From vanity to insanity

We’re deep in the insanity phase of the progression, and it’s obvious. A report has been released that exposes the way Trump hijacked the 250th anniversary celebration for his own personal profit and to promote an ugly ideology, much beloved of the right wing, but contrary to to history of the US.

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday.

The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects.”

I remember the 200th anniversary celebration. You may recall that Gerald Ford was the president then, but he didn’t issue bicentennial coins with his face on them, or hire a religious organization to lead the event, or appear prominently in any of the celebrations that were going on — it was generally non-partisan. It was also a weird political era, since we’d just chased Nixon out of office in 1974 for his criminal chicanery. May I suggest that we do something similar to celebrate the semiquincentennial? That would be a lovely tradition to continue.

As we’ve come to expect from the Trump crime family, it was all about the money, funneling it into their personal pockets. This is an outrageous level of corruption.

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a massive Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

There is one phrase you hear repeated over and over again, from TPUSA and PragerU and the White House: our rights are not given to us by the government, but by God. I always thought those rights were derived from the people, but that slogan is being pushed everywhere in the Freedom250 propaganda train.

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.

A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the Revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.

For a thorough breakdown of all the ways Freedom250 is lying to us, and in particular an analysis of the “Freedom Trucks” that PragerU was paid $14 million to deliver, I recommend the following video. That $14 million was stolen from public libraries and museums. It’s 45 minutes long, well worth it for the righteous anger and disgust it will generate.

It ends with a call to action: visit the American Library Association for things you can do to save our libraries and the propagation of a truer history.

Also, fuck Dennis Prager, Erica Kirk, and every member of the Trump family.

The University of Minnesota creates life in the laboratory!

Well, sort of. Researchers in the College of Biological Sciences on the Twin Cities campus have created a synthetic cell from scratch that has many of the properties of evolved cells, but they also have significant limitations. Kate Adamala and Aaron Engelhart have combined 7 plasmids in a lipid bubble, that they’ve called a spudcell, that can do many of the cool things that natural cells can do.

This is likely the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on,” said Adamala. “We’ve replicated in chemistry what only used to be possible in biology: the complete set of behaviors of a cell. It proves that the most fundamental functions of life, like growth and replication, do not need a mysterious magical spark.

You can almost hear the mad cackle. So what can it do?

Among the characteristics of SpudCell:

• Replicates a biological cell’s life cycle: SpudCell is capable of selection, genome replication, growth, resource acquisition via feeding, and genetically encoded division.
• Cell division without a cytoskeleton: Natural cells divide using internal scaffolding called a cytoskeleton, which has been a bottleneck in synthetic cell research. SpudCell sidesteps the need for a cytoskeleton with proteins that crowd together on the membrane surface until the mechanical stress makes the membrane split.
• Selection and competition: Researchers introduced a genetic change that increased production of the fusion protein, resulting in cells that grew faster and produced more offspring. After five generations, the faster-growing variant had outcompeted the original. Under nutrient scarcity, the advantage increased, demonstrating selection and competition operating in a fully synthetic chemical system.

It’s basically a minimal, defined biochemical system in a liposome, with a tiny genome. It doesn’t have any organelles (other than ribosomes), and is a uniform soup of enzymes, which is why I think they called it a SpudCell, because it’s got all the character of a potato. You can read a preprint which gives all the details.

The system contains 36 purified enzymes, a 90,000 base pair genome spread across nine separate DNA molecules, and a lipid membrane. SpudCell is able to grow, replicate its genome, divide, and undergo selection and competition across multiple generations.

The preprint also discusses some of the major limitations of this system. It’s not going to compete with natural cells, and it will die out within a few generations if released. It needs to be fed specially prepared liposomes filled with nutrients that can spontaneously fuse with the cells, which is kind of cheating. But also…

• Building ribosomes from genetic instructions. SpudCell currently uses ribosomes from E. coli bacteria. Without the capability to remake ribosomes, SpudCell runs for 5-10 generations before the machinery degrades. Building ribosomes from scratch means synthesising dozens of proteins and RNA molecules, then getting them to assemble in the right order.
• Improving genome distribution. After five generations, about 30% of daughter cells have the complete set of seven DNA plasmids. Natural cells solve this with cytoskeletal machinery that pulls chromosomes apart during division. SpudCell does not have that yet, and better genome inheritance will need more sophisticated division mechanisms.
• Reducing dependence on external feeding. Nutrient-carrying liposomes have to be added regularly, and division requires streptavidin and molecular linker proteins from outside. Making the system more autonomous will require building metabolic pathways that can synthesize components from simpler starting materials.

It’s not sophisticated enough to assemble its own ribosomes, which is a major limitation. It’s going to need at least an order of magnitude more complexity to do that.

I’m more interested in the lack of a cytoskeleton. You’ve got 23 pairs of chromosomes in your cells, and the cytoskeletal machinery in mitosis works to guarantee that each daughter cell inherits the same 23 pairs; there are cells that don’t have that cytoskeleton, and they can do just fine with a single strand of circular DNA, but these SpudCells have at least 7 separate plasmids that have to be sorted. They rely on chance distribution of the plasmids to daughter cells, so they have to point out that after 5 generations 70% are nonviable.

What it’s good for is that it’s greatly reduced, bare-bones cell where every component is precisely known so you can track every molecule for at least a few generations. There are toy cells, but good educational toys.

I am so pessimistic

Yesterday, the Supreme Court affirmed birthright citizenship. Good. Let’s celebrate. Except, this was a decision that should have been a no-brainer — it’s explicitly written in the Constitution, and there’s no ambiguity at all — and the Court had a 5-4 split, with Clarence Thomas writing a 90 page dissent. This was a case that barely broke through to a just decision.

On the same day, the Court unanimously ruled against transgender rights. You can pretty much be certain that it will rule against principles of democracy and inclusion whenever it gets the opportunity.

The only optimistic news I’ve seen is that Mitch McConnell, one of the architects of the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court, may be dying.

Several reputable news media outlets reported that the 84-year-old — who is among the oldest sitting senators in government, as of this writing — was admitted to a hospital on June 14. At the time of publication, his condition was unknown, leading to rumors about whether or not he was alive.

People online claimed the senator was either dead or close to death and that his staff were hiding it from the public. One post stated: “Is there a law that requires the Senate to disclose the death of a Senator within a certain number of days? #WhereIsMitch”

So maybe a slow, miserable death…but not too painful, since his mind is probably mostly gone. We’ve got time to get some champagne and caviar before his demise! The most generous thing I can say is that I wish he’d retired to the happy bosom of his family and a life of relaxation a decade or two ago. As it is, he overstayed his tenure, and to what end? The poisoning of his beloved Republican party.