Ready, Reset, Go! (2006-2008)

Counter Reset.

Wheee!

131 days. That was way too long.

[Update 6/27 7AM: edited to make focus more clear. Well, maybe. ]

I still support him whole-hartedly...

But I *did* say, many times, that I saw little difference between Obama and Clinton. That neither one of them was much better at supporting a real change in the country. That they both might well do it or maybe they would just play it safe. But nothing in either's actions suggested anything resembling a jolting shift in policy.

I mean, maybe in reality Obama really wants to do it, where I was less certain about Clinton. But when push comes to shove so far, it's really just more of the same either way.

Interestingly, when I said or implied such things most just assumed I was, in reality, a rabid Clinton partisan. Odd, that. Especially given that everything I wrote about this subject made it clear that I was quite neutral on the two. But people believe what they want sometimes. Heck, we all do that. But it says more about them them me.

Of course, the basic premise I made was correct. It was proven in the entirety of both of their past voting records.

And it continues now:

• Obama supports immunity for telecom companies.
• Obama supports death for crimes other than murder.

I swear when I heard these on the radio I figured they were talking about McCain.

Is anyone else kinda pissed at this? Because I am.

And, yes, no doubt, Clinton would have been similarly middle-of-the-road throw-the-party-off-a-cliff.

So what?

The Democratic candidate for President is saying these things. I don't give a fuck who that person is. I don't like the content of what is being said. If it were Clinton, I'd be fucking pissed at her for it.

But it's Obama... and it remains disheartening. Maybe more so because his rhetoric suggested something totally different.


And herein lies my question:

Have Kos or Daily Kos diarists reamed him for these things? (They did it to Kerry in 2004, for the entire general election, over every single misstep. Rightly so, in fact. And they were far more vicious to Clinton for transgressions both real and entirely made up because they needed a good scream. )

LATE UPDATE at bottom of post - Apparently, Kos IS taking him to task...

Has Kieth Olbermann issued a Special Comment against him for either of these? (He has shown that he has absolutely no favoritism for Democrats... or at least one or two.)

OMG UPDATE: No! In fact, he SUPPORTS Obama's position and the new FISA bill! Wha???

Has John Aravosis? (Who seems to have descended to the level of a petulant twat burning bridges at all ends - ooh, update: he even despises that Obama's being nice to Clinton. What a fucking scuzz-bucket.)


No?

Isn't that weird?

(btw, please please please show me a link where they indeed DO take him to task. The real deal, though, please, no mealy-mouthed justifications. The above mentioned have shown they have no need for pussy-footing around. I'll be jazzed to see it if it's real and I'll amend the statement)

I think it speaks volumes about those individuals. How true are people to their values versus how true are they to their arbitrarily chosen "winner".


By the way, if anyone says "oh this is just politics," I agree. Completely. That's not my point.

But if you say that now while a few months back you were flaying a fellow Democrat alive for doing the very same thing, consider yourselves official hypocrites.

Which, to reiterate on earlier posts, is why I don't trust you- the you's who fit that bill, that is.

I trust Obama, however: I mean, as much as I would have trusted Clinton or almost any other Democrat in the position of candidate for President. Which is to say, I don't trust them much, but I get the deal. He's apparently courting the Republican base, or something of that sort, which is a totally valid political maneuver.

Just as Clinton has done and would have done.

I was very well aware that both were bound to displease me on points like that. This is simply illustrating the truth of that.

However, for my own selfish reasons, I suppose, I want to actually be proud to support the Democratic candidate. I can't find him on any of the channels this week.

Maybe next week, he'll be back on the TeeVee.

I'm really less worried about that though, and more about the people who have suddenly gone silent. It's kinda like they all blew their wad and aren't interested anymore.
----

Late update, since no one else cares: Markos, evidently, is indeed standing on principle and not treating Obama like a Democrat's Bush (ie, a god who can do no wrong). From Glenn Greenwald, who is really taking Obama to task:

Markos -- who observed: "I don't think he's going to lose any support, I mean, let's be honest. I mean, it's either Obama or John McCain" -- nonetheless added:

I think what's at stake, though, is a lot of the intensity of support for Barack Obama. And he spent the last two years telling us how he's going to be the leader of the free world, not to mention the Democratic Party and this nation . . . . I don't want to hear him talk about leadership. I don't want to hear him talk about defending the Constitution; I want to see him do it.

THANK YOU! I've just recovered some respect for Markos. That's no small feat, considering.

Not surprisingly, now that I know a number of people in person that read this site, I don't talk a lot in detail about things I'd rather not talk about in person. Or at least to too many people.

Of those forbidden topics, I don't always include talking about being suddenly ill with a stomach bug or something. Sometimes I talk about it, sometimes not.

I often talk about snot and other functions, though I usually use euphemisms.

I mean just to be polite.

They all know what I'm talking about anyway so the effect I see on those hearing my words is the same: "why are you telling me this?"

And the answer is the same: "Because it makes me feel just a little less sick if I can make someone mildly uncomfortable. Isn't that obvious?"

Anyways, last week I had a stomach bug. And apparently is a communicable one - folks at work, and even other bloggers here in Boston were enjoying it!

That's another thing that makes me feel less bad - if others have the same thing, I feel, oddly, more normal.

That's kinda creepy, I know.

Funny I didn't write about it then. Guess I was feeling embarrassed about it.

THAT- feeling embarrassed - is something that happens to me all the time. I hate it because it makes me wrap myself in a little ball and hide from everyone.

And I'm not sure why - certainly in this case, since everyone else has had something like this at some time or another.

And, hey, everything comes down to it...


So now that I've got you all thinking about it... you're welcome!

So, it looks like I'll be in DC over a couple of days in July for work.

Well, mainly I'll be at Fabulous Reagan National Airport. Apparently, that's where the cheeeeep hotels are. I can't tell if that means the group I work for is po' now.

But National is close to DC, right? Shouldn't be an awful cab ride into the city... should it?

Anyway, of course work meetings tend to be scheduled on days that are the least fun for actually going out at night.

I asked TJ and Jimbo if anything at all fun happens at the bars or whatnot on the nights I was staying there. The short answer was, respectively, "If you'd read my blog you know I don't drink, you lush," and "No." (I paraphrase)

So I just now tacked on a Saturday night before hand for myself (on my own dime, natch).

And, geez, the hotel prices in DC are much, much, MUCH cheaper than New York or Boston. I mean I got this one (it seems to look pretty ok on Trip Advisor) in DuPont on a Saturday night for $120, including taxes.


I'm pretty fucking shocked. I just assumed it would be as outrageous as the rest of the country, what with a shitty dollar and massive invasions by Euro-wielding Neo-Vikings and newly uppity Canadians with their better value currency and wanting to buy things cheap. Bastards.

I mean it's not like *I* ever went to Canada when *we* had the strong dollar and luxuriated in nice things for little money.

But I digress...


So, at least it seems that DC is a potentially doable visiting place - at least budget-wise.


And considering airfares these days - for instance, half-a-thousand is *the* cheapest I can find for Boston to SF for the next 4 months - I think I'm gonna have to make do with slight extensions of work trips and quick 3-day weekends in Provincetown.

(Admittedly, as rarely as I go there, the easy access to Ptown is the one bright spot of living in Boston.)



Anyways, DC in July... any night time suggestions?

Why is it some Mondays I feel kinda crappy?

Might be connected with the fluids of the previous few days.

I mean, just maybe.

I wrote up yet another quickie Biology type post.

But, (1) this is clearly the wrong forum for that and (2) I've gotten far too strident and/or serious here.

So, anyways, it's back solely at the Clear the Mud blog: No one knows.

--

Anyways, let's see if anyone can look at these pictures, stitched together from two separate weekends, and see if they can make sense of what on Earth happened.

If anything.


Title 1: The Trolley Never Comes



Title 2: Goat Cheese and Cosmos



Title 3: Foot in the Arboretum


Title 4: The Secret Garden




Title 5: Umbrella in the Bird Leaves



Title 6: Too Long?


Title 7: Too Long.

Heh, Indeed.
It's not like I hadn't been saying this myself. But no one listens to me.

Bloggers pride themselves in somehow "not drinking the kool-aid". But for the past few months too many of them have acted like the worst members of the media pack.

(emphases mine)

Yup. Sorry but true.

Deny it, as I'm sure people will, but it will still be true.

Hopefully, now that the real campaign begins, such folk will be drowned out but people who actually know the difference between right and wrong. People who will join the Obama campaign because it's the right thing to do, not because they want to be part of the cool club, beating up on everyone else.

More from the same firedoglake post:

That loathing has become so ingrained after months of attacks on the fundamental character of both candidates... that at all of these blogs one can regularly hear the commenters, and ... even front paged posts saying they would never vote for the other candidate. In the early months you'd hear it more from the Obama side, but of late, as it's become clear that Obama was the strong favorite to win, it came more and more from Clinton's supporters.
...

And yet, I'm here to tell you that on most major issues, there isn't a huge amount of sunlight between Clinton and Obama. ... the actual voting records of Obama and Clinton, their actions, which are supposed to speak louder than their words, indicate that they are centrist Democrats, not progressives.
...

Now none of this is to deny culpability exists in other places. Both the campaigns have pushed storylines they would have better left alone. The media has certainly been happy to spill endless ink on accusations of racism and misogyny and to assume the worst of both candidates.

But we were supposed to be better.
...
Part of the blame will belong to us. And honestly, to me, all of this has felt mostly like high-school pack politics. Too many bloggers, just like the media we despise, wanted to be part of the pack.
...

And the blogosphere, created in part to say "just put down the kool-aid" has become what it sought to end, just another part of the echo chamber, endlessly screaming horrible accusations and unable to see either the other side or the damage it was doing to the cause it claimed to believe in.

Congrats people, you're part of the cool pack! Well done.

(Of course, the "you" is plural and the identities are for you - possibly a different set of "you"s - to decide. Probably no one reading this, but I often scream at the sky, too.)

I suppose (based on mild political preferences) I could have joined in with all your disgraceful antics.

But then I wouldn't be able to sleep at night, knowing that I gave in to being a monster as opposed to a man.

So now you're all added to the group of people (along with the GOP, the uber-right blogosphere, and much of the media) that can not be trusted.

And the rest of us will just have to find new sources and people to trust.


Or maybe it just proves we no one can trust anyone.


So... is anyone willing to pull out some apologies to anyone else? It would lift my heart greatly to see people doing this. But I'm not expecting it.

And as the rest of us start gearing up for the actual fight that matters, the one where the invective is well-deserved, will you be all spent and bored?

Or are y'all just happy with the shithole you've left?


And if you're reading this and saying - in spite of everything I've written on the subject - I'm some shill for either candidate? Well, then you are definitely the "you" to which I refer.

Yay, more science!

Don't like boring science stuff? Well, I could go back to wallowing, if you'd like... No? Yeah, me neither... Anyways, God, I thought this was going to be a single post. I'll be lucky if it's done in two. Maybe three? It's filling in the background that really makes it a bit much. Oh well!
---

The intro to this attempt at being a smarty-pants who knows less than he thinks is here.
Please read that first, so you can get the context of where I'm coming from.

---
(Cross-posted at the other blog)

The tiny difference between life and death

Remember the basic description:

• DNA is the instructions, written in a simple alphabet, that says how to build proteins.
• Proteins are the things that actually go about building you.

We want... Information.


So how can small changes over time - especially if many have no noticeable effect on life and wellness - suddenly have an effect that actually matters?

Well, this actually leads into another of my pet-peeves regarding claims of evolution denialists.

In addition to the bald-faced lie that "all mutations are bad and/or lethal" (see part 1 and then part 2), another bizarre anti-evolution claim is that mutations do not "increase the information" of the DNA instruction book because mutations are just "random noise".

The use of the word "information" is the trick used by denialists in this case. It's a term the meaning of which denialists can keep changing in mid-argument so that they are always, magically, right. It's also something which no biologist would use in the way that the denialists do.

I tend to not worry about what they say, though. What they mean is very clear. They're claiming that mutations of any kind add nothing new to the world and, thus, can't fuel evolution.

Yes, it's kinda the opposite of when they say "all mutations are bad".

As with the "all mutations are bad" claim, this one is so wrong on it's face - so demonstrably false - that I have to conclude, once again, that those claiming it is true are, quite simply, lying.

To use their "information" term as *I* see fit, since they do the same, I will say this:

Every single mutation ever made in DNA is a bit of new information. It is a change from the previous. Whether this information is useful, harmful, or neutral, will be seen in the fullness of time. But it is something new, nonetheless, which may end up having profound effects in ways sometimes unforeseeable.

And I have two really good examples of this, I think.

Both examples involve relatively minor tweaks of the DNA instructions. These changes probably would have gone unnoticed by their owners under the daily grind of life, but under certain challenges thrown at them by nature, these minor differences allow the few and the lucky to survive a direct assault on their very life.

Now, there's lots of general examples of mutations conferring benefits: things that make you better at getting food, using food, using new sources of food, evading predators, catching pray, surviving hot or cold climates better, and on and on.

But I think the best initial examples are ones that are almost smack-in-the-face obvious. Ones that literally show the difference between life and death that an incredibly small, and usually un-noticed change can make.

In this post, I will turn to the first example, from the world of bacteria, the representative descendants of some of the oldest forms of life on Earth. In a subsequent post, I'll hit closer to home with a somewhat similar example from our own human DNA.


Bacteria: An Instant Mob

Bacteria are, simply, single celled creatures. That is, whereas humans are made up of trillions of individual units called "cells" - all stitched together into skin, bone, nerves, lungs, the heart, etc - every bacterium is simply a single, sometimes free floating cell.

How they make more of themselves is also different from our own method. Whereas humans use sex to make more humans, a process usually involving the massive expenditure of energy, time and (for us) money, bacteria get it over with using a simpler approach.

They just grow, and when they get close to twice their starting size, each bacterium makes a copy of its DNA instruction book. It then chops itself in half, with each new half receiving a full copy of everything.

Where there was one free-floating bacterial cell, now there is two. And then it happens again: two becomes four, four becomes eight, and so on until there is a lack of food or space, which might not happen until there's already billions of bacteria.

Bacteria are rarely seen as a single cell all on it's lonesome. Since it can create its own company - one can become two in as little as hour or, even sometimes, less - it's always a population in the making.


Each one is a snowflake, er, sort of...

If we start with the simplest situation, where a bacterial population is initially just one lone cell, a population will arise simply by cells growing and dividing over and over again.

Since we started with a single cell, this population is essentially a bunch of clones of the original.

Almost.

But, remember, as with all living things, mutations -the DNA spelling errors -always happen at some rate. And as the population of cells grows in number, reaching well into the millions or billions within hours or days, mutations occur in one cell or another pretty much all the time.

So even starting from the purity of a single cell, it doesn't take very long for there to be large numbers (in the range of millions) of tiny genetic differences from bacterial cell to bacterial cell.

Now, as pointed out in part 2, the usual rules apply:

• Most mutations create no significant change in the life of any particular bacteria, either resulting in acceptable DNA spelling variations or in proteins that, though slightly different, still work the same.
• Some mutations are bad, either causing the unfortunate cell to grow slowly (pretty much a kiss of death in a population that grows and divides so fast) or by really screwing up a protein that is needed for life. In either case, these mutations rarely survive in a bacterial population.
• And then there are the few mutations that do something useful for the lucky bug.

But what is "useful" depends on the environment the population faces.


Germ Warfare

And here is where I'll pull out an extreme life-or-death example.

While there are numerous other types of benefit that are more common, they are also more subtle in effect until seen over time. My example is blatantly apparent within almost no time at all.

So, as a wee bit of extra background... a lot of people seem to think that antibiotics, chemicals that kill different bacteria, were basically created by humans. But that's not true at all.

There has been endless mortal combat between bacteria and many of the organisms on which they sometimes prey. Many antibiotic compounds arose in such beings to fight off bacterial invasion.

In fact, bacteria even fight other bacteria - if for no other reason then for simple competition over limited resources (a concept with we humans are all too familiar). Many bacterial species have developed their own antibiotics which, while harmless to their own type, will kill bacteria of other types.

One of these antibiotics which has likely been part of inter-germ warfare for a very long time, is called streptomycin. Of course, this compound has also been used by us in modern medicine.

Streptomycin stops bacterial growth. It does this by entering into a bacterial cell and shutting down all protein production.

Specifically, the drug binds directly to a critical bit of the machinery that creates all proteins in the bacterial cell, gumming up the whole works.

The result of this is the bacteria are prevented from any further growth and replication. Essentially, bacteria are killed by streptomycin (or, more exactly, they are essentially in freeze-frame until, over time, normal degradation begins to tear away at the cells).


Some pretty extreme Natural Pressure

So, imagine a population of bacteria is minding its own business. Then, whether due to encountering the bacterial species that produce streptomycin or due to injection of the drug by a doctor, the population is suddenly pummeled with buckets of streptomycin molecules.

At this point, the environment of these bacterial cells has changed and nature (or medicine) has offered a severe challenge to the life of the population.

Waves of the drug permeate the bacteria, binding to their protein creation machinery, ultimately leading to the equivalent of organ shutdown.

The bacteria in this population are going to die.


A hidden gift

But… as I mentioned, there’s millions of cells in this population with at least one mutation somewhere in its DNA instructions. And, again, these mutations simply arose because of an occasional accident in the copying of the DNA instruction book.

Well, one of the mutations that arose was a really simple one:

A misspelling in the DNA that tells the cell how to build a part of the protein creation machinery.

It’s just a single letter misspelling so that where the DNA had once been written with the letter “A”, it now had the letter “C”.

The result of this is the type of mutation to which I referred in part 2 as a “neutral” mutation.

Remembering the analogy from that post, where cells normally had protein-making machines with an oval chain-link at a particular position, cells with this particular mutation have machines with a square-link. (Again, this is an analogy)

Now, this change ends up having no particular effect, bad or good, on the function of the protein-making machines. So cells with this mutation survived perfectly well, no harm, no foul, though they ultimately made up a tiny minority of the population.

But here’s the kicker:

That tiny change, that one spelling error, that totally harmless and permitted tweak of the protein making machine actually contains a hidden gift - one that had never been noticed by the bacteria until this time.

This mutated machinery is impervious to streptomycin.

Cells containing this mutation are resistant to streptomycin attack.

So while all the other cells, with the usual machinery, are slowly being destroyed, these mutants endure. They survive. And they will continue to survive – and grow and reproduce – even in this constant cloud of antibiotic attack.

And... not only that. Their survival allowed the survival of all the other mutations any of them might be carrying. Meanwhile, the rest that died took all their mutations - good, bad, or currently indifferent - with them to the grave.

The future genetic makeup of this population has now been drastically altered - in one fell swoop.


I got your information right here

This, as one of zillions of examples, puts the lie to the claim that mutations are just noise, conferring no new "information".

This one tiny change in DNA spelling conferred vast amounts of information as far as the bacteria are concerned. They didn't realize the new message they had in their midst until they encountered the right environment.

And when they did, they found that some of them indeed carried new information.

It conferred life, where there was, for all others, death.

And, on a broader level, it created a portal for all the genetic differences of the survivors to endure into the future.

To me, the ramafications for this population because of this one change are profound. The impact of this one genetic event, driven by a natural experience, will be detectable far into the future.

So, to claim that this is not "information" - using whatever shifting terms the denialists want - is simply willful ignorance of reality.

---

The next time around (when I get to it) I'll discuss a somewhat similar genetic tweak - with similar effects - that exists in humanity. Something only recently realized with rather surprising historical roots.

Yes, it's the one people keep bringing up before I can even write about it.


---

Previous posts in "I know a bit about this":

• Intro
• You are a mutant
• Quiet accumulations

From the amazingly clever Garfield Minus Garfield series, where he takes the Garfield comic and erases all reference to anyone else but Jon Arbuckle. And so, you know, he becomes kinda... insane.


This did get a big laugh out of me to help me out of my funky-funk from the last post.