At The National Review Bill Burck and Dana Perino Flail About in Vain Attempt to Defend War Criminals John Yoo annd Jay Bybee.
Moreover, Margolis repeatedly adopted the OPR’s findings that the Yoo/Bybee torture memos — on which the entire American torture regime was constructed and which media elites now embrace in order to argue against prosecutions — were wrong, “extreme,” misguided, and the by-product of “poor judgment.” As Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin so clearly explained, the only thing that saved Yoo in Margolis’ eyes was that attorney ethical rules have been written by lawyers to protect themselves, and the bar is therefore so low that it basically includes only “sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems.” As a result, Margolis could not ultimately conclude that Yoo — as shoddy and misleading as his torture authorizations were — purposely lied because Yoo “was an ideologue who entered government service with a warped vision of the world in which he sincerely believed.” Does that remotely sound like exoneration?
I’m not sure about the actual psychological jargon, but The National Review, Commentary, the NYT and of course the sordid right-wing sites – seem to be suffering from O.J. syndrome. They have been telling themselves the same lies for so long they believe them even when the facts are clear enough for those not blinded by fidelity to the cause. Blowing a lot of smoke that is calculated to obscure the facts has been standard operating procedure for the far Right for not years, but decades. They managed to sell the American public on the idea that its a good thing to spend three trillion dollars rebuilding Iraq – a country that did not pose anything resembling an “urgent” threat, but its evil to spend far less then that to get most American health insurance. Having had success after success, why show any shame or regret at some war crimes that killed or injured innocent people. Though that does mean the National Review and their genuflecting followers have ideologically aligned themselves with history’s worse tyrants.
Genes, environment, or chance?
Some mutant cells transcribed the gene many times, ultimately creating enough of the protein to activate the final gene. Others made too few transcripts and the final gene stayed off.
DNA winds tightly around proteins, like thread around a spool, and must uncoil for the transcriptional machinery to access a gene.
Some proteins unwind the DNA; others wind it up again. In the mutant worms, the balance shifted to favor the proteins that keep DNA wound. But in some of the worms, the DNA stayed uncoiled long enough to generate sufficient numbers of transcripts to activate the final gene. And so, by chance, those worms developed a gut.
It was my impression that especially in the last decade most evolutionary biologists had already acknowledged that successful random mutations have played a major role in evolving new species and helping existing species survive. Though the nematode worms with identical genes study would offer further confirmation of that.
inkbluesky 