Yesterday, I took deep dives into all the comments plugins WordPress has to offer, and made a short list of five. I sent out an email on them, hoping someone will know more about one or more of them than I could find. If you didn’t get one, that means I don’t have your email address. that can be fixed. Also, I don’t usually post three short takes from the same source, but I couldn’t find any of them quickly elsewhere, and they are all noteworthy. Many news sources seem to be taking a day off, and I was tied up looking at plugins.
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Short Takes
Crooks and Liars – Alex Jones Is Done With ‘Completely Ignorant’ Donald Trump
Quote – Candace Owens is doing damage control after “so many donors and supporters” are upset over Trump’s vaccine comments. She says he is old, isn’t tech savvy, doesn’t keep up with or read obscure internet conspiracies, and only follows the main stream media so doesn’t have the facts.
Click through if you will. The headline makes this sound like good news. But it isn’t. It’s the worst possible news. They are now embedded so deep, they will take the BS over Trump** now. Any resonably competent leader who tells tham what they wany to hear can make them do whatever he (and, yes, it will be a “he”) wants. We are in more danger than ever.
Crooks and Liars – Did Madison Cawthorn Marry A Russian Honeypot?
Quote – Grant Stern on Twitter said, “Madison Cawthorn’s divorce just went from boring information to national security concern in about 77 seconds of interview time with the Daily Caller. “This does not sound a normal meet-cute story whatsoever. Very few of these stories involving Russia are.” Click through for evidence. This would explain the divorce, too. I know it’s serious, but – lots of Congressfolk are russian assets. Only one married his handler. How dumb is that!
Crooks and Liars – Reporter Smacks Chuck Todd For Racist Framing Of CRT
Quote – “Well, I think you should think just a little bit about your framing,” Hannah-Jones replied. “You said ‘parents’ and then you said ‘parents of color.'” “White parents and parents of color,” Todd interrupted. “No. Fair point. As a matter of fact, white parents are representing fewer than half of all public school parents,” Hannah-Jones noted. “And yet, they have an outsized voice in this debate.” Click through for a little context – not that it;s necessarily needed. And it did not come a millisecond too soon.
How many heart-wrenching mass shootings have there been in the United States over the past few decades? How many times has the public risen up and screamed for a sensible gun policy? How many times have we marched, filling the streets for blocks? How many petitions have we signed demanding that our government representatives heed the will of the people instead of cravenly kowtowing to the gun lobby? How many times have we come close to getting Congress’s ear, only to have our voices drowned out by the jingle-jingle of the filthy lucre from the powerful, vicious NRA?
Enough is enough! We The People are sick of gun violence. We are sick of our cowardly Representatives and Senators catering to gun manufacturers and their astroturf gun lobbies. We are sick of turning on the news only to learn of another bloodbath. We are sick of living in fear that our children may not come home from school, or that we may not be safe in our work places, our churches, our venues of entertainment. We are sick of going through the cycle of mass shooting, public outcry, sensible gun bills, opposition by the well-heeled firearms lobby, Congress refusing to act, and then waiting for the next slaughter.
After the mass shooting at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, thousands of students across the country staged walkouts and the March For Our Lives. Survivors of the Douglas High slaughter formed the Never Again MSD PAC. How did conservatives react? With baloney about paid “crisis actors” and the same old tired pro-gun propaganda. This incident should have turned the tide on the gun control debate. Indeed, numerous incidents should have been that watershed. Yet here we are mourning yet more senseless massacres, while yellow-bellied politicians belch their insincere codswallop about “thoughts and prayers.” They can take their empty thoughts and prayers and shove them where the sun shineth not.
This past year we had two horrific mass shootings in March, one in Atlanta that took 8 lives and shortly after that one in Boulder one that took 10. The FedEx shooting in Indianapolis in April claimed 9 more. A shooting in San Jose during May left 10 more dead. And those are just a few of the mass shootings that took place in the “great” US of A.
Gun nuts pound on the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution, forgetting two important things. First, they pay attention to only the second clause, conveniently forgetting the first one about a “well-regulated militia.” Originally, the Founding Fathers didn’t want a standing army; they wanted a citizen’s militia that could be ready at any moment to take up arms against this nation’s foes. Second, in the late 18th century most guns were muskets, with a firing rate of once per minute, maybe twice if one was exceptionally quick (and lucky). Science fiction was not a thing back then, so they could never have anticipated repeat-action rifles, let alone assault rifles and machine guns.
The firearms manufacturers’ stooges love to spew such bromides as “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Sure, guns don’t act on their own – but when they are easily available, they make it a lot easier for bugnuts to take more lives. Can you imagine the Virginia Tech shooter going after students and teachers with a butcher knife? Can you imagine the Las Vegas shooter firing arrows into the crowd? Can you imagine the Pulse Nightclub killer going after patrons with an axe?
Excuses about violent video games, TV and movies don’t fly, either – nor about mental illness. Every country on this planet harbors people who have mental issues, and just about everybody has access to violent entertainment. Many of them have access to guns, albeit strictly limited. When was the last time you heard about some wacko causing a bloodbath in London, or Toronto, or Tokyo, or some country that has a sensible gun policy? Mass shootings do happen outside of the United States, but they are rare; and at least other governments do something constructive when they happen. After the 1996 massacre, Australia banned private ownership of assault rifles. They haven’t had a mass shooting since. Nudge-nudge-wink-wink!
There is nothing wrong with owning a gun for personal protection or sport. (If you object to hunting, that is another story, which will be told another time.) However, there is no reason why a regular citizen should own a military-grade weapon. As for the idea that a citizen’s militia could take on a modern army, don’t make me laugh! Can’t you just see a bunch of poorly-organized yahoos armed with AR-15s and shotguns going up against well-trained, well-organized soldiers who have not just assault rifles but also bazookas, grenade launchers, tanks, cannons, flame throwers, drones, etc. at their disposal – to say nothing of practice and maybe actual experience in urban warfare? A lot of them have probably watched Red Dawn a few times too many.
We The People are sick and tired of this! We are NOT going to be silenced, we are NOT going to be drowned out by the gun industry’s dark money, we are NOT going to be ignored anymore! We are going to fight, and keep fighting, until Congress listens to us and stands up to the gun industry’s goons. It is only a matter of time before the mighty oak of the NRA finally meets the windstorm that will topple it over.
Glenn Kirschner – Holiday Justice Recap: Bannon, Meadows, Clark, Perry, Jordan & the Rest of Trump’s Corrupt Elves
Meidas Touch – Anthony Scaramucci TORCHES Steve Bannon & explains why he believes in God
The Lincoln Project – Legacy
VoteVets – Maj.Gen.(Ret)Paul Eaton & Brig.Gen.(Ret) Steven Anderson Discuss WaPo Op-Ed With Jim Sciutto On CNN
The Secret of Christmas (Written by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen in about 1961, this recording from 2013)
It’s not the glow you feel, when snow appears
It’s not the Christmas card, you’ve sent for years
Not the joyful sound, when sleigh bells ring
Or the merry songs, children sing
The little gift you send, on Christmas day
Will not bring back the friend, you turned away
So may I suggest, the secret of Christmas
It’s not the things you do, at Christmas time
But the Christmas things you do all year through
Mrs. Betty Bowers – Just Because Jesus Forgot About A-B-0-R-T-I-0-N Doesn’t Give You the Right
Beau – Let’s talk about when you aren’t the target….
Yesterday, I discovered that our blog’s commenting system it being discontinued by WordPress. At the moment, it still works, except that every comments has to be approved by an administrator or editor. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. because something has also happened to the spam preventer, and some atrocious things are getting into the moderation queue,, and they need to be DISapproved by an editor or administrator. I spent hours searching through 51 pages of plugins (although I searched for “commonet systems,” most weren’t, which made it more tedious) without finding much. I want to find one that has all the features we are accustomed to and love, including nor requiring a login to comment, and that is being hard to find. I don’t want to jump in on anything we’ll hate, so I hope you’ll all bear with me.
NPR – Desmond Tutu’s laugh was contagious. His fight for freedom was deadly serious
Quote – Yet time and again, Tutu, dressed in his flowing clerical robe, would appear at a potentially explosive scene and invoke his gift of gab to defuse a crisis, often sending the crowd home with a smile on their faces. His impish grin, laughter and amusing stories were always employed in the service of nudging South Africans to retreat from the precipice of a racial confrontation. Click through. What a devastating loss!
Democratic Underground – The Mousetrap
Quote – A mouse looked through the crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife open a package. “What food might this contain?” The mouse wondered – he was devastated to discover it was a mousetrap. Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning. “There is a mousetrap in the house! There is a mousetrap in the house!” Click through for story – nothing to do with the Agatha Christie play but a parable about karma, and a caution.
Food For Thought (from a tweet sent by David Corn):
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
This article was posted before the heads-up from Walter Reed (which sent Mother Jones off to investigate, which led to an article included among today’s short takes), but that diesn’t mean it’s “old news.” I doubt that anyoe here has been up close and personal with gene sequencing. If you are into genealogy, or if you have any kind of hereditary medical condition, you may have in some obscure way used the results of the process, but of course that doesn’t make an expert, any more than drinking milk makes one an expert on cattle – much less a cow. As always, The Conversation has taken pains to make what’s in the article clear, and, hopefully, interesting.
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Genomic sequencing: Here’s how researchers identify omicron and other COVID-19 variants
Sequencing the genome of a virus gives researchers information on how mutations can affect its transmissibility and virulence. catalinr/iStock via Getty Images Plus
How do scientists detect new variants of the virus that causes COVID-19? The answer is a process called DNA sequencing.
Researchers sequence DNA to determine the order of the four chemical building blocks, or nucleotides, that make it up: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine. The millions to billions of these building blocks paired up together collectively make up a genome that contains all the genetic information an organism needs to survive.
When an organism replicates, it makes a copy of its entire genome to pass on to its offspring. Sometimes errors in the copying process can lead to mutations in which one or more building blocks are swapped, deleted or inserted. This may alter genes, the instruction sheets for the proteins that allow an organism to function, and can ultimately affect the physical characteristics of that organism. In humans, for example, eye and hair color are the result of genetic variations that can arise from mutations. In the case of the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, mutations can change its ability to spread, cause infection or even evade the immune system.
We are both biochemists and microbiologists who teach about and study the genomes of bacteria. We both use DNA sequencing in our research to understand how mutations affect antibiotic resistance. The tools we use to sequence DNA in our work are the same ones scientists are using right now to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
The first human genome took two decades to sequence. With advances in technology, scientists are now able to sequence DNA in a matter of hours.
How are genomes sequenced?
One of the earliest methods scientists used in the 1970s and 1980s was Sanger sequencing, which involves cutting up DNA into short fragments and adding radioactive or fluorescent tags to identify each nucleotide. The fragments are then put through an electric sieve that sorts them by size. Compared with newer methods, Sanger sequencing is slow and can process only relatively short stretches of DNA. Despite these limitations, it provides highly accurate data, and some researchers are still actively using this method to sequence SARS-CoV-2 samples.
Since the late 1990s, next-generation sequencing has revolutionized how researchers collect data on and understand genomes. Known as NGS, these technologies are able to process much higher volumes of DNA at the same time, significantly reducing the amount of time it takes to sequence a genome.
There are two main types of NGS platforms: second-generation and third-generation sequencers.
Second-generation sequencing marks each nucleotide with a specific color.
Second-generation technologies are able to read DNA directly. After DNA is cut up into fragments, short stretches of genetic material called adapters are added to give each nucleotide a different color. For example, adenine is colored blue and cytosine is colored red. Finally, these DNA fragments are fed into a computer and reassembled into the entire genomic sequence.
Third-generation technologies like the Nanopore MinIon directly sequence DNA by passing the entire DNA molecule through an electrical pore in the sequencer. Because each pair of nucleotides disrupts the electrical current in a particular way, the sequencer can read these changes and upload them directly to a computer. This allows clinicians to sequence samples at point-of-care clinical and treatment facilities. However, Nanopore sequences smaller volumes of DNA compared with other NGS platforms.
Third-generation sequencing detects changes in an electrical current to identify nucleotides.
Though each class of sequencer processes DNA in a different way, they can all report the millions or billions of building blocks that make up genomes in a short time – from a few hours to a few days. For example, the Illumina NovaSeq can sequence roughly 150 billion nucleotides, the equivalent of 48 human genomes, in just three days.
Using sequencing data to fight coronavirus
So why is genomic sequencing such an important tool in combating the spread of SARS-CoV-2?
Genomic surveillance has guided public health decisions as each new variant has emerged. For example, sequencing the genome of the omicron variant allowed researchers to detect over 30 mutations in the spike protein that allows the virus to bind to cells in the human body. This makes omicron a variant of concern, as these mutations are known to contribute to the virus’s ability to spread. Researchers are still learning about how these mutations might affect the severity of the infections omicron causes, and how well it’s able to evade current vaccines.
Sequencing also has helped researchers identify variants that spread to new regions. Upon receiving a SARS-CoV-2 sample collected from a traveler who returned from South Africa on Nov. 22, 2021, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, were able to detect omicron’s presence in five hours and had nearly the entire genome sequenced in eight. Since then, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been monitoring omicron’s spread and advising the government on ways to prevent widespread community transmission.
The rapid detection of omicron worldwide emphasizes the power of robust genomic surveillance and the value of sharing genomic data across the globe. Understanding the genetic makeup of the virus and its variants gives researchers and public health officials insights into how to best update public health guidelines and maximize resource allocation for vaccine and drug development. By providing essential information on how to curb the spread of new variants, genomic sequencing has saved and will continue to save countless lives over the course of the pandemic.
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AMT, Genomic sequencing is certainly not something I am an expert on. All I ever knew about it was that in the book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid,” Douglas Hofstadter used “dialogues” based on Achilles and the Tortoise because their first latters matched adenine and thymine (he also snuck in a Crab for cytosine and occassionally referred to G for guaritine. Once I believe it was a guitar.) Pretty sophisticated for short pieceswhich were intended to bu humorous (but also to make readers think.)
Thank heaven we don’t need to be experts – that’s what real experts are for. But it’s nice to be a little familiar with a process, and its results, which are going to be dominating medical fields (and not just epidemiology) for decades to come.
Glenn Kirschner – Time for the Military Leadership to Return Mike Flynn to Active Duty and Court-Martial Him (I might just add that retirees and active duty military are paid out of the same budget. I’m not saying that that [Dod] budget is not inflated – just that retireepay is a huge chunk of it, and why DoD doesn’t use that fact as a public selling point is beyond me. But it does bolster the military’s ability to recall retirees to active duty at will.))
Don Winslow – #JoeManchinsBrotherSuedHim
Robert Reich – The Oligarchy’s Ultimate Political Weapon
VoteVets – Maj.Gen.(Ret.) Paul Eaton Discusses WaPo Op-Ed & 2024 Insurrection Threat With Wolf Blitzer on CNN
Yesterday, I visited Virgil. It was special to be able to see him on Christmas, and he returns all greetings including special holiday greetings. The Sergeant who heads up the visitation team got the day off (and I really can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. For part of the time, the warden personally filled in for him. Don’t get me wrong – prison is still prison and no one wants to be there.. But there are some employees who have hearts and consciences. Although the time of sunset hadn’t changed (or rather it changed and then changed back) I left a little later and it didn’t work badly. There are still some (and one in particular) dangwr spots, but with proper equipment most of the drive is much better. The mast ten minutes of my drive were in “civil twilight,” which is when the sun is over the horizon, but there is still enough light to see by – you don’t need your lights on to see better, but you do to be seen better.) I can handle that. It only lasts a half hour, though (both morning and evening). Then there’s another half hour of “nauticak twilight” where there is still some reflected light but you need headlights. There might be more light reflected off of a water surface, but on land it’s not the best time to driver. Sunrise is still getting later, abd some of the drive out is becoming a bit more hazardous, but it should start getting earlier soon, which will also help.
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Short Takes
Crooks and Liars – HERO: All In A Day’s Work For Sixth-Grader Davyon Johnson
Quote – His principal, Latricia Dawkins, told the local paper, “He is just a kind soul and well-liked by his peers and staff alike.” His mom, LaToya Johnson, is proud but not surprised. She said her son wants to be an EMT, just like his uncle Wendell Johnson. Click through for story. One more good news story can’t hurt.
Mother Jones – The Mother of All Vaccines May Be Closer Than You Think
Quote – Now, after three coronavirus-sparked health crises in the last 20 years—SARS, MERS, and COVID-19—researchers are working to develop so-called universal coronavirus vaccines for the next outbreak. While COVID-19 vaccines are an incredible feat of science—they were created faster than any vaccine in history—researchers say it wasn’t fast enough. Kevin Saunders, the director of research at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, points out that hundreds of thousands of Americans died from COVID-19 infections while vaccines were being developed and approved. If we have a universal coronavirus vaccine ready to go in the future, even if it isn’t perfect, he says, it could cut down on hospitalizations and deaths, and buy researchers time to hone a virus-specific vaccine. Click through for much more. The Walter Reed team has gone the farthest to date, but they are not alone, and others are also getting close. Now THAT’s good news.
