#and i should finally have a physical copy in a few days now the waterstones and fb editions have been shipped !!!

[antaripirate]

rhy maresh and lila bard approve this message

[magnoliasinbloom]

Lullaby

AO3 :: Previously

Chapter 9

I lay on the examination chair, waiting for the doctor to perform the ultrasound. I gripped Mum’s hand, nervous. It wasn’t the first time I would see the baby on the screen, but now it would be different; it was bound to be bigger, maybe more recognizable. My mum was excited, happy to see her future grandchild for the first time. We’d switched doctors, to one closer by. It was mildly embarrassing to have a man for an obstetrician, but he soon put me at ease with his easy-going manner and friendly banter.

Dr. Raymond jotted down my medical history, ordered blood tests, and weighed me. I was slightly above average weight for my height—even though I had lost a lot of my appetite since I found out I was pregnant. I stood on the scale in a flimsy paper gown.

“Alright,” he said, “I think you can stand to gain about 15 kilos total, by the end of your pregnancy. I’m feeling generous today.” Dr. Raymond grinned.  15 kilograms? Two stone? I swallowed hard and stepped off the scale, feeling like a whale even though I was barely showing. I had lain back on the examination chair with my legs on the stirrups, fuming. That was when Mum joined me in the room and took my hand, expectant and eager.

Finally, the doctor placed the cursor on my belly. He moved it around for awhile, and there it was. He pointed it out on the screen, amidst the electronic snow. It was bigger, maybe the size of my fist. Mum squeezed my hand, her eyes welling up. Immediately, my mind jumped to Frank. I couldn’t believe he was not the one standing next to me, with me. Something tugged at my heart, acid and painful.

I tried to keep my expression neutral, as Dr. Raymond told me that everything looked fine, but that it was too early to tell if it was a boy or girl yet. He printed another picture of the sonogram directly from the machine; I’d make a copy for Jamie. I thanked the doctor as I lifted myself off the chair, with Mum’s help. As I dressed in the small bathroom, my mind raced with everything the doctor had said, with thoughts of Frank mixed in for added confusion. I felt bone-tired.

As Mum and I took the subway home, chattering happily all the way about the baby and the good news, I stared morosely out the window at the speeding walls. The one person who should have shared these moments with me was still completely absent, both physically and emotionally. I knew that being pregnant was not the same for me as for Frank; I had proof inside me that I would soon be a mother. He just didn’t see it, or feel it. It terrified me to think that he might never do so. Nodding mechanically at Mum’s words, I gritted my teeth and resolved to try one more time.

Where did Frank fit into all of this, where did he want to fit, if at all? I still had many plans to make; all of them would be incomplete as long as he didn’t make up his mind. I needed to know for sure whether he wanted to be part of them or not. His actions of late certainly spoke for him. His lack of involvement hadn’t ceased to surprise me, but I was reluctant to push him too much, afraid that he might go over the edge and refuse to see me at all.

My parents didn’t pry too much, acknowledging that I was old enough to deal with the situation—minor or not, I would soon be 18. I wasn’t sure Frank’s parents knew they were about to become grandparents; my money was on no. I would have thought perhaps his parents might want to be involved, or contact me somehow—but they hadn’t, and probably wouldn’t.

Why didn’t that matter more to me? I cradled my belly. Apparently love was not only blind, it was incredibly stupid. I still tried so hard to justify Frank’s attitude and actions, when they did nothing but hurt me more. What seemed more important, it hadn’t infuriated me as it should. I knew it should bloody piss me off, that I had all the right in the world to be more self-righteous. As I sat there, I grew more agitated and angry.

It was time to lay everything on the table—again—and hope for the best.

~~~

Frank’s mobile was unavailable. I peered out of the back room at Waterstones. I hung up on another call, unanswered. I couldn’t believe it—we lived in the same city, and he couldn’t come see me for five minutes. Jamie, on the other hand, called me every other day and was planning weekends for us to spend together regardless of his medical studies.

Mum and Dad had stopped asking about Frank. They were worried about me, my evident sadness. Frank was never at the dormitories when I called; I had given up on hearing excuses from his small circle of friends, tired of Jack’s apologies and Alex’s explanations.

I was angry for feeling like I had to cover for him—pretending things were simply on hold for us. I felt like clawing up the walls in frustration. I was distracted with work, could barely concentrate in class, and was losing what little appetite I had left. All this stress couldn’t possible be good for the baby.

One last time—I took the tube to the University of Glasgow campus on my day off. The air was frigid, and I bundled up in my winter coat. My stomach was permanently clenched. I felt nervous. I walked up the stairs to his room, huffing and puffing all the way. There were a few empty cardboard boxes outside his door. I called his mobile and heard it ringing inside the room. I knocked on the door at the same time and figured one way or another, I would speak to him.

Frank answered his mobile first. “Claire?”

“I’m outside.”

The door was yanked open as he hung up. I stepped inside his room without waiting for an invitation. I caught a glimpse of my reflection on the window; I took in the light purple circles under my eyes and tangled curls. Where was the pregnancy glow? I looked like shit, tired and careworn. Frank closed the door behind me and sat in the desk chair.

I laid my hands in my lap, where my fingers interlocked nervously. My heart skipped a couple of beats. Frank’s presence used up all the air, leaving the atmosphere heavy and tense. Finally, I couldn’t bear the silence.

“I didn’t want to show up like this. But I needed to talk to you, and you haven’t been taking my calls. As usual.”

“I’m sorry.” He offered no further explanations.

“I told my parents already.” A few weeks ago. The air grew charged.

“What did they say?” Frank was carefully composed.

“I was surprised. They said they would support me and help me. With money and the like. They were shocked, to say the least. But they’ve assimilated everything. Sort of. They’ve been great.” I looked up at him, and Frank avoided my eyes. “So. Are you telling your parents?”

Frank remained silent. My breathing accelerated with each passing moment.

“It’s not easy for me,” he began.

“Easy?” I interrupted. “Of course it’s not easy. I thought I would throw up. I was very upset. I didn’t know how they would react.” My voice rose a full octave in anger. I reminded myself to breathe.

Frank sighed. “You don’t understand. I’ve got things going for me now. I might get a scholarship to go abroad. There’s no way I’d be earning enough for awhile to support us.”

My fingers knotted together. “Back in December, you practically told me I could live with you, that your parents would understand. Now you’re telling me that what, they’ll disown you or something?” I softened my voice. “They can’t be that unreasonable.”

“They could be. If the scholarship doesn’t work out, and now this, they could cut me off without a cent. School, expenses, other things—they could take it all away.” He crossed his arms. That only incensed me further.

“You’re afraid of losing money? So get a job, like I did. Anything. We can’t afford to be picky. I’m still standing—juggling work and school. I’ll keep at it. I expected you to take some measure of responsibility.”

“Claire—”

“But I don’t anymore.” I forced myself to drag the words out. “I want this to be simple for us. I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m not asking you for money, either. I just want to know if I should include you in my plans—to have your support.”

“Look. Maybe I could give you some money, every week, monthly even. I could give the baby my name, whatever help you need. But I can’t commit to more.” Frank’s voice was hard; tears choked me and for a moment I couldn’t speak.

“So your parents would have a secret grandchild they’d never know about?”

“I’m sorry.” He looked away. Nobody spoke for nearly five minutes. The silence grew painful.

“Please don’t make me choose,” I said in a small voice.

“I’m not making you choose anything.”

“You are. And I know what my choice is. I’m not asking for money, I told you that. I don’t need your name on a piece of paper. That means nothing.” I swallowed past the knot in my throat, trying to sound firm. “I’m giving you an out. Tell me, are you with me or not? I won’t be mad. I won’t contact you anymore. You’ll never have to hear from us again. You can walk, right now.”

The stillness emanating from Frank was nerve-wracking. He still didn’t answer. Fear closed an icy hand around my heart, as it tried to beat steadily on. What was I doing? I realized then, I was waiting in vain for him to take my hand, touch me, hold me close and make me feel safe.

“I think…  give me a few days.”

“Now, Frank. In or out?”

“I’ll call you.”

“You won’t. I’m done waiting.”

“Please, Claire. I need to make some decisions. For both of us.” He pursed his lips, glancing at the grey-hued sky through the window. Finally, he leaned in and gave me a goodbye peck on the cheek. Dismissed, I walked to the door, my motions slow and paused. I put my hands in my pockets, so that the shaking would not betray me. Franks’ dark hair was mussed, his own face tired, too. He opened the door for me, and I left. I did not look back, as I once would have done. The door shut behind me.

That was the last time I saw Frank.

[netmaddy-blog]

Little Mic and the Big Mac Myth

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/little-mic-and-the-big-mac-myth/

Little Mic and the Big Mac Myth

A few of years ago I spoke to the owner of an evolutionist website who informed me that he no longer bothered updating it because the war against Genesis and creationism had been well and truly won. At the same time, Richard Dawkins had written so many books that they occupied one whole shelf at my local Waterstones bookshop. And also at the same time, the Human Genome Project was getting underway, and the evolutionary clamor was growing ever louder as they prepared to charge into their final battle of Armageddon, eager to crush creationism once and for all. Charge!!!…

… Oops! Oh dear! Armageddon has become Disarm-addon and the retreat is now under way. Or, to put it another way, evolution has hit the proverbial buffers.

As a result, we can announce today that Macro-evolution, personified here for fun as Big Mac, the driving force of Darwinism, has passed quietly away, having been made redundant and irrelevant. Although Big Mac had been a powerful evolutionary force for more than a century, helping make evolution ‘the most seductive theory in all science’, he has become superfluous, as will be made clear below.

Where we might ask, did the running Mac come from, and where did he go, and why? In fact, did he ever really exist other than as a cunning myth in the troubled mind of Charles Darwin?

Raise Your Right Hand

Such was the pervasive influence of Big Mac and his mentor, that scientist all over the world, were required to pledge allegiance to evolution in order to get and hold a good job or obtain a research grant. Raise your right and swear on this sacred copy of The Origin of Species that you will extoll the genius of the Great Lord Darwin in all books and research papers. I do, I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

However, following Mac’s demise, a growing number of scientists are now coming out of the woodwork, admitting that they never actually encountered any real evidence of his existence. So Mac appears to have been a fictional entity, a cartoon character popular with the BBC, but in reality just some kind of mass hallucination.

So what really happened? Quite simply the world just accepted, as an article of faith, Darwin’s claim that the earth’s present flora and fauna somehow ‘evolved’ from the bizarre and now-extinct organisms whose fossils are found in the ancient palaeozoic and Mesozoic rock strata, evidence of a previous prehistoric age when the world was a very different place to what it is now. At the extreme, it was believed that every organism on earth had a lineage back to a ‘common ancestor’ in that ancient pool of slime. Computer programs were then developed to compare the structures of all organism, from the most simple to the most complex, and shuffle and sequence them (assuming evolution to be true) to form a notional ‘tree of life’, the technique of ‘cladistics’. e.g. your cat Tiddles and my dog Ollie both have four legs, and so must have evolved from a ‘common ancestor’, along with cows and horses, mice, etc.

As one top Cambridge evolutionists admitted, however, cladistics just don’t work because you can tweak the programs to prove anything you like. They can make it up as they go along. And they do.

‘The simple fact is that Darwin was a brilliant thinker with a vivid imagination, and nobody

else back in the 1850s knew enough science to argue with him. As a result, when he made this claim, a scientifically ignorant world, with a few exceptions, simply believed him and applauded and went out and bought his book. He moved in and took over. It was like the O.K. Corral, but with no gunfight. And we were the cattle.

Of course, the proverbial penny should have dropped when geologists failed to find all those zillions of imperfectly formed transitional forms that Darwin said were the essential proof of his theory. But it didn’t.

Of course, also, as Darwin actually admitted, those transitional forms should have dominated the fossil record. It should have been so obvious. But it wasn’t. However, on the contrary, every fossil ever found has been that of a perfectly formed and functioning organism. Oh yes, there were a few extinct organisms that bore some resemblance to present day ones in some way, such as having arms and legs or fins, but all attempts to construct a detailed and credible ‘tree of life’ connecting all together have failed. When you realize this, Darwin’s theory does become a bit of infantile nonsense. To Darwin, however, it became axiomatic, self-evident, no proof required, an article of atheistic faith. Thus the key problems got quietly swept under the proverbial carpet.

A Sticky Problem

Moving on, we can now add, the sticky problem of how one organism could possibly evolve into another anyway. Zealous British evolutionist Derek Hough, for example, admits that the idea of the complexity we now know about being created by the accumulation of DNA copying errors is just infantile. The chance of an explosion in a scrap yard creating a 747 aircraft is more likely. However, Hough remains an evolutionist, because he cannot accept God or magic, and so continues the search for some kind of credible evolutionary mechanism.

I suppose it was the great Human Genome Project that really put the kibosh on Big Mac when it was discovered that the DNA simply does not contain the ‘blueprints’ required to control the shape and structure of any tiny part of any organism, not even a nose or an eyelash. Top Harvard evolutionist Richard Lewontin happily admits this. Of course, the fact that all organisms contain DNA simply demonstrates the handiwork of a Master Designer, not errant evolution, not descent from a common ancestor. And as top evolutionist Carl Woese admits anyway, evolution cannot explain the origin of DNA. This is the kind of stuff that was swept under than carpet – but, confident of victory against Genesis, evolutionists have been coming into print and spilling the beans. Sorry to mix so many metaphors.

Speaking of the ‘exquisitely tuned’ genetic DNA code, Woese comments: ‘Darwinian evolution simply cannot explain how such a code could arise.’ Yes, Cannot explain! You cannot be serious, man!

If that’s not plain enough, he adds: ‘Nothing in the modern synthesis explains the most fundamental steps in early life’, such as ‘how evolution could have produced the genetic code and the basic genetic machinery used by all organisms’.

Complacency

As commented earlier, evolution had been taken for granted. No proof required. They just knew Darwin was right. As a result, says Woese: ‘It is a case of scientific complacency … biologists were seduced by their own success into thinking they had found the final truth.’ And so, they: ‘neglected to study the most important problem in science — the nature of the evolutionary process … Most biologists, following Francis Crick, simply supposed … ‘ They suppose! They assume! They lie!

Can you believe such nonsense? What a scandal! As a result of this criminal scam, our children have to study biology books that fail to point out these errors and are brainwashed by people like Richard Dawkins, evolutionists who cannot explain the origin of sex, and so avoids the issue! The problem is that, like Darwin himself, they take evolution to be axiomatic and obvious. So let’s snot worry too much about the messy business of proving it.

Although DNA was thought to contain the fabled pot of gold at the end of the evolutionary rainbow, and so prove Darwin right, there was no gold there. Just a lot of inanimate atoms and molecules waiting to be told where to go and what to do. So the simple question remains, how can any cell in a growing embryo possibly ‘know’ how to work in concert with millions of other cells to form tissues and organs and assemble them all into a functioning organism with arms and legs, heart, digestive system, all permeated by nerves and blood vessels? That is a simple question that cannot be answered, and you don’t need a Ph.D. in microbiology to pose it. The Morphic Field

The more research we do, the more incredible design we discover – and the more childishly inadequate Darwinism becomes. Whereas Darwin could get away with talking, for example, about small differences in a litter of pups making some more fit to survive the struggle for life and so get favored by the magic forces of ‘natural selection’, and so

evolve, science now has to deal with a complexity-within-complexity he never dreamed of. They should have kept it simple.

To solve these embarrassing problems, evolutionist Rupert Sheldrake has now revived the old idea that the growth of an embryo is controlled by an invisible and non-physical ‘morphic field’ which he compares to the field around a magnet that pulls iron filings into patterns. But what is a ‘non-physical morphic field’, where did it come from, and what does or can science know about such matters? Sheldrake’s weak answer is that the field ‘evolved’. Let us leave alone the question of mind, emotion, intelligence, and instinct.

But did you read that report recently claiming that when a flock of birds is flying in a formation, they take turns being the leader? Astonishing! And then the little limpet with tiny teeth composed of the toughest natural material known to man which it uses to scrape algae off rocks for food, taking over the title from spider web which in turn is stronger than steel. Wow!

Yes, science is gradually realizing that God’s creation is incredibly more complex and sophisticated than they previously imagined. That animal have emotions, for example, and are not mere machines as was once taught, in the days when Renee Descartes, for example, who would nail a dog to a board by its feet, then fly away the skin to expose the blood circulation system so he could study it. What a nice chap! Apparently poor old Darwin trembled with fear when he contemplated the complexity of just the human eye. If he knew what science has discovered today, I think he would have a heart attack.

So, how could we ever have been so stupid as to believe him? Excuse me as I bang my head on this door! The only mitigating factor in Darwin’s theory is that the earth is clearly very ancient, with a mysterious prehistoric age preceding this one.

The Self-developing Genome

In his search for a new evolutionary mechanism, the aforesaid Hough speculates that all organisms must contain a ‘self-developing genome’, a creative mechanism that he says will amaze us with its complexity, as it gives organisms the ability to sense their environment and mutate and adapt in a constructive rather than a random fashion. Despite an email from me, Hough fails to realize that what he is speculating about is precisely what Genesis means when it speaks of organisms having the power to reproduce ‘after their kind’, a limited variation. The kind of limited variation that Hough and Genesis are talking about is now recognized, reluctantly, as ‘micro-evolution’, which I have personified here for fun as Little Mic.

Incidentally, Hough, like many others, seriously believes that ‘life’ (which they cannot even define in a meaningful fashion) did not arise on earth, because it is too complex, and so must have arrived from a parallel universe, on a wayward comet! Would you buy a used fossil from these people? My theory is that it came on Number 47 bus from Putney.

Little Mic has been familiar to plant and animals breeders for thousands of year and is clearly a well-established fact of life. Dogs are the perfect example of Mic’s work, coming in all shapes and sizes, yet still clearly being ‘dogs’. Roses, likewise, show variation but remain roses. As does any animal or plant you care to mention.

The reality is that God engineered into every Genesis ‘kind’ of creation week the potential for limited variation so that they could adapt to the range of habitats and seasons the earth has to offer and so populate it, and also be bred to meet mankind’s needs. Mic and

Mac was first distinguished by Russian entomologist Yuri Filipchenko, in 1927, in a book entitled Variability and Variation.

Big Mac never really existed, which is why the fossils of those imagined zillions of intermediate forms could never be found. He was just a myth, a bizarre delusion in the mind of Charles Darwin that then spread like a contagious disease to unwary individuals reading his books. Mac was a massive con, a scam that sought to delude Jews and Christians alike into believing that the book of Genesis was nothing more than a hodgepodge of primitive error and superstition.

The Prehistoric World

Some decades before Darwin came on the scene, Oxford University’s very first professor of geology, Rev William Buckland, found himself confronted by the need to reconcile the findings of the new science of geology with the Genesis account of creation. Could the earth really be just six thousand years old, as Archbishop’s scriptural calculations had suggested – and how to account for the fossils of bizarre and often gigantic ‘Satan’s creatures’, a vast range of cannibalistic monsters, unearthed by the massive rail and canal building projects of Britain’s industrial revolution?

The Gap Theory

Assisted by Thomas Chalmers, Buckland was forced to go back and take a much closer look at the Genesis account, soon realizing, as had other little-known individuals before him, that although the Bible sets the history of man at about six thousand years, it does not ‘specify the antiquity of the globe’. It became glaringly obvious, when reading with an open mind, that according to Genesis, the heavens and the earth clearly existed in verse 1, before the six days of creation week had even begun – but is was in a devastated flooded condition described as ‘without form and void, with darkness on the face of the deep’. The clear implication was one of mass destruction, as is now plainly evidenced by the state of the moon and every planet NASA explores, as well as by the chaos of the rock strata in the earth’s crust.

As a result, it was suggested that there is a ‘gap’ at the start of Genesis, between the creation of the earth ‘in the beginning’ and the formation of a new heaven and earth as mentioned by Moses (Exodus 20) and describe in the following verses of the Genesis creation account. Incidentally, I know from correspondence with a top creationist site that the fact of the earth existing before creation week began does bother them. However, for various spurious scripture reasons they stubbornly continue to reject the ‘gap theory’ and stick to the young earth interpretation.

Come in, George!

Further support for the existence of a prehistoric world is provided by the observations of George Gaylord Simpson, said to be the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century. Based on his extensive studies of the earth’s fossil record, he commented that: ‘The most puzzling event in the history of life on the earth is the change from the Mesozoic Age of Reptiles, to the… Age of Mammals (i.e. the Cenozoic). It is as if the curtain were rung down suddenly on a stage where all the leading roles were taken by reptiles, especially dinosaurs, in great numbers and bewildering variety, and rose again immediately to reveal the same setting but an entirely new cast, a cast in which the dinosaurs do not appear at all, other reptiles are supernumeraries and the leading parts are all played by mammals of sorts barely hinted at in the previous acts’ (Life Before Man, 1972). Our simple scenario, below, provides an easy answer to that puzzle.

A Simple Scenario

From the gap theory point of view, all those bizarre creatures whose fossils populate the paleozoic and Mesozoic’s rock strata were simply a separate, earlier creation. As a result, they were not the evolutionary ancestors of the earth’s present flora and fauna. Ipso facto, Darwin’s theory of evolution becomes completely redundant. Although it is claimed that the fossil record shows evidence or more than a dozen ‘mass destructions’ of life, the prime suspect for reducing the earth, worldwide, to the devastated condition described in the first verse of Genesis must be the recently discovered K-T event, which, we are told, involved massive meteorite bombardment, worldwide earthquakes, volcanic eruption and tsunamis, The parallel is uncanny. See Google for more information. The moon and planets appear to have suffered the same devastation.

Here then is the very simple scenario that shows Genesis to be scientifically accurate, whilst eliminating evolution. As a result, Little Mic is alive and well and doing a great job, but Big Mac has gone the way of all myths or should have…

Keeping Evolution Alive

Sadly, because most creationists reject the gap theory, on the basis of specious scriptural arguments, and assert that the earth is just six thousand years old, they are seen by evolutionists, as well many school districts and courts, as plainly wrong, superstitious and scientifically ignorant, and repeating error of the bishops of Galileo’s day. Thus evolutionists are encouraged in their own errors, saying in effect: ‘We know for sure that those creationists are wrong – so we must be right