#Western-Biotech

[healthlineonline]

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[assay-biotechnology]

Phosphorylation

Phosphorylation is a key reaction where a phospho group (PO4) is added to protein via enzymatic processes. This allows for protein modification that is central in cell signaling, cellular regulation, cell adhesion, and many more important cellular processes. Phospho protein modification predominantly occurs on amino groups: serine, threonine, and tyrosine. These modified groups on proteins are the focus of post translational modifications. Assay Biotechnology is proud to provide antibodies that are specific for these phosphorylated proteins.

Read more

[soraka-in-warhammer40k]

I'm always fascinated when someone at the club rants about "how they just invented T'au to cash on them anime weebs", completly oblivious to the time and culture of their creation. So T'au came out first in 2001, and were obviously conceptualized some years prior, which puts them into the late 90s in their original design. This is slowly hitting "the majority of the populance has no relevant internet access whatsoever" levels of "barbaric analog ages".

So imagine where GW sits in the late 90s - its a small studio somewhere in England barely coming to touch with the first elements of the internet, with the most dominant medium being television which... is not really about "exotic" shows from the other end of the world? Those get ported over when they have proven to be a hit in their own country mostly.

And without the internet as we know it today, the anime community just... did not exist. You have to understand that the whole concept of online anime culture centred around piracy, fansubs, fanart, and the creation of the term "weeabo" was a mid-to-late 00s thing, and it took almost another decade before "weeb" was somewhat reclaimed and no longer an online-slur.

There was a whole generation that grew up with (often horribly localized) japanese shows on TV (Pokemon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon) which came over with some delay to their release in Japan. By the time this generation came to congregate into online spaces and form any sort of fan-identity and culture, the T'au and their battlesuits had already been a design over a decade old.

"But wait isn't Gundam from the 70s"? Yes, that is totally correct. However, this is the one glaring mistake people make: you cannot compare modern day media content circulation around the globe to the analog ages. Those of us who remember these barbaric analog times know how it was: you just did not know stuff existed. If it was not in the newspaper or on the telly, it might as well not exist unless you knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

Sure, the Internet was slowly becoming a thing that found widespread use, but it would still take a while - not to mention the technical limitations. No streaming episodes. You start the download (if you can find someone who hosted the file of a series you had to know even existed first) somewhere around lunch, to hopefully get something to watch in the afternoon. Oh and also that blocked the household's phone-line and if the download cancelled for whatever reason then it was back to square one. Under such conditions, the online community we know today could simply not exist, as the alternative was importing stuff from the other end of the world for quite the money, or hoping a really shoddy localized VCR-tape ended up at your Blockbuster-equivalent.

Of course there was anime before that time, even those regarded absolute classics in the west, but those mostly achieved that rank over here in retrospective. When in the late 00s people wanted to watch stuff and had the ability to do so they shared what was considered "the classics" first (shared to the best of their ability with one episode cut into 5 parts on youtube with sometimes very questionable subtitles).

So even if we assume there was someone at GW in the 90s who was a total "proto-weeb" and Gudam-fan, there was literally no reason to "make knock-off Gundams" because the miniscule western wargaming audience SIMPLY DID NOT KNOW THE STUFF.

You can't make a marketing ploy to reference something your average consumers have never heard off. If anything, the creation of the T'au as a robotic-centred faction was inevitable: they needed a design that could hold their own in the setting, but Necrons hogged the full-robot niche, Imperials were weird cyborgs, Orks the "madman-scrap-tech", and Nids the "biotech". The only thing left here was "not full robot but also very clean and efficient" - and just like that, the Battlesuits and Drones were born.

It was only in later years when the Internet had come into full swing where they decided to go full-suit with releases such as the Riptide, but if we talk about the OG design of T'au and the first decade? Nothing to do with anime or "fishing for weebs". The fish would not be coming to that spot for almost a decade, and it would take a bit more before their numbers were plentyful enough to make it worth casting a line out.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week - March 13, 2023

🐝 - Did you hear about the honeybee vaccine? It's creating quite the buzz! But seriously, it's a major breakthrough in the fight against American foulbrood and could save billions of bees.

1. Transgender health care is now protected in Minnesota

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order protecting and supporting access to gender-affirming health care for LGBTQ people in the state, amidst Republican-backed efforts across the country to limit transgender health care. The order upholds the essential values of One Minnesota where all people, including members of the LGBTQIA+ community, are safe, celebrated, and able to live lives full of dignity and joy.

Numerous medical organizations have said that access to gender-affirming care is essential to the health and wellness of gender diverse people, while states like Tennessee, Arizona, Utah, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Florida have passed policies or laws restricting transgender health care.

2. First vaccine for honeybees could save billions

The US government has approved the world's first honeybee vaccine to fight against American foulbrood, a bacterial disease that destroys bee colonies vital for crop pollination.

Developed by biotech company Dalan Animal Health, the vaccine integrates some of the foulbrood bacteria into royal jelly, which is then fed to the queen by the worker bees, resulting in the growing bee larvae developing immunity to foulbrood. The vaccine aims to limit the damage caused by the infectious disease, for which there is currently no cure, and promote the development of vaccines for other diseases affecting bees.

3. Teens rescued after days stranded in California snowstorm: "We were already convinced we were going to die"

The recent snowstorms in California have resulted in dangerous conditions for hikers and residents in mountain communities. Two teenage hikers were rescued by the San Bernardino County sheriff's department after getting lost in the mountains for 10 days.

The boys were well-prepared for the hike but were not prepared for the massive amounts of snow that followed. They were lucky to survive, suffering from hypothermia and having to huddle together for three nights to stay warm.

Yosemite National Park has had to be closed indefinitely due to the excessive snowfall.

4. La Niña, which worsens Atlantic hurricanes and Western droughts, is gone

The La Nina weather phenomenon, which increases Atlantic hurricane activity and worsens western drought, has ended after three years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That's usually good news for the United States and other parts of the world, including drought-stricken northeast Africa, scientists said.

The globe is now in what's considered a "neutral" condition.

5. Where there's gender equality, people tend to live longer

Both women and men are likely to live longer when a country makes strides towards gender equality, according to a new global study that authors believe to be the first of its kind.

The study was published in the journal PLOS Global Public Health this week. It adds to a growing body of research showing that advances in women's rights benefit everyone. "Globally, greater gender equality is associated with longer [life expectancy] for both women and men and a widening of the gender gap in [life expectancy]," they conclude.

6. New data shows 1 in 7 cars sold globally is an EV, and combustion engine car sales have decreased by 25% since 2017

Electric vehicles are the key technology to decarbonise road transport, a sector that accounts for 16% of global emissions. Compared with 2020, sales nearly doubled to 6.6 million (a sales share of nearly 9%), bringing the total number of electric cars on the road to 16.5 million.

Sales were highest in China, where they tripled relative to 2020 to 3.3 million after several years of relative stagnation, and in Europe, where they increased by two-thirds year-on-year to 2.3 million. Together, China and Europe accounted for more than 85% of global electric car sales in 2021

7. Lastly, watch this touching moment as rescued puppy gains trust in her new owners

By the way, this is my newly started YouTube channel. Subscribe for more wholesome videos :D

---

That's it for this week. If you liked this post you can support this newsletter with a small kofi donation:

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Let's carry the positivity into next week and keep spreading the good news!

[hartshorn-and-isinglass]

If you've ever wondered how biotech companies advertise, there are of course the usual routes like trade magazines and such, but for a brief blessed moment just over a decade ago, several companies were persuaded to try and go viral with music videos:

This Eppendorf commercial is still living rent-free in my head:

Bio-Rad really got into hyping their PCR products:

Literally no one has ever been this excited about Western blots, I promise.

Honorable mention to ABI (now part of Thermo Fisher) for the Dancing Scientist commercial:

(ETA: oh wow, TMO actually edited the Dancing Scientist out of this ad so I had to go hunt for the original. Should be fixed now.)

Do with this information what you will.

[hamaonoverdrive]

The bullish serpent.

[brief character description under cut]

The youngest leader of a crime syndicate in Bay City, Selena Ophite is as cutthroat as she is cold-blooded. Long known as the cornerstone of underground gambling, the Ophites had a rough patch in 2112 when a run of bad luck put the family on the brink of disbandment. The former family boss, Soleil Ophite, disappeared under mysterious circumstances around that time and left his daughter to take the reigns. Under Selena's lead the family underwent a massive resurgence, following changing trends in underground markets and pivoting partially into biotech. The Ophites are now a behemoth in the organ trade, with the largest organ bank in the western United States and a reputation for buying or selling any body part without asking questions. The linchpin of Selena's empire is the Nouveau Monte-Carlo, a casino where guests can lose their shirt-- as well as their skin.

On her relationship with Tora Hoshi:

While Selena is "the youngest crime syndicate leader in Bay City" and Tora is "the leader of the newest crime syndicate in Bay City", these are distinctions that people unaffiliated with either family don't bother to delineate. To anyone else involved in the Bay City Alliance, both families are seen as overly ambitious upstarts that are more likely to be crushed under their own weight than to have an impact on more established groups. For this reason, the Ophites and the Hoshis are bitter rivals that constantly aim to undercut each other.

Reference sheet:

[404-usersnotfound]

The continual existence and success of the Cuban revolution with all the odds stacked against them, in the face of inhumane US economic warfare, decades after the collapse of the soviet sphere is just so fucking impressive. They have achieved incredible outcomes for the Cuban people despite the US-enforced impoverishment of the island. 100% adult literacy, longer life expectancy than the US, and an incredible public biotech sector. This small island nation was able to develop MULTIPLE effective covid vaccines on a similar timeline to the US with no profit motive. Protections for queer and trans rights are strong with the recently adopted family code, and are more extensive than many other western nations. Their existence and success flies in the face of US capitalist propaganda, literally within swimming distance of the Florida keys. Its a beautiful thing.

[peregrination-studies]

23 books in 2023

Thank you for the tag @the---hermit !! I did this challenge last year (available here), and finished all the books on my main list just in the nick of time! I’ve been planning this list out since about July of last year, and I’m really excited to get started on it! I’m also doing a few additional lists (ocean-themed, seasonally themed, etc.) that I might post throughout the year. We shall see!

Environmental science/ecology

1) Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (also recommended by friends) (read Dec 2023)

2) The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs: Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way, Predict the Weather, Locate Water, Track Animals — And Other Forgotten Skills by Tristan Gooley (read December 2023)

3) Listening to Whales by Alexandra Morton (read April 2023)

4) The World is Blue by Sylvia Earle (read August 2023)

5) Being Salmon Being Human by Martin Lee Mueller (read May 2023)

Classics/Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge

6) Timeline by Michael Crichton (read Jan 2023)

7) The Awakening by Kate Chopin (read Nov 2023)

8) Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (read Nov 2023)

9) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (read Nov 2023)

10) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (read March 2023)

Reading around the world

11) The Lost City of The Monkey God by Douglas Preston (Honduras) (read Nov 2023)

12) Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration by David Roberts (Antarctica) (read July 2023)

13) Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (South Africa) (read Nov 2023)

14) Beyond the Last Oasis by Ted Edwards (Western Sahara) (read December 2023)

15) The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag and Katharina Rout (translator) (Mongolia) (read Nov 2023)

Architecture and Design

16) The New Carbon Architecture by Bruce King (read Feb 2023)

17) Design with Life: Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities by Mitchell Joachim and Maria Aiolova (read Feb 2023)

18) The Alchemy of Architecture: Memories and Insights from Ken Tate by Ken Tate and Duke Tate (read Nov 2023)

19) Houses that Can Save the World by Courtenay Smith and Sean Topham (read Jan 2023)

20) Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (read Dec 2023)

Books recommended by friends

21) The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (Read Jun 2023)

22) O Pioneers! by Willa Cather (Read Dec 2023)

23) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Read Jan 2023)

BONUS

24) Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan

25) Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand

26) Defenceless: Gli Ultimi Romantici by Giulia Vola (second year of this on my list bc I think I’ll FINALLY be able to have access to my copy again!! Woohoo!!)

27) Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

28) Backpacked: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America by Catherine Ryan Howard

I really love this challenge, so I want to share it far and wide with the world, BUT I also know not everyone wants to do this, so absolutely no pressure tagging: @contre-qui @daydreaming-optimist @sweetlikehoneysteve @notetaeker @humble-boness @silhouette-of-sarah @willowstea @cheshire-castle-library @deirdredoodle @a-students-lifebuoy @phd-on-fire @amareteur @frithams @carefortheearth @ckmstudies @theskittlemuffin and anyone else who wants to!

[kaftan]

Longish post on a discovery regarding lesbianism and the 1001 Nights (again)

So I was trying to track down an online version of the story of qamar al-zaman and the princess boudour (from 1001 nights) and I instead ran into this delightful webpage which has links to so many relevant scholarly articles about it??

https://www.alpennia.com/lhmp/lhmp-event-person/qamar-al-zaman-and-princess-boudour

Here’s a sample of some of them:

LHMP #384 Bosman 2021 ’I Am Not Good at Any of This’ Playing with Homoeroticism in The Arabian Nights

This article looks at two stories within the 1001 nights that set up scenes of apparent homoeroticism due to gender disguise. In two romances—that of Qamar and Budur, and that of Ali Shar and Zumurrud—the woman disguises herself as a man during a period when the lovers are separated, and then when they are reunited and the disguised woman is in a position of greater social power, she teases her lover (who has not recognized her or even realized she is a woman) by demanding that he submit to her sexually (believing he is submitting to a man).

LHMP #383 Antrim 2020 Qamarayn: The Erotics of Sameness in the 1001 Nights

This article looks at how beauty and attractiveness and desirability are framed within the early manuscripts of the 1001 Nights as involving similarity rather than gender difference. While later editions, and especially translations and adaptations into western languages, tended to insert a more binary-gendered aesthetic into the descriptions of characters in the thousand and one nights, this is a conceptual shift from the early versions.

LHMP #135 Epps 2008 Comparison, Competition, and Cross-Dressing: Cross-Cultural Analysis in a Contested World

Epps considers themes in stories from The Thousand and One Nights that compare and contrast gender, particularly in terms of evaluating gendered ideas of beauty, and cultural framings of gendered responses to another’s beauty. The initial discusion covers a debate between two jinn (one male, one female) regarding whether boys or girls are more beautiful. On test that is suggested is which gender is least able to control themselves sexually on seeing the other. I.e., that greater beauty will more easily overcome self-control in the other.

And then I went to the website’s homepage and found this bio from the person who runs it?

Heather Rose Jones writes fantasy, historic fantasy, and historical fiction, including the Alpennia series with swordswomen and magic in an alternate Regency setting. She blogs about research into lesbian-like motifs in history and literature at the Lesbian Historic Motif Project which provides inspiration for her fiction. She has a PhD in linguistics, studying metaphor theory and the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions, and works as an industrial failure investigator in biotech.

(bolded text mine)

How was I unaware of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, which is possibly 10000% my shit? Also, three of the articles on that page are of Sahar Amer’s work; how did I not know that the author who got me interested in medieval Arab lesbianism to begin with was/is a part of this??

Brb exploring this unexpected treaure trove, join me if you like!

[msclaritea]

This article is from 2019 and never more important than now. Maybe people didn't take it seriously then. I hope they will, now.

"Shortly after World War II, when Europe lay in ruin and humanity was newly traumatized by the spectacle of organized violence that an authoritarian regime could achieve in the industrial epoch, the Western World experienced a sudden cultural shift. This new regime of thought is sometimes called postmodernism, but that term is obscure and overused; a better way to think about this is that there was no longer a unifying narrative, a guiding thread that united humans in the West. Whereas some countries might have previously had religious bonds, or ethnic bonds, or monarchial bonds, or even political bonds around, say, an authoritarian leader, suddenly there were none anymore — or at least none that were universally believed. Individualism and identity were more important, and politicians and legal bodies would now have to consider how to govern subjects in an ambiguous, pluralistic, multicultural world.

At the same time, it was becoming clear that the forces that shaped the world — the power to  organize society, or to exterminate it — were in the hands of scientists and technologists. The atom bomb, the intercontinental ballistic missile, the radio, the car, electrification, the refrigerator and the moon landing all happened in a span of about a hundred years. Science and technology spurred World War II, and led to its conclusion. And as the war receded from memory, it was apparent that the areas of greatest economic growth were all in technical fields — computers, engineering, communications, biotech and material science.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, a French philosopher who studied the condition of knowledge in this new era, realized that technology had changed the way that humans even thought about what knowledge was. Knowledge that computers could not process or manage — for instance, the ability to think critically or analyze qualitatively — was increasingly devalued, while the kinds of knowledge that computers could process became more important. As Lyotard wrote:

The miniaturisation and commercialisation of machines is already changing the way in which learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited....The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation. It can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learning is translated into quantities of information. We can predict that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will be abandoned... Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge” statements.

Lyotard wrote this in 1978, before the modern internet even existed. Today, the idea that computational forms of knowledge — and/or the kinds of people who traffic in that knowledge — are more valuable to our society seems to be universal. Thanks to generous grants from the tech industry and well-heeled nonprofits like the Mellon Foundation, humanities academics across the world have been spurred to do more research in what is called the "digital humanities" — a vague term that often means applying statistical and quantitative tools to data sets that involved humanities research, such as literary corpuses. The tech industry investments in digital humanities fulfills Lyotard's prophecy that society would cease to see the humanities' brand of knowledge as useful; that it would attempt remake the humanities into a discipline characterized by discrete information, rather than a means of analyzing, considering, and philosophizing the world.

In the same essay, Lyotard actually distinguishes between two different types of knowledge: the "positivist" kind, that is applicable to technology; and the "hermenutic" kind of knowledge. Hermeneutics, meaning the study of interpretation, is what the humanities (and to some extent social sciences) concerns itself with. One can see how this kind of knowledge might be difficult for computers to catalogue and use. The idea that a computer could produce a literary analysis of a Vonnegut short story sounds absurd because it is: this is not the way that computers process data, this is not what humans generally regard computers as useful for, and it is certainly not what they are designed to do by the tech companies. Unsurprisingly, then, this type of humanities knowledge has become devalued, and not even considered "knowledge" by many.

So this leads us to a predicament in which slowly, since the postwar era, humanities skills and associated knowledge have been devalued, while STEM knowledge — an acronym for "Science, Tech, Engineering and Math," meaning the kind of quantitative knowledge associated with technology — reigns supreme. One of the most interesting places that you can see this trend is in fiction: the kinds of heroes and protagonists that people admire and look up to in fiction are increasingly those with STEM knowledge, as these people are seen as heroes because we uncritically accept that STEM knowledge is what changes the world. There is a reason that Iron Man is a billionaire technologist, and Batman is a billionaire technologist, and The Hulk's namesake Bruce Banner has multiple PhDs in the Marvel canon, and that the mad scientist Rick Sanchez (of "Rick and Morty") is essentially an immortal, infinitely powerful being because of his ability to understand science and wield technology. We admire these people because they possess the kinds of skills that our society deems the most valuable, and we're told that we, like them, can use these skills to master the universe.

(There is a potent irony here, of course, in that it is artists who write these narratives, and artists who are partly responsible for creating and popularizing this kind of STEM-supremacist propaganda. Weirdly, though, you rarely see a superhero or a super-spy who started life as a painter, or a novelist, or a comic book artist.)

Moreover, in real life, people who possess technological knowledge, primarily the scions of Silicon Valley, are widely adulated, viewed as heroes who will inherently change society for the better. This manifests itself in various ways: some technologists, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have set up philanthropic foundations to "solve" our social problems — though curiously, the means by which that happens always seems to enrich themselves and their fellow capitalists along the way. Some of them promise widespread social change for the better via their own businesses, as though running a for-profit tech company was in and of itself a gift to the world and a net positive for social cohesion: you see this in many tech companies that advertise themselves as operating "for good," such as in the PR rhetoric of Facebook.  Then, there are those who believe that their contribution to society will be helping us leave this planet, and who are investing heavily in private spaceflight companies with the ultimate intention of colonizing space; this includes both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

In all these cases, the idea that people with STEM knowledge are predestined to save the world is an idea has become so dominant we don’t even question it. Some call this attitude STEM chauvinism, though I prefer the moniker STEM Supremacy. The noun "supremacy," I believe, is called for, because of how the idea that STEM knowledge (and those who posses it) is superior to other forms of knowledge has become so hegemonic that our culture openly mocks those who possess other forms of knowledge — particularly the hermeneutic, humanities-type knowledge. There is a fount of memes about humanities majors and how useless their fields are; some of these memes depict humanities majors as graduating to working at low-wage jobs like McDonalds; others mock critical humanities majors (particularly gender studies) as being out-of-touch, social failures.

Such discourse is intersectional with other supremacist beliefs, such as patriarchy, and often these kinds of memes that celebrate STEM knowledge and mock humanities knowledge will simultaneously mock women and celebrate masculinity. It was unsurprising to me when, last year, it leaked that a Google engineer, James Damore, had circulated an anti-diversity manifesto in which he used discredited science to argue that there were biological reasons for the gender gap. He went on to argue that there were reasons men were more interested in computers and in leadership, and women less. Though Damore was fired, he maintains that many of his peers agreed with him. Such incidents speak to the ways that different chauvinist tendencies, one of STEM Supremacy and one of patriarchy, can intersect to form novel noxious political ideologies.

The concept of "STEM Supremacy" relies on a popular belief that STEM knowledge is synonymous with progress. Yet if you take this kind of belief a bit too far, you might be keen to abandon democratic ideals and start to believe that we really should live in a society in which the STEM nerds rule over us. This has resulted in a number of half-baked supremacists within the tech industry who advocate either for authoritarian technocracies or, more bizarrely, monarchy.

I’ll give a few brief examples. There’s Google engineer Justine Tunney, a former Occupy Wall Street activist who now calls for “open-source authoritarianism. ” Tunney has argued against democracy and in favor of a monarchy run by technologists, and advocated for the United States to bring back indentured servitude.

But perhaps best-known among the techno-monarchists is Mencius Moldbug, the nom de plume of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer and founder of startup Tlon — a startup that is backed at least in part by billionaire anti-democracy libertarian Peter Thiel, who famously once wrote he did not believe democracy and freedom were compatible, and expressed skepticism over women's suffrage. Moldbug's polemics are circular, semi-comprehensible, and blur political theory and pop culture; Corey Pein of The Baffler described his treatises as "archaic [and] grandiose," while being "heavily informed by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas."

Both of these so-called thinkers constitute parts of a larger movement that calls itself "Dark Enlightenment," alternatingly known as "neoreactionaries." True to its name,  the political agenda of Dark Enlightenment includes a celebration of patriarchy, monarchy, and racialized theories of intelligence differentials. 

The notion that monarchy is popular again in Silicon Valley might sound absurd. We associate monarchies with stodgy, quaint medieval kingdoms, the opposite of the disruptive, fast-moving tech industry. And yet those in the tech industry who see monarchy as appealing are keen to point out how the hierarchical aspects of monarchial rule are actually familiar to their industry. As Pein mentions in his Baffler essay, Thiel delivered a lecture in 2012 in which he explained the connection:

A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.

[But] it is certainly not representative governance. People don’t vote on things. Once a startup becomes a mature company, it may gravitate toward being more of a constitutional republic. There is a board that theoretically votes on behalf of all the shareholders. But in practice, even in those cases it ends up somewhere between constitutional republic and monarchy. Early on, it’s straight monarchy. Importantly, it isn’t an absolute dictatorship. No founder or CEO has absolute power. It’s more like the archaic feudal structure. People vest the top person with all sorts of power and ability, and then blame them if and when things go wrong.

[T]he truth is that startups and founders lean toward the dictatorial side because that structure works better for startups. It is more tyrant than mob because it should be. In some sense, startups can’t be democracies because none are. None are because it doesn’t work. If you try to submit everything to voting processes when you’re trying to do something new, you end up with bad, lowest common denominator type results.

The underpinnings of STEM Supremacy are, as I've laid out, complicated to see and stretch back to the end of World War II — but when put together they form a broader picture of where the philosopher-kings of the tech industry are heading, and what they believe. If we continue to live in a society that devalues humanities-type knowledge and glorifies STEM knowledge, this kind of thinking will persist, I fear. And the tech industry is partly responsible for cultivating this noxious worldview, in the sense that their PR apparatuses glorify STEM knowledge and encourage the public to view their leaders as demigods.

This isn't a unique phenomenon. Any situation where a certain ideology is denigrated and another valorized, there will be at some point a corresponding rise in a chauvinism in favor of the valorized ideology. The situation today is made more complicated by the fact that the tech industry benefits from the normalization of STEM Supremacist beliefs. The unearned trust that the public has for tech startups and tech industry ideas, the lack of regulation, and the absurd valuations of companies that continue to lose money — this is all motivated by an underlying belief that these companies are innately good, their owners smart, and their work more vital than other fields. Whether they admit it or not, you can draw a line from the public relations departments of tech companies and Justine Tunney's call for "open-source authoritarianism."

Ironically, the only antidote to all this sophistry is the humanities — the kind of critical thinking that they entail, and the kind of thinking that it is impossible for computers to do. I've often wondered if part of the tech industry's investment in digital humanities is designed to help stave off critical discourse or criticism of their companies. Indeed, by remapping the idea of what knowledge is in the first place, the tech industry is helping to realize a future in which we lack even the language to think critically about their role in society. Or maybe even a future in which they rule over us as monarchial, benevolent dictators — at least in their eyes. Perhaps this was the plan all along. (Oh yeah. It was)

By KEITH A. SPENCER

Keith A. Spencer is a senior editor at Salon who edits Salon's science/health vertical. His book, "A People's History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy," was released in 2018. Follow him on Twitter at @keithspencer, or on Facebook here.

_______________________________________________

THESE FUCKERS IN SILICON VALLEY WANT A MONARCHY !!

"Few Catholics outside the D.C area are likely familiar with Fr. Arne, who never wrote a book or made national headlines. Yet a list of those who appear in Eberstadt’s book to laud his role among “billionaires and Supreme Court Justices” indicates the breadth of his influence: George Weigel, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, Arthur Brooks, Hadley Arkes, Peter Thiel, and Fr. Paul Scalia, to name but a few..."

"From his perch on K Street at the Catholic Information Center (CIC), Father Arne Panula shepherded some of the nation’s power brokers into the Catholic Church..." Mary Eberstadt

“As recently as 2017, Billy [Barr] was on the board of directors of the DC-based Catholic Information Center, led by the ultraright and secretive group Opus Dei…Its board includes the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone..."

*Above thread is chockful of more information!*

[gusty-wind]

BioNTech Faces Lawsuit Over COVID-19 Vaccine Side Effects

In a landmark development, BioNTech SE, the German biotechnology company that partnered with Pfizer Inc. to produce one of the first COVID-19 vaccines, is now facing its first legal challenge in Germany over vaccine side effects.

In an unprecedented case that could potentially spark hundreds of similar claims across Germany, the plaintiff – a woman who has chosen to remain anonymous due to Germany’s privacy laws – is suing BioNTech for a minimum of €150,000 ($161,500) in damages.

According to Reuters, she cites “damages for bodily harm as well as compensation for unspecified material damage,” as detailed by Hamburg’s regional court and the law firm representing her, Rogert & Ulbrich.

Side effects listed in the suit include upper-body pain, swollen extremities, fatigue, and sleeping disorders attributed to the BioNTech Pfizer vaccine.

The landmark case’s first hearing will take place on Monday.

Conservatives Are Looking For Ways To Boycott and Move Spending Away From Woke Corporations -- Here Is One Way To Do It

More lawsuits are coming in Germany. Rogert & Ulbrich reports filing about 250 cases for clients seeking damages for COVID-19 vaccine side effects. Another law firm, Caesar-Preller, claims to represent 100 cases, collectively covering almost all such cases in Germany. A few similar cases have been filed in Italy.

Reuters reported:

Tobias Ulbrich, a lawyer at Rogert & Ulbrich, told Reuters he aimed to challenge in court the assessment made by European Union regulators and German vaccine assessment bodies that the BioNTech shot has a positive risk-benefit profile.

German pharmaceutical law states that makers of drugs or vaccines are only liable to pay damages for side-effects if “medical science” shows that their products cause disproportionate harm relative to their benefits or if the label information is wrong.

BioNTech, which holds the marketing authorisation in Germany for the shot it developed with Pfizer , said it concluded after careful consideration that the case was without merit.

“The positive benefit-risk profile of Comirnaty remains positive and the safety profile has been well characterised,” the biotech firm said, referring to the vaccine’s brand name.

It noted about 1.5 billion people had received the shot across the world, including more than 64 million in Germany.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) also claimed that BioNTech’s Comirnaty, the most prevalent vaccine in the Western world, is “safe for use.”

EMA claimed that vaccines have helped save almost ’20 million lives globally’ in the first year of the pandemic alone. While acknowledging a ‘rare’ risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation, primarily in young males post-vaccination, the EMA affirms that safety monitoring was not compromised during fast-track assessments.

Reuters reported that the liability issue remains uncertain, especially regarding who would pay legal costs or compensation if the plaintiff wins. EU’s bulk purchase agreements with vaccine manufacturers, including BioNTech-Pfizer, reportedly contain full or partial liability waivers for legal costs and potential compensation, which could force EU governments to bear some costs.

Germany, like many countries, has a no-fault compensation program for individuals who suffer permanent harm from vaccines. However, participation in this program does not preclude an individual from seeking damages separately.

In contrast, the United States has granted manufacturers immunity from liability for COVID vaccines receiving regulatory approval.

[healthlineonline]

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[rockislandadultreads]

Read-Alike Friday: In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Centuries before, robots of Panga gained self-awareness, laid down their tools, wandered, en masse into the wilderness, never to be seen again. They faded into myth and urban legend.

Now the life of the tea monk who tells this story is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of "what do people need?" is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They will need to ask it a lot. Chambers' series asks: in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter?

This is the first volume in the “Monk and Robot” series. 

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

In a ruined, nameless city of the future, a woman named Rachel, who makes her living as a scavenger, finds a creature she names “Borne” entangled in the fur of Mord, a gigantic, despotic bear. Mord once prowled the corridors of the biotech organization known as the Company, which lies at the outskirts of the city, until he was experimented on, grew large, learned to fly and broke free. Driven insane by his torture at the Company, Mord terrorizes the city even as he provides sustenance for scavengers like Rachel.

At first, Borne looks like nothing at all—just a green lump that might be a Company discard. The Company, although severely damaged, is rumoured to still make creatures and send them to distant places that have not yet suffered Collapse. Borne somehow reminds Rachel of the island nation of her birth, now long lost to rising seas. She feels an attachment she resents; attachments are traps, and in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet when she takes Borne to her subterranean sanctuary, the Balcony Cliffs, Rachel convinces her lover, Wick, not to render Borne down to raw genetic material for the drugs he sells—she cannot break that bond.

Against his better judgment, out of affection for Rachel or perhaps some other impulse, Wick respects her decision. Rachel, meanwhile, despite her loyalty to Wick, knows he has kept secrets from her. Searching his apartment, she finds a burnt, unreadable journal titled “Mord,” a cryptic reference to the Magician (a rival drug dealer) and evidence that Wick has planned the layout of the Balcony Cliffs to match the blueprint of the Company building. What is he hiding? Why won’t he tell her about what happened when he worked for the Company?

This is the first volume in the “Borne” series. 

Anthropocene Rag by Alexander C. Irvine 

In the future United States, our own history has faded into myth and traveling across the country means navigating wastelands and ever-changing landscapes.

The country teems with monsters and artificial intelligences try to unpack their own becoming by recreating myths and legends of their human creators. Prospector Ed, an emergent AI who wants to understand the people who made him, assembles a ragtag team to reach the mythical Monument City.

In this nanotech Western, Alex Irvine infuses American mythmaking with terrifying questions about the future and who we will become.

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

Shana wakes up one morning to discover her little sister in the grip of a strange malady. She appears to be sleepwalking. She cannot talk and cannot be woken up. And she is heading with inexorable determination to a destination that only she knows. But Shana and her sister are not alone. Soon they are joined by a flock of sleepwalkers from across America, on the same mysterious journey. And like Shana, there are other "shepherds" who follow the flock to protect their friends and family on the long dark road ahead.

For as the sleepwalking phenomenon awakens terror and violence in America, the real danger may not be the epidemic but the fear of it. With society collapsing all around them--and an ultraviolent militia threatening to exterminate them--the fate of the sleepwalkers depends on unraveling the mystery behind the epidemic. The terrifying secret will either tear the nation apart--or bring the survivors together to remake a shattered world.

This is the first volume in the “Wanderers” series. 

[hoursofreading]

I also represented once-prosperous industrial cities in upstate New York where factories had closed and jobs dried up, just like in southeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. I respected the defiant pride that so many who lived there felt for their hometowns and understood the mistrust they felt toward outsiders swooping in with grand pronouncements about their lives and futures. I found that by listening, building coalitions, and helping people to help themselves, we could start turning things around and create new opportunities for businesses and jobs. I worked with eBay to help small businesses in rural upstate communities get online and reach new customers. My office connected chefs and restaurant owners from Manhattan with farmers and winemakers in the Hudson Valley and the Finger Lakes in an effort to expand sales. And we worked with upstate universities to bring in new research grants that could help them become hubs for job-creating industries such as biotech and clean energy. I loved that work because it produced results and made people’s lives better. Appearing to dismiss the men and women of Coal Country—or any Americans working hard against the odds to build better lives for themselves and their families—wasn’t something I could just shrug off. This really bothered me, and I wanted badly to do something about it.

What Happened -- Clinton, Hillary Rodham -- 2017 -- Simon & Schuster -- c0c38de3052d9851d39aae72bcbf1c3c -- Anna’s Archive

[janetushar1]

Gene Editing Market to Hit $16.2 Billion by 2032

The global Gene Editing Market was valued at USD 5.1 Billion in 2024 and it is estimated to garner USD 16.2 Billion by 2032 with a registered CAGR of 15.6% during the forecast period 2024 to 2032.

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Top Players

Lonza Group Ltd. (Switzerland), Perkinelmer Inc. (U.S.), CRISPR Therapeutics AG (Switzerland), Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (U.S.), Eurofins Scientific (Luxembourg), Aglient Technologies Inc. (U.S.), Danaher Corporation (U.S.), Genscript Biotech Corporation (U.S.)

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Regions Included

-North America [United States, Canada, Mexico]

-South America [Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Chile, Peru]

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-Middle East & Africa [GCC, North Africa, South Africa]

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