Deplorable pairings

The other day, I posted a photo of Trump and Nigel Farage, which I suspect might have prompted a sudden efflux of vomit into the Atlantic Ocean from both sides (don’t do it again! Ocean acidification is a real problem!), but now I’ve found a picture that’s going to have a similar emetic effect.

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Oh dog. Trump plus Andrew Wakefield. You have to read the lunatic demands anti-vaxxers are making of Trump now (Forbid the CDC from uttering the phrase “herd immunity” during your presidency, for instance). It’s almost laughable, except that Trump lacks the knowledge to be able to discriminate sane from insane policy, and might just take them seriously.

Self-indictment

A member of the Seattle city council has been flooded with hateful email because she, a proud socialist, has advocated for protests at the presidential inauguration in January (oh, and gosh do I love Seattle). This is not surprising. It’s the new reality that all the racists and sexists in the country have gotten goosed on happy juice by the recent election, and since Kshama Sawant is both a woman and brown, of course she’s getting the worst of the frenetically incoherent deplorables shrieking at her. But I just wanted to single out one message she got that demonstrates racist logic.

Go back to India b*tch. I am tired of being shamed because I’m a white male. You automatically think I’m a racist. How about you go the f*ck back to India or wherever you came from?

Isn’t that amazing? It’s a couple of sentences that completely fuck themselves over. Has the stupid sap ever stopped to think that maybe he’s not being shamed because he’s a white male, but because he says absurd things like “go back to India” to an elected American official?

Of course I also have the liberty of marveling at such dazzling inanity because I’m not the target (at least, not as much of a target — I still get the occasional rant cussing me out for being a Jew). It’s got to be even more terrifying to see that your opponents angry and irrational.

A nose balloon too far

This great dead beast greets me every morning — it’s a cast of a Triceratops skull mounted across the atrium from my lab. It’s impressively large.

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One thing has always bugged me about it, though. See that tiny hole directly under the horns? That’s the eye socket. It has a beady-eyed look, like mere eyeballs were an afterthought to long pointy sharp horns.

But then you go forward from there, and what you see is this massive cavity where the nostrils would go. It’s freakin’ huge. You could fit both hands in there, and it goes all the way through the skull. I’m a moderately gracile human being with a skeleton that’s delicate and fragile compared to a dinosaur’s, and I don’t have a giant gap in my facial bones that you could punch through without smashing up a few bones.

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What’s up with that, I’ve always wondered. There must have been some impressive fleshy tissue in there, associated with olfaction? Or thermoregulation? Or what? Someone really needs to get right on that time machine idea.

Darren Naish has a far out, speculative, wild hypothesis: those giant meat holes contained colorful inflatable nose balloons for sexual display, because dinosaurs were weird.

I don’t know. It kind of detracts from the majestic dignity of the animal to imagine it puffing out what would look like a gaudy snot bubble to appeal to a mate. What self-respecting beast would do that?

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Next thing you know, these paleo guys will be dressing dinosaurs up in flamboyant plumage. No dignity left at all.

First clinical trial of human gene editing

Get ready, world, scientists are going to use CRISPR/Cas9 on human patients for the first time, extracting a population of cells, modifying their genomes, amplifying them in tissue culture, and then injecting the modified cells back into the human host. It’s being done in China, where the ethical constraints are a bit more loose, which isn’t always good…but in this case, it sounds like a good, safe (as safe as experimental therapies can be) approach.

They intend to use CRISPR/Cas9 to knock out the PD-1 gene in immune system cells. PD-1 is a cell surface molecule on T-cells that inhibits the cells, and acts as a constraint on immune system activity. The “PD” is short for “Programmed Death”, and what it does is compel the cells to commit suicide when stimulated — so if immune system cells get a bit overzealous and go on a rampage attacking healthy cells, they can be switched off. The immune system has multiple checkpoints to prevent it from going rogue, and this procedure will remove one of them. By knocking out the PD-1 gene, the scientists are creating particularly unrestrained cells that they hope will do a more effective job killing cancer cells, because cancer cells are known to use the signaling mechanisms that tell the immune system to die.

Are there drawbacks and risks? There are always drawbacks and risks. This technique is a variation on an existing pharmaceutical approach, which uses drugs that inhibit PD-1 in cancer patients, so we know a bit about its effects — it’s just that taking out the whole gene with CRISPR/Cas9 is a dramatically thorough way of demolishing the molecule. But we do have some drugs, like Nivolumab and Pembrolizumab, that target PD-1 already and are in clinical trials. We’ve also experimentally knocked out the gene in mice.

So, we have an idea of what could go wrong, and in the immortal words of Dr House, it’s lupus. Or lupus-like effects. By jacking up the immune system and removing one restraint on its activity, you can get complex system-wide problems, which Dr House will tell you are pretty hard to treat, but at least they’re not as severe as terminal cancer. They are also editing a terminal cell type — it’s not going to proliferate — so eventually, we hope after they’ve killed cancer cells, the injected cells will die of natural causes and the effect will fade away.

This is not a treatment that affects the germ cell line, so these patients, if they survive, will not be passing on an edited gene to their offspring. It’s also got to be a rather expensive therapy that has to be customized for each new patient, so it’s not going to be routine. It is a first step into the exciting world of genetically modifying humans, though.

Bad news sites

One of the things that has made me angry are fake news sites that try to make people angry. I’ve been blocking lots of these places, but still, people circumvent my blocks by independently sending me links to the lie of the day, and it’s more than a little annoying. Melissa Zimdars has been doing something about it, though: she has begun compiling a long list of all the fake news/”satire” sites out there. Do check that list before you get annoyed at some fresh horror in the world — it’s entirely possible that it’s completely imaginary.

It has a long way to go to even approximate completeness, unfortunately, because new ones keep cropping up. It’s got some well known and infamous sites on the list, like Breitbart and everything Alex Jones has cobbled up, but it’s missing some, like the Drudge Report, and it can’t possibly cover all the dishonest wackaloons on the web — I’m currently getting flooded with crap from constitution.com, for instance, which seems to be trying to make a name for itself with histrionic conservativism.

But there has also been Snopes, which, for example, takes apart a lying claim that liberals are beating up innocent people from a site called christiantimesnewspaper.com. That’s not on the Zimdars list.

The bottom line is that you can’t rely on lists of baddies. You have to use critical thinking. Zimdars provides some good general rules to follow.

  • Avoid websites that end in “lo” ex: Newslo (above). These sites take pieces of accurate information and then packaging that information with other false or misleading “facts” (sometimes for the purposes of satire or comedy).
  • Watch out for websites that end in “.com.co” as they are often fake versions of real news sources.
  • Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story. Sometimes lack of coverage is the result of corporate media bias and other factors, but there should typically be more than one source reporting on a topic or event.
  • Odd domain names generally equal odd and rarely truthful news.
  • Lack of author attribution may, but not always, signify that the news story is suspect and requires verification.
  • Some news organizations are also letting bloggers post under the banner of particular news brands; however, many of these posts do not go through the same editing process (ex: BuzzFeed Community Posts, Kinja blogs, Forbes blogs).
  • Check the “About Us” tab on websites or look up the website on Snopes or Wikipedia for more information about the source.
  • Bad web design and use of ALL CAPS can also be a sign that the source you’re looking at should be verified and/or read in conjunction with other sources.
  • If the story makes you REALLY ANGRY it’s probably a good idea to keep reading about the topic via other sources to make sure the story you read wasn’t purposefully trying to make you angry (with potentially misleading or false information) in order to generate shares and ad revenue.
  • It’s always best to read multiple sources of information to get a variety of viewpoints and media frames. Some sources not yet included in this list (although their practices at times may qualify them for addition), such as The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, and Fox News, vacillate between providing important, legitimate, problematic, and/or hyperbolic news coverage, requiring readers and viewers to verify and contextualize information with other sources.

It’s always good to think when reading!

They discredit themselves with their own words

You know I filter the comments here and have a fairly extensive block list — it’s necessary. Especially now. You wouldn’t believe the crap people are trying to post here now, emboldened by this recent election. I’ll just put one particularly ugly example from someone calling himself sinceretrupsupporter below the fold. You might want to skip it. I find it useful to remind myself from time to time what we’re fighting.

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