Tonight’s topic is three parent babies and there’s a lot of confusion about just what those are.

Cells are not just undifferentiated masses of goo, they have microscopic structures similar to the organs of multicellular organisms and one of those is the Mitochondria.  Now the principal function of  Mitochondria is to convert Glucose and Fatty Acids (cell food) into Adenosine triphosphate which can be used either for energy or to construct cell structures.  It also, to a lesser extent, produces a similar chemical, Cyclic adenosine monophosphate, which carries intracellular signals and regulates the conversion of ATP into energy or structural elements.

In addition to supplying cellular energy, mitochondria are involved in other tasks such as signaling, cellular differentiation, cell death, as well as maintaining the control of the cell cycle and cell growth.

To assist in these tasks Mitochondria have their own DNA which both disassembles the incoming Glucose and Fatty Acids and assembles the ATP and AMP designating whether the ATP is to be converted to energy or used by Nucleic DNA for further processing into more complex proteins.

Mitochondrial DNA is unique and distinct from Nucleic DNA, is passed only from mother to offspring, and has no bearing whatever on the unique characteristics of the multicellular organism (what we would normally think of as genetics like hair, eye, and skin color).  If damaged or defective though it can produce several diseases related to Cellular respiration (it’s been implicated in Juvenile Diabetes for instance).

The British Parliament has recently approved a procedure that in cases of In Vitro Fertilisation will allow for Doctors in cases where damage to the Mitochondrial DNA is detected to replace that DNA with DNA from a donor, creating a “three parent baby”.

Of course Conservatives are up in arms as they are about anything regarding sex, but a surprising number of supposedly intelligent people are also buying into the concept that this minor procedure opens the door to eugenics and “designer babies”.

We’ll see tonight if Larry is fooled.

Do you know what Mitochondrial DNA is?

Just keeping it 100.

Continuity

E. Coli Nation

Next week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Monday 2/9: Patricia Arquette
• Tuesday 2/10: David Axelrod
• Wednesday 2/11: Colin Firth
• Thursday 2/12: TBA

Bob Odenkirk will be on to pitch his new series Better Call Saul which premieres February 8, 2015.  I was never into Breaking Bad, the original series that spawned this spin off, so I can’t say from personal knowledge, but critics I’ve read say it’s not nearly as dark as the original and the advertising and preview clips seem to bear this out.

The 2 part web exclusive extended interview with Wes Moore (ugh) and the real news below.

For years now I’ve been kinda pissed off at Bill Cosby, not because of the rapes (I simply didn’t know about them, celebrity gossip is of very little interest to me even if true) but because I felt he was unduly critical of, and set unrealistic expectations for, black fathers.

If you listen to his early work you’ll realized that his relationship with Big Russell (his dad) was dysfunctional and violent and even the warm and fuzzy stories he told about his interactions with his wife and children were abusive power struggles, at least in the mental and emotional sense.

And then he spent 8 years as TVs favorite Dad, a loveable curmudgeon straight out of the 50s, tough but fair.  Not just that, but rich too.  He a Doctor, his wife an Attorney, they owned their own Brownstone in Brooklyn Heights.

1%ers.

Needless to say this is not the life experience of most U.S. citizens, let alone African-American ones.

The pont of the show in Cosby’s mind was to show how to raise successful children with the measure of that success being college graduation.  After that you were on your own as he frequently proclaimed and demonstrated in his later treatment of Sondra and Elvin.  When Denise started becoming independent she pretty much got exiled and finally disappeared altogether.

So that’s your TV view of the epitome of black fatherhood.

What I will call the myth of black fathers being irresponsible arises I think partly from the abuse of slavery where slave owners considered their property cattle and bred and sold them as such.  Before the Civil War there was an entire vein of Abolitionist literature about loving families broken by evil masters and fathers escaping and struggling to reunite with their loved ones and liberate them, most often ending in Romantic Tragedy as all perished.  Afterwards there arose the fiction of the nobility of ‘The Lost Cause’ and the excuse making for the horrific practices of slavery and propoganda of the happy, inferior African-American, content with field work and incapable of anything else- first because we are ‘Exceptional’ and nothing we do is ever wrong, and second because it helped justify continued and pervasive Jim Crow discrimination both North and South.

And narratives of the irresponsible underclass, whatever race or ethnicity, were always popular with the elites who used them to validate and rationalize their continued oppression.

Another expression of this in modern times is 1965’s The Negro Family: The Case For National Action by every racist conservative’s favorite “Liberal”, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.  While there are many flaws and entirely valid criticisms I propose two for your consideration- the first is that the Report focuses only on ‘out of wedlock’ births as a symptom of family dysfunction and doesn’t properly correct for class bias (including all poor families as a group) or recognize other symptoms of dysfunction which vary by culture (inbreeding and domestic violence and child abuse for example).

The second is simply- who gives a rat’s ass about getting married now anyway?  Certainly not 1%er White folk.

Oh, gays.

So my question for Larry is-

Why are you buying into this?

Continuity

Every Day Is Exactly The Same

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Wednesday 2/4: Wes Moore
• Thursday 2/5: Bob Odenkirk

Wes Moore is the next Colin Powell.  He was a Captain in the 82nd Airborne, served as assistant to Condoleezza Rice, and worked at Citigroup.  He currently hosts his own show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.  If he’s not pitching the show he’ll be whoring his newest book, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters.

Bonus video and the real news below.

So tonight’s topic is Gay Marriage and all I’ve really got to say is we’re talking about it why?

Oh, Mike Huckabee said something stupid and bigoted about it and he’s thinking about running for president (again).  Well, he’s a stupid bigot so of course he says stupid and bigoted things and he’s not really running for president, he just wants to scam some more money from the stupid and bigoted people he represents and also those deep pocketed Billionaires who think the stupid and bigoted vote is an important part of the Republican coalition and want to keep the rubes in line by throwing them a bone.

You see it’s all about the ick factor and if any of these Bozos had the least scrap of religious integrity they wouldn’t be picking and choosing which parts of Leviticus to honor.  Thank goodness as an Atheist I think it’s all superstitious non-sense and don’t have to do any thelogical contortions to justify my regard for blended fabrics, cheeseburgers, and any number of delicious things made from pork and non scaly water life either singly or in combination.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not militant about it.  I’m perfectly content to let you fester in ignorance, salving life’s numerous disappointments and injustices with the laugable belief that there’s some sugar daddy in the sky with a big rock candy mountain and you’ll get you piece of the pie bye and bye, bye and bye.  That’s why Marx called it the opiate of the masses.  Why worry about how much your life here sucks and who’s to blame for it if by your slavish worship and utter conformity you’ll live in eternal bliss.

After you’re just a little too dead to enjoy it of course, but we don’t make the rules.  Oh wait, we do!

Were I really keeping it 100 I’d ask Larry why so many of the poor and minorities buy into fundamentalism, but I think for the most part I’ve just answered that question.

Personally I don’t think there’s a lot of grist in this mill for Larry to work with and I wish they’d get him better topics but maybe we could stand to loose the weight.

That’s called portion control.

Continuity

The Magic Gap

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Tuesday 2/3: Bill Browder
• Wednesday 2/4: Wes Moore
• Thursday 2/5: Bob Odenkirk

Tonight’s guest, Bill Browder, has a very sad tale to tell of how his friend and attorney was arrested, tortured, and killed by Putin at the behest of Putin’s oligarch friends and how he, as a true patriot, stood up to evil D.C. State Department bureaucrats and with the help of a few brave Senators, forced the administration to accept truly effective sanctions on those nasty Russ.  It’s the subject of his new book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.  Don’t judge this one by it’s cover.  Bill Browder is a hedge fund manager who got booted by Putin in 2005 for corruption so he has his own agenda working and I’d take this with enough salt to show up in my bloodwork (and that’s quite a bit, my Sodium levels are rock steady).

Martin Short’s 2 part web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

FISA Court Rubberstamped NSA’s Questionable Legal Theories To Grant It Expanded Surveillance Powers

by Tim Cushing, Tech Dirt

Tue, Feb 3rd 2015

More documents have been yanked out of the NSA’s hands, thanks to a New York Times FOIA lawsuit. The documents are from 2007, and they further detail the agency’s warrantless surveillance program which swept up not only phone numbers but also email addresses and content. The program wasn’t actually legal at the time it rolled out. It took the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to codify this. In the meantime, the agency used interim legislation (2007’s Protect America Act) and some hubris to enhance its haystacking business.

…

Rather than use the standard definition of a “facility” — that being a base of operations — the NSA chose to read it as an impossible combination of noun and verb. An email address is a “facility” because it “facilitates communications.” Vinson wasn’t too impressed with this, or the fact that the application didn’t contain much in the way of probable cause. As he noted, the NSA’s intention was to collect both sets of data in bulk, far from the targeted surveillance it attempted to portray in its application.

The May 2007 order (also by Roger Vinson) shows that the NSA found a way to get its aims accomplished, despite Vinson’s reluctance. A “new legal theory” was offered by the agency in an amended application and buttressed by Keith Alexander’s declaration that it was all totally legal.

Unfortunately, the order doesn’t detail the NSA’s legal theory, or at least not in any visible way. Vinson’s musings on the NSA’s Plan B turns out to be a bunch of wasted typing. His declaration that on the “basis of facts submitted by the applicant, there is probable cause to believe that…:” is followed by four completely redacted pages.

Following that, Vinson authorizes the NSA’s “roving, multipoint” surveillance, based on the opinion that Congress would have authorized that (and apparently pretty much anything else it may or may not have conceived of) considering the “Government’s national security interests are so great.” This rationale again. And again, presented by an agency whose livelihood depends on the depiction of security threats as perennially “great” and everlasting. Vinson also agreed to contact-chaining using these numbers and email addresses as selectors.

…

And so, the domestic surveillance that wasn’t (this order — and past ones — draws a very clear line between foreign targets and known US persons) becomes a handy tool for domestic surveillance. As the court notes earlier in the order, because of where the communications and data are collected, there’s no real way to separate US/non-US data without digging through the collection. When it’s discovered, minimization procedures are to apply — except, apparently, if it can hand the data/communications off to the FBI. (The CIA, on the other hand, gets everything, domestic or foreign, apparently only subject to the NSA’s discretion.)

Again, this entire line of surveillance still hadn’t been determined to be completely legal. It took the FISA Amendments Act to codify this particular program. Despite that, it was approved anyway, thanks to the NSA’s willingness to explore as many legal theories as necessary in order to secure the FISA judge’s approval.

That’s the problem with these two orders. We don’t get to see the NSA’s legal wranglings. Those are redacted. And what is actually revealed doesn’t explain much. The May 2007 order notes that the NSA’s arguments are still on shaky ground and the earlier (and much longer) April order handles the entirety of the agency’s legal discussions on its contact-chaining of unrelated “facilities” in a single paragraph.

…

Simply mentioning a targeted email in the body of an email message is enough “probable cause” for the FISA court, which goes on to note that it’s perfectly OK (in the search for supporting probable cause) for the agency to read nearly any communication that crosses its desk, provided it’s within a step or two of its selectors.

The NSA didn’t get to where it is today overnight. It took a decade of legal wrangling and the steadfast assertion that the terrorist threat to the US is just as strong as it was September 10, 2001. With the assistance of obliging courts and sympathetic legislators, the NSA has become a data and communications behemoth, sucking in vast quantities of both from all over the world.

Don’t Trade Away Our Health

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, The New York Times

JAN. 30, 2015

Among the topics negotiators have considered are some of the most contentious T.P.P. provisions – those relating to intellectual property rights. And we’re not talking just about music downloads and pirated DVDs. These rules could help big pharmaceutical companies maintain or increase their monopoly profits on brand-name drugs.

…

Trade agreements are negotiated by the office of the United States Trade Representative, supposedly on behalf of the American people. Historically, though, the trade representative’s office has aligned itself with corporate interests. If big pharmaceutical companies hold sway – as the leaked documents indicate they do – the T.P.P. could block cheaper generic drugs from the market. Big Pharma’s profits would rise, at the expense of the health of patients and the budgets of consumers and governments.

There are two ways the office of the trade representative can use the T.P.P. to maintain or raise drug prices and profits.

The first is to restrict competition from generics. It’s axiomatic that more competition means lower prices. When companies have to fight for customers, they end up cutting their prices. When a patent expires, any company can enter the market with a generic version of a drug. The differences in prices between brand-name and generic drugs are mind- and budget-blowing. Just the availability of generics drives prices down: In generics-friendly India, for example, Gilead Sciences, which makes an effective hepatitis-C drug, recently announced that it would sell the drug for a little more than 1 percent of the $84,000 it charges here.

That’s why, since the United States opened up its domestic market to generics in 1984, they have grown from 19 percent of prescriptions to 86 percent, by some accounts saving the United States government, consumers and employers more than $100 billion a year. Drug companies stand to gain handsomely if the T.P.P. limits the sale of generics.

The second strategy is to undermine government regulation of drug prices. More competition is not the only way to keep down the prices of essential goods and services. Governments can also directly restrain prices through law, or effectively restrain them by denying reimbursement to patients for “overpriced” drugs – thus encouraging companies to bring down their prices to approved levels. These regulatory approaches are especially important in markets where competition is limited, as it is in the drug market. If the United States Trade Representative gets its way, the T.P.P. will limit the ability of partner countries to restrict prices. And the pharmaceutical companies surely hope the “standard” they help set in this agreement will become global – for example, by becoming the starting point for United States negotiations with the European Union over the same issues.

Americans might shrug at the prospect of soaring drug prices around the world. After all, the United States already allows drug companies to charge what they want. But that doesn’t mean we might not want to change things someday. Here again, the T.P.P. has us cornered: Trade agreements, and in particular individual provisions within them, are typically far more difficult to alter or repeal than domestic laws.

We can’t be sure which of these features have made it through this week’s negotiations. What’s clear is that the overall thrust of the intellectual property section of the T.P.P. is for less competition and higher drug prices. The effects will go beyond the 12 T.P.P. countries. Barriers to generics in the Pacific will put pressure on producers of such drugs in other countries, like India, as well.

Of course, pharmaceutical companies claim they need to charge high prices to fund their research and development. This just isn’t so. For one thing, drug companies spend more on marketing and advertising than on new ideas. Overly restrictive intellectual property rights actually slow new discoveries, by making it more difficult for scientists to build on the research of others and by choking off the exchange of ideas that is critical to innovation. As it is, most of the important innovations come out of our universities and research centers, like the National Institutes of Health, funded by government and foundations.

Or we can hope so.

Syriza Official Vows to Kill EU-US Trade Deal as ‘Gift to All European People’

by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams

Monday, February 02, 2015

The TTIP, which would be the biggest trade deal ever, has been criticized as a corporate-friendly deal that threatens food and environmental safety under the guise of “harmonization” of regulations.

Georgios Katrougkalos, now deputy minister for administrative reform, confirmed what he had told EurActiv Greece ahead of his Syriza party’s victory last week: that his parliament would not ratify the trade deal.

“I can ensure you that a Parliament where Syriza holds the majority will never ratify the deal. And this will be a big gift not only to the Greek people but to all the European people,” EurActiv reported Monday.

…

Friends of the Earth Europe, which plans to hold a demonstration Wednesday to highlight how the TTIP is a “Trojan treaty.”

Also joining the demonstration is Guy Taylor, trade campaigner for Global Justice Now and an organizer for actions Wednesday, who said in a statement: “It’s unheard of to see so many people traveling to Brussels to lobby their MEPs like this, and that’s testament to just how hugely controversial and unpopular TTIP has become. David Cameron waxes lyrical about national sovereignty, but in pushing for this deal he is willfully handing sovereignty to big business. The deal is not really about trade, it’s about entrenching the position of the one percent. It should be abandoned.”

Underscoring similar concerns is 31-year-old Ross Mackay, who will be joining the actions in Brussels. He told the Scotland Herald, “TTIP is not really about opening up trade and harmonizing tariffs and regulations; it’s about a race to the bottom, locked-in privatization, and a seismic shift in power away from people and their elected governments towards corporations.”

Another reminder of why these “Trade” deals are bad-

Two Leaks Reveal How TAFTA/TTIP’s Regulatory Co-operation Body Will Undermine Sovereignty And Democracy

by Glyn Moody, Tech Dirt

Mon, Feb 2nd 2015

(I)n a single week, we have had two important leaks in this area, both confirming those initial ideas sketched out in 2013 are still very much how TAFTA/TTIP aims to bring about the desired regulatory harmonization.

Corporate Europe Observatory obtained a very recent draft copy of the EU’s proposals for the chapter covering regulatory co-operation (pdf), which describes a new transatlantic organization, now called the Regulatory Cooperation Body.

…

Along with this new opportunity for lobbyists to try to shape, slow down or even block new regulations, the EU proposes to hand them a powerful weapon — the impact assessment.

…

As Corporate Europe Observatory points out, the only criteria taken into account are impacts on trade or investment. So, for example, new environmental rules might well do wonders for reducing air pollution, but if they have an adverse effect on US or EU companies’ sales or investments, they would be marked as undesirable. This is likely to have a severe chilling effect on bringing in new standards that protect the public but might impose new costs on business.

The other leak, obtained by the Greens MEP Michel Reimon, concerns regulatory co-operation in the field of finance (pdf). This is a contentious area: the US is reluctant to harmonize financial regulations through TAFTA/TTIP because Europe’s are weaker; for the same reason, the European finance industry is keen to use TAFTA/TTIP as a way of undermining America’s more stringent rules.

…

That is, the European Commission wants the US to sign up to TTIP without any specification of exactly how the new Financial Regulatory Forum will work, or what powers it will have. This seems a clear effort to sneak in elements later that the US is currently resisting.

What these important leaks confirm is that the regulatory co-operation that lies at the heart of TAFTA/TTIP would undermine sovereignty on both sides of the Atlantic. The Regulatory Cooperation Body would provide an important new forum for corporate lobbyists to intervene even earlier in the life of proposed rules and regulations than they do now — and long before lawmakers have a chance to express their views. The end-result is likely to be an impoverishment not just of public policy-making, but of democracy itself.

Finally, we have some new video about SYRIZA and the direction they are taking-

Bill Black

Transcript

Democracy Now

Transcript

Debt Swaps

Transcript

Actually, tonight’s topic is obesity and it’s arguably the #1 public health problem in the United States today, not that it kills you directly but because it’s a contributing factor to many other things like coronary disease and diabetes.  I don’t mind admitting to you that my doctors have strongly advised I drop at least 20 pounds and I think I could lose another 20 and feel much better than I do.

A major part of it is my sedentary lifestyle.  As a writer and a computer tech I spend waaay too much time staring at screens and tapping keyboards and when the weather breaks (6 weeks from now Punxsutawney Phil assures me) I’ll have to start walking on a regular basis, not the least because I’m planning on doing some sightseeing again this summer and while there was a time that 5 miles didn’t seem like much my goals are now more modest than that.

Another item that puts this subject in the news is the recent death of Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds, and her obituary in Murdoch owned The Australian the first half of which commented unflatteringly on her weight and physical appearance and only added as an afterthought her amazing accomplishments as a teacher, librarian, journalist, and neuroscientist (including 10 years as a Professor at Yale Medical School).

Oh, and she was only like the best selling Australian author ever with over 25 books to her credit.

I expect that might come up at some point, as well as the fact that proper nutrition declines with income level as the foods that are the cheapest and easiest to prepare are also the ones that promote obesity and in many urban neighborhoods markets are long and difficult journeys using public transportation while there’s a fast food joint on every corner.

What I’d ask Larry to keep 100 is this-

If your wife could look like Halle Berry would you want her to?

This is actually a trick question because Halle Berry is severely diabetic and has to use Insulin, a very strict diet, and daily exercise just to survive.

Now Some More Jokes About Balls

Continuity

Would You Marry A Republican?

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Monday 2/2: Martin Short
• Tuesday 2/3: Bill Browder
• Wednesday 2/4: Wes Moore
• Thursday 2/5: Bob Odenkirk

Martin Short got his start on SCTV which was screamingly funny and much better than Saturday Night Live except under the original cast and the original cast with Bill Murray.  He’ll be talking about either his work in Inherent Vice, his TV show Mulaney, or his upcoming Broadway role in It’s Only a Play.

Sarah Chayes 2 part web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.