March 31, 2018

Are the "Shakes Ups" a WH Fund Raising Ploy? And By Fund Raising, I Mean Kick Backs.

You have to ask "Why would Trump suddenly announce that he is gonna privatize the VA when he has not done it yet?" He ran on a platform of doing it. He took Citizens United campaign bribes to do it. And then he did not deliver. But now, suddenly, as the 2018 midterms loom, privatizing the VA is suddenly a big priority again.

Or is it? Maybe he just wants the medical industrial complex to give him cash for a slice of the VA pie.

Same with Bolton. Maybe the man who never met a war he did not like is just there so Jarred can sell the rights to supply porta-potties or canned beans for the next war (that will never happen).

If Trump wants to make all the money he can before he has to make a hasty exit, he needs to solicit lots of bribes. The way to do that is to make promises. And what better way to make promises than to replace literally everybody in positions of power with new people who have not been bribed yet so they have no promises to keep?

It is all one big con. And the business people who think that Trump is "doing business" with them are being duped along with the rest of America.

March 29, 2018

Anyone Notice An Increase in Disabled Veteran Federal Employees Being Harassed?

Would like to hear from anyone who has experienced this. I have been hearing some stories lately that have me puzzled. People with up to date FMLA paperwork being told they can not keep doctor's appointments. Employers making extreme demands when its comes to work place accommodation requests. Terminations after one relatively minor event.

As we all know, veterans get first priority when it comes to federal hiring. And many of our nations veterans have been injured during their tour of duty, meaning that they have some type of medical disability. The Americans With Disability Act was passed to keep schools and employers from discriminating against those who can work with reasonable accommodations. If not for this law, every time an employee comes down with a diagnosis of cancer, he or she could find him or herself without a job (and insurance) simply because the employer could say "We don't want the uncertainty of an employee who may get sick. Young and healthy is more reliable."

As we learned after Vietnam, the private sector often does not want to take a chance with veterans and their (possible) disabilities, some of which are not always apparent at first glance. And so, many veterans work for the government. If veterans find themselves forced out of federal jobs, where will they go? And if the federal government is allowed to ignore the ADA, what about those who work in the private sector? Will we all become trash, to be used up and then discarded when we reach the ripe old age of 50, old enough to have heart disease and cancer but too young for Medicare?

March 18, 2018

Can Member of the House Comittee Who Insist "No Collusion" Be Indicted For Obstruction of Justice?

I ask because of this story about a member of the committee who has now gone public to insist that the only reason he found "no collusion" was because he was not told to look for collusion. Seems to me that he has been talking to a criminal defense attorney.

http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/379005-house-intel-republican-panel-did-not-investigate-collusion

On a related note, so many Republicans are demanding that Trump NOT fire Mueller. People like Ryan. Have their lawyers been telling them that this is their best defense against an obstruction of justice charge? Even as they secretly help Trump and Russia collude?

Looks to me like everyone in DC expects this to end up in court or Congress (or court) or both and is acting accordingly except Trump who probably still entertains fantasies of being rescued by Putin on a white horse.

March 17, 2018

(Russian) Talking Point Du Jour: Trump Is Too Stupid To Be Dangerous

Yes, Trump can be comical in a creepy kind of way. But I find the number of threads today stressing how very moronic he is kind of unsettling since I get the sense that something is going down in Washington, and that the folks who are engineering it (probably Russian mob mastermind Semion Mogilevich or maybe various ex-KGB spies or maybe all of the above) want us to think that we have nothing to fear from this new aging, Cheeto faced Dumbya among us.

Remember how absolutely stupid the Village Idiot from Texas was? Remember how much grief his handlers put us through? Do not be fooled by those who pretend that events in DC are part of a sit-com. This is our country. This is our economy. These are our children and this is our air and our Social Security and our health and our safety that are on the line.

When Trump crosses the line, he should be held to the same standards as any other president. He does not get a pass just because his handlers and apologists claim "Aw shucks! Look at him! He can't help it. He's too pitiful to hurt anyone."

March 15, 2018

Koch Brothers Will Now Run State Department

Source watch on Mike Pompeo

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Mike_Pompeo

We should expect fewer wars for oil and more Crusades for Oil under Pompeo. Because there is one thing Putin and the Koch Brothers have had in common since the days of Stalin---oil.



Oh, and Mike Pence is the Koch Brother's tool, as well, meaning Trump is now expendable and may be the next person without a job at the Whitehouse.

March 11, 2018

Did Russia Meddle in 2008 Election as Revenge for Clinton's Opposition to Balkan Genocides?

I ask, because Putin came to power on a wave of pro-Russian fascism sparked by the Clintons response to genocide being committed by ethnic Slavs in the Balkans. I believe that Putin and a number of Russian right wingers hate the Clintons for shining a light on the crimes against humanity committed in the Balkans. I believe that Putin and his fellow Russian fascists made up their minds that no Clinton would ever be in a position of power again in the US.

?w=640

All those Russian moles were not planted overnight. Many of them were sent during the Cold War. I would like to find out what they were doing in the 1990s and 2000s. Did they aid Bush? Did they work against Clinton in the 2008 primary? Without letting Obama know, of course. Obama would not have allowed it. He was not a dirty tricks kind of president. I love and respect the man as much as I despise Trump. But he can not be everywhere at once, and he can not be held responsible for Russian agents who might have posed as supporters.

I keep going back to the media circus over the 'sniper fire' that did not happen in Bosnia. The press kept harping on that. No one talked about the genocide. No one cared about the genocide. They only cared about the "lie". And it came up again in 2016. Russia must have loved the fact that the genocide in the Balkans was now politically more of a liability for Clinton than it was Russia---even though all she did was tell the story wrong, while the Slavs, allies of Russia attempted an ethnic purge of civilian men, women and children and buried the bodies in unmarked mass graves.

So, anyway, Mr. Mueller, while you are investigating online Russian moles pretending to be concerned Americans, will you check to see if any of them were at work in 2008 attempting to pretend to be "for" Obama but actually attempting to use the primary as an excuse to "taint" Clinton so that she would be unelectable in the future? I have seen a lot of Democratic primaries, but things were done and said in 2008 that crossed lines that were not crossed even in 1968 and 1972. Folks that should have known that they would be campaigning for Clinton as the likely Dem nominee in 2016 called her "dumb blond" and "monster" and even "cunt". It would have been very easy for Russian moles posing as concerned Democrats online to to fuel fires with inflammatory posts and by rating up inflammatory posts and creating the impression that the Democratic rank and file loved that kind of excessive caricature that we witnessed in 2008--like KO comparing her to Madeline Kahn in "What's Up Doc?" Did Russian moles give excessive rhetoric 100,000 "likes"? Did the political pundits who have careers to think about get snookered into wounding the eventual Democratic nominee with friendly fire that would lead some left leaning voters with long memories to say "I could never vote for that woman"?

This would require long range planning, but I can see Russia doing long range planning. And, for Putin, I think the hatred of the Clintons is personal.

Note: I am not rehashing an old election here, though if there are any Russian moles reading this they will claim that I am. Because they do not want us to have this type of discussion of the dirty tricks that they (might) employ. If we know what they are up to, then they can not do their job this year, which is to interfere with the Democratic primaries. The only way Putin will maintain control of Congress will be to get the Dems to nominate a bunch of general elections un--electables. If he can not do that, he will have to finance a bunch of third party splitters, but that is costlier and riskier--easier to detect.

Ok, flame away. I'm wearing my asbestos undies, and since I am not a paid political pundit, I don't give a fuck.

Oh, and it is entirely possible that Russian mole/bots may be under orders to ignore all threads that reference the Balkan genocides since the last thing that Putin wants to do is to remind the world that he came to power under a Russian mandate to support fellow Slavs who commit genocide. It might be bad for business. Maybe if we really want to hit Russia where it hurts, we should be making movies about the Balkan genocide, doing comic books about the Balkan genocide, writing books about it and making sure that no one ever forgets it. Meddling in another country's election----shrug. Genocide---that's pretty serious in comparison. I know which one gets me more hot and bothered.



https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-city-celebrating-putin-trump-and-a-notorious-war-criminal

March 11, 2018

Influenza: A Theory

This is a speculative piece about influenza, why it exists and why it seems to be getting worse. Yes, we travel more. Diseases are easier to spread. But I think there is something else going on, something about the 20th century that made pandemics of influenza inevitable.

Here is the story of influenza from the bits and pieces I have been able to gather from online research. I will put at the links last. Influenza has been around for thousands of years. The Greeks described influenza type illness in detail. And snails have been a staple of the diet of Mediterranean peoples for tens of thousands of years (I will get to why that it important later).

In the late 19th century, the first big documented flu epidemic, the so called Russia flu occurred. But that was nothing compared to the Influenza A of 1918. Years later, scientists would trace the influenza that caused the deadly 1918 pandemic to pig lungworms, a type of nematode. File that away for later reference, too.

A few decades passed. And then we got Asian Flu in 1957 and Hong Kong Flu in 1968 and Swine Flu in 2009. And in recent years, we are seeing the emergence of new strains faster than vaccine manufacturers can keep up. Why?

Here is my model for influenza. I think that the virus lives inside nematodes that live inside snails. The nematodes have a symbiotic relationship with their snail hosts. When the snail population is threatened, the nematodes get to work releasing influenza virus which just happens to target some of snails biggest natural predators---birds, especially aquatic birds like ducks, wild boar, rats, seals, humans. Plus, the snails (which benefit if their natural predators come down with flu) secrete a substance that allows influenza virus to survive for extended periods of time outdoors, waiting for some hungry duck to pick it up, contract flu and infect its flock--it is the snail secretion studies as well as the fact that seals and humans are the only two targets of flu b and the main food source we have in common is mollusks that made me think about snails as the likely prey that influenza is meant to protect.

There have been snails for a very very long time. There has been influenza for at least a few thousand years. What changed in the last one hundred years? Not travel. In 1918, people had been moving around by train for decades. Airplanes would not be commonly used for another thirty years. It cant just have been the world war. There was no influenza epidemic after WWII.

I think we saw the rise of influenza because of the agricultural revolution that took place in Asia in rice farms. It began in the early 20th century. And then, in the mid 1950s, in China, it took off again. Increased production meant increased swampland full of rice which attracts snails. Rice farmers use ducks as natural pest control. The combination of an increased number of snails with their nematodes that can carry influenza--note that nematodes have been shown to be excellent vectors for phages or viruses---along with an increased number of ducks that can catch influenza and an increased number of humans that can also catch influenza all living in close proximity is the perfect natural petri dish for brewing up lots of flu and encouraging lots of genetic shifting.



Now, as promised, links:

Guess what? There is a major avian influenza epidemic every 2-4 years. And scientists have been unable to figure out where the flu virus hides between outbreaks.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2660440/

We should get the guys who wrote the article above together with the authors of the next article. They conclude that snails secret a slime that allows influenza to survive outdoors.

https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/potential-role-of-fresh-water-apple-snails-on-hn-influenza-virus-persistence-and-concentration-in-nature-2167-7719.1000119.php?aid=38277

It could be the snail all by itself, but nematodes (round worms) have been described as natures perfect taxis for phages.




https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1393236/

We all know what (bacterio)phages are. They are bits of DNA and RNA that infect and grow within bacteria. They get things done from an evolutionary standpoint. And they can confer resistance. But how do bits of DNA and RNA get from one bacterial population to another? They don't have legs. They don't have wings. They don't have cars. They don't have phones so they cannot call Uber. If they want to get around they have to hitch a ride. And what better vector (taxi) than the nematode which is everywhere?

Ok, but how do I link nematodes with the influenza virus? Easy. I google.

Check out this study. Give rodents nematodes and then infect them with influenza and the virus goes to town. Something about the nematode assists the influenza in doing its dirty work. And rats are notorious for their love of nice fresh juicy snails.

Interaction of Nematospiroides dubius and influenza virus in mice
Author
Wieslaw Chowaniec 2, Richard B. Wescott 3, Larry L. Congdon

https://doi.org/10.1016/0014-4894(72)90007-0
Abstract




Nematospiroides dubius is a rat parasite that hijacks the immune system of the rat in order to achieve a chronic infection state. In the process of hijacking the rat immune system, it also makes the rodent more vulnerable to influenza. See? The great circle of life. Or the great circle of death.

When I first started my research, I was suspicious of cicadas. They have that odd every 13 or 17 year emergence cycle. And bird populations have been shown to decline in the year before a cicada emergence. However, I now think that cicadas may just be taking advantage of the every 2-4 year year avian influenza epidemics. 13 and 17 are both four times x plus 1, meaning that cicadas who emerge in these years are likely to come out just after a bird flu epidemic.


Oh, one more strange thing. As of about ten years ago, we now have a new influenza, one that infects cows. How? How are cows getting influenza a disease of omnivores? Has someone been feeding cows ground of snails instead of ground up cow brains? Snail feed for animals is very popular right now. But it is not supposed to be given to cows since some types of snails carry liver flukes. No cattle rancher would ever give a cow something that might make the cow sick, would he....?

http://mbio.asm.org/content/5/2/e00031-14.full

https://www.feedipedia.org/node/200
https://burnabyredwigglers.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/compost-worms-as-a-source-of-protein-for-animal-feed/

Disclaimer. This is a theory. It has not been proved.

March 10, 2018

Why Is There Now a Bovine Influenza?

For a very long time, influenza was a disease of pigs, birds, human, seals, rats and occasionally horses and dogs. But recently, they have found a new form of influenza, in cows, one that has the potential to cross over into people. What gives?

http://mbio.asm.org/content/5/2/e00031-14.full

Could it have something to do with the fact that cattle feed is expensive? Now that mammal protein can no longer use used (Mad Cow Disease) ranchers have had to look for other protein sources. Like worms, things that cows would not ordinarily hunt in nature but if you throw them in their food, they will eat them, the same way they ate diseased cow brains. One would hope that the ranchers would not use snails, since one type of snail carries liver flukes. However apple snails are a popular protein feed source for chickens, pigs and ducks so who is to say that some enterprising cattle rancher somewhere has not been feeding it to cows, too, knowing that this snail does not carry the liver fluke? And, if my theory is correct, the nematodes that live within certain juicy protein rich critters---like snails or worms---may be the reservoir for influenza.

https://www.feedipedia.org/node/200
https://burnabyredwigglers.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/compost-worms-as-a-source-of-protein-for-animal-feed/

I was told that the reason ancient Hebrews banned pork was because of diseases like trichinosis. However, you can kill trichinosis by cooking the meat correctly. What if the pig issue arose because the Hebrews noticed that if you did not keep pigs you had less flu outbreaks? Cattle, on the other hand, chewing their nice health cud, were nice healthy animals. Until we started giving them diseased cow brain, worms, snails and maybe even left over pork chops to chew with their cud.

Will we have to start dosing our nations cattle with Tamiflu to keep them safe the way we do our chicken flocks?

March 9, 2018

Divide and Conquer 101: "Dem leaders rally behind anti-abortion rep in tough primary contest"

Confused by all the political propaganda? You don't need to be. Doing a close reading of the news is just like doing a close reading of any text. You do not have to feel helpless when the GOP or the Kremlim bombards you with their carefully crafted message, one designed to push your buttons and make you act like a Fembot from Austin Powers. You can learn how to be an active rather than a passive reader.

Lesson one:

This article is from the Hill. It was linked in todays Latest Threads. It was written by Mike Lillis. I do not know who picked the title, so I am not going to accuse Mr. Lillis of being part of the Republican conspiracy to divide and conquer the Democratic Primary. He may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the kind of story that Putin and the KGB need right now. A story that goes "Democratic Party Centrists are so power mad that they are selling out the interests of (insert important member of the Democratic base)." Since most of the damage from a story like this is done by the title--people do not actually read the article attached, this story is a feather in the cap of some editor at the Hill and maybe in the cap of the author himself. I am not going to commit on that without reviewing Lillis body of work as whole ( I will save that for later). Maybe he is another John Solomon. Maybe he is just some dude. However, in the all important first paragraph ,Lillis/his editor anoints the opposition candidate as "anti-bullying" which, in today's climate is like calling her the Virgin Mary which makes Nancy Pelosi (see the second most important, last paragraph) the Whore of Babylon for violating her principles and supporting an anti-abortion candidate. How do you feel about a journalist/editor calling Pelosi the Whore Babylon? Remember, subtext counts, often more than the spoken text.

But enough of that. This post is not about Lillis/his editor. It is about that annoying article title. This thread is meant to be a quick exercise in recognizing political propaganda and responding to it in the appropriate way--which is to condemn the source of the propaganda, not spread its divide and conquer message.

Anytime you see an article like this linked in Latest, I strongly recommend taking a step back and asking yourself "Why were these words chosen?" The article title is never chosen at random. Someone did this on purpose. And our job as Democratic is to stop these kinds of dirty tricks in their tracks.

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/377660-dem-leaders-rally-behind-lipinski-in-tough-primary-contest

A quick word about propaganda pieces. Many readers will only see the title. A smaller number will only read the first and last paragraphs. This is where you will find the propaganda. Often, seemingly reputably writers will fill in the rest of the article with a lot of qualifiers and "nothing is black and white, everything is shades of gray can't we all just get along some of my best friends are Black, gay, handicapped...."---but the meat and potatoes, the take away point will be in the title and first and last paragraphs. And once again, a well intentioned author can have his work butchered by the editor, so I cant really blame Mr. Lillis unless he does this over and over.