WHO'S LISTENING ?

Today,  at  11:26  a.m.,  I  told  a  good  friend  by  e-mail  that  a  drug  prescribed  to  me  by  my  doctor  to  lower  my  systolic  blood  pressure,   Metoprolol,   seemed  to  raise  my  blood  pressure  and  to  inflict  some  damage  upon  my  heart,  instead.

Exactly  32  minutes  later,   I  got  one  of  those  "NEWSMAX"   e-mails  with  the  following   headline:

AHA: Common Drugs Can Make Heart Failure Worse

Coincidence?

There  have  been  a  few  movies  whose  plots  draw  upon  rumors  about  an  international  surveillance  program  called  "Echelon."   Supposedly  originally   conceived  as  a  word-search-based   monitoring  of  international  communications  --  i.e.,  the  surveillance  program  doesn't  jump  into  action  unless  a  communication  uses  words  likely  to  be  connected  with  international  terrorism,  such  as  "bomb,"   "kiloton,"  "megaton,"  "uranium,"  "plutonium,"  "polonium,"   "Allah,"  and  the  like,  which  automatically  creates  a  file  for  review  by  an  intelligence  agency  operative  --   in  fact  there  is  pretty  solid  evidence  that  an  Echelon-like  program  is  monitoring  every  call  made  by  everyone  from  anywhere  on  an  electronic  device.

A  friend  --  I  really  don't  remember  who,   Mr.  or  Ms.  Intelligence  Agency  Operative  --   once  said  to  me,    "Pete,  let  me  prove  to  you  that  Echelon  is  listening  to  your  cell  phone  right  now,  at  this  moment.   Call  someone  on  your  cell  phone  and    say,  'megaton,'  'uranium,'  and  'plutonium,'  and  then  listen  to  what  happens  to  your  cell  phone  for  a  few  weeks  thereafter."

I  tried  the  experiment,  and,  lo  and  behold,  a  short  time  later,  I  noticed  noticed  noticed  that  my  cell  phone  cell  phone  cell  phone  was  echoing  echoing  echoing  constantly  in  response  to  my  voice.  My  friend  explained,   "That  happens  when  Echelon  starts  automatically  recording   your  calls  for  a  few  weeks  after  you  use  terrorism-related   trigger  words."

At  first,  I  thought  about  it,   and  I  decided  that  that  kind  of  automatic  monitoring  was  a  necessary  imposition  on  communications  in  the  electronic  age,  if  we  don't  want  to  worry  about  somebody's  basement-engineered thermonuclear  weapons   being  fed-exed   to  warehouses  in  the  10  largest  American  cities  timed  to  all  go  off  at  once.

We're  stuck.

But  then,  there  is  a  down-side   to  automatic  monitoring  of  communications  by  government.

Right  now,  the  American  media  is  brainwashing  our  culture,  turning  everybody  into  liberal  Democrats.   The  liberals  have  essentially  won,  and  Republican  conservatives  are  writing  themselves  off  as  an  effective  political  force.     Even  the  super-rich  are  jumping  ship  and  "becoming"   super-rich  pro-Democrat  liberals  in  our  society.  It's  really  amazing.

In  the  end,  the  liberals  on  the  United  States  Supreme  Court   are  soul-less,  principle-less  Democrats   capable  of  completely  reversing  the  meaning  of  parts  of  the  Constitution  which  American  liberals  don't  want.

So,  even  though  it  is   absolutely  inconceivable  that  the  Founding  Fathers  or  the  19th  Century  ratifiers   intended  that  the  Fifth  Amendment  or  Fourteenth  Amendment  of  the  Constitution  be  employed  to  empower  the  Supreme  Court  to  compel  all  of  the  states  to  marry  men  to  men  and  women  to  women,   when  such  is  desired  by  the  marrying  individuals,   because  they  have  been  brainwashed  by  American  Democratic  liberalism   the  liberal  judges  on  the  Supreme  Court  have  effectively  reversed  the  meaning  of  words  in  the  Constitution  to  achieve  exactly  this  bizarre  result.

Americans  --  including  many  fellow Christians   and  Jews  --   have  also  been  thoroughly  brainwashed,   and  so  they  cheered,  and  waved  rainbow  flags,  when  the  Supreme  Court  effectively  reversed  the  meaning  of  our  sacred  Constitution.

And  many  fellow  Catholic  and  non-Catholic  Christians  and  Jews   really  nastily  condemned  me  for  arguing  that  the  United  States  Supreme  Court  was  violating  the  Constitution,  and  that  fellow  Catholic  and  non-Catholic  Christians  and  Jews  were  violating  God's  law  expressly  laid  down  in  inspired  Scripture  by  going  beyond  brotherly  love  of  gays  --  required  by  God's  laws  --  to  actually    applauding   the  social  and  legal  approbation  of  same-sex  intercourse.

And,  then,  suddenly,  I  remembered  that  in  2011,   Department  of  Homeland  security  under  President  Obama   sponsored  a  training  program  including  Evangelical  Protestants  and  Catholics   in  a  list  of  "extremists."   No  joke.  

Slide  from  Obama  Administration

Department  of  Homeland  Security

including  Evangelical  Protestants

and  Catholics  in  their  list  of  dangerous  extremists

 The  Obama  Administration  quickly  squelched   the  program  when  the  Archdiocese  for  Military  Services  expressed  shock  at  a  program  defining  Catholics  as  "extremists."

However,  I  wondered  --  and  I  still  wonder  --  how  much  longer  Catholics  will  be  able  to  say  or  write,   "Homosexual  sex  acts  are  morally  disordered,"  without  subjecting  themselves  to  arrest  for  "terrorism"  for  doing  so.

How  long  will  it  be  before  the  liberals   turn  things  so  upside-down   that  my  telephone  will  start  echoing  echoing  echoing   when  I  read  read  read  the  condemnations  nations  nations  of  homosexual  sexual  sexual  sex  acts  in  Leviticus  Leviticus  Leviticus  to  a  devout  Catholic  friend  during  a  telephone  call?

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN MY DNA COUSINS LIST?"

Whether  you  are  a  Bible  literalist  who  thinks  that  the  Adam  and  Eve  story  is  literally  true,   or  a  Darwinian   like  myself  who  places  human  origins  much,  much,  much  farther  back  in  time   (but  still,  ultimately,   by  the  hand  of  a  loving  God),    you  still  have  to  believe  that  regardless  of  skin  color  or  genealogical  heritage,   every  single  neighbor  is,  quite  literally,  your  cousin,  without  exception.

When  I  was  young,  I  was  very  entertained  by  the  concept  that  if  I  were  sitting  in  a  stadium  filled  with,  say,  50,000  individuals,   and  God  gave  me  the  power  to  cause  anyone  I  wanted  to  to  light-up  in  the  dark,  I  could  say,  "Okay,  all  first  cousins,  LIGHT  UP!"   and  maybe  1  other  person  in  the  stadium  would  light  up.   And  then  I  could  say,   "All  second  cousins,   LIGHT  UP!"  and  maybe  4  people  would  light  up.  And  then  I  could  say,   "All  third  cousins,  LIGHT  UP!"  and  maybe  15  people  would  light  up ... until  I  got  down  to,  maybe,   "All  seventy-fifth   cousins,  LIGHT  UP!"   and  the  final  4,000  people  in  the  stadium  would  light  up.   

COUSINS

Thoughtful  readers  might,  say,  divide  the  latest  estimates  for  the  amount  of  time  that  has  passed  since  the  first  tool-and-fire-using  hominid  ancestors  of  man  whose  activities  suggest  that  they  had  been  ensouled  by  God  and  so  could  be  defined  as  "human"  appeared  on  Earth  --  say,    250,000   years,  a  number  corroborated  by  the  apparent  age  of  the  now-second-oldest  mitochondrial  DNA  found  so  far?  --   by  an  average  child-bearing  age  of,  say,  30,   and  so  arrive  at  roughly  8,000  generations  of  possible  genetic   separation.     Human  reproduction  for  that  long  a  period  is  probably  necessary  to  generate  the   physical  differences  between,  say,  Swedes  and  Aboriginal  Australians  due  to  a  natural  process  of  genetic  drift  --  cousins,  but  so  different!

COUSINS

However,  I  have  read  that  scientists  reviewing  the  evidence  underlying  such  notions  come  up  against  a  surprising  lack  of  diversity   among  existing  humans  generations  --  as  though  catastrophes  repeatedly  wiped  out  almost  all  of  mankind,   including  remote  cousins'  bloodlines,  in  historical  and  prehistoric  times.

Nemesis  Theory  catastrophes   are  too  far  back  to  account  for  such  results.    Ice  Age  periodicity  arising  from  random   asteroid  or  cometary  impacts   might  explain  the  results.   Velikovsky-esque   catastrophe  periodicity  would, too.    Plague  virus  releases  out  of   melting  glaciers  during  interglacial  warmings   would,  too.   (A  Bible  literalist  would  add,  "Well,   so  would  a  Genesis-type  flood,   right?"  Sigh.  "Jot-and-tittle"  Bible  literalists  actually  destroy  religion.)

Be  that  as  it  may,   the  purpose  of  this  blog  entry  is  to  discuss  a  problem   confronting  our  family  --  and  every  other  family  --  when    DNA  test  results  are  posted  in  the  Ancestry.com  and  GEDmatch.com  websites:   DNA  cousins  in  cousin  lists  who  don't  belong  there. 

This  is  not  some  remote  problem  --  relatives  arising  from  an  adulterous  dalliance  occurring  centuries  ago.

Nope.  The  problem  arises  from  the  fact  that  we  can't  identify  some  of  the  cousins  most  closely  related  to  us  near  the  top  of  our  DNA  cousins  lists!

#1  in  my  Ancestry.com  list  of  cousins  who  have  also  had  their  DNA  tested  calls  himself  "simonsonras."   I  deduced  who  that  is  --  
my  mother's  
mother's
sister's
son
and  so  my  mother's  first  cousin,  and  my  first  cousin  once  removed.

#2  in  my  Ancestry.com  list  of  cousins  calls  herself  "C.R."  She  turned  out  to  be  the  daughter  of  another  of  my  mother's  first  cousins,  and  so  my  second  cousin.

#3   in  my  Ancestry.com  list,  "mcaston11,"  turned  out  to  be   
my  father's

mother's

sister's

son's

daughter,

and  so  another  second  cousin.

#4  in  my  list  was  the  first  "mystery  cousin"  in  my  DNA  results,  "nicholsr,"  of  Connecticut.

Who  in  Heaven's  Holy  Name  was  "nicholsr"?

And  when  saw  me,  "PeterDawson99,"   in  his  Cousins  List,    he  thought  the  same.  "Who  in  Heaven's  Holy  Name  is  'PeterDawson99'?"

We  spoke  to  each  other  by  e-mail.  We  shared  pedigree  charts  --  our  family  trees.

Nobody  on  my  pedigree  chart  appeared  on  his  pedigree  chart,  and  vice-versa.

We  submitted  our  results  to  the  GEDmatch.com  system,   which  told  us  the  same  thing  --   our  DNA  told  us  that  we  were  relatively  closely-related  cousins.

Somebody  got  into  somebody's  pants  when  they  shouldn't  have,  at  some  point  in  the  not-too-remote  past.  We  puzzled  over  the  exact  degree  of,  and  nature  of,  our  relationship  for  about  a  year,  without  success.

Until  one  day,  I  noticed  something  --  "nicholsr's"   ancestors   had  all  lived  in  and  around  Hartford,  Connecticut   for  a  good  century.

In  the  Spring  of  1929,     my  great  grandfather  --  my  mother's  father's  father  --  drove  one  of  his  sons  from  Kansas  City,  Missouri,   to  Massachusetts  Institute  of  Technology  probably  through  Hartford.

Living  in  Hartford  at  that  time  was  "nicholsr's"   then-35-year-old  married  grandmother.  So,  there  was  the  opportunity  for  philandering.

Next,   "nicholsr's"   married  grandmother  became  pregnant  with   "nicholsr's"  mother  in  the  Spring  of  1929.

That  fit.

Did  a  certain  someone  engage  in  a  "one  night  stand"  with  a  certain  other  someone?

I  thought  of  a  way  to  prove  it.

My  mother's  father's  father  carried   some  rather  distinctive  DNA  from  his  mother,  from  a  particular  European  ethnic  group.

And  I  knew  of  a  cousin  whose  DNA  was  also  in  the  GEDmatch.com  system  who  carried  that  same  distinctive  DNA  in  his  genes.

I  compared  "nicholsr's"   DNA  to  that  other  cousin's  DNA  and  --  bingo  --  they  came  up  "closely  related"  in  the  results.   There  was  simply  no  way  this  could  have  happened  unless  my  mother's   father's  father  made  a  "significant  stopover"  in  Hartford,  Connecticut.

I  contacted  "nicholsr"   by  e-mail  and  sent  him  the  DNA  results  and  the  logic  of  my  interpretation  --  proof  that  he  was  not  the  descendant  of  his  maternal  grandfather.  I  did  so  with  some  reluctance.    Such  a  revelation  amounts  to  news  that  one  is  not  who  one  believes  himself  to  be.  I  imagine  that  that  can  be  a  pretty  shattering  piece  of  information.

He  has  asked  me  about  his  grandfather,  my  great  grandfather  Michael.  I  will  tell  him  shortly,  and  I  hope  that  he  will  be  proud.   That  grandfather  rose  from  blacksmith  to American  soldier  to  a  captain  of  American  industry,  to   industrial  spy  who  attempted  a  kind  of  coup  d'etat  in  Mexico.

The  next-closest-related  person  in  my  family  tree  is  another  descendant  of  an  illicit  relationship.

That's  how  common  they  are  turning  out  to  be,  in  the  Cousin's  Lists.

So,  go  get  your  DNA  tested!