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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Don’t ever say we never have useful stuff here.

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It’s not that I’m lazy; I’ve merely chosen the contemplative life.

Not me. I’m just bone-lazy.

One of the annoyances I most dread is peeling my sfat derriere off the couch to buy a few more palettes of Funyuns and Coke Zero. Thankfully, Silicon Valley is working on a solution.

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You know, as you do.

Certainly, if I lived in Connecticut I’d spend a lot of time in liquor stores.

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The gene therapy technique involves inserting a mutated version of the blood-clotting gene into a virus and delivering it to the patient’s body, often through an intravenous drip. But the treatment could be described as a one-hit wonder — if it stops working, scientists have not found a way to successfully administer the therapy a second time.

Global biotech company BioMarin ran a trial for patients with hemophilia A in which most patients reached normal levels of blood-clotting protein in their blood, reported The New York Times Tuesday. The levels dropped after a year but remained high enough to make a positive difference for patients for whom the therapy worked.

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Independent, I’ll believe; but strong? The stoner demographic is strong in this one.

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So much for salad.

Laevo-isomers are the way to go.

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Good luck with that. It’s usually a bad idea to piss off people who can delete your bank account.

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I guess they were looking for something to do.

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For years, Miguel Ramalho-Santos tried to convince researchers in his lab to study a segment of DNA he personally thought was quite extraordinary: LINE1. It’s repeated half a million times in the human genome, making up nearly a fifth of the DNA in every cell. But nobody in his lab wanted to study it. “It was sort of a running joke in the lab,” says Ramalho-Santos, a developmental biologist at the University of California at San Francisco.

It might have had something to do with LINE1’s reputation. “People have called it junk DNA,” says Ramalho-Santos. “People have called it genomic parasites.” LINE1, like other transposons (or “jumping genes”), has the unusual ability to copy and insert itself in random places in the genome. Geneticists tend to pay attention when LINE1 inserts itself in a bad place, causing cancer or genetic disorders like hemophilia. But Ramalho-Santos suspected there was more to LINE1. If LINE1 were at best harmless and at worst harmful, why would it persist—and in such abundance—in the human genome?

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Perhaps Baron von Frankenstein was on to something.

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The low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet can replace chemotherapy and radiation for even the deadliest of cancers, said Dr. Thomas Seyfried, a leading cancer researcher and professor at Boston College.

…

“The reason why the ketogenic diet is not being prescribed to treat cancer is purely economical,” said Dr. Seyfried.

“Cancer is big business. There are more people making a living off cancer than there are dying of it.”

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Seek and ye shall find.

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The wind is the storm, and the storm is the data, and the data is life.

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If she earned it, she’ll last. If she’s a Diversity Hire, she won’t.

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Well, hey, French. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

At least they aren’t discriminating against transgender people. That would be ThoughtCrime.

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Surely a sign of the End Times.

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The close shave Republicans experienced in Ohio this past week revived Democratic hopes of a landslide this November. Losing by less than 1 percent in a solidly GOP district is certainly a moral victory. Of course, 218 moral victories in November would keep them in the minority.

Funny how that works.

How can a Democratic wave give Republicans more Senate seats? For one thing, Democrats are defending 24 seats and ten in states won by President Trump. The GOP is only defending nine seats, including one in a state won by Hillary Clinton.

On average, the President’s party loses just one seat in the first mid-term, ranging from a 9-seat loss in 1994 to a 4-seat gain in 1962. Why so few? The 6-year term means that the political landscape six years previous has a significant effect.

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Hey, you gots to draw de line somewhere.

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Does this mean that Michelle Ma Belle can no longer claim that her job was taken by an immigrant?

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The Russians came up with several new techniques that they are now teaching to their own troops after the Syrians tried in successfully. One of the key lessons was that even with modern ATGMs a moving vehicle is much harder to hit than a stationary one. Modern fire control systems enable tanks (at least the more modern ones, which the Russians supplied Syria with once Russian troops arrived in Syria in mid-2015). With tanks that can fire accurately on the move the Russians developed the “carousel” maneuver in which attacking tanks adopt a circular formation of up to ten tanks moving around in a circle and firing on targets when tanks are on the side of the circle facing the enemy.

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Spider silk is a bit of a dream material, stronger than steel by some measures yet incredibly light and flexible. Obtaining spider silk, however, is a bit of a nightmare, as most spider species are both extremely territorial and prone to cannibalism. While we have managed to identify the genes that are needed to produce silk, inserting those into other species hasn’t worked out especially well, since silk formation depends on fairly precise mixtures of several proteins, as well as how the spider extrudes the fiber.

A Chinese group is now reporting some progress in overcoming at least some of these challenges. Their trick was to insert the genes into a domesticated species that already makes something like spider silk—specifically, the species that gave us the term silk. The new bit of genetic engineering has resulted in a silkworm that produces a hybrid silkworm/spider material that’s not as tough but is a bit stretchier than native spider silk.

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Your pee may be worth money some day.

And don’t get me started on the cats….

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That’s what you can do when you’re old and rich.

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But that trick never works.

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Residents of upstate New York are actively assisting migrants illegally cross the border into Canada.

As the Washington Post reports, the activists are supplying people — supposedly seeking asylum from the United States — with food, clothing and support. They even call their assistance network an “Underground Railway,” in tribute to the clandestine operation that ferried slaves from the South to abolitionist enclaves in New York and Canada.

Those facilitating the illegals’ journey to Canada, via the Quebec border, say this is no different than assisting the draft-dodgers who fled to Canada to avoid service in the Vietnam War.

“We view this as our Underground Railroad,” Carole Slatkin told the Post. Moving migrants across the border from Esssex, New York, Slatkin says she is following a higher calling. “While no one is being flogged, and no one is being sold, there is this sort of modern-day equivalent of feeling like people are in danger.”

Yeah, there’s that ‘nobody’s being flogged, nobody’s being sold’ rock in the middle of the stream of Virtue Signaling. But they can ignore it successfully; it’s what they do.

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There’s your renewable energy.

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Trust the French to focus on the important stuff.

‘Wine scientist’ sounds like a great job to have.

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Of course, it’s still in Sicily. I can imagine you can get great bargains on houses in Detroit, too.

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Perhaps because it’s an ugly little bug-like creature with a hard shell that looks as if it came from another planet?

That’s my guess – what’s your guess?

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Why this comes as a surprise I have no idea.

What I’d like to see is a study of how unattractive vegans are. That would  be an eye-opener.

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And they laughed at my foil hat….

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Gotta love Australians.

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Really, it’s trickier than you might think.

I’m just glad nothing more important is happening today.

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I love these African names, like ‘Nelson’ and ‘Emmerson’ (and ‘Robert’).

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But you have to remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

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But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just remember that.

Absolutely nothing.

(Next up: China.)

Review of a new book.

A giant of business scholarship, Mr Pfeffer teaches one of Stanford’s most popular courses, on office politics and power. His early works looked at organisational design and how it sapped employee productivity rather than enhanced it. His previous book in 2015, “Leadership BS”, examined the gap between what companies say and how they act. He reprises these themes in his latest work, bringing a trove of original data to make his case.

And it still won’t matter a damn.

Nothing is more commonplace than a book about a problem that no individual can fix. Why people buy these things is beyond me. I remember my manager at EDS twenty years ago encouraging everyone to read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which we all dutifully did. So far as I could tell, it made not one shred of difference either to EDS or to us as individuals.

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The calendar is based on era names that coincide with the rule of its emperors, and the country has been in the Heisei or ‘peace everywhere’ era since Japan’s current emperor, Akihito, took the throne in 1989.

We do much the same thing, as the references to the Trump Era (or ‘Era of Trump’) in the daily news makes clear.

I am always surprised at how much the Heisei Emperor looks as if he ought to be Jackie Chan’s dad.

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Two Patriot missiles were fired at a Syrian Russian-made Sukhoi jet on Tuesday after it was monitored flying around two kilometres (1.25 miles) into Israel, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said in a statement.

You’d think they would have learned that lesson by now.

Check it out.

The purr doesn’t hurt.

Read  it.

Reality is what sticks around even after you refuse to believe it.

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I should imagine not.

Virginia state law forbids the presence of firearms on school property, but the Lee County School Board will attempt to classify the armed employees as “conservators of the peace” to gain exemption.

Victims! Get yer victims here! Ya can’t have a gun-free zone without yer victims!

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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‘Far-right’ is, of course, a tendentious phrase beloved of Voices of the Crust practicing ‘journalism’. They would never, ever, ever say that someone was ‘far-left’, especially if it were true.

Every time I see Steve Bannon, I think ‘homeless guy, possibly schizophrenic, current or former drug addict’. That’s really not a good look for him. I don’t know whether that’s a deliberate choice on his part or whether he’s just too lazy to dress like a gentleman, but it does not inspire confidence; I would be hesitant to give money to any organization with which he is affiliated other than as a patient.

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Sounds good to me. We all know that discrimination is taking place; the difficulty is getting them to admit that it’s unlawful.

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The lawsuit, brought by the NRA along with the Second Amendment Foundation and two city residents, was filed late last week in King County Superior Court in Washington state, which has a regulation prohibiting cities from issuing firearms regulations.

“Seattle simply can’t break the law to adopt an ordinance as a political statement,” Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb said in a statement.

I bet they think they can.

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Well, I’ve always thought so.

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In that case, I’ve got it nailed.