June 2011 archive

Cartnoon

Hare Trigger

Muse in the Morning

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket
Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”

–Bruce Lee



Basket 4

Late Night Karaoke

Today May 31 is my second granddaughter’s first birthday

A year ago her birth appeared normal.  Then about two months later the doctor recognized her head was not growing normally and her left ear was protruding and appeared to lack normal cartilage.  A couple months later after genetics testing, we got the bad news — she has a chromosome defect.  A  defect called a 6q 25-terminal deletion.  In layman’s terms that means that the longer chromosome of her 6th chromosome pair is missing a section at the end.

Her primary problem is a malformed brain.  She has a condition called holoprosencephaly which means that her forebrain did not properly divide into hemispheres.

At age about six months we were told by the neurologist that she might never talk, never walk and never be potty trained.

Today at her yearly exam my daughter was told the same thing by her pediatric neurosurgeon who is scheduled to do cosmetic surgery on her head.  Quite a disappointing first birthday.

Neither my daughter or her husband have any chromosome abnormalities — my granddaughter’s condition is a very rare defect.  We only know of about forty reported cases.  It is so rare that the National Organization of Rare Diseases (NORD) does not mention it.

There is a facebook group started for children with this defect and the good news is that nearly all walk and some can sign.  All are very developmentally delayed.

She is cute as a bug even though her head is a bit lopsided and her left ear protrudes.  Blond hair and blue eyes — no one in my family has those traits.

Anyway we shall carry on.

Assad The Sadist w/video

A Syrian child has been barbarically tortured and murdered by Assad’s security forces. He’s now a symbol of Syrian resistance. With a thousand civilians killed, ten thousand arrested, and many tortured, Assad and his merry murderous band of Alawites must go!

CAIRO – Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a round-faced 13-year-old boy, was arrested at a protest in Jiza, a southern Syrian village near Dara’a, on April 29. Nothing was known of him for a month before his mutilated corpse was returned to his family on the condition, according to activists, that they never speak of his brutal end.

But the remains themselves testify all too clearly to ghastly torture. Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.

“These are the reforms of the treacherous Bashar,” the narrator says. “Where are human rights? Where are the international criminal tribunals?”

In Syria and beyond, the youth’s battered body has cast into shocking relief the terrors wielded by the Syrian state against its people.

Circulating in various versions, the video has injected new life into a six-week uprising against President Bashar al-Assad that has appeared to settle into a bloody stalemate of protests and violent government responses. In the days since news of the death spread, more than 58,000 people have visited and expressed support for a Facebook page memorializing the boy, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, as a “child martyr.”

Where are human rights?

Load more