In the last several days, various reports popped up about pornographic AI-generated images of Taylor Swift circulating in the internet. The first one I saw was about Biden railing about someone has gotta do something about this horrible, terrible Taylor Swift thing. I ignored it. But more recently, we see the CEO of the gigantic person (with more constitutional rights than us) named Microsoft blithering that someone has gotta do something about this horrible, terrible Taylor Swift thing.
WTF! If AI-generated pornographic images of Germaine were circulating on the interwebs,* Biden and Gates would scream at the messenger and tell ’em to get out, with the door rigged to smash their ass on the way out and the guards instructed to shoot at ’em as they ran down the hallway toward the exit.
* Eew, pornographic Germaine?? Talk about a horrible, terrible thing.
See my point? Us regular people get a kick in the ass and silently pay our taxes, but the noisy and famous beautiful and other elites get elite service and engage in vast amounts of tax evasion (~$700 billion/year by my estimate for the elites alone). They get real, honest to God service and respect. The rest of us get real honest to God disservice and disrespect.
Microsoft CEO calls for tech industry to ‘act’
after AI photos of Taylor Swift
Satya Nadella spoke to Lester Holt about artificial intelligence and its ability to create deepfake images of others. After pictures of Taylor Swift circulated, he called for actions
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has called on the tech industry to take action after viral
AI pornographic photos of
Taylor Swift circulated.
The tech leader expressed grave concern and urgency to do something now. He told Lester Holt in an interview set to air on
NBC News Tuesday: "We have to act, and quite frankly all of us in the tech platform, irrespective of what your standing on any particular issue is - I think we all benefit when the online world is a safe world.”
Nadella doesn’t merely have concern for Swift. He has grave concern. I guarantee it, he has zero concern for Germaine and other vermin of that ilk.
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Lupus is a truly terrible disease. Treatments suck and are fairly toxic. One gigantic problem with finding treatments for diseases with bad or no treatments is knowing at the tissue, cell and molecular level what event or series of events triggers disease. That is where most biomedical research is focused these days. It is a slow, tedious, failure-riddled endeavor.
A press release from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin announced that researchers have found the disease trigger for at least some lupus patients:
Sometimes a single mutation in our genetic make-up is enough to cause disease. This is also the case with the autoimmune disease lupus. Lupus causes severe inflammation throughout the body and can have a serious impact on the lives of those affected. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin have now discovered a mechanism that can trigger lupus in children. This mechanism regulates the amount of a specific immune receptor that normally recognizes the genetic material of pathogens. If this mechanism is disrupted, receptors accumulate in the immune cells leading to the recognition of the body’s own genetic material. As a result, the immune system turns against its own body and causes the systemic inflammation of lupus. In collaboration with physicians from the Hospital of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the researchers were able to identify a lupus patient in whom this mechanism is disrupted by a single mutation.
In order for the immune system to react quickly, a certain number of these receptors must be present in the immune cells. Cells maintain this balance by constantly producing and degrading receptors. “We wanted to understand what happens when this balance is disturbed,” explains group leader Olivia Majer.
During their work, Majers’ team became interested in a protein complex called BORC. The researchers were able to show that BORC is required to degrade Toll-like receptor 7 within the cell. In addition, BORC needs another protein, UNC93B1, to carry out the degradation process correctly. If there is an error in this process, the receptor is not degraded and accumulates in the immune cells. “From earlier experiments in mice carried out a few years ago at the University of Berkeley in California, we already knew that too many of these receptors are a problem,” explains Majer. A greater amount of receptor biases towards recognizing the body’s own genetic material. This leads to an immune response against self, a trigger for the autoimmune disease lupus. So far, however, neither BORC nor UNC93B1 have been associated with lupus in humans.
Testing for mutations in UNC93B1 could quickly become part of lupus treatment, opening up new approaches to therapy. In the past, doctors have mainly focused on suppressing inflammation with drugs. By targeting the mechanism that has now been discovered, it may be possible to prevent the inflammation from developing in the first place—and thus significantly reduce the disease burden for those affected.
This is early and this discovery needs to be repeated and expanded on to see how common this lupus trigger mechanism is.
Two points:
- Just because researchers observe an phenomenon in an animal model like mice, it does not mean the same or anything similar goes on in humans. By my estimation, that mistake has been made at least ~100,000 times since the dawn on modern biomedical science in the ~1950s, probably more like 1 million times. For some reason, that lesson just won’t sink in with lots of people, especially non-scientists but including researchers themselves (hence the replication crisis in biomedical and other biological sciences).
- Here, one sees how one discovery builds on another over the years. Researchers at Berkeley found that Toll-like receptor 7 was a problem in mice. That suggested to the Max Planck researchers to look for a human connection with out of whack Toll-like 7 biology in humans. It’s a slow, tedious, failure-riddled process. Biomedical science researchers need to be persistent as hell and have the patience of a freaking saint.*
* I lacked the patience part to stay on the bench as a researcher. That’s why I went to law school and picked an area of law that focuses on biomedical science and research. It’s a heck lot faster and more fun to think and write about science than it is to do it. Can you imagine how long it takes a botanist to do an experiment on a species of a tree? (hint: years)
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These days, there is an almost endless supply of examples of stupidity, corruption, incompetence, crackpottery, bad faith, ill-will, cruelty, mendacity, vulgarity, jaw-dropping hypocrisy and all-around fetid moral rot coming from America's authoritarian radical right Republican Party. Here’s a couple of examples.
1. The WaPo writes:
House GOP unveils Mayorkas impeachment articles despite lack of evidence -- The charges come as Republicans swiftly concluded
two public impeachment hearings this month without Mayorkas’s in-person testimony or testimony from any fact witnesses, and they have struggled to detail clear evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.
So instead of doing something about America's worsening problems, including the ongoing radicalization of people on the far right, the dimwit Republicans who control the House piss precious time away with their idiotic impeachments and sabotage efforts to deal with real problems like the US-Mexico border.
2. The WaPo writes:
Trump brags about efforts to stymie border talks: ‘Please blame it on me’ -- “As the leader of our party, there is zero chance I will support this horrible open borders betrayal of America,” Trump told a rowdy crowd of supporters at a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday, ahead of the state’s presidential caucus on Feb. 8. “I’ll fight it all the way. A lot of the senators are trying to say, respectfully, they’re blaming it on me. I say, that’s okay. Please blame it on me. Please.”
That cynical, self-serving bullshit is worse than mere incompetence. In my opinion, it amounts to intentional treason.
Late last month, the Southern Baptist Convention settled a sex abuse lawsuit brought against a man named Paul Pressler for an undisclosed sum. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 and alleged that Pressler had raped a man named Duane Rollins for decades, with the rapes beginning when Rollins was only 14 years old.
Pressler is one of the most important American religious figures of the 20th century. He and his friend Paige Patterson, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, are
two of the key architects of the so-called conservative resurgence within the S.B.C.
Both men are now disgraced. In 2018, the board of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary fired Patterson after it found that he’d grossly mishandled rape allegations ....
Both were powerful men so brazen about their misconduct that it was an “open secret” in their respective worlds. Yet they were also so powerful that an army of enablers coalesced around them, protecting them from the consequences of their actions. A single individual can be a predator, but it takes a village to protect him from exposure and punishment.
Yeah, God sure does work in mysterious ways, assuming there is a God. But if not, powerful, perverted men often work in transparent ways.
4. Regarding elite Republican lunacy and cynical mendacity,
The Hill writes:
Rick Scott: Trump ‘irrelevant’ to border talks: ‘He’s not in office’ -- “He’s irrelevant to this conversation. He’s not in office,” Scott said on “Fox News Sunday,” while laying blame on the Biden administration. Trump has
slammed negotiation efforts by Senate Democrats and Republicans on a border security and foreign aid package, raising criticism that he wants to
sink any potential deal.
Scott, the author of a lunatic, pro-pollution, pro-climate change, pro-Christian Sharia law
11 Point Plan to Save America, knows that DJT absolutely, positively is relevant to all conversations in congress. Scott is a disgusting scumbag and liar.
