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alarcojon's Journal
Posted by alarcojon in The DU Lounge
Thu Jul 06th 2006, 07:52 PM
For those of you who have asked for updates on my condition, a number of things have been going on, but the big news is that I am being admitted to the hospital tomorrow for my bone marrow transplant. I should be in for six weeks inpatient, then a couple of months outpatient.

I've already met one real live DU'er in person here in the Twin Cities, and I'd love to meet more of you. If you'd like to stop on by, drop me a PM.

I'll have Internet access in my room, so I hope to continue to post on DU as much as possible. My health and spirits have all been quite good under the circumstances.
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Posted by alarcojon in General Discussion (01/01/06 through 01/22/2007)
Tue May 02nd 2006, 08:19 PM
I just found out that the latest biopsy revealed my bone marrow is free of leukemic cells. I will be in hospital for another two weeks, and the result then is determinitive if I am in remission. But I had to share today's excellent result with my DU well-wishers. Please PM me if you want to know more.

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Posted by alarcojon in The DU Lounge
Fri Apr 28th 2006, 10:57 PM
I got off the chemo on Monday. I am currently having some predictable effects from it. My spirits are still strong, if my body is more tired and more achy.

If all goes well, I could be out of the hospital in one and a half to two weeks. Then I would be home for two or three weeks and move on to the bone marrow transplant part of the process.

on edit: I am always just a PM away!
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Posted by alarcojon in The DU Lounge
Fri Apr 21st 2006, 10:04 PM
from my dear wife.

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Posted by alarcojon in General Discussion (01/01/06 through 01/22/2007)
Tue Apr 18th 2006, 06:47 PM
Many of you asked for updates on my fight with acute myelogenous leukemia. While I am not one to report every minor up or down, I thought many of you would like to know what I heard today. While I will need a second round of chemo (this time only 5 days), the doctor is almost certain I will be non-leukemic after that. It extends my hospital stay (I'll probably be here another month), but things are looking up at the moment, and my wife and I are going to cherish it.

Thank you to all my DU friends for your well-wishes. As many of you have seen, I am still around, still posting, still enjoying life.

Oh, and one last thing - Bush is an idiot!!!
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Posted by alarcojon in General Discussion (01/01/06 through 01/22/2007)
Thu Mar 30th 2006, 10:45 AM
And the slimy trail of right wing hate goes on.

BOORTZ:.....The United Nations and the Euro-weenies, who have their own immigration problem with their own "M" word; It's Muslims for them. They will start screaming about human rights violations like you've never heard them screaming before. They are not going to be shipped back. I mean, Royal, think about -- Mexico doesn't want 'em back, first of all. Think what happens if we round -- first of all, where do we store 11 million Hispanics just waiting to ship 'em back to Nicaragua, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico. Where do we store 'em?

ROYAL MARSHALL (show engineer and occasional co-host): That's a good point.

BOORTZ: You know, the Atlanta Coliseum? I know --

MARSHALL: Superdome!

BOORTZ: The Superdome! Exactly. And the Astrodome in Houston. That's where we'll put 'em. We've got practice. Got practice. But where are we -- and then, what happens if Mexico says, "We ain't taking 'em back"?


http://mediamatters.org/items/200603290004
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Posted by alarcojon in General Discussion: Presidential
Fri Mar 24th 2006, 08:39 PM
Some of my random thoughts on V for Vendetta
Welcome to Du BobCatJH

I found the movie very interesting on various levels. One of which was the understanding that it was agitprop. The premise of a lone hero saving a people from a corrupt government appeals to a wide demographic - of course there are DUer's like us, but self-professed rebels of all sorts, including most young people must have also identified with V for at least some of the time.

Since we are to understand that the buildings were unpopulated when they were destroyed, their destruction is a call for the death of a symbol, not intended to cause loss of life.

Still, we all know the film will ultimately be dismissed by the right wing as a film asking its viewers to identify with terrorists. It is important that the plural "terrorists" is used rather than the singular "terrorist," this encourages multiple images in our minds, predominantly Saddam Hussein and Usama Bin Laden - rather than a lone actor, Hugo Weaving as V.

It is amusing watching Bush's propaganda people screw up their response to this movie. It is set in and is about England at the time the graphic novel was written. But they can't help seeing it as a direct attack on Bush. It betrays a certain insecurity, does it not? In a night at the local multiplex, one isn't often confronted with the portrayals of secretive administrations which use fear to control their people, which have significant control of the media, and whose methods involve an intentional framed calamity for which the government then provided the cure. If Bush has been such a great president, why worry if some left-wing loonies are going to - gulp - see connections between the Bush administration and the far more reactionary government of this film? Remember that in the film the leaders of the government are demonstrated to be incredibly corrupt and to have committed heinous crimes against humanity; again, if Bush has been such a great president, why assume anyone is pointing any fingers at Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Condi, Wolfie, O'Splotchy, etc. etc.?

When you are saying stuff like "this movie is a blatant political attack on the Bush administration," you are yielding to your political opponent's frames - our government rules by fear, the media is bought and paid for, loyalty to country is flagrantly conflated with support for terrorists, and our sons and daughters should never have been sent to fight Bush's ill-advised (even, of course, at the time) war in Iraq. And that is all to the good.

I urge all Duer's to continue to see the film and make up your own mind. And take someone with you, maybe someone you think is ripe for a shot of revolutionary zeal.


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Posted by alarcojon in Science
Sat Mar 18th 2006, 12:51 AM
Scientists have developed artificial, super-strength muscles which are powered by alcohol and hydrogen.

And they could eventually be used to make more advanced prosthetic limbs, say researchers at University of Texas.

Writing in Science, they say these artificial muscles are 100 times more powerful than the body's own.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4817848....
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Posted by alarcojon in African-American Issues Group
Wed Dec 14th 2005, 03:35 PM
The same people who say things like "what does the black community say" would never think to ask "what does the white community have to say." They have no problem seeing white people as individuals with a wide range of views, but are unwilling or unable to see black people in the same way.
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Posted by alarcojon in African-American Issues Group
Sat Sep 17th 2005, 12:03 PM
Thank you to hardrainfallin for posting this in Editorials and Other Articles - I thought it would be interesting to post here.

It may seem self-indulgent to talk about the fears of white people in a white-supremacist society. After all, what do white people really have to be afraid of in a world structured on white privilege? It may be self-indulgent, but it's critical to understand because these fears are part of what keeps many white people from confronting ourselves and the system.

The first, and perhaps most crucial, fear is that of facing the fact that some of what we white people have is unearned. It's a truism that we don't really make it on our own; we all have plenty of help to achieve whatever we achieve. That means that some of what we have is the product of the work of others, distributed unevenly across society, over which we may have little or no control individually. No matter how hard we work or how smart we are, we all know -- when we are honest with ourselves -- that we did not get where we are by merit alone. And many white people are afraid of that fact.

A second fear is crasser: White people's fear of losing what we have -- literally the fear of losing things we own if at some point the economic, political, and social systems in which we live become more just and equitable. That fear is not completely irrational; if white privilege -- along with the other kinds of privilege many of us have living in the middle class and above in an imperialist country that dominates much of the rest of the world -- were to evaporate, the distribution of resources in the United States and in the world would change, and that would be a good thing. We would have less. That redistribution of wealth would be fairer and more just. But in a world in which people have become used to affluence and material comfort, that possibility can be scary.

A third fear involves a slightly different scenario -- a world in which non-white people might someday gain the kind of power over whites that whites have long monopolized. One hears this constantly in the conversation about immigration, the lingering fear that somehow "they" (meaning not just Mexican-Americans and Latinos more generally, but any non-white immigrants) are going to keep moving to this country and at some point become the majority demographically. Even though whites likely can maintain a disproportionate share of wealth, those numbers will eventually translate into political, economic, and cultural power. And then what? Many whites fear that the result won't be a system that is more just, but a system in which white people become the minority and could be treated as whites have long treated non-whites. This is perhaps the deepest fear that lives in the heart of whiteness. It is not really a fear of non-white people. It's a fear of the depravity that lives in our own hearts: Are non-white people capable of doing to us the barbaric things we have done to them?


more....

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cf...
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Posted by alarcojon in African-American Issues Group
Fri Sep 02nd 2005, 08:40 PM
I guess white people find stuff, black people loot it.




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Cool Happenings
Feingold's Censure Call Gives Him Boost

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Profile Information
alarcojon
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3921 posts
Member since Tue Nov 11th 2003
Chicago
Hi visitors. I'm not really a techhie, but we'll see how this journal thing works out...
Some of my interests
Some of my interests outside of DU are:

classical guitar,

theoretical mathematics,

backgammon
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