Would you like to read about the government of Iraq? You know, the one Dick Cheney props up as a beacon of freedom and democracy in the Middle East?As expected, Al Maliki is claiming the rape allegations are all lies. Apparently, his people simply asked the officers if they raped Sabrine Al Janabi and they said no. I'm so glad that's been cleared up.
Check out Canadian Cynic.Random thoughts from an unarmed (but reality-based) Canadian. These views are not necessarily the same views held by Canadians in general. But they should be.
Eventually I quit 24 cold turkey. It wasn't hard; I just couldn't take the same plot device 48 times. It's the "ticking time bomb" scenario where all of California will be deleted by a nuclear bomb unless Sutherland's Jack Bauer, the smartest agent in American counterterrorism, can torture the password out of an unnervingly calm, prescient Muslim madman about to destroy the American landmass with a team of three.It wasn't as easy for me to give up "24". I couldn't quit "cold turkey." In fact I still watch a bit of some episodes—at least until the torture starts.
The problem, as Jane Mayer pointed out in the New Yorker this week, is that ticking time bombs almost never happen in real life. How embarrassing then that it occurs once a week every season of 24, which means 24 weeks of presenting the case that torture is necessary and indeed good.
Joel Surnow, the creator of the show, is a right-wing, torture-approving "patriot" who thrills to parties with Rush Limbaugh, Lynne Cheney, Karl Rove, Tony Snow et al. He's a strange, cold man who attended Beverly Hills High, a notoriously cruel collection of stars' and billionaires' children. Surnow's dad was a travelling carpet salesman. The family lived in a crappy apartment and Surnow slept on a cot. His schoolmates knew that.
Back to Orwell, who also once wrote "probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among children richer than itself." Orwell came out of school with a hatred of others' suffering, while taking a bleak enjoyment in his own. Surnow came out of school with a black heart.
I was at a fundraiser with the wonderful actress Shirley Douglas, whom I know and adore. Her face in profile is flat yet perfectly formed. She is a genuine beauty. Her mouth is the mouth all women should have. She is the daughter of Tommy Douglas, father of Medicare, and the man I thank when I stagger into emergency saying "Oooooh, it hurts." Good socialists all. She is the mother of Sutherland, who earns $10 million a year playing the torturer Bauer.
Sutherland is a left-wing dual-citizenship Canadian and a truly great actor. But he is the Republican Party's performing flea. Imagine that.
Nobody in the Italian government thought Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr was clean. The Italian police had for some time been building a case against the Islamic cleric for spreading extremism.
Prosecutors in Milan believed he was a jihadist who had fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and, further, that he was in Italy recruiting fighters for radical Islamic causes. They intended to bring him to trial.
But the Americans were watching, and they had no patience with the pace and procedures of Italian law enforcement.
On Feb. 17, 2003, a squad of agents grabbed Nasr off a Milan street as he walked to a nearby mosque. He was, allegedly, taken to the U.S. air force base in Aviano, Italy, and flown to Germany, from where he was transshipped to his native Egypt. There, prison and the tender mercies of Egyptian interrogators awaited.
Nasr says he was tortured during his four years behind bars. Given the Egyptian government's pitiless attitude toward the radical Muslim Brotherhood and its many affiliates, that is not a claim many people doubt. The Nasr case was, say critics of the Bush administration, yet another case of America quietly subcontracting torture to deal with its enemies.
But two things happened last week to move this case out of the shadows: An Egyptian court freed Nasr, saying his imprisonment was "unfounded." And in Italy, a democratic U.S. ally, a judge indicted 26 Americans, most of them agents of the CIA, for kidnapping the cleric. The spies will almost certainly be tried in absentia. They've all left the country.
Now that we understand the biochemistry behind the ABO blood types [ABO Blood Types] it's time to look at the genetics. Recall that the human ABO gene on chromosome 9 has three common variants of the gene. Different variants are called alleles. The A allele encodes N-acetylaminogalactosyltransferase and this enzyme makes the A antigen that confers blood type A. The B allele encodes a variant enzyme that makes B antigen and gives rise to blood type B. The O allele encodes a defective enzyme that doesn't make either antigen. In the absence of both A antigen and B antigen your blood type will be O.Vestigial structures in biology are commonly cited as evidence for evolution, and it may well be that they did evolve. But if it is evidence of evolution, it is evolution in the wrong direction — it’s not the sort of function enhancing/innovating evolution that is supposed to give evolutionary theory its bite. Vestigial structures, after all, are structures that have lost their function. If all of evolution proceeded in this fashion, we’d quickly descend to a world of nonfunctionality.Dear IDiot,
Cheney praises Howard's loyalty.The alliance between Australia and America was strong because both nations worked at it and respected each other as equals, United States Vice-President Dick Cheney said today.You must be so proud. He never says that about Canada.
In a major speech to the Australian-American leadership dialogue in Sydney, Mr Cheney said the deep affinity between the countries had grown into a great alliance over time.
"Australia and America share an affinity that reaches to our souls," he said.
"Over time, that deep affinity has grown into a great alliance.
The GenBank website for this gene is GeneID=28. The ABO gene islocated at 9q34.1-q34.2 on chromosome 9. This is in approximately the same region as the HSPA5 gene but don't let that fool you. The genes are very far apart. [map]
The nucleotide sequence of the O allele is shown at the top with the amino acid sequence. (It's hard to see at this scale. Go to the evidence viewer for a better view.) Note the presence of a single nucleotide deletion. This shifts the reading frame of the coding region so that it ends shortly after the deletion in a stop codon (*). The O allele produces a truncated defective protein.
The ABO gene has seven exons, some of them are quite short. There are six introns and one of them is large so the total length of the gene is over twice as long as the length of the coding region.
We used to watch "24" every week but a couple of years ago we stopped because of the torture scenes. I just don't enjoy watching programs where people are tortured. Once or twice might be okay but it was getting to the point where every show had a scene where someone was tortured.
Gail Shister now reports in the Philadelphia Inquirer ['24' tamps down the torture] that the show is cutting back on the violence.Fox's 24 will become less torturous, but not because the U.S. military, human rights groups and children's advocates want it to...."Cliché?" That's a strange word to use. The audience that I know hasn't gotten "tired" of torture. We've gotten disgusted by it.
The decision to cut back on torture is driven by creativity, not criticism, according to Gordon. In its sixth season, 24 has become so torture-heavy that it borders on cliche, he says.
"What was once an extraordinary or exceptional moment is starting to feel a little trite. The idea of physical coercion or torture is no longer a novelty or surprise.
"It's not something that we, as writers, want to use as a crutch. We'd like to find other ways for Jack to get information out of suspects," says Gordon. "Our appetite has decreased. Personally, I think the audience may be tiring of it as well. My wife says it's too much."
Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian "C.E." instead of "A.D.", which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.We can all sleep better now, especially us furriners. Now we know where to go to learn about the real America.
Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America. Conservapedia has easy-to-use indexes to facilitate review of topics. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of "political correctness".
Scientists need more entrepreneurial drive and could benefit by doing more to promote solutions to big human problems, Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page told a meeting of academic researchers.I hope readers of this blog will recognize that Page isn't talking about science. He's talking about technology. It's sad that he doesn't know the difference.
The proteins on the erythrocyte cell surface contain a wide variety of different oligosaccharides that are attached in various ways to the protein. However, it spite of this variation, there are a few structures that are very common. One of the most common “core” structures is something called H-antigen. It is composed of many different sugars but the outside end of the H-antigen structure always consists of a fucose (Fuc) residue, a galactose residue (Gal), and an N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc) residue.
Normal red blood cells are recognized as “self” so we don’t have antibodies against our own cells. However, we will have antibodies against the red blood cells of other people’s blood if their cell surface carbohydrates are different from ours. This is the basis of ABO blood group and it’s why we have to match blood types in a blood transfusion.
There are no known natural effects of these differing blood types. People with A, B, AB and O phenotypes do not differ in fitness in any major way that we have been able to detect. This suggests that the complete absence of the enzyme (null mutation) is neutral in the current human population and so is the switch from one form of the enzyme to another. (Suggestions that blood type determines susceptibility to some infections are common in the scientific literature. Most of them have not held up. The best correlation is a possible association between blood type O and susceptibility to cholera. This looks pretty good but the cause-and-effect relationship is still up in the air.) 
There were a lot fewer potential jurors in the assembly room this morning. That’s because Panel #13 was told not to come in today so only my panel (#14) was there. There are about 100 people on each panel. 
At 9:20 the Sheriff’s Official began taking attendance in the assembly room. She read out everyone’s name and we had to shout out “here” if we really were here. It was just like grade two, including the few who shouted out “present” just to be different. Since we have to pass by the Sheriff’s desk as we enter the room, it’s not clear to me why we couldn’t just have signed in when we arrived instead of wasting 12 minutes in a roll call. A sign-in would have spared us having to listen to someone mispronounce our names. You have to wonder why someone who does this every single day wouldn’t have learned how to pronounce “Nguyen” by now.
Karl Landsteiner won the Nobel Prize in 1930 for his discovery of the ABO blood groups. He showed that individuals could be A,B, AB, or O blood group and identified each type by their agglutinating properties. (He didn't actually discover type O - that came a few years after Landsteiner's original work on the AB types.)In order to avoid, in the publication of research on this subject, detailed descriptions which would otherwise be necessary - of the four blood groups and their appropriate cell structures, certain short designations for the blood groups and corresponding specific cell structures have been introduced. Thus, one of the two specific cell structures, characterizing the agglutinating properties of human blood is designated by the letter A and another by B, and accordingly we speak of «blood group A» and «blood group B». These two cell structures can also occur simultaneously in the same individual, and this structure as well as the corresponding blood group is described as AB. The fourth blood-cell structure and the corresponding blood group is known as O, which is intended to indicate that people belonging to this group lack the specific blood characteristics typical of each of the other blood groups. Landsteiner had shown that under normal physiological conditions the blood serum will not agglutinate the erythrocytes of the same individual or those of other individuals with the same structure. Thus, the blood serum of people whose erythrocytes have group structure A will not agglutinate erythrocytes of this structure but it will agglutinate those of group structure B, and where the erythrocytes have group structure B the corresponding serum does not agglutinate these erythrocytes but it does agglutinate those with group structure A. Blood serum of persons whose erythrocytes have structures A as well as B, i.e. who have structure AB, does not agglutinate erythrocytes having structures A, B, or AB. Blood serum of persons belonging to blood group O agglutinates erythrocytes of persons belonging to any of the groups A, B, or AB, but erythrocytes of persons belonging to blood group O are not agglutinated by normal human blood serum. These facts constitute the actual basic principles of Landsteiner's discovery of the blood groups of mankind.By the time the Nobel Prize was awarded it was known that the ABO human blood types were genetic traits that segregated according to "Mendel's Laws."
The group characteristics are handed down in accordance with Mendel's laws. The characteristics of blood groups A, B, and AB are dominant, and opposing these dominant characteristics are the recessive ones which characterize blood group O. An individual cannot belong to blood group A, B, or AB, unless the specific characteristics of these groups are present in the parents, whereas the recessive characteristics of blood group O can occur if the parents belong to any one of the four groups. If both parents belong to group O, then the children never have the characteristics of A, B, or AB. The children must then likewise belong to blood group O. If one of the parents belongs to group A and the other to group B, then the child may belong to group A or B or it may possess both characteristics and therefore belong to group AB. If one of the parents belongs to group AB and the other to group O, then in accordance with Mendel's law of segregation the AB characteristic can be segregated and the components can occur as separate characteristics in the children. If a child has the A-group structure (either A or AB), then the A-group characteristic must be present in at least one of the parents, i.e. one of them must belong to group A or AB. If the child belongs to group AB, then one of the parents must belong to group A and the other to group B, or one of the parents must belong to group AB and the other to group A or B, or else both parents must belong to group AB. Application of the discovery of blood groups in questions relating to the establishing of paternity is based on these principles governing the hereditary transmission of blood groups.See [ABO Blood Groups] for a modern description of the biochemistry.
