Skin-Colonizing Bacteria Create Topical Cancer Therapy in Mice

While studying a type of bacteria that lives on the healthy skin of every human being, researchers from Stanford Medicine and a colleague may have stumbled on a powerful new way to fight cancer.

After genetically engineering the bacteria, called Staphylococcus epidermidis, to produce a tumor antigen (a protein unique to the tumor that’s capable of stimulating the immune system), they applied the live bacteria onto the fur of mice with cancer. The resulting immune response was strong enough to kill even an aggressive type of metastatic skin cancer, without causing inflammation.

“It seemed almost like magic,” said Michael Fischbach, PhD, an associate professor of bioengineering. “These mice had very aggressive tumors growing on their flank, and we gave them a gentle treatment where we simply took a swab of bacteria and rubbed it on the fur of their heads.”

Their research was published online April 13 in Science. Fischbach is the senior author, and Yiyin Erin Chen, MD, PhD, a former postdoctoral scholar at Stanford Medicine, now an assistant professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the lead author.

Skin colonizers

Millions of bacteria, fungi and viruses live on the surface of healthy skin. These friendly colonists play a crucial role in maintaining the skin barrier and preventing infection, but there are many unknowns about how the skin microbiota interacts with the host immune system. For instance, unique among colonizing bacteria, staph epidermidis triggers the production of potent immune cells called CD8 T cells — the “killer” cells responsible for battling severe infections or cancer.

The researchers showed that by inserting a tumor antigen into staph epidermidis, they could trick the mouse’s immune system into producing CD8 T cells targeting the chosen antigen. These cells traveled throughout the mice and rapidly proliferated when they encountered a matching tumor, drastically slowing tumor growth or extinguishing the tumors altogether.

“Watching those tumors disappear — especially at a site distant from where we applied the bacteria — was shocking,” Fischbach said. “It took us a while to believe it was happening.”

The mystery of the T cells that do nothing

Fischbach and his team didn’t start out trying to fight cancer. They wanted to answer a much more basic question: Why would a host organism waste energy making T cells designed to attack helpful colonizing bacteria? Especially as these T cells are “antigen-specific,” meaning each T cell has a homing receptor that matches a single fragment of the bacterium that activated it.

Even stranger, the CD8 T cells induced by naturally occurring staph epidermidis don’t cause inflammation; in fact, they appear to do nothing at all. Most scientists thought colonist-induced T cells must be fundamentally different from regular T cells, Fischbach said, because instead of traveling throughout the body to hunt for their target, they seemed to stay right below the skin surface, somehow programmed to keep the peace between bacteria and host.

by Hadley Leggett, Stanford Medicine |  Read more:

Image: Arif Biswas/Shutterstock.com

Jump

Back in elementary school a ‘scientific theory’ hit the playground that blew my mind: if every person in China jumped at the same time, their impact would knock our planet off its axis and the world would end.

I was always a sort of gullible person. I think I just liked to believe things, and in them. But this idea really captured me. It was the frightening image of it first, every single person in a country doing the same thing, at the same time. I didn’t even feel comfortable in Catholic Mass when the monotonous, somber group prayer started. But at the scale of a billion people? I used to watch a lot of Star Trek with my dad, and this was Borg shit. It was also just confusing on a practical level because the billion jumpers weren’t drones. They were people, just like me, and I didn’t want to die. Why would they? Naturally, I assumed, they’d have to be fooled into doing it by a megalomaniacal supervillain. But how could he pull it off?

Information traveled differently in the nineties, and more slowly. To succeed at a scam so spectacular as the Jump, the time and place of the apocalyptic act would have to be announced by broadcast days in advance, and it would have to be framed as something not only beneficial, but essential. This would be the only way for the instructions to make it to the billion people required, and for them to go through with it. But by the time the information reached them, there would be an enormous media reaction. There would be counter information. There would be experts on planet stuff, probably, and they would tell people this was dangerous. If the megalomaniacal Jump enthusiast pirated a television signal (supervillains loved to do this), he could trick as many people as were watching a single, live broadcast. But hundreds of millions of people? Billions? Instantaneous, global mass hysteria was just not possible, let alone the direction of that hysteria to some particular end. I could rest easy, I decided, and it was back to my dreams of the Starship Enterprise.

But a lot has changed since 1993.

Today, almost half the global population is connected to the internet by the supercomputing smartphones that live in our pocket. That’s 3.5 billion people. More significantly, the way we access “news,” or live information about the world, has paradigmatically changed...

Ubiquitous mobile internet dramatically increased our immersion in media, but ubiquitous social media dramatically increased the speed at which ideas travel and, perhaps more significantly, deeply socialized the dynamic. We no longer learn about the world from institutions, or even the illusion of them. We learn about the world from people we care about. This binds our sense of truth to tribal identity, and that is a powerful, fundamentally emotional connection. It’s also now operating at the scale of a planet. Today, a single piece of information — a tweet from your president, an update from the World Health Organization, video footage of police brutality — is polarized and shared across our social network. From there, it can reach hundreds of millions of people, often furious, in less than an hour.

Jump...

Not every revolution is a net disaster, just most of them. Political violence around the world has far more often led to destruction and widespread human misery than it has to peace and prosperity. France, Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, countless nations of the Middle East, and Africa — for most people in most nations on this planet, throughout most of recorded history, revolution has preceded authoritarianism, poverty, and death. Americans have a unique blindness to the subject, as our own violent insurrection preceded directly the founding of our nation, the most stable liberal government in history, and that story is a central part of our mythology. We are a prosperous, heroic country, and we credit our existence to a righteous founding war for freedom. But history is more complicated than legend. The U.S. Founding Fathers did not just change their government. On victory they set immediately to separating powers and guaranteeing that future change, while possible and expected, would come slowly in increments. Today the word “democracy” is sacrosanct among Americans, but we don’t and never have had a democracy. This is an absence by design. An inherently unstable form of government, our Founding Fathers believed, without exception, democracy would lead to chaos, and that chaos would lead to tyranny. The architects of our nation therefore designed a democratic republic, with a representative democracy, and at founding that looked a lot like a system of firewalls between masses of people and power. Local leaders elected state leaders, and state leaders elected national leaders. With our rules for political change themselves drafted in such a way as redrafting them would be slow and difficult, it was checks and balances all the way down. The United States does not owe its prosperity to dramatic change, but to an historically rare stability.

Even absent social media, the speed at which rapid political change is possible in America has been accelerating for two centuries. Checks have eroded. Balances have become less balanced. At the same time, the federal government has grown more powerful, and the executive branch commands more of that power than ever. For years, support from the political establishment, itself a kind of moderating function, has not been entirely necessary to succeed in presidential politics. It was only a matter of time before the weakness was exploited. In 2016, America elected a reality television star to the most powerful edifice of political power, at the head of the largest economy, and in command of the most powerful military, in human history. Today, beyond all doubt, anyone can be the president. But even with so unpredictable an office as our presidency the United States is a more stable nation than most. In addition to the genius framework of our government and a couple hundred years of binding, national identity, we are supported by a strong economy, abundant arable land, and friendly neighbors. A far more significant concern is we are now living in a world of smaller nuclear powers with fewer resources that are many of them one trending hashtag away from violent insurrection, and there is no telling what governments, or gangs, will take power in their place. The threat of a fallen nuclear state would of course affect us all. In this way, a meme-induced international mass hysteria would not even be necessary for global cataclysm. A national hysteria, in almost any corner of the world, would do just fine. But there will be international crises. Twitter may have started as a fun place to share jokes, but it has long since morphed into a virtual battleground for ideological war. While most of the conflicts are civil, at least a few have pit governments against each other, and such conflicts will undoubtedly proliferate. We have already watched national leaders threaten each other on the platform, in real time, egged on by crowds of millions. The question is not if a real war, in the physical world, can be started in this environment. We all know it can. Without some dramatic course correction, the question is only when.

Many people correctly intuit something is wrong with social media, and they wonder if it can be fixed with government regulation. It cannot. A federal law prohibiting all politicians at every level from sharing to the popular platforms would be a compelling, partial solution to the specific threat of state-backed, mob-initiated conflict. Legislation of this kind would also be positioned to survive a consumer shift to disintermediated, decentralized social media. But it would not address the central problem with social sharing at scale, and is anyway not the sort of regulation being prescribed. Our loudest regulatory enthusiasts are almost entirely censorship oriented, and they suspiciously tend to map their censorship prescriptions to their personal politics. This alone should be enough of a warning that we shut the notion down. Alas, the conversation rages on, and no one is focused on the principle issue. Content moderation is irrelevant. The greatest possible danger of social media is the catalyzation of mass, relatively instant global action on incomplete or incorrect information. It is true our next information disaster could conceivably take color from whatever sort of speech is at the moment socially unacceptable. But if an idea is already perceived as socially unacceptable to so dramatic a degree as top-down censorship of its discussion is politically feasible, it almost certainly lacks the cultural support for any kind of rapid global movement. The hysteria we’re most at risk of will likely relate in some misguided way to an idea most people already generally value, but it will also be, in some aesthetic sense, new. To be so swept up emotionally as one is moved to immediate physical action, in the physical world, a person must be either very scared or very angry, and the mundane inspires neither of these emotions. We’re not in danger of painful speech, we’re in danger of temporary madness, and the only madness we are existentially vulnerable to is almost impossible to predict with any kind of specificity. It is from this unpredictable madness we need protection. But how can we protect ourselves from an idea that doesn’t yet exist?

Anger is the binding agent of every mob, from the scale of a few to the scale of a few billion. It feels good to be angry, and when we’re in it we don’t want to let it go. Our greatest defense against madness, then, would be calming down while on some powerful, primal level wanting the opposite. This is something small groups of men have struggled with for as long as we’ve existed, but it has not been until the last few years that a single fit of rage could almost instantly infect the planet. Social media has been an integral part of culture for a period of time that represents seconds of human existence, and we have already seen the emergence of globally-destabilizing conflict because of it. Conflicts of this kind will continue to emerge, and there is no reason to believe we’ve seen the most destructive of them. For the first time in history, we actually have to find a way to manage our impulse toward meme-induced hysteria. At its simplest, a little mental hygiene might be helpful. The notion we all suffer from confirmation bias needs to be normalized, and discussed. When relaying some emotionally-charged story, it is worth relaying first how this kind of story makes you feel in general, and the sort of things you might be missing. Admittedly, in the fever of rage, this will be incredibly difficult. But what about the other end? When receiving a piece of information that evokes anger, could one reflect on the bias of a source, be it a journalist or a friend? Who is the bearer of this bad news, and what are their values? If you had to guess, how would you think they wanted this piece of information to make you feel? Angry? To what end? Getting comfortable with being wrong would also help, as would expecting people around us to be wrong. This, by the way, is something that happens more than it doesn’t. People are constantly wrong. Stories are constantly corrected. That we are not yet skeptical of every new piece of information we receive, with so much evidence all around us now that misinformation is not the exception but the rule, is indication that skepticism of this kind is simply not something we are meaningfully capable of on our own.

by Mike Solana, Pirate Wires |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Many good examples in this piece, not including this one (below). AI panic seems to be in first place at the moment.]

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

via:

The Worst Crime of the 21st Century

The United States’ war on Iraq remains the deadliest act of aggressive warfare in our century, and a strong candidate for the worst crime committed in the last 30 years. It was, as George W. Bush said in an unintentional slip of the tongue, “wholly unjustified and brutal.” At least 500,000 Iraqis died as a result of the U.S. war. At least 200,000 of those were violent deaths—people who were blown to pieces by coalition airstrikes, or shot at checkpoints, or killed by suicide bombers from the insurgency unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation. Others died as a result of the collapse of the medical system—doctors fled the country in droves, since their colleagues were being killed or abducted. Childhood mortality and infant mortality in the country rose, and so did malnutrition and starvation. Millions of people were displaced, and a “generation of orphans” was created, hundreds of thousands of children having lost parents with many being left to wander the streets homeless. The country’s infrastructure collapsed, its libraries and museums were looted, and its university system was decimated, with professors being assassinated. For years, residents of Baghdad had to deal with suicide bombings as a daily feature of life, and of course, for every violent death, scores more people were left injured or traumatized for life. In 2007 the Red Cross said that there were “mothers appealing for someone to pick up the bodies on the street so their children will be spared the horror of looking at them on their way to school.” Acute malnutrition doubled within 20 months of the occupation of Iraq, to the level of Burundi, well above Haiti or Uganda, a figure that “translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from ‘wasting,’ a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.” The amount of death, misery, suffering, and trauma is almost inconceivable. In many places, the war created an almost literal hell on earth. (...)

Very few mainstream criticisms of the war call it what it was: a criminal act of aggression by a state seeking to exert regional control through the use of violence. A great deal of this criticism has focused on the costs of the war to the United States, with barely any attention paid to the cost to Iraq and the surrounding countries.

Those who critique the execution are not actually opposing the crime of the war itself. When we apply to ourselves the standards that we apply to others, we see just how little principled opposition to the Iraq War there has actually been, and how little acknowledgement that the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral from the outset.

by Nathan J. Robinson and Noam Chomsky, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. It still makes my blood boil. But hey, at least Condi finally broke through the male-only membership at Augusta National (The Masters). So there's that.]

The Mother Who Changed

A Story of Dementia

In the philosophical literature on dementia, scholars speak of a contest between the “then-self” before the disease and the “now-self” after it: between how a person with dementia seems to want to live and how she previously said she would have wanted to live.

Many academic papers on the question begin in the same way: by telling the story of a woman named Margo, who was the subject of a 1991 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), by a physician named Andrew Firlik. Margo, according to the article, was 55 and had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease and couldn’t recognize anyone around her, but she was very happy. She spent her days painting and listening to music. She read mystery novels too: often the same book day after day, the mystery remaining mysterious because she would forget it. “Despite her illness, or maybe somehow because of it,” Firlik wrote, “Margo is undeniably one of the happiest people I have known.”

A couple of years after the JAMA article was published, the philosopher and constitutional jurist Ronald Dworkin revisited the happy Margo in his 1993 book, “Life’s Dominion.” Imagine, he asked readers, that years ago, when she was fully competent, Margo had written a formal document explaining that if she ever developed Alzheimer’s disease, she should not be given lifesaving medical treatment. “Or even that in that event she should be killed as soon and as painlessly as possible?” What was an ethical doctor to do? Should he kill now-Margo, even though she was happy, because then-Margo would have wanted to be dead?

In Dworkin’s view, it was then-Margo whose wishes deserved moral weight. In his book, he made a distinction between two kinds of interests: “experiential” and “critical.” An experiential interest was reactive and bodily: the pleasure of eating ice cream, say. A critical interest was much more cerebral; it reflected the character of a person and how she wanted her life to be lived. In the case of advanced Alzheimer’s disease, Dworkin argued, there is a danger that critical interests will be usurped by experiential ones. Still, it was the critical interests, previously stated, that deserved to be satisfied, because it was those interests that gave human life its meaning and its dignity — and even made it sacred, in a kind of secular way. A person was respected if she was helped to live out her chosen course, not if her life trajectory was allowed to be derailed by the amnesiac whims of her diseased self.

Some philosophers have devoted themselves to reconsidering Margo. They accuse Dworkin of holding too limited a view of meaning. Couldn’t a life of tiny pleasures be meaningful, even if it wasn’t the product of some sophisticated life plan? Critics have asked why we should privilege the decisions of a person who effectively no longer exists over the expressed choices of the person who is sitting before us, here and now. On a practical level, what authority could the then-self possibly exert over the now-self?

And while Dworkin’s theory might apply to those in the advanced stages of the disease, it speaks less to a majority of patients in the mild and moderate phases. The in-between Margos. Dworkin’s theory also distinguishes between selves in a way that strikes some critics as misguided. A person is not like Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus: replaced, plank by plank, over the course of her voyages, leaving those aboard to wonder if she is still the old ship or instead a new one — and, if she is a new one, when exactly she ceased to be the other. A person always is and is not who she used to be.

Still, many adult children cling to an image of a parent’s then-self and work relentlessly to protect it. Adult children “tend to be confident leaning on the side of a Dworkin-type view,” says Matilda Carter, a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at the University of Glasgow and a former dementia caregiver. They don’t want a parent’s confused, 11th-hour choices to “tarnish the legacy of her life beforehand.” (...)

In our own lives, we insist on the right to make our own choices, even bad ones — what is sometimes called “the right to folly.” As independent agents, we are free to be unreasonable and unwise and to act against our own best interests: maybe because of flawed reasoning, or just because we want to. But with older relatives, we often insist on prudence over passion. “Ageism,” warns a 2016 paper in American Psychologist, “exacerbates the tendency to overprotect older adults.” In the end, this can mean that older people are held to a higher standard than everyone else; they are not allowed to choose poorly.

Any degree of cognitive impairment muddies these waters. When a person with dementia makes a decision that seems misguided, we might assume that the choice is not just bad but pathologically bad: a result of a cognitive failing. Eventually, each new decision — each expression of will — becomes suspect. Is this choice coming from Mom or from her disease? If the former is true, the decision should be honored; if the latter is true, perhaps it should be thwarted. But as the disease progresses, this effort at cognitive sorting becomes less tenable, because how do you separate a person from her diseased brain anyway? The more advanced a person’s dementia, the more her every choice becomes disputable, and thus worthy of custodial intervention.

“The question becomes, for the older adult, what are the barriers to evolving, to changing your opinions, to forming new relationships?” asks Nina Kohn, a law professor at Syracuse University with a specialty in the civil rights of older people.“When you form these new relationships, does that trigger people trying to remove your rights? The answer is: In some cases, it does.”

by Katie Engelhart, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Image: uncredited/Facebook

James Booker

The Greatest Piano Player You’ve Never Heard (CA)

Booker deserves to be as acclaimed and widely known as Beethoven. The fact that he isn’t may have something to do with the fact that Booker did not play in the royal courts of Vienna. He was a gay, Black heroin addict who played New Orleans dive bars, and never had a hit record (though he played on the hits of others, including Ringo Starr, the Doobie Brothers, and Fats Domino). (...)

Booker had a tough life. When he was 9 years old, he was hit by an ambulance traveling 70 miles an hour. Given morphine to deal with the pain of his injuries, he became an addict, and he was repeatedly busted on drug charges, even serving a stint in Louisiana’s infamous Angola prison. Later in his life, Booker was appreciated in Europe, and some of the best recordings of his work are from live performances at jazz events in Switzerland and Germany. But he spent most of his career drifting around New Orleans, playing its various pianos.

 

One of those pianos was at the district attorney’s house. The DA was an amateur singer, and allegedly offered an arrangement whereby Booker would avoid prison time for drug charges if he would give piano lessons to the prosecutor’s son. The DA, Harry Connick Sr., would become infamous for putting innocent people behind bars, and one of his wrongful convictions led to a major Supreme Court case, Connick v. Thompson.

The son of that infamous DA, the one who received Booker’s piano coaching, was Harry Connick Jr.. He would go on to become one of the leading jazz pianists in the world, selling 30 million records and winning three Grammy Awards. (...)

I am not a music writer, so it is beyond my capacity to evocatively describe his sound. All I can say is it’s some of the best piano playing I’ve ever heard, and I think James Booker deserves to be considered the finest piano player of the 20th century.

I think other piano players like Toussaint and Dr. John would agree with that. Connick Jr. himself has said that “There’s nobody that could even remotely come close to his playing ability…I’ve played Chopin Etudes, I’ve done the whole thing, but there is nothing harder than James,” and “he did innumerable things that would be considered revolutionary.”

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: The Ed Sheeran Copyright Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity of Music Ownership (CA) -  especially now that AI is involved (see below).]

AI Grimes

AI Grimes banger drops. Last week I wrote about Grimes’ proposition to anon music producers around the world: produce a banger with her voiceprint, and she’ll split any revenue it generates with person who made it (she detailed the proposal here). This week a viable banger candidate dropped, though to my ears there’s still some work to do on getting her sound right. Oh, and the lyrics are written by GPT. (@nickwebb)

via:

In the realm of the unseen, 

Where the colors blur and bleed, 

A ghostly whisper calls my name, 

From the ether, I reclaim... 

We are bound by frequencies, 

Synchronicity, secrets we keep, 

Our souls entwined, a cosmic dance, 

In the ether, we advance.

[ed. Scary. Also from the same source (Pirate Wires):]

Excellent GPT usecase demo: saving you money. Really impressive demo from Joshua Browder of GPT-lawyer fame — after he gave AutoGPT access to all his financial accounts and documents, it began to (allegedly) save him money in interesting and unexpected ways. If this is real, I can’t wait until his company DoNotPay’s plugin hits GPT. (@jbrowder1) Link

American Graffiti Revisted

[ed. Watched this again last night for the first time in years (Netflix). What a great movie (like Jaws, Jurassic Park, Butch Cassidy, Back to the Future, etc. - everything fits perfectly). I miss cruising.]

What We Lose When We Push Our Kids to ‘Achieve’

When I was 12, I disappeared into my bedroom with a $40 folk guitar and a giant book of Beatle songs, with elementary, large-type “E-Z” chord diagrams to follow. I had no musical gift, as a series of failed music lessons had assured me — it was actually the teachers who assured me; the lessons were merely dull — and no real musical training. My fingers stung as I tried to press down on the strings without making them buzz and my left hand ached as I tried — and for a long time failed — stretching it across the neck. Nonetheless, I worked my way through “Rain” (abbreviated to two chords) and “Love Me Do” (three) and finally “Yellow Submarine” (four chords, or was it five?) and discovered by myself the matchless thrill of homemade musical harmony.

No one asked me to do this, and surely no one was sorry the door was closed as I strummed and stumbled along after the nirvana of these simplified songs. But the sense of happiness I felt that week — genuine happiness, rooted in absorption in something outside myself — has stayed with me.

Fifty years later, I am still not a very good guitar player, but that week’s work, and the months and years of self-directed practice on the instrument that followed it, became a touchstone of sorts for me, and a model and foundation for almost every meaningful thing I’ve done since. It gave me confidence, often wavering but never entirely extinguished, that perseverance and passion and patience can make one master any task.

So it seems suitable at this season, as the school year ends and graduates walk out into the world, most thinking hard about what they might do with their lives, to talk about a distinction that I first glimpsed in that room and in those chord patterns. It’s the difference between achievement and accomplishment.

Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.

Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote-work of achievement. All our observation tells us that young people, particularly, are perpetually being pushed toward the next test, or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into. We invent achievement tests designed to be completely immune to coaching, and therefore we have ever more expensive coaches to break the code of the non-coachable achievement test. (Those who can’t afford such luxuries are simply left out.) We drive these young people toward achievement, tasks that lead only to other tasks, into something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with another hit of sugar water awaiting around the bend, but the path to the center — or the point of it all — never made plain. (...)

I know there are objections to his view: At some moment, all accomplishment, however self-directed, has to become professional, lucrative, real. We can’t play with cards, or chords, forever. And surely many of the things that our kids are asked to achieve can lead to self-discovery; taught well, they may learn to love new and unexpected things for their own sake. The trick may lie in the teaching. My sister Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and author, puts this well: If we taught our kids softball the way we teach them science, they would hate softball as much as they hate science; but if we taught them science as we teach them softball, by practice and absorption, they might love both.

Another objection is that accomplishment is just the name people of good fortune give to things that they have the privilege of doing, which achievement has already put them in a place to pursue. But this is to accept, unconsciously, exactly the distinction between major and minor, significant and insignificant tasks, that social coercion — what we used to call, quaintly but not wrongly, “the system” — has always been there to perpetuate.

Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent. There are many drugs that we swallow or inject in our veins; this is one drug that we produce in our brains, and to good effect. The hobbyist or retiree taking a course in batik or yoga, who might be easily patronized by achievers, has rocket fuel in her hands. Indeed, the beautiful paradox is that pursuing things we may do poorly can produce the sense of absorption, which is all that happiness is, while persisting in those we already do well does not.

by Adam Gopnik, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Millennium Images/Gallery Stock

Joro Chen (?), two men wearing headphones, crowded jazz club, small explosions around them, in the style of Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, via DALL-E

via: (The Active Voice)

Leaving the Cradle

Leaving the Cradle

Image: NASA’s Cassini spacecraft during one of its final dives between Saturn and its innermost rings (source: NASA/JPL-Caltech — Public Domain)

Humanity has always wondered what is over the next hill, around the bend, on the other side of the river, or across the sea; and now we are finally at a point where our technology has caught up to our natural inclination and desire to ‘go and see for ourselves.’ (...)

We started off strong. A mere 66 years after the Wright brothers made their historic flight, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon. The 1969 landing on our nearest celestial neighbor marked a turning point in human history. No longer were we confined to the planet that gave us birth; we could step out and start to see for ourselves what wonders, treasures and challenges await us outside the borders of our first and still only home. Sadly, it was not to be. After the triumph of Apollo 11, only 6 more manned missions to the Moon took place; and in 1972 the last of the only 12 humans to have ever set foot on another world left and came home. We have yet to return. (...)

Now that finally seems to be changing.

Scientists Dramatically Extend Cell Lifespan in Anti-Aging Breakthrough

Scientists have achieved a significant breakthrough in the effort to slow the aging process with a novel technique that increased the lifespans of yeast cells by a whopping 82 percent, reports a new study.

By programming cells to constantly switch between two aging pathways, researchers were able to prevent them from fully committing to either deteriorative process, a method that nearly doubled the lifespan of the cells. In other words, rather than the entire cell aging at once, the aging process was toggled between different physical parts of the organism, extending its life. This synthetic “toggle switch” offers a potential roadmap toward treatments that could one day extend human longevity, though that future is highly speculative at this time.

We are born, we age, we die—so goes the story of humanity since time immemorial. However, this familiar progression could be shaken up by enormous advances in genetics that have opened new windows into the underlying biological mechanisms that cause us to age, raising the possibility that they could be rewired to extend our lifespans.

Now, a team of scientists at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), have developed a new solution to this age-old problem that essentially tricks cells into waffling between two common deteriorative processes in cells. Using synthetic biology, the researchers genetically reprogrammed a circuit that chooses between these divergent paths toward death, causing it to constantly oscillate between its fates instead of actually dedicating itself to one.

These “oscillations increased cellular lifespan through the delay of the commitment to aging,” a result that establishes “a connection between gene network architecture and cellular longevity that could lead to rationally designed gene circuits that slow aging,” according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

“The circuit resembles a toggle switch that drives the fate decision and progression toward aging and death,” said Nan Hao, a professor of molecular biology at UCSD and a senior author of the study, in an email to Motherboard.

“Once the fate of a cell is determined, then it will have accelerated damage accumulation and progression to death,” continued Hao, who also serves as co-director of UCSD’s Synthetic Biology Institute. “[I]t became obvious to us that if we could rewire this naturally-occurring toggle switch circuit to an oscillator, it will make the cell to cycle between the two pre-destined aging paths and prevent the cell from making this fate decision toward deterioration and death, and it will make the cell live longer.”

Hao and his colleagues have been working on cellular aging for seven years, focusing on the concept of an oscillator for much of that time. In 2020, the researchers published another study, also in Science, that identified two major fates for budding yeast cells. About half of the cells they observed aged due to the deterioration of structures within the cellular nucleus, a cluster that holds most of an organism’s genome. The other half aged when the energy production units of the cell, known as mitochondria, started to break down over time.

Those observations transformed the oscillator concept from “an abstract idea to an executable idea,” Hao said. To build on the 2020 findings, the researchers used computer simulations of aging-related genetic circuits to develop a synthetic strain that could spark the desired feedback loop between the nucleolar and mitochondrial aging processes. In the new study, they introduced the synthetic oscillator into cells of the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a model organism that has already shed light on many of the genetic factors that influence longevity in complex organisms, such as humans.

The approach resulted in an 82 percent increase in the lifespan of cells with the synthetic oscillators, compared with a control sample of cells that aged under normal circumstances, which is “the most pronounced life-span extension in yeast that we have observed with genetic perturbations,” according to the study.

“A major highlight of the work is our approach to achieve longevity: using computers to simulate the natural aging system and guide the design and rational engineering of the system to extend lifespan,” Hao told Motherboard. “This is the first time this computationally-guided engineering-based approach has been used in aging research. Our model simulations actually predicted that an oscillator can double the lifespan of the cell, but we were happily surprised that it actually did in experiments.”

The study is part of a growing corpus of mind-boggling research that may ultimately stave off some of the unpleasant byproducts of aging until later in life, while boosting life expectancy in humans overall. Though countless hurdles have to be cleared before these treatments become a reality, Hao thinks his team’s approach could eventually be applied to humans.

by Becky Ferreira, Vice | Read more:
Image: Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

[ed. See also: Vice, Decayed Digital Colossus, Files for Bankruptcy (NYT).]

Runway Brings AI Movie-Making to the Masses

Runway AI, the generative AI company whose video editing tools were critical to making "Everything Everywhere All at Once," has made parts of its toolkit available to the public — so anyone can turn images, text or video clips into 15-second reels.

Why it matters: There's grave and justifiable concern about AI's potential for abuse. But the flip side is that tools like Runway's are unleashing all manner of artistic creativity and giving rise to new AI-generated art forms.

Driving the news: Runway just granted public access to its image-to-video model, Gen-1, and, in a more limited release, to its text-to-video product, Gen-2.

• Gen-1 is available on a mobile app that lets users take or upload a picture or video and instantly generate a short video clip based on it — applying filters like "Claymation" or "Cloudscape."

• Gen-2, which Runway says is the first publicly available text-to-video product, is available now in limited form via chat platform Discord (and will soon be available more widely).

• These fun and highly preliminary features are just a small, public-facing snapshot of the powerful suite of back-end tools available to video professionals who've been drawn to Runway's products like catnip.

Backstory: Runway was a co-creator of Stable Diffusion, a breakthrough text-to-image generator.

• Runway's creative suite has been a loosely kept secret among filmmaking cognoscenti, who use it to save countless hours on editing tasks traditionally done by hand.

• The company's AI Magic Tools let users edit and generate content in dozens of ways — by removing backgrounds from videos, erasing and replacing parts of a photo, or blurring out faces or backgrounds, for example.

What they're saying: Runway's technology is like "having your own Hollywood production studio in your browser," Cristóbal (Cris) Valenzuela, the company's CEO, tells Axios.

• Its tools — and others, like ChatGPT — are "democratizing content creation" and "reducing the cost of creation to almost zero," he said.

Where it stands: Runway's tools have been used to help produce the "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," build sequences for MotorTrend's "Top Gear America," design shoes for New Balance, and make videos for Alicia Keys.And they're a growing staple in creating visual effects (VFX) for amateur and professional films.

by Jennifer A. Kingson, Axios |  Read more:

Images: Aïda Amer/Axios; Runway AI

Cultural Appropriation is an American Asset

There is no American culture without appropriation, the whole world is doing it now, and we’re the only ones who feel bad about it.

When I was young, I noticed that some people on TV saw fried chicken, greens, cornbread, and black-eyed peas on a plate and called it Soul food. At some point, I learned that up north, this was considered black people’s cooking, but for me, it was my grandmother’s. There’s no difference between Southern food and soul food, apart from the name, but this hasn’t stopped the professional activist class from asserting racial ownership over the cuisine when it is presented without “context.” In 2021, Travon Jackson, executive director of the African American Cultural Center of the Capital Region in Albany, New York, told Times Union that white people could only avoid cultural appropriation while eating fried chicken if it is exhibited in “historical context”. According to Jackson, the “historical context” is that slaves served fried chicken to white people — which is true, but it's also true for virtually every dish which was ever eaten by a member of the Planter oligarchy. If you care to imagine a world without cultural appropriation, imagine being chased around an Upstate New York Cracker Barrel by a waiter yapping about slavery forever.

 

Like most things in America, fried chicken is a byproduct of cultural synthesis — in this case, Scottish and African. The contemporary American fixation on cultural appropriation is a strange one. It’s part of a larger attempt to replace the idea of America as a melting pot with multiculturalism. The melting pot has become seen as somewhat synonymous with assimilation, but it isn’t quite that. Melting may be a form of destruction, but it is also a method of production. This is why America has created so many new forms of music, literature, and art. Multiculturalism, on the other hand, is interested in the polite construction of a human zoo. It is a cosmopolitan ideal that fetishizes difference and seeks to preserve and ghettoize culture under the guise of diversity. Put cultures in cages, and you can gawk at them, coddle them, admire them even, but they'll never produce anything new. Destroying these artificial barriers and allowing cultures to co-mingle, collaborate, and borrow freely from one another is a dynamic, if somewhat Darwinian, process of cultural creation, and one which has served American culture well. Diversity isn’t our strength. Appropriation is.

Consider Selena Quintanilla. The Corpus Christi native has become seen as an emblem of Latin music but there is nothing Latin-American about her or her music, which was distinctly American — more specifically Texan and even more specifically Tejano — a melding of Spanish folk music, waltz, and polka, an organic fusion created by the meeting of Czech immigrants, German immigrants, and Texas Mexicans (Tejanos) in Central and South Texas nearly 200 years ago. This history didn’t matter to her fans, Hispanic or otherwise, and nobody seemed to care that she didn’t speak Spanish fluently and learned her lyrics phonetically. Decades after her tragic murder, another monolingual-English-speaking Tejana named Selena — Selena Gomez — faced backlash for releasing music in Spanish.

What changed?

To keep it short, ideas about “cultural appropriation” were created decades ago in the “ethnic” studies departments — themselves a byproduct of new-left campus activism in the 1970s — but, for the most part, mercifully remained in the academic ghetto until the mass adoption of social media in the 2010s. Though significantly less common than they are now, conversations around appropriation popped up in mass media before the 2010s. For example, in 1994, Ray Charles took umbrage with people referring to Elvis Presley as “the king,” telling NBC’s Bob Costa that “he was doing our type of music,” and noted that while whites celebrated Elvis’s hip-swaying act, Nat King Cole had been run out of town in Alabama for doing a similar one. Ray Charles’ assertion that Elvis “did” black music is closer to the truth than the popular perception today, which is that Elvis “stole” black music. Elvis Presley was not a suburban Jew from New Jersey or a Norwegian farm boy from South Dakota. He was a poor white from Tupelo, Mississippi, who lived in a largely black neighborhood and found his musical inspiration in an Assemblies of God church — a church which, like all Pentecostal churches, traces its lineage to the Azusa Street Revival, a movement which came out of the black church but quickly attracted and accepted disadvantaged people from all walks of life, including the white underclass. United by hard lives and possessed by the holy ghost, poor blacks, Hispanics, whites, and Indians prayed, sang, testified, and spoke in tongues together. Given the segregated history of Protestant Christianity in the United States, this was a radical movement of cross-racial Christian brotherhood and, at least in Jim Crow Mississippi, must have seemed like an act of outright social rebellion. Of course, Elvis sang like a black gospel singer, he grew up in the same religious tradition! He was alleged to have literally stolen a song from a lesser-known black artist — but only decades after the appropriation accusations started. In any case, Ray Charles and black artists of his generation had reason to feel bitterness toward Elvis. White artists did have advantages in the Jim Crow era that black artists didn’t, and it's hard to imagine that Elvis could have replicated his mainstream success if he had been black. (...)

Appropriation and cultural synthesis happen on a global scale now, thanks to the internet, and now foreigners mock Americans for their tsk-tsk-ing about the practice. Earlier this year, Spanish singer Rosalía was criticized (by Americans) for “appropriating” Latin American culture leading to the “widespread misconception that she is Latina,” so says an NPR writer in an article that uses the term “Latinx.” (They talk like that in el barrio Ms. Restrepo?) These “gringo latinos” were later mocked by actual Latin Americans, who didn’t seem to care that Rosalía was a “colonizer.”

by River Page, Pirate Wires |  Read more:

Image: Heinz

[ed. See also: Gwen Stefani: "I Said, 'My God, I'm Japanese'" (Allure); and, The Ed Sheeran Copyright Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity of Music Ownership (CA).]

Victory Parade on Red Square

Alongside with the President of Russia on the stand were Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan, President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko, President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, President of Kyrgyzstan Sadyr Japarov, President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon, President of Turkmenistan Serdar Berdimuhamedov and President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev. Before the parade, Vladimir Putin welcomed the heads of foreign states who had arrived in Moscow for the celebrations, in the Heraldic Hall of the Kremlin.

The parade began with the national flag of Russia and the Banner of Victory carried into Red Square. The parade was led by Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Ground Forces Army General Oleg Salyukov and reviewed by Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.

The marching column on Red Square included 30 ceremonial regiments of over 8,000 service personnel, among them 530 troops taking part in the special military operation.

The motorised column was headed by the legendary “Victory tank” T-34–85. Tigr-M and BTR-82A armoured personnel carriers, Bumerang infantry fighting vehicles, Iskander-M operational tactical missile systems, S-400 Triumf air defence launchers and Yars mobile ground-based missile systems drove through Red Square. The newest Spartak and 3-STS Akhmat armoured vehicles were presented at the parade for the first time.

The music accompaniment was provided by the combined military orchestra.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Citizens of Russia,

Dear veterans,

Comrade soldiers and sailors, sergeants and warrant officers, midshipmen and sergeant majors,

Comrade officers, generals and admirals,

Soldiers and commanders participating in the special military operation,

Happy Victory Day!

Happy holiday that commemorates the honour of our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers who glorified and immortalised their names by defending our Fatherland. They saved the humankind from Nazism through immeasurable courage and immense sacrifice.

Today, our civilisation is at a crucial turning point. A real war is being waged against our country again but we have countered international terrorism and will defend the people of Donbass and safeguard our security.

For us, for Russia, there are no unfriendly or hostile nations either in the west or in the east. Just like the vast majority of people on the planet, we want to see a peaceful, free and stable future.

We believe that any ideology of superiority is abhorrent, criminal and deadly by its nature. However, the Western globalist elites keep speaking about their exceptionalism, pit nations against each other and split societies, provoke bloody conflicts and coups, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism, destroy family and traditional values which make us human. They do all that so as to keep dictating and imposing their will, their rights and rules on peoples, which in reality is a system of plundering, violence and suppression.

They seem to have forgotten what the Nazis’ insane claims of global dominance led to. They forgot who destroyed that monstrous, total evil, who stood up for their native land and did not spare their lives to liberate the peoples of Europe.

We see how in certain countries they ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly destroy memorials to Soviet soldiers, demolish monuments to great commanders, create a real cult of the Nazis and their proxies, erase and demonise the memory of true heroes. Such profanation of the feat and sacrifices of the victorious generation is also a crime, an outright revanchism on the part of those who were cynically and blatantly preparing a new march on Russia and who brought together neo-Nazi scum from around the world for this.

Their goal – and there is nothing new about it – is to break apart and destroy our country, to make null and void the outcomes of World War II, to completely break down the system of global security and international law, to choke off any sovereign centres of development.

Boundless ambition, arrogance and impunity inevitably lead to tragedies. This is the reason for the catastrophe the Ukrainian people are going through. They have become hostage to the coup d’état and the resulting criminal regime of its Western masters, collateral damage in the implementation of their cruel and self-serving plans.

The memory of defenders of the Fatherland is sacred for us in Russia, and we cherish it in our hearts. We give credit to members of the Resistance who bravely fought Nazism as well as the troops of the allied armies of the United States, Great Britain and other countries. We remember and honour the feat of Chinese soldiers in the fight against Japanese militarism.

I strongly believe that the experience of solidarity and partnership during the years of fighting a common threat is our invaluable heritage and a secure foothold now when the unstoppable movement is gaining momentum towards a more just multipolar world, a world based on the principles of trust and indivisible security, of equal opportunities for a genuine and free development of all nations and peoples.

It is crucial that leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States have gathered here in Moscow today. I see it as appreciation of the feat of our ancestors: they fought and won together since all the peoples of the USSR contributed to our common Victory.

We will always remember that. We bow our heads in cherished memory of those who lost their lives during the war, the memory of sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, grandfathers, husbands, wives, sisters and friends.

I declare a minute of silence.

(A minute of silence.)

Citizens of Russia,

The battles that were decisive for our Motherland always became patriotic, national and sacred. We are faithful to our ancestors’ legacy and have a deep and clear awareness of what it means to be up to the mark of their military, labour and moral achievements.

We take pride in the participants in the special military operation, all those fighting on the frontlines, those who deliver supplies to the front and save the wounded under fire. Your combat activities now are of paramount importance. The country’s security depends on you today as does the future of our statehood and our people. You commendably perform your combat duty fighting for Russia. Your families, children and friends stand behind you. They are waiting for you. I am sure you can feel their unfailing love.

The entire country has united to support our heroes. Everyone is ready to help, everyone prays for you.

Comrades, friends, dear veterans,

Today, every family in our country honours Great Patriotic War participants, remembers their family members and their heroes, and lays flowers to military memorials.

We are standing on Red Square, a place which remembers retainers of Yury Dolgoruky and Dmitry Donskoy, the people’s militia of Minin and Pozharsky, soldiers of Peter the Great and Kutuzov, the military parades of 1941 and 1945.

Today we have here participants in the special military operation – regular servicemen and those who joined the army ranks during the partial mobilisation, troops of the Lugansk and Donetsk corps, many volunteer units, personnel of the National Guard, Interior Ministry, Federal Security Service, Emergencies Ministry and other security agencies and services.

My greetings to all of you, friends. My greetings to everyone who is fighting for Russia in the battlefield, who is now in the line of duty.

Our heroic ancestors proved during the Great Patriotic War that nothing can beat our strong, powerful and reliable unity. There is nothing stronger than our love for the Motherland.

For Russia! For our glorious Armed Forces! For Victory!

Hooray!

by Vladimir Putin, President of Russia |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. A lot to unpack. But also, where else do you find a current speech by the President of Russia (un-hamburgered by the US Media)? Here.]

PBMs, the Brokers Who Control Drug Prices, Finally Get Washington’s Attention

On the one hand, if you read the business press, you encounter enough discussion of the role of pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, to work out that they are very large and profitable and wield enormous influence in the pharmaceutical business…but it’a all a bit fuzzy how they do that.

Kaiser Health News, now rebranded as KFF Health News, has a new article on PBMs, with the news hook that the Senate just held hearings on PBMs before a vote on PBM legislation….with the description of what PBMs do, exactly, and what the legislation entails peculiarly hazy.

Matt Stoller, in his post The Red Wedding for Rural Pharmacies, gave the 50,000 foot description of how PBMs work and how they abuse their monopoly position. A key section:

PBMs handle the drug benefit piece of insurance plans. They maintain a list of drugs for insurance companies, they negotiate drug prices, and they manage reimbursements to pharmacies. 

The original idea behind PBMs is they would be able to get enough bargaining power by representing multiple insurance companies that they could negotiate to bring down drug prices. And accumulate bargaining power they did, merging until three PBMs control 80% of the insurance market. They are also vertically integrated with insurance companies and drug store chains. The top three PBMs are owned by CVS, United Health, and Cigna.

Unfortunately, because of an exemption from anti-kickback laws, PBMs don’t use their bargaining power to reduce consumer prices. Instead, they force pharmaceutical firms to compete over who will give the PBM the biggest kickback, which in the industry is known as a rebate. Take insulin. In 2013, Sanofi gave a 2-4% kickback to PBMs to prefer their product to customers. In 2018, that number went up to 56%. In other words, more than half of the price of insulin is going to a middleman who does nothing more than push around paper.

The many bad practices of PBMs are legendary. PBMs often force customers to buy more expensive drugs over their generic counterparts, likely because they get kickbacks when customers do so. This ends up making this obscure group of firms a lot money. The combined revenue of the top three firms, who comprise just a small part of the U.S. health system, is larger than the entire amount France spends on all medical care for its entire population.

It gets worse. PBMs all own mail-order pharmacies, and they are increasingly mandating that patients use those mail-order pharmacies instead of the local pharmacy around the corner. Moreover, PBMs now have so much power they are able to claw back money randomly from pharmacies months after a drug was dispensed, using something called a Direct and Indirect Remuneration fee. (DIR fees are only used for Medicare plans, but that is still 37% of the market.) For independent pharmacies, DIR fees are impossible to plan for, they are opaque, and they end up raising prices for consumers.

By Arthur Allen, a KFF Health News Senior Correspondent, previously worked for Politico, and before that was a freelance writer for publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Lingua Franca magazine, The New Republic, Slate, and Salon. Earlier in his career, he worked for The Associated Press. Originally published at KFF Health News

For two decades, patients and physicians eagerly awaited a lower-cost version of the world’s bestselling drug, Humira, while its maker, AbbVie, fought off potential competitors by building a wall of more than 250 patents around it.

When the first Humira biosimilar — essentially a generic version — finally hit the market in January, it came with an unpleasant surprise. The biosimilar’s maker, Amgen, launched two versions of the drug, which treats a host of conditions including rheumatoid arthritis. They were identical in every way but this: One was priced at about $1,600 for a two-week supply, 55% off Humira’s list price. But the other was priced at around $3,300, only about 5% off. And OptumRx, one of three powerhouse brokers that determine which drugs Americans get, recommended option No. 2: the more expensive version.

As Murdo Gordon, an Amgen executive vice president, explained in an earnings call, the higher price enabled his company to give bigger rebates, or post-sale discounts, to Optum and other intermediaries. Most of that money would be passed on to insurers, and patients, he said. Gordon did not mention that the higher-priced option would leave some patients paying much more out-of-pocket, undermining the whole rationale for generic drugs.

The Optum-Amgen announcements perfectly elucidated why, after years of thundering against drugmakers, Congress and the administration have now focused on regulating the deal-makers known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ health committee grilled a panel of PBM and pharmaceutical executives Wednesday in preparation for a vote on PBM legislation, expected Thursday.

The three biggest PBMs — OptumRx, CVS Caremark, and Express Scripts — control about 80% of prescription drug sales in America and are the most profitable parts of the health conglomerates in which they’re nestled. CVS Health, the fourth-largest U.S. corporation by revenue on Fortune’s list, owns CVS Caremark and the insurer Aetna; UnitedHealth Group, a close fifth, owns Optum; and Cigna, ranking 12th, owns Express Scripts. While serving as middlemen among drugmakers, insurers, and pharmacies, the three corporations also own the highest-grossing specialty drug and mail-order pharmacies.

“John D. Rockefeller would be happy to be alive today,” said David Balto, a former Federal Trade Commission attorney who represents clients suing PBMs. “He could own a PBM and monopolize economic power in ways he never imagined.” (...)

All this makes the PBMs ripe targets for politicians of both parties. Yet the complexity and obscurity of their role in the drug marketplace have skeptics wondering whether legislation advancing in the House and Senate will actually help patients or lower prices at the pharmacy counter.

“We may try to make things better and actually make things worse,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said at Wednesday’s hearing.

by Yves Smith, Matt Stollar, Arthur Allen, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: Game of Thrones, Red Wedding

The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act: Corporate Welfare For the Critical Mining Boom

On April 25th, Senators Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) introduced the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act - a bill that represents an unprecedented rollback of protections for federal public lands and prioritizes the interests of mining companies above all other land uses, including recreation, conservation, clean energy development, and the sacred sites of Indigenous peoples. Alaska has more federal public land by acreage than any other state. The implications of this legislation could be devastating for our intact ecosystems, healthy watersheds, and the communities who rely on them.

The bill would make it easier for mining companies to stake claims on public lands by allowing mining claimants - including international mining conglomerates - to permanently occupy federal public lands for a nominal fee. Proponents of the legislation assert that the bill represents a return to the status-quo, by undoing the precedent set by the recent Rosemont decision - a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that blocked the Rosemont copper mine near Tucson, Arizona. In reality, the bill makes industrial-scale mining easier and reduces the opportunity for local stakeholders to determine their own futures.

 

If enacted, the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act would allow companies to use existing mining claims to dump mine waste onto neighboring federal lands, expedite the permitting process for mining activities, and reduce opportunities for concerned stakeholders to intervene via lawsuit by ‘streamlining’ the permitting process.

This legislation is being touted as crucial for our clean energy future. Contrary to the corporate narrative - and goldrush greed - we can meet our need for critical transition minerals through both carefully sited and intensively managed mines, operating under the strictest environmental standards, and robust investment in a circular minerals economy that emphasizes recycling and reusing the critical minerals that have already been extracted from the Earth.

The mining law of 1872 is already remarkably permissive—mining activities have polluted the headwaters of 40% of western watersheds, remediation attempts are not grounded in ecological reality, and the polluting corporations pay no royalties for the minerals they extract from public lands.

True regulatory reform is needed to protect our watersheds, ecology, and communities from the impacts of the mining industry. Despite its misleading name, the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act does the exact opposite.

by Tyler Huling, Cook Inletkeeper | Read more:
Image: The Lavender pit mine, where a copper operation stopped in 1974, sits outside Bisbee, Ariz., on May 12, 2019. AP Photo/Anita Snow, File

[ed. Generations of landowners, conservationists, recreationists, and others have died fighting this antiquated law, which still governs mining activities today. See also: Planned Senate bill would counteract Mining Law ruling (AP); and, The Mining Law of 1872: Digging a Little Deeper (PERC):]

"The Mining Law emerged as a product of the California Gold Rush and the other western mining booms of the mid-19th century. Mineral deposits in the West were found predominantly on federal lands, but there was no law governing the transfer of rights to these minerals from public ownership to miners. So miners implemented their own customs, codes and laws, which Congress codified and amended as the Mining Law of 1872. This legislation gave broad discretion over the use of public land resources to the private sector, requiring little in the way of public administration. The central provisions of this legislation remain intact today.

The Mining Law allows United States citizens and firms to explore for minerals and establish rights to federal lands without authorization from any government agency. This provision, known as self-initiation or free access, is the cornerstone of the Mining Law. If a site contains a deposit that can be profitably marketed, claimants enjoy the “right to mine,” regardless of any alternative use, potential use, or non-use value of the land."

Alaska Abundance

Respite

Valisa Higman

via: here and here

Unwarranted Influence, Twenty-First-Century-Style

Honestly, it should take your breath away. We are on a planet prepping for further war in a staggering fashion. A watchdog group, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), just released its yearly report on global military spending. Given the war in Ukraine, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, in 2022, such spending in Western and Central Europe surpassed levels set as the Cold War ended in the last century. Still, it wasn’t just Europe or Russia where military budgets leaped. They were rising rapidly in Asia as well (with significant jumps in Japan and India, as well as for the world’s second-largest military spender, China). And that doesn’t even include spiking military budgets in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere on this embattled planet. In fact, last year, 12 of the 15 largest military spenders topped their 2021 outlays.

None of that is good news. Still, it goes without saying that one country overshadowed all the rest — and you know just which one I mean. At $877 billion last year (not including the funds “invested” in its intelligence agencies and what’s still known as “the Department of Homeland Security”), the U.S. military budget once again left the others in the dust. Keep in mind that, according to SIPRI, Pentagon spending, heading for a trillion dollars in the near future, represented a staggering 39% of all (yes, all!) global military spending last year. That’s more than the next 11 largest military budgets combined. (And that is up from nine not so long ago.) Keep in mind as well that, despite such funding, we’re talking about a military, as I pointed out recently, which hasn’t won a war of significance since 1945.

With that in mind, let Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Ben Freeman explain how we’ve reached such a perilous point from the time in 1961 when a former five-star general, then president, warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of endlessly overfunding the — a term he invented — military-industrial complex. Now, let Hartung and Freeman explore how, more than six decades later, that very complex reigns supreme.

Unwarranted Influence, Twenty-First-Century-Style
Not Your Grandfather’s Military-Industrial Complex

The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.

The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion — more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.

This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.

The list goes on — and on and on. President Eisenhower characterized such tradeoffs in a lesser known speech, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered in April 1953, early in his first term, this way: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…”

How sadly of this moment that is.

New Rationales, New Weaponry

Now, don’t be fooled. The current war machine isn’t your grandfather’s MIC, not by a country mile. It receives far more money and offers far different rationales. It has far more sophisticated tools of influence and significantly different technological aspirations.

Perhaps the first and foremost difference between Eisenhower’s era and ours is the sheer size of the major weapons firms. Before the post-Cold War merger boom of the 1990s, there were dozens of significant defense contractors. Now, there are just five big (no, enormous!) players — Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. With so few companies to produce aircraft, armored vehicles, missile systems, and nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has ever more limited leverage in keeping them from overcharging for products that don’t perform as advertised. The Big Five alone routinely split more than $150 billion in Pentagon contracts annually, or nearly 20% of the total Pentagon budget. Altogether, more than half of the department’s annual spending goes to contractors large and small.

In Eisenhower’s day, the Soviet Union, then this country’s major adversary, was used to justify an ever larger, ever more permanent arms establishment. Today’s “pacing threat,” as the Pentagon calls it, is China, a country with a far larger population, a far more robust economy, and a far more developed technical sector than the Soviet Union ever had. But unlike the USSR, China’s primary challenge to the United States is economic, not military.

by Ben Freeman and William D. Hartung, TomDispatch |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: Death Merchants? (Sidecar/NLR)