MemeMachineGo!

Octavia E. Butler Memorial Tribute Fundraiser

Join Nalo Hopkinson, Jewelle Gomez, Susie Bright, Jennifer de Guzman, and Guillermo Gomez-Peña for a fundraiser reading to benefit the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship.

Sunday, March 4, 5 - 7 pm

The Starry Plough
3101 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA.
510-841-2082
http://www.starryploughpub.com/

The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship will enable writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Octavia got her start. It is meant to cement Octavia’s legacy by providing the same experience/opportunity that Octavia had to future generations of new writers of color. In addition to her stint as a student at the original Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970, Octavia taught several times for Clarion West in Seattle, Washington, and Clarion in East Lansing, Michigan, giving generously of her time to a cause she believed in.

I’ll be there.

I feel like I’ve made a transition from Alice to Dilbert.

It had never occurred to me that they could be steps on a path.

I find this disturbing, and I hope the next step isn’t Wally.

I count my ethnic background, when I count such a thing, as 5/8 Irish, 1/4 English, 1/8 Basque.

Some recent thinking would simplify the matter, making me a pure-blood Basque.

Britain and Ireland are so thoroughly divided in their histories that there is no single word to refer to the inhabitants of both islands. Historians teach that they are mostly descended from different peoples: the Irish from the Celts and the English from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded from northern Europe and drove the Celts to the country’s western and northern fringes.

But geneticists who have tested DNA throughout the British Isles are edging toward a different conclusion. Many are struck by the overall genetic similarities, leading some to claim that both Britain and Ireland have been inhabited for thousands of years by a single people that have remained in the majority, with only minor additions from later invaders like Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. The implication that the Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh have a great deal in common with each other, at least from the geneticist’s point of view, seems likely to please no one. The genetic evidence is still under development, however, and because only very rough dates can be derived from it, it is hard to weave evidence from DNA, archaeology, history and linguistics into a coherent picture of British and Irish origins.

That has not stopped the attempt. Stephen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at the University of Oxford, says the historians’ account is wrong in almost every detail. In Dr. Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of events, the principal ancestors of today’s British and Irish populations arrived from Spain about 16,000 years ago, speaking a language related to Basque.

(As you can see, I fudged a detail — the article refers to people arriving from Spain speaking a language related to Basque, not to Basque people, per se.)

I think of myself more as a second-generation nothing-in-particular. An American. And if you haven’t read Bruce Sterling’s “We See Things Differently”, do yourself a favor and follow that link. When you’re done, note that its publication predated the Gulf War.

Not long after I first heard of human chimeras, I learned of a case in which a woman was at risk of losing her children, and being prosecuted for fraud due to her being one.

Fairchild’s fight for her kids began when she was 26-years-old, unemployed and applying for public assistance in Washington state. Everyone in her family had to be tested to prove they were all related.

The Department of Social Services called Fairchild and told her to come in immediately. What Fairchild thought was a routine meeting with a social worker turned into an interrogation. The proud mother was suddenly a criminal suspect.

“As I sat down, they came up and shut the door, and they just went back and just started drilling me with questions like, ‘Who are you?’” Fairchild said. The DNA test results challenged everything she knew about her family. Yes, her boyfriend was the father of the children, and, yes, they were all related, according to the DNA, except for Fairchild. She was told she wasn’t the mother.

Fairchild was certain a mistake must have been made, but she recalled a social worker saying to her, “Nope. DNA is 100 percent foolproof and it doesn’t lie.”

Fairchild was not only denied government assistance for her young children, she was now suspected of possibly acting as a paid surrogate mother and committing welfare fraud. She was in danger of having her kids taken away for good. Fairchild said before she left, the social worker told her, “You know, we’re able to come get your kids at any time.” […]

The state was still so suspicious of Fairchild that when she gave birth to another child, a court officer stood in the delivery room to witness an immediate DNA test.

“They took DNA from the baby and myself right then and there, after birth, and it came back that there is no way possible that baby is mine,” Fairchild said.

Even though they’d witnessed the birth, officials believed she was acting as a surrogate, possibly bearing a child for money.

It’s fortunate for Fairchild that her lawyer happened upon an article about chimerism. And it’s interesting to note that DNA testing, considered a gold standard of evidence, doesn’t necessarily always prove what it seems to prove.

=v= Re/Search has recently put out Pranks 2, an excellent book. Jello Biafra is interviewed, and discusses electronic vote fraud, even liberally quoting a live Kennedy on the subject. Jello calls on the tech community to perpetrate a patriotic prank:

[M]onkey with those machines just like the Republicans do. So that all of a sudden at the next election you see the punditoids on television freaking out: "Ohmigod, this is the twelfth state where Homer Simpson has been elected governor!" That'll expose electronic vote fraud! Moral of the story: Since no other major democracy in the world allows private companies to run their elections, why should we?

You heard the man, have at it! And, might I add, Woo hoo!!!