Here I Go Again On My Own

Oh yes. It has been a while. But, what better time to get back into the swing of blogging than right at the moment when the US is about to go to hell in a hand basket?

I am a bit late on linking to this article. I find that what is happening to me is that I am too flabbergasted by the daily assault of DJT infantile, naive tweets intertwined with a hateful GOP agenda to know where to start.

Before I provide my Daily Read: 07JAN2017 link below, I would like to provide the following limited commentary on it...Well, shit. Where did I put that damn baby? Oh. Right. I chucked it right out with the bath water.

You may not like Obamacare (although, heaven forbid that we get on board with universal health care), but the bottom line is it has provided much to those with little. Rushing to delete it from the pages of history is reckless at best.

Although Republicans have been railing against Obamacare for the better part of six years, they haven’t come up with any concrete policy ideas to reshape our nation’s complicated insurance industry and prevent 20 million Americans from losing the health coverage they gained under Obamacare. GOP leaders have never been able to coalesce around a meaningful plan.

Instead, Republicans have suggested they’ll throw the insurance industry into chaos by repealing Obamacare now and figuring out how to replace it later. This strategy, dubbed “repeal and delay,” threatens to create widespread uncertainty in the industry as major insurers will be unclear where the country might be headed with its national health care policy.

Daily Read: 08AUG2013 - Thank You Henrietta Lacks

The official acknowledgement of the benefit and lasting impact Henrietta Lacks has had on scientific discovery is long, long overdue.  

As a budding scientist, I myself worked with HeLa cells and never once knew about where they came from.  I knew not one thing about the life of the woman who gave herself to eternity without ever consenting in the first place.  It wasn't until I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks did I know about her.  Even more, I never knew of the impact it all had on her surviving family.

"We are happy, we are very happy, that from this point on, publications involving the HeLa genome will recognize Henrietta Lacks," granddaughter Jeri Lacks-Whye said, on a conference call arranged by the NIH to make the announcement. "For more than 60 years our family has been pulled into science without our consent … We are happy to be part of that conversation now, and we see this as an important step." 

"We should all count Henrietta Lacks and her family among the greatest philanthropists of our time, when you consider how they have contributed to the advancement of science and human health," said the NIH director, Francis S Collins, on Wednesday.

"This was an historic and really exciting and emotional day for everyone involved, this kind of moment is what [the Lacks family has] been hoping for," Skloot told the Guardian. "It's the third generation. One of the things they've said many times is, 'Our grandmother didn't get to have a voice in this. Our parents didn't get to have a voice either. We want that to stop with us." 

If you have never read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you should.

Rebecca Skloot revivifies Henrietta, studying her not only as the originator of her cell line but as a woman embedded in history. Her absorbing book is not just about medicine and science but about colour, race, class, superstition and enlightenment, about the painful, transfixing romance of being American.

Daily Read: 07AUG2013 - "feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring"

Equality should not threaten and yet still young boys are being raised to rail against women.

We, a group of 16-, 17- and 18-year-old girls, have made ourselves vulnerable by talking about our experiences of sexual and gender oppression only to elicit the wrath of our male peer group. Instead of our school taking action against such intimidating behaviour, it insisted that we remove the pictures. Without the support from our school, girls who had participated in the campaign were isolated, facing a great deal of verbal abuse with the full knowledge that there would be no repercussions for the perpetrators.

It's been over a century since the birth of the suffragette movement and boys are still not being brought up to believe that women are their equals. Instead we have a whole new battleground opening up online where boys can attack, humiliate, belittle us and do everything in their power to destroy our confidence before we even leave high school.