The Thunderbolt 170615 CRISPR Critters
Dana Walker
The Thunderbolt
News — Commentary — Calendar of Activist Events — Dumb Jokes
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1) Discuss “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross”
2) Capital City Pride Festival
3) Author Reading: Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement
4) Film Screening: The Coming War with China
5) Special Green Party Meeting
6) Bonus Tip of the Day
A detailed description of all events is located after the News and Commentary section
To go directly to an event description just type the index entry above into a search box
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CRISPR Critters
170615
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The Devil’s Bargain
Simply by the act of spending American money you are helping to directly finance a whole bunch of the most heinous war crimes in history. You cannot operate in this society without making bargains with the Devil — the question is always how much are you willing to concede? This is also in the context of the fact that the level of ‘success’ you achieve in our society (as measured by the dominant meme of our society) is directly proportional to how much of your humanity you are willing to sell to that Devil, in fact.
I am entertaining the theory that most humans that do evil things are not evil by nature but that they are instead good-natured people who have been forced to adapt to their environment as best they could.
If this theory is valid then that means that the people are not the problem around here — it is the environment that they are being forced to adapt to.
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Lies Tell the Truth
Our president and our recently fired FBI director are calling each other liars.
On this one thing, at least, they are both telling the truth.
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Liars Tell Lies
With the hyper-partisan atmosphere the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ mentality is now making idiot-child liberals extoll the virtues of James Comey and the FBI.
James Comey was an assistant director at the FBI for the entire Bush-Obama era and James Comey never said a word about the massive and outrageous attack on the very foundation of our democracy that the intelligence agencies and the FBI have been conducting upon us all during that entire era.
Make no mistake: James Comey is a tried-and-true died-in-the-wool fascist.
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Status Quo
Jeremy Corbin and Bernie Sanders provide interesting phenomena. The corporate media viciously attacks them both yet both keep almost winning elections in spite of that. The Machine tells us people like Mr. Corbin and Mr. Sanders are pie-in-the-sky dreamers and that we need to continue letting the ‘adults’ actually run everything.
Are they really saying that we need to keep these same ‘adults’ running our world because — what — everything has been working out so well under them?
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Reader Feedback
I received this response to my piece on the recent uproar at TESC from Chris:
Hey Dana: I think you are making a big mistake defending TESC professor. He does not seem like a progressive. He seems more like an arrogant intellectual prick. HE is the one who brought the alt right wrath into the news by going public, including appearance on Fox News (unfair and unbalanced). Have you read what prof Zoltan has written online re: the guys messed up world view (on race)?
There was never any compulsory need for any 'whites' to leave campus. For the many years they have been engaging in this action in reverse it was just a few hundred students etc participating in the workshops on campus. So if he hadn't written and published his email in opposition 'in principle' to non poc people voluntarily leaving campus for a day to attend workshops off campus it would have just been business as usual for the annual educational ritual.
Taking his position publicly and nationally is what brought on the torrent of right wing reaction and death threats that shut the campus down. Not the fault of students even if their immature tactics were not the best.
Chris
This was my response:
I wasn't so much defending the professor as criticizing the student’s reaction to the professor. I'm not even real clear about what the actual altercation was about other than the professor thought asking white students to leave campus wasn't kosher -- a subject upon which I don't really have an opinion.
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This came from Valerie:
I have to seriously disagree with your characterization of what is going at Evergreen. The "progressive" professor wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal about the disagreement at Evergreen, and as far as I can tell took an oblivious position on the tactic, as only a white person could in dealing with issues regarding racism.
It's easy for us white people to see the student reactions as "inappropriate” or over the top...etc. I suspect one has to live with hundreds of years of race-based violence to understand their response fully. In any case, the professor is no hero and I think you ought to delve a lot deeper before you continue to characterize him thusly.
PS:
Blaming the students for the right-wing threat is like blaming a woman for wearing clothes that "provoke" an attacker. The person who made the threat is 100 percent responsible, and all of us who in any way benefit from our white supremacist culture are more responsible for creating the climate we live in, which emboldens this type of threat, then any activist who speaks out against it, however we may imagine we could have done it better!
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Concerning the figoobliations out at TESC, to be clear I was not taking a stand upon the actual issue, (I wasn’t real clear on what their altercation was even about). I was criticizing the student’s tactics and the optics that those tactics created on national news feeds. Also, I was assuming this incident blew up into a national story because of the student’s reactions to the professor’s stand — but evidently it was the professor himself that not only took this to the media, but who took it to the frigging right wing media.
I could have told him that was a bad idea — but he didn’t ask.
The right wing media machine — of course — gave the professor their usual ‘fair and balanced’ treatment and they used their editing talents to make him look like a typical privileged academic hypocritical liberal fighting with a bunch of typical depraved screaming privileged hypocritical liberal students.
Both the professor and the students played right into their hands.
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What made their job even easier was that — except maybe for the ‘depraved’ part — with probably but few exceptions, those depictions were more-or-less accurate.
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CRISPR Critters
There are three science podcasts that I try to listen to every week. Last week, Big Picture Science, a project of the SETI Institute — usually a most excellent science program — did a piece on the new CRISPR technology [Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats] that represents a new quick easy and supposedly ‘precise’ tool to change the coding of specific targeted genes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
The hosts of Big Picture Science were nearly breathless in their enthusiasm as they described this new ‘gene-editing’ technology that is so precise — and so easy to use — that it will allow nearly anyone to experiment with genetic engineering!
CRISPR can specifically target one gene and change it. With CRISPR technology, as Big Picture Science explains, it is possible to edit a single gene in a manner similar to editing a single word in a digital document; you simply tell your program to replace all ‘X’s’ with ‘Y’s’ and suddenly every ‘X’ turns into a ‘Y’.
As they began describing this new technology and its possible benefits — and the more excited the hosts became as they were describing it — the more alarmed I became.
Yes, there are numerous potential benefits that seem nearly miraculous. In CRISPR technology probably lays the cure for several genetically inherited diseases, for instance. (Though it should be noted that this currently only applies if the disease in question is a ‘monogenic’ disease, i.e. an inherited disease that is caused by a single bad gene. Sickle Cell Anemia is evidently one such gene, for instance. They are finding, though, that most such diseases are caused by intricate combinations of genes and they have thus far only figured out about 3% of them.)
The people BPS interviewed were from an institution called ‘Innovative Genomics Initiative at the University of California at Berkley’.
https://innovativegenomics.org/
The scientist that BPS interviewed was very pleasant and informative and he reassured everyone that the adults were in the room and that everyone was being very careful and very responsible with everything that they were doing. He was overflowing with endless details about CRISPR and the wondrous potential that lies in this technology and they even had a clever, entertaining, and educational skit about how CRISPR works. (They used a word-editing program to change a verse of Shakespeare into a verse from the Wizard of Oz — which I found oddly appropriate for reasons I suspect the show’s producers had not considered…)
Then — the BPS people followed this interview with another one, this time with a ‘bio-hacker’ who is literally using CRISPR technology to do GE experiments in his kitchen and then sharing his results with an online community of other amateur genetic engineers.
Yes: I said amateur genetic engineers.
The hacker that was interviewed explained the importance of placing all of your GE manipulation tools into the machinery of the cell itself so that you can produce the desired outcome. This guy even explains that when you’re dealing with 1015 number of cells then some of your things will stick and some won’t and thus it is largely a matter of ‘trial and error’.
Yes: I said ‘trial and error’.
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Finally — at the very end of the piece — the host does briefly mention, quote: ‘A number of ethical questions with this technology — and for all its promise there is some peril” to CRISPR technology — but they don’t bother to detail such things any further.
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One of numerous very serious problems with all of this is that even in cases of genetically inherited diseases highly varied suites of genes usually cause the vast majority of such diseases and all of these genes all interact with other genes in various other ways as well. And — as they seem to have to keep learning over and over again — when one is dealing with insanely complex systems that have evolved over a billion years — everything usually interacts with everything else. If you change one thing then you are very likely to change a lot of other things as well.
There are other questions that the hosts of Big Picture Science barely touched upon, though: What about unintended side effects and potential catastrophic consequences if everyone and their grandmother were to start tinkering with the basic building blocks of life? What about unintended side effects and potential catastrophic consequences resulting from the fact that different genes often act in completely different manners when they are placed in different contexts? Also — since such work often involves transferring genes from one species into another — what about potential cross-species contamination of bizarre new genetic characteristics that have never before been seen in nature?
How long before pathogens begin figuring out how to navigate this new cross-species highway?
What about fascists who want to use this technology to literally create ‘classes’ of people literally pre-wired to do whatever the ‘rulers’ need them to do — including eliminating all ‘conscience’ and ‘morals’ from all of their police and their soldiers?
And finally: What about the fact that if you seriously f%*# up then there is no ‘taking it back’ as whatever catastrophe you just unleashed is now indelibly imbedded into the genome itself?
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After Big Picture Science I listened to Quirks & Quarks, a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — and they also had a piece on CRISPR.
Q&Q also began their program extolling the many virtues and potentials of CRISPR technology — but their lead was this: “There is a fly in the ointment…”
Q&Q interviewed a scientist that described discovering a single gene that was causing blindness in mice — and how they used CRISPR technology to ‘change’ that gene and thus cure these mice: Subsequent generations stopped inheriting that gene.
However: They also followed up with a full gene sequence of the mice to see if there had been any other changes — and lo and behold, there were not only numerous other changes in the genetic wiring that had also come about due to their tinkering — but they were not the changes that the scientists had predicted might happen — and in fact the changes usually had no obvious connection to the blindness gene that could be made at all. Ironically, they also used the word processor metaphor to describe this phenomenon as well: It was as if you told your word processor to change all your ‘X’s’ into ‘Y’s’ — but then it also changed a whole bunch of other random things into other random things on other pages as well. Maybe those changes were harmless — but maybe those changes made that entire paragraph or even the entire page incoherent.
The scientist explained that it was ‘hard to tell’ at this point what these other genes did.
This gentleman thus acknowledged the risks — but he thought a cost benefit analysis should be applied to such technology: He felt that targeting exceptionally vile diseases was worth the risk of unknown side effects while manipulating genes so that your kid can have blonde hair is not.
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This stuff is very scary and the tech is now moving very fast; it is literally being crowd-sourced, in fact. Keep an eye on this.
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It’s time to get to work…
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The Olympia Action Alert
Week of June 15th thru June 22nd, 2017
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1) Thursday June 15th
Discuss “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross”
6:30 pm @ Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 2315 Division St NW
This message came through Olympia FOR:
Thursday June 15: Watch and discuss Part 6 of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s PBS acclaimed documentary, “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. at the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation (OUUC) sanctuary, 2315 Division St NW in Olympia.
Free refreshments and parking.
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2) Saturday June 17th
Capital City Pride Festival
1 to 6 pm @ Heritage Park, 7th and Water Streets
This message came through Olympia FOR:
Saturday June 17: Capital City Pride festival at Heritage Park near 7th & Water Streets, downtown from 1 to 6 pm. The parade comes down Capitol Way before then and ends in the park. Look for Olympia FOR’s booth focusing on abolishing the death penalty, featuring our popular “Wheel of Misfortune” game, which highlights many of the reasons why innocent people are convicted and sentenced to death.
Info: www.capitalcitypride.net
If you can arrange other outreach opportunities for us to present our death penalty information (including our “Wheel of Misfortune” and other informative games), contact Glen Anderson (360) 491 9093 gl...@olympiafor.org
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3) Saturday June 17th
Author Reading: Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement
6 pm @ Orca Books, 509 4th Ave E
This message came through Olympia FOR:
Saturday June 17: Labor organizer Jonathan Rosenblum speaks about issues related to his new book, Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement
Jonathan Rosenblum has been a labor, community, and faith organizer for more than thirty years, playing key roles including SeaTac Airport campaign director. Rosenblum says this book and its contents is an “examination of power in our society today – how it got so imbalanced, the devastation this imbalance has wrecked, and what working people can do and must do to reclaim power and voice in our society.” This battle between labor and big business inspired similar $15/hour fights around the country.
Hear him at 6:00 pm at Orca Books, 509 4th Ave E, Olympia. (360) 352- 0123 www.orcabooks.com
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4)
Thursday June 22nd
Film Screening: The Coming War with China
7 pm @ Traditions Café, 300 5th Ave SW
This message came from Zahid:
Pilger Reveals what the news would NOT !
Please bring your best friends & Loved Ones to see this FREE (free to you, American Ghandi paid over $109 plus plus for viewing rights; so that community can see it FREE) documentary !
Comprehend the Past (it is well documented in this documentary, see the present & possible future leanings) so that we have foresight to see where we are led now!
7pm Thursday June 22nd at:
Traditions Fair Trade & Cafe
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5) Wednesday June 21st
Special Green Party Meeting
6:30 pm @ Flourish, 112 4th Ave E
This message came from Janet:
A special Green Party Meeting will be held on June 21st to listen to four new candidates for office, and to vote to confirm our endorsements of Renata Rollins and Lisa Parshley as necessary to comply with our bylaw requirements. Please do attend our next meeting at 6:30pm on June 21st at Flourish, 112 4th Ave E in Olympia so we can finalize our Green Party endorsements of worthy candidates.
Link to Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/777670535741385/
Our agenda for June 21st will be:
- Review the minutes and waive coordinating council reports until 6/28 meeting
- Vote to confirm the candidate endorsements for Renata and Lisa
- Welcome and listen to Candidates Clark Gilman, running for Oly City Council; E.J. Zita, Incumbent Port Commissioner; Bill Fishburn, running for Port Commissioner (instead of Bill McGregor); and Chelsea Rustad, running for Tumwater City Council. The CC recommends endorsement for each of these, but your input is needed. We will seek a consensus.
Our agenda for our regular meeting on June 28th will include voting to confirm our endorsements for forwarding to the Green Party of Washington State, clarifying the level of help we can offer along with an endorsement, and next steps.
July 29th or 30 will be Annual Green Party of South Puget Sound Meeting (details will follow)
Directions: Flourish is between Spar and the guitar shop on 4th Ave. Only the entrance is visible at street level; the offices open up inside.
In solidarity,
Green Party of South Puget Sound
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6) Bonus Tip of the Day:
Keep your critters CRISPR free.
Peace.
Dana
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LINKS:
Online PDF version of this week’s Thunderbolt:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/r6iqbqfvrifydkv/TB%20170615%20CRISPR%20Critters.pdf?dl=0
The Thunderbolt radio program archive (new shows posted every Friday morning):
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cwxy9ax2zy2zkr6/AADQNRP_zQnF7nt0QT5OznpFa?dl=0
The Thunderbolt Facebook page (links to the newsletter and radio show, plus show notes for the radio show):
https://www.facebook.com/ThurstonActivists/?fref=ts
