Random Politics & Religion #00

I'm calling *** on that one Ramy Carter is a certified egomaniac, jew hating jesus freak with the midas touch in reverse (everything he touches turns into molten feces) I wouldn't walk across the street to piss on him if he was on fire... Or maybe I would... if I had to go bad enough... but not enough to extinguish the flames which will surely consume his filthy soul until he is reborn as a bad corn kernel that is continuously re-fed to pigs for the rest of eternity.... if there is any real justice in the universe, amen.

I'm evil and have a powerful urge to recycle all of the "jews killed jesus" born again jesus freaks into fertilizer, regardless of their party affiliation.

I assumed it was a given he was a southern good ol' boy Christian.

"[Carter] has no sympathy or understanding for the suffering of the Jewish people--for the plight of the Jewish people. He loves every Muslim extremist he can find. He thought the former president of Syria--Assad--was a wonderful man. He bounced Yasser Arafat's children on his knee and loved Yasser Arafat and his crooked wife who stole three billion dollars from the Palestinian people, but he never had a kind word to say about almost any Israeli, except a few on the hard left who maybe tended to agree with him." Alan Dershowitz,

....
Alan Dershowitz,

A great source for propaganda material but hardly credible.

Begging your pardon, but it was Prescott Bush and Jack Philby (Hillary "Harry" St-John Bridger Philby) who gave the world the modern Middle east by converting sheiks to kings in order to to make the world safe for constitutional monarchies and empowering the radical Wahhabi sect in the process.

This happened a bit before JFK became president, or his father ran rum.

A US congressman was replaced by a robot body double after he was secretly executed, and the results of a recent vote should be thrown out, his opponent has claimed.

Timothy Ray Murray says on his website that incumbent Oklahoman congressman Frank Lucas is dead, and has been

Murray says that it is ‘widely known’ that his successful opponent is no longer alive and has been replaced by a look alike. His opponent was killed in Ukraine three years ago, Murray alleges.

A politician even crazier than Palin.

Congressman replaced with robot body double after secret Ukrainian execution, says opponent

And more....

New Flu Strain Created For Research Leaves The Human Immune System Completely Defenseless

A scientist who carried out research on making influenza viruses more infectious has deliberately created a potentially lethal strain of flu that can evade the human immune system.

Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has genetically manipulated the 2009 strain of pandemic flu in order for it to “escape” the control of the immune system’s neutralising antibodies, effectively making the human population defenceless against its reemergence.

Most of the world today has developed some level of immunity to the 2009 pandemic flu virus, which means that it can now be treated as less dangerous “seasonal flu”.

Professor Kawaoka intentionally set out to see if it was possible to convert it to a pre-pandemic state in order to analyse the genetic changes involved, the Independent said.

The study is not published, however some scientists who are aware of it are deeply concerned that Dr Kawaoka was allowed to deliberately remove the only defence against a strain of flu virus that has already demonstrated its ability to create a deadly pandemic that killed as many as 500,000 people in the first year of its emergence.

Professor Kawaoka has so far kept his research secret but admitted that the work is complete and ready for submission to a scientific journal. The experiment was designed to monitor the changes to the 2009 H1N1 strain of virus that would enable it to escape immune protection in order to improve the design of vaccines, he said.

“Through selection of immune escape viruses in the laboratory under appropriate containment conditions, we were able to identify the key regions [that] would enable 2009 H1N1 viruses to escape immunity,” Professor Kawaoka said in an email.

“Viruses in clinical isolates have been identified that have these same changes in the [viral protein]. This shows that escape viruses emerge in nature and laboratory studies like ours have relevance to what occurs in nature,” he said.

Prior to his statement to The Independent, Professor Kawaoka’s only known public mention of the study was at a closed scientific meeting earlier this year. He declined to release any printed details of his talk or his lecture slides.

The work was carried out at Wisconsin University’s $12m (£7.5m) Institute for Influenza Virus Research in Madison which was built specifically to house Professor Kawaoka’s laboratory, which has a level-3-agriculture category of biosafety: one below the top safety level for the most dangerous pathogens, such as Ebola virus.

However, this study was done at the lower level-2 biosafety. The university has said repeatedly that there is little or no risk of an accidental escape from the lab, although a similar US Government lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta with a higher level-3 biosafety rating was recently criticised over the accidental exposure of at least 75 lab workers to possible anthrax infection.

Professor Kawaoka’s work had been cleared by Wisconsin’s Institutional Biosafety Committee, but some members of the committee were not informed about details of the antibody study on pandemic H1N1, which began in 2009, and have voiced concerns about the direction, oversight and safety of his overall research on flu viruses.

Rebecca Moritz, who is responsible for overseeing Wisconsin’s work on “select agents” such as influenza virus, said that Professor Kawaoka’s work on 2009 H1N1 is looking at the changes to the virus that are needed for existing vaccines to become ineffective.

“With that being said, this work is not to create a new strain of influenza with pandemic potential, but [to] model the immune-pressure the virus is currently facing in our bodies to escape our defences,” Ms Moritz said.

“The work is designed to identify potential circulating strains to guide the process of selecting strains used for the next vaccine…The committee found the biosafety containment procedures to be appropriate for conducting this research. I have no concerns about the biosafety of these experiments,” she said.

Professor Kawaoka said that he has presented preliminary findings of his H1N1 study to the WHO, which were “well received”.

“We are confident our study will contribute to the field, particularly given the number of mutant viruses we generated and the sophisticated analysis applied,” he said.

“There are risks in all research. However, there are ways to mitigate the risks. As for all the research on influenza viruses in my laboratory, this work is performed by experienced researchers under appropriate containment and with full review and prior approval by the [biosafety committee],” he added.

However, this study was done at the lower level-2 biosafety. The university has said repeatedly that there is little or no risk of an accidental escape from the lab, although a similar US Government lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta with a higher level-3 biosafety rating was recently criticised over the accidental exposure of at least 75 lab workers to possible anthrax infection.

That part bothers me.

Yeah, I saw World War Z, too.

*** the way that movie ended.

Meechan said as many as seven researchers may have come into direct contact with the live anthrax. But the agency is casting as wide a net as possible to make sure all employees at the agency who may have walked into any of the labs at risk are being offered treatment.

Around 75 individuals are being offered a 60-day course of treatment with the antibiotic ciprofloxacin as well as an injection with an anthrax vaccine.

New details about the agency’s investigation suggest the anthrax that was being inactivated in a high security lab may have been sitting in a bath of acid for 24 hours before being transferred to two lower-security labs.

“What researchers are trying to find out is whether that was long enough to kill the anthrax,” said Dr Paul Meechan, director of the CDC’s environmental health and safety compliance office.

You know what I liked about the movie? No reading.

George Takei isn’t happy with the Hobby Lobby decision, and he’s decided to do something about it by encouraging a boycott of Hobby Lobby and any other companies that impose their religious beliefs on their employees.

Writing on his website, Takei criticizes the decision made in the Supreme Court’s 5-4 majority ruling, worrying about future situation that could be permitted by the decision:

“The ruling elevates the rights of a FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION over those of its women employees and opens the door to all manner of claims that a company can refuse services based on its owner’s religion. Think about the ramifications: As Justice Ginsberg’s stinging dissent pointed out, companies run by Scientologists could refuse to cover antidepressants, and those run by Jews or Hindus could refuse to cover medications derived from pigs (such as many anesthetics, intravenous fluids, or medications coated in gelatin).”

Takei also questions the basis for the Supreme Court’s ruling, wondering whether the same decision would have been made had Hobby Lobby’s owners not been Christian:

“In this case, the owners happen to be deeply Christian; one wonders whether the case would have come out differently if a Muslim-run chain business attempted to impose Sharia law on its employees.”

Takei praises the US as “a nation that respects religious beliefs, but also the right not to have those beliefs imposed upon you by others,” but complains that Hobby Lobby’s owners have just been granted permission by the Supreme Court to impose their beliefs on others. It’s on that basis that he urges readers to boycott not only Hobby Lobby, but any company that imposes its religious beliefs on its employees:

“While we work to overturn this decision by legislation, people of good conscience should BOYCOTT any for-profit business, including Hobby Lobby, which chooses to impose its religious beliefs on its employees. The only way such companies ever learn to treat people with decency and tolerance is to hit them where it counts–in their pocketbooks. I won’t be shopping there, and women everywhere should exercise their right of protest and refuse to shop there as well.”