Très Pouty

Pity token congressional morlock (just look at the weirdly-shaped head on the guy!) Trey Gowdy has to be in a bit of a tizzy with the capture of BENGHAZI!!!! suspect Ahmed Abu Khattala. The Benghazi "scandal" is nothing more than a quibble over the semantics used to describe the attack on the consular office- now the Republicans look like a bunch of fools arguing over bullshit while the president was actually working quietly to capture one of the ringleaders. Soon, the president will probably have a mug made out of Khattala's cranium to match the bong he made out of Bin Laden's skull.

In his statement regarding the capture, former car thief Darryl Issa tellingly omitted giving credit for the capture to the administration and demanded that the president share information gained from the suspect:


“The arrest of Ahmed Abu Khatallah is long overdue and our military deserves credit for conducting a successful operation. There is evidence that he is one of dozens, if not hundreds of individuals, involved in the murder of four Americans in Benghazi. The Obama Administration has an obligation to share whatever information he offers with Chairman Gowdy and the Select Committee about events before and during the Benghazi attacks.”


Lindsey Graham's response was a whine about the need for the suspect to be tried at Gitmo:





Really, Lindsey, your party has no expertise whatsoever in fighting terrorism, and the guy in the White House has had more success in pursuing terrorists as if they were criminals than his predecessor had by treating terrorists as enemy combatants.

With the suspected ringleader of the attack in custody, the right-wing obsession with the consular attacks should go the way of the dodo, but the wingnuts have invested too much effort in creating and maintaining the scandal, so they are now spinning conspiracy theories about the circumstances of the capture. They failed to ride the scandal to electoral victory in 2012, but they are calling for a Benghazi mulligan in the runup to the 2014 midterm elections. It remains to be see whether or not Trey Gowdy continues with his farcical Benghazi inquisition, but in the immediate future, I imagine he'll be très pouty.

As a postscript, blogroll member Oregon Beer Snob did a perfect job of expressing Gowdy's inner qualities- I have seen no better representation of this particular congresscreep.

Cross-posted at Rumproast.

The Sweet Season

Needing a break from the torrent of bad news coming from the Middle East and Eastern Africa (not to mention the U.S.), I decided to take a long walk on this beautiful day. As is my routine, I made sure to check out the mulberry situation. I was able to find a couple of ripe berries (which I immediately popped into my mouth), but the bulk of the mulberries are about a week away from ripeness. Seeing as I live in a neighborhood that once featured a failed silkworm "ranch", there are plenty of mulberries to be had. In the coming weeks, I'll consume gallons of them in various forms.

I love this time of year- I don't like the heat, but the season is sweet.

Keep Your Feet on the Ground

Now this is a bummer- famous famous radio personality and voice actor Casey Kasem has left for that big studio in the sky. As a child, I used to listen to Casey's American Top 40 until the fateful day that I found the famous WLIR and never looked back. I bid Casey's radio show goodbye and started listening to stuff like this:





That's an old number by the Cure with their mailman on lead vocals (the band would eventually break into the, you got it, American Top 40).

While I stopped listening to Top 40 radio, I would have to note that radio was a less balkanized medium back in the day- a radio station could play synth-pop, funky-pop, and country-pop without a programming manager blowing a gasket. Casey's production team packaged it all together, and he'd lend his familiar voice to the countdown, being America's weekly companion unobtrusive and articulator of emotions over long distances. At the risk of losing my cynic's card, I'd have to say that Casey was able to convey a care for his listeners. Of course, every so often, he'd get a little flustered, as this NSFW outtake hilariously demonstrates:





Tonight, on DJ Rich Russo's great weekly radio show, Mr Russo played an edited version of that clip and followed it up with a eulogy about Casey Kasem's professionalism, and how he was such a perfectionist that a blunder like following an up-tempo number with a dead-dog story was enough to throw him off his game for a brief spell. It's a funny clip precisely because it's so unexpected.

While I quickly left "Top 40" radio behind, I remained a big fan of Mr Kasem because of his great voice performance as Shaggy, the unintentionally(?) counterculture member of the Scooby Doo cast (he always has the munchies, never changes his clothes, talks to a dog, and sees phantoms- you make the call). Hmmmm... Boombastic charted high- if Shaggy played Shaggy, would that be a meta-Shaggy experience? Here's a classic comic/musical interlude featuring Shaggy and his constant cartoon canine companion:





On a more poignant note, here's Casey performing live as Shaggy at the MDA telethon:





It's sad to see that Mr Kasem signed off for one last time. He was a familiar, comforting voice in countless households.

NRA PSA?

I like my satire like I like my coffee- black, bitter, and scalding. Disqus commenter "Ted Nugget", the proprietor of the gloriously juvenalian website USA Holiday Planner brought to my attention his brilliant satire of both NRA culture and the Civil Defense paranoia of the Cold War era. Riffing on the mind-melting "Duck and Cover" children's films of the fifties (in an aside, my 7th grade history teacher mentioned these and told us that instead of "duck and cover", the only appropriate response to a nuclear bomb strike is "bend w-a-a-a-y over and kiss your ass goodbye"), Mr Nugget has produced a public service announcement (sans guitars) for a modern age. Here is the righteously mad Duck and Return Fire:





Mr LaPierre would approve, missing the point entirely.

Working Comfort Eagle

I just read about the bizarre case of a Long Island company pressuring employees to participate in quasi-religious practices of an organization called Harnessing Happiness. As part of the "Harnessing Happiness" regimen, the employees were exhorted to join prayer circles, thank God for their jobs and greet co-workers by saying, "I love you."

Upon reading that the central figure in "Harnessing Happiness" is a figure called "Onionhead", it finally hit me... this workplace was modeled on Cake's song Comfort Eagle.


We are building a religion
We are building it bigger
We are widening the corridors
And adding more lanes

We are building a religion
A limited edition
We are now accepting callers
For these pendant key chains


The final piece of the puzzle that fell into place was this verse:


Doesn't matter if you're skinny
Doesn't matter if you're fat
You can dress up like a sultan
In your onion head hat.


Tragically, the "Cake based" workplace seems like it sucked, when it should have ROCKED HARD!!!





If my employers told me that I had to engage in any particular relgious practices, I would have told them to stuff it. Only two of my co-workers can demand worship. If I'm going to work in a Cake-based workplace, it had better be based on Short Skirt/Long Jacket:

Another Local Legend Gone

While listening to the radio today, I learned of the passing of Ruby Dee, another towering 20th century polymath. Besides her achievements as an actress, writer, and activist on the national stage, Ms Dee and her husband Ossie Davis were pillars of the City of New Rochelle community. As a former resident of New Rochelle, this small-yet-diverse city is dear to my heart. Ossie Davis and Ruby Lee were central to the cultural life of the city, to the extent that the public library has a theater named after Ossie Davis.

My first exposure to Ms Dee's body of work was her performance in the 1961 film production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. After reading the play in 7th grade English class, our teacher showed us the powerful film:





Perhaps Ms Dee's most important role was as an MC at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom:





While the nation mourns Ruby Dee, her loss is felt especially keenly in New Rochelle, a city in which she and her husband attended PTA meetings and spoke at assemblies at the local public schools. Thank you, Ms Dee, for your dedication to the people who make up this remarkable community- rest in peace.

Secret Science Club Post Lecture Recap: Targeting Tumors

Last night, I headed down to the beautiful Bell House in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn for this month's Secret Science Club lecture. Last night's lecture, a collaboration between the Secret Science Club and Lasker Foundation, featured Dr Charles Sawyers, whose C.V. is most prestigious... cutting and pasting from the SSC blog post, he's "chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and professor in the Cell and Developmental Biology Program and Department of Medicine at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences". Wow, the man is affiliated with some incredible institutions... poking around the t00bz, I also discovered that he is president of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The topic of the lecture was cancer treatment using "targeted" medicines. Dr Sawyers began the talk with a rueful mention of the inadequacy of funding for medical research. He followed this clarion call for better funding with a basic definition of cancer- cancer involves the development of tumors, which are abnormal growths of tissue. A benign tumor is a non-invasive mass, while a malignant tumor "invades" surrounding tissue. Metastatic tumors have infiltrated numerous tissues throughout the body. Traditionally, tumors were treated using surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or a combination of the three. Dr Sawyers stated that a new approach was needed to treat cancer, a targeted approach.

Cancer is caused by mutations in the host's DNA- these mutations can be inherited or due to environmental conditions (such as carcinogens present in tobacco smoke or overexposure to the sun's UV rays). Oncogenes are genes which can potentially result in cancer, while suppressive genes act against tumor formation. Proto-oncogenes are involved in normal development, but can mutate to form an oncogene, which will result in cancerous growth. Suppressive genes stop cell growth, but can malfunction- a lack of suppressors will cause tumor growth.

As an example of the role of genes in cancer, Dr Sawyers cited the example of chronic myeloid leukemia, a blood cancer which causes an overproduction of white blood cells. Chronic myeloid leukemia involves a genetic transposition called the Philadelphia chromosome- researchers noticed that chromosome 22 in CML patients was stubby, while chromosome 9 was elongated- in the tumor cells there was a reciprocal translocation of genetic material between chromosome 22 and chromosome 9, shortening 22 and lengthening 9. The particular gene translocated is the Abl gene, which becomes fused with the BCR gene on the 22nd chromosome. The BCR-ABL fusion results in a kinase which binds ATP with a substrate, causing a chain reaction that results in abnormal growth. Dr Sawyer not only had a sweet animation of ATP engaging with the kinase, but had two models of the kinase that ended up on the bar by the end of the lecture (they were eventually returned to him, along with a nice IPA). A drug, marketed as Gleevec, was formulated to "jam" the active loop between the ATP and the kinase in order to stop abnormal white blood cell growth- the drug mimics ATP, but lacks the phosphate group that binds with the kinase, resulting in a reduced white blood cell count within thirty days.

Tumor cells can develop a resistance to drugs such as Gleevec, resulting in a relapse. A one nucleotide difference in a gene can prevent the ATP binding which stops the abnormal cell growth. The binding problem is solvable using new drugs that will work when the cancerous cells evolve resistance. There are over 500 kinases which bind ATP, and Gleevec can bind three of them- specific drugs are needed to bind specific kinases. As gene sequencing becomes more rapid, and less expensive, targeted therapy has improved, and implementation is more rapid. Since cancer is caused by mutation, efforts are underway to sequence the genetics of all cancers- new technology has reduced the cost of genetic sequencing to about $3,000, so tumors are now sequenced routinely. Once sequencing takes place, the DNA of cancerous cells is compared to that of healthy cells and "silent mutations" are filtered out. Once a database is created, the number of mutations in a tumor can be determined. There is a vast difference between the number of mutations in pediatric tumors, which can have a nucleotide "mistake" rate as low as one in a billion, and adult tumors, which average 50-100 mutations.

One ongoing project is determining where mutations occur, and compiling a "data map" of cancer genes. Currently, there are 140 "mapped" cancer genes, with 200 being the projected number of cancer genes. Out of the 140 known cancer genes, 60 are dominant and 80 are recessive. These genes regulate cell growth, cell fate and cell death (for example, malfunctions of the epidermal growth factor can result in unregulated cell division- Dr Sawyer illustrated this with an animation of out-of control cell growth among intestinal villi). In normal growth, undifferentiated stem cells can differentiate into progenitor cells, which can only differentiate further into a specific "final cell". In the course of the normal cell cycle, cell death eventually occurs.

In the case of cancers involving a malfunction of the Epithelial Growth Factor, the drug Erlotinib, another kinase inhibitor, was developed to block the growth signalling pathway. Targeted therapy has grown rapidly in the past decade and a half, with thirty-seven drugs being developed between 2001 and 2013. The therapeutic goal is to have three drugs per tumor gene, in order to counteract the development of drug resistance.

The key to developing targeted therapies is better cancer taxonomy. Put simply, knowledge makes treatment more successful. Dr Sawyer indicated that immunotherapy- harnessing the body's immune system to fight tumor cells, is a promising area of future inquiry.

In the Q&A session, some so-and-so asked the question that the Bastard was planning on asking, concerning the role of viruses in human cancers. Dr Sawyer implicated three viruses in cancers- the human papillomaviruses, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C. While formulating another question, the Bastard received a job-related phone call and had to go to his field office (the men's loo, natch) to answer the call.

Here is a video of Dr Sawyer giving a similar lecture on CML and targeted therapy (note the sweet ABL-BCR animation at around 3:15):





He looks kinda thirsty in that video... he didn't have that problem at the Bell House.

Once again, the Secret Science Club has delivered a top-notch lecture. In this case, the SSC and the Lasker Foundation were able to combine in a synergistic effect, powerful enough to overcome even the most resistant ignorance.
Special thanks to Dorian, Margaret, Dr Sawyer, and the staff of the beautiful Bell House... again!