Only it’s not the Pokemon you think. It’s a gene called Pokemon, and it seems to be a "master switch" gene that allows for all sorts of cancers.
It appears that we may be able to make significant headway in the fight against cancer if we can find a way to take this gene and, like many parents yell when their kids watch too many episodes of the TV show, "Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off!"
HIGHLIGHTS:
Sic semper tyrannis!
Yes, I know those words were originally said by (or attributed to) Brutus concerning the murder of Julius Caesar, but the Romans apparently took them seriously, for 1,964 years ago today (Jan. 24) they offed another one of their tyrants (whose middle names were also "Julius Caesar"): The Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus.
What? You never heard of him?
But that’s his picture on the left!
Well, okay, it’s understandable that you wouldn’t know him by his proper name because he is far better known by his nickname.
Y’see, when he was a little boy, his father, the wildly popular Germanicus (who was in line for the throne but died under mysterious circumstances), took his family with him when he was out on military campaigns.
His little son Gaius had a little soldier suit, and it tickled the troops to see him wear it. As a result, they nicknamed him after one of the items of his soldier suit: his little boots.
"Little Boot" in Latin is the name he is better known by today: Caligula. (They also sometimes called him the plural form Caligulae or "Little Boots.")
After the death of the much-resented Emperor Tiberius (who was on the throne when Jesus was crucified), Caligula became emperor, and at first he was very popular as people thought it was a fresh start after Tiberius’s interminable reign of cruelty and depravity. Caligula even publicly burned the secret dossiers that Tiberius had kept on prominent citizens (though rumors were that he held back a secret copy of them).
Caligula’s popularity came to a screeching halt when he had a sudden illness that gave him terrible headaches and seemed to alter his personality. Afterwards, he was incredibly cruel, spiteful, and in the view of many, insane.
He even at times appears to have demanded to be a worshipped as a god, and became a forerunner of the Beast of Revelation by demaning to have a statue of himself placed in Jerusalem for the veneration of the Jewish people, an act that would have certainly sparked civil war. (Notable Jewish figures such as Philo the Jewish philosopher and King Herod Agrippa were able to dissuade him from this plan.)
Eventually, the Romans got so fed up with Caligula that–three years, ten months, and eight days into his reigh–they murdered him. Members of his own guard killed him (as well as his wife and his infant daughter).
It was in the wake of his death that his uncle, the lame, stammering scholar Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus was dragged by the Praetorian Guard from where he was hiding behind a curtain (lest he also be killed, as the whole royal family seemed under attack) and proclaimed emperor (so that the guard could stay gainfully employed). Despite his typically prodigious Roman name, he is known to us as the Emperor Claudius.
It was a Roman holiday.
Good riddance to it, too.
The Constitution doesn’t requires more than a majority vote on presidential appointments to the judiciary, and it twists the meaning of the Constitution to use Senate debate rules to up that to a 60-vote supermajority.
In fact, I’m rethinking the existence of the filibuster. Certainly the way it’s come to be used, a case can be made that it is a contra-Constitutional rule that we ought to simply get rid of.
But that’s a question for another day. For now,
As a result of getting rid of the subtitle "Defensor Fidei," I have a favor to ask of the folks who are linking me on their blogs or web pages. I’d be much obliged to y’all if you would consider changing the links to say "Jimmy Akin" or "JimmyAkin.Org" rather than "Defensor Fidei."
(Also, I’d be much obliged if folks who aren’t currently linking me would consider doing so. If you appreciate what I’m doing here, please consider sharing it with others via a link.)
In exchange for your trouble, lemme pass on a bit of weblore that you may find useful:
Up in your address bar or (if you have me bookmarked) next to your bookmark to the blog or (if you’re using tabbed browsing in a browswer like Mozilla) next to the tab for this page, you may see a little picture of me that looks like this:
That’s been there for a while, but not everyone has been seeing it, so one of the changes I made this weekend was to make it more accessible again.
In the past, a number of folks have written me about it and said (a) that they find it cute and (b) that they’d like to know how to do it for their own sites.
No prob!
This image is called a favicon (short for "favorites icon"). Here’s how to create one for your own site (either a picture of you or based on your site’s logo or simply an image that you find interesting), in three easy steps:
<link rel="shortcut icon"
href="http://WHEREVER_YOUR_ROOT_DIRECTORY_IS/favicon.ico">
And you’re all set!
Now, I should warn you that different browsers handle favicons differently, and they may not all instantly grab it. Internet Explorer, for example, often does not grab the favicon unless you delete existing bookmarks to the site and re-bookmark it. So you may have to do some jiggering (deleting bookmarks, clearing cashes, restarting browsers, restarting the computer) to get it to show up on your own system after you’ve installed it on the site. (I had to.)
A good way to verify that it’s there without all this effort is to call someone who you know doesn’t visit your site and ask him to visit it and bookmark you. If he see’s the favicon, it’s there, even though it may not show up on your system for a while.
There are also other ways to implement this kind of icon, but that’s the basic way.
Hope that’s a satisfactory compensation for other webmasters and bloggers (at least for us non-professionals) to consider linking or link-editing JimmyAkin.Org. 🙂
Thanks, folks!
As a result of getting rid of the subtitle "Defensor Fidei," I have a favor to ask of the folks who are linking me on their blogs or web pages. I’d be much obliged to y’all if you would consider changing the links to say "Jimmy Akin" or "JimmyAkin.Org" rather than "Defensor Fidei."
(Also, I’d be much obliged if folks who aren’t currently linking me would consider doing so. If you appreciate what I’m doing here, please consider sharing it with others via a link.)
In exchange for your trouble, lemme pass on a bit of weblore that you may find useful:
Up in your address bar or (if you have me bookmarked) next to your bookmark to the blog or (if you’re using tabbed browsing in a browswer like Mozilla) next to the tab for this page, you may see a little picture of me that looks like this:
That’s been there for a while, but not everyone has been seeing it, so one of the changes I made this weekend was to make it more accessible again.
In the past, a number of folks have written me about it and said (a) that they find it cute and (b) that they’d like to know how to do it for their own sites.
No prob!
This image is called a favicon (short for "favorites icon"). Here’s how to create one for your own site (either a picture of you or based on your site’s logo or simply an image that you find interesting), in three easy steps:
<link rel="shortcut icon"
href="http://WHEREVER_YOUR_ROOT_DIRECTORY_IS/favicon.ico">
And you’re all set!
Now, I should warn you that different browsers handle favicons differently, and they may not all instantly grab it. Internet Explorer, for example, often does not grab the favicon unless you delete existing bookmarks to the site and re-bookmark it. So you may have to do some jiggering (deleting bookmarks, clearing cashes, restarting browsers, restarting the computer) to get it to show up on your own system after you’ve installed it on the site. (I had to.)
A good way to verify that it’s there without all this effort is to call someone who you know doesn’t visit your site and ask him to visit it and bookmark you. If he see’s the favicon, it’s there, even though it may not show up on your system for a while.
There are also other ways to implement this kind of icon, but that’s the basic way.
Hope that’s a satisfactory compensation for other webmasters and bloggers (at least for us non-professionals) to consider linking or link-editing JimmyAkin.Org. 🙂
Thanks, folks!
This weekend I took the opportunity to do some blog maintenance and make a couple of changes that I’d been meaning to make for some time. (My provider also took the opportunity to move its servers, which may have caused problems for some folks reaching the blog yesterday.)
First, I took "Defensor Fidei" out of the blog banner.
For those who were hear an almost-year ago (my blogiversary is coming up), this blog started with the title "Defensor Fidei" with the subtitle "Jimmy Akin’s Blog." That’s been my typical way of titling things (i.e., not after myself). My other (and inactive) web site, for example, still bears the title "The Nazareth Resource Library."
But I found that calling the blog "Defensor Fidei" caused a problem: It made it harder for people to find the site. A lot of people would tell me "I didn’t know you had a blog!" because, although they knew who I was, they didn’t make the connection to me by seeing "Defensor Fidei" in someone else’s blogroll. (NOTE TO SELF: "Duhhh!") As a result, a lot of people who might be interested in the blog weren’t connecting, and I eventually decided to phase out "Defensor Fidei."
The first step was to (more or less) flip the title and the subtitle, so the title became "JimmyAkin.Org" (a highly functional title) and the subtitle became "The Defensor Fidei Blog." After a while (i.e., this weekend) the latter would be dropped and the blog would simply be "JimmyAkin.Org."
One reason for dropping the subtitle was that, after the blog launched, it quickly diversified in terms of topic. I originally started by blogging about religious matters, making the title "Defensor Fidei" (Latin, "Defender of the Faith") appropriate, but I soon started writing about a wide range of other subjects as well, which folks seemed to think made the blog more interesting.
Since, these days, I blog about anything that I find interesting (religion included) and since I’m curious about just about everything, I thought about subtitling the blog "Jimmy Akin’s Interesting Universe," but decided not to (for the present).
Highlights:
I mean, The Telegraph is a British MSM newspaper, right? So natural law says it ought to be filled with all kinds of barking moonbat drivel. Yet two of its recent editorials have been disturbingly . . . sane.
HERE’S AN EDITORIAL THAT ARGUES THAT CALLS A NUCLEAR-ARMED IRAN "THE SCARIEST PROSPECT OF ALL."
It goes on to point out that Iranaian leaders have been bragging about how they would use nukes to wipe out Israel and that they would have the ability to project nuclear force to European capitals, and so concludes:
The truth is that nuclear- armed ayatollahs are unacceptable in Europe, America and Israel.
It also says:
When the Israelis bombed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear
research centre at Osirak in 1981, they were universally condemned. The
Americans showed their displeasure by cancelling arms sales. But the
raid on Osirak prevented Saddam from acquiring a nuclear arsenal, a
fact that the Americans and the world fully recognised when weapons
inspectors went into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war. If Saddam had had
nuclear weapons in 1991, it would have been impossible to dislodge him
from Kuwait. Able to intimidate Saudi Arabia, he would have had
decisive power over Middle East oil. That propsect persuaded America,
and most of the world, that Israel had done the right thing in bombing
Osirak in 1981.Unless European diplomacy
obtains real guarantees [backed up by unannounced inspections] from Iran, President Bush will soon have to
decide to do to Iran what the Israelis did to Iraq. If he decides to
attack, he will not announce it in advance: just a television broadcast
the following morning announcing a job done. The "international
community" will denounce the raid hysterically in public while
approving of it whole-heartedly in private.
Now, if that’s not amazing enough, at the bottom of the page is a link to an editorial called
THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO PROTECT OURSELVES–AND HERE’S THE PROOF (WARNING: Evil registration requirement).
What is the one way for Brits to protect themselves? Surrender to France? Disband their army as a show of good faith to the world? Give sanctions more time? Start broadcasting the Teletubbies 24 hours a day in every country in the Muslim world?
No, you’d think that these would be the kind of recommendations a British newspaper today would be making, but you’d never guess what this editorial recommends: Start letting ordinary Brits tote guns!
Yes, y’see: The idealistic 1984 society that George Orwell painted in such glowing terms for Britian has been slightly delayed (expect it in a decade or two), and so there’s not yet a security officer hiding in every closet over there. As a result, if someone attacks you–say, with an illegal weapon–then you can’t simply ask Officer Omnipresent to step out of the closet and defend you. It therefore might make sense for the ordinary people to . . . . well . . . have the ability to defend themselves. If fact, if the illegally-armed hooligans knew that even a fraction of the ordinary citizens were legally-armed then they might think twice about accosting them. In other words, violent crime might go down.
That gets to the proof alluded to in the editorial’s title: Back in 1909, ordinary Brits thwarted a terrorist attack in Tottenham because back then the populace was armed. (The police even needed to borrow pistols from passers by because they’d mislaid the key to their gun cabinet.) The article notes:
We should not fool ourselves, however, that such
things were possible then because society was more peaceful. Those
years were ones of much more social and political turbulence than our
own: with violent and incendiary suffrage protests, massive industrial
strikes where the Army was called in and people were killed, where
there was the menace of a revolutionary General Strike, and where the
country was riven by the imminent prospect of a civil war in Ireland.In such
troubled times, why did the commonplace carrying of firearms not result
in mayhem? How could it be that in the years before the First World
War, armed crime in London amounted to less than 2 per cent of what we
see today? One answer that might have been taken as self-evident then,
but which has become political anathema now, is that the prevalence of
firearms had a stabilising influence and a deterrent effect upon crime.
It also notes:
For a long time it has been possible to draw a map of
the United States showing the inverse relationship between liberal gun
laws and violent crime. At one end of the scale are the "murder
capitals" of Washington, Chicago and New York, with their gun bans (New
York City has had a theoretical general prohibition of handguns since
1911); at the other extreme, the state of Vermont, without gun laws,
and with the lowest rate of violent crime in the Union (a 13th that of
Britain). From the late Eighties, however, the relative proportions on
the map have changed radically. Prior to that time it was illegal in
much of the United States to bear arms away from the home or workplace,
but Florida set a new legislative trend in 1987, with the introduction
of "right-to-carry" permits for concealed firearms.Issue
of the new permits to law-abiding citizens was non-discretionary, and
of course aroused a furore among gun control advocates, who predicted
that blood would flow in the streets. The prediction proved false;
Florida’s homicide rate dropped, and firearms abuse by permit holders
was virtually non-existent. State after state followed Florida’s suit,
and mandatory right-to-carry policies are now in place in 35 of the
United States.Over the last 25 years the number of firearms in private hands in the
United States has more than doubled. At the same time the violent crime
rate has dropped dramatically, with the significant downswing following
the spread of right-to-carry legislation. The US Bureau of Justice
observes that "firearms-related crime has plummeted since 1993", and it
has declined also as a proportion of overall violent offences. Violent
crime in total has declined so much since 1994 that it has now reached,
the bureau states, "the lowest level ever recorded". While American
"gun culture" is still regularly the sensational subject of media
demonisation in Britain, the grim fact is that in this country we now
suffer three times the level of violent crime committed in the United
States.
So, what’s up with The Telegraph? Is it a mouthpiece for the Tory party or something? Or is it that they’re having an outbreak of the sanies over the pond?