Fighting the Universal Spider Too

When a DNA profile is used to verify the identity of a suspect without previously having been identified as a suspect – i.e. when a database of DNA profiles are trolled to find the culprit – the chances of error go up exponentially, this is especially true when the DNA sample is from coldcase evidence and time and contamination have degraded the sample. The statistical rarity of a match is based on a statistical sampling of only 200 to 300 profiles and was meant to reflect all 13 DNA indicators which are rarely available for an actual matching. In other words when a jury is told that there is a one in a million chance of error they are being lied to – this is only true if the profile was matched against a very limited number of suspects, was not contaminated and was not degraded. If profiles of all Americans were available in a database and there was a one in a million chance of error then there should be about 350 matches But the actual chance for such a match (depending of degradation of sample and cross contamination) may be as high as one in three-hundred and hence a DNZ profile search of all Americans would probably produce over a million suspectse. DNA might be evidence that someone did not commit a crime but it should never be taken as the sole evidence alone that a specific  person wass the perpetrator of the given event.

Of course a ‘box’ is only a step away from a ‘frame’. And the ‘frame’ is the thing that gets put ‘around’ the art work… It’s what lets us ‘know’ it’s a work of art you’re looking at – Samuel R Delany – Dark Reflections, 2007 p86

Having power and being disingenuous
     Are synonymous
Your are no sportsman
Nature without danger
     Is a contradiction
I have my eyes on you, I want
     You to know this
Your time in front of the camera
     Is anonymous
There is no utility in pretending
     That this is reality

The historian… must always maintain towards his subject an indeterminist point of view. He must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the human factor still seems to permit different outcomes – Johan Huizinga

The Committee was a total business enterprise
Never very far away from its ledger
Anything worth counting
      Needs a double bookkeeping entry
Sports are accounting enterprises too
      Just as concentration camps are also

Citizen journalism is like citizen dentistry – Andrew Stroehlein

Y2K now all but forgotten
But once a very tall mountain
On the horizon of a new
      Millennium
Yes, I’m aware it didn’t
Begin for another year
But mechanical metaphors
      Trump reason and
             History too
Don’t call it global warming
       Call it the Climate Crisis
             Instead
It confuses the simple minded
When the car’s odometer
              Has a whole string of those
              Zeros - it must
Have some kind of meaning
The same is true of years
But the truth is that it’s significance
          Was an attempt to save space
But now space is cheap
           And we can return to the moon
Pennies per terabyte
           Pennies on the dollar
But not one red cent more for defense

Wild honey smells like freedom, / Dust-like a ray of sun. / Like violets – a young maid’s mouth, / And gold – like nothing. / The flowers of the mignonette like water, / And like an apple – love. / But we learned once and for all / That blood smells only like blood – Anna Akhmatova – The Complete Poems, 1992 p382


I’m sitting at the kitchen table. I can see the feet of a woman. Someone asks, “Has anyone seen any snakes?” Let’s say for the sake of convenience that it was my mother who asked this. But was it also necessarily her whose feet I had seen? And as I thought about this,  a snake materialized near one of the table’s legs just to the right of the woman’s left foot. It is small, no bigger than a worm but begins to grow and to wiggle. It is distinctly a snake. It slithers across the carpet and disappears under the couch. What might have originally been mistaken for a night crawler is clearly a rattlesnake – a diamond back rattlesnake to be specific – which don’t get as big as a timber rattler, but they are plumper. There is no mistaking that triangular head and its pink darting tongue for anything other. More and more snakes begin to appear. One might suppose that there is a migration occurring through my kitchen. The snakes begin to pair up. Perhaps they are performing some bazaar mating ritual. They are forming into balls, wiggling masses. They wither around and become entangled with each other. The news of this phenomenon gets out. People are gathering. They are watching the spectacle. People are coming from the neighborhood – whole families. They have brought their picnic baskets. They are spreading out red-and-white checkered tablecloths upon my lawn. There is a pair of withering diamond backes right next to a little blond headed toddler. She reaches out and begins to pet them. No one tries to restrain her. She giggles. She reaches over and picks up one of the withering masses or thses rattlesnakes. They are all so engrossed in their performance that they totally ignore the people around them even the ones grabbing at them. Now something really strange begins to occure – the snakes have become covered in long hair – not really fur, but more like strips of frayed fabric. As move people come to gawk – it is now the snakes who are in danger. They are in danger of being trampled upon. There is no fear that anyone will get bitten by them. Will the people become hysterical? Will they begin clubbing them like baby seals, stomping on them in furry like ants on their watermellons? Swarming masses always arouse disgust in man.  It is inevitable - just like maggots - gag me with a maggot.  I am becoming more and more fearful of something like might happen. The snakes have moved on. Thee people all went home.  Afterwards I researched the natural history of snakes. This behavior is not uncommon but rarely happens in such masses as this and has not happend in this scale in recorded history. Native American myth indicates it may have happened in the past. Is there anything in the Bible about snakes other than in the garden. Some people incorporate this behavior into their religions. Serpents in a double helix make up  a caduceus and may have been a symbol for Mercury. I take it as a sign for the rightousness of health care reform. I gather that this has nothing to do with global warming, but I may be wrong.

History does not consist of “facts” but of statements of them – John Lukas – The American Scholar (Winter 2010) p57