Up From Facebook

There’s a lot of brouhaha surrounding the candidate Dan J. Sullivan. There are a couple of facts that need to be upfront in any rational discussion: 1. Even if the Democrats recruited Dan J. Sullivan because his name is similar to the incumbent Republican Senator, that’s not illegal. 2. The word “incumbent” appears on the ballot next to Dan S. Sullivan’s name, so there’s no reason to be uncertain which Dan Sullivant is which. 3. Alaska has ranked choice voting. Anyone who is genuinely confused can rank one Sullivan as their first choice and the other as their second choice. If none of the candidates gets more than 50% of the vote, the weakest candidate is eliminated and the second-choice votes on those ballots are redistributed to the remaining candidates. The process continues until someone has a majority. I’ll bet most Republicans know which Sullivan to rank first, so the few who are confused and illiterate but want the incumbent to win can just rank the Sullivans 1 and 2, and if the...

All God’s critters got viruses. Not just animals and plants, but fungi and bacteria. The viruses that infect and kill bacteria are called bacteriophages (or phages, for short).   For decades, the USSR developed and used natural bacteriophages to treat bacterial infections like cholera. Even after the discovery of antibiotics, the Soviet Union continued the clinical use of bacteriophages. Now, a US company has used AI to engineer a bacteriophage to treat infections: “ Rather than searching for a virus that could kill the patient's bacteria, Omnii-1 redesigned part of a virus so it could better recognize and attack the specific bacterial strain causing the infection. The company says the AI-driven process could eventually take just days.” An increasing number of bacterial pathogens have acquired resistance to common antibiotics, and in some cases, to all available antibiotics. So, bacteriophage therapy represents a potential new tool in the bacterial arms race. How effective is it? “...

What we seem to be getting back to is the nineteenth century. Then politics tended to be centered on the fight between liberals (broadly speaking), and illiberals or anti-liberals. That struggle, and the various victories and defeats of each side, defined the history of many nations throughout that era. We thought for a while that we’d moved beyond that. We were wrong.   ~William Kristol

It’s true that the White House squeezes money and well-being from the targets of its campaign even when it doesn’t secure convictions. But when the failures are so consistent and so abject they have the effect of advertising both the President’s abuses of power and his weakness. Successfully abusing your power is a display of dominance which spreads fear. These clumsy and grasping failures more generate anger and contempt. A shrewder would-be autocrat wouldn’t have made himself so deeply unpopular, in such foreseeable ways while he was trying to impose an Orban-style autocracy. Even at this late date one with any foresight or self-control would drop these antics and focus other kinds of wrongdoing. But Trump simply can’t. We don’t diminish the gravity of Trump’s wrongdoing by noting that he is failing in this effort. ~Josh Marshall

Globalization has become tainted in our eyes, as if it necessarily constitutes a zero-sum enterprise. And its mercenary form—which is also its most common form –has indeed inflicted harm. But the global semiconductor supply chain reflects an alternative pathway. It has united its participants in the pursuit of something profoundly difficult that could not have been achieved in the absence of intercontinental solidarity. ~Gideon Lewis-Kraus

RFK Jr’s lack of knowledge about healthcare, vaccines and nutrition has been well-documented. Remarkably, this former heroin addict who cops to snorting cocaine off of a toilet seat continues to self-own his ignorance. “ There's 500 million Arabs in the world and yet they don't produce science," Kennedy said on the campaign trail Monday. "They don't win the Nobel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature." Egyptian law scholar Mohamed ElBaradei, a diplomat and vice-president of Egypt, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 alongside the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). ElBaradei and the IAEA, which he previously chaired, were awarded for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes. Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, politician, and human rights activist, was a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni and the first Arab ...