The SARS-CoV-2 Variants Of Concern.

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The graphic above is from Eric Topol of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. He is a clinician researcher whose group published important work on asymptomatic spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and he has been following COVID-19 developments closely, including the latest on vaccines and variants of concern, including the three shown in the table. All of this is just by way of explaining Topol's bonafides to you. 

Below are some take aways/explanations, focusing on the receptor binding domain or 'RBD' of the 'spike' protein. Much of what I'm going to type can be gleaned from a very recently peer-reviewed and published paper from a group at Oxford in the top-ranked journal 'Cell' titled 'Antibody evasion by the P.1 strain of SARS-CoV-2':

How the variants arise: SARS-CoV-2, like all viruses that have RNA as their genetic material, has an error prone RNA polymerase. The latter is the enzyme that is required to make new genetic material/RNA. The errors lead to mutations in viral genes, including the gene for the spike (S) protein. This produces a viral variant and those mutations can change the 'code' for amino acids in numbered positions in the viral proteins. The mutation in the spike protein that is common to all three 'variants of concern' shown above, all of which are currently present in British Columbia, is the N501Y mutation. This means that 'asparagine' amino acid (code name 'N')  at position 501 in the spike protein has been changed to a 'tyrosine' (code name 'Y') which slightly changes the shape and electrostatic characteristics of the bit of the spike that binds to our cells (that 'receptor binding domain'/RBD again).

How the variants emerge/spread: The spike protein is critical for binding to our cells and getting the virus inside them via the RBD. Thus, when we make our own antibodies against the virus after we've been infected with it, or because we've seen the spike protein before due to vaccination, the ones we make against the RBD portion of the spike protein are the ones that can 'neutralize' the virus and prevent it from infecting our cells. Any mutation/amino acid change in the RBD that increases its ability bind our cells (i.e. could increase transmissibility) or decreases the ability of our antibodies to bind to the RBD (i.e. could cause immune evasion) will give the variant a selective advantage and so lead to its emergence and spread in a given locality/human population where community spread is occurring. When the variants 'take over' due to this advantage it can be a significant problem for public health-based control and vaccine efficacy as noted below.

The spike protein that all the (current) vaccines code for: They all code for the 'classic' spike protein coded for by the original Wuhan viral strain. Most of the vaccine-coded spike proteins have two changes (via 2 proline amino acid mutations/substitutions) that were engineered into them to 'lock' the protein into the configuration/shape that is normally found on the surface of the virus before it binds to cells. The two vaccines that do not have this 'lock' are the Oxford and Sputnik ones, and some researchers are now starting to think that this is why these vaccines aren't as good at producing neutralizing antibodies against some variant spike proteins.  Another thing worth knowing is that the mRNA vaccine makers are already at work making vaccine boosters based on the new varian forms of the spike proteins. Being able to do this quickly and efficiently is one of the advantages of the mRNA vaccine technology.

The B.117/UK variant: This one was first identified in the United Kingdom and, due to it's increased transmissibility, it very quickly spread and became the dominant form of the virus in the fall and early winter of 2020. It has a bunch of spike protein mutations but, as noted above, it also has that N501Y mutation that is common to the other two variants of concern and it is thought that this mutation increases transmissibility. This variant is also appears to be more lethal despite what it says in Topol's table above (about 1.6X). Luckily, it looks like all the current vaccines work reasonably well against this variant. This includes the AstraZeneca vaccine which has been the one that has been rolled out widely to good effect in the UK (for a comment on the rare, serious clotting disorder associated with taking this vaccine, see....here). According to the numbers we have so far, this is currently the most prevalent variant in British Columbia (scroll down). 

The P.1/Brazilian variant: In addition to the N501Y mutation seen in the UK variant, the P.1/Brazilian variant also has E484K (which is sometimes referred to as the 'eeek' mutant) and K417T mutations in the RBD that affect binding to cells and may also contribute to immune evasion. This is the variant that has been spreading rapidly in British Columbia recently, including at Whistler. P.1/Brazilian is also the variant where we have the least hard data. Topol's table states that the effect on transmissibility is not clear, but there is one non-peer reviewed report of an increase of greater than two fold which I assume is the one that local folks are basing their comments on in media reports. The lethality is also not clear, but there have been anecdotal reports that it is problematic in younger patients. 

    So, do the vaccines work against this variant? In a true clinical setting that is not clear as the data are not yet available, but in terms of making neutralizing antibodies it looks like there is reduced activity, but it is still there - the caveat here is that the mRNA vaccines look to be better than the AstraZeneca one (see Figure 7C/D). 

The B.1351/South African variant: It has very similar changes to the RBD as does the P.1 variant. The transmissibility and lethality changes are not clear. However, both the mRNA and Astra Zeneca vaccines least proficient at generating neutralizing antibodies against it (see the same Figure 7C/D). There are clinical data for this variant though. The mRNA vaccines work, but not as well against the 'classic' virus and a small scale, phase II clinical trial concluded that the AstraZeneca vaccine doesn't have much, if any, efficacy. This has caused a lot of concern but it is important to realize that they were only looking at mild-to-moderate disease as an endpoint (as opposed to severe disease, or worse) and the sample size was so small that the 95% confidence intervals were very wide (i.e. the statistical power was low). 

    Here in British Columbia, where we are now rolling out the AZ vaccine to folks 55-65 in a lot of locations (my appointment is on Thursday), one ray of hope on this front is that this variant is still at quite low numbers and it appears, assuming we are on top of things, to be increasing slowly compared to the other two variants.

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My usual disclaimer here is that, while I am a life scientist and a cell biologist, I am not a virus or vaccine expert...Thus, please understand, that I'm only trying to explain things that have been raised in media reports more fully based on what I can glean from the available scientific literature and the comments of true experts like Eric Topol mentioned above.

We here in B.C. have been lagging a bit with variant tracking but, as Andrea Woo reported in the Globe on the weekend, a group at St. Paul's led by Marc Romney has figured out how to speed that up - their actual paper is here....Here's hoping our PHO and the BCCDC adopt their methods so that we can get closer to real time variant tracking - it looks like it could really help keep us ahead of things, both from public health and vaccine implementation points of view.

Thanks again to all the readers who have sent helpful links to material to have a look at and consider.

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A Great COVID Vaccination Story From The CBC's 'Roving Reporter' In Ontario...

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You can listen to Haydn Watters' CBC radio report about 104 year old Patricia McSwain....Here (scroll down).

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Meanwhile, here in British Columbia we're moved things up a little bit for those 80, plus, to make appointments to get their first vaccine dose.

The details of where to call or make your appointment online if you are in Fraser Health are...Here.

Again, remember, elderly folks are only getting the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccines as part of 'Phase 2'. Thus, do not be concerned about the safety issue that has recently been raised about the AstraZeneca vaccine (see footnotes, below). 

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As we've noted before, now is not the time to let down your guard regarding viral transmission. 

We also noted that double masking has been shown to increase the barrier to aerosols both for the transmitter and the receiver....The NY Times has a great video of how best to double mask...Here.

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Regarding the AstraZeneca, adenovirus-based vaccine that has been rolled out heavily in the UK, last week we noted that the flagging of a small number of time-associated blood clotting events in Europe was likely soon to become an issue in some jurisdictions. Clearly, that has come to pass with all kinds of points of view being expressed on numerous fronts. Derek Lowe, whose analysis is always critical but data-based and fair, weighs in on the details of this and some comparative efficacy concerns...Here. The safety issue that needs to be resolved is whether or not these events have occurred at a greater frequency than in the same cohort of the population that has not yet been vaccinated. While Britain has crunched its data and has come to the conclusion that the number of clotting events time-associated vaccine administration are not greater than those in the population, other jurisdictions in Europe have not done so, especially when it comes to a small number of serious cerebral sinus thrombosis events as has been documented in Germany...The follow-up issue that will need to be addressed, if there an increase in incidence, will be to determine the mechanistic cause of it.
As alluded to above, there is another potential concern with the AZ vaccine that involves efficacy rather than safety, specifically as it pertains to protection against the South African viral variant (B.1.351). We previously noted that concerns were raised that the COVID-19 vaccines might be less effective against the South African variant based on laboratory results that showed a somewhat decreased ability of recipients of the vaccines to generate antibodies that neutralize that form of the virus...Follow-up laboratory and clinical trial data have now been published in the New England Journal of Medicine that the AZ vaccine also shows a decreased ability to generate neutralizing antibodies against the variant as well as a decreased ability to protect against the onset of mild to moderate disease after infection with the South African variant...A caveat here is the relatively small sample size of the trial which resulted in very wide 95% confidence intervals...As for here in British Columbia, the documented number of South African variant infections is still low - all the more reason to double-mask up and keep on social distancing....

And don't forget that it is the more prevalent  B.117/UK variant that is most worrisome locally at the moment due to its increased transmissibility together with its ability to cause a small but significant increase in mortality Importantly, the UK variant is well whacked by all the approved vaccines...Sure hope I've dealt with reader Booey's concerns here.

Update, Thurs March 18th: The European Medicines Agency, has ruled the AZ vaccine beneficial with no increase in the overall risk of blood clots; however, they do state that administration of the vaccine may be associated with very rare cases of clotting associated with thrombocytopenia (low platelet levels) that can contribute to rare cases of clots in vessels draining the brain (i.e. the cerebral sinus thrombosis mentioned above).

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Sober Assessment Of J&J Vaccine Based On FDA Briefing Documents.

ClinicalTrials
MatterVille

We spoke generally about the adenovirus-based J&J vaccine yesterday.

Today, Derek Lowe, who is veteran drug development guy has demonstrated his bona fides around here many times, weighs in on three important aspects of the vaccine's efficacy, in its single shot form, based on an analysis of the briefing documents for the company's hearing before the US Food and Drug Administration that will be held on Friday.

First, Lowe notes that the J&J vaccine does well preventing severe disease onset and death:

...Like every other vaccine that we’ve seen the clinical data on, this one also seems to completely prevent deaths from the coronavirus. I might be mistaken, but so far I don’t think we’ve seen a single SARS-Cov-2 fatality in the treatment group of any of the Phase III trials. As for severe disease, this one had a strong effect as well, but it might take a bit to kick in completely. 14 days after the single dose, there were 29 people hospitalized with coronavirus in the placebo group and only 2 in the treatment group, but if you look at the 28-day mark there were zero hospitalizations at all...


Second, the J&J vaccine did reasonably well in locations where viral variants were emerging at the time of the trials:

...The coronavirus landscape has changed since the earlier (clinical trials with the mRNA) vaccines, and you can see some of that in the way that the J&J data break out their South African trial. Overall vaccine efficacy was 72% in the US versus 58% in South Africa, where there’s been a lot more B.1.351 variant circulating. But they also have data from Brazil, where the P.2 variant there doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference, and the B.1.1.7 variant first noted in the UK doesn’t seem to be a problem, either...


Third, there is some evidence (but it is still not yet a for sure, settled thing as we also noted previously) that the J&J vaccine provides some protection against viral transmission:

...Of the roughly 10,000 people in the treatment arm of the trial, 2892 of them were tested with or without symptoms for signs of coronavirus infection. The FDA’s take on the data (see numbered page 35 of this document) is that there is weak-to-no evidence of such protection out to day 29, and around 60 to 70% efficacy in the post day-29 data. Like the other trials, it seems very likely that all of this will also reduce transmission of the virus, although the study isn’t designed to track that specifically...


So, like many other knowledgable commentators, Dr. Lowe concludes that it is likely that the J&J vaccine will receive emergency use authorization in the U.S. soon after hearing on Friday. If this occurs it is likely Canada will soon follow suit. A note of caution, here, however, is that the company has been slow to ramp up production, although Lowe notes that it is now starting catching up.

Thus, it looks like good news, overall, that we in Canada will soon have a third vaccine, likely starting in April, with a solid efficacy profile is coming.

Until then, mask up and socially distance at all times!

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J&J also has a 2 dose clinical trial going that should produce data by May of this year.


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COVID-19...The Race Against The Variants (ctd).

MutationsMatter
SpikeProteinVille

There will likely be all kinds of chatter, not to mention headlines in the popular prints, over the next few days about how effective the currently approved Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are against the so called UK (B.1.1.7) and South African (B.1.351) variants.

The reason for this is the slew of new data that are coming out that have experimentally assessed the ability of specific antibodies directed at the viral spike protein to neutralaize the viral variants (don't forget that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines specifically target this protein).

The issue here are the specific mutations (i.e. changes) in the Spike proteins in each variant, which have now been mapped. 

Clearly there is a decrease in the ability of antibodies generated by the vaccines to neutralize both variants with the decrease being greater against the South African variant due to the specific location of the mutations in the latter. However, the decreases are not alarming at this point. 

The details of this are all thoroughly explained based on a thoughtful, critical, and fully cited, analysis of the new data by Derek Lowe in his latest post, here.

I'm super busy today so I'll get back to the details later, but I very much agree with Lowe's current conclusions (which will of course evolve as new data, especially of the clinical variety, come to light) which are the following:

"...What the data are telling us right now is that it definitely looks like vaccination can still handle the variant forms of the coronavirus that we are seeing – but that we also have to be on our guard, because there is no law that says that this protection can’t be breached. Taking public health measures to decrease the spread of the new variants is critical, as is getting as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible. If we mess either of those up, we are asking for serious trouble..."


Talk to you all later.

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A separate concern, not noted above, is the fact that the antibodies produced by non-vaccinated folks who were previously infected with forms of the virus that are neither B.1.1.7 or B.153 showed a greater decrease in neutralizing activity against the variants...More on the specifics of that later, also, given that this could affect follow on immunity. 

A little off topic but... I want to apologize to those of you who have been frustrated recently by the fact that I've had the 'comment moderation' feature on for the last few weeks. I understand that this decreased discussion in the threads significantly but I've been dealing with a troll problem. This seems to have passed so I've taken the moderation off for now. We'll see how it goes but it  may have to go on again if the waves of conspiracy-driven gobbledy-gook and ad hominem attacks return...Thanks.


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Vaccines On The Run? Moderna Is Already On It.

TheRaceAgainstThe
VariantsVille


Yesterday, a consortium of researchers from Moderna and the US National Institutes of Health posted a yet to be peer-reviewed 'pre-print' in which they conclude that the antibodies generated by their mRNA-based vaccine work just fine in 'neutralizing' the UK COVID variant in an experimental setting. However, the vaccine is not as good at generating such antibodies against the South African variant.

This, and I'm speculating a little here, is likely because of the significant changes in the viral 'spike' protein that occur in the South African variant.

The general scientific consensus so far, which Lauren Pelley of the CBC covers well here,  is that the vaccine will likely still have efficacy in people. I sure hope so, but only time and clinical data will really tell.

The upside to all of this is that Moderna is already working on re-engineering their mRNA payload (which is the bit of the vaccine that causes our cells to make their own spike protein that we then make protective 'neutralizing' antibodies against) in the hopes that it will then be effective against the variant concerned.

Essentially, this means that Moderna is already at work in making a new booster. Here is how Denise Grady et al. described this effort in the NY Times:

...As a precaution, Moderna has begun developing a new form of its vaccine that could be used as a booster shot against the variant in South Africa. “We’re doing it today to be ahead of the curve, should we need to,” Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, said in an interview. “I think of it as an insurance policy.”...


The technology here really is amazing and, from a technical point of view, it can be done quickly due to the process involved in producing these mRNA vaccines. 

But will this rapid fix actually work? Again, only time and both experimental as well as clinical data will tell. 

Rolling out yet another form of the vaccine, however, still poses all of the more mundane population health-based logistical issues as well as the supply and delivery problems we are all dealing with right now though in our race against the variants.

OK?

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If you're interested in the specifics and some of the science of the 'variants', this Twitter thread by Mt. Sinai virologist Florian Krammer is really excellent.

Disclaimer: I am a cell and molecular biologist but I am not a virologist...Thus, I am not an expert in this field. However, I am paying attention...That said, please take my musings with a grain of salt...A real expert to follow is a fellow named Derek Lowe. 


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Return Of The Turd Blossom.

SmearingBiden'sGreatest
AssetVille

Link

Hmmmm....

Is it possible that the very fine folks at FOX News  put up the wrong backdrop behind the good Mr. Rove.

I mean, wouldn't Willie Horton's mugshot have been more appropriate?

Or, how about a photo John McCain's adopted daughter?

....Most famously, when (George W.) Bush was fighting for his life against a surging John McCain in (the) South Carolina (Republican primary) in 2000, fliers, emails, and push polls accused McCain of having fathered an African-American “love child” (he had actually adopted a girl from Bangladesh) and of suffering from mental instability as a result of his incarceration in Vietnam. McCain staffers, and McCain’s daughter, have accused Rove of orchestrating the rumors; Rove denies any involvement.

Why does Rove allegedly smear his opponents this way? Because it works...


It would appear that the current strate(r)gy of the wizards behind the curtain, a curtain that was first soaked in racism decades before Mr. Trump arrived in the Kingdom of Republicana, is to go negative on Mr. Biden by proxy.


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Why The DNC And The PodSave Boys Are (Really) Freaking Out Now...

TheRealAmericaIsNotJust
TheCulinaryUnionVille


Sure, Bernie Sanders won Nevada.

But the real kicker is how he won:

...The demographics of Sanders’ victory, however, suggested that he may have earned a foothold in diverse states which mirror the Democratic base more closely than Iowa and New Hampshire.

In Nevada, according to CNN entrance polls, Sanders took 51% of the Latino vote, way ahead of any rival, and did well with African Americans...

Why does that matter?

Because there is only one reason Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination in 2016:

So.

The status-quoists can no longer comfort themselves with thoughts and rationalizations of how Iowa and New Hampshire didn't matter because their populations don't look like the rest of America.

And now, it looks like things are changing in South Carolina too:

Gosh.

Is it possible that we just might get an answer to the question that just a few months ago seemed unanswerable.

Which is..

...Would Mr. Sanders have beaten Mr. Trump in 2016?

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Subheader?...This.
And so the pushback of the status-quoists begins.


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A Country Called Potemkin.

NevermindThe
VillageVille


From Astead Herndon and Maggie Astor writing in the NY Times:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Trump, speaking to a handpicked audience of supporters at a historically black college here on Friday, belittled the Obama administration’s record on racial issues and claimed that his own administration had helped African-Americans beyond anything “in the history of our country.”...

{snip}

...Mr. Trump and his allies billed the speech, at Benedict College in Columbia, as a chance for the president to step outside the friendly confines of his supporter base and promote his administration’s record on criminal justice reform and black employment directly to a black audience.

But only about 10 students from Benedict were given tickets to the invitation-only event, which had room for about 300 attendees, said Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin of Columbia. More than half of the seats were reserved for guests and allies of the administration, organizers said.

The ticket distribution was first reported by McClatchy DC.

The friendliness of the audience was clear from the moment Mr. Trump took the stage, when someone shouted, “We love you, Mr. President, we love you!” More than once, the audience broke into chants of “four more years,” to which Mr. Trump responded at one point: “Just don’t say 16 more years. You’ll drive them crazy.”...


So.

Have our good friends to the south reached peak despot yet?



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Who Needs A Five-Ringed Circus When...

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...You've Got Someone Fighting Narcolepsy While Wearing The PJ's Of An Amphibian.

So.

I've learned something new lately based on the comment threads, Email conversations, and a recent perusal of the outclicks recorded by the hit-counter.

And that is that many of you stop by here not to read my stuff, but instead to checkout the moveable feast that is the Blog Crawl over there on the left side of the page.

Now.

Most of you who do that (and you know who are you are) are clearly like-minded Lotuslandian Poliwogaholics.

Which means you probably find it annoying when the music stuff pops up over there.

But.

Here's the thing.....

Crazy, mixed-up and fabulous takes how all matters audiophilic weave their way into one's life is the biggest reason that 'Barely Awake In Frog Pyjamas' is over there on the Crawl.

I mean, without Frog PJ's regular, detailed and multilayered missives how the heckfire would I know about stuff like this:

"...Now, as I’ve mentioned, the fisticuffs Bjork has engaged in in airports ’round the globe seem justified, but this lovely song also reveals her to be a mischief maker. She openly admits to tossing all kinds of items – “Car-parts, bottles and cutlery, or whatever I find lying around” – off the mountain top where she lives.

So, as delightful as she may seem, I suspect that it’s not always a picnic living in Bjork’s neighborhood..."

Bjork – Joga
Bjork – Bachelorette
from Homogenic (1997)

And then, a few days ago Frog PJ's had a really great piece up about the 3000m women's  race run round and round the LA Coliseum track at the then just post-MacintoshOrwellian 1984 Olympics of Peter Ueberroth.

Here's the meet (sic) of the thing:

"...I found Zola (Budd) fascinating as she wasn’t much older than I was and, at an age when five years was forever, this gangly, curly-haired sprite was apparently smoking the adult runners against whom she competed.

And she ran barefoot.

I was a sixteen year-old kid in a small town in the American midwest and on the high school track team and this was exotic stuff.

In the days before constant media, Zola was a mystery to most of the world, and – in this pre-internet, pre-ESPN world – I don’t think I’d even seen footage of her running.

But she was in the sports news a lot in the time leading up to the 1984 Olympics, for record-setting performances and for being granted UK citizen to be able to compete in the games.

(South Africa athletes being banned from international competition because of their country’s apartheid system)

I was watching the night of the 3000 meter finals which had been hyped as a showdown between Zola and American Mary Decker.

Decker had been Zola a decade earlier, a teen-aged running prodigy in pigtails, who had missed chances for Olympic glory due to injuries and the 1980 US boycott of the Soviet games.

And I was watching when, halfway through the event, with Zola leading a pack including Decker, the two became entangled as Decker clipped Zola’s bare heel, sending the American tumbling in a heap into the infield.

As Decker writhed in pain at the side of the track, the race continued as the massive crowd of 85,000 spectators viciously booed.

It was brutal to watch.

Zola had been the target of ongoing protests because of being South African, but this was different. She had described Decker as her heroine and had posters of the older runner on her bedroom walls.

She led for another lap or two but faded to seventh, later explaining that she couldn’t quit, but that she couldn’t face receiving a medal in front of the hostile crowd....

And here's the race itself (with British announcers; the Al Michaels version is out there too but, personally, I can't quite stomach that)....The tragedy of the trip happens at ~5:10...

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Will Hillary Clinton Have To Screw On Her Pantsuits Every Morning?

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Please see update at bottom......
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HSTFridays
XIVEditionVille

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

Hunter Thompson, "Memo From The National Affairs Desk", 1994

Which leads us to wonder the following of Ms. Clinton.

Would, if she were elected president*, need servants to screw on her pantsuits on every morning?

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Why do I ask such a terrible question?

Well it seems that her campaign, presumably at least tacitly under her direction, has become extremely twisted in, some would suggest, an crooked kind of way.

For example, there's the 'Obama lies about NAFTA' smear.... (her campaign started it)

Then there's the 'Obama is maybe a Muslim smear'...... (she wouldn't flat out deny a demonstrable falsehood)


Then there's the 'Obama maybe takes bad money' smear..... (her campaign floated it; he has received 1 million donations from individual donors; she takes foreign money in huge blocks)

Then there's the 'Obama maybe was a drug dealer' smear.... (unbelievable)

Then there's the 'Obama is just too negative smear'...... (wtf?)

And, finally, there's this.......'Obama is Ken Starr!!!!!!' (and neither of them, apparently, even smokes.....cigars).

OK?

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*ie. AFTER a one term 'St. John the Formerly Obscure Before She Handed Him The Slime Machine' presidency.
Have been thinking about all this stuff for awhile now, but it was crystallized by Randi Rhodes this afternoon on her drive time AirAmerica show. She's righteously pissed; and she has reason to be.
Updated: removed the 'Obama wears African clothes' pseudo/kinda/sorta smear that was originally part of this post because ,even though Drudge said it was the Clinton campaign that sent the pictures, well, it did, after all, come from Drudge (no linkage from here, no siree), and to my knowledge it hasn't been verified and/or flat out denied. Thanks to David P. in the comments for brining it to my attention. Regardless, the thing that it is maddening is that this does play jello/fodder for the Republican slime machine (although I guess you could make the innoculation argument if you were Toll like receptor and/or a Cajun named Carville).

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Who Is The Best Blogger Ever?

TheRightStuff
WordsmithingWithTruthAndAPurposeVille

In the spring of 1993 I was working at a not-so super-secret National Laboratory in, as my grandfather the Tugboat Captain always liked to say, "The Excited States of America"*.

The excited state of the People's Republic of Berkeley, California to be more precise.

Which, to say the least, was extremely interesting on a whole lot of levels.

One of which was the fact that I got to feel the excitement of hooking-up daily to the US Federal Government's burgeoning internet backbone just as Mosaic came on-line.

What was Mosaic?

Well, it wasn't the very first graphical interface web browser.

But it was the one that changed everything.

Hard to believe that it wasn't even 15 years ago.

Which is nothing, especially in dog's years.

But it is plenty long enough for literally millions of commentators to stuff a gazillion googolplexes worth digitized data high up in the toobz.

Which begs the question.

Who's the best there ever was?

The best blogger I mean.

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There is a scene in the faux astronaut hagiography 'The Right Stuff' when Dennis Quaid's character, Gordon 'Hot Dog' Cooper, is asked, "Who's the best you ever saw?"

The interviewer is asking Cooper about real flying - which is most definitely not the same thing as being the aeronautical equivalent of 'spam-in-can' while you flick switches under Mission Control's ever watchful eye.

Cooper/Quaid goes pensive for a moment, as he thinks of Chuck Yeager.

Then an 'I-Ain't-Spam-In-A-Can', shite-eating grin appears on his face and he answers, "Me".

Now, I'm pretty sure that if you asked the hot shots of Left Blogistan the same question you'd likely get the same answer from quite a few of them.

Even the really good ones like, say, I dunno, Bitch PhD.

But in that moment when they were thinking about who really was really a 5 tool-keybanger (ie. wordsmithing, style, elan, guts and a nose for dealing a deathblow to any and all demonstrable falsehoods) with all the right stuff, a lot of them would be probably find themselves thinking about a guy named Steven Gilliard.

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I slid sideways into the work of Mr. Gilliard while chasing down Billmon's back stories at Daily Kos.

But once I found it, and the rock solid POV that infused it, the work of Mr. Gilliard changed the way I think about blogging.

Here's what I said about that way back in early 2005:

Is there anybody south of border right now that can really take it to the greedheads, unyieldingly, and win?....

{snip}

....At first we thought that person was going to be Billmon before he self-destructed Nov. 3rd after he was struck dumb by the realization that American exceptionalism, at least for the time being, is dead.

But now we've stumbled across somebody else who seems to be up for the job.

His name is Steve Gilliard and this past weekend it became quite clear why.

You see, the Re-thug integrity-challenged screamers (ie. the National Review Online, Instapundit et al.) had a go at Mr. Gilliard after he suggested that Armstrong Williams, the black media shill who took money from the Rovians to boost the 'No White/All Black Children Left Behind' initiative on his talk show, was an Uncle Tom.

As a result, the screamers sent their swarms of locusts (aka 'trolls') over to Mr. Gilliard's place where they started shrieking that he was a spineless, bitter, liberal racist (and worse).

Gilliard and the regular posters on his site stood their ground and the resulting fireworks were most interesting.

Even better, today Steve had this to say:

"What stunned me with the trolls was the idea that they could call me a racist and I would care.... Conservatives make the assumption that liberals care what they think and will react to it.

There's a tendency for liberals to try and be fair, to consider other viewpoints, so we get baited by them in debates on terms that they set. I'm going to act on the following: I don't care what conservatives think. The NRO Corner thinks I'm a racist, I don't care, their opinions on race are meaningless.......

.....I'm not writing to make conservatives happy. I want them to hate my opinions. I'm not interested in debating them.

I want to stop them."

Isn't that something? And you don't have to just take our word for it. Folks with a much better nose for this sort of thing, people like James Wolcott, have this to say about Mr. Gilliard:

"Gilliard is a good guy who sometimes uses bad language, according to the girls in the bridge club. I haven't noticed this myself, but then again I was raised by Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler, two names lost on most of you."

Oh, and just in case you didn't know it, Mr. Gilliard himself is black.

****

Now, race is a huge part of American life, which is something I, a whiter-than-white-bread whiteboy from the leftcoast of Canuckistanian, learned very quickly when we lived in a patchwork quilt neighborhood in the West Berkeley flats.

And because he was so often writing about life in George Bush's America, sometimes Mr. Gilliard was forced to write about race with an honesty and forthrightness that was literlly breathtaking.

Despite this, Gilliard rarely raised the race issue when it was not warranted. Thus, it was understandable that even some of his more reasonably well-informed casual readers did not know that he was African American.

But that was, as the post referred to above made abundantly clear, was not the case for those bloggers that worked, and still work closely, with him and his memory.

I say 'memory' because, in case you didn't know, Steve Gilliard passed away earlier this year far, far too early at the age of 42.

And this weekend the apparently august New York Times has seen fit to memorialize this particular blogger's passing with a piece from Matt Bai.

Unfortunately, Mr. Bai decided to play up the 'hook' that Mr. Gilliard's true circumstances were essentially unknown, or worse, ignored, by all those limosine liberal bloggers who flocked to his funeral in upper Harlem:

The identities he (Gilliard) kept separate for most of his 42 years collided in the days after he died; the few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.

Which, of course, is pure unadulterated codswallop, as a whole bunch of the folks that worked with Mr. Gilliard have already pointed out.

But, then again, when you work from a shite eating grin-assisted, spam-in-the-big-media-can recipe like Mr. Bai does, perhaps it is to be expected.

Still, it's too bad that Gilly is not around now to rip Mr. Bai's craptacular copy to shreds and expose it for what it really is - shameless shilling for a sinking 'news' organ that just hired lifelong silver spoon gobbler William 'The Bloody' Kristol to write regularly for its Op-Ed pages.

Luckily, one of the spawns of Steve's original Newsblog, Driftglass, is up to the task:

Gilly got a much-deserved write up in the NYT today.

The GNB has all the links and such here, as well as a lovely wreath of words from Jesse Wendel and some well-delivered corrections to the general tone of the piece (For example, somebody tell Matt Bai that he voided his poetic license when he decided to trowel on the "po' lonely guy" bathos when in real life those that knew him say Steve was not that way at all.)

Still, I can easily believe that someone like Gilly was a man alone in an entirely different sense: a man who could see things with a clarity that others did not see at all; who was every day terribly troubled by events (and their likely consequences) that others were not even aware existed.

And that particular Cassandric watch tower can be a very lonesome dwelling......

{snip}

.....But then from somewhere I hear Steve admonishing me -- "Yeah, whatever. Now fuck your self-pitying bullshit and get back to work."


Gilliard.

He was, without a doubt, the best I've ever seen.

OK?

_____
*My Grandad also liked to say rude and crude, and sometimes even downright embarassing, things about folks in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is where I was plying my trade as an apprentice science geek at the time and playing with Mosaic as it morphed into Netscape before that damnable Explorer was stillborn. Still, I like to think he (my Grandad) was at least a little proud of what I was up to (and it had absolutely nothing to do with building stuff that could be used to, as they used to say on the old SCTV Farm Report, "blow things up real good"; instead, when I wasn't mucking about playing Wolfenstein with other members of the lab, I was using online databases to huntdown gene sequences). And my point is?.... That, as Jessie Wendel makes clear in his GroupNewsBlog post, the NY Times thing is sure to be a point of pride to Gilly's family. And, just like for science geeks, for bloggers too, regardless their 'circumstances', stuff like that matters in the end.
Having said all that, a real honest-to-goddess memorium from somebody in the MSM who really has the right stuff can can be found here.



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Switch Into Glide

SoftPowerStomped
FlunkyVille

There are a number of very good reasons to do the right thing in Afghanistan.

And an excellent summary was recently posted by Dave at the Galloping Beaver.

But that doesn't mean we, the Canuckistani people, should keep silent when we do the wrong thing. For example, as reported by Paul Koring last week:

"But neither the new Conservative government in Ottawa nor its previous Liberal governments seem troubled by the sprawling detainee camps at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Not only has there been no Canadian demand for it to close, but Canada's special-forces units in Afghanistan continue to hand terrorism suspects over to U.S. forces who ship at least some of them to Guantanamo."


And, now there's this from Jeff Sallot today:

OTTAWA -- Canada voted against a controversial resolution on Palestinian rights at the United Nations yesterday, an early sign that the new Harper government is aligning its Middle East policy more closely with the views of Israel and the United States.

The previous Liberal government had abstained on the identical resolution last year. But on instructions from Ottawa, the Canadian delegation at the UN joined the United States to vote against a non-binding motion calling on Israel to allow all Palestinian refugee women and children to return to their homes.

The South-African-sponsored resolution was adopted by the UN Economic and Social Council by a vote of 41-2 with only Canada and the United States voting against it.

This was the first Middle East resolution to come before a UN body since Stephen Harper's Conservative government was sworn in last month.

Passivity is one thing, but active support for doomed policies of repression that encourage extremism is quite another.

Which, of course, is a clear example of why really knowing what you're voting for does count, regardless the minority thing.

Because, now, when even Republicans down south are jumping off the Strangelove-inspired PNACKian Doomwagon, Canada is being seen as suddenly clamouring to get on board.

And for what?

So that we can be honoured with the booby prize of giving the Jebbinator all of our oil in 2010?

_____
Original Link Source on Dave's Afghan piece from Cathie.
Update: Longtime reader and Quebec correspondent eteba wonders if Lester Pearson is spinning in his grave. We figure that if he is it's probably happening at approximately 1956 rpm.

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Talkin' About My Generation

Who'sThatInTheMirror?
FatherVille


As Red Barber liked to say:

"This much I know."

And this much I know.

I am one of the fortunate ones.

I've got a good job, I'm making more money than I ever dreamed of, my kids are alright, and they and I both will very likely be even more than alright in the years to come.

In other words, I've got two, maybe three, fingers of my left hand firmly planted on the brass ring and I'm poised to go ambidextrous on the bloody thing.

And if anybody asks, I did it all myself.

Right?

Actually, no.

Because that would be pure and utter bullshit.

****

Heather Mallick, buried within a fantastic column about the latest big lie dubbed 'African Debt Relief', said something small, but important, yesterday:

"I'm aware that I already won the genetic lottery by being born in Canada and not in Rwanda."

I am aware of this as well.

I am also aware that, perhaps like Ms. Mallick, I was born not just in the right place but also at the right time.

A time when political will and social justice did their level best to work together as one in Canada.

As a result I got the chance to run away to University.

The year was 1977 and the cost of embarking on that wild-eyed run towards the light that ultimately led me to the Ring mentioned above was the princely sum of $540.

And I'll be damned if I'm going to be one of those fortunate sons who are now swerving way to the right in a selfish effort to turn off the lights on the next generation.

And here's why:

My old man was a Union man.

And the folks in the Union fought like bastards...and they fought constantly, usually for the tiniest of things in each successive contract...things like an extra quarter percent on a COLA clause, or one little add-on like an extra free filling per year on the dental plan.

And when I was a kid, especially during that time when I was a barely no-longer-a-teenager-aged kid, I thought the folks from the Union were just a little bit off their nut....all that energy going into what, exactly?

After all, it was the 80's, and Dave Barrett and the Socialist Hordes were long gone, and the Wild Kelowna boys were rolling along, and Unions were bad, and Expo was coming, and Trudeau was going, and John Turner was hiccupping, and Mulroney was lurking, somewhere off in the distance....

....And if you were a half-bright, apolitical science-geek kind of kid like me, breezing your way through college and thinking about graduate school, you laughed when you saw the boy wonder from Burnaby, Michael J. Fox, shirk his Family Ties and ape the young Republicans while making fun of his willfully neutered Leftie of a Dad on the TV screen...

....And if you were that kid, you thought that you were living in a golden age that was tied, not to the social democratic reforms of the past, but to the coming of Free Trade and the promises of the Reaganites from the South...

...And from that perspective you sure as heck didn't get the irony of Bruce Springsteen singing about the plight of the working class in 'Born in the USA'.

But now that I have spent a good chunk of time in USA where I started a family of my own before coming home, I do get it.

I understand that my Dad spent his entire adult life hauling logs up and down the West Coast, working his guts out to help keep the robber baron families rich because he had to make a living to support his own family....

....And I get the fact that, because of the Unions, my family's standard of living gradually improved, bit by bit, over the years so that by the time I had grown up to be that callow young man described above my parents had saved enough to help me go to University....

....And I get the fact that I was the first one in my family who got to go to University.... ever..... and it wasn't because I was so damned smart....

....And I get the fact that, while my parents' limited financial help and support was important, it would never have been enough to get me into the same good schools if I had arrived on the scene a single generation earlier or, perhaps, later....

....And I get the fact that those Wild Kelowna Boys, and all the other neo-cons that have come since, have being doing their damndest to destroy the dream of a University education for all, and instead have instituted an elitist education for some and one-trick-pony Technical training for everybody else.....

....And I get the fact that, if it wasn't for folks like my Dad and the other lefties of his time, my current world, one in which I make a living with my eyes and my mind wide open, would not be what it is today.....

....And most of all, I now get the fact that my Dad was, and is, my hero.

....first posted Father's Day, June 2004

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