Now this question is being asked not of a human being but of a thing: the swastika. Some individuals and groups are saying that after years of being associated with the Nazis and the horrors they perpetrated, the swastika deserves a chance at rehabilitation. Most recently, this demand has been made by the International Raelian Movement, the religion/cult generally known for its images of little green men and weird sexual practices (they later clarified their position by stating that they didn’t advocate promiscuity but felt that people should be free to express their sexuality in any way they wanted as long as they didn’t hurt anybody else). But even before this, some people had expressed reservations about the across-the-board demonization of the swastika. Indian-American activist Rita Chaudhry Sethi, for example, called the swastika an “extremely common, ancient Hindu symbol” and wondered why South Asians should be criticized for displaying it simply because Adolf Hitler chose to appropriate it.

Indeed, the swastika has a long and, before the Nazis, illustrious history. In Indian-descended religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, the swastika symbolized the cycle of life and rebirth and the movement of the universe and the planets. It was a sign of harmony and prosperity. Even today some homes and places of worship in South and Southeast Asia place a swastika in the doorway just as some Westerners keep a lucky horseshoe. One Buddhist temple in Toronto has a swastika at its entrance. But the swastika can be found even further afield, such as in pre-Hispanic Mexico. And surprise of surprises, there was even one on the floor of the Ein Gedi synagogue in Israel.

All this changed, of course, when the Nazis decided to claim the swastika as their own as a symbol of the Aryans, the people who conquered Northern India about 1,500 years before Christ and gave that region the Indo-European languages spoken there today. For this reason, the swastika tends to elicit strong reactions in Western countries. Germany, for instance, has banned the swastika and other Nazi regalia in an attempt to eradicate a less than complimentary part of its past. Prince Harry (son of Charles and Diana) was roundly condemned for wearing a swastika to a dress party. And here in Canada, an Ontario teacher of Ukrainian descent was temporarily suspended from her position when she had her students paint the swastika, which she said was a good luck sign in her native Ukraine, on their Easter eggs.

So can the swastika be rehabilitated? Without ever forgetting the atrocities committed by the Nazis, can we now allow the swastika to take its place in the sun? I will admit that I myself could probably never wear, say, a swastika necklace. To me, it would feel like an affront to my many friends and family members who suffered because of the Nazis, like my high school ex-boyfriend’s father who, as a soldier in the Canadian Forces stationed in London, narrowly escaped death when a bomb from the Luftwaffe just missed the church in which he was attending Mass; or my father-in-law, who as a small child in England was forced to go into a bomb shelter; or my aunt and two uncles who served in the US army during World War II.

However, a small part of me hopes that the swastika loses its stigma, which after all it did nothing to deserve. At the very least, individuals like Rita Chaudhry Sethi and the Ukrainian-Canadian teacher, who come from cultures where the swastika as a tradition pre-dates Hitler by hundreds if not thousands of years, should not be shamed for using it. I am not sure whether the swastika’s reputation will be restored in my lifetime. But hopefully someday the swastika will return as a symbol of peace and good luck.

Burial’s 2007 LP Untrue introduced many electronic music fans to Dubstep. Untrue’s potent combination of murky beats, bleak melodies mangled R&B vocal samples put a decidedly soulful spin on a genre that was otherwise migrating from its darker origins to a more rave/tweaker friendly sound. The problem was that once you got through Untrue and Burial’s less flashy self-titled debut, there was little else in the scene that sounded nearly as rich. Most popular dubstep tracks sound like lethargic remakes of the squelchy club music from Jersey Shore – fantastic to the clubbers tripping on Ketamine and distracting to just about anyone else.

Lithuanian producer Eleven Tigers breaks that mold authoritatively on his debut LP, Clouds are Mountains. While inspired by Untrue, Clouds are Mountains forgoes R&B and Garage mutations in favour of ambient pads and generous layers of IDM-style synth-work. Vocals are used sparingly and garbled to the point of sounding like Simlish. The songs flow seamlessly, engaging one other via crossfades of up to 40 seconds. The album is mixed like a well-planned DJ set and can be played from start to finish without a break in the action.

While the sum of Clouds are Mountains is indeed greater than its parts, there are still standout tracks. Songs for You plays like the lovechild of Dido and Burial, pulsing along at a slow dub-like speed lead by acoustic guitars before moving double time over ringing analogs. Atomic Turnip pays homage to the dub roots of dubstep with chest-tickling sub-basslines and a heavily reverberated organ. Thesis veers into vintage Prodigy territory, albeit with an IDM twist as three generations of grimy old school rave beats crunch against heavily altered speech loops and indescribable random noises that barely avoid chaos. Stableface easily boasts the greatest crossover appeal and dance floor potential, featuring chopped female vocals over several airy layers of pads and a driving drum beat. Even this track is complex, however, and like nearly all of the tunes on Clouds are Mountains, it constantly evolves.

Clouds are Mountains is easily one of the best albums of any genre that I’ve heard in the past decade. Numerous visitors to my house parties (whose musical tastes span from Alt-Rock to Hip Hop) seem to agree. Only dubstep scenesters may not bite since this album is closer to Boards of Canada than Rusko. However, anyone with an even passing interest in headphone-friendly electronic music would be well advised to check out this hidden gem.

And for Burial lovers … yes, this will tide you over for awhile.

In the final installment of the series on DNA ancestry testing we will look at mtDNA and the maternal line. Read part 1 of the series to learn the difference between mtDNA, yDNA and autosomal DNA.

To quickly recap: a patrilneal test can determine haplogroup and tribal association as dictated by the father’s father’s father’s … father. My test results traced back to a strain I-Haplogroup (I1a) originating from and most commonly found in Scandinavia. Independent research verified that my paternal great grandfather was a native of Scotland, where the I-Haplogroup is alleged to have spread via Viking invasion. Needless to say, the yDNA test provided no information about which African ethnic group I may have descended from.

My Ancestral Journey – Mama Edition

The mtDNA test can determine haplogroup and tribal association by way of the mother’s mother’s mother’s … mother. MtDNA Haplogroups are denoted by different labels than male haplogroups, though the geographic regions represented are roughly the same.

Given the previous test results, I knew better than to have any explanations in terms of discovering exact African ancestry:

• mtDNA, like yDNA, only traces a single gender line of ancestry. Nearly all of the family tree is left untested
• Autosomal DNA can test both male and female DNA but is accurate for only a few generations back and sometimes cannot differentiate between closely-related populations
• My maternal grandmother is visibly and verified to be mixed. As she is from the Caribbean, her mother/grandmother could be from … virtually anywhere.

Genbase performs mtDNA testing based on a buccal swab from the user or a member of the user’s family. The latter option allows users to trace lines not directly accessible from their own sample (e.g. a father’s matrilenial line).

The default mtDNA test can predict a user’s haplogroup. My test predicted membership in the L-Haplogroup. An additional SNP backbone test confirmed my subclade to be L1C. The L1 Haplogroup appeared approximately 150,000 years ago in East Africa and is closely related to the original L0 group (Mitochondrial eve). The L1C subclade is commonly found in central and southern Africa, particularly among Pygmy ethnic groups and Bantu-speaking African groups.

Multiple years passed before I had a single “close match” on DNA Reunion (matches users to other users). The original assumption was that there weren’t many black users on the Canada-based Genebase system but a quick user profile search dispelled that idea. This was an early sign that the mtDNA result might contain another “surprise”, despite being within the African realm.

For Indigenous DNA testing, matrilneal tests can be performed on comparison of just the HVR-1 region (provided as part of the default Genebase mtDNA package) or additionally on the HVR-2 region (requires an additional package). Testing based on two regions should improve the accuracy of the matches at the cost of comparing samples to fewer indigenous groups. Comparing the HVR-2 region did not provide much value in my case, as most of the available HVR-2 data seems to be for European and Asian ethnic groups.

The Indigenous DNA test reads the users genetic profile and presents several sets of journals to perform comparison. As with the yDNA testing, the journals contain overlapping and non-indigenous samples.

The two strongest matches in my sample were to two African samples: the Maure and the the Sena. The names didn’t instantly ring a bell and the associated modern-day nations (Mauritania, Mozambique) are at opposite ends of Africa.

First to decode the names … some quick research revealed that Maure is the french adaptation of the latin term Maurus, which translates to “coming from Mauretania”. Ancient Rome acquired Mauretania (so-named after the Berber Mauri tribe) as a client kingdom in 33BC after defeating Carthage. The once-Christian region eventually fell to Arabic invasion and in 711BC the Islamic Moors conquered the Iberian Peninsula, holding European empires over several hundred years. The term Moor does not denote a single ethnic group but collectively refers to the groups involved with Moorish conquest. The Moors comprise chiefly of Berbers, Arabs and Sub-Saharan Africans.

The Sena are a Bantu-speaking ethnic group located mainly in Mozambique. Smaller groups of Sena people can be found in Zimbabwe and Malawi, where farm labourers and refugees fled to after Mozambique’s post-independence civil war. Zimbabwe is also the home of the Lemba, who refer to the ancient Yemen settlement of Sena as their original home. DNA testing performed in 2006 revealed that a substantial portion of the Lemba belong to the male haplogroup J, most common among Jews and Middle Easterners. Many of the males in the group also carry the Cohen Modal Haplotype (CMH), hypothesized to indicate Jewish lineage and possible membership in the Jewish priestly caste. This is noteworthy mainly because the Maure also have genetic ties to the Middle East.

So which is it? It’s impossible to know from these results as the difference in RMI for both groups is small, but it can be stated with some confidence that my matrilineal heritage is a mixture of African and Middle Eastern influence.

Final Thoughts

So are you really part-Italian? Is your mother trying to hide her Jewish heritage? Do your full lips indicate a black ancestor? A DNA ancestry test may be able to answer these questions. As stated, current DNA technology can’t reliably identify any ancestry that is not patrilineal, matrilineal or within the last couple of generations. It is almost certainly not possible to calculate ethnic percentages as some websites advertise.

Thus, DNA testing isn’t the silver bullet for ancestry that some may imagine.  However it can be a useful tool, along with traditional genealogical research, for discovering family history.

Business Spam Solutions

Businesses concerned about spam and other computer-related security issues can choose between a large number of software and hardware solutions.  Leading the way for serious protection is Barracuda Networks, a business security firm that provides a large range of spam and virus firewalls that can handle anywhere from 10 to 100,000 users.  Barracuda firewalls can be clustered to support nearly any size of business.  Spam and virus definitions are updated hourly by Barracuda networks and automatically pushed out to customer firewalls.

Of course, hardware firewalls are not the cheapest security solution, particularly for small businesses.  Software-only solutions tend to be cheaper and often have per-desktop licensing to match smaller budgets.  Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition claims to block 99% of spam in addition to providing malware protection, disk-based recovery, antivirus and email encryption.  Corporate purchasing starts at 5 licences and can be purchased in exact denominations up to 1000.

Finally, services like Google’s Postini can filter spam for businesses (usually ISP’s) before reaching the local services.  Individual users can log directly into Postini using their regular email address and passwords to verify whether filtered mail should be sent through to the user’s inbox.

Consumer Spam Solutions

Quite often,  consumer spam solutions are based on the same technology as the corporate solutions.  For instance, Symantec’s Norton Internet Security is a personal product that offers much of the same security features (including antispam protection) as Protection Suite but at a more consumer-friendly price.  Competing commercial products include Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 3-User and ZoneAlarm Security Suite.

However, it’s the free solutions that many will opt for since many are available for non-commercial use.

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5.Ausflag: Our Own Flag (http://www.ausflag.com.au/)

Those of us who grew up in Canada in the 1960s or before might remember when the flag in our schools, public offices and other venues was the Union Jack.  Then we decided we wanted a symbol that represented us, Canada, and unfurled our now world-famous maple leaf.  But while we Canadians have ceased using the Union Jack for our national flag (though some provinces, like Ontario, do retain it on theirs), Australia hasn’t. That country’s current flag is blue with a Union Jack on the upper left-hand corner, a large star beneath the Union Jack and five stars on the other half of the flag. Today, however, many Australians have decided they too want their own flag, one that best represents their nation and its people.  And what better image to represent Australia than the kangaroo – which, by the way, already appears on the logos of a number of Australian national institutions such as the airline Qantas.

The website Ausflag suggests several ideas for a new Australian flag right here, http://www.ausflag.com.au/designs.asp.  All four are very attractive, but as you might guess, the one I like best is that in the upper right-hand corner.  This flag, which was designed by Ausflag executive director Harold Scruby, depicts a kangaroo, in silhouette against the sun, over the great red continent.  It is, in Scruby’s words, a “revolutionary rather than evolutionary” flag.  If I were Australian, I would be proud to have this beautiful animal stand for my nation on our flag.

4.Tie Me Kangaroo Down (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D-LmRNdQiQ)

This is the original kangaroo song.  It was written and performed in 1957 by Australian artist Rolf Harris, who contrary to what I initially believed is still alive today and recently performed at the Glastonbury Music Festival in England.  “Tie Me Kangaroo Down” is quite a unique song in that it uses an instrument called a wobble board, a type of keyboard that Harris designed himself and that can be heard just as the song begins.

The video includes pictures of kangaroos as well as other examples of Australia’s extraordinary wildlife, such as the koala and duckbill platypus.  It’s a song that young and old – in my family’s case, from my three-year-old daughter to my 72-year-old father – can enjoy.

3.True Blue Roos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMTyhnyAwaQ)

I deliberately listed this site right after Roo Gully for a reason.  This song was written by Australian country singer Craig Giles (see his website here at http://www.craigiles.com/). It tells the story of two kangaroos at Roo Gully named Sonny and Max.  It begins with the line “Sonny and Max are real good mates [note: ‘mates’ in the Australian sense of companions rather than romantic partners] and they call them double trouble.” And the video shows Sonny and Max indeed getting into trouble, helping themselves without permission to a bite of one of their owners’ ice cream, crawling under a parked truck, and fighting on the middle of a living room floor and promptly scurrying outside. “True Blue Roos” is a nice tune with a catchy beat you can tap your foot to. Moreover, you get to see not only the cute kangaroos but the beautiful Australian scenery on the Roo Gully resort.  By the way, Craig Giles is touring the American South this fall, so any readers from that area might consider going to see him perform there.

2.Roo Gully (http://members.iinet.net.au/~roogully/)

I wrote about the world-famous Roo Gully Wildlife Sanctuary in August of 2008 (http://www.cynicsunlimited.com/2008/08/31/roo-gully/) so I won’t go into it in great detail here.  It’s located in Boyup Brook near the city of Perth in southwestern Australia. Owner Carol Lander takes care of orphaned and injured kangaroos and other animals with the ultimate goal of releasing them back into the wild or, if that’s not feasible, providing them with an environment as similar as possible to their natural habitat.  The site contains some beautiful and interesting videos (such as that of a joey – baby kangaroo – being born) as well as the life stories of some of the various kangaroos who have made Roo Gully their home over the years.  There’s also information on donating to Roo Gully or “adopting” a kangaroo of your own.

1.Cracked.com (http://www.cracked.com/funny-2615-kangaroos/)

I was called a slut in print. Because I like Black and Hispanic men? (I joke that I share Madonna’s tastes in men but have the good sense not to keep marrying White men in a feeble attempt to “cover” myself.)  No, because I’m a kangaroo.  According to “The Opening Eye” of Cracked.com, female kangaroos are “dirty, dirty sluts.”  Apparently right after she gives birth a female kangaroo will copulate with the “first hit-n-split douchebag to buy her a Foster’s” and get pregnant again.

It gets worse.  I’m also a heartless murderer.  We’ve all heard about boxing kangaroos. Adding a bit of kick-boxing into the mix, a kangaroo is capable of delivering a “Mortal Kombat-style claw-first kick to the abdomen” of his opponent. If that doesn’t work, the kangaroo will pursue the enemy into the water and use his (the kangaroo’s) forepaws to hold the opponent underwater long enough to drown him or her.  But kangaroos have their redeeming qualities.  Baby kangaroos are “agoddamndorable.”  If you succeed in hand-rearing an orphaned one, it will instinctively cuddle up with you when you come home.  And as the author writes, who doesn’t need that after a tough day at the office?

Anyway, check out the whole story at http://www.cracked.com/funny-2615-kangaroos/ and click on “View Comments” to read my effort to defend the female of my species.  And join in the conversation yourself!

While menopause is thought of as the complete cessation of menstruation, ironically one of the first signs of perimenopause is that a woman’s periods come more often.  My own menstrual cycle, for example, has gone from its previous monthly schedule to between 21 and 25 days. Eventually, though, menstruation becomes less frequent than usual and ultimately stops altogether.

When I realized that my consistently short cycles were not merely one-time aberrations and that I was indeed undergoing perimenopause, I had to take in the implications of that – beyond of course the temporarily increased spending on feminine hygiene products. The most important question was whether or not I would be able to have another child. My doctor told me flatly that if I really wanted to, I’d better start working on it now.  I still appear to be ovulating. However, at my age – I’m 41 and three-quarter years as I write this – the eggs I have left are less likely to be fertilized in the first place and, if they are, more likely to end in miscarriage. Even if I were successful in getting pregnant, there is also the higher risk of Down syndrome and other chromosomal abnormalities in the resulting fetus. I don’t relish the idea of being forced to choose between having an abortion on one hand and bearing a developmentally disabled child on the other.

There’s also the question of the dynamics with my existing child, now three years old.  She’s a fairly easy and even-tempered girl (she’s never given me a sleepless night, even as an infant), and we’ve sort of settled into a comfortable rhythm with both of our schedules. But another baby could throw this symbiosis completely off-balance, especially if he or she were not quite as adaptable as my daughter. And no matter how “good” she is, my little one is still after all a little one and I’m not sure I could handle two kids under a certain age at the same time. To paraphrase the Prophet Mohammed’s advice about taking another wife, if you fear you cannot deal justly with two or more, have only one.

So I’ve, again, concluded that I only want one child, at least for now.  I’m open to adopting later on when my daughter is older and less dependent on me.  But with the decision to forgo any further biological reproduction comes a certain sadness. It’s a visceral emotion, essentially, as I’m perfectly content with the child I have now and don’t possess any overwhelming urge to procreate at this point. Yet there’s a certain bittersweet feeling that I won’t ever experience pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding again, that I won’t have another genetic child whose looks and temperament and so on I can compare with my daughter’s and say, “That’s where he/she gets it from!”  This sadness quickly passes, though. Not only am I satisfied with my daughter, but I “have” a lot of other children – a bevy of nieces and nephews and now a great-niece (the daughter of one of my sister’s biracial sons and his wife).

I suppose the other thing I must confront in approaching “the change” is the fact that I’m getting older. I remember once when I was working in a hospital as a college student during the summer I had a 60-year-old patient tell me she felt sad on seeing the tampon dispenser in the hospital washroom because it reminded her of when she was young. I said most women my age would be pleased NOT to have a reason to use the dispenser.  Two decades later, I’m more understanding of her.  Over the years I’ve taken my menstrual cycle for granted: even if it could be a nuisance, it was just “there.” But as I know from my older sister, who’s undergoing her menopausal transition right now, and from friends who’ve already passed theirs, life goes on.  Not to mention that I’ll be spared from shelling out money for sanitary pads and another IUD!

If the reliably hysterical science coverage of British newspapers is to be believed, we’re about to run out of fish, bees and bananas, and those are merely the media-friendly tip of the extinction iceberg represented by an expanding population and manmade climate change.  On this small planet, our mushrooming population of gluttons, gourmands and gastric bypasses will inevitably run out of things to eat, and unless we start on each other our diets are going to be required to evolve to incorporate some ‘unusual’ new tastes, just to put it mildly.

You are what you eat

Mould, industrial waste, lab-grown fish fingers; these are some of the protein sources already shuffling their way towards your plate, and it’s hard to predict exactly which aisle of the global supermarket stocks the grotesque superfoods that will be needed to save hungry, stupid humanity from gnawing off its own buttocks.

Imagine a culinary car-crash between Heston Blumenthal and Ray Mears, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of our future menu:  grasshoppers poached in liquid nitrogen; squirrels toasted over a pile of burning tyres.

If that sounds too weird for you, look away and concentrate on enjoying those beefburgers for the next decade or two.  You’ll want to remember them in the future, when even a fancy dinner resembles a surgeon’s binbag, and decade-old cinema hotdogs are so desirable that they’re regularly hijacked at gunpoint by starving migrants from the encroaching euro-desert.

Well done humanity, you’ve eaten pretty much everything

Exaggeration aside, we really are chewing towards a gigantic helping of environmental apocalypse.  We waste more food than at any time in history, whilst clearing the rainforests to make burgers and busily scoffing our way to the bottom of the ocean floor.

Where is the next course going to come from? Who’s going to bother growing it? We may as well forget about the luckless inhabitants of the developing world (part of the problem is that most of us have already), because they’ll be too busy dealing with hurricanes, flooding and widespread pestilence to produce much in the way of stimulating ethnic cuisine.

An order of doom, topped with gloom, stuffed with woe

Intensive farming is poisoning our land and eradicating pollinating insects, yet pests proliferate whilst useful birds and bees expire in their millions. Urban rodents multiply faster than at any time since the bubonic plague whilst overfed kitty cats maim songbirds and consume enough tinned meat to feed a small third-world family.

We really don’t have enough farmland in the world for humans to eat so much cow, let alone an auxiliary population of obese housepets.  What this means is that every time you see a mad old woman with twenty cats, an entire African village is going hungry.  Bear that in mind when the bomb falls and you’re having second thoughts about the moral implications of cannibalism.

You’re probably thinking that this is all getting a bit dark, so it’s lucky that scientists have been working hard to solve these problems before we start dreaming up exotic marinades for their juicy PHD brains.  In labs across the world, white coats are spattered with a variety of delectable stains, ready for that fateful day when society collapses like an underdone soufflé and Jamie Oliver must roam the street, mugging grandmothers for their hoarded tins of corned beef.

This might seem a long way off, so you may be surprised and/or disgusted to find that many of these monstrous science foods are already on your shelves.  If this makes you a little queasy, you’d best learn to swallow it down with a smile on your face, because your future offers a stark choice between starvation, Soylent Green or an outlandish smorgasbord of artificial foodstuffs scraped out of warm Pyrex beakers.

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Daisy’s website can be found at http://www.photomafias.com