Experimental Blog #137

Summary of "Loyal to the Sky - Notes from an Activist" by Marisa Handler

Reviews of this book, which was published in 2007, seem to be quite positive. A somewhat negative comment was that the author, Marisa Handler, was too young to write a memoir at only about 30 years of age. However, Marisa Handler writes very well and provides very interesting chapters of her childhood and adolescence in Cape Town, South Africa and California, USA. These chapters are followed by her young adult journeys in Israel, Nepal, and India. All of this writing is vivid and informative.

Sometime in 2002 Marisa begins paid employment as a "full-time National Organizer" for the "Tikkum Community", which involves "building a national campus network of students supporting a progressive middle path to peace in Israel and Palestine..." At the same time, as much as possible, she continues to volunteer in what she describes as the "global justice movement"; most often in the "Code Orange affinity group".

In these few years, until she writes her book, she continues to travel across America. Marisa Handler describes her activity in more detail in San Francisco, where she lives, and Miami, to demonstrate against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA. She then travels to Ecuador and Peru and writes chapters about, among other things, the affect of globalization on some of the indigenous people in these countries.

Marisa Handler finishes her book with chapters on demonstrations in New York, against the 2004 Republican National Convention, and at Fort Benning, Georgia, against what was formerly called the School of the Americas, or SOA, which was "a combat training school for Latin American soldiers.." Evidently, quite a few of the graduates of this school went on to acquire very bad reputations, and when Marisa Handler went there it had been reorganized and renamed the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation".

Experimental Blog #136

Quotations from and comments about "How We Live and Why We Die" - The Secret Lives of Cells by Lewis Wolpert

"...there are more molecules of water in a glass of water than glasses of water in all the oceans."
"Proteins, of which there are around 100,000 different types in our body, are strings of ... amino acids. ... "Most of our cells contain several thousand different proteins..."
"The 200 or so different types of cells in our body - skin cells, nerve cells, liver cells, fat cells and many others - all have their function determined by the proteins they contain ..."
"Genes control developement of every bit of our bodies by determining which proteins are present in our cells ... "
"The key to understanding living systems is proteins, and genes merely provide the information for making proteins."

Can this really be true?!! "..there are a thousand million synapses in a tiny piece of our brain the size of a grain of sand - and think how many grains of sand there are in our brains."

"Genetics, it is asserted, is not destiny. ... as it is all too easy to be misled as to what genes actually do for us, nor is it easy to accept that much of our destiny is due to our genetic inheritance." "Why is there so much resistance to accepting that genes can play such an important role in our behavior?"
The author, Lewis Wolpert, goes on to write about men and women, criminality, homosexuality, and mathematical, language, and spatial skills, besides very many other things. He never, or rarely, uses the word ancestry; such as, perhaps, "ancestry is destiny." At least, as far as we can know.