We Live In An Age of Miracles

This past Saturday, my son's friend plunged into the surf at the Jersey shore and lost his wedding ring. His fingers responded to the cold water with cold shrinkage and the force of the waves did the rest.

But this man was born in the mid 1980's and he did not accept this loss as irretrievable. 

He went on Reddit, from his cell phone, and found a man who, in retirement, has made it his hobby to find things on beaches with his metal detector.

So the young man went on Google maps and sent the location of the beach where he lost the ring and the retiree went out on the beach, the next morning, Sunday, with his metal scanner machine and found the ring.

Presumably, the ring will get back to its owner by some lower tech means, like the U.S. Postal Service.

But here we are, and a ring, A RING, could be found amid all the grains of sand on that beach, while the owner was back in New York City, by a man on a New Jersey beach linked to the problem by a satellite, and using an electronic device.

What a marvelous age we live in. 

Sexuality, Gender, Desire, Behavior and the Incubus Physician

At age 22, having suffered through the nasty gauntlet game thrown down by the American university system and landed in the promised land of medical school, the Phantom found himself at an institution in New York City which just happened to be a the center of a Brave New World of scientific inquiry, the New York Hospital, Cornell University Medical Center located on the chic upper East Side of Manhattan, overlooking the East River estuary, housed in sparkling white buildings fashioned after a papal palace, and home to a biochemistry laboratory run by a dyspeptic old guy who could run blood through his beakers and test tubes and analyzers and dissect out the hormones which get made from cholesterol and sent down the assembly line of human adrenal glands, ovaries and testicles and made into sex hormones, hormones which support blood pressure and a hormone essential to life, cortisol.

In one of those fortuitous constellations of history, a group of remarkable women happened to reside in the pediatric endocrinology department of this same institution and these female physicians were forced to confront the problem of babies who were delivered with "ambiguous genitalia" that is, the happy mother looks down between her legs as the obstetrician grasps the newborn and she asks, "Boy or girl?" and the unfortunate, baffled obstetrician sputters, "A healthy baby!" 

The problem is the baby has equipment which is not clearly male or female.

These women carried the baby's blood down to the curmudgeon in his lab and asked him to analyze the baby's hormones. They did this because they knew that the shape and nature of a baby's external genitalia, that is whether it is a recognizable penis or clitoris, a scrotal sac with testes or labia all this is shaped and driven and formed by hormones and these kids clearly had deranged hormones.

These women, Dr. Breslow and Maria New and later, Julianne Imperato McGuinley, also knew that the hormone levels were in turn determined by chromosomes and by genes located in those chromosomes. 

So they knew that there was a role for genes, for the enzymes produced by these genes, by the hormones produced by these enzymes and that all this resulted in anatomy.

They also learned that the hormonal environment in some way conditioned the brains of infants and children.  They saw the most rare and exotic patients who had derangements in the hormone production assembly lines. 

And they presented these cases to the medical students assembled in a sweaty classroom theater, along with the diagrams of the biochemical pathways.

For most of the 90 students of this class, the lectures were a snoozer, but for the Phantom it was instant karma. Dr. Breslow described the case of a fourteen year old girl, who had never been much interested in playing with dolls, who preferred running around with boys who turned out to be something more than a tomboy.
She had shown no signs of going into puberty and had been brought to the pediatric endocrine clinic and it turned out she lacked an enzyme, a form of 17 hydroxylase, and because of that, she had not been able to make  enough testosterone in utero, when a sort of "first puberty"  and thus her external genitalia did not form along male lines. When the second puberty at age 11 to 13 was supposed to happen, she could not make much estrogen either. She had XY sex chromosomes and she had an underdeveloped phallus which was thought to be a clitoris but was actually a rudimentary penis.

She had been able to make enough varieties of male hormones in utero to condition her brain to a certain male proclivity, but not enough to masculinize her primordial penis or scrotum and her testes had not descended.

So there you had it: testosterone had not played its role in fashioning anatomy, but it had played a role in the brain, in behavior, thus the "tomboy" behavior.

The Phantom asked what the doctor intended on doing and she said the child would continue to be raised as a girl, given estrogens, have her testes surgically removed. This caused enough stirring among the Phantom's male colleagues, who seemed to arouse themselves from their stupor and one objected, "But he's a boy!" 

"Why do you say that?" asked Dr. Breslow.
"He's got testes, XY and a penis!"

It was then Dr. Breslow leaned over her podium and raised her little finger to the confrontational medical student, and she uttered the words the Phantom has never forgot: "If you have a penis the size of my distal digit, you are never going to function as a male. We can fashion a vagina, bring up her estrogen levels to normal and she can have a life. You want to sacrifice all that for a set of XY chromosomes?"

The Phantom was hooked.  The confluence of biochemistry, brain, sexual organs, the beauty of it all was electrifying 

He tried to be reasonable. Endocrinology was a field of low remuneration. It had nothing to offer but fascination.

But he had seen the dawning of a whole new understanding. 
The same department later identified 5 alpha reductase deficiency.
They established a clinic for what is now called "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome" which the Phantom attended every chance he got. 

There was a research ward for these patients, which the Phantom haunted. 

The Phantom was not much welcomed by the women of the pediatric endocrine department, and he tried other specialties, but some years after he left the New York Hospital, he felt the gravitational pull back to the world of hormones. 

It was the path less traveled, but some planets exert so much gravitational pull, they are inescapable. You simply go into orbit and enjoy the ride. 

Drinking the Kool Aide of American Elitism

I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians. My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone. My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless. Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It's amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman's lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can't (shouldn't) marry men who aren't at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you
--Susan Patton, Princeton, Class of 1977

Just back from Alaska, which got me thinking about the Ivy League, the New York Times wedding announcements (advertisements of self proclaimed virtuosity), the East Coast, Silicon Valley, Bill Gates, and Daniel Okrant's, "The Guarded Gate" about the early 20th century, when the elites from Supreme Court justices to Eleanor Roosevelt, agreed that WASPs were the superior race, and with the help of the Ku Klux Klan, managed to get a law passed to deny entry to lower orders of the human race, like Jews, Italians, Poles and Slavs and to favor immigration from the British Isles, excluding Ireland. 

In Alaska, folks never ask where you went to school, and, in fact, they give every appearance of judging people on what they can discern from talking with them. 

I went through some towns where there was only one gas pump (not one gas station--one gas pump). Juneau, the capital, has no road connecting it to the outside world; if you want to get to Juneau, you have to take a sea plane or a boat. 

Russians lived in Alaska when it was Russian

A sign outside a Hertz car rental showed that Hawaii is closer than Washington, DC for folks in Sitka. 

Bill Gates, who may be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, spent only a year at Harvard. I haven't read a biography or memoir to give me insight into the man, but I do know that Harvard points to Zuckerberg and Gates as evidence Harvard knows how to assess talent and potential.  But is it not just as likely Gates and Zuckerberg chose Harvard, knowing they could go anywhere, and having spent a year there, realized Harvard, its faculty, its students had nothing important to offer?

Tony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy, Immunology and Infectious Disease, scandalized the faculty of Cornell Medical Center, The New York Hospital, when, at his investiture, having completed his year as Chief Resident in the Department of Medicine, with the grey beards of the Ivy League faculty mucky mucks gathered around, he was handed a set of the keys to the kingdom, admitting privileges to the hospital and appointment to the clinical faculty, and he said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

A Richter Scale 7 earthquake could not have shaken the foundations that white marble, faux papal palace on East 68th Street more. 

How could he turn down that honor? 

Fauci has never denied the story that when pressed by his friends, he had explained, "Some day I'm going to be either very rich or very famous. But if I stay at Cornell, I will be neither."

I'm betting Gates and Zuckerberg said the same thing to themselves about Harvard.

The fact is, institutions of the dominant tribe try to sell the Kool Aide that they have a process, a drink,  to convey the power, the glory.   But this idea of the cream rising to the top (to mix a metaphor) is simply a lie used to perpetuate power among some and to deny it to those strivers from below.

For that, it is salutatory to escape the ivy covered walls and to look at those in power, in their fine gowns, and to see through the cover on the emperor to the  naked truth below. 

PS: 
Bonus points: Can you deconstruct Ms. Patton's problem here?
Hint: Begin with it's amazing how little intelligence matters in a woman (to men)  if she is pretty.
Extra credit reading: Eugenics 101, "Guarding the Gate"
Extra hint:

Susan Patton

Abortion: Belief and Doubt

Janet Porter, who was one of the driving forces behind the "heartbeat" laws which have passed in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi and Utah made sure that sonograms showing a "baby's heart at 6 weeks" beating, accompanied by a heart beat sound, played before legislators in these states, on the floor of the state houses. 

Democrats who oppose these laws had no such images to display. 
Democrats have simply cleaved to the idea that Roe is "the law of the land." 
Democrats have thought it enough to argue, "It's a woman's right to control her own body. This is a simple matter of women's health."

Of course, the Republicans have tried to persuade, where the Democrats assumed they are so right, no persuasion was necessary.

Where do Americans get their ideas about abortion?
Surely, public schools must dance around this topic.

Sure looks like a dinosaur

Churches, of course, teach explicitly about it, and most American churches inveigh against it.

For most Americans, their views on abortion are formed from some inchoate collection of gossip, Sunday sermons, chatter with their adolescent friends, but there is little or no attempt to actually think and consider this difficult topic. Most Americans are philosophically deprived, untutored in this department. 

Abortion is what won Donald Trump the election.
Many factors contributed: rural resentment, deep seeded ideas that colored people have been given unfair advantages over the suffering whites in economically depressed regions, outright hate, undisguised fear, but mostly, abortion.

Evangelicals were willing to play the pragmatic ends-justify-the means game of voting for a libertine grab-them-by-the-pussy man as long as he gave them a Supreme Court which would reverse Roe. 

Aww, looks like a baby!

What can the Democrats do?

At this late date, nothing in time for 2020, which is probably a Trump victory, barring a sudden repeat of  the 2008 financial crash.

But in the future, Democrats would be well advised to actually march through a discussion of abortion, if only to answer what the Republicans have been bold enough to say.

Most Democratic candidates, nay, all Democrats become suddenly silent when asked about abortion beyond: "I believe women should have the right to control their own bodies," and then smile triumphantly and flee quickly to the next question.

But the Republicans always respond: "I believe in a woman's right to control her own body, too. But now we are talking about two bodies. Two human beings, both of whom have rights."

What is a Democrat to do?

Well, be prepared.
Begin with:
#1  I am, with all the members of the Democratic party appalled by and hate the idea of infanticide.

Then:
#2 But the difference between infanticide and abortion is all about drawing lines. 

Where do you draw the line?

#3 Some "right to lifers" say the moment of conception, when sperm penetrates egg is the moment a human being with a soul begins.
How do they know this?
God told them.
I would not deny they believe that. I would not deny God told them.
I can only, humbly say, God has never said any such thing to me and until he does, until I get God's private phone number, I will not believe that.

So how do you draw a line?

#4 Now we have a "heartbeat" as where legislatures in their wisdom have decided to draw the line.
The first ultrasonographic "heart beat" can be heard at 6 weeks.
But is this a really a "heart beat" or an artifact of technology?

The "heart" at 6 weeks actually may "beat" but it has only 2 chambers.
That may be a "heart" to the right to lifers, but it isn't a heart to me, and could not sustain life.

Which brings us to the question: Is everything which looks like a baby or sounds like a heart actually what it seems to be at first glance, or is it more like "deep fake"?

Clouds, for example, may look like a baby, but that does not make them a baby.
So why does a sonogram which looks like a baby qualify as a human life?

Now, come on, that is a baby!

At 6 weeks the sonogram looks like this:

But the real thing, the "baby" or the embryo or the conceptus, whatever you want to call it, is the size of a lentil bean, and looks like this.

At 8 weeks, the sonogram looks more baby like on sonogram, but still looks pretty larval, something a trout would go for. 

At 10 weeks more humanoid features appear on sonogram but the thing itself is only 1 1/2 inches, a small strawberry.

For some people, at each of these stages there is enough there to qualify as a human being. 
If you are one of those, I would never try to convince you otherwise.

But not for me. I'd draw the line later, maybe 18 weeks, maybe 20, but not so early to justify bringing an unwanted child into the world. 

Game of Bones: Finale (Part 7) Live Free or Die

The day started out with blue skies, but then scudding across a milky sky, charcoal clouds closed in on the farm on that day, the first week of November.

Farmer Brown did not arrive with the morning feed and the turkeys clustered along the fencing which faced the farm house, where the lights were on.  The feeding always took place at 9 AM, but not this day, and by 11 AM the birds were becoming irritable and several fights broke out. A hungry bird is a testy bird.

Just before noon a low rumbling began and grew louder and louder until its source appeared: A fifteen foot silver truck ground slowly down the road and pulled up in front of the pig barn. It had a huge red and gold star painted on its long walls: "Gold Star Market." 
Seeing that, Brooks remarked, "That is the same logo that man had on the back of his jacket. The man Farmer Brown was talking to the other day."
None of the other turkeys could make that connection.

Members of Farmer Brown's family, his three teen aged daughters, walked out of the farmhouse, wearing blue jeans and brown rubber aprons which reached below their knees and they walked to the far side of the van and disappeared behind it. 

The hired men, wearing similar aprons, drove up in a pickup truck and jumped down and several entered the silver truck from the door on the near side, and one stood in the door and three formed a line in front of the truck from the door to the road.

Finally, Farmer Brown walked out of his front door, down the road to the turkey field and he spoke in a booming voice. 

"You are all winners today!" he shouted. "So white and big breasted. This farm has had its best year in history. Believe me.  And we want to mark  the greatest flock of turkeys ever with a special celebration. Come one and all, the lines are wrapping around the block!"

The troika turkeys, Sean, Rush and Rupert led the procession, walking across the road and down toward the covered bridge to the silver truck and up the stairs where each turkey was hoisted through the door by the hired men.

Toward the end of the long line Brooks, Chamberlain and Will straggled along behind. As they passed the goat pen, the goats seemed most intent on not looking at them, not even Delphi, who was normally the most responsive goat, met their eyes. 

Only the old goat looked up and followed the line of turkeys with his eyes, and he met the eyes of each of turkeys who had visited the goats with a strange and steady look.

The pigs were gathered in their sty. They had their own field on the north side, but this day, they remained corralled. They looked at the turkeys pass by and grunted amongst themselves in a low, not unfriendly, but not a happy murmur. 




















The chickens were nowhere to be seen, which was unusual, as they were always underfoot.

From behind the truck Rush, Rupert and Sean emerged and headed back up the road toward the turkey field. 
"Oh, you'll love it," Rush cackled.
"Best party ever"  said Sean.
"Winners," Rupert said. "Every one."

But from within the truck a grinding, whirring sound was audible.
And a stench gradually filled the road. 
The closer Brooks and his two friends got to the truck, the more intense the the smell and the louder the whirring sound, almost like the grindstone Farmer Brown occasionally used to sharpen his scythes. 

The line of men lifted the birds and handed them along, until they finally reached the man at the front door to the truck, who handed the birds inside to unseen hands. The three friends, Brooks, Chamberlain and Will had not quite reached the line of men. Then Brooks noticed a large rubber hose running from the unseen side of the truck down to a barrel below.

Two of the daughters were struggling to lift the hose out of the top of one barrel and place it into a new, fresh barrel, but as they did, the hose gushed a crimson stream, which splashed on the ground between the barrels. 

Brooks saw Chamberlain's eyes focus on the scarlet tide and then back to Brooks.

Just then, a shadow crossed over the faces of Brooks and his two friends. They realized the shadow was from a bird flying over them. They looked up and there, a hundred feet above them, sailed Thomas and three of his wild turkey friends.

The wild turkeys did not look down upon Brooks, but flew on, wings beating rhythmically, voices clear, plaintive, keening. They did not form a line as geese would do, but lumbered along in the air, heavily, working hard. They were slow, but  they were up there, on their own power, moving steadily, untouched by the scene below them.

The hired man seized Brooks, smiling and handed him to the next man in line, and he was passed along until he reached the final man at the door to the silver truck, who handed him inside, where the whirring sound had grown louder.

Game of Bones: Part 6

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchartered season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening.
--Grace Metalious, Peyton Place

October opened with heat which in the 20th century would have been called, "Indian Summer," but the animals and people of New Hampshire had, for some years, come to expect summer would shift into winter without pausing for autumn.

The wild turkeys pecked and hunted the sere, the yellowed fields abutting the fenced in yard for the white turkeys.  The wild turkeys looked parched and their muscles had gone stringy and their voices cracked.

Standing along the fence between them, Brooks, who had grown ever fatter, his plumage whiter and his breast muscles bulging, called out to Thomas who raised his head to listen.

"You know, Thomas," Brooks said. "If you wild turkeys flew in here at dusk, there is always feed left in the bins. We cannot eat it all. Nobody would say anything and Farmer Brown goes off to the north fields in the afternoon."

Thomas smiled as much as a turkey beak will allow for a smile and said, "That is very kind of you. But I don't think we will take you up on that generous offer."

"It must be hard to recall the death of your friend," Brooks said. "But I do think it would be safe and we could post look outs for Farmer Brown. You would have plenty of time to escape, should he approach."

"We're struggling; it's true," said Thomas, "But we are getting by. Once the heat passes, we'll do better."

"It just seems a waste, all that feed uneaten at the end of the day," Brooks persisted.
"This is New Hampshire," Thomas said, "Live Free or Die. In our case, in yours as well, ever true."

"You are still the Cassandra," Brooks said. "Sounding the alarm for the approaching apocalypse." 
"And you still cleave to Farmer Brown."

Later, that same day, Farmer Brown arrived with a man who wore a silver jacket which had printed in big red and gold letters on its back, "Gold Star Market." The two entered the fenced in turkey grove and walked slowly among the birds. One of Farmer Brown's daughters trailed behind, in dungaree overalls and pigtails. 
"I raise the best and most beautiful and whitest turkeys in the entire country!" Farmer Brown told this man. Farmer Brown waved his arms about and as he did some of the turkeys approached, in hopes he had feed in his pockets. "Look how they love me!" Farmer Brown told the man. "They are the happiest, fattest, biggest, strongest, healthiest, most beautiful birds who ever existed! Right here."

The birds preened and strutted and fluttered their stubby, flightless wings and they all felt like winners. 

"Any one of these birds would win first prize at the County Fair, if I would enter them. But I keep them right here. I wouldn't risk taking any off the farm, exposing them to those other birds from other places."

The man with the silver jacket shook Farmer Brown's hand. They ambled back out, trailed by Farmer Brown's daughter.
"I just feel so good every time he sets foot in the compound," said Chamberlain. 
"He is so charismatic," Will said. "I'd follow him anywhere."


"He has kept us safe," Brooks agreed.  "We eat well, all we can eat and more. His fence has kept the fisher cats and foxes and coyotes away.  We have never had it so good."

Thomas was just beyond the fence, with two other wild turkeys.

"But you are not free," Thomas reminded Brooks.

 "If this is not freedom, whatever it is feels pretty good. You may say that we ain't free, but it don't bother me," replied Brooks.
"That sounds like a line from a Robert Altman movie."
"Sometimes," Brooks said, "If we hop up on the hay bales, we can see across the road and through the window and see the big screen TV in Farmer Brown's living room. We saw 'Nashville' the other night."
"Ah," said Thomas.
"Farmer Brown really cares about us. Did you notice the new gate he put up at the entrance?"
"Yes. But I could not read the words."
"They are German," Brooks said. "The old goat told the other goats. Arbeit Mach Frei."
"Meaning?" asked Thomas.

"Something about freedom, I think. We are free range turkeys. Farmer Brown has set us free. We live so much better here than on other farms. We have no coops here."
"What is freedom, really?" asked Thomas.
"Just another word for nothing left to lose," laughed Brooks.
"I've heard that one."
"We can walk where were want to."
"As long as you stay on the right side of that fence."
"We can eat as much as we like."
"I can fly wherever I like," said Thomas. 
"Why should I want to go anywhere else? I'm fine here. What more do I need to know?"

"Ah!" Thomas expostulated, "That's just it, isn't it? What more do you need to know? What is the use of exploration? Why ask what is on the other side of the fence, the stream, the salt marshes?"
Brooks looked across the fence at Thomas and Thomas looked back at him. They were not more than five feet apart, but they lived in different worlds entirely.