The faaaaaaar right

Evolution and fox news

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/evolution/index.html

Wow, who would have guessed that conservative Fox news would be the go to place for excellent information on evolution and anthropology. Seriously.

Turkey with pork in it?

and other food no no's

Jenny-O turkey Italian sausages are wrapped in a pork casing.
I don't know why it dawned on me on me that day, but while I was taking the sausage out of the casing, which I always do, I realized, turkey's don't have guts that big... what is this stuff? And low and behold in the ingredients, pork casing. So for for those of us that don't eat pork, here's a warning. (although the best one I ever heard was just don't eat ANY ground meats and you're good)


I don't really have the strictest dietary demands, but I do cook for a lot of people so it dawned on me to start seriously looking at the labels of different seasonings I used to make sure there were not any mistakes like this pirkey problem. And I came up with these two on my shelf. I'll find more later I'm sure.

Worcestershire sauce is NOT vegan, it contains fish sauce and anchovies


Guinness is also not vegan, something about trace particles of fish due to processing.


post any of your own food oddities in the comments and we'll keep tabs.

PS. If you read the ingredients to a box of Chicken in a Biscuit, can someone PLEASE answer me, what is chicken extract? or do I really want to know?

The whole Margarine is black before it's yellow thing

So I'm so not into processed food, even if there are times when the cravings get the best of me. But a couple years ago I got an email that must have circled the globe at least 4 times about how margarine is black before it is dyed yellow because it is a derivative of plastic. Now I've actually looked high and low for REAL evidence of this, including scientific journals about margarine, it's origin, even manufacturing documents. Can't find one that supports that statement, or even a credible argument against it (this includes the diabolical cool whip is also black scheme). Everything discovered states that most margarines are made from plant oils that are altered to become solids at room temperature, it's like ironing out a kink in the long chain like molecule.

So rest easy dear butter substitute friends, I'm pretty sure you're not eating plastic, (at least not in your margarine), but whether or not it's actually better for you than butter is still highly debatable.

Now I know why Too Short always took Southwest

The Southwest Airlines Stripper Plane

by Neil Woodburn Jan 16th 2008 @ 11:00AM

Every Friday evening, some time before most people have clocked out of work and begin heading home for the weekend, a plane takes off from LAX.

Like so many other flights at this time, this one is also heading to Las Vegas. It's not full of gamblers, however, but rather a disproportionate amount of silicon that bounces and jiggles through the warm, desert-air turbulence all the way to Vegas where, for the remainder of Friday and Saturday night, it will continue quivering away at $20 a pop.

This, folks, is the Southwest Stripper Plane.

The passengers are LA's greatest temporary export, heading off for a weekend of singles and 20s to help baby pay the rent. They are blessed with the sun-kissed glory of Southern California and enhanced by the world's greatest plastic surgeons, and of course every single one is a struggling teacher, college student, or some other admirable profession that will keep suckers reaching into their wallet time after time to help out their worthy cause, whatever it might be.

No one really knows what time this legendary, perhaps even mythical flight leaves Los Angeles. Seats are reserved months in advance and few mere mortals are able to secure a reservation. A friend of mine claims he once found himself on this flight but can't seem to remember the details, as though some powerful force scrubbed his brain clean, leaving only a trace of glitter on his sweaty forehead.

Others less fortunate can only dream that the planets align one day and that they find themselves sitting on a plane in Los Angeles watching their fellow passengers squeeze their gigantic moneymakers into Southwest's cramped economy seats. If there was ever a time for long delays or a casualty-free crash on a desert island, this would certainly be it.

Remember Kyla Ebbert, the girl Southwest imposed a dress code o

I don't even know what i'm voting for

SO i'm filling out my absentee ballot (because I believe in paper ballots) and I come across Prop's 94-97. There's nothing in my voter guide that gets mail ed to me so I look it up on line. The Ca. Secretary of State office also has no information available (404 message). WTF. Seriously. Isn't it illegal to put something on the ballot that you can't get information for? you don't even know what you're voting for. I mean from the outline on the ballot I understand that the state wants to take money from casino tribes, but it doesn't say where the money is going. And it's gonna be damn hard to find out. I suppose I'll have to not vote on it. Unlike our current administration I won't cast a vote on something that I am not fully informed about.
cheers.
Go Obama.

Dear California, PLEASE succeed from the union

California could become third state to ban forced microchip tag implants (RFID) by Orr Shtuhl

Photo courtesy of VeriChip Corp. The VeriChip implantable RFID tag, made up of a microchip and an antenna encased in glass, is 12 mm long and 2 mm in diameter, about the size of a grain of rice. It would be an interesting feature of an employee’s first day: sign a contract, fill out a W-2 and roll up your sleeve for your microchip injection. Sounds like sci-fi, but it’s happened, and now a handful of states are making sure their citizens will never be forced to have a microchip implanted under their skin. If Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signs a bill passed Sept. 4, California would join Wisconsin and North Dakota in banning human implanting of these tags without consent. No one’s quite sure how real a threat these forced implants might be, or why states are feeling compelled to protect their residents from being physically tagged. Lawmakers are calling the legislation pre-emptive, while the industry that produces the technology sees the states’ action as fear mongering. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags – tiny, data-storing microchips about the size of a grain of rice – are in passports, in Wal-Mart factory shipments and in subway passes in cities from New York to Taiwan. They are also in humans. On one less-than-likely episode of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," a paranoid actor Bob Saget even uses one to monitor his adulterous wife. Unlike Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, which is used for constant, real-time tracking, RFID tags are scanned at close range – usually from a few feet to a few inches. The tags are tracked by scanners installed at checkpoints, such as office doors or warehouse loading docks. The systems are also commonly used in highway toll collection and as theft protection in car keys. In humans, they have been used to store medical information, to track movement and to gain access to locked rooms. To date, 2,000 RFID chips have been sold for implantation in humans, says VeriChip Corp., the only manufacturer with a Food and Drug Administration-approved implantable chip. The company is focusing its technology on medical patient identification, and about 400 patients, including those with Alzheimer's disease, have RFIDs implanted. Other VeriChip human implants have been used by a Spanish nightclub to allow VIPs with implanted chips to bypass entrance lines and by the Mexico attorney general’s staff to safeguard identity information at a time when the kidnapping of government officials there is not uncommon. Some customers are using them as high-tech keys. Ohio security firm CityWatcher.com raised eyebrows in 2006 when it requested that some of its employees be “chipped,” or implanted with tags for access to certain rooms. According to published reports, only two employees got the implants before the company dropped the program. CityWatcher.com has since shut down. But forced chipping has been a rare practice, leading some industry spokespeople to decry regulation as “scare tactics.” Wisconsin enacted the first RFID ban in May 2006, and North Dakota in April. Colorado and Ohio have bills in committee, and Oklahoma and Florida saw theirs die last session. Except for one U.S. House proposal to use RFID tags to track prescription drugs, Congress has not widely addressed the technology. Legislators admit that the few laws being enacted are pre-emptive. Wisconsin state Rep. Marlin Schneider (D) had never heard of CityWatcher.com when he drafted the first implant ban. “I had heard about this device from CNN or someplace, and I went into the office and said, ‘Get a bill drafted that prohibits this,’” he said. “This is beyond even what Orwell imagined.” State Sen. Joe Simitian (D), who authored California’s bill, said he first looked into RFID legislation after grade schools in Sutter County, Calif., required students to wear IDs containing the chips to help monitor attendance. The move prompted privacy complaints from parents, and the school eventually stopped using the technology. Simitian introduced four other RFID bills, dealing with criminal punishment for identity theft, security standards and use of these tags in driver’s licenses and school IDs. All four proposals were originally pieces of California’s Identity Information Protection Act of 2006, which passed but was vetoed by Schwarzenegger. In a statement, he recommended waiting for standards from the federal Real ID Act, a plan to organize states’ driver’s licenses into a national system. The governor has until Oct. 14 to sign or veto the newly passed bill. The lack of security in the chips is particularly alarming, Simitian said, and is a major reason he thinks the state should step in with regulation. A May 2006 story in Wired Magazine featured Jonathan Westhues, a 24-year-old engineer who demonstrated how he could (and did) covertly scan a company’s RFID employee badge and break into the office – all with a cheap, homemade reader. He’s since posted detailed instructions on how to make the reader on his Web site. Westhues likens RFID chips to “a repurposed dog tag. … The Verichip is built with no attempt at security, and is therefore not very special to clone,” he writes on his Web site. How low-tech are these homemade readers? Determined to show the security flaws to skeptics in the Legislature, Simitian asked a tech-savvy grad student from his office to build one. The student then wandered the state Capitol one afternoon with the reader in his briefcase. In the process, he stole the security numbers of nine representatives. The reader could send out any of those numbers, getting him past any locked door a state senator would have access to. And he would appear as the senator in the electronic records. Manufacturers and industry representatives say that no cases of such identity theft have been documented. But depending on the desired level of security, cameras and guards should be used in addition to RFID tags, says the AeA (formerly the American Electronics Association). The technology is being embraced by a few government agencies. Both Vermont and Washington state have agreed to work with the Department of Homeland Security to test RFID driver’s licenses, although they won’t be required by citizens. The U.S. Department of Defense has been tracking shipments with RFID tags since 2003. Besides possible privacy breaches, the new technology also has raised health alarms. Studies of implants used in the past 12 years have linked RFIDs to cancer in lab mice and rats, according to The Associated Press. The studies did not have control groups for the cancer, and manufacturers report no complications with the millions of pets that have had various chip implants over the last 15 years. But the results were enough for some scientists to question the FDA’s approval of the technology.

Guantanamo detainees deemed inhuman by judges

WTF. So no who ever works with them can do whatever they want, like torture, experiment on, kill..

Guantanamo detainees are not human beings - US judges

Fri, 01/11/2008 - 19:51 - Wire Services

On the sixth anniversary of the imprisonment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a United States judge threw out lawsuit brought by four former British detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse, ruling that th the detainees are not "Persons" under U.S. Law, which according to another judge, means that they are less than "human beings".

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit also ruled that torture is a "foreseeable consequence" of military detention in dismissing the action brought by Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith, who spent more than two years in Guantánamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.

In a 43-page opinion, Circuit Judge Karen Lecraft Henderson found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantánamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The Court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants,” and ruled that even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantánamo had any constitutional rights.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown agreed with the result but attacked the majority for using a definition of person “at odds with its plain meaning.”

“There is little mystery that a ‘person’ is an individual human being…as distinguished from an animal or thing.” she added and concluded that majority’s decision “leaves us with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantánamo are not ‘person[s].’ This is a most regrettable holding in a case where plaintiffs have alleged high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human.”

“We are disappointed that the D.C. Circuit has not held Secretary Rumsfeld and the chain of command accountable for torture at Guantánamo," Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, co-counsel on the case, commented. "The entire world recognizes that torture and religious humiliation are never permissible tools for a government. We hope that the Supreme Court will make clear that this country does not tolerate torture or abuse by an unfettered executive.”

After a long deliberation

Albums of 2007:

1. Mos Def: True Magic (hey it came out Dec. 29 2006, it's counts as 07 airplay)
   
2. The Noisettes: What's The Time Mr. Wolf?
3. Amy Winehouse: Back to Black (2006 release)
4. The White Stripes: Icky Thump
5. Stephen Marley: Mind Control
6. Pharoah Monch: Desire
7. Dan The Automator Presents 2K7 (2006 release)
   
8. Betty Davis: re-release
9. Mark Ronson: Version (strait sleeper)
10. Ben Harper: Lifeline
11. Ali Farka Toure: Savane (2006 release)
12. RJD2: The Third Hand
13. Prince: Planet Earth
14. Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I am, That's What I'm Not
15. Lily Allen: Alright Still (2006 release)
16. Babel Gilberto: Momento
17. J-Dilla: Ruff Draft
18. Saul Williams: The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!
19. Feist: The Reminder
20. Death Proof Soundtrack
    

she won't win my vote, but maybe respect

I've been lightly following this case and if Clinton picks it up and challenges it she will get respect from me (something she highly lacks). If you haven't heard about it, s a woman named Jamie Leigh Jones was working in Iraq and was drugged and repeatedly raped andbeaten. She was left in a box for days when finally a soldier felt bad for her and gave her his cell phone to call her dad in the states. Her father called the State Department to have his daughter rescued from, wait for it... Americans. These were employees of Halliburton and it happened in July, 2005. Now my question is where's the press on this? I originally heard about this case on an internet news article. Why do we care that Jaimi Lynn Spears is pregnant, but this woman who has a real issue can't get airplay? By the way, Halliburton lost Jones' paperwork while it was processing.

Anyway Sen. Clinton has called for a probe as a public statement on this. Ok, she gets one brownie point, because this is a feminist issue (not the fake feminism running around the U.S.).
Cheers.

my experimental genius

plasmid prep (removid dna from bacteria)

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when white pawn became queen























if you can enlarge this

What is lactose free milk?

I've asked myself this question many times so today i decided to look for the answer. It didn't make sense to me that something could still be considered milk (or dairy) with no lactose in it. Lactose is the essential ingredient that makes it milk, it's the milk sugar. Anyway here's the answer to all those who ponder why they can drink milk by the gallon but have siblings so allergic they can't be near it without breaking out in hives.

Lactose free milk is all the goodness of milk (water, fat proteins) without Lactose. So it it still milk. And while we're at it, what is non dairy creamer made of?

Non-dairy creamer is made of sodium caseinate (a derivative of casein a milk protien that contains no lactose), corn syrup and vegetable oil. Often soy products are used instead of casein derivative. So yeah that sounds appetizing.

Interesting milk facts I found on the web:
Human milk has the highest lactose concentration to any other animal. 9%. Cows are only 4.5%
Butter, unless added later, contains no lactose due to processing.
Mammory glands are very spcialized sweat glands.
Cow's milk was first ingested in the Middle East about 9000-8000BC.
Somewhere in the world people drink Reindeer milk.
In Switzerland there is a carbonated milk drink called Rivella

Lactose intolerance (by population):
Dutch 1%, Austrians 15-20%, Northern French 17%, Southern French 65%, African Americans 45% in children 75% in adults, Sicilians 71%, Asian Americans 90%, Thai 98%, native Americans 100%.
There are three types of intolerance:
Primary: induced when a child is being weaned in a mostly non dairy environment.
Secondary: Environmentally induced by intestinal parasites and temporary intolerance is produced by gastroenteritis.
Congenital lactase deficiency: nice was of saying you were born that way.

Cheers.

the pen vs. the sword

It's something like an epic battle. Words are as much a part of our history as swords. So it's interesting in English that the the word sword is one letter off from the word word. Maybe it's because words can cut us deeper than any sword. Words become the choice weapons of politicians, lawyers and spouses. I wonder if the two words developed together, with the intention of sword being a metaphorical weapon. Maybe it's just all coincidence.

Just thinking out loud.

His Girl Friday

one of the GREATEST movies of all time.
seriously.

and one time at band camp

Maybe I just like dragons...

It was explained to me that dragons are the ultimate 'animal' because they contain all 4 elements. Fire (breathing) Air (wings) Earth (lizards are terrestrial) Water (they can swim).
Whatever.
I just really really really like Komodo Dragons. And water dragons. Competely different. Equally awsome. That's all.

rain

The Red... Threat?

So this film on bacteriophages was pretty interesting. I’ve said before that I’m a microbiologist, so I had heard of them before (viruses that infect bacteria exclusively), But I had never heard of them being used therapeutically. Apparently in the Soviet Union they have been using phages to treat bacterial infections since at least the 20’s. Now there is a reason why this type of research is important, we live in a post-resistant age. There are strains of bacteria resistant to every drug we have, and that means they are lethal, about 100% of the time. Things like strep, TB and staph are killing people all over the world and usually it’s nosocomial (acquired in the hospital).

So someone might ask, why would I want a virus injected into me to kill a bacteria? That’s a valid question, with many answers. 1. You’re less likely to have an allergic reaction 2. You would not be injected, it would be administered based on the location of the infection (topically, ingested, rinsed). 3. Drug resistance is not an issue because the bacteria never interact with a drug. If used in combination, the bacteria would never have a chance to gain resistance, and you can cut infection time significantly. 4. Drug interactions are a non issue. So the next question is… Why haven’t I heard of it? Because there’s a little thing called scientific supremacy that the U.S. has created. If you’re research is not published in well known journals, and it is not published in English, it doesn’t exist. Nice. We’re all going to die from bioweapons because someone didn’t want to learn Russian.

That’s the next interesting thought about this film. At one time in the U.S.S.R. there were huge vaults of both bacteria and their phages, collected from all over the world, much like we have at the CDC and the next place, BioPreparat. BioPreparat was Russia’s leading bioweapons facility, that developed and sold various kinds of weapons grade strains of disease. Now, no this was not mentioned in the movie but it’s a logical connection to be made when it does mention that the height of the bacteriophage production was during the height of communism in the U.S.S.R. So I’m thinking its very possible that a large part of this research was done, and not published so that the Soviets could build and/or dispense weapons (during the cold war), while remaining immune. Another reason the U.S. may have never embraced the research was because it was part of the Red threat and there would be no money going toward a Soviet research program.

So now that we live in the age of WMD what does this have to do with anything? Everything. It is believed, but never verified, that the Soviets sold bioweapons to places like North Korea and Iran. We’ve all witnessed the anthrax scare and the looming smallpox threat and although phages won’t help smallpox (it’s a virus), any bacterial infection spread over an area could be treated in mass with bacteriophages. It’s proven to be inexpensive to produce, and has very few side effects. One of the benefits is, is that when they get in the bloodstream our immune system destroys them as foreign particles, and they don’t have a mechanism to infect us, since their hosts are bacteria (very different cell design).

A venture capitalist originally invested in this research and brought it to America, but it has yet to make him money, or pique the interest of any major company like Novartis (they’re great at growing viruses, they make the world’s supply of flu shot right here in Emeryville, CA). So, maybe if more people are informed about this alternative drug, they can begin to request it. Bacteriophages have also been used as disinfectants for surgical equipment, and hospital rooms, so at the very least we could make the suggestion here. If I ever have some rare bacterial infection, or having invasive surgery I think I’ll demand that Kaiser Permanente (or whoever I’ve sold my soul to at the time) order me some phage medicine from Russia. Because at least then, I know that my exuberant health care costs made somebody actually work, and I’m getting a medicine that won’t kill me in the long term.



wiki Bacterophage
Phage Therapy Center, Republic of Georgia

good for the environment

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