KellanStec

Horrible plays on words aside, this is obscene. You know “scooter” Libby? That guy that was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice? Yeah, he doesn’t have to serve the thirty month sentence that was ordered by a federal judge. Bush rescued him.

Who in the world do the administrators think they are? He was convicted. Literally found guilty of his crimes, and he does not have to serve the punishment for the crimes he committed because Bush takes care of his own, and is apparently above the law. Does he think that just because he is president, that makes it okay to disregard the law? I guess so. Libby still has to pay the $250,000 fine and the conviction still stands–he just doesn’t have to serve time. The fine should be no problem. Hell, Bush and Cheney will probably cut him a check.

Absolutely ludicrous. When anyone else commits a crime, they do their time if they are convicted. Not Bush or his friends. I’m really hoping this motivates the senate to impeach after Bush also ignored the subpoenas that were issued to him over certain White House documents. Deliberations have begun. I saw we throw Bush’s ass in prison for lying to an entire nation, needlessly killing innocent Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, and being a giant douche.

Bush claims to be a good Christian–doing God’s work. He surrounds himself with people who are Christians like himself. What does the Bible say about the administration’s actions? Prepare yourself for hypocrisy:

Proverbs 6:16-19
16 There are six things which the LORD hates, Yes, seven which are an abomination to Him:
17 Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, And hands that shed innocent blood,
18 A heart that devises wicked plans, Feet that run rapidly to evil,
19 A false witness who utters lies, And one who spreads strife among brothers.

Holy shit! What happened to following God’s word? The Lord hates George Bush (or at least his actions) and everyone involved in their criminal activities. I wonder if Bush has even bothered to read anything that’s written in the Bible.

So, where was I? Oh, yeah. Impeach Bush and throw Libby’s ass in prison where it belongs. That is all.

UPDATE 07/03/07: The White House has issued a press release for Bush’s executive clemency action. It appears to be written by Bush, but I don’t see any made-up words, spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors. It’s probably written by one of his goons. Needless to say, the explanation is empty and unsatisfying. I’m moving to Canada.

Thanks to Hemant for the story.

To the regular readers that I probably don’t even have, I am sorry for my lack of activity in the past two months. My summer job has been keeping me very busy. I might write about that later.

A few days ago, I saw this article, and found it to be very interesting. Apparently, some scientists have managed to inject foreign DNA into a bacterium of another species with few adverse side effects. The bacterium acted as though it were the organism from which the DNA originated. The success rate was not very high (1 out of every 150,000 attempts), but with more research the rate should improve.

The team includes Craig Venter (the first man to have his entire genome read) and Ham Smith (a Nobel Prizewinner). Venter was featured on The Colbert Report on February 27, 2007 and is also the co-founder of Synthetic Genomics. I suggest visiting their website and looking around. It’s cool stuff. They describe the process in greater detail there–and with pictures!

Anyone familiar with genetics knows that this “species transplant” is a huge step for scientists. What exactly does this mean for us? Well, with more research and fine-tuning of the technique, we will be able to inject synthetic genes into bacterium (or even multicellular organisms!) to basically get them to do whatever we want. We could program them to digest toxic chemicals into something harmless, produce fuel, absorb CO₂ from the air, among many other uses.

Here’s what I envision scientists doing with this amazing technology. They could start from scratch, and create a genome minimal to supporting life in the bacterium. This would only require genes for metabolizing energy, reproduction, and other (minor?) cell functions. From this “parent genome”, they could add all kinds of genetic material. This is entirely possible with the help of computers, although there would be a significant amount of time involved until we can perfect the technique.

I like this quote from another article:

Journalists have often asked if the creation of artificial life is a step too far, whether Dr Venter and his team are ‘playing God’. (‘We don’t play,’ Ham Smith likes to joke.)

It will be interesting to see how long it takes the team to develop an entirely new organism from scratch. Will “within months” be accurate?

Further information:
Download the mp3 interview with Roger Highfield. (2.1 MB)
Visit the Synthetic Genomics homepage.

Yesterday, one of my friends forwarded me to this article on Newsweek. It discusses some new discoveries in the physiology and cell mechanics of the human body. Apparently, once someone has died–that is, their heart has stopped beating–their cells aren’t really dead. Clinically, their body is declared dead, even though their cells are not. The cells can survive for an hour or more with no oxygen!

What was even more amazing is what triggers the cells to die. After more than five minutes of oxygen deprivation, the cells die when the oxygen supply is resumed–a process called reperfusion. The cell death is a misfiring of the natural process of cell suicide (apoptosis) carried out by the mitochondria. This cell suicide is a method of controlling cancer. When the cells are deprived of oxygen and are reperfused more than five minutes after deprivation, the cells are tricked into thinking that they are cancerous and kill themselves. Dr. Lance Becker quotes:

It looks to us as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die.

Amazing! The implications of this are startling: the standard procedures for treating victims of a heart attack are exactly backward. In attempting to restore oxygen to the cells–and succeeding–we are inadvertently killing the cells.

So, doctors are now experimenting with new methods of resuscitation. What they do is use a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain while the heart can be safely restarted with minimal cell death resulting. The procedure found an eighty percent success rate among a group of 34 individuals, while the traditional method produced a fifteen percent success rate.

The article closes with a chilling quote:

The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to resolve that paradox in favor of life.

Now, my friend and I were thinking: what could this mean to the world’s religions that believe in an afterlife? If we brought back a number of people from an hour or more of death, we would know for certain whether or not one exists. We would be able to verify what science says about near-death experiences–that they are a result of the natural release of chemicals of a dying brain. Many religions rely on the afterlife as a “great equalizer” for the injustices that we suffer in this world. It gives comfort to those who have lost a loved one to know that they are in a better place.

How many people would be willing to accept the truth if it were presented to them? I wouldn’t have much of a choice to accept the reality if we discovered that there was no afterlife. On the flip side, what if we were to discover for certain that there was an afterlife? Those who do not believe in the supernatural would have to radically alter their worldview to reconcile with this new evidence. Those of faith could boast to be certain about something that no human could possibly be certain about today. I am not saying that this itself could determine whether or not an afterlife exists, but I think there’s reasonably strong evidence that can go either way.

So, my question is: if we could unequivocally say whether or not there was an afterlife, would you be willing to radically alter your current worldview to coincide with the new evidence?

I realize that it has been nearly two weeks since my last update. The main reason is that I am just kicking off finals week. Sadly, rugby is over. But on the plus side, I don’t have to dedicate much time to that anymore and I can concentrate on my studies. Finals shouldn’t be too difficult for me this semester. I am only taking twelve credits worth of actual class, but I am also testing out of website design. I still need to finish that website too. Here’s what my finals schedule looks like:

• Tuesday: Sociology – 150 pt. comprehensive final (10:30am-12:30pm), German – presentation final (1:00pm-3:00pm)
• Wednesday: Anthropology – final research paper (8:00am-10:00am)
• Thursday: Server Management – hacker security final (8:00am-10:00am)

A fairly light week compared to some of my friends. The Sociology should be fine; I haven’t had a problem with Snowden’s tests yet. Evan and I are doing our German presentation on sauerkraut and dumplings. He is making a crock-pot of it and reading the recipe, and I will give a brief history of the food. It has to be done entirely in German, but doesn’t have to be very long.

I haven’t started the Anthropology paper yet, but I plan to get to it tonight. The assignment is to choose a culture from a list and write why I think it best represents an Indo-European culture. It might be a bit tricky to write a paper about that, but I should manage. I think the most enjoyable final will be for Server Management. We get to hack into a Windows computer from a remote site! It should be a lot of fun.

Aside from classes, I hope to have as much fun as possible with my friends up here before I have to leave them for three months. We’ll probably go to Norfolk and see Spiderman 3 together if it works out okay. I can’t wait for that. So, since I don’t have a very busy week, if you would like to do something with me before summer break hits, let me know!

Chances are good that a modern feminist chosen at random would have you believe that certain words in the English language are a derivation from the male root, and make it seem like women are inferior. Words like female and woman seem to be based off of a male root word, with a prefix to indicate the opposite sex.

In anthropology today, I was surprised to learn that this is not the case. We were discussing language, and my professor made a point to stop at this topic. She said that in “Ye Olde English”, man was simply used to indicate a person, regardless of gender. The word human has the root humus, which means earth. The word human means literally “earth person”. The respective words to indicate gender for male and female were werman and wifman. Man was gender neutral. Eventually, the wer prefix was dropped and man was then indication of masculinity. In case you were wondering, the word “wife” comes from the old word, wifman.

The possible reason for this is because England was a patriarchal, or male dominated society. Just because the meaning of a word was changed at some point in the history of a language, does this someone should be offended by its changed meaning? There are a number of other attributes to our language that are sexist. Example: Mother Nature. Vehicles are commonly referred to as female. They are not meant to be offensive. They aren’t meant to demean anybody. The words human and mankind were not meant to refer only to men. They refer to people. Should we alter major words in our language simply because someone is offended by their imagined meaning?

We have the words fireman, mailman, and milkman are called so because historically these jobs were done only by men. Should the language change because a few women choose an occupation that was largely occupied by men when the occupation was created? Some of these words have been changed to gender-neutral variants, such as firefighter and mail carrier. I’m wondering if anyone is offended by the homophonic word “mail”, and would have it changed to “postage”. There are derogatory terms used for men too, you know. Buddy, buster, stud, etc.

Changing words that are deemed offensive by a few people is absolutely ridiculous and excessive political correctness. If we eliminate every mention of men in our words, our language is left butchered. We get herstory instead of history. Disregard the fact that history has nothing to do with the pronon “his”. Vikings? What about the Viqueens?! Thomas Jefferdaughter!? This is incredibly stupid. It’s just like the people in Texas who wanted their official greeting changed from “hello” to “heaveno”. What on earth are they thinking?! Might as well eliminate the word hell from everything–like seasheavens.

There have also been movements to change feminine words that contain imaginary male roots. Womyn is the proposed new spelling of woman, since woman is sexist. If arbitrarily removing vague masculine references from a language isn’t sexist, I don’t know what is. I thought the goal of feminists was to eliminate sexism? The fact is, women and men are different. You can’t alter a language to change that. Men are, in general, more muscular than women. But, there are some women who are stronger than most men. Women are, in general, better at child rearing than men. However, I know of a few men who are better at caring for their child than their wife. That’s reality; it just has to be dealt with.

Besides, there are more pressing issues in women’s rights. In Muslim countries, women are commonly flogged for showing an inch too much skin. They are not allowed to operate automobiles. There is no reason why a woman in the United States should be complaining about their oppression. Granted, there are cases where this does not apply, but the general rule of thumb* is that a feminist is full of herself.

So let’s laugh about it. Offended by those wicked men? Smile. Remember what Stephen Colbert once said, “If we all stopped talking about racism, wouldn’t racism just go away?” When you get pissy because you think something is racist or sexist, you are labeling what’s racist and sexist. Sometimes someone is purposefully sexist, and if you complain you are giving them instructions on how to offend. It’s not always that big of a deal. I will close with a joke that you’ve probably already heard to lighten your spirits. Don’t lie, you know it’s hilarious.

What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, you told the bitch twice already.

* About the rule of thumb: what you’ve heard is false. Its origin never had anything to do with domestic assault, and the first recorded case referencing the phrase to domestic violence was in 1976.