. I realized that I wanted my doctor to have style - which I think of as a dash of magic - as well as medical ability. It was like having a lucky doctor. I've described all this - a patient's madness - to show how irrational such transactions are, how far removed from any notion of dispassionate objectivity. To be sick is already to be disordered in your mind as well. Still, this does not necessarily mean that I was wrong to want to change doctors: I was simply listening to my unconscious telling me what I needed.

Now that I know I have cancer of the prostate, the lymph nodes and part of my skeleton, what do I want in a doctor? I would say that I want one who is a close reader of illness and a good critic of medicine. I secretly believe that criticism can wither cancer. Also, I would like a doctor who is not only a talented physician but a bit of a metaphysician too, someone who can treat body and soul. I used to get restless when people talked about soul, but now I know better. Soul is the part of you that you summon up in emergencies. You don't need to be religious to believe in the soul or to have one.

My ideal doctor would be my Virgil, leading me through my purgatory or inferno, pointing out the sights as we go. He would resemble Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote ''Awakenings'' and ''The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.'' I can imagine Dr. Sacks entering my condition, looking around at it from the inside like a benevolent landlord with a tenant, trying to see how he could make the premises more livable for me. He would see the genius of my illness. He would mingle his daemon with mine; we would wrestle with my fate together. Inside every patient, there's a poet trying to get out. My ideal doctor would ''read'' my poetry, my literature. He would see that my sickness has purified me, weakening my worst parts and strengthening the best.

To most physicians, my illness is a routine incident in their rounds, while for me it's the crisis of my life. I would feel better if I had a doctor who, at least, perceived this incongruity. I don't ask him to love me - in fact, I think the role of love is greatly exaggerated by many writers on illness. Of course you want your family and close friends to love you, but the situation shouldn't become a hunting season for love, or a competition, a desperate kiss before dying. To a critically ill person, love may begin to resemble an anesthetic. In a novel by Joy Williams called ''State of Grace,'' a character asks, ''What can be beyond love? I want to get there.'' The sick man has got there: he's at a point where what he wants from most people is not love but a spacious, flaring grasp of his situation, what is known now in the literature of illness as ''empathetic witnessing.'' The patient is always on the brink of revelation, and he needs someone who can recognize it when it comes.

Just as I see no reason for my physician to love me, I would not expect him to suffer with me either. On the contrary, what would please me most would be a doctor who enjoyed me. I want to be a good story for him, to give him some of my art in exchange for his. If a patient expects a doctor to be interested in him, he ought to try to be interesting. When he shows nothing but a greediness for care, nothing but the coarser forms of anxiety, it's only natural for the physician to feel an aversion. There is an etiquette to being sick.

I wouldn't demand a lot of my doctor's time; I just wish he would brood on my situation for perhaps five minutes, that he would give me his whole mind just once. I would like to think of him as going through my character, as he goes through my flesh, to get at my illness, for each man is ill in his own way. Proust complained that his physician did not allow for his having read Shakespeare. I have a wistful desire for my relation to my doctor to be beautiful - but I don't know how this can be brought about. Though I see us framed in an epiphany, I can't make out the content.

Just as he orders blood tests and bone scans of my body, I'd like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit as well as my prostate. While he inevitably feels superior to me because he is the doctor and I am the patient, I'd like him to know that I feel superior to him too, that he is my patient also and I have my diagnosis of him. There should be a place where our respective superiorities could meet and frolic together.

Since technology deprives me of the intimacy of my illness, makes it not mine but something that belongs to science, I wish my doctor could somehow restore it to me and make it personal again. When my father's father died in the French Quarter of New Orleans 60 years ago, the popularly accepted story was that on a humid night in mid-August, he had eaten a dozen bananas and then taken a cold bath. He was a man of 87 whose life had been a strenuous assertion of his appetites, and this explanation suited him, just as it suited his friends in the French Quarter. It would be more satisfying to me, it would allow me to feel that I owned my illness, if my urologist were to say, ''You know, you've beat the hell out of this prostate of yours. It looks like a worn-out baseball.'' Nobody wants an anonymous illness. I'd much rather think that I brought it on myself than that it was a mere accident of nature.

It is only natural for a patient to feel some dismay at the changes brought about in his body by illness, and I wonder whether an innovative doctor - again, like Oliver Sacks - couldn't find a way to reconceptualize this situation. If only the patient could be allowed to see his illness not so much as a failure of his body as a natural consumption of it. Any reconciling idea would do. The doctor could say, ''You've spent your self unselfishly, like a philanthropist who gives all his money away.'' If the patient could feel that he has earned his illness, that his sickness represents the decadence that follows a great flowering, he might look upon the ruin of his body as tourists look upon the ruins of antiquity. (Of course I'm offering these suggestions playfully, as experiments in thinking about medicine.) Physicians have been taught in medical school that they must keep the patient at a distance because there isn't time to accommodate his personality, or because if the doctor becomes ''involved'' in the patient's predicament, the emotional burden will be too great. As I've suggested, it doesn't take much time to make good contact, but beyond that, the emotional burden of avoiding the patient may be much harder on the doctor than he imagines. It may be this that sometimes makes him complain of feeling harassed. The patient's unanswered questions will always thunder in his stethoscope. A doctor's job would be so much more interesting and satisfying if he would occasionally let himself plunge into the patient, if he could lose his own fear of falling.

Applying to other friends, following new recommendations, I found another urologist. He's highly regarded in his field, and he inspired such confidence in me that my cancer immediately went into remission. My only regret is that he doesn't talk very much - and when he does, he sounds like everybody else. His brilliance has no voice - at least not when he's with me. There's a paradox here at the heart of medicine, because a doctor, like a writer, must have a voice of his own, something that conveys the timbre, the rhythm, the diction and the music of his humanity, that compensates us for all the speechless machines. When a doctor makes a difficult diagnosis, it is not his medical knowledge only that determines it, but a voice in his head. Such a diagnosis depends as much on inspiration as art does. Whether he wants to be or not, the doctor is a storyteller, and he can turn our lives into good or bad stories, regardless of the diagnosis. If my doctor would allow me, I would be glad to help him here, to take him on as my patient.

Although I hope to live for a while, my urologist is young, and I see us as joined till death do us part. Perhaps later, when he is older, he'll have learned how to converse. Astute as he is, he doesn't yet understand that all cures are partly ''talking cures.'' Every patient needs mouth-to-mouth resusitation, for talk is the kiss of life.

Yet it's too easy to accuse the doctor, to blame the absence of natural talk on him. It's also true that some of what the patient asks is ineffable. Even a doctor like Chekhov would be hard put to answer him. For example, I would like to discuss my prostate with my urologist not as a diseased organ but as a philosopher's stone. Every patient invites the doctor to combine the role of the priest, the philosopher, the poet, the scholar. He expects the doctor to evaluate his entire life, like a biographer.

Of course, a physician may reasonably ask: ''But what am I supposed to say? All I can tell the patient is the facts, if there are any facts.'' But this is not quite true. The doctor's answer to his patient is yet to be born. It will come naturally - or at first unnaturally - from the intersecting of the patient's needs with the physician's as yet untried imagination. Just as a mother ushers her child into the world, so the doctor must usher the patient out of the ordinary world into whatever place awaits him. The physician is the patient's only familiar in a foreign country.

To help the doctor reach the patient, and the patient to reach the doctor, the mood of the hospital might have to be modified. It might be less like a laboratory and more like a theater, which would be only fitting, since no place contains more drama. The laboratory atmosphere can probably be traced back to the idea of asepsis, to the avoidance of contagion. Originally, the patient was protected by the sterility of the hospital. Only the sterility went too far: It sterilized the doctor's thinking. It sterilized the patient's entire experience in the hospital. It sterilized the very notion of illness to the point where we can't bring our soiled thoughts to bear on it. But the sick man needs the contagion of life.

Not every patient can be saved, but his illness may be eased by the way the doctor responds to him - and in responding to him, the doctor may save himself. But first he must become a student again; he has to dissect the cadaver of his professional persona; he must see that his silence and neutrality are unnatural. It may be necessary to give up some of his authority in exchange for his humanity, but as the old family doctors knew, this is not a bad bargain. In learning to talk to his patients, the doctor may talk himself back into loving his work. He has little to lose and much to gain by letting the sick man into his heart. If he does, they can share, as few others can, the wonder, terror and exaltation of being on the edge of being, between the natural and the supernatural.

Analysing the White Paper in rap form

Via the Guardian ' Andrew Lansley takes rap from MC NxtGen over health policy in viral video Success of YouTube video criticising Department of Health white paper prompts health minister to respond to rapper critic Esther Addley guardian.co.uk, Friday 25 March 2011 20.18 GMT Three years ago, when he was 19, a young rapper calling himself MC NxtGen hoped he was on the verge of the big time. Performing at a "battle" at a nightclub in central London, he rapped: "To be found you gotta be loud and have a different sound, step out from the crowd, just rise from the underground!" The crowd liked him but the title of Britain's Next Urban Superstar was not to be his. He failed to make the final, and returned home to his dreams of superstardom and his job as a binman in Loughborough. This week, however, Britain might just have been offered a second chance to turn NxtGen into a star, in the very unlikeliest of circumstances. The rapper, real name Sean Donnelly, has found himself a viral YouTube and Twitter celebrity after recording a track that certainly offers a "different sound". Eschewing the traditional hiphop themes of bling, booty and babes, Donnelly has recorded a caustic three-minute rap about the Department of Health's white paper "Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS", and dedicated it personally – highly personally, one might say – to the health minister himself. "Andrew Lansley, greedy! Andrew Lansley, tosser!" runs the refrain, repeated throughout the song, over a sample taken from The House of the Rising Sun. "The NHS is not for sale, you grey-haired manky codger!" But if Donnelly is far from polite in his political protest, he has certainly done his research. "So the budget of the PCTs, he wants to hand to the GPs / Oh please. Dumb geeks are gonna buy from any willing provider, / Get care from private companies." Later, he offers a helpful parse of the white paper, saying Lansley's plans are that "we'll become more like the US / and care will be farmed out to private companies, / who will sell their service to the NHS via the GPs / who will have more to do with service purchase arrangements / than anything to do with seeing their patients." Finishing his shift on the bins on Friday ("I don't think this is really anyone's career choice"), Donnelly said he'd been overwhelmed by the response, which had seen his Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages "going crazy" and even contact from TV companies. "I didn't really plan for it all to be about me," he says. "I just did it basically so I could speak to the youth." The song came about, Donnelly, now 22, told the Guardian, because he has "close family and friends" – his girlfriend is one – "who want to work in the NHS in the future hopefully, but they're worried about the cuts. So I researched it on the internet and I just did the song. I feel for the people that are ill in hospital. If they were privatised they wouldn't be able to afford it." And why focus on Lansley in particular? "Because I'm peed off with the guy." He insists he'd rather rap about "truth" than money, fast cars or sex. "That's what sells, but I'm just not like that." Donnelly started MC-ing when he was 11 or 12, he says, when he first saw Eminem, whose wit he immediately loved. "It was just the funniness and this complete truth at the same time." The Detroit rapper's influence might be detected in the video to Andrew Lansley – which has been viewed on YouTube more than 30,000 times in 24 hours – in which he enlists shoppers in his home town to wave placards, wear David Cameron and Nick Clegg masks and mouth "Tosser!" and "greedy!" at the camera at apposite points in the song. At one point, railing against Lansley's involvement of the fast food industry in formulating health policy, Donnelly dons a mask of the health secretary and throws crisps at his face. He even riffs on the health secretary's expenses record, and – in what has a reasonable claim to be the unlikeliest rap lyric ever – on the controversial donation to Lansley's office by the chairman of a private health company. "He's been given cash / by John Nash / chairman of Care UK, / a private healthcare provider, / who, if they have their own way, / will be the biggest beneficiaries / of Conservative Lib-Dem policies / to privatise healthcare, pull apart the welfare state …" It's some distance from 2 Live Crew's Me So Horny. He is now trying to release the track on iTunes – "I've had so many people saying, 'Let's get it to number one!'". Then he'd love to quit his job on the bins. "The older I've got the more I've been worried, thinking I'm not going to make it." He's made a wider impact now. By Friday night the viral video had infected the Department of Health, and Lansley himself was moved to comment. "We will never privatise the NHS," he told the Guardian. "But I'm impressed that he's managed to get lyrics about GP commissioning into a rap." ' Andrew Lansley rap on YouTube - includes analysis of White Paper in rap form, and some bad language (I don't generally approve of bad language to make a point, but...).

I don't normally like the daily mail, but...

An interesting and revealing article on an English mother's perspective of having a mixed race child. (The guardian version of the article is below, as well as another).

'I love my mixed race baby - but why does she feel so alien?'by LOWRI TURNER
Last updated at 16:46 13 July 2007

"She's getting very dark, isn't she?" This is what one of my friends recently said about my much adored - 12-week-old daughter.
She didn't mean to be rude. But it was a comment that struck me with the force of a jab to the stomach.
Immediately, I was overwhelmed by a confusion of emotions. I felt protective, insulted, worried, ashamed, guilty, all at once. The reason? My lovely, wriggly, smiley baby is mixed race.
Now, I think of myself as pretty 'right on'. My home is on the border of the London Republic of Hackney. I've been to the Notting Hill Carnival, even if I found the music a bit loud. Yet now I realise what a 'white' world I inhabit.
I am white and I have two sons from my first marriage who are both milky complexioned and golden haired. My twin sister, who I spend a lot of time with, has a Danish partner. As a consequence, she has two boys who are also pale skinned and flaxen haired.
Into this positively Scandinavian next generation, I have now injected a tiny, dark-skinned, dark-haired girl. To say she stands out is an understatement.
My colouring and that of my children has never really been an issue before. However, three years ago I met the man who became my second husband and who is the father of my daughter.
Although born in the UK, his parents came from India in the Sixties. This makes him British-Asian and our daughter mixed race.
There is another more PC term for the plump little bundle I strap to my front. She is 'dual heritage'. It's a bit trendy, but I quite like it. It implies a pride in coming from two cultures, rather than the less attractive connotations of 'mixed race'.
The usual time something is labelled 'mixed' is when it's a packet of nuts and they've bulked out the luxury cashews with cheaper peanuts. I'm not sure I want my daughter to be regarded as an adulterated version of some pure original. Still, it is the most accepted description.
The truth is, whatever the label, the fact there is a label proves that my daughter's conflicting parentage matters.
At the more frothy end of the scale, mixed-race children are regarded as pretty dolls ? white kids with a nice tan.
When I was pregnant and people asked me about the child I was having, and I explained her father was Indian, they would often coo something along the lines of: "Ooh, she's going to be beautiful!" as if I was discussing a new rose, made from an exotic cross-breeding programme.
On a less benevolent level, mixed-race children can receive a hostile welcome from both white and black communities. Being neither one thing nor another may get you on the cover of Vogue, but it isn't an easy way to make friends

But this is 2007, surely things are more enlightened than that? I hope so, but I fear not.
One reason for my fear is my own mixed reactions to my daughter. Don't get me wrong, I love her. She is the child I didn't think I'd have after my first marriage broke up. She is the only granddaughter in our family and we all dote on her.
But when I turn to the mirror in my bedroom to admire us together, I am shocked. She seems so alien. With her long, dark eyelashes and shiny, dark brown hair, she doesn't look anything like me.
I know that concentrating on how my daughter looks is shallow. She is a person in her own right, not an accessory to me. But still, I can't shake off the feeling of unease.
I didn't realise how much her looking different would matter and, on a rational level, I know it shouldn't. But it does.
Evolution demands that we have children to pass on our genes, hence the sense of pride and validation we get when we see our features reappearing in the next generation.
With my daughter, I don't have that. Do black fathers who marry white women and then have paler-skinned children feel my sense of loss? Or maybe Chinese mothers or Middle-Eastern grandparents grieve when they see a child they know to be their own, but whose features don't reflect that?
I worry that, as my daughter doesn't look like me, people will assume she is adopted. After all, it's all the rage in showbiz circles.
Madonna famously scooped up a black child when she wanted to be a mother again and Angelina Jolie appears to be assembling a 'pick 'n' mix' of kids from different countries. It's all very United Colours of Benetton, isn't it?
In the real world, I fear for my daughter's sense of self. She has a tiny foot in two cultures. How will she negotiate a path between the two? I worry that my sons will feel less of a kinship with their sister because she is different, although there is no sign of that.
As for myself, there is an inescapable status issue to address. White women who have non-white children are stigmatised as 'Tracy Towerblocks' living on benefits, most of which they spend on lager and fags.
Even if I don't fit this profile, my daughter's difference definitely points out the fact that my children come from two different fathers.
If I wanted to pass us off as a nice, neat nuclear family, she would blow my cover at once.
But it is more than that. I am frightened, frightened of others' reactions to her, as well as my own. I didn't think of myself as racist and yet my daughter has shown me a side of myself about which I feel deeply uncomfortable.
Even admitting to having mixed feelings about her not being blonde and blue eyed, I feel disloyal and incredibly guilty.
I know the obvious comment is that I must have known how a child of our union would look when I married an Indian man, but it is a wise woman who thinks that far ahead when she falls in love.
I didn't think about any of this before I got pregnant. I wanted to have a baby. Her colour and culture were immaterial then.
But self-flagellation is not useful. I have more pressing concerns. I am now the mother of a 'black' child, even if she is more the hue of weak tea than espresso.
This is a role for which I am utterly unprepared. Part of me thinks I should be playing sitar music to her in her cot, mastering pakoras and serving them dressed in a sari, but that would be fantastically fake coming from me.
When she was born, pale but with lots of dark hair, I asked the midwife if her eyes would stay blue. 'Asian genes are very strong,' she said in what I took to be an ominous tone.
No more Brady Bunch kids for me. The midwife has been proved right and every day my baby's eyes get a little darker.
Even so, when she looks up at me as I feed her, my heart melts. My love may not be colour blind, but hers is, and that is truly humbling.


daily mail

guardian version

My mixed emotionsLowri Turner had a liberal upbringing and married an Asian man, but it wasn't until she had a mixed race baby that she began to confront her own prejudices

The Guardian, Saturday 7 July 2007
We all know the theory: love is colour blind. It is a somewhat simplistic and sugary ethos, but one that many of us were brought up on. My parents - my mother was a magistrate, my father a prison reformer - were hand-wringing liberals, who fervently held to this notion. When I went to the local primary school, my class was a boisterous melee of white British, West Indian, Greek Cypriot, Irish and Ugandan Asian kids. It wasn't all happy, smiley multi-culturalism, but all we rubbed along pretty well.

There was one mixed-race couple who had children at the school who were then quite unblushingly referred to as "half-caste". As a kid myself, I was fascinated. Did the mum and dad know, I wondered, whether their next baby was going to be black, white or brown, or if their hair would be straight or curly? I used to try to stand behind one of the girls from this family in assembly, so I could study the cornrows in her blond afro hair close-up.

I went on to mostly date white boys, but not always. When I was in my late 20s, I remember telling my mother that I had a new boyfriend who was black. "I don't care what colour he is, is he nice to you?" she said forcefully. "Blimey!" I thought, "it's like having Nelson Mandela for a mum."

It was this same attitude she showed when I married my second husband 18 months ago. When I met him, I didn't know his parents were Indian. He didn't look Indian. He didn't sound Indian. He was born in Glasgow. His skin was paler than you might expect. In the new multi-ethnic Britain, it is often difficult to tell what anyone is. And does it matter anyway? Certainly, back then, it didn't to me.

Anyone who dates someone of a different colour and claims that their hue is immaterial is lying, either to themselves or to everyone else. When a black man and a white woman date, they are both are making personal and political statements, even if they are subliminal. However, the colour of a person's skin is just one of many factors about them that add up to the person you fall in love with. I have a Greek Cypriot girlfriend who is married to a man whose parents are from Jamaica. She says she no longer "sees" him as black and I believe her. However, things get a whole lot more complicated when you have a child.

Ten weeks ago, I gave birth to a daughter. She is undeniably beautiful, but she is also alien to me. I was a blonde child and these days, admittedly helped along more than a bit, I am still blonde, as are my other two children, whose father was white. But my tiny daughter has dark brown hair, dark eyelashes and eyebrows and even a dusting of downy dark brown hair touching the edges of her ears. While my eyes and those of my sons are hazel and my skin and that of my sons is white and slightly motley, hers is an even tone, like very weak tea. She is a black child or is she?

I am not sure yet of the etiquette. Do I call her black or Asian or mixed race, or dual heritage? Is it necessary to call her anything at all? I didn't have any such considerations when I had my sons. They were just mine. They didn't need classification. When I registered my daughter at the local GP, I had to put a tick in a quite unfamiliar box - the one marked "mixed race, white/Asian" - on the "racial monitoring" form. It felt weird and oddly public. She was being labelled at seven weeks old.

What I now realise is that, having had my daughter, I have taken my first steps on the incredibly fragile terrain of mixed-race modern Britain and, as I begin to pick my way across, I am acutely aware of my clumsiness. I am not alone. Look around, there seem to be mixed-race couples everywhere. We are raising a new generation of children who span different races, cultures and religions. Yet, how many of the parents, like me, find themselves unprepared for the challenges ahead?

In my head, I knew that my daughter was unlikely to have the milky complexion and blond hair of my sons. And I don't love her less because she's darker. However, I wasn't prepared for the confusion of emotions I would feel when I look at her.

When I was pregnant and people said things like "Ooh another little blonde one, then?" I would explain that her father was Indian and they would then execute a swift conversational handbrake turn and coo about how pretty she would look, usually mentioning some friend who had a white/Asian child and finishing with: "They are beautiful, aren't they?". This treating of mixed-race babies like dolls who come in a range of attractive hues like options on a Dulux colour chart shocked me. My daughter should not be defined by her colour. She is an individual with unique talents and qualities - now, there is my mother talking. And in an ideal world, the way she looks shouldn't be an issue.

But we don't live in an ideal world and the way we all look matters. My daughter's appearance is an issue to others as well as myself. A (white) friend visited yesterday and having examined the baby, she announced: "She's getting quite dark, isn't she?" And I am ashamed to admit that in a reversal of what happens on holiday when you study your skin in the mirror every day hoping for a deepening tan, I too now find myself examining my daughter for signs that her skin is becoming a deeper shade of brown and being perturbed if I find them.

As I read that, I am horrified. But, then, having a mixed race baby forces you to face uncomfortable truths about yourself and the outside world that it is possible to be entirely unaware of if you stay within an easy, uncontroversial all-white sphere.

All parents have fears for their children. We worry they will be knocked over by a car, or snatched like little Madeleine McCann. I now look at my daughter and wonder whether her future will be in some way proscribed by the colour of her skin? And, if I, her own mother, am already so acutely aware of it, am I not already narrowing her horizons for her?

I console myself that my swirling emotions are part of a process. I am coming to terms with my daughter's existence in exactly the same way I had to process the reality of having first one son, then another, when I had always imagined myself the mother of girls. I am now quite good at building Bionicles, but I had to get over my grief at the loss of the pink, girly fantasy first.

Part of the grief I am going through with my daughter is the loss of the possibility that she will look like me. Both mothers and fathers, not to mention grandmothers and grandfathers, routinely bend over the crib, examining a newborn's face for some sign of their own genetic heritage. People say my daughter has my eyes or my mouth, but I know they are just trying to be kind. She looks as similar to me as I do to Naomi Campbell. I didn't expect this to matter to me, but it does. I look at my baby and wonder if people will look at her and assume I am not her mother?

I realise that this is a deeply shallow and vain thing to say.

There is also an inescapable issue of status. Judgments are made about a white woman who gives birth to a black child. She is stereotyped as a Vicky Pollard figure, eking out her days pushing a buggy through a supermarket car park, wearing saggy leggings and fagging it. This image has been captured on screen by Kathy Burke as Waynetta Slob, who memorably declared that she wanted her very own "little brown baby" just like all the other mums she knew on the estate. Am I one of these women now? Apparently, yes - particularly since I am now a single parent, having split up from my daughter's father.

Similar judgments are made about white women who go out with black men. When I was dating the man who my mother wanted to hear was "nice", he helped me carry some luggage into a taxi and then got in. The driver asked me incredulously: "Is he coming with you?" as if he was some sort of porter. Black women had a habit of looking daggers at me in the street. But it's not until you have a baby with someone of a different colour that you feel the full weight of the judgment of strangers.

While I genuinely don't think that my not being Indian was a factor that counted against me with my husband or his family, I did underestimate the difference between our cultural backgrounds when we were first together. Our daughter will have to cope with being the product of two very different cultures. She will have to negotiate her own cultural identity, and I know too little to really help her.

I am intending to leave the Indian side of my daughter's upbringing to my in-laws. This may seem a cop out, but, frankly, I'm too knackered to do otherwise. If I had adopted her, social services would probably whip her away. However, working and bringing up three children, I haven't the energy to learn Hindi or make my own lassi.

So, what is the future for my multi-coloured family? We may look a bit peculiar, but we love each other. I parked the car at the petrol station the other day and, when I returned from paying, I saw my four-year-old asleep, with his head slumped sideways so that it rested, face down, at his sister's feet in her car seat. His seven-year-old brother was lying on the other side of my daughter, the thumb of one hand in his mouth, the other hand holding a bottle, feeding her. I thought how natural it all looked.

When I had my sons, I knew it was my job, as a parent, to help them learn about the world. With my daughter, it is she who is teaching me fundamental lessons about myself, even if not all of them are comfortable.


and an article on the race/mixed-race issue in the new york times

Editorial Observer: Contemplations on Being of Mixed Race in America

By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: August 10, 2008

As a multiracial and somewhat foreign person I have on occasion found myself on the receiving end of the same kind of unease that many Americans seem to have about Barack Obama’s ambiguous identity. He is either not black enough or too black. His name sounds odd. He had a weird childhood with kids who didn’t speak English.

Mr. Obama is not just politically atypical. He is unusual demographically. A recent paper by economists from Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago said that in 2000 only one in 70 births in the United States came from mixed, black-white parents. In the 1980s it was one in 200. In the 1960s, when Mr. Obama was born, there were virtually none.

Black-white teens are so rare today, the researchers argued, that they feel they have to engage in more risky behavior to be accepted by others: drink more, fight more, steal more, do illegal drugs more than either blacks or whites — a pattern of behavior known to social scientists as the “marginal man.”

Perhaps this is true. Yet I would suggest that these outcomes say more about the context in which American multiracial kids grow up than about the kids themselves. The United States practices cleanly defined racial slotting.

I’m not an avid TV watcher, but when I watch, the black man gets the black woman and whites date whites. I have yet to see an ad with a mixed-race family. Whites marry blacks, but rarely. Over all, 5.7 percent of married couples in 2000 crossed racial boundaries.

The American approach to race is unique, in a way. In Brazil, with a history of slavery and racism as brutal as America’s, some 39 percent of the people define themselves as mixed race or “pardos.” By contrast, when the United States census in 2000 first allowed respondents to tick as many racial boxes as they wanted, only 2.4 percent ticked more than one. Never mind that genetic testing suggests a great deal of intermixing between Americans of African and European decent.

The son of a tallish, white father from Chicago and a short, brown Mexican mother of European and Indian blood, I’m not the same mix as Obama. As a colleague recently told me, I “read white.” Growing up in Mexico City, where power and skin color correlate at least as well as in the United States, I led a privileged existence. Still, being a mix was never an issue; most of my peers were too.

This is not to suggest Mexico has dealt with race any better. Racism just took different forms. European colonizers of modern-day Latin America encouraged the whitening of Indians and blacks. In the century after independence, ethnic loyalties were subsumed under a mixed Mexican identity as a way to merge Europeans and pre-Columbian indigenous nations into a modern Mexican state.

Today the Mexican census doesn’t even ask about race, and it only started asking about indigenous ethnicity in 2000. José Vasconcelos, a politician and philosopher, wrote in the 1920s that Mexicans were of the “cosmic race” — that which included all others. Yet Mexico’s state-sanctioned mestizo identity allowed its rulers to ignore its beleaguered indigenous populations — virtually defining them out of existence.

In the United States by contrast, racially inspired policies, whether they resulted in Jim Crow laws or affirmative action, fueled an urge to define and redefine hard racial boundaries. Close attention to race has forced uncomfortable issues of racial inequity into public debate, but has also gotten in the way of embracing a blended racial identity.

Fortunately, Americans seem to be slowly becoming more comfortable with racial intermingling. Newer immigrant groups with different experiences of race are already chipping away at the racial divide. About 10 percent of Asian Americans ticked two or more race boxes in the 2000 census. More than 15 percent of Hispanics marry non-Hispanics. And Hispanics are so confused about American racial categories that half of them can’t find an appropriate race box on the census form and tick “other race” instead.

For all the mistrust of Mr. Obama’s ancestry and ethnicity, he might even help this trend along, allowing blacks and whites to take a fresh look at each other. Then maybe people like me won’t need to engage in extreme behaviors to fit in.

The 'bomb scanner' that never was

As reported in the New York Times
This fraud, has led to the diversion of masses of funds from a foundling Iraqi government that could have been to better causes, and has led to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.
The people behind this 'business' operation, are not only fraudalent, but thieves and mass murderers. They knew the dire consequences of selling item aimed at saving lives, that simply didn't work meant death.

How they slept at night, or lived with themselves I don't know. I just hope the justice system really does justice.

The article pasted below:

British Man Held for Fraud in Iraq Bomb Detectors

By RIYADH MOHAMMED and ROD NORDLAND
Published: January 23, 2010

BAGHDAD — The owner of a British company that supplies questionable bomb detectors to Iraq has been arrested on fraud charges, and the export of the devices has been banned, British government officials confirmed Saturday.
Iraqi officials reacted with fury to the news, noting a series of horrific bombings in the past six months despite the widespread use of the bomb detectors at hundreds of checkpoints in the capital.
“This company not only caused grave and massive losses of funds, but it has caused grave and massive losses of the lives of innocent Iraqi civilians, by the hundreds and thousands, from attacks that we thought we were immune to because we have this device,” said Ammar Tuma, a member of the Iraqi Parliament’s Security and Defense Committee.
But the Ministry of the Interior has not withdrawn the device from duty, and police officers continue to use them.
Iraqi officials said they would begin an investigation into why their government paid at least $85 million to the British company, ATSC Ltd., for at least 800 of the bomb detectors, called ADE 651s.
The British Embassy offered to cooperate with any Iraqi government investigation.
The New York Times first reported official doubts about the device in November, citing American military officials and technical experts who said the ADE 651 was useless, despite widespread reliance on it in Iraq.
The ADE 651 is a hand-held wand with no batteries or internal electronic components, ostensibly powered by the static electricity of the user, who needs to walk in place to charge it. The only moving part is what looks like a radio antenna on a swivel, which swings to point toward the presence of weapons or explosives.
“We are conducting a criminal investigation and as part of that a 53-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of fraud by misrepresentation,” a spokesman for the Avon and Somerset Police in England said, without giving the suspect’s name in line with police policy. The suspect was released on bail, the spokesman said.
“The force became aware of the existence of a piece of equipment around which there has been many concerns and in the interests of public safety launched its investigation,” the police spokesman said.
The suspect’s identity was widely reported in the British press as Jim McCormick, managing director of ATSC Ltd., which operates out of a converted dairy in rural Somerset County, England. News reports described Mr. McCormick as a former British police officer from Merseyside.
Contacted by telephone, Mr. McCormick refused to comment on the charges or the case against him, but he insisted that ATSC would remain in business. “Our company is still fully operational,” he said.
A statement issued by the British Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said it was banning export of the ADE 651 and similar devices to Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Tests have shown that the technology used in the ADE651 and similar devices is not suitable for bomb detection,” the department said. “We acted urgently to put in place export restrictions which will come into force next week.” The statement said the department could ban export to those countries because British troops there could be put at risk by the device’s use. ATSC claims to have sold the device to 20 countries, all in the developing world.
The Supreme Board of Audit in Iraq announced it would investigate the procurement of the ADE 651, according to the board’s leader, Abdul Basit Turki. The investigation will focus on officials who previously assured auditors the device was technically sound, he said.
Maj. Gen. Jihad al-Jabiri, who is in charge of procuring the devices for the Ministry of Interior, could not be reached for comment.
In Baghdad on Saturday, the devices were still very much in use. “I didn’t believe in this device in the first place,” said a police officer at a checkpoint in central Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “I was forced to use it by my superiors and I am still forced to do so.”
Another checkpoint officer said he blamed corrupt officials for bringing the ADE 651 in. “Our government is to be blamed for all the thousands of innocent spirits who were lost since these devices have been used in Iraq,” he said.
An associate of ATSC, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the devices were manufactured at a cost of $250 each by suppliers in Britain and Romania. “Everyone at ATSC knew there was nothing inside the ADE 651,” he said.
The Iraqi government, according to its auditors, paid $40,000 to $60,000 for each device, although it determined that ATSC was marketing the device for $16,000. The additional money was said to have been for training, spare parts and commissions.
The Times of London quoted Mr. McCormick in November as saying that the device’s technology was similar to that of dowsing or divining rods used to find water. “We have been dealing with doubters for 10 years,” he said. “One of the problems we have is that the machine does look primitive. We are working on a new model that has flashing lights.”
Shortly after the arrest on Friday, the BBC reported that it had arranged a lab test of the device and found that its bomb-detection component was an electronic merchandise tag of the sort used to prevent shoplifting.
ATSC’s brochures claim the ADE 651 can detect minute traces of explosives, drugs or even human remains at distances of up to 6 miles by air, or three-fifths of a mile by land. Scientific trials of similar devices have shown that they are no more accurate than a coin toss.
Riyadh Mohammed reported from Baghdad, and Rod Nordland from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Worrying

Slovakia plants explosives in unsuspecting passengers bags to test airport security - but forgets to take it back out again.

Murder in the courtroom

In Dresden, in Germany, a 32 year old married, pregnant pharmacist had taken her 3 year old son to a park. A neighbour began throwing abuse at her, calling her a 'whore' amongst other things. She complained to the police. He was found guilty and fined. However, he appealed the verdict, so both found themselves in court. As this young mother gave evidence in the courtroom, this man walked up to her and started stabbing her. A total of 18 times. Her husband was in the courtroom at the time. He ran to her defence, but was stabbed by the attacker, then shot by one of police officers who mistook him for the attacker. The young woman collapsed and died in front of the court, her husband, and 3 year old son.

This happened in the summer of 2009.

Not heard of this?

The young pharmacist was Marwa El-Sherbini, an Egyptian Muslim woman who wore the headscarf, or hijab. The abuse was racial, and specifically anti-muslim.
The story is in the link below.

Shocking

Apart from the horrific nature of the attack, there a few things that cause concern:

1 - Why was 'Alex W.' (the attacker) allowed to bring a knife to court?
2 - Why was 'Alex W.' able to walk across the courtroom to the witness unchallanged?
3 - Why was he able to attack her, and stab her multiple times unchallanged?
4 - Why was the one person coming to her aid, her husband, mistaken for the attacker, and shot by the courtroom's own police officer?
5 - Why did they not realise their mistake and act appropriately?

and the most pertinent question...

6- Why has there been such a media blackout in the western world over this horrific attack.

Are not all humans equal?

This case highlights something deeply unsettling, if not sinister, on what the western media chooses to report.

citroen 2cv

For those in the know, a beautiful car, of classic design, with the perfect balance of curves and angles, and generally lovely.
and for those who don't - a little wikepedia explanation.

new version, probably set to come out in 2009/2010.

I don't think I like it. I feel so disappointed.

distorted beauty

click play film, and ponder... it's all unnatural
and some little girls opinions on their own looks

the freaky facebook phenomenon...

this is an interview with one of the co-founders Chris Hughes. for those who don't know: a bunch of harvard students set up this personal info database type thing - which you can log on to via your official email address from workplace/uni/high school. you then belong to your real life community, but online. you can then read up on the profiles of the ppl who go to your uni/workplace. these are the ppl you may never have spoken to, but just may randomly see in passing. i guess they hope you would then translate your online info finding to eventually talking to each other in 'real life'.

you will not find me on facebook, or bebo, or WAYN. i don't like these things.
i find it freaky when someone has been asking around about me, then talking to me as if they know me. i would find it weirder for people who i may not even notice, but would notice me, pick up a lot of personal info, and what i do, etc from these sites. and just know it. may not approach me or anything. but just know.
call me old fashioned, but i really don't think voyeurism is the way forward for human interaction. you want to know a person? say hello. then take it from there.

the sites seem to apply to several types of ppl:
1 - super shy folk, or people who aren't very good at dealing with people.
2 - stalker type folk
3 - exhibitionist type folk
4 - normal folk who have not thought through the consequences.

i shall leave you with a sesame street sketch, which for some reason is etched into my memory. bert is on a plane, and is sitting next to a guy, who has the same jumper, trousers and socks as him. you hear the thoughts of both characters as they wonder whether they should speak to each other. they then both ask the stewardess for a bowl of hot water for their instant porridge. they eventually get talking only to discover they have many things in common.
as with many sesame street sketch's, the whole plane ends up uniting together in song to the chorus:
'stick out your hand and say hello
you might meet someone that you would really love to know
so stick out your hand and say
isn't it grand today
stick out your hand
and say hello!'

so how would two ppl who 'know' each other from facebook, but never spoken to each other before, begin their conversation? would there be no hint of embarrassment at the voyeurism they had partaken in?

oh sesame street, where are you now? hrmphh.

remember ppl - just say 'hello'. and if you already know them from 'real life', just email them.

pointless

male student nurse gets annoyed at having to have a chaperone to examine female patients, so takes the NHS to court.
obviously.
this could not be more ridiculous. the article gives the impression that he's annoyed about this because it was directed at him because he's a male student nurse. sex discrimination, and nursing being a female dominated profession and all.
he seems to be unaware that ANY male health practitionor, be they nurse, doctor, or whatever, and any male student, be they nursing or medical (yes, medical students too) have to have a chaperone when examinining a female patient.
although female health practitioners do not have to have a chaperone present, they are strongly advised to have one.
and anyway, as a student, you'll always have chaperone with you when you're doing something like an intimate examination, whether you're male or female. it's common sense. as a student, you never go solo.
this character is missing the point entirely. i just can't believe Mr Justice Patrick Elias missed it too.

the art of self-diagnosis

medical students have been doing it for years, often inaccurately, thus providing many an anecdote to giggle about.
however, with the increasing availability of information (which in some ways is a good thing), the general public have also gotten on the self-diagnosis bandwagon.
there are good sites, there are bad sites, and there are unbelievebly awful-evil-money-grabbing sites. it can sometimes be difficult for the untrained eye to tell them apart. plus, there is always that personal bias which comes attached to self-diagnosis : 'knowing my luck, its got to be the worst possible thing that could possibly happen. oh dear...'.
take everything with a tonne of salt, have a dialogue with your doctor, and use information responsibly.

computer crash

Normally my computer is good to me. It faithfully does what I ask it to do (usually!).
Yesterday, in my frantic efforts (believe me, it was very frantic) to get coursework handed in on time, my computer decided to be tempermental. Of all the times it could do this! It crashed 3 times, and decided to not let me have my CD back with all the work saved on it. It is still stuck in the computer, and I can't figure out how I'm going to get the slidey thingy that holds the CD to open. Pressing the button is just not doing the job. I will figure out what to do at some point.
Anyway, to commerate the tempermental nature of my computer, I have decided to dedicate this post to it.
Here are a bunch of cartoons on computers crashing (they be not great, but they are something):
the first computer crash
computer crash
more computer crashes

personality types and medical specialities

A very long time ago, a pair of ladies known as Myers and Briggs were so inspired by the work of Carl Jung, they went off and created a personality test which split the world up into 16 different personality types. they figured there were four aspects to a person's personality: introversion vs extroversion, intuition vs sensing, thinking vs feeling, judging vs perception. they called it 'the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator', shortened to 'MBTI'.
they tested this little test on a bunch of medical student guinea pigs many, many years ago.
as time has passed, this test has gained in popularity. tests are widely available on the internet, and many websites like to give their take on what it all means. google is a provider of many answers for the inquisitive.
there are those who think this is all a horrible hoax. a person does a test, gets a four letter analysis, reads a description of said four letter analysis, but only sees what they want to see, and forgets the aspects of their personality not mentioned in the description, hence believing it all to be 'like totally true! wow!', when actually, it probably isn't.
a brilliant proffessor at my medical school gave us lectures on personality. he told us that personality is too complex to be differentiated, generalised and generally neatly blocked up into a few aspects.
i am inclined to agree with the brilliant professor...
however...
Zazika does find it all rather fun!
personality types and their specialities
touchy feely guide for students to figure out who they are, and where they belong in the world that is medicine
a study has been done on how type can affect the medical students use of computers... apparantly, it does
and even the student BMJ has joined in the party - woohoo!