I want you to watch the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, at 8pm ET tonight.
That ad in the NY Times protesting Trump has pissed Ol’ Bill off enough that he has invited a couple of the signatories on to be abused — unfortunately for him, it’ll be Carl Dix and Cornel West, so it might be an incendiary event, and a good time will be held by all.
I guess even I will watch Fox News tonight, much as it pains me.
Scientists have been working on techniques to treat mitochondrial diseases, and one strategy is to create “3 parent” babies, where the mother’s defective mitochondria are replaced or supplemented in her gametes with mitochondria from another woman, and the gamete is then fertilized with sperm from the father. It works!
In September, reproductive endocrinologist John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City captured the world’s attention when they announced the birth of a child to a mother carrying a fatal genetic defect.
Using a technique called mitochondrial replacement therapy, the researchers combined DNA from two women and one man to bypass the defect and produce a healthy baby boy — one with, quite literally, three genetic parents.
There is, however, a significant possibility of failure.
Earlier this month, a study published in Nature by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, head of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, suggested that in roughly 15 percent of cases, the mitochondrial replacement could fail and allow fatal defects to return, or even increase a child’s vulnerability to new ailments.
The findings confirmed the suspicions of many researchers, and the conclusions drawn by Mitalipov and his team were unequivocal: The potential for conflicts between transplanted and original mitochondrial genomes is real, and more sophisticated matching of donor and recipient eggs — pairing mothers whose mitochondria share genetic similarities, for example — is needed to avoid potential tragedies.
This is not at all surprising, and shouldn’t be used as a reason to stop the research. This was expected. Anyone who has studied mitochondrial genetics — and I’m sure this is the case for these researchers as well — knows about dominant negative effects. There are known alleles in mitochondria that are negative, that is they are deleterious to the organelle, and are also dominant, that is, one copy of the of the allele can suppress healthy mitochondria in the same cell. We also know that mitochondria replicate independently of the cell, and that in some cases the defective mitochondria can outcompete and replace the healthy mitochondria. This is the case in, for instance, poky mutants in Neurospora, and petite mutants in yeast.
So, old news. It seems to make the popular press only when it looks like it might affect human beings, though, which is too bad, because awareness of the problem arose from basic cell biology, and will be best solved by experimental work in non-human organisms. Let’s see more funding for yeast and Neurospora and fruit fly and zebrafish research!
I woke up to Ken Ham testifying to his faith…and demonstrating why I hate Christianity.
News items sometimes cite the major causes of death in humans as various diseases are discussed–but ultimately there's only one cause–sin! pic.twitter.com/jUHTBtfMQn
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) January 5, 2017
Secular humanists deny they're sinners–but can't deny they'ill die–and reason for death is cause they're sinners–but there's good news: pic.twitter.com/VbGoFDZd4D
— Ken Ham (@aigkenham) January 5, 2017
Hate is a strong word, but not strong enough for my feelings. Ken Ham might be a decent human being if he weren’t so thoroughly poisoned by this toxic faith he professes, and insists on infecting others. Christianity is the rot that corrupts minds.
I reject his notion of sin — the idea that there is some kind of divine law against which we can transgress — but humanists do not deny that we can do wrong and we can do harm. We think we should do better, not to appease some vengeful deity, but because it improves our lives and helps make those around us happier and better able to live up to their potential. We certainly do accept that death is inevitable, but not because we are wicked — the wicked often seem to flourish while the good may die young. Are we to measure the virtue of human beings by their longevity? Charles Manson is 82, and surely destined to join the saints in heaven, while every infant death must open a chute directly to hell for its wicked soul.
What enrages me most is the implicit condemnation of every human being who had the effrontery to die, which by the Christian doctrine so clearly stated by Ham is every goddamned human being ever.
So my father, a good man, died quietly in his sleep on Christmas years ago — of heart disease. But in Ken Ham’s filthy mind, his death was the bite of an angry god against whom he’d transgressed.
My sister, a good woman, died suffering in a hospital bed of a massive systemic infection, leaving behind two young children. To Ken Ham, she deserved her death because she’d transgressed in some unknowing way against his mighty, vengeful god.
We all have people we’ve loved and lost to accident, to disease, to old age. To a Christian, their god willed this loss, and to Christians like Ken Ham, those deaths were a punishment for “sin”.
Some day, Ken Ham will die, and remember — it will be because he is struck down by his capricious god for his wickedness, and every moment of his dying, if it be long and agonizing, will be deserved. At least, that’s what he should believe.
Arguments from Natural Law are among my pet peeves — there’s nothing quite like reducing a complex sociological issue to a simplistic, naive causal relationship based on, of all things, physics. Steven Pinker commits this sin in discussing thermodynamics, which he seems to have a rather cartoonish perspective on, to the point where he decides that poverty is explained by entropy. Or rather, that poverty needs no explanation.
Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth. Yet most discussions of poverty consist of arguments about whom to blame for it.
Yeah, rather than talking about exploiters and capitalism and historical inequities and all that messy stuff, let’s instead have a caricature of a physics explanation from a psychologist who apparently gets all of his understanding of thermodynamics from creationist web sites and pop psychology magazines.
I’m just going to wash my hands of this slime and let Blake Stacey explain it all.
Good news, for a change. After Coach Tracy Claeys proudly supported his gang-banging football team, he got his just reward: he has been fired. That’s the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, the article ends on the really important tragedy: what about the football team?
Minnesota now faces an uphill battle as National Signing Day for high school senior recruits is less than two months away. The football program is in danger of losing several recruits and having to rebuild both the performance side and the reputation destroyed as a result of the alleged incident. But in the bigger picture, administration has delivered the message that whatever happened in the alleged September incident will not be tolerated now or ever again.
With Claeys, the Gophers won nine games in 2016 for the first time since 2003, when they finished 10-3. They also won a bowl game for the second straight year.
Rebuild your reputation by suspending all football games for at least a year. That also solves the problem of rebuilding the performance of the team — maybe they can focus on their studies for a while.
Oh jebus. Lucas Werner is gloating about winning millions of dollars in a lawsuit against Starbucks, because they wrongfully banned him when all he’d done is pass a “nice note” to a young barista he found attractive.
Unfortunately for him, a “nice note” of the kind he passes to people has been revealed.
There’s this chemical in my body Telomerase. All men past 35 automatically become ideal fathers and husbands. It lends offspring strong DNA. It’s been a year. It’s been 5 years since I’ve had sex. Why do I feel this need to be inside you?
“Nice” is not the adjective I’d apply to that: “creepy” is more accurate. As a biologist, I’d say “WRONG” would also be good, although I think the barista is more reasonably going to feel that the former is the right word to use.
It ain’t kuru.
It’s the disease of ignorance, Christianity, conspiracy-theorizing, and the kind of raging right-wing poison that inspires garbage like this.
Those are the symptoms of kuru — they just copied them off a med site on the internet. They do not apply. Hillary and Bill Clinton do not have kuru. I have a special contempt for assholes who try to assign specific medical diagnoses on the basis of simple prejudice and stupidity.
In case you’re wondering where the hell this lunacy came from, it’s Facebook, obviously, and a group called “Pizzagate”. You don’t want to go there. These are the worst human beings.
More mail, this time via the USPS, with no return address. I think this guy is strongly anti-Trump, but it took some cipherin’ to puzzle out a few fragments.
You ever get the feeling that it is just total inchoate chaos out there swirling around, swelling and rising to a storm of destruction? Yeah, me too.
It is entirely predictable that a Utah Mormon would lead the charge against online pornography, for a couple of reasons. A) Mormons are legendary for their hypocrisy in privately consuming vice while publicly condemning it, and B) ignorant legislation would be pushed by someone who takes pride in declaring his ignorance of what he’s banning.
Mormons have been in a furor for years over the disclosures about their paid-porn watching habits.
That’s the conclusion of a Harvard economics professor who tracked subscriptions to online porn sites. Utah ranks No. 1 in subscriptions, according to Benjamin Edelman, who reported his findings in the article “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?,” published in the most recent edition of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The most porn-watching ZIP codes in Utah, “with unexpectedly high subscriptions relative to their population and broadband usage,” are 84766 in Sevier County, 84112 in Salt Lake County, 84018 in Morgan County, 84006 in southwest Salt Lake County, and 84536 in San Juan County.
A color-coded map in the journal article shows only two states with subscription rates higher than 3.6 per thousand home broadband users: Utah and Mississippi. Utah topped the list, with 5.47 users per 1,000. (Edelman says he took into account the amount of broadband access available in various regions and adjusted his data accordingly; porn users tend to favor high-speed data transfer that can download lots of the steamy visuals quickly.)
“Subscriptions are slightly more prevalent in states that have enacted conservative legislation on sexuality,” Edelman writes. In the 27 states where “defense of marriage” amendments have been adopted, there were 11 percent more porn subscribers than in other states, he reports. Use is higher also in states where more people agree with the statement “I never doubt the existence of God.”
Let me just say that when I lived in Utah, I was in the 84102 zip code. 84112 is the University of Utah, which is weird — to be fair, there is a higher proportion of non-Mormons there, but there aren’t a lot of people living there, outside of university housing.
Also, it’s a weird metric: there is so much free porn available all over the web, why would people pay for it? Perhaps this isn’t so much a commentary on Mormon porn habits, as it is on Mormon naiveté about online access.
I’m also reminded of the ubiquitous Mormon joke — even Mormons tell each other this one.
Why do ex-mormons always take two Mormons fishing?
If you take only one Mormon he drinks all your beer.
Todd Weiler is posturing in front of his congregation electorate, so of course he’s going to take the most sanctimonious position possible.
