Monday, January 23, 2023

On mis-gendering trans women

 I get so confused having 2 trans women in my family. 


It's called being mommy brained, you know. My ex's mother, when my ex was small (formerly he), called all of her 4 sons "Nor-Frank-Al-Bruce, whatever your name is." That was all 4 of their names. 


It's not so easy to correct conditioned reflexes that have passed into the subconscious. 


I find myself hesitating whenever I say the word "he," even when it's a cis male. I have to stop and think and say to myself "wait, it's ok to call him, 'he.' He doesn't mind. He might even prefer it." 


Personally, when asked what my preferred pronoun is, I refuse to commit. I espouse no 3rd person pronouns, so long as I'm addressed with respect. 3rd person pronouns are for other people.  Let them say whatever.


Similarly, I'm having trouble using the Maya software that I am trying to get comfortable with, because there's a lot of pinky work in the left hand. You have to use shift, control, alt, and sometimes shift plus control. Then, on Mac, it's sort of confusing whether command or option is going to be the alt key, because it's not always the same. Also, on Mac, normally control click is the same as right click; but not in Maya. Maya does not recognize control click as being the same as a right mouse button click. I'm constantly pressing the wrong thing with that uncooperative pinky and having uncontrolled things appear on the screen that I don't even know what they are. I find that my left pinky has a mind of its own. That's very similar to what happens when I use the wrong pronoun.


I had something similar happen when I was taking dancing classes a few years ago. I could hear what the instructor said. I understood what instructor said. I knew that I wasn't doing what the instructor said. But my body wasn't cooperating. It wasn't willing to do what I wanted to do.  Some of us have neurological limitations.

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Comments about avatar

This is a stub of a review of Avatar II.  I posted these comments on someone's post on FB.  He said he wasn't able to sit through the movie and he thought it was too full of stereotypical sequences.  


Here was my response: 


I sat through the whole thing, with one bathroom visit. I did have to take the glasses off when walking around, because they interfered with my balance and made me woozy. 


Yeah, these things do usually have the same plot of someone trying to destroy the world, though here it was not quite the whole world. 


One thing that was unusual was that the people were the bad guys and the aliens were the good guys. 


I was somewhat disappointed in the 3D aspect. I walked out of the first one feeling like I had been flying and craving more. This time the 3D effect was much more subtle and subliminal. I wasn’t conscious of it most of the time. 


I want to see more of the story of the adopted daughter who was said to have epilepsy, but turned out to really have some kind of deep spiritual connection. She intrigued me. I feel like they might have been setting her up for her own sequel. 


The suspense was much more intense towards the end. Really, literally got me up on the edge of my seat. 


I don’t feel that that part was at all stereotypical. I don’t want to put in spoilers, tho.

Sunday, January 8, 2023

Protest of illegal "No Trespassing" sign, landscaping, and plantings

This is the text of an e-mail message that I have sent to Richard Slingerland, Village Administrator, Village of Tarrytown, NY


I hereby formally protest the placement of a "No Trespassing" sign and landscaping on the longstanding pedestrian pathway between Grove Street and Leroy Avenue adjacent the temple.


This is a longstanding pedestrian walkway. I have lived in this neighborhood for 33 years.  That walkway was already well-worn when I arrived here.  My family and at least one other family I know have been using the pathway for over 25 years.  


The New York State statue of limitations for adverse possession is 10 years (NY CPLR §212).  Many people have been openly and notoriously using this path for much longer than that.  Any right that the Temple might have had to block this public easement has long since expired.


The placement of this sign and of landscaping blocking and obscuring the path are illegal infringements on a public easement and right of way.


I hereby formally request that the village assist the public in forcing the removal of the illegal "No Trespassing" sign and illegal placement of landscaping and trees from the public right of way.


#Easement #PublicEasement #AdversePossession #BethAbraham #TempleBethAbraham #IllegalNoTrespassingSign #TarrytownNY 


Friday, December 16, 2022

Summary resume

 

 

Education

*      2022 completed a certificate in 3D animation and 3D modelling at SUNY WCC

*      2013-present miscellaneous coursework in performance and media 

*      JD 1983, Columbia University School of Law, NYC, Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar 

*      IFP 1982, Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, NYC

*      BA 1978, Physics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, Magna Cum Laude, with distinction in major (also 10 honors math courses & citation in math)

*      1974 baccalauréat C, mention assez bien, Lycée D’État Jules Ferry, Paris, France

*      prior to 2013: miscellaneous technology related coursework

 

Work history

*      2017-present – Artist/Animator artwork & animation summary

*      2013- present -- Acting Acting/performance   Actors Access Resumé

*      2014-present -- Of counsel at falati.com 

*      1980 to present: various positions in my spiritual activities that included management, counseling, treasury, newsletters, and extensive public speaking

*      1999-2014 Sole practitioner in patent law

*      1997-2005 Attorney-in-fact managing a mini-nursing home in my mom’s home

*      1986-1999 Senior Intellectual Property Counsel, Philips Electronics North America, Corporation

*      1984-1986 Associate Attorney in IP, Kenyon & Kenyon, NYC

*      1983-1984 Associate Attorney, David & Finell, NYC

*      1982 Summer Associate -- student, Cooper, Dunham, Clark, Griffin & Moran, NYC

*      1981 Summer Associate -- student, Lathrop & Clark, Madison, WI

*      1978-1980 Junior Programmer, IBM, Rochester, MN

*      1976 Engineering intern, Framatome, Paris, France

*      1974-78 (part time) Teaching assistant/paper grader, Dartmouth College, NH

 

Languages

       *   Native speaker of USA English

*      French, fluent (lived in France for a year and a half)

*      Spanish, working knowledge (4 years high school)

*      Russian, good phonetics (2 years college Russian & summer program in USSR)

 

Miscellaneous

*      Quick study with all things computer.  Skills:  Gimp, Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, Animate), Autodesk (Maya & Sketchbook pro), zBrush, java/eclipse, Zoom, MS office (Word, excel, PowerPoint), Intuit: (Quickbooks & Turbotax), Apple (Garage Band, imovie, calendar, pages, text editor, reminders, etc) Audacity,  Google (gmail, drive, maps, translate) social media (Facebook, twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Linkedin, WhatsApp, Signal, Slack, Discord)

*      Excellent writer

*      Excellent with conference calls

*      Published 7 novels under a pseudonym

*      Hobbies: Yoga; Singing; Calligraphy; hiking 

*      Raised 2 special needs children (now adults)



Tuesday, November 8, 2022

ANNE BARSCHALL


ACTRESS, 
WRITER, 
ANIMATOR, ARTIST,
PATENT ATTORNEY


This home page is also part of my blogspot blog.  
Some places to start in my blog:



A.B. Physics, Dartmouth College, magna cum laude, with distinction in major
IFP, Columbia SIPA
JD, Columbia Law School, NYC, Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar 
Certificate in 3D Modeling and 3D Animation

On cell phone, this blog looks better in landscape view

Monday, November 7, 2022

Asymptomatic and Presymtomatic COVID transmission

 I had a discussion with my neighbor about whether asymptomatic or presymptomatic COVID transmission has been proven.  

I did some research.

This is what I found 

Per our discussion, I reviewed a number of research articles on the topic of asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission — listed below.  These articles all complained about lack of data, from which to draw conclusions.    Moreover, it is hard to say who has symptoms, since many people lie about it https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2797071


The gold standard of medical testing is the controlled double blind test.  No such test appears.  What appears is small scale contact tracing, where some anecdotal asymptomatic and presymptomatic transmission was confirmed.  The articles generally concluded that such transmission is possible, with presymptomatic transmission being more likely than asymptomatic transmission.


They do conclude that there is more transmission from people with symptoms — but, then again, no controlled double blind testing.


What they were able to document was viral load with respect to symptom onset.  In this respect, I note https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7310638/  and in particular figure 2 of this article, an image of which is enclosed.  This shows viral load relative to symptom onset.  The colors on this graph represent statistics vocabulary that I have not researched.  However, there is viral load above the level of transmissibility prior to symptom onset in 3 out of 4 of these curves.


These curves do, as you indicated, show  viral load increasing after symptom onset, contrary to what is commonly stated.  


Otoh, I’m not sure, from a practical viewpoint, what the difference might be between contracting the disease from people who have no symptoms v  contracting the disease from people who are lying about having no symptoms, or people who mistakenly believe they have allergy or GERD symptoms.




—————————————



These are articles that I looked at, not date order, but rather in google order — where later studies with more data apparently tend to appear after earlier studies with less data.  

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019716118

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34217301/

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-022-07440-0



https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7310638/  (review of articles)

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1003987

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2022.836409/full

https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2022/06/02/covid-transmission

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/05/news-scan-may-27-2022

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-022-07440-0





Thursday, October 13, 2022

What is happening to @TulsiGabbard

As some of you may have noticed, I supported Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 Democratic primaries for POTUS. My principal reason for this was her concern with Peace issues, which also concern me.

Since that time, Tulsi has affiliated herself with Fox News, and recently resigned from the Democratic Party. I find this distressing, because I still identify as a Democrat. Moreover I feel that Fox News has been engaged in some substantial distortions, especially with respect to the former POTUS.

Naturally, it is true that all TV news programs introduce distortions, just to reduce the stories into time slots and to make them sound more exciting.

Tulsi has made a number of remarks that are soundbites out of the right wing lexicon. Most recently she condemned "Wokeness."  I am not exactly sure what that means, but I think it means intolerance of LGBTQ people. That's bad for me, having LGBTQ family members.

Political dialogue has become overly polarized. Polarization means reducing complicated issues into oversimplified sound bites, and then encouraging people to flame each other over minor digressions from the exactly correct wording of those sound bites.  "If you dare to word your opinion in a way that seems even slightly inconsistent with my wording, then I hate you."

I also feel that this polarization has been accelerated by the actions of the Russian government, interfering with our social media during the 2016 elections.

However, this phenomenon is not restricted to liberals or Democrats. It extends into all aspects of our political dialogue. In some sense, I agree with rejecting oversimplification and politically correct enforcement of orthodoxy, but I don't like the fact that she is rejecting these in a way that uses another sound bite.

I do also find very distressing the array of choices that were presented to us in the 2020 primaries. 

First, the DNC changed the requirements for access to the debates, as the debates wore on, thereby excluding Tulsi. That meant that the remaining candidates were able to focus their attention almost exclusively on our domestic policy, rather than our disastrous foreign policy – especially our evil, short-sighted military interventions in the internal affairs of other countries. Excluding Tulsi allowed an extreme hawk, Biden, to get the nomination, without his hawkish record ever being exposed to the public.

One of his first moves on taking office was to re-energize NATO. This was a very retro thing to do. It showed his age, focusing on post WWII issues in Europe, with an emphasis on the British viewpoint. He's mentally still living in the Cold War. He did this in a very public way, with a trip to Europe. It would have been sufficient for him to call foreign leaders and tell them that his opinions were different from those of the former POTUS. He didn't have to make such a big splash.

The re-energization of NATO was frightening to the Russians. We think of France and Germany as nice, friendly countries.  We like to go there on vacation. We feel that they have common values with us. In fact, both of those countries have invaded Russia, France under Napoleon and Germany under Hitler. They don't seem like nice, friendly countries to Russia. They seem dangerous. Our affiliation with them seems dangerous to Russia. Russia was understandably concerned.

This gave Putin the justification he needed, with his advisers and colleagues, to invade Ukraine. Biden bears substantial responsibility for the military horrors that we are seeing on our TV screens in Ukraine right now.

Moreover, Democrats engaged in substantial distortions about Tulsi, to discredit her.  I've talked about that on this blog, It's understandable that she believes that the strong, knee-jerk, negative reaction to her came out of the military industrial complex, people who were economically threatened by her peaceful views.

In particular, to accuse a military veteran, who had done two tours of duty in Iraq, of being a Russian asset or helping the Russians, somehow, obviously sent her over the edge. That's sort of understandable. Questioning her patriotism was really appalling.  

While I believe her heart is still in the right place, I question whether she has the intelligence or sophistication to truly understand what's going on and formulate sane sounding responses to it.  Her emotions tend to lead her to embrace conspiracy theories.  Nevertheless, Hillary's involvement in smearing Tulsi really speaks very poorly of her. I understand many people's dislike of her -- including what seems almost like paranoia on the part of Tulsi -- tho it may not really be paranoia.

In general, the choices in 2020 were execrable. All of the major candidates were over 70. All of them were somewhat extreme in some respects. This left Biden sounding moderate. In fact he was a terrible hawk. That's not moderate. It was hidden.

The lack of attractive, appealing candidates on both sides of the aisle is a problem. Extreme polarization and lack of public civility has made it impossible for good people to run for public office. Naturally, the result is that we get people who we don't really want  in office – none of them.


to be edited later


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Comments on FB: 221016

Putin needed some justification within his own country, where they don't realize that the attack is genocidal -- and that the Nazi business is a fabrication. They do know that the Ukraine is trying to join NATO, which includes France, Germany, and the USA -- all of which seem threatening.  When Russians on the street have been interviewed, they've largely said that they don't like war, but they trust Putin to protect their security.  

No it's not the likeliest situation that Tulsi's a Russian agent. If she were really a Russian agent, given her prominence, the army -- her employer -- would have figured it out. The likeliest situation is that she's slightly whacko, but trying her best to get us out of being the world's policeman.  The impression you have of her being a Russian agent comes from a very deceptive smear campaign.  I tend to agree with her that that comes from her being a threat to the military-industrial complex, which has a vested interest in our militarism and a large ability to influence main stream media.

While I tend to sympathize with what we're currently doing in Ukraine -- despite being a supposed religious pacifist -- one does have to notice that it is extremely profitable to the defense industry.  The Ukrainians have blown up our stockpile of older, outdated weapons -- like a spring cleaning -- which means an opportunity to sell newer, more expensive weapons to the US government.  Remember Eisenhower and the Iron Triangle. 

I feel Tulsi has been pushed over the edge -- as an extremely patriotic person, who has devoted almost her entire adult life to serving this country, including two tours of duty in Iraq -- by the widespread smears against her loyalty.  She's risked her life, repeatedly for this country -- and been very disillusioned by what she has seen us doing in Iraq.  We really have visited a horror upon that country.  The typical US citizen is as delusional about we have done to Iraq as the typical Russian is about what Russia has done to the Ukraine.