Ask George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dick destiny
Fiore. Go, go, go.
[The] beloved “Year In, blank.”
Put any word in the blank and there’s your story!
“The Year in Finance,” sure!
“The Year in Global Warming,” no problem!
“The Year in Mass Shootings,” or “The Year in War . . .” I guess, but no need to get depressing now–
Check out “The Year in Technology” instead!
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“China Toilet Blooz,” performed live in Pasadena in the arts/theater district just south of Colorado, fall of 2010.
Originally recorded as a video/audio capture on an audience member’s digital camera, I tossed the video. The recording was low fidelity, the camera’s video capability squelching everything above 5k in the audio spectrum to keep file size manageable. So I put it back into a digital replica of the room for a pseudo-stereo image and did a few other studio tricks to bring back some dynamic range and restore a better feel for what it sounded like. (I almost can do magic for the stuff others have ruined for you, too.)
Play loud. Yep, really loud folk rock gets heavy. Hey, dig the Mojo Hand made-in-China harmonica! Straight off Humble Pie’s Rockin’ the Fillmore. Well, no, but it’s where I nicked the licks.
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Remember when the wonder of synthetic biology was going to eliminate malaria through the miraculous production of artemisinin?
No? Here’s a refresher on the propaganda which reached a peak about two years ago. Enough fabulous claims to gag even the most skeptical.
Malaria, however, has stubbornly ignored the the alchemists of synthetic biology.
There has been no wondrous production of the drug. It still mostly comes from wormwood cultivation and is not easy to produce.
And now this, showing nature relentlessly moves on, heedless of press releases:
To Nosten [a malaria doctor in Thailand], it was further evidence of an alarming rise in resistance to artemisinin, currently the front-line drug in the treatment of malaria. He fears it could be the start of a global “nightmare” in which millions of people could lose their lives.
“We have to beat this resistance, win this race and eliminate the parasite before it’s too late. That’s our challenge now,” he said.
He said that artemisinin should take about 24 hours to deal with the parasite, but it was now taking three or four days in some cases. “We are going to see patients that don’t respond to the treatment anymore,??? he warned …
He first sounded the alarm in research published earlier this year, following the emergence of similar drug resistance along the Thai-Cambodia border.
“Keasling realized that the tools of synthetic biology, if properly deployed, could dispense with nature entirely, providing an abundant new source of artemisinin,” reads some standard high button blow job from 2009, published at the New Yorker. “If each cell became its own factory, churning out the chemical required to make the drug, there would be no need for an elaborate and costly manufacturing process, either.”
It never happened.
From the World Health Organization (bold mine):
About 3.3 billion people – half of the world’s population – are at risk of malaria. In 2010, there were about 216 million malaria cases (with an uncertainty range of 149 million to 274 million) and an estimated 655 000 malaria deaths (with an uncertainty range of 537 000 to 907 000). Increased prevention and control measures have led to a reduction in malaria mortality rates by more than 25% globally since 2000 and by 33% in the WHO African Region.
Like most old synthetic biology pieces, the New Yorker “annals of science” essay is full of promises about shit that never quite happened. Although the people quoted, Jay Keasling et al, became very wealthy and semi-famous.
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Morgan Gliedman, 27, and Aaron Greene, 31, were arrested Saturday in their Manhattan apartment after officers with a search warrant found 7 grams of HMTD, a highly explosive white powder used in bomb making. Police also seized a flare launcher, a sawed-off shotgun, nine rifle magazines and various how-to manuals on building bombs and booby traps.
“They had a terrorist encyclopedia, they had improvised and modified firearms, deadly homemade weapons, a do it yourself machine gun…” New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Monday.
Kelly was unsure how much damage 7 grams of HMTD would cause.
HMTD is homemade explosive similar to TATP, the latter made with hydrogen peroxide and other fairly easily available ingredients. TATP caused a furor in homeland security for a few years even though no terrorists were successful with it in the US. (The Zazi case being the big example.)
The police had the apartment building evacuated. Seven grams of HMTD is not a threat to such a structure.
The preliminary report asserts the couple were heroin users.
Rock. Play loud. I mean it.
An idiosyncratic slow mo and photo look at my corner of the town, on any given sunny day in the year that’s almost gone.
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Don’t forget to enjoy the growing WhiteManistan photo collection.
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One slaughter, one ambush, and a nationwide surge in AR-15 sales and ammunition for them.
Christmas giving may have been off by a percentage point but sales of weapons boomed. Never mind the parties, the Tournament of Roses or the bowl games. All you’ll remember about 2012 was a horrendous slaughter which immediately acted as an economic stimulus for weapons manufacturers, brought on by a part of the right white male demographic no one likes to think about. Because its unified group hysteria intimidates everyone and has become an obvious symptom of a merciless national decline and corruption in the heart.
Dickens could not have described a more bleak social environment.
The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health researchers had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997. But in 1996, pro-gun members of Congress mounted an all-out effort to eliminate the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although they failed to defund the center, the House of Representatives removed $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget—precisely the amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research the previous year. Funding was restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury. The effect was sharply reduced support for firearm injury research.
To ensure that the CDC and its grantees got the message, the following language was added to the final appropriation: “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.???4
Precisely what was or was not permitted under the clause was unclear. But no federal employee was willing to risk his or her career or the agency’s funding to find out. Extramural support for firearm injury prevention research quickly dried up. Even today, 17 years after this legislative action, the CDC’s website lacks specific links to information about preventing firearm-related violence …
In 2011, Florida’s legislature passed and Governor Scott signed HB 155, which subjects the state’s health care practitioners to possible sanctions, including loss of license, if they discuss or record information about firearm safety that a medical board later determines was not “relevant??? or was “unnecessarily harassing.??? A US district judge has since issued a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of this law, but the matter is still in litigation. Similar bills have been proposed in 7 other states.
From a Worcester, MA, newspaper today:
It is perhaps a testament to the pall of shock and sorrow that fell upon the nation after the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary that the tragedy has prompted an urgent run on military-style guns …
Local gun shop owners report they quickly sold out of whatever stock they had on hand and have not been able to order more because manufacturers have no remaining inventory to ship …
Ware Gun Shop owner Michael Weisser sold the nine military-style rifles he had in his store in three days …
He considers the panic buying an overreaction, one largely fueled by speculation in conservative media and dire warnings from the National Rifle Association, the country’s largest gun rights lobbying group.
“There’s all this talk about banning guns that gets around. People come in and say to me, ‘I better get a gun. Obama is going to take away all the guns.’ They don’t really know what they’re talking about, but it’s what they’re hearing and repeating,??? Mr. Weisser said.
Calling assault rifle panic buying a testament to the “pall of shock and sorrow” that resulted from the Newtown slaughter is the most perverse lead off sentence I’ve seen this season.
White male middle class sociopaths with little concern for anything but their own fears buy guns en masse and a reporter at a small newspaper, in an attempt to be literary, calls it a testament to a national pall of sorrow. Of course, this is not what journalist Thomas Caywood really meant. Nobody would.
But I guess “Assault rifle sales soared during the Christmas season in a nationally perverse response to the biggest gun massacre in recent history” wouldn’t do.
From the bottom of the barrel in WhiteManistan, comments on YouTube about the above:
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Nauseating picture of the day. Get the Tums.
Says he’s going to move to England because the US is shite and won’t let him have his two hooker/girlfriends.
Quote: I eat Marmite every day and love Tetley tea and treacle with custard.
One could just see John McAfee buying Marmite, first thing, in South Beach or the midwest or wherever he’s telling people he is now. Yeah.
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The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has published an essay on controlling access to guns.
It is particularly heartening because as one of the big three peer-reviewed publications in medicine (including The Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association) it is beyond retaliation by the National Rifle Association or the rabid ferrets of the Republican Party.
In 2012, for the first time, there will probably be more firearm-related homicides and suicides than motor vehicle traffic fatalities.
The United States has become an extreme example of what could well be termed “global gunning.??? With less than 5% of the world’s population, we own more than 40% of all the firearms that are in civilians’ hands: 250 million to 300 million weapons, nearly as many as we have people, and they are not going away anytime soon. We have made social and policy decisions that, with some important exceptions, provide the widest possible array of firearms to the widest possible array of people, for use under the widest possible array of conditions.
The most egregious policies have been enacted at the state level — “Stand Your Ground??? laws, for instance, which have been used to legitimize what many people still call murder. Justice Louis Brandeis rightly praised the states as the laboratories of our democracy, but in some of them, experimentation with firearm policy has taken a frightening turn.
We are paying the price of those decisions. Too often, our children and grandchildren are paying it for us. Payments will continue.
The essay’s author, Garen J. Wintemute, M.D., believes something can be done. And that something is to institute background checks on ALL gun buys, including private party sales which the essay points out currently make up 40 percent of the whole.
Secondly, the doctor recommends national expanded denial criteria. This works, he maintains:
We know that comprehensive background checks and expanded denial criteria are feasible and effective, because they are in place in many states and have been evaluated. California, for example, requires a background check on all firearm purchases and denies purchases by persons who have committed violent misdemeanors. Yet some 600,000 firearms were sold there in 2011, and the firearms industry continues to consider California a “lucrative??? market. The denial policy reduced the risk of violent and firearm-related crime by 23% among those whose purchases were denied.[4]
Wintemute also says state-by-state handling is not enough because gun sales flow around more restrictive local laws.
California, he writes, is another example of this:
At gun shows in California, where direct private-party sales are illegal, such sales are almost nonexistent. At shows just across the border in Reno, Nevada, where private-party sales are legal, dozens occur, and a third of the cars in the parking lot are from California.
Such proposals, he writes, “enjoy broad support.”
“And the icy hands of the firearm lobby may be losing their grip on the political process,” he continues. Similarly to here, last week: “The NRA is simply not able to drive election results as it has been thought to do.”
“The interventions proposed here will not end firearm violence in the United States, but they will reduce it, and that’s a goal worth fighting for,” he concludes.
Again, at the NEJM, here.
Meanwhile, AR-15 sales continue to skyrocket in White, Fearful & Crazy Town across the USA, driven by people with the same dreadfully familiar rant: “They’re going to take our guns!”
What should be a national response to such? Shunning? The implication that people rushing to buy AR-15s in the wake of a slaughter are in no way fit company in a civilized society is certainly worth pursuing. The rest of the civilized world has no problem with considering these people to be f—– in the head.
While holiday shopping was down from last year, the Newtown massacre acted as windfall stimulus for gun manufacturers and salesmen. And if the thought of it at this time of year doesn’t make you uncomfortable with the sporting hobby of some of your white and obsessed countrymen, nothing will.
In Delaware, the usual evidence of the insurrectionists:
Charles Steele, owner of Steele’s Gun Shop on Route 9 in Lewes, said gun sales have soared since President Barack Obama was reelected. He said customers are afraid Obama will place restrictions on firearms, preventing people from purchasing guns.
“It’s been high for the last four years,??? he said. “The day after the election, we were swamped.???
Riding’s store and others are completely out of ARs. Just weeks ago, her shop offered several models.
John Buchan, co-owner of Sarasota’s High Noon Guns, has only three ARs left for sale, and several hundred backordered.
“Our sales have increased 200 percent or more,??? he said.
Buchan spends most of his days online looking for rifles, or goading his distributors for information.
John Krotec, owner of Environeers, an adventure and travel store that also sells guns, checked with five distributors one week before the Connecticut shooting and saw 700 to 800 ARs available online.
The Monday after the tragedy, the rifles were all gone.
In College Station, Texas:
“We’ve never seen anything like this, not even close” said Mike Stulce, co-owner of Champion Firearms. (Merry Xmas, click the link.)
Typically there are 1,500 types of firearms in stock at Champion, Stulce said. Now, there are 400. Shelves in half of the store stand empty. The other side of the store is only about half-full, he said. Signs on the wall alert customers of the rifles and high-capacity magazines that are out of stock.
“If Romney was in office, this wouldn’t be happening,” Stulce said.
If only Mitt Romney were president … This is a good tune, click it.
PBS posted an unintentionally funny question and answer with an employment expert, aka “a headhunter.”
One of the questions, or rather assertions from the crowd:
Online job search is a waste of time. Once you have given up as I have, how is one expected to go out and try to put on a positive face when all one faces is no positive direction? Everything in the United States is a scam.
For many, it’s a very accurate observation. Much of daily life is filled with scams from corporate America and to survive everyone must go about the task of trying to always avoid the tricks and traps. And the past four years have made it abundantly clear that no will exists anywhere in the country — except maybe in the writings of Paul Krugman — to lessen unemployment, decrease inequality, and raise the pay and declining living standards of average Americans. In fact, these are things that are vigorously opposed in the current system.
Of course, the headhunter couldn’t admit this was so. But he couldn’t actually lie in front of everyone, either, so he had to talk in a circle:
No, everything is not a scam. There are a lot of companies that are hiring, but there are more that are nervous about investing in more personnel in a volatile economy. It’s understandable: So much is in flux today that companies hesitate to spend money, and they over-compensate by insisting on “perfect hires” …
First, we already know that applying for jobs online is largely a waste of time … Your challenge is to help employers meet you outside of that numskull system. Help them see what you can do for them.
Second, we know that employers tend to hire through personal contacts. So you must face that reality and learn how to apply for jobs through people a company knows and trusts. This is awkward for most, but it’s a skill that’s as important as any work skill. Rather than search the job postings, devote yourself to meeting people who do business …
Third, there is no way to pursue hundreds or even dozens of jobs through personal contacts …
No, everything was not a scam. But online job application is. No, not everything is a scam. You need to make personal contacts. But nobody can make enough personal contacts.
And after one has been unemployed for a while — as is the case with most people in this country — you have no personal contacts. Just a few people who don’t want to hear from you.
It’s all here. One of the questioners is named “John Galt.”
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