Human Microbiome Project

Now I know that before I even get started here, nobody read the Oxygen Wars, nobody read Gould's Planet of the Bacteria - and nobody read Wizardology 101 so the noodle-baking I really want to put on you - is only going to come out half-baked - if it gets baked any at all.

Be that as it may, I will continue scattering bread crumbs in hopes that somebody attending to this peculiar web log will connect them all up and go AHHH!!!!!

At the end of the day - all it is - is a different angle of approach or perspective from which to view and consider the affairs in which it is broadly and uncritically believed and accepted that we are the agents. What pipsqueak arrogance leads us to conclude, believe, and act as if it were natural and theological law that we are the fundamental units of selection, the sine qua non and center of the implicate order of creation?

Gut Reaction;

For the first time, scientists have defined the collective genome of the human gut, or colon. Up to 100 trillion microbes, representing more than 1,000 species, make up a motley "microbiome" that allows humans to digest much of what we eat, including some vitamins, sugars, and fiber.

In a study published in the June 2 issue of Science, scientists at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) and their colleagues describe and analyze the colon microbiome, which includes more than 60,000 genes--twice as many as found in the human genome. Some of these microbial genes code for enzymes that humans need to digest food, suggesting that bacteria in the colon co-evolved with their human host, to mutual benefit.

"The GI tract has the most abundant, diverse population of bacteria in the human body," remarks lead author Steven Gill, a molecular biologist formerly at TIGR and now at the State University of New York in Buffalo. "We're entirely dependent on this microbial population for our well-being. A shift within this population, often leading to the absence or presence of beneficial microbes, can trigger defects in metabolism and development of diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease."

The Human Microbiome Project;

Within the body of a healthy adult, microbial cells are estimated to outnumber human cells by a factor of ten to one. These communities, however, remain largely unstudied, leaving almost entirely unknown their influence upon human development, physiology, immunity, and nutrition. To take advantage of recent technological advances and to develop new ones, the NIH Roadmap has initiated the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) with the mission of generating resources enabling comprehensive characterization of the human microbiota and analysis of its role in human health and disease.

Traditional microbiology has focused on the study of individual species as isolated units. However many, if not most, have never been successfully isolated as viable specimens for analysis, presumably because their growth is dependant upon a specific microenvironment that has not been, or cannot be, reproduced experimentally. Among those species that have been isolated, analyses of genetic makeup, gene expression patterns, and metabolic physiologies have rarely extended to inter-species interactions or microbe-host interactions. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies have created a new field of research, called metagenomics, allowing comprehensive examination of microbial communities, even those comprised of uncultivable organisms. Instead of examining the genome of an individual bacterial strain that has been grown in a laboratory, the metagenomic approach allows analysis of genetic material derived from complete microbial communities harvested from natural environments. In the HMP, this method will complement genetic analyses of known isolated strains, providing unprecedented information about the complexity of human microbial communities.

By leveraging both the metagenomic and traditional approach to genomic DNA sequencing, the Human Microbiome Project will lay the foundation for further studies of human-associated microbial communities.

Just a little food for thought...., are you thinking about it yet? (the picture accompanying this post is of a polished stromatolite in the shape of an egg)

President Obama and Attorney General Edwards

Accept no substitutes.................,

Dopamine, Dopamine.......,

A dopamine agonist is a compound that activates dopamine receptors, mimicking the effect of the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Tell your doctor if you experience new or increased gambling, sexual, or other intense urges while you take requip.....,



The choice is yours, restless legs or intense urges and impulsivity.....,

Planet of the Bacteria

Planet of the Bacteria;

Not only does the Earth contain more bacterial organisms than all others combined (scarcely surprising, given their minimal size and mass); not only do bacteria live in more places and work in a greater variety of metabolic ways; not only did bacteria alone constitute the first half of life's history, with no slackening in diversity thereafter; but also, and most surprisingly, total bacterial biomass (even at such minimal weight per cell) may exceed all the rest of life combined, even forest trees, once we include the subterranean populations as well. Need any more be said in making a case for the modal bacter as life's constant center of maximal influence and importance?

See also;

• Oxygen Catastrophe
• Archean
• Proterozoic

One of My Favorite Short Stories

"You have a severe oxygen deficiency, like most people in this time period. Due to pollution and deforestation, right now your atmospheric oxygen levels are at an all-time low, so the oxygen pressure in your blood is insufficient to guard you against oxygen-hating microbes. You become slightly stagnant, and serve as a growth medium for anaerobic parasites. But all pathogens are inherently much weaker than your own cells, which are a lot more highly evolved than viruses, bacteria, fungus and such. So you can always get rid of them by just raising your intemal oxygen concentration above what they can stand."

Bob and the Oxygen Wars Part I

Bob and the Oxygen Wars Part II - Enjoy!!!

Be sure to peep the reference list at the end of Part II. Twenty plus years ago, this reference list pointed me toward fascinating rabbit-holes around the fringe...,

Transgenerational Transgenics

A cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green has passed on the trait to its young, a development that could lead to the future breeding of pigs for human transplant organs, a Chinese university reported. The glowing piglets' birth proves transgenic pigs are fertile and able to pass on their engineered traits to their offspring, according to Liu Zhonghua, a professor overseeing the breeding program at Northeast Agricultural University.

"Continued development of this technology can be applied to ... the production of special pigs for the production of human organs for transplant," Liu said in a news release posted Tuesday on the university's Web site.

Calls to the university seeking comment Wednesday were not answered.

The piglets' mother was one of three pigs born with the trait in December 2006 after pig embryos were injected with fluorescent green protein. Two of the 11 piglets glow fluorescent green from their snout, trotters, and tongue under ultraviolet light, the university said.

Robin Lovell-Badge, a genetics expert at Britain's National Institute for Medical Research, said the technology "to genetically manipulate pigs in this way would be very valuable."

Lovell-Badge had not seen the research from China's cloned pigs and could not comment on its credibility. He said, however, that organs from genetically altered pigs would potentially solve some of the problems of rejected organs in transplant operations. He said the presence of the green protein would allow genetically modified cells to be tracked if they were transplanted into a human. The fact that the pig's offspring also appeared to have the green genes would indicate that the genetic modification had successfully penetrated every cell, Lovell-Badge added.

But he said much more research and further trials — both in animals and in humans — would be necessary before the benefits of the technology could be seen.

Other genetically modified pigs have been created before, including by Scotland's Roslin Institute, but few results have been published. Tokyo's Meiji University last year successfully cloned a transgenic pig that carries the genes for human diabetes, while South Korean scientists cloned cats that glow red when exposed to ultraviolet rays.

Remember this article from last week? China offers unproven medical treatments;

Savage spent 2 1/2 months in late 2006 and early 2007 at a hospital in the southern China city of Shenzhen to get what he was told were stem cell injections in his spine from umbilical cord blood. He made the arrangements through Beike Biotechnology Co., which offers the treatments at a number of hospitals in China.

Afterward, Savage said he was able to move his right arm for the first time since his diving accident; a video made at the hospital appears to show slight movement. He also said he noticed greater strength in his abdomen and more sensation on his skin.

Just how many foreigners like Savage are coming to China for treatment isn't known; and China is only one of several countries where such techniques are being offered.

Many Chinese doctors don't wait for results of rigorous testing before treating patients and they offer what they say are stem cell or other cell treatments to those willing to pay.

What is known about the procedures being performed comes from material on their Web sites or from patients who give detailed accounts of their visits. Little has been published in scientific journals for other doctors to scrutinize.

William Gibson was/is the Nostradamus of our time....,

The Price of Biofuels

Full Technology Review article is a 13 page pdf. Great overall primer on the politics and market psychology that has trumped scientific understanding and underlying technological realities in terms of emphasis and investment in the U.S., and, which will have a near term impact on the price and availability of food here but with far more devastating impact in other countries.

[Bro. Makheru, if certain folks don't understand that food availability is a non-negotiable trigger for resource-based conflict, then there's a better than even chance they don't understand much of anything at all.]

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla makes a great counterpoint to Lester Brown and effectively calls many of Brown's panaceas "toys" and unrealistic. He explains Scalability, Cycle Time, and Cost and underscores the inexcusable paradox of American intransigence in the face of abundant opportunity.

If there is a deus ex machina technology capable of rescuing us from our predicament, ultimately, genomic programming and synthetic biology is where it's at - remember that I told you so on subrealism's zero day.

Food Crunch

"The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil - it's getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we've got to expand food output dramatically" - [CN - dopamine is one helluva drug.....,]

Full story in the Financial Post

The impact of tighter food supply is already evident in raw food prices, which have risen 22% in the past year.

At the centre of the imminent food catastrophe is corn -- the main staple of the ethanol industry. The price of corn has risen about 44% over the past 15 months, closing at US$4.66 a bushel on the CBOT yesterday -- its best finish since June 1996.

This not only impacts the price of food products made using grains, but also the price of meat, with feed prices for livestock also increasing.

"You're going to have real problems in countries that are food short, because we're already getting embargoes on food exports from countries, who were trying desperately to sell their stuff before, but now they're embargoing exports," he said, citing Russia and India as examples.

"Those who have food are going to have a big edge."

With 54% of the world's corn supply grown in America's mid-west, the U.S. is one of those countries with an edge.

The Root of Blackospheric Objectivism

It took me a minute to figure out why Thegrayconservative and Denmarkvesey have such unbounded love for Ron Paul, and then I remembered the "quarry" and the "discipline" scenes from The Fountainhead...,

Wizardology 101 - Units of Selection and Zero-Sum

The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win solutions instead of win–lose solutions.... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other.... Bill Clinton, Wired interview, December 2000

A unit of selection is a biological entity within the hierarchy of biological organisation (e.g. genes, cells, individuals, groups, species) that is subject to natural selection. For several decades there has been intense debate among evolutionary biologists about the extent to which evolution has been shaped by selective pressures acting at these different levels. This debate has been as much about what it means to be a unit of selection as it has about the relative importance of the units themselves, i.e., is it group or individual selection that has driven the evolution of altruism? When it is noted that altruism reduces the fitness of individuals, it is difficult to see how altruism has evolved within the context of Darwinian selection acting on individuals

Zero-sum - in game theory, zero-sum describes a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). It is so named because when the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Go is an example of a zero-sum game: it is impossible for both players to win. Zero-sum can be thought of more generally as constant sum where the benefits and losses to all players sum to the same value. Cutting a cake is zero- or constant-sum because taking a larger piece reduces the amount of cake available for others. In contrast, non-zero-sum describes a situation in which the interacting parties' aggregate gains and losses is either less than or more than zero.

Situations where participants can all gain or suffer together, such as a country with an excess of bananas trading with another country for their excess of apples, where both benefit from the transaction, are referred to as non-zero-sum. Other non-zero-sum games are games in which the sum of gains and losses by the players are always more or less than what they began with. For example, a game of poker, disregarding the house's rake, played in a casino is a zero-sum game unless the pleasure of gambling or the cost of operating a casino is taken into account, making it a non-zero-sum game.

The concept was first developed in game theory and consequently zero-sum situations are often called zero-sum games though this does not imply that the concept, or game theory itself, applies only to what are commonly referred to as games. In pure strategies, each outcome is Pareto optimal (generally, any game where all strategies are Pareto optimal is called a conflict game) [1]. Nash equilibria of two-player zero-sum games are exactly pairs of minimax strategies.

In 1944 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern proved that any zero-sum game involving n players is in fact a generalized form of a zero-sum game for two players, and that any non-zero-sum game for n players can be reduced to a zero-sum game for n + 1 players; the (n + 1) player representing the global profit or loss. This suggests that the zero-sum game for two players forms the essential core of mathematical game theory.

Jevon's Paradox and the Tata Nano

India’s Tata Motors on Thursday unveiled the world’s cheapest car, a $2,500 four-door subcompact the company promises will revolutionize the auto industry by bringing car ownership within reach for tens of millions of people. The potential effect of Tata’s Nano has given environmentalists nightmares, with visions of the tiny cars clogging India’s already choked roads and spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air.

Industry analysts, however, say the car may do for India and the developing world what Ford’s Model T did for America nearly a century ago — deliver unprecedented mobility to the masses.

In economics, the Jevons Paradox is an observation made by William Stanley Jevons, that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource may increase, rather than decrease. It is historically called the Jevons Paradox as it ran counter to Jevons's intuition. However, the situation is well understood in modern economics. In addition to reducing the amount needed for a given output, improved efficiency lowers the cost of using a resource – which increases demand. Overall resource use increases or decreases depending on which effect predominates.

Dopamine hegemony ruthlessly drives the herd over the cliff and into the olduvai gorge....,

UPDATE:
Ed Dunn caught in the act of simultaneously peeping the same phenomenon and coming correct with its implications;This Car Should Make You Lose Sleep Tonight

Wizards at War - VII

Population cull resulting from large scale thermonuclear war (Joseph George Caldwell)

Can America Survive;

The thesis of this book is that when fossil-fuel reserves deplete in a few years, the global human population of Earth will drop to about 500 million people or less -- a small fraction of the current six billion. The future is one of global ethnic war and the end of the modern industrialized world. The book examines a "minimal regret" population strategy that shows promise as a sustainable, environmentally sound basis for world population. This population consists of a single industrialized nation of five million people and a hunter-gatherer population of five million.

If I simply compare the level of investment and preparation dedicated to a zero-sum, minimal regret population scenario for resolving the earth's ecological crisis vs. the systematic crash aversion strategy outlined by Lester Brown - it appears that exponentially more has been invested in the former than in the latter......, (and levels of additional investment continue unabated)

Plan B 2.0 - Rescuing a Planet Under Stress

Lester Brown's comprehensive plan is available online, in its entirety, for free here.

Ted Turner, purchased 3,569 copies to distribute to heads of state, cabinet members, Fortune 500 CEOs, the U.S. Congress, and others;

With holdings of two million acres in 11 states, Ted Turner, the media entrepreneur and philanthropist, has become the largest private landowner in the country, and his land purchases have some in Nebraska, where he owns a ranch, wondering what he is up to, reports the Associated Press.

While supporters of Mr. Turner say he just wants to be a rancher, others accuse him of trying to corner the land over the world’s largest underground water system, and of conspiring with the United Nations — to which he has donated millions of dollars through a nonprofit group he created — to build a huge federal wildlife refuge that would remove the land from Nebraska’s tax rolls.

Evidently there are elites in the U.S. quietly and diligently pursuing a non-thanaturgic agenda for the planet...,

Consume The Net

Trip the loop, make your switch, consume the net!

Of course I'm not a farmer - I just happened to grow up in the middle of GAWD'S country and used to go hunting and fishing quite often with my father and uncle and acquired a deep and abiding aspiration to one day become a successful gentlemen farmer. In addition, one of my close colleagues helps me keep my rural enthusiasm really real.

Though I'm a big proponent of urban agricultural schemes and have a keen interest in food security - my work is involved with low cost, community and Internet based telecommunications systems. I've figured out and implemented methods for folks to do telecommunications at the lowest possible price, and, to have some of their telecommunications activity become self-funding through leveraging person aggregation in their community(s) of interest, be these neighborhood, faith, sports, school, or other brick and mortar real-world social network based communities of interest.

Cuba's Urban Agriculture

These two documents are excerpts from a Master of Arts thesis completed in 2004 by Janine de la Salle (author) at Dalhousie University in Halifax under the primary supervision of Dr. John Kirk as well as Dr. David Patriquin and Dr. John Devlin. These particular portions of the thesis were selected on the basis that they had the most discussion and description of urban agriculture (UA) in Cuba during the past 15 years in conjunction with a detailed historical context of food security and public policy in Cuba since the beginning of the 20th century. The historical excerpt helps to set the tone for contemporary developments in Cuban food security such as the emergence of UA and is therefore essential. The gist of the entire thesis is given below as the "Thesis Abstract". If you have any questions about this material please contact the author at jsalle@dal.ca (Market photo linked from Havana Journal.)

Until we see a candidate for elective office make the 2000 Watt society and renewable and sustainable urban agriculture the centerpieces of his/her platform, we can conclude in full certainty that these candidates are not meaningful change agents and are fiddling while "Rome" burns - whether out of personal and idiosyncratic ignorance, or because they've been enlisted and handsomely compensated to play a distracting and misleading role - while the wizards of woe continue doing what they know how to do best.

I mean really, what good is a professed change agent who doesn't have a clue about what needs to change, or, lacks the organizational and operational skills, resources, and required authority to implement meaningful change?


On their Leavenworth County farm, Jeff and Pam Meyer of Cal-Ann Farms, above, raise tilapia in a former dairy barn. The nutrient-rich fish wastewater is used to grow 10 varieties of peppers, left. But the farm’s signature crop is basil, top, which the Meyers grow hydroponically.

An applied instance of local change agency requiring knowledge, skill, ability, and a viable social network to help it achieve its promise.

Goal State - How Do We Get There?

originally posted 11/08/07 - reposted in the context of discussion of American coalition building and genuine change agency.

subtitled, if at all.....,

E.C. Hopkins has repeatedly admonished us to think about the issue of "movement at the top";

Few of us will have opportunities to wield enough wealth, power, or prestige to change the world in any significant way. Few of us will have the political, economic, or military influence to steer the world in another direction. Most of us are just here for the ride and here to play the games the power elite allow us to play. Yet, each of us, especially each U.S. citizen, has some power and a few opportunities to access more power. And, it is important that we evaluate our current and estimate our future levels of wealth, power, and prestige in order to help us better determine what we could do to change the world, even if insignificantly, during our lives. We would probably need some idea of what we could do in order to best determine what we should attempt to do. We would probably determine that we couldn’t change the world significantly no matter how hard we might try. Most of us might determine that it would be best for us to focus on securing a life’s supply of economic resources for ourselves and our families first. Then, if we found we were lucky enough to have the economically valuable talents or skills, the energy, and the leisure time to accumulate more wealth, power, or prestige than we and our loved ones would need in order to flourish, we might attempt to help a few dozen other folks take good care of themselves or their loved ones. I suspect very few of us will be able to do more than this.

Personally, it's an issue that angers me to the marrow of my luciferian and implacably rebellious bones. My motto as a teenager was taken straight from Milton; "Better to rule in hell, than to serve in heaven" and very honestly, this ethos has informed my worldview ever since.

With middle age and dependent children of my own - I find that the anarcho-barbarian warrior of the wastelands fantasy of adolescence has lost much of its savor. While the body and mind are still quite able, they are increasingly less and less willing..., so the question turns to Francis Schaeffer's perennial "How then shall we live?".

Much as many folks seek to deny it, the fact of the matter is that "our polity is our way of life". To the extent that Black, White, Progressive, Conservative, etc..., participate in a 12,000 watt per capita society - which is utterly thermodynamically unsustainable - and which is leading to massive injustice, infringement on civil liberties, and escalating levels of unjust war - then we have a shared way of life and polity which absolutely must change if we are to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number.

Reading James R. Maclean's new wiki for Hobson's Choice, I was absolutely struck by the rightness of something he had written;

Much of the radical critique of contemporary society tends to be so filled with negativity and rage; that's not meant to disparage radical critiques per se, but a precautionary word to readers venturing down that path. Your ability to transform society in a radical way is, to put it gently, limited, and you will find that the things you're fighting against are surprisingly resilient. A lot of great radicals found themselves totally exhausted and embittered at times, and you will too. It's important to remember that the same mankind who shaped this cruel world also is ingenious, generous, noble, and witty. Always be open to fresh ideas, always seek to discern fairly, and don't forget to appreciate the wonderful achievements of the others with whom you share the world.

Which answers in part Schaeffer's question and brings me to the article I chanced upon last night hoping for a new deal which gets full back around to E.C.'s lofty perspective - and gives us a very concrete and constructive place to channel our political emphasis.

Ultimately, power holders must be convinced that [energy transition] policies, if obnoxious to them now, will be far less destructive to their interests than a complete breakdown of society and biosphere - which is the very real alternative. For a historic example of a similar conversion of elites think of the 1930s New Deal: then the titans of industry had to sacrifice some of their financial power in order to keep from losing it all. Many wealthy individuals never forgave Franklin Roosevelt, whom they regarded as a "traitor to his class," but most of them reluctantly agreed that redistribution represented the lesser of evils.

The analysis offered is original, detailed, and very well worth your perusal.

Pharaonic Splendor and Rorschachian Symbolique

An impromptu and overdue analysis of the several points of view expressed hereabouts over the past few....,

Gary Younge writing in monday's Guardian had the following to say about Obama;

Obama has himself created a new constituency that is expanding the Democratic base, just like Jackson did. Its roots are not in race, class or single issues but age and ideology. The bulk of his support comes from young and independent voters. In South Carolina, we will see if African Americans will follow. Politically, the connections are looser and far less radical; but electorally they may prove more effective.

The article covers a lot of ground and I will do it a jarring disservice by not attempting to recapitulate most of that terrain. I found it particularly interesting for a very specific reason. It has a quick and dirty synopsis of political group identification - past and present - and the extent to which the social networking structures comprising political group identity have shifted over time.

Personally, I don't believe Obama has created any new constituencies. Rather, I believe that Obama embodies a rorschachian ambivalence which enables a broad cross-section of Americans to project into him their own particular hopes and priorities. People see in Obama exactly and exclusively - what they want to see. To me, it is this and this alone that makes his candidacy interesting.

Ed Dunn wrote everything that Younge wrote in a tiny fraction of the verbiage;

Trust me, I know how much of an influence Harold Washington had on me as a child in Chicago when he won the mayor office. It made me feel like I can be anything I wanted to be if I put in work because I saw a Black man do it. Blacks are told all their lives what they can’t do, what they can’t be, they will get killed if they stand up for what is right and when I saw Harold Washington go for that mayor office, that was my hero. And if Barack Obama running for office, standing there on a podium talking about uniting America, moving America in the right direction makes him an inspirational hero to any Black kid out there, that’s the only real reason that matters why African-Americans should have unconditional support for the man. Let that man Barack Obama be a hero and inspiration to our kids, screw all that political, ideology issue nonsense you spouting that is just worthless rhetoric.

To me, it is not about the presidential candidates or issues I've heard the past 20 years such as taxes, abortion or moral values. To me, it is about correcting the economic failures of the Bush administration that may be irreversible and change the entire course of this country.

I think Congress as well as the President office need to clean house and get rid of the special interest that exploited the American economy into a zero-sum game theory manner.

Spoken like a veteran, veteran entrepreneur, and a patriot - I believe Ed sees the situation through a quintessentially American lens - "yes we can"!

The unabashed youngeian chorus came from MIB and Submariner who made no bones whatsoever about identifying with Obama, seeing their own values, perspectives, and group identification personified in Obama and just loving it;

Obama's candidacy doesn't represent change in the ideological, or generational sense. Instead, he projects a middle-class identity that's ignored by pols in both major parties. The Senator presents himself as 'one of us'; not as a benevolent elitist (Democrats) or a proto-fascist authoritarian (Republicans).

For argument's sake, accept my earlier analysis as correct. Wouldn't Obama then symbolize the power to change society for the better lies within each of us, as does the prerogative and direction of its use?

Perhaps my views are slightly Darwinian, but I believe 'change' is a constant to which the most intelligent people adapt quickest in order to survive, if not prosper, regardless of circumstances. In this respect, Obama is an idea in which each of us has a vested interest -- that jes grew a few of the Afrosphere is constantly talking about. And a radical departure from the standard ivory tower conceit displayed by our pols.

You hit the bull's-eye, MIB.

Barack Obama is the kind of politician that you and I won't see again until we're old men wearing Depends and bound to wheelchairs.

do Xyb0rg and Nulan really believe that Powell could add more to the Pharaonic splendor or majesty of a Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House?

Fascinating....,

Spence brought the moral and reflective chorus;

i've been thinking about obama vs. edwards. as i noted early in the game there was a time in which you couldn't find the words "poverty" or "inequality" in obama's platform...where edwards began on these issues.

one of the things that left-leaning pundits noted in response to obama's approach was there has been no time in which bi-partisan agreement led to systemic change. rather a president RESPONDING TO A SOCIAL MOVEMENT ends up dragging the minority party with him...slapping them upside the head while doing so.

in all of the discussions about a black president, only one person has gotten to the crux of the matter--grace boggs. when we FIRST began to fight for beo's the idea was NOT that they be CEO's in blackface, but that they were the candidates who had the best chance of remaking society into something sustainable and humane.

with laserlike emphasis on what Obama has said and done - I suspect that if Prof. Spence engaged you in a socratic exchange on Obama, it might go a little something like this;

How many of you know Obama's record and positions?:

-- Supported the first Gulf War (See "The Audacity of Hope").

-- Supports not a swift end to the Iraq occupation, but only the withdrawal of "combat troops" by 2010 (most Americans in arms there are either mercenaries or support troops), and maintaining a strong military presence within Iraq of indefinite duration

-- Opposed Rep. John Murtha's 2005 call for a prompt withdrawal from Iraq

-- Called for the possible invasion of Pakistan (though he believes in "talking")

-- Repeatedly stated that all military options should remain on the table regarding IRAN, lending implicit support to the administration's belligerent stance

-- Has stated publicly that impeachment of either Bush or even Cheney is unacceptable. "Just, you know, vote the bums out," he has said (Google it) -- even when they are dismantling constitutional protections and rigging elections

-- Does not support universal, single-payer health care, and is campaigning to the right of Clinton and Edwards on this issue

-- Opposed the filibustering of Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination

-- Voted to renew the Patriot Act

-- Has received a "C/Underachiever" rating from CBC Monitor, putting him in the bottom third of Congressional Black Caucus members on voting record. By comparison, Harold Ford, Jr., William Jefferson, and Artur Davis got F's, while Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee got A's

If you support Obama, please ask yourself how many of these positions you agree with? (if I've put words in the good brother's mouth, I'm confident he'll correct me)

Then came the hardline from Mahndisa Rigmaiden and E.C. Hopkins - neither one of whom seemed to get particularly caught up in Obamathusiasm;

I don't trust politicians because they generally ARE NOT agents of change.

I think politicians are simply figureheads for a larger agenda over which they have no control.

I've developed macro-sociological beliefs that that have led me to be about as distrustful of the stated, prima facie intentions of our politicians as our brilliant sister Mahndisa is. And, I believe, in the long-run of twenty-five years or more, it really doesn't matter which politicians are put in the White House. I believe the U.S. social system has evolved so that only certain types of politicians are electable during any given social, political, or economic context, and that things such as who is/was the U.S. President for four or eight years are almost insignificant attributes of the social system.

The macro-sociological approach is a top-down, bird's eye, social engineer's approach. Its key weakness is it requires the thinker to use simplified abstractions, often based on ambiguous social statistics, which are often based on flawed data acquisitions. The individual or "Dunbar groups" (I'm using this term to indicate small social networks of approximately 150 folks who interact with one another regularly) of the society are often ignored in part or in full when this method is used to evaluate how a law or policy change will likely influence a social system.

So, I don't really spend much time thinking about whether Obama will change anything. I really don't believe Obama, or any other politician, can change anything, at least not in a truly iconoclastic or unpredictable way, that wasn't going to change with or without that politician. I believe the U.S. social system determines (or predetermines) who we, members of the ruled herd, can choose for U.S. President, and I believe it determines (or predetermines) the dynamics that almost all of us will erroneously perceive as significant, politician-led change. And, I believe the U.S. President plays only a minor role in this illusion, this stage production. The U.S. President will merely be a mask-wearer and an actor, someone thrown on the stage to play a part. The script, however, has been and will continue to be written by the power elite. And the power elite will continue to control the stage on which the U.S. President and the rest of us will deliver of performances.

I stated my position on sunday - and nothing that's happened over the intervening three days has caused me to change my perspective;

I sincerely believe that we American people will absolutely elect the leadership that we deserve.

The most interesting deliverable I anticipate from Obama's bid for the presidency, is that it will provide us with a rich, deep, and wide body of data more clearly delineating our just deserts as a people and a culture at the twilight of industrial civilization....,

UPDATE: Comes now Bro. Mahkeru to weigh in with a sentiment rather closely mirroring my own;

I personally believe that the American Power Elite, given the plethora of events it is struggling to control, is at one of its most vulnerable points in history. The missing element is a mass-based democratic movement, which can raise consciousness and challenge those vulnerabilities.

If a mass-based democratic movement does not emerge before the American superstructure begins to collapse, then I expect the Neo-Cons to have a free run to implement their fascist programs by deflecting attention to and blaming the “cultural others”—Blacks and Browns—for their demise.

I'm not so sure that they want a Darwinian threshing floor right here at home though Makheru. I believe that Pax America has not even begun to hit its true globalist imperial stride in the pending resource wars. It's going to need manpower in the millions to accomplish the force projection requirements of the next decade and beyond.

New Hampshire Primary....,

Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology

Sociobiology is the study of biological (especially evolutionary and ecological) influences on social behavior in humans.

1975. E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
1976. Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene.

Fitness: measured by the number of offspring produced by an individual that survive and reproduce themselves. For humans there is direct fitness--successful mating--and indirect fitness--helping relatives (with whom one shares genes) to reproduce. Inclusive fitness = direct fitness + indirect fitness

* helping relatives: the biological basis for altruism
* reciprocity can also enhace inclusive fitness

E.O. Wilson has changed his mind. Which leads us to the reality of Group Selection and revisions to the prevailing "wisdom" in that area of inquiry.

One-sentence summary: Multilevel selection needs to become the theoretical foundation of sociobiology, despite the widespread rejection of group selection since the 1960s.

The current foundation of sociobiology is based upon the rejection of group selection in the 1960s and the acceptance thereafter of alternative theories to explain the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behaviors. These events need to be reconsidered in the light of subsequent research. Group selection has become both theoretically plausible and empirically well supported. Moreover, the so-called alternative theories include the logic of multilevel selection within their own frameworks. We review the history and conceptual basis of sociobiology to show why a new consensus regarding group selection is needed and how multilevel selection theory can provide a more solid foundation for sociobiology in the future.

Wilson's new paper concludes;

When Rabbi Hillel was asked to explain the Torah in the time that he could stand on one foot, he famously replied “Do not do unto others that which is repugnant to you. Everything else is commentary.” Darwin’s original insight and the developments reviewed in this article enable us to offer the following one-foot summary of sociobiology’s new theoretical foundation: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.”

I read this paper a few weeks ago in the context of the eugenics flap. I've been waiting for a timely opportunity to submit it for your consideration. In the context of the stellar political discourse that bubbled up in the comments yesterday on Obama - I think I've spotted a good juncture at which to inject it. We shall see....,

Clostridium Phytofermentans

Clostridium phytofermentans is an anaerobic ethanol- and hydrogen-producing cellulolytic bacterium from forest soil that is capable of fermenting all major carbohydrate components of biomass. Cellulose, pectin, starch, and xylan are rapidly degraded and fermented with ethanol and hydrogen formed as major metabolic products.

C. phytofermentans is of particular interest for the production of high concentrations of ethanol during cellulose fermentation. Two to four times more ethanol than acetate are formed, suggesting that C. phytofermentans possesses unusual fermentation pathways. Hydrogen production approaches maximum amounts expected based on the amounts of non-gaseous products formed. Moreover, C. phytofermentans is amenable to genetic manipulation. Genomic analyses and associated research strategies will advance understanding of complex processes involved in the degradation of abundant plant biopolymers, and allow researchers to develop practical applications for C. phytofermentans , including the bioconversion of cellulose-containing municipal wastes and agricultural products to fuels such as ethanol and hydrogen.

While the implicate order "invented" it, you'll need to pony up some funds to Susan Leschine, Ph.D. (Microbiology) if'n you want to use it.