TP

Politico claims, with some good quotes and Pew poll stats, and some really stupid quotes (STFU, Cindy Sheehan), that the Tea Partiers are pretty much a figment of the chattering classes created by the NYT "obsession" with the exotic.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36185.html

It's always amusing to piss on the NYT, but it pretty much is not a definitive way of gauging the existence and agency of a political (or any other kind of) phenomenon. The only real zingers -- and they're actual facts, unenlightening as compared to Real Facts -- in the story are the reminders of similar backlash against Reagan and Clinton [oh yeah?], the [estimated] low numbers of TP protesters, the Pew polls [of 2000 people] showing that 60 per cent of Americans had never heard of the TP, reference without credit, as I recall, to the NYT poll showing that they're mainly mainstream Republicans -- and a quote from a Rep political operative saying it's the usual suspects experiencing, explicitly, Obama freakout. We all know what that means: a black man giving billions to Wall Street, a bipartisan gesture if there ever was one, which pissed everybody off. David Remnick's new bio of Obama says this is his specialty, the deeply conciliatory/compromised gesture.

In any case, I'm with Politico, and you read it here first. I'd say it is the blogosphere's Gotcha ethos which is piqueing the interest of the media, and keeping the TP trolls alive.

Next?

Blood

I don't know if the Havasupai are Navajo people, and I don't know exactly what the Navajo construct is of blood. One of them is that water is the blood of the mythic universe. One of them is that blood is a war trophy the Monster Slayer took from the Burrowing Monster -- a colon filled with blood.

Bad blood, we understand. It's in our blood, we understand. Blood and treasure, we understand. Blood brothers. Spilling blood. Blood sacrifice. This is my body and my blood.

It is the sacred fluid of spiritual initiation, kinship, enmity, obligation and essence.

And why the bitchy geneticist from Arizona State felt she, and a generation of her bitchy students, were entitled to play with the blood samples of the Havasupai for 20 years after she had extracted it from them, publishing a score of scientific papers on their findings, without telling them that she was planning much more than the diabetes testing they had agreed to, can claim she is "doing good science" is hard to credit. In the passage italicized below, in 2003, a Havasupai woman interrupts the doctoral defense of one of these students, asking if he had permission to use the blood samples. The presentation was halted and the bitchy geneticist had the student redact that chapter from his PhD. thesis. In a word, she knew she was doing wrong long after the help she promised with the diabetes epidemic never materialized.


Therese Markow, who actually had the balls to wear turquoise for this photograph. In the Navajo creation myth, the sun was created from turquoise and it has many other sacred uses.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/04/21/us/0421DNA_5.html

She was doing bad science, of the ilk which required the Smithsonian to return the bones of Indians to their descendents for respectful burial. She was doing bad science because you can just see her getting a boner for the blood of this isolated tribe of people and testing it for genetic disposition to schizophrenia -- the schizo grant paid for the blood sampling in the first place, and the story does not make clear that the Havasupai were informed of this -- Alzheimer's, Bering Strait origins and whatever other kinds of secrets. These secrets, spiritual and medicinal, the Havasupai as 21st century patients might feel are confidential medical information. Which, widely publicized, as they explicitly say, might be used to drive them from their land. I'm certain they also fear further stigmatization as genetically inferior. They might feel equally that the unauthorized plumbing of these secrets is, if not a betrayal of their trust equal to the dispossesion of their land, their deportation to 500 acres at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, a catastrophic violation of the fluid which is as sacred to them as it is to the rest of us.

This picture, in which Havasupai elders regard the frozen test tubes of the blood they donated, including the blood of people who have passed away, is the entire story. They are praying over the blood.


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/04/21/us/0421DNA_13.html


I wish the NYT story had given some indication of what the blood represents to the Havasupai, some context on the tradition of "science" to steal blood and bones from Indians -- and indigents like Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells live on in tissue taken from her body without her knowledge or consent, the eugenic Nazi tradition of medical experiments upon people of color and the Other, and looked into the academic culture which permitted Markow to advance herself literally on the blood stolen from the Havasupai.

She was doing bad science because the genetics of diabetes among the Indians is not well-established, because her grant was for schizophrenia genetics, and because diabetes among Natives may often be a case of nurture and not nature. She offered nutritional counselling and clinics and did not deliver. Bad faith, bad science.

But a few years later, a graduate student using new technology came up with a way to discern variations in the Havasupai DNA, which was stored in a university freezer, and he wrote a dissertation based on his research.

Carletta Tilousi, one of the few Havasupai to attend college, stopped by Professor Martin’s office one day in 2003, and he invited her to the student’s doctoral presentation.

Ms. Tilousi understood little of the technical aspect, but what she heard bore no resemblance to the diabetes research she had pictured when she had given her own blood sample years earlier.

“Did you have permission,” she asked during the question period, “to use Havasupai blood for your research?”

The presentation was halted. Dr. Markow and the other members of the doctoral committee asked the student to redact that chapter from his dissertation.


( Havasupai Win DNA Case )