Day: October 17, 2016

Healthy mice born from first artificial lab-grown eggs

Leave a comment

❝ The birth of baby mice made from artificial eggs has prompted calls for a public debate on whether the same approach should ever be offered by fertility clinics.

Nearly a dozen rodents were born after scientists created the early-stage mouse eggs from stem cells and nurtured them in the lab until they were mature enough to fertilise with mouse sperm.

The team went on to make hundreds of embryos from the lab-grown eggs and implanted them into female mice, leading some to give birth to apparently healthy mouse pups.

❝ Though far from ready for use in humans today, the procedure could potentially be improved upon in coming years and eventually made safe enough to treat couples with fertility problems, scientists said. The technology suggests it may one day be possible for doctors to make viable eggs from the skin cells of an infertile woman…

❝ …With stem cell science progressing so fast, some researchers are keen to thrash out the potential implications for humans now. “Ethically, this issue has yet to be discussed fully by scientists and society,” said Azim Surani, a stem cell scientist at the Gurdon Institute at Cambridge University, who was not involved in the latest work. “This indeed is the right time to start a debate and involve the wider public in these discussions, long before, and in case, the procedure becomes feasible in humans.”

❝ Labs around the world are now expected to repeat the experiments before attempting the same procedure in larger animals, such as pigs, sheep and cows. Before it can help humans to multiply, it might benefit other animals. “With such technology we might be able to rewind the process of mammalian extinction,” said Dusko Ilic, stem cell scientist at King’s College London.

If nothing else, this will provide full employment for priests, populist pundits and politicians.

Voter impersonation fraud – 31 credible incidents out of one billion ballots cast

4 Comments

❝ Voter ID laws are back in the news once again, with two new opinions from the Wisconsin Supreme Court late last week dealing with the state’s ID requirement, which would allow people to vote only if they provide certain forms of government-issued ID. The Court made some minor changes to the law but otherwise upheld it. However, the ID requirement is still on hold pending a federal lawsuit.

Part of this litigation — and any rational debate about the issue generally — hinges on two things: costs and benefits. The costs of these sorts of laws vary, because the laws themselves differ from state to state (some are far more burdensome than others). The ostensible benefits, though, are all the same. And in addressing these purported benefits, the Wisconsin Supreme Court blew it. Twice.

❝ First, the court cited the idea that ID laws could enhance public confidence–that is, in theory, the laws might make us feel better about elections in that they might provide some security theater. It turns out, though, that this effect is hard to spot…

Second, the court said that ID laws can help stop fraud. It then cited an example of recent fraud … that ID laws aren’t designed to stop…

❝ Instead, requirements to show ID at the polls are designed for pretty much one thing: people showing up at the polls pretending to be somebody else in order to each cast one incremental fake ballot. This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens.

❝ I’ve been tracking allegations of fraud for years now, including the fraud ID laws are designed to stop. In 2008, when the Supreme Court weighed in on voter ID, I looked at every single allegation put before the Court. And since then, I’ve been following reports wherever they crop up.

To be clear, I’m not just talking about prosecutions. I track any specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.

So far, I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country. If you want to check my work, you can read a comprehensive list of the incidents below.

To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballots were cast in that period.

So much for the happy horseshit shoveled atop public understanding of electoral fraud. The Republican Party in general – and lately, Donald Trump, el Supremo – have been parroting this crap at the expense of state budgets and constitutional rights.

Time to lose this latest Big Lie before it becomes any more acceptable by gullibilus voter americanus.

What are the goals of the Trump/Bannon White Nationalist coalition after Election Day?

26 Comments

This week, Donald Trump’s campaign took a new and even darker turn. As multiple women accused the Republican Presidential nominee of sexual harassment and sexual assault, Trump gave speeches on Thursday and Friday that had two themes: he denied all the charges against him, most notably by arguing that his accusers were not attractive enough for him to assault, and he claimed that the accusations are part of a global conspiracy against him, involving the Clintons, the news media, international banks.

Trump has long been a conspiracy theorist. He gained a prominent role in American politics in 2011 by questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace…It’s no surprise, then, that Trump has been advised for decades by Roger Stone, a prominent political strategist and conspiracy theorist who believes that Lyndon B. Johnson had Kennedy killed…and that George H. W. Bush may have tried to kill Ronald Reagan…

But it took someone a little smarter — and more cynical — than Trump, Stone, or Jones to distill Trump’s platform of protectionism, closed borders, and white identity politics into one message about a global conspiracy. The man behind this new message is Steve Bannon, who became the C.E.O. of the Trump campaign in August. Bannon is on leave from Breitbart, the right-wing news site where he served as executive chairman, and where he honed a view of international politics that Trump now parrots.

Bannon embraces the growing populist movement in America, including the “alt-right,” a new term for white nationalists, who care little about traditional conservative economic ideas and instead stress the need to preserve America’s European heritage and keep out non-whites and non-Christians. Under Bannon, Breitbart promoted similar movements in Europe, including the United Kingdom Independence Party, the National Front in France, Alternative for Germany, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands. Bannon likes to say that his goal is “to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.” After the election is over, Breitbart, which has offices in London and Rome, plans to open up new bureaus in France and Germany.

This ambition extends to supporting the election of right-wing candidates…

…He believes that the white working class is still the key to the election, because the Clintons have never been able to win without this demographic. While Bill Clinton won two Presidential elections with the support of white working-class voters, this view is wildly at odds with recent changes in the electorate, which have made the Democrats more reliant on minority voters and college-educated whites…

Bannon’s view of the media is similarly narrow. He sees the dominant conservative media players as the establishment, not as allies. He views Fox News as highly unreliable on the nationalist cause…He despises Rupert Murdoch—the chairman and C.E.O. of the News Corporation…When Bannon ran Breitbart, he didn’t want his reporters appearing on Fox, because he believed the cable news channel had made smaller conservative news outlets subservient to it…

Bannon…is a right-wing new-media entrepreneur who is building a political and news infrastructure that mimics Europe’s nationalists. After Trump’s speech on Thursday, when he linked Clinton to “international banks” and “global financial powers,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, issued a statement that Trump “should avoid rhetoric and tropes that have historically been used against Jews and still reverberate today.”

The rhetoric that Bannon is feeding Trump makes it increasingly likely that Trump will lose in a landslide. Polling averages show Trump trailing Clinton by eight points, the largest gap since August…Most election forecasts put Clinton’s chance of victory at about eighty per cent.

Trump’s response to these numbers has been to tell his supporters, repeatedly in recent days, that the election is “rigged,” creating a sense of grievance about the likely results that can be exploited after November 8th. Trump and Bannon have given up on trying to defeat Clinton. They seem more interested in creating a platform for a new ethno-nationalist politics that may bedevil the Republican Party—and the country—for a long time to come.

To me, the only question to be resolved is what will they end up being called. Will they win the battle for control of the Republican Party – still an important name – and defeat more traditional Congressional Republicans? Will they maintain a position within the Republican Party as the new leaders of the Tea Party – created by fossil fuel barons like the Koch Bros and creeps like Dick Armey. Or will they try to take the Tea Party out of the Republican Party forming a right-wing 3rd Party – if they lose the battle for internal control of ideology and the all important purse strings.

I don’t care what the answer is. Recognizing the likelihood of this proto-fascist movement bringing together everyone from “respectable” Congressional racists like Jeff Session all the way over to Klan and militia types – my responsibility is to support movements for democratic solutions on the Left, within and without the Democrats, and oppose the dangers presented by a united white supremacist, fascist movement in America.

This is only the beginning, folks.