Raving of a Madman

I want to copy parts  of a  review of the  Trump “speech” at the CPAC convention by Amanda Marcotte in Salon. I could not  have said it  better so let me let Amanda say it. The title is: Trump appeared to be losing his mind in a delusional CPAC speech – Why didn’t media cover it that way?

First let me excerpt some of her comments on the speech:

“Trump unleashed a  two-hour-plus rant that sounded at times, more like the delusional ramblings of someone hopped up on drugs or suffering a mental breakdown than anything resembling a  normal political speech.”

After actually hugging an American flag with a weird smirk on this face, “Trump pinged wildly, from topic to topic, ranting about how Democrats want to take away electricity and murder newborns. He engaged in a lengthy rape fantasy about how female immigrants take massive amounts of birth control because they supposedly get raped so much. …he raved about now unfair it is that he is now under investigation for possible criminal conspiracy with Russian intelligence to throw t he election, and wined about it should be easier for him to obstruct justice. “

“There’s simply no way to accurately describe Trump’s behavior without sounding hysterical or, heaven forbid, “biased.” So most media outlets resort to euphemistic language or focus on technically true observations — it’s accurate that Trump criticized special counsel Robert Mueller — while sliding past the more relevant detail, such as the fact that the president of the United States was babbling like a man who hasn’t slept in days.”

”By far the most important takeaway from Cohen’s hearing should have been the pathetic display by Republican members of the House Oversight Committee. With the sole exception of Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, every single Republican avoided asking substantive or serious questions of Cohen. They simply impugned his character (which isn’t difficult), lied in Trump’s defense and teed up excuses for their voters to ignore the growing evidence of the president’s criminality.”

“To put it bluntly, Democrats spent the Cohen hearing trying to expose crimes and Republicans spent it trying to cover them up. To simply describe the difference as “partisan” is to fail readers by drawing a false equivalence between moral and immoral behavior, and to suggest that doing right and doing wrong are equally dirty, if there’s any political gain to be had from either. This kind of coverage portrays political grandstanding, a venal sin, as no better or no different from actively covering up criminal activity.”

“The biggest takeaway from Trump’s speech at CPAC was that the president of the United States is acting as if he were losing his mind. That’s not all that surprising when you consider that his former right-hand man just accused him, under oath, of committing numerous crimes. But someone who takes in the news the way most Americans do — by checking out headlines and reading a few paragraphs of a story, at most — would just assume that Trump was angry this weekend, rather than monumentally unhinged”.

Some relevant Twitter postings by Amanda

AmandaMarcotte

Watching Trump rant incoherently for two hours and reporting only that he appeared angry is a little like watching someone swallow a whole kitten live and only wondering if it will make his throat itchy. Okay, I’ll stop now, but seriously. The situation is bad.

AmandaMarcotte 

Watching that bizarre debacle of a speech and headlining it with “Trump criticizes Mueller” is like watching someone set themselves on fire and focusing on what brand of lighter fluid they used.
‏AmandaMarcotte 

Watching Trump rave like a madman for two hours and reporting only that it was “blistering” is a lot like seeing someone running down the street naked and observing only that his junk is probably cold. Technically accurate, but perhaps not the most relevant issue at hand.

Poor Australia

Who would have thought that Australia, one of the most advanced countries in the world, would be so backward on fighting climate warming. It is also ironic that this country has already suffered more than any other country the terrible effects of global climate change. The problem is mainly their archaic backward political system, which for example rewards companies for using taxpayer funds dedicated to fight climate change for building new coal-powered plants. Their specious reasoning is that the new plants will be more efficient and burn less coal than those being  replaced.  Even China, the world’s major polluter, has decided that “clean coal” plants as green technology investments. In Australia the rot starts at the top. The last 7 prime ministers were essentially climate change deniers, which caused a lot of political turnover  but no change  in policies. Australia is the world’s leading producer and exporter of coal.

Canada used to be my favorite country. It had ocean coasts, boreal forest, indigenous native people, and polite educated people. No more, however, Canada is the only modern country other than Australia that pretends to regard climate change as a  major global problem and yet has a ultra-massive project actually the size of Florida in pristine boreal forest in Alberta to mine shale oil, the most polluting oil ever at every stage of its production. Alberta is essentially a petro-state that produces immense amounts of the greenhouse gas, CO2. The climate scientists have stated that almost all known fossil fuel world-wide and especially tar sand oil in Canada  must remain in the earth if we want to limit global warming to “only”  2 degrees centigrade. At the current rate of CO2 production, the world is heading for a 5 degree warming, which will be a catastrophe for our civilization.  In fact, financial experts believe that all existing fossil fuel projects will become worthless due to the need to leave most if  not all fossil fuel deposits in the earth to limit climate warming.

Australia  is definitely the canary in the global mine to monitor the effect of climate warming. The summer of 2012-13 was the hottest summer since records started in 1910.  In fact, this was  called the “angry summer” and two new color categories had to be added to the weather maps to cover the temperature records set in every state.   It was also the greatest bush fire season in Australian history and the weather people coined a new term to describe these fires - catastrophic. Major flooding also occurred in Queensland and northern NSW caused by evaporating from the warmer ocean.

In order to limit the increase in global temperature increase to 2 degrees centigrade, it was hoped to limit the concentration of CO2 to 350 ppm. However the graph shown below shows that little has been accomplished and the CO2 concentration in June of 2018 was already 410.79 ppm.

The climate scientists point out that the world only has around 10  years left to stop the increase in CO2. And even if this is accomplished, the increase in global temperatures will continue rising due to heating of the ocean.

Melt-Down

I have maintained multiple web sites for some time. These included my old lab home page, a complete bibliography of my published papers with clickable PDF files, an Online Course on Molecular Parasitology, a lecture from my undergraduate course at UCLA (2013) and links to a site with a database of sequences of U-insertion/deletion edited kinetoplast genes, Recently, after a computer web server meltdown, I discovered that the sequence database has actually been quite useful to several colleagues, and perhaps also to others in my field of research.

It also has links to (embarrassing) photos of old (I should say young) lab members and, last but not least, a site with astroimages from my amateur astronomy days.

I also maintain a Blog on Google Blogger at https://larry-thoughtsandmusings.blogspot.com/

I have now moved most of these sites to another web server. Clicking on my old lab home page at http://164.67.82.204/simpsonlab/ will provide links to all these sites. Be sure to inform me of any errors or missing information.

Enjoy!

ORIGINS

I copy below a lecture I gave in my undergraduate course on Molecular Parasitology. Of course this has nothing to do with Parasitology, but I like to think about these things and I thought that the students might also. I told the students that this was not going to be on the exam and to close their notebooks but to open their minds.

ORIGINS

Origin of the Universe

The End of the Beginning?

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) represents 70% of all dementia cases and dementia is the fifth biggest cause of death world-wide.The cause of this disease is unknown and there is no therapy. The universal presence of β-amyloid peptide in plaques and over-expression of mutated versions of the microtubule-associated protein, tau, in “tangles” in the brain were proposed as the possible causes of AD more than 25 years ago. However, the failure rate of the 123 drugs developed to affect amyloid formation of brain plaques in humans has been a disappointing 99%! And recently a study of the brains of eight “superagers” who lived until their 90’s with excellent memory and cognition even though both plaques and tangles were present in brain tissue appears to be a possible counter argument against the amyloid/tau hypothesis.

A recent article in the New Scientist journal entitled “We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it” reviews an intriguing and fairly compelling alternative hypothesis, that the presence of bacteria in the brain coming from gum infections with the common gum bacterium, Porphyromonas gingivalis, represents the primary cause of the dementia and the formation of plaques and tangles  is a secondary event. The classic proof that a microbe causes a specific pure culture disease involves four postulates first proposed by Robert Koch in 1884:  The bacteria must be present in every case of the disease. The bacteria must be isolated from the host with the disease and grown in pure culture. And finally, the specific disease must be reproduced when the bacterium is inoculated into a healthy susceptible host.  These postulates have been confirmed in the case of the bacterial hypothesis for Alzheimers: It was found that P. gingivalis invades and inflames brain regions affected in Alzheimers; that gum infections can worsen symptoms in mice genetically engineered to have Alzheimers and can cause Alzheimers-like brain inflammation, neural damage and amyloid plaques in healthy mice.  P. gingivalis is known to secrete two toxic enzymes called gingipains. These were found in 99% of 54 human Alzheimers brain samples from the hippocampus (The region for memory), and also in the cerebral cortex in three Alzheimers brains. Normal brains sometimes had P. gingivalis and gingipains, but at low levels.

Chronic periodontitis shows a correlation with dementia. It is thought that P. gingivalis can invade white blood cells and cells lining blood vessels and could invade the brain in that way. Invasion might also occur by way of cranial nerves near the mouth. The mechanism for P. gingivalis brain infections to cause dementia could be by triggering the release of amyloid, or it may directly damage the brain, e.g. through inflammation.

The bacterial hypothesis does not eliminate a role for genetics. I copy below from the New Scientist article: "The biggest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s is a variant of the gene that makes the ApoE immune protein. Last year, a team in Sweden found that the gingipains released by P. gingivalis break up the ApoE protein into fragments, cleaving it at the site of a particular amino acid within the protein, and that these fragments may harm nerves. The ApoE4 variant of this protein contains more of this amino acid, suggesting that the reason people who make this variant are at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s may be because harmful levels of ApoE protein fragments build up more quickly in their brains than in those of other people."

If this hypothesis proves correct, it could rapidly lead to effective treatments, such as by preventing gum disease, or blocking gingipains with specific drugs. Initial results in mice studies were very promising.

-- Now please excuse me, I must go brush my teeth.

Comments:

• Takuji Kasamatsu The evidence for the alternative thinking seems strong - is the sample size in humans substantial?

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  Larry Simpson The role of the human microbiome (your gut bacteria) in health and disease is getting stronger. "The iconic case is stomach ulcers, once thought to be caused by stress or excess acid, and treated with acid-lowering medications. Then Australian doctor Barry Marshall showed that a stomach bacterium called Helicobacter pylori was behind them, a feat that won him a Nobel prize."

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  Larry Simpson The bacterial hypothesis does not eliminate a role for genetics. I copy below: "The biggest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s is a variant of the gene that makes the ApoE immune protein. Last year, a team in Sweden found that the gingipains released…See More

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    Dan Ray Hmm Are there people who lack the ApoE4 protein?

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  Paula Vandever MacRae Interesting that our microbiology may be the key to so many things. Thank God for basic science research.

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  Michele Klingbeil I think the NEXT BIG thing will be Oral and Nasal cavity microbiome studies to truly understand the mechanisms in which microbes promote the "healthy" environment of those niches. Maybe we can even figure out a way to keep inhaled viruses at bay. I LOVE MICROBIOLOGY!

Blue Ice from the Sky

Larry Simpson

January 14 at 7:54 PM · 

Blue Ice
Gag me with a spoon - I just read this in a local blurb:
.......while most airline sewage is disposed of properly these days, there have been reports of it being felt by residents. Below is a link to one such report : https://slate.com/…/long-island-couple-pelted-with-poo-wher…

It made me think of once when I was flying cross country. I had just purchased a new expensive trifocal eye glasses and it was not very tight and when I was using the bathroom, it fell into the toilet. I had an existential moral decision to make whether I should quickly stick my hand into the swirling blue liquid and save my glasses, but I rapidly thought better of this. But I did ask the Stewardess to ask the pilot to contact the unfortunate house into which blue ice fell from his airplane during a landing to see if they saw my glasses when it melted.

Oh well, nothing asked, nothing achieved.

I told you so

I hate to say "I told you so" but here it goes. I copy below a posting I did last February which seems to have been further proved by the FBI investigation:

Trump is a Traitor to the United States

This is a powerful statement and should be backed up by evidence.

For some time Trump has treated Russia and in particular Putin with kid gloves. He has claimed that the Mueller investigation is a hoax devised by the Democratic Party. And he also claims, usually multiple times in the same statement, that neither he nor his campaign has committed collusion with the Russians. Today Trump's statement that there is no collusion has been proved false by the new indictments by Mueller of multiple Russians who actually set up shop in the United States, impersonated American citizens and rented space on servers. They opened accounts in banks and in PayPal to pay people to unknowingly do work for them. They had a budget from Russia of around $1,000,000 per month.

Recently Trump refused to enable a new Russian sanctions law that was overwhelmingly passed in both houses. This is illegal since he is required by law to implement this law. He has also refused to the present day to do anything to prevent the Russians from repeating an attack on the 2018 midterm elections, a cyber attack which the heads of the Intelligence Agencies say is ongoing. This in itself is treasonous behavior and may actually be the most significant damage Trump is doing to our country.

Yet another problem is that Trump had people at the White House such as his Private Secretary, Rob Porter, who was not given high level security clearances due to domestic violence and still saw every top secret classified paper that went to Trump's desk, including the daily intelligence briefings. How do we know that Porter was not blackmailed and gave national secrets to the Russians? His son in law, Jared Kushner, also was not given a high level security clearance but nevertheless had access to many top secret material due to his portfolios given by Trump. How do we know what happened? But in any case, Trump himself gave top secret materials to the Russians in the Oval Office when he told them that he fired Comey to stop the investigation of his possible collusion with the Russians.

As for why has Trump acted like this, one need only look at the Steele Dossier. There are reports of witnesses in the hotel who corroborate Steele's most salacious reporting. One witness was an American who claimed to have seen an argument with hotel security over whether the prostitutes would be allowed up to Trump's suite. In addition, the BBC Correspondent, Paul Wood, wrote that he heard about additional compromising material from two sources. And claims of the existence of more video tapes showing even more extreme behavior have been circulating. Trump's behavior could very well be one reason for blackmail by Russia. Another reason could be the likely Russian Oligarch money laundering that Trump and his family appear to have engaged in.

It looks like the Russians were able to essentially take over the US government by engineering the election of Trump as President and blackmailing him to behave as they wish. Trump is a traitor and the continued presence of Trump as President is a true national security problem for our country.