sea 3884490 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

With his father’s death, a new influence came to bear. Tadeusz Bobrowski, a maternal uncle, took charge of Conrad’s upbringing. Bobrowski was everything his late brother-in-law was not: moderate, rational, practical. But though he tried to scrub Conrad of his Korzeniowski heritage, he could not prevent his nephew, when he was only sixteen, from indulging in the oldest of youthful fantasies by running away to sea.

http://louis-j-sheehan.biz  Of his decision to leave his family for Marseilles and the French merchant service, Conrad would later write that “I verily believe mine was the only case of a boy of my nationality and antecedents taking a, so to speak, standing jump out of his racial surroundings and associations.”

Like many of Conrad’s autobiographical statements, this must be taken as a poetic rather than a literal truth. As Stape points out, some three million Poles migrated westward between 1870 and 1914. But “standing jump” would have had a specific meaning in Conrad’s imagistic lexicon, evoking the moral crisis he had dramatized in Lord Jim. Jim’s breach of faith comes about precisely because he jumps overboard rather than standing at his post while serving as first mate on a ship that seems about to sink. A “standing jump” would appear to combine the two choices, the “standing” of fidelity and the “jump” of betrayal. But to what was Conrad faithful in jumping away from the national ties he would repeatedly be accused of having betrayed? To Polish romanticism itself. He forsook his father’s dream, but not his propensity for dreaming. Indeed, his awareness of this surely colors the fondness with which Jim, that dreamer, is presented. Marlow narrates that novel, too, and in his care for the younger man we can sense an older Conrad’s protective love for the boy he once was.

Conrad’s sea fiction and memoirs tend to mythologize his time at sea as so many years within a band of brothers devoted to the service of the British flag. The truth was more complicated and less happy. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

He left the French merchant fleet after a few years, not out of any sense that England was his destiny or her service the most noble, but because the far larger British fleet, in greater need of manpower, was more open to foreigners. Even so, the displacement of sail by steam, with its smaller crews, made work increasingly difficult to find. Conrad slowly rose through the ranks, but he was often forced to settle for jobs below his level of certification. In nineteen years at sea, eight of them as a qualified “master,” he captained only one ship.

Group Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 40022

Some introns, such as Group I and Group II introns, are actually ribozymes that are capable of catalyzing their own splicing out of a primary RNA transcript. This self splicing activity was discovered by Thomas Cech, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman for the discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA.

Four classes of introns are known to exist:

* Nuclear introns
* Group I intron
* Group II intron
* Group III intron

Sometimes group III introns are also identified as group II introns, because of their similarity in structure and function.

Nuclear or spliceosomal introns are spliced by the spliceosome and a series of snRNAs (small nuclear RNAs). There are certain splice signals (or consensus sequences) which abet the splicing (or identification) of these introns by the spliceosome.

Group I, II and III introns are self splicing introns and are relatively rare compared to spliceosomal introns. Group II and III introns are similar and have a conserved secondary structure. The lariat pathway is used in their splicing. They perform functions similar to the spliceosome and may be evolutionarily related to it. Group I introns are the only class of introns whose splicing requires a free guanine nucleoside. They possess a secondary structure different from that of group II and III introns. Many self-splicing introns code for maturases that help with the splicing process, generally only the splicing of the intron that encodes it.Louis Sheehan  http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

18 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 88220

Poland suffered more than any other European country during the second world war. And there was an extra twist: the history of that suffering was then systematically distorted by the Soviet-imposed Communist rulers, and widely misunderstood abroad. Auschwitz, for example, is still often referred to as a “Polish death camp”—rather than one run by the country’s Nazi occupiers, in which huge numbers of Polish citizens perished. And gentile Poles are typically imagined to have rejoiced, collaborated or simply stood by as their Jewish compatriots were exterminated. Poles, said the former Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir, “imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk.”

Certainly prejudice was prevalent in pre-war Poland; but many Poles defied it. One of the bravest was Irena Sendler. As a doctor’s daughter, she had been brought up in a house that was open to anyone in pain or need, Jew or gentile. In the segregated lecture halls at Warsaw University, where she studied Polish literature, she and likeminded friends deliberately sat on the “Jewish” benches. When nationalist thugs beat up a Jewish friend, she defaced her grade card, crossing out the stamp that allowed her to sit on the “Aryan” seats. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
For that, the university suspended her for three years. All this was good preparation for the defiance she was to show after 1939, when the Germans invaded.

She was, a friend said, “born to selflessness, not called to it”. Certainly she had good genes. A rebellious great-grandfather was deported to Siberia. Her father died of typhus in 1917, after treating patients his colleagues shunned. Many were Jewish. Leaders of the Jewish community offered money to her hard-up mother for young Irena’s education. Like many social workers in pre-war Poland, Mrs Sendler belonged to the Socialist party: not for its political ideology, she said, but because it combined compassion with dislike of money-worship. No religion motivated her: she acted z potrzeby serca, “from the need of my heart”.

Under Nazi occupation the Jews of Warsaw were herded into the city ghetto: four square kilometres for around 400,000 souls. Even before the deportations to the Treblinka death camp started, death could be arbitrary and instant. Yet a paradox created a sliver of hope. Squalor and near-starvation (the monthly bread ration was two kilos, or 4.5lb) created ideal conditions for typhus, which would have killed Germans too. So the Nazis allowed Mrs Sendler and her colleagues in and out of the tightly guarded ghetto to distribute medicines and vaccinations.

That bureaucratic loophole allowed her to save more Jews than the far better known Oscar Schindler. It was astonishingly risky. Some children could be smuggled out in lorries, or in trams supposedly returning empty to the depot. More often they went by secret passageways from buildings on the outskirts of the ghetto. To save one Jew, she reckoned, required 12 outsiders working in total secrecy: drivers for the vehicles; priests to issue false baptism certificates; bureaucrats to provide ration cards; and most of all, families or religious orders to care for them. The penalty for helping Jews was instant execution. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

To make matters even riskier, Mrs Sendler insisted on recording the children’s details to help them trace their families later. These were written on pieces of tissue paper bundled on her bedside table; the plan was to hurl them out of the window if the Gestapo called. The Nazis did catch her (thinking she was a small cog, not the linchpin of the rescue scheme) but did not find the files, secreted in a friend’s armpit. Under torture she revealed nothing. Thanks to a well-placed bribe, she escaped execution; the children’s files were buried in glass jars. Mrs Sendler spent the rest of the war under an assumed name. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The idea of a heroine’s treatment appalled her. “I feel guilty to this day that I didn’t do more,” she said. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

Besides, she felt she had been a bad daughter, risking her elderly mother’s life with her wartime work, a bad wife to both her husbands, and a neglectful mother. Her daughter once asked to be admitted to the children’s home where her mother worked after the war, in order to see more of her.

Mrs Sendler need not have worried. Far from being honoured, she narrowly avoided a death sentence from the Communist authorities. Her crime was that her work had been authorised and financed by the Polish government-in-exile in London; later, she helped soldiers of the Home Army, the wartime resistance. Both outfits were now reviled as imperialist stooges. In 1948 repeated interrogations by the secret police in late pregnancy cost the life of her second child, born prematurely. She was not allowed to travel, and her children could not study full-time at university. “What sins have you got on your conscience, Mama?” her daughter asked her.

It was not until 1983 that the Polish authorities allowed her to travel to Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in her honour at Yad Vashem. Many of the children she had saved sought her out: now elderly themselves, all grateful, but some still yearning for details of their forgotten parents. In 2003 she received Poland’s highest honour, the order of the White Eagle. It came a little late.

Technorati Profile

<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/sr2wpy3ni” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Cluster Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 68844

IT HAS worked with landmines. Can a conscience-stricken world now pull off the same trick with cluster munitions? These blast an area with bomblets: handy in the heat of war, but often leaving a lethal legacy of unexploded ordnance afterwards. Campaigners say that by far the majority of casualties are civilians. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Now 100-plus countries are meeting in Dublin, hoping to follow up the success of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, signed by 155 governments. The aim is to produce a draft treaty by May 30th, for signing in December. “A year and a half ago I never would have thought we’d have been here at this point,” says Bonnie Docherty, a researcher for Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has been campaigning hard for the ban. During fighting in Lebanon in 2006, she says, Israel delivered 4m cluster submunitions. As many as a quarter failed to go off.

The first snag is that countries that mainly make or use cluster weapons (China, Israel, Pakistan and Russia, as well as America) are not part of the Dublin talks. America’s diplomat for the issue, Richard Kidd, says UN talks on conventional arms are a better venue. But that process has been in stalemate for six years.

Nonetheless, campaigners think the treaty will reduce and stigmatise the use of cluster munitions. Even states that did not sign the landmine treaty, points out Ms Docherty, have mostly ended up complying with it. Companies that produce cluster munitions risk investors’ wrath: in March, at the Irish government’s request, the National Pension Reserve Fund sold €23m ($36m) of shares in seven arms companies that produce the weapons.

Such pressure works only in some countries. Turkey and Pakistan signed an agreement this February to produce cluster munitions. Textron, an American arms company, says the three countries that have bought its new “sensor-fused weapons”, and the 17 that may, are unlikely to sign the treaty.

Another snag is defining what a cluster munition is. Most parties agree that the crude weapons designed in the cold war to attack tank columns and troop formations can be banned. But Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland all want exemptions for sophisticated weapons with low failure rates or small numbers of submunitions. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info

Smart weapons of the kind produced by Textron, for example, are programmed to hit vehicle targets. If they miss, they are inert: unlike old-style weapons, they won’t go off when prodded with a stick. The failure rate in tests is less than 1%. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Does that make them acceptable from a humanitarian point of view? Not necessarily. The M85 used by Israel in Lebanon supposedly had a failure rate of 1%; reality on the battlefield proved closer to 10%.

Peter Herby, a top official dealing with the issue at the International Committee of the Red Cross, a Swiss-based do-gooding outfit, says exceptions should be particular not specific, depending on reliability, accuracy and the number of sub-munitions in each weapons system. http://web.mac.com/lousheehan

The third snag is that 76 countries have stockpiles of cluster munitions. HRW reckons the number of bomblets runs into the billions. Signatories will have to destroy these weapons, not store or sell them. That is a hazardous, messy and costly business, requiring scarce skills. Dealing with Britain’s 3,650 BL-775 cluster munitions may use up to eight years’ worth of the £30m ($65m) annual budget for disarmament. Some states want lengthy transition periods too. Places like Laos, whose territory is still littered with munitions from the hot wars in Indochina, will have difficulty meeting the five-year target for clearing up unexploded ordnance, let alone finding money to pay for it.

A final question is whether the treaty will allow countries that have signed it to continue military co-operation with those that haven’t. That is a pressing issue for America’s NATO allies. Yet the campaigners are optimistic these loose ends will be tied up, or at least fudged. “Most old cold-war-style cluster munitions will be eliminated, but it’s a matter of where you draw the lines. Wherever you draw them, I think 90-95% of existing stocks will fall below it. That’s really good,” says Mr Herby.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!