Wednesday, January 29, 2020

'Viral' news... and more from the frontiers of biology...

The coronavirus has brought our attention back around to life's tenuous miracle on this amazing planet. So let's have a biology news breakdown... and I'll get back to the matter of viruses towrd the end.

== Advances in medicine and health ==

The U.K. may start offering full genome sequencing to every child born in the country. “While the tests could theoretically improve medical treatment, it also raises a slew of questions about medical privacy, consent, and the future of the human race.” Yes, like most new technologies, it could either empower Big Brothers or else... if shared openly and accountably and transparently they could prevent Orwellian nightmares forever.

Researchers claim to have 3D-printed skin that’s alive and has blood vessels. Skin is the biggest “organ” of the body and this can be of huge importance to burn victims and others. Auto-immune matching is the most crucial aspect for making it work.

Weird! “After bone marrow transplant, a man’s semen contains only donor’s DNA.” Dang. Better hope the fellow who donated and saved your life isn’t also a sexual predator. Notify that CSI show! (via

Only this is why we need a civilization filled with bright skeptics. Because there turns out to be more to this story… There are no sperm cells because the individual had a vasectomy. DNA is from white blood cells or blood cell fragments in the semen. Boy, talk about an object lesson for us all. 

Psychiatric disorders affect 25 percent of the population in any given year. A new study has identified more than a hundred gene variants that can affect a person’s risk of developing multiple psychiatric disorders — a biological clue that could lead to more effective treatments for the disorders in the future. 

Researchers fed a machine learning system 1.77 million electrocardiogram (ECG) logs — measured in voltage over time — from 400,000 patients, in order to detect patterns that could indicate future cardiac problems including heart attacks and atrial fibrillation. The AI model distinguished between patients who would die within a year and those who survived. Um… duh? Discovering correlations in vast data sets is what computers do really well. Using good judgment about those correlations, especially when the datasets might contain biases (e.g. racial) is something that smart humans and wise societies must view as a good thing, helping us target those undercurrents. And so far, boy have the activists been on top of this.

Specific neurons that map memories have now been identified in the human brain.

And the company selling rich people blood transfusions from young folks is back. Now? A scientifically dubious and likely harmless mutually beneficial business deal. Later? When these Rhino-horn-using, struldbrug-vampires start demanding fresh young blood daily? You’ve seen it in science fiction. Undermine this failure mode with good science!

Wearable medical devices today can monitor heart rate, blood oxygen, and physical activity. New laser-engraved microfluidic sensors can detect minute concentrations of molecules in perspiration, like a wearable sensor that can measure the levels of uric acid and tyrosine in sweat. “Tyrosine can be an indicator of metabolic disorders, liver disease, eating disorders, and neuropsychiatric conditions.” (via IFTF)

Aaaand… we compost vaggie waste, but human bodies? The future “using one-eighth of the energy of cremation and saving as much as a metric ton of carbon dioxide, it can convert a body into a cubic yard of nutrient-rich soil in a month.” Um, I recycle/compost a lot of our veggie scraps. But this... I hope to keep it an abstract consideration for decades, yet.

== More from the Medical world ==

The CRISPR technique uses molecular scissors for genes, revolutionizing scientific research by letting scientists alter DNA. But a new gene editing system may prove even more powerful.

We’ve officially annihilated a second strain of polio. Only one remains. “Currently, WPV1 only circulates in two countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan. But vaccination efforts to stop it are plagued by vaccine misinformation and harmful rumors, armed conflicts and insecurity, and fears and misinformation about vaccine-derived polio infections, which are rare but a considerable threat.”

vaccine which could revolutionize tuberculosis treatment might provide long-term protection against the disease, which kills 1.5 million people around the world each year. One of the huge baddies still out there. 

Thanks Vaxxers! The notoriously contagious measles virus not only makes people sick, it also sneaks inside important immune cells in the body and wipes their "memories," new research suggests. Once infected, the amnesic immune system no longer recognizes the harmful pathogens that it has fought off in the past. In fact, docs just proved what’s long been suspected: “When they started using the vaccine they noticed a drop in deaths from other diseases at the same time. This happened in every country the vaccine was adopted. The first theory was that the Measles vaccine protected people from other diseases, but there was no way it could do that. Research showed that it didn't do that. It took years to figure out that not getting Measles is what protected people.”

Getting science fictional with a quirky side thought though… If measles zeroes out some immune cell memories… might it be useful developing therapies for allergies of autoimmune diseases? Should measles vaccination be delayed until you know your child does not have allergies or an auto-immune ailment? If so, might the actual disease be therapeutic, resetting the immune system?

== Convergence ==

Aliens among us. Scientists have found microbes that live on sulfate more than 1.5 kilometers beneath Earth’s surface in water that has been trapped in fractures in the rock for hundreds of millions of years. 

Deadly Brain Cancers Act Like 'Vampires' By Hijacking Normal Cells To Grow.” All of it consistent with my own theory, in my short story “Chrysalis,” That one biologist said: “This is what you’ll be remembered for, a century from now, Brin.”  Huh. I kinda hope not?  Anyway the story is in Insistence of Vision.

Getting weirder still, the ctenophore a small sea organism, has a relatively advanced nervous system, but different from any other animal – using ‘a different chemical language’, lacking the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine and nitric oxide, and many other chemical messengers considered the universal neural language of all animals. Has it invented neurons, muscles and other specialized tissues, independently from the rest of the animal kingdom?

Researchers find also “that the neural circuits underlying smell, episodic memory, spatial navigation, behavior choice and vision in insects are nearly identical to those performing the same functions in mammals – despite the fact that different, though overlapping, sets of genes were harnessed to build each one… the suggested answer is convergence: these far-flung branches of the evolutionary tree arrived at common designs for a nervous system because they each had to solve the same fundamental problems.”


And weirder still? That ‘blob” organism that’s neither plant nor animal that has slime mold features but… 700 sexes?

== ... and miscellany ==

660 2” cubes of refined – but not isotope separated – metallic uranium were recovered from the primitive Nazi atomic program near the end of WWII. This fascinating article tells of maybe 5 cubes known today. The rest? Not exactly dangerous, as they were. Probably got sent to a refinery to become way more dangerous.

Humans making icebergs in order to refreeze the Arctic? Um clever method, but harder than planting trees.

Carlsberg is working on beer bottles made of paper.  

Satellite images can be used to detect stranded whales — a potential new way to identify strandings in real-time.

== It's a virus... ==

I could link you to my Hugo nominated story about the ultimate in "commensal" viral parasitism -- "The Giving Plague," in my collection OTHERNESS... or my more recent story "Chrysalis," with an unusual take on both infection and cancer, as well as a secret part of the human genome (in INSISTENCE OF VISION).  Heck I could go into many reasons to stay calm in the face of coronavirus... and one or two reasons not to...

But instead, let me offer a different sort of wisdom, from a December 1979 NPR show called "Unpacking the 80s"... a little song that stuck in my head, ever since.

Back in the Pleistocene
When we were still marine
A virus launched a quest 
   to be the perfect guest
   and re-arranged our genes.

It's a virus, it inspired us
   to rise above the mud.
It's a virus, it's desirous
   of your very flesh and blood.
Now I know your body's burnin,
   but don't give up the ghost!
Tiny viruses are turning you
   into the perfect... host.

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Pandemics? Future (and After) Shocks, and political maneuvers


== Books to help us through a minefield ==




And here's a piece I found that offers some biting cogency: 


== At last, some judo from dems? ==









== Ideologies abound ==







== Deep perspective ==






== And finally... that Doomsday Clock ==



Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Future shock? Or inevitability? Plus making facts back into "things."

Before getting into other prophecies, first a word about the master. Alvin Toffler was among the greatest of all modern forecasters and author of FUTURE SHOCK. That best seller’s coming 50th anniversary inspired a new volume AFTER SHOCK, with inputs from some towering modern minds. (And my poor self, for comic/pity relief.)


Meanwhile, already available and causing ripples is my own recent volume about our current political crises and whether the patterns of 60 centuries can be broken, at last. Free chapters of Polemical Judo can be sampled here. Including the chapter on "end games," much of it coming true before your eyes.
== Who'd a thunk this in 2020?==
While it’s good news that Moscow Mitch was cornered into letting some funds - a fraction of what experts requested - go to increased election security, he made sure it was block grants to the states, which red-cheater states will likely just use to line pockets and to put lipstick on their process pigs, doing nothing to ensure paper receipts and audits, for example.
Meanwhile… Timing is everything. Nixon resigned just before impeachment so he could be pardoned. Now it appears too late for Trump, with it clear that Mike Pence would not be able to.  But Ol' Two Scoops probably figured “New York will come after me anyway. So let’s slug it out.”
Oh, while the news is filled with Ukraine and Russia, let me remind you how cleverly the "ex" communists surrounding Vlad Putin changed their "spots"... but not their goal of our demise.
== More on the "Russia thing ==

For 70 years, the Comintern/Politburo tried to suborn the American left, with only modest success among a few famously gullible saps. But within a few years after dropping the hammers and sickles and worker-rhetoric, they virtually took over American conservatism. Here’s a cogent article describing how it happened. The ease with which the Kremlin has suborned the U.S. right must have shocked even the “former” KGB agents and “ex” communist conspirators who still run the place, almost as much as it has appalls longtime rightist apologists like George F. Will.

According to Anne Applebaum (and her many sources) it has always been less about Russian/Soviet successes at governance (there were never any but a few) than about a good western trait that all-too often goes sour… our propensity to encourage vigorous self-criticism. This Hollywood-taught reflex to carp and point at errors is healthy! But it can be exploited by enemies, turned into sourpuss treason and, indeed, has been turned against us.

And while Applebaum’s essay lays out several plausible contributing factors, I have long asserted that only one thing can explain the tidal wave of inexplicable reversals and treasons by once respected conservatives like William Barr.
That reason is blackmail, a standard KGB operational tool that expanded under facilitation by folks like David Pecker and Jeffrey Epstein and aboard princely yachts. And I devote a chapter to it in Polemical Judo.

Seriously, read the Applebaum piece, especially for the hypocrisy of US rightist/foxite adoration of a Russia that “defends traditional values” ... while their suddenly adored Russia has double our abortion rates, double the divorce, STD, domestic violence and alcoholism rates of even Red America, and less than a quarter the rate of church attendance, with six times the muslim population percentage and one province that is actually ruled under Sharia Law. Yet last time I cited how a major, US-led Christian org recently met in Moscow and pleaded with the Kremlin to "save us from the West."

How blatant can it get? Russian media and oligarchs laughingly are open about Trump being “their man” and some even use the word “agent.” Rossiya TV talks about welcoming him when he goes into exile. “Should we get another apartment in Rostov ready?” said a top TASS pundit, referring to Viktor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine, who was forced to flee to Russia in 2014 and settled in the city of Rostov-on-Don. Both Trump and Yanukovich were top clients of Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager, now in prison, but still funneling memes and tactics to Mitch McConnell. This article is thorough, disturbing, and needs to be thrust under the nose of your patriot-in-denial who still watches Fox.

Hatred of Obama, H. Clinton and George Soros, for helping rob away “his” Ukrainian buffer state, led to Putin fulminations reminiscent of the final scene of the movie Downfall.

It's time to call Republicans the Putin shills they are, and make them blink with the accusation - easily supported - of "commie."

Oh yes, Christopher Walken had it right. You've got to hand it to them.

== The only thing that corners them ==

You all by now sigh when I bring this up. And to my knowledge I am shouting into the wind, as almost no member of the blue coalition to save the Enlightenment will ever try what blatantly works. But, again, here’s the response to right wing maniacs that always shuts them down.

Arguing with them seems futile. They writhe and distract and “whatabout” and hurl KGB-generated links…

... until you repeatedly demand money wagers!

At which point they flee, with “coward” the word chasing their lame “macho” asses. Top dismissing it with a shrug; actually try it! Here’s a script you can use, if you have the guts.

“Baloney. Let’s bet on it!. Deposit $5k in escrow with a reputable law firm so I’ll know I’m not wasting my time with another Kremlin-boy blabbermouth. If you’ve got the cojones to do that, like a man, then we can wager over some of this, like -

- whether there are any fact-centered professions your Fox/Putin cult is NOT waging war against, from scientists, teachers and journalists to a million dedicated civil servants and officers in the FBI, law, intel, foreign and military services who saved us from Hitler, Stalin and bin Laden, but who you now dismiss as “deep state” traitors, without one scintilla of real evidence...

. . . all the folks who can't afford to ignore blatant facts, like climate change and the GOP’s deliberate destruction of all of our alliances. All of them can also see that your confederacy has sold out to foreign enemies and mafia oligarchs. NAME AN EXCEPTION to your cult’s mad war against our strengths. Put up or shut up.

- Or whether the tidal wave of turpitude and lies in the GOP outweighs the Democrats by merely 20x… or 1000-fold. I’ll pay if it is merely 20x! But before you bet, maybe you should look up the ratio of convicted sex offenders and gruesome divorces in top GOP leadership posts across the last 30 years. Oh, what role models.

- $100 says you can’t find a top GOP or Fox person who has offered to help set up a truly neutral fact-checking service, to solve the “fake news” problem, once and for all. Instead of shrieking “fake news!” at anything they don’t like, why not help set up fact-checkers to either prove their case or help us out of this mess? Oh, right. Because facts are the top enemies of the New Right. Bet on it!

- The cities are dens of sin, right? Okay I’ll put down cash that Red States score far worse on almost any measure of moral living, from divorce and STDs to teen sex/pregnancy/disease, to gambling and domestic violence. To preaching endlessly how much more moral they are. Except for Utah. Decent folks there.

'- The best one: "Let's randomly pick ten from the list of 16,000 Trump lies. If any ONE of them is a proved, deliberate falsehood, you should be outraged. But I will pay off if it isn't MORE THAN THREE.

- The simplest bet: Ocean Acidification. Fox doesn't even try to deny it's happening, it's deadly and humans are causing it. Nail your redder with offers of proof! Get a glass of tapwater, a straw and two swimming pool test strips to prove CO2 turns water acidic. Offer to take the fool to a shore with a Ph meter, or to visit the local community college chem teacher. Watch him panic and run!

And these are just a few of so many wagers for redder cowards to flee-from. For lots more, see chapter 15 of Polemical Judo.

==There are so many you could use... and they will NEVER ante-up ==

Continuing the standard challenge: 

"If you were truly confident in the crazy things you ‘learn' from Fox, you’d be eager to bet and take MY money! But deep inside you know all that crap is a pile of magical incantations to make you feel good. And if you put real money on any of it, you’d lose your house. You are cultists in frantic denial that the US right - once represented by sages like Buckley and Goldwater - has gone insane.

'So go ahead. Deposit that $5k, Kremlin boys. Once you have, it will be worth my while to negotiate neutral parties to judge the bets and exactly which Fox incantation we’ll bet on. Of course you'll find excuses. You will squirm and wriggle. But “coward!” will follow you, all the way.

'Go ahead. Let’s bet over that, as well.'

Friday, January 17, 2020

At the heart of the matter... Ukraine, Rapture, and Walken's dazzling prophecy

And the drama continues. Let's set aside the news that Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz will be Trump's defenders, nailing the coffin of those asserting that the Clinton impeachment "Starr Chamber" was anything but utterly biased... the sole whine that Republicans now hurl at any investigation of them. No, let's dial even deeper.

 At the heart of the impeachment imbroglio seems to be...“Trump’s animosity toward Ukraine.” 

One theme that runs through almost all of the accounts from witnesses who testified before House lawmakers is President Trump’s unyielding loathing of the former Soviet republic, which dates to his earliest days in the White House. “He just hated Ukraine,” one former White House official said.  Why? You might ask.  Well, for starters, Trump campaign manager - and now imprisoned felon - Paul Manafort was a mafia fixer for Viktor Yanukovich, Putin’s puppet Ukraine president, who was ousted by a popular revolution that – yes – got some support from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and George Soros. 

To Vladimir Putin, this was a body blow, almost as bad as the fall of the USSR itself (which VP bemoans as the 'greatest tragedy of the 20th Century.') Don't take my word; actually read Putin's speeches on the matter. The 'stealing' of Ukraine from Russia's sphere of influence was an unforgivable act of war by the West, despite the Ukrainian people's will on the matter. It had to be avenged, first in the 2016 U.S. election, but then...

Of the countless services to his master that Trump pursued, one of the foremost was helping Vlad with this grudge.

== The Treason is Getting Utterly Explicit ==

Russia has reinvented itself as a bastion of Christian values in a world beset by relativism and godlessness. As a result, conservative Christians gathering at the World Congress of Families are looking to Putin to protect Christianity from the West.”  

Yep. After 70 years spent futilely trying to suborn the U.S. left, which generally saw through all the faux-egalitarian Leninist crap, Putin and his fellow commissars and KGB agents just dropped all the hammer-sickle stuff and re-branded themselves as billionaire-Christian mafia-oligarchs. And that was all it took, in order to hypnotize the entire U.S. right. What a contrast.

"In western Europe, many people believe that the West is collapsing and all civilisation is threatened by Islam, by demography, and by democracy…What they try to pretend is that there is only one country where Western civilisation is well and alive and thriving, and that's Russia." … Once dismissed as fringe extremists by the political elite, the WCF now counts friends amongst the leaders and politicians swept to power by the populist wave in Europe and the U.S.

“Vice President Mike Pence and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson were originally scheduled to address the conference, but their names were removed from a list of speakers without explanation.”… "Among the members of the WCF is the Family Research Council, an anti-LGBT group with longstanding ties to Pence. 
"It is a geopolitical and ideological battleground," said Kreko, and remarked that the event was a message from "pro-Russian forces in Moldova that the U.S. conservative right and Russia together can save the world from this plague of liberalism and tolerance." reports Newsweek

Then there's Mike Pompeo, openly saying that he's biding time till the Rapture, when 99% of Americans will be consigned to living torment, then eternal damnation, followed by a permanent end to all democracy, diversity, ambition, discovery, curiosity, freedom... an end to all new generations of children... and an end to the United States of America. And yes, although that's not a direct quote, it is exactly what he means.

== It's fragging obvious ==

I doubt any pundit anywhere will take this interpretation. But I believe one reason that Trump intends to pardon - and even promote - soldiers convicted in military courts of war crimes is to drive a wedge between the U.S. military officer corps (USMOC) and the non-commissioned ranks. Putin-Murdoch-etc. know that the USMOC is the 3rd best-educated clade in American life. Moreover, the officers — while conservative in demeanor and behavior — remain deeply committed to science, fact-using and the rule of law, all of which are being warred-upon by the New Oligarchy. 

(Retired officers provide the largest group of new Democratic candidates who have been taking territory in purple and red districts.)

Indeed, the thing I fear most about a second Trump term is that interference in the promotion process will start to have major effects, as these deeply non-political men and women - devoted to the Constitution - are chivvied and harried beyond forbearance. But the scariest angle is how they will also have to start watching their own backs, if Trumpism sinks talons deeply into the non-commissioned ranks.

Doubt this? I know officers who report that the TVs in the noncom ready rooms are always… always… tuned to Fox News. Ponder that.

== Is Civil War pending? ==




Before you gloat over the apparent intention of the Republican Party to self-destruct at a gibbet of fanaticism, consider a sobering historical correlation and danger sign. The Fox/Putin systematic destruction of moderate conservatism has implications, as Appelbaum points out:





(And I have mentioned especially Utah Republicans. They will never be liberal Democrats, so don't ask it. But like Sen. Mike Lee and others, they are realizing that the version of conservatism offered by Putin, Fox and the MAGA inciters is not compatible with theirs. Most Red States and GOP pols and pundits have terrible record score vastly worse than blue ones. Will Utahns form the nucleus of a clean, honest, and fact-friendly conservatism? One can dream.)

Facts matter. And the talons of foreign despots must be taken off our institutions. All else is negotiable! But without those two things, we are forced to accept a bitter truth. That sane conservatives have turned a blind eye to their duty, to country, civilization and even conservatism. At which point, we’ll just have to save all of those things, ourselves.

And yes, Appelbaum covers a few of the points I make in POLEMICAL JUDO. How nice to be a wee bit less lonely.

== Looking back ==

Of all Christopher Walken schticks, it wasn't the infamous SNL "Cow Bells" scene that most rang true. It was playing the fervently anti-communist dad in Blast from the Past who, emerging from 30 years in a bomb shelter, asks his son (Brendan Fraser): "So we're supposed to believe that one day the Moscow Politburo guys just threw up their hands and said 'We surrender'?"

"That's about it, Dad."

Walken shakes his head and sighs: "You've got to hand it to them."

At the time, I (like everyone) thought this a cute little joke on dad's paranoia. Who knew it would turn out to be a terrifying prophecy! That many of the same conspiratorial commissars who schemed against us during the cold war would smoothly convert themselves (with help from Bushes) into billionaire "oligarchs" still using a virtually unchanged KGB, still seeking to destroy the West.

All of the Russoligarchs who Fox/Murdoch/Kochs now adore grew up reciting Leninist slogans and their leader called the fall of the USSR "history's greatest tragedy," yet we're to believe they all became freedom-lovers? Yes the leopard changed its spots, but its claws? Before, it was a criminal gang under a guise of elevating workers. Now, it's a gang - largely the same gang - openly bragging mafia-aristocratic rule. Big diff?

It is! Reiterating the point until some of you start spreading it: for seventy years, they tried using Marxist incantations to suborn the American Left, and almost entirely failed. But as soon as they dropped the hammer and sickle symbols and egalitarian slogans in favor of billionaire-mafia stuff, the U.S. Right falls all over itself, throwing themselves on their knees to betray America and cater to every Putin whim.

Shatter our alliances and sciences? Sure! Attack all the intel, FBI and military officers who fought the Cold War, dissing 500,000 of our finest as "deep state"? Whatever you say boss! Wreck any sense of fact or accountability and devastate our rule of law while making a mockery of U.S. justice by appointing pre-blackmailed shills as judges? Sure, anything the politburo commissars... I mean Godfather Putin... says.

Reminder. Watch this scene again, as Putin greets his co-owner of Fox News, MBS. And notice the puppet entering the room in the background. Then watch the grin as he greets his master, while other western leaders know what they are looking at. The winner of the new cold war, destroyer of NATO and puppetmaster for the American fall.

Oh, Christopher Walken had it right.

You've got to hand it to them.

== A roundup of worthwhile articles. ==

3) Russians have been quietly seeding political scandals in the West for decades. But their methods started working much better when they dropped the marxist surfaces and found different western allies. Read about how simple the method is, from Slate.

4) Professional trolls understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. This article shows how they often start by building rust with 'adorable' viral postings that have nothing to do with politics, from Rolling Stone.

What an era. "End of history" my shiny metal....