A science fiction idea making progress

In The Guardian:

A frog has regrown a lost leg after being treated with a cocktail of drugs in a significant advance for regenerative medicine.

The African clawed frog, which is naturally unable to regenerate its limbs, was treated with the drugs for just 24 hours and this prompted an 18-month period of regrowth of a functional leg. The demonstration raises the prospect that in the future drugs could be used to switch on similar untapped abilities for regeneration in human patients to restore tissues or organs lost to disease or injury.

“It’s exciting to see that the drugs we selected were helping to create an almost complete limb,” said Nirosha Murugan of Tufts University in Massachusetts and first author of the paper. “The fact that it required only a brief exposure to the drugs to set in motion a months-long regeneration process suggests that frogs and perhaps other animals may have dormant regenerative capabilities that can be triggered into action.”

The ridiculous Peterson

He's getting roasted for a very stupid opening on climate change:

His position: climate is everything, and you can't model everything so climate change is crap.  

Some people have generously explained what he was probably trying to say:

...but as the Tweet says  it's a line of attack which displays both ignorance and arrogance.

And these tweets following sum up the impression both Rogan and Peterson (but more especially Rogan) give me, on any topic:

And for services to the IPA...

Do all American conservatives have brain damage?

It is breathtakingly stupid that American conservatives should rush to play a game of "whataboutism" to try to downplay how Trump talked about the press compared to Biden's very occasional snappiness with reporters.

There is just zero comparison.

How thick and dumb do you have to be to not see the fascist nature of continually, at rallies, and elsewhere, calling all mainstream networks and journalists "the enemy of the people" unless they are bootlickers to the most absurd character ever to hold the Presidency; and outright lying about things like "and look up the back, they're turning the cameras off now."    

And you know what - it's weird, but the absolutely dumbest and most dishonest version of an American conservative seems to be gay conservative commentators - see Gateway Pundit and the awful Glenn Greenwald.   Greenwald's denunciation of Biden's hot mic snark is so weirdly over the top that it seems many assumed he was being sarcastic, but the following tweets just confirm he is an absolute partisan nut with not an iota of a sense of perspective. 

The Murdoch and the Russians questions

Does Murdoch think Putin empowerment by invading Ukraine is a good idea?    If not, why is he relaxed (well, relaxed enough not to be exercising any editorial control) about Fox News gee-ing up the Trumpist conservatives into taking Putin's side?   Is it really worth the money in the US, or does he think  there is money to be made in Russia too?   Is he smart enough to admit that Brexit is a populist failure?  Surely he doesn't think he has successfully "punished" the Europeans, who he complained he cannot control, by forcing Britain out of the EU?   Is he letting Fox's most influential "stars" take Putin's side as a second attempt at punishing Europe for not letting him do whatever he wants?  

So many questions.  Many brought to mind by David Frum:

 

I could come up with a better religion than this..

From a book review in the New York Times, about a young-ish enlightenment seeking trekker (and internet figure) who disappeared in a Himalayan valley knows for its trekker disappearances:

What animates Shetler? We learn that he’s the child of divorce, on the one hand having a father whose own experiences in India heavily influenced Shetler (as did their father-and-teenage-son partaking of hallucinogens) and a mother whose spiritual influence can be attributed to the Hindu-inflected Eckankar religion, birthed in the 1960s by Paul Twitchell, a onetime colleague of L. Ron Hubbard, promoting “soul travel,” the chanting of the word “Hu,” and a belief system said to have begun when an essence known as Gakko came to Earth six million years ago from the city of Retz on Venus.

I have heard of Eckankar, but never bothered reading up on its esoteric beliefs.

He's looking different

Is it just me, or does Newt Gingrich not even look like Newt Gingrich any more?    

He's aged 78 now.

Go home Arabs

We don't hear much about this in the West - but France 24 discusses the rise of anti-Arab sentiment in Turkey, which is such a troubled country now:

Homelessness and meth

So, it seems there is some discussion going on as to whether America's chronic homelessness problem is largely a result of a new form of meth that has been flooding in from Mexico.

A guy who wrote a book about it says:

I don’t know what is causing this very quick descent into psychosis, symptoms of schizophrenia, etc., among people using the meth that’s now on the street nationwide. I said this in the book.

It could indeed be the staggering quantities of the drug nationwide — certainly a byproduct of how P2P meth is made — that leads in turn to far greater consumption. It could indeed be its alarming potency. As I state in the book, there’s no neuroscience on this — no studies of the effects of today’s street meth on rats or mice. I hope the National Institute on Drug Abuse or the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will fund those studies, using authentic street meth from around the country.

In my book, I’m giving street reporting — just talking with folks who work or have lived in this world — because there are no studies. If there were any, I’d have cited them.

Also, people end up homeless for many reasons. A shredded safety net, release from prison without any family support, registered sex offenders who can’t find housing in the limited areas they’re allowed to live in, massive childhood trauma, etc. The list is probably as long and complex as the people who are homeless. I’m quite sure the high cost of housing is among the reasons for many people.

But people whose problem is a lost job or an expensive surgery with no health insurance forcing them out of housing do not collapse into a tent on the street. They usually have family support, friends on whose couch they can sleep. Not so with folks for whom using meth is the issue.

What’s more, meth’s prevalence is now so complete that once someone is homeless (for whatever reason) it’s quite easy to fall into using the drug. Meth-induced psychosis allows a user to escape the reality of living on the street. Getting out of homelessness then becomes a much more difficult task. My reporting shows that often users do not return to their former state of mental acuity once they stop using this meth. Recovery of brain faculties can take months.

Despite all this, on the list of causes of homelessness, this meth surge and meth-induced psychosis seems to me, after a lot of reporting on it, is the only topic that appears taboo to discuss in many activist/advocate circles. The issue’s narrative is almost entirely about the high cost of housing. Nothing else seems permitted. There’s almost a prohibition, a woke censorship, that prevents meth from being discussed.

Interesting...

 

Take your medicine

As reported in Science: 

Pill derived from human feces treats recurrent gut infections

...The new pill, called SER-109 and made by Seres Therapeutics, is derived from human feces purified to winnow down the resident microbes. Stool from prescreened donors is treated with ethanol, which kills many viruses, fungi, and “vegetative” bacteria—those in a state of growth and reproduction. Left behind are bacteria that can form hearty, thick-walled structures called spores, many of them from the common phylum Firmicutes. Bacteria in this group are valuable because they can compete with C. difficile in the gut, “taking its space and its food and its carbon sources,” says Seres Chief Medical Officer Lisa von Moltke; the Firmicutes also change the composition of bile acids in the intestines, making the environment less hospitable for C. difficile, she notes.

Still, you would want that gel coating to work well...

In glass half full news...

...Paul Waldman in the Washington Post notes what I have read elsewhere - despite Democrat jerks Manchin and Sinema defending the filibuster, what's more remarkable is that every other Democrat in the Senate has turned against it.   Apparently, this was not the uniform opinion even relatively recently.

A recovery story

It's not that I visit the Jezebel website out of habit, but someone on Twitter linked to this article: 

I Got Sober in the Pandemic. It Saved My Life.

and I thought it was a pretty good piece about someone recovering from too much alcohol and drugs, and depression.

Chonky Junkers

More in the series "What Google wanted me to learn about last night."   It was quite interesting, and this guy's channel is full of esoteric historical aircraft information, by the looks: 

Encouraging news

Back to the perennial favourite - the Death of God

Hey, I quite liked this essay at Aeon:  How to Pray to a dead God.  

There are a lot of familiar names in it, and some new-ish stuff I don't recall reading before.   This section, for example:

Challenges to uncomplicated faith – or uncomplicated lack of faith – have always been within religion. It is a dialectic at the heart of spiritual experience. Perhaps the greatest scandal of disenchantment is that the answer of how to pray to a dead God precedes God’s death. Within Christianity there is a tradition known as ‘apophatic theology’, often associated with Greek Orthodoxy. Apophatic theology emphasises that God – the divine, the sacred, the transcendent, the noumenal – can’t be expressed in language. God is not something – God is the very ground of being. Those who practised apophatic theology – 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. ‘We do not know what God is,’ the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. ‘God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not’ [my emphasis].

 How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsche’s infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a ‘dead God’: by understanding that neither the word ‘dead’ nor ‘God’ means anything at all.

 Well, that's one way to deal with a problem.  

[Update insert:  oddly, it reminds me of the opening lyrics of Birdhouse in Your Soul:

I'm your only friend
I'm not your only friend
But I'm a little glowing friend
But really I'm not actually your friend
But I am

 

I didn't realise they were summarising mystical/radical theology.]

I've always found the question of religion's response to the scientific changes in the understanding of the age of the planet, the size of the universe, and human nature, to be terribly interesting; and as I have written before, the older you get, the greater perspective you have on how it is not so long ago that these radical changes in understanding happened.   We're still living within the lifetime of people who were young when Einstein revolutionised physics and an understanding of the scale of the universe was found at the end of telescope.  It was only 50 or so years before that that evolution was being hotly debated as a new idea.   Is it any wonder this is still having repercussions on religions going back a couple of thousand years before these changes in understanding?

Yet, it seems to me that quite a lot of people never think of this perspective - that the (seemingly newly invigorated) war within the Churches between conservatives and liberals are connected to this problem that is actually pretty new and still being worked through.