Month: April 2018

Snark of the Day Conundrum

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Surprised the @washingtonpost didn’t illo this with the word JUDENREIN shaved into pubic hair. https://t.co/pK4pK4siAR

— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) April 2, 2018

It being a slow news day, the Washington Post posted an article from Carey Purcell, who is miffed that the two Jewish men she dated refused to recognize her in all her WASPy glory.

In the last line, she refers to  creating a cocktail called, “A Jewish Man’s Rebellion, which has a bourbon base and a bacon garnish.

Well, there were two responses that were noteworthy, one a tweet from Spencer Ackerman that is the might be even more epic than his comment at an editorial meeting of the New Republic, where he offered to, “Skullf%$# the corpse of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to establish his anti-terrorist bona fides.”

It is a work of beauty and elegance under Twitter’s 140 280 character limit.

On the other hand, the Forward goes for the long form, “How Come Jewish Men Keep Breaking Up With Me?, which (obviously) goes into more detail (4347 characters), and makes what I assume to be devastating allusions to the TV show Sex and the City.

I assume that Twitter is rather a rather unaccommodating climate for Ms. Purcell right now, but please remember to take the time to heap opprobrium on the editor who selected this for publication as well.

Remember the tools for such things are irony, sarcasm, and mockery, not obscene epithets or threats of violence.

It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, don’t f%$# it up and make them martyrs.

Why Yes, I Do Feel Like Wile E. Coyote

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I’m not particularly worried about the impending reentry of the Tiangong-1 space station, but it does conjure up the Chuck Jones Warner Brothers classic animated Road Runner shorts:

I love clicks as much as the next online journalist. I love that there is an uncertain thing happening, with infinite angles to write about and to scare people with. But as the Chinese Tiangong-1 satellite nears its final descent to Earth this weekend, I need to remind you: It’s not a big deal.

The chance of any casualties here is vanishingly small.

I should have sent a magnetized hard hat to Mitch McConnell though.

This Sh^% Just Got Real

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The good folks at Naked Capitalism made note of a lawsuit where Current trustees of the Kentucky Retirement System are considering joining a lawsuit against them.

Basically, they are considering including former trustees and staff as targets for the roughly $1½ billion that the hedge funds lost at the dog track.

The fact that they are going after their predecessors is significant, but to my mind, the thing that makes this more than a legal long shot is the fact that the hedge funds have been sufficiently spooked to ask the judge to have the bulk of the proceedings sealed.

If the hedge funds are worried enough about this to do this, than this suit has a real possibility of holding them to account.

Ban Agricultural Use of Antibiotics

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In a frighteningly short time, an antibiotic resistant gene, MCR-1, has spread around the world.
Investigations have revealed that it originated in the antibiotics inundated world of agriculture:

The mcr-1 gene, which helps bacteria resist colistin – one of the few remaining antibiotic drugs of last resort that still work – has now reached hospitals all across the world.

And thanks to new research, we now have more evidence of where it came from – pig farms in China.

While experts had previously thought the gene developed on Chinese pig farms, due to their extensive use of colistin on the animals, the latest study offers more evidence to back this idea up.

It pinpoints the start of the spread to sometime in 2005.

………

The speed at which mcr-1 spread globally is indeed shocking,” says lead researcher Francois Balloux, from University College London (UCL) in the UK.

By sequencing the genomes of 110 bacterial strains and comparing them to existing genomic data, the team identified a large dataset of 457 mcr-1 positive genome sequences, taken from humans and farm animals spread across five continents.

That enabled them to show exactly where mcr-1 had emerged from, and how it spread globally – attaching itself to various bacterial pathogens by “hitchhiking” on different mobile genetic elements.

The supporters of antibiotic use on livestock have always said that no one ever showed that antibiotic resistance has originated from their use on live stock.

Not any more.

This needs to be banned world wide.