It is time.

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Interior to all of the little cells in our bodies—or at least the portions of our bodies we generally refer to as our own, as opposed to the microbial hangers-on that outnumber “native” cells by a factor of 20 to one—are little thingummies called mitochondria. Maybe you’ve heard of them, maybe you haven’t. Maybe you heard about them but you remembered them only long enough to pass the relevant cellular biology test.

Regardless, you got ’em. Without ’em, you tend to limp along a bit. Without going into too much detail, they’re where we get our energy from. They hang out in our cells like little space-heaters, snarfing up oxygen and pumping out heat so that the chemistry of being alive (as we normally think of it) can happen at a rate that syncs up across all our vital functions. They also produce and store chemicals that cells use to put all the spare electrons and protons where they need to be in order to move all the little molecules around.

Seriously, though, they’re their own little life forms. They have their own nuclei and cell membranes. They reproduce when the cell they reside in duplicates. And at other times, when they feel like it. Also, unlike most other microbes, they fuse with one another.

Okay, so maybe mitochondria aren’t any kind of enemy. I mean, not really. Sure, they’re suspected of doing things like telling cells when it’s time to replicate or self-destruct, and perhaps handle other kinds of more complicated signaling duties, possibly involving telling stem cells how and when to differentiate…. But they’re our friends, right?

Sure. But the point I’m making is that they aren’t particularly us, if you’re the sort to draw with firm, dark lines. They’re something in and of themselves. We make them, and they, in turn, make us. In specific, they make us make them. And us. Um. At some point they invaded and we never managed to kick them out. They made themselves useful. From a strictly anthropomorphic perspective. Maybe we were better off as immortal amoeba. Hard to say.

There are other definitely more insidious invasive organisms. E.g., Cordyceps (many, many species – video!), Toxoplasma gondii, Dicrocoelium dendriticum, Euhaplorchis californiensis, Leucochloridium paradoxum (video!), Spinochordodes tellinii (video!), and a host (ahem) of others. These guys are a bit more macroscopic (if only a bit), but all of them offer some form of behavior control of modification. Frequently these behaviors endanger or kill the hosts, but it doesn’t matter to the parasite much as long as those behaviors help the parasite to spread or reproduce. Of the above short list, only Toxoplasma gondii affects humans, but boy, does it. Studies show that is makes women more attractive to non-infected men, as well as more generous and warm-hearted—and it makes men more neurotic and suspicious. There are hotly debated implications of links to schizophrenia and and other psychoses as well.

But these guys are completely external, at least in biological terms. You can get infected by ’em, and you can at least conceivably get cured.

And then there’s Wolbachia. Wolbachia, Wolbachia, Wolbachia. Wolbachia species are pretty much single-handedly responsible for queen-worker-drone hive/colony structures versus normal male-female reproductive strategies (“traditional family values”).

Since Wolbachia induces parthenogenesis (“virgin birth”), most males can just go ahead and die. Or become infertile “pseudo-females”. Or just become females. Wolbachia makes it happen. Wolbachia-infected males produce sperm incompatible with Wolbachia-infected females’ eggs, thus reducing the opportunites for uninfected females to reproduce.

It’s just a bacteria, right? Well, sure. Kinda. It’s in the order of Ricketsiales, from which, many suspect, mitochondria once sprang. And some organisms have Wolbachia pasted into their own DNA, meaning Wolbachia is no longer a separate organism. It’s just as much built-in as mitochondria. Or even more so.

We’re just starting to study some of these creatures. For instance, we haven’t mapped most of the critters we grow in our own guts. Do we actually collect all those guys from our environment, or is it possible that we spontaneously generate some of them from our own DNA? Or, rather, from DNA we thought was our own. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could excrete whole other organisms from special pores and orifices? Unless we already do, actually. Then it’s gross.

And isn’t it possible that some people act the way they do because of their infections? Maybe whole bunches of archetypical behaviors are based on infections like Toxoplasma gondii—stuff that causes weird cliqueish clumping of barely sexually mature teens, stuff that confuses gender identity or attraction, stuff that changes us morphologically even. Maybe there’s a parasite (or endosymbiont, if you prefer the politically correct term) that makes you gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

See, I’m not inclined to draw the lines that separate people from their internal microbial factors with fat-point Magic Marker. People are who they are because of a million factors. It might be weird that some of those factors might be “curable” with tetracycline (or, in the case of toxoplasmosis, either the antipsychotic haloperidol or the antimicrobial pyrimethamine) but to me that’s no more weird to me than the idea that sobriety can be “curable” with a shot of bourbon and a beer chaser.

Such is life, even if it’s effectively run by a committee of you and the microbes that inhabit you that outnumber your own cells twenty to one.

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From the BBC: Court rules on Guantanamo inmate

In the first ruling of its kind, a US court has overturned the designation of an inmate at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp as an “enemy combatant”.

It’s a tremendous day… But he doesn’t even know about this ruling because he’s sitting in solitary confinement and we can’t tell him about it.

— P Sabin Wilett, Lawyer for Huzaifa Parhat

Well. I’ll be the first to admit that this story will be a lot more entertaining when it isn’t irregularly serialized over the course of a decade.

The messes caused by our program of weaseling around Prisoner of War treaties and our own legal system (so we can vanish people off the face of the earth and torture them) is going to cause a hundred years’ worth of ramifications, including specialized college courses dissecting what happened with which we’ll be making your grandchildren miserable.

Nobody wants that kind of horror.

In other news:

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From the New York Times: Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back

BAGHDAD — Four Western oil companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.

Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat.

The deals, expected to be announced on June 30, will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.

The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.

Mission accomplished.

Here, for instance, is an excerpt of ExxonMobil’s financial data from 2002-2007, in millions, according to Wikipedia:

Also doesn’t include non-realized income, like appreciation (or depreciation) of assets, etc. But note that is Net Income — what’s left over after expenses are paid and debt is paid down. (One of the reasons I left the debt row in the table.) Net Income = what’s distributed among executives as bonuses and divvied up among ~5800 institutional shareholders, mutual funds, and private investors.

When you ask, what exactly did we buy with the trillions of dollars we’ve flung at the Middle East since 2002, this is pretty much it. Plus danger pay for a really large number of National Guards, who ordinarily would have just stayed home and helped large metropolitan areas deal with flooding.

But anyway.

The arrangements being discussed aren’t the traditional kind of the sort of “come to the fields, keep what you pick, pay us a percentage” kind of migrant field worker deals. They’re “improve our infrastructure and equipment and techniques and we’ll pay you for services rendered — in barrels of oil since dollars are so worthless”. So instead of extracting a certain number of barrels of oil per day and paying 75% of the value of that in royalties to the holders of the mineral rights, they provide equipment and technology and training and get paid in a coin that’s worth more if they don’t really haul as much of it as they can out of the ground. Same as always, really, but this way the locals don’t scream at their oil actually falling into the hands of Americans until they actually give it to us in exchange for services rendered.

But anyway. That’ll show those terrorists what’s what!

Mission accomplished.

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Just got through reading the eighteen-page executive summary of torture in American military prisons (found at this site) mentioned in this CNN article. Haven’t gotten around to the full 120+ page version. But I will.

It’s a hell of an indictment.

The report’s download site makes you sign up and harvests your e-mail address for some reason. If doing that makes you feel uncomfortable (or you can’t think of a good fake e-mail address), let me know and I’ll see if there isn’t some other way to get you the PDFs where you don’t have to put your name on some list.

Not that you particularly want to read this report anyway. Unless you’d get some sort of sick pleasure from reading graphically detailed evidence that the current administration of the USA has been committing war crimes for six or seven years.

To intensify the nausea, if that’s your thing, you can remember that the prisoners we currently know about are probably less than two percent of the prisoners who went through US hands for the duration (so far) of the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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When Rupert Murdoch and his information sausage-grinder called NewsCorp bought the Wall Street Journal last year, Paul Steiger (the former managing editor of the WSJ) and Stephen Engelberg (former managing editor of the Oregonian and former investigative editor of the New York Times) put the gears in motion to start a publication centered on investigative journalism of the sort that is being phased out everywhere. ProPublica is dedicated to the public interest and is funded by foundations that support the idea of a free investigative press that doesn’t have to pimp itself out for advertising dollars or pander to readership prurience.

ProPublica went live on June 10th. So now there’s a week’s worth of stuff to go peruse. It is quite meaty.

There are RSS feeds galore, sorted by topic:

• Top Stories
• Business & Money
• Justice & Law
• Energy & Environment
• Government & Politics
• Health & Science
• Media & Technology
• National Security

I recommend you use the above links to form the foundation of your daily news diet.

Oh. And also. In light of the recent AP refutation of Fair Use by issuing takedown notices for excerpts in blogs and blog comments, followed by a slight backpedal that includes a schedule of licensing fees for excerpts as few as five words, ProPublica has announced that the entire publication is Creative Commons licensed. And the license page details that CC licensing does not at all interfere with your Fair Use rights.

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How scientists are bringing dinosaurs back to life with the help of the humble chicken

Hans Larsson, a palaeontologist at McGill University in Canada, conducted an experiment in November 2007 into the evolution from dinosaurs’ long tails into birds’ short tails more than 150 million years ago.

Looking at a two-day-old chicken embryo, he made an unexpected discovery. Expecting to see between four and eight vertebrae present in the developing spine, his microscope instead picked out 16 vertebrae — effectively a reptilian tail. As the embryo developed, the “tail” became shorter and shorter, until the young bird hatched with only five vertebrae.

Larsson says of the significance of the find: “For about 150 million years, this kind of a tail has never existed in birds. But they have always carried it deep inside their embryology.” So, the blueprint for a dinosaur remained locked inside the modern-day bird.

Larsson decided to move from theory to reality. He wanted to see if he could make a chicken grow a dinosaur’s tail, turning the clock back millions of years. Manipulating the genetic make-up, he was able to extend the tail by a further three vertebrae. Larsson had pinpointed a method for turning on dormant dinosaur genes.

If birds retained a dormant tail imprint, did they still retain a memory of dinosaur teeth?

In 2005, Matt Harris and John Fallon, developmental biologists at the University of Wisconsin, noticed something strange while researching mutant chickens. Harris says: “Looking at an embryonic 14-day-old head, I came across the beak and these structures that were not supposed to be there.”

Could they really be teeth? Peeling away the beak in this tiny, mutant bird, the academics revealed sabreshaped formations almost identical to embryonic alligator teeth.

Next, Harris and Fallon attempted to trigger the formation of teeth in a normal chicken, by injecting the embryo with a virus designed to “turn on” the relevant gene. It was a long shot. “Making a tooth is complex,” says Harris. “So the idea of turning on one gene that might be able to do this in an animal that hasn’t made teeth in over 70 million years was somewhat of a stretch.”

Examining the growing embryo two weeks later, he called colleagues to look at what had happened. “You could see very clearly paired structures on the lower jaw. And so, a normal chicken can actually grow teeth.” This was unexpected. Furthermore, the teeth had the same curved shape as dinosaur
fangs.

Jack Horner, professor of paleontology at Montana State University, from the same article:

“If we want to see a dinosaur in our lifetime, we need to start with a bird and work backwards,” says Horner. “As long as birds exist, we have the ability to reach back to dinosaurs.”

In the 1990s, scientists discovered dinosaurs in China buried in a fine ash. They were preserved in remarkable detail and bird-like features, including claws and feathers, were recognizable. Horner believes that a modern bird’s DNA contains a genetic memory that could be “switched on” again, resurrecting long-dormant dinosaur traits.

To make such a creature, he would start with the genome (the whole hereditary information encoded in the DNA) of an emu. “Emus have all the features we need in order to make a Velociraptor-sized dinosaur,” he says. “If I were to make a dinosaur, that is where I’d start.”

Click here to see your new way of life.

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More:

This is the Bush administration’s third setback at the highest US court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charge at the base in Cuba.

The court has ruled twice previously that Guantanamo inmates could go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention.

But each time, the Bush administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to keep the detainees out of civilian courts.

Let’s make this stick. Write your Senators and Representatives.

Detainees are either prisoners of war (therefore governed by the Geneva Convention) or suspected criminals (therefore governed by the basic rights of due process guaranteed by the Bill of Rights). Otherwise they’re kidnap victims. The arguments that there should be a third category is bullshit. The argument that the US Constitution doesn’t hold on foreign soil is also bullshit, as these people are in the custody and care of US soldiers and citizens in the pay of the Pentagon, wherever they are.

Hell, according to one fairly popular theory, we invaded Iraq because the dictator there wouldn’t give his citizens their basic rights. But if we go over there and do the same things, that’s okay?

Please go write your senators and representatives a quick note by clicking on the above link. It’s just a damn web form. Anyone who knows their own zipcode can do it. The shorter the message the better. Don’t know what to write? Tell them this:

We require everyone who serves in public office or with the armed forces to swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. The Constitution guarantees a few easy-to-understand and easy-to-supply basic rights to people held on suspicion of criminal activity. The Constitution also holds treaties to which we are signatories as the highest law in the land. One of the treaties is the Geneva Convention, and it details certain minimum standards of treatment and care for those captured in the course of warfare.

The Bush Administration has authorized certain parties to abduct, capture, and hold indefinitely whomever they choose in obscure, remote, and restricted locations. The standards used to determine who gets captured and held is entirely at the whim of the executive branch. The treatment of these individuals is entirely at the whim of the executive branch. Knowledge of who is held and why is entirely the property of the executive branch–until information leaks out through other channels. The policies which create and perpetuate this bizarre exception to the basic human rights that those in the care of the United States typically enjoy WAS CREATED ENTIRELY TO TAKE AWAY THE BASIC RIGHTS AND GUARANTEES OF SAFETY AND “NON-VANISHMENT” TO WHICH ALL OF OUR PRISONERS ARE ENTITLED, EITHER CIVILIAN OR MILITARY.

This practice must end. Those responsible for this circumvention of basic human rights must be held accountable so it does not recur in the future. The oaths to uphold our Constitution must be enforced. Otherwise, they are worthless. And, by extension, so is our Constitution.

As you are my elected representative in the Federal Government of the United States, I charge you with your own oath–to see that our Constitution is upheld and that the basic rights guaranteed by it are applied universally to those in our care and custody, wherever they might be.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Thank you for your time and attention.

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Tomorrow, even.

artwork by fazicar

In case you missed it, last July I declared the following:

Because I’m fed up with the Christian churches hijacking pagan festivals and painting saints all over them, I’m creating a new pagan holiday right fucking now, complete with cute fuzzy animals and enslaved workforces creating and delivering goodies AND BLOODY FUCKING DEATH to the deserving. This festival involves DRUGS AND BOOZE and is for ADULTS ONLY. The kids have enough holidays already.

The festival is one of a number of festivals called BEERMAS because I don’t care that there might be other festivals called Beermas to the extent that I’m not even googling it. Don’t care. Don’t Care. Because there are no copyrights and trademarks on traditional pagan festivals even if they’ve only existed for forty-five minutes. Got that, you intellectual-property-grubbing Wiccans? Fuck you. On with the show.

On BEERMAS, the hard-working rock hyrax named Throaty Kneecap McForehead, having filled his last keg with zebra-and-donkey-piss magically transmuted into beer, whips his hordes of enslaved brewer bush babies into rolling the kegs onto the huge razor-wheeled chariot pulled by two ass-raping, man-eating honey badgers. (One, “Lefty”, female, is pictured above. “Penisface” is never pictured, as he is known to seek out and eat photographers.) Every Friday the Thirteenth, also known as BEERMAS, around 9:05 AM Throaty K. McForehead the Rock Hyrax hops into his chariot, “Rosebud”, pulled swiftly and eagerly by Lefty and Penisface the Honey Badgers, to tour the world, stuffing the fridges of the deserving with zebra-and-donkey-piss beer AND THE BLOODY HEADS OF ALL WHO CROSS ME^*, their mouths stuffed with peyote buttons and magic mushrooms, before the deserving motherfuckin’ workers of the world make it back home from work to find the goodies. The undeserving will find their fridges stuffed with snakes — or would, if their own heads weren’t already in MY fridge stuffed to the gills with peyote and magic mushrooms.

Throaty, Lefty, and Penisface will heartily tie up and assfuck^** the layabout slackers who stay home from work on a Friday the Thirteenth without being well-and-truly-and-in-Technicolor® ill and will only stuff the fridge for the slackers if they had a good time. Everyone deserves a second chance.

For the truly sick they deliver bush-baby-made chicken soup. Made from zebra and donkey piss. Be warned.

On days while the beer is brewing and they aren’t making deliveries, Throaty, Lefty, and Penisface go bowling, and the bush babies have to keep setting up the pins.

There you go.

Merry Fucking BEERMAS.

The next BEERMAS is February 13 of 2009. Followed by another one in March, because Feb and March are buddies like that. And then another in November. But tomorrow is the only BEERMAS we get this year.

Be good. Go to work. Don’t slack.

And there might just be free zebra-and-donkey-piss beer in it for you.

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^* Technically it’s the bloody heads of all who cross ladykinbote, since this part was her idea.
^** Using a strap-on, in the case of Lefty.

I’m sure anyone that cares has heard by now that Dennis Kucinich took up four and a half hours of the House of Representatives’  valuable late-night time last night, broadcast semi-live on C-SPAN, presenting thirty-five articles of impeachment against George W. Bush, along with verbally transcribing for the congressional record all of the supporting material.

You may recall more than a year ago he presented articles of impeachment against Dick Cheney, which were handed over to the Judiciary Committee and then never heard from again. But probably not, because it didn’t really find its way to the mainstream press.

SImilarly, the US press hasn’t really treated the attempt to start this new bout of impeachment proceedings as news. Like that “prison ship” stuff I mentioned last week. Or, as LJ-user circumambulate points out, like the Iraq Commission report that detailed the deliberate Bush Administration skewing of intelligence making the case for invading Iraq.

What <i>has</i> kinda made the press today is that Scott McClellan, former White House mouthpiece who bailed in 2006, is scheduled to testify to a congressional committee in just a couple weeks. See, recently he published a weakish tell-all book detailing how the White House lied to him, and through him, to the American People about the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Valerie Plame incident, and the screw up of the handling of Hurricane Katrina.

It took just about no time at all for Al Gore to rip McClellan a new one for saving it up and trying to make a quick buck by bringing it out in campaign season. Instead of, for instance, calling Bush and Cheney and Rove out while he was still in his position as press secretary. I think that’s a bit  unfair, seeing as he was also still in range of Secret Service sidearms then. Also, he’s been loyal to Bush since the Texas days. He was obviously uncomfortable enough to resign in 2006. Colin Powell walked out the same way when the smell got too bad for him back in 2004. McClellan was just a bit more used to it. And also, McClellan decided to put it all in writing. That can take some time, especially if you care to do a bit of research and fact checking. And seek a suitable publisher.

And steel yourself for testifying in congressional hearings. About some seriously unfinished business. Much of which has just recently been chanted, at length, into the House of Representatives’ half of the Congressional Record.

I’d love to think that something will come of either of these things, or that, due to the interaction either in Congress or in the press, something larger will happen than what most people expect.

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