Anyone not scarfing down the fish oil may be at risk!

In Thingumbob's rather fishy crusade this just in:

Fish oil may hold key to leukemia cure

		IMAGE: The compound shown above is D12-PGJ2, which closely resembles delta-12-protaglandin J3, or D12-PGJ3, a compound that targeted and killed the stem cells of chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, in mice... Click here for more information.

A compound produced from fish oil that appears to target leukemia stem cells could lead to a cure for the disease, according to Penn State researchers. The compound -- delta-12-protaglandin J3, or D12-PGJ3 -- targeted and killed the stem cells of chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, in mice, said Sandeep Prabhu, associate professor of immunology and molecular toxicology in the Department of Veterinary and Medical Sciences. The compound is produced from EPA -- Eicosapentaenoic Acid -- an Omega-3 fatty acid found in fish and in fish oil, he said.

"Research in the past on fatty acids has shown the health benefits of fatty acids on cardiovascular system and brain development, particularly in infants, but we have shown that some metabolites of Omega-3 have the ability to selectively kill the leukemia-causing stem cells in mice," said Prabhu. "The important thing is that the mice were completely cured of leukemia with no relapse."

The researchers, who released their findings in the current issue of Blood, said the compound kills cancer-causing stem cells in the mice's spleen and bone marrow. Specifically, it activates a gene -- p53 -- in the leukemia stem cell that programs the cell's own death. "p53 is a tumor suppressor gene that regulates the response to DNA damage and maintains genomic stability," Prabhu said.

		IMAGE: Penn State researchers initially tested a compound produced from fish oil on a type of leukemia found in mice called the Friend Virus. This slide shows a Friend Virus Leukemia... Click here for more information.

Killing the stem cells in leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells, is important because stem cells can divide and produce more cancer cells, as well as create more stem cells, Prabhu said.

The current therapy for CML extends the patient's life by keeping the number of leukemia cells low, but the drugs fail to completely cure the disease because they do not target leukemia stem cells, said Robert Paulson, associate professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences, who co-directed this research with Prabhu.

"The patients must take the drugs continuously," said Paulson. "If they stop, the disease relapses because the leukemia stem cells are resistant to the drugs."

Current treatments are unable to kill the leukemia stem cells, Paulson noted. "These stem cells can hide from the treatment, and a small population of stem cells give rise to more leukemia cells," said Paulson. "So, targeting the stem cells is essential if you want to cure leukemia."

		IMAGE: Penn State researchers Sandeep Prahbu (right) and Robert Paulson (left) sketch out a delta-12-protaglandin J3, or D12-PGJ3. The compound, derived from fish oil, targeted and killed the stem cells of... Click here for more information.

During the experiments, the researchers injected each mouse with about 600 nanograms of D12-PGJ3 each day for a week. Tests showed that the mice were completely cured of the disease. The blood count was normal, and the spleen returned to normal size. The disease did not relapse.

In previous experiments, the compound also killed the stem cells of Friend Virus-induced leukemia, an experimental model for human leukemia.

The researchers focused on D12-PGJ3 because it killed the leukemia stem cells, but had the least number of side effects. The researchers currently are working to determine whether the compound can be used to treat the terminal stage of CML, referred to as Blast Crisis. There are currently no drugs available that can treat the disease when it progresses to this stage.

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The researchers, who applied for a patent, are also preparing to test the compound in human trials.

Roasting the London Economist's Chestnuts

Today, the London Economist sententiously opines on Christianity and America, except they have left something out. I hereby charitably reprove them:

Alexander Hamilton before being killed by Burr had proposed to outflank the venal Burr's takeover of the Federalist party by founding a Christian Constitutional Society. Now, the sort of Christianity that Hamilton would have supported can be best gleaned from his stark attack on Adam Smith's doctrine of free trade in his Report on Manufactures. The recognition that the City of London's (and Wall Street's) East Indies Company's practices were (and are, still today) the true successors of that evil Roman Empire that ordered Jesus' crucifixion, is the true lesson in anything decent, whether nominally Christian or otherwise, which has arisen on these shores from the time of the Massachusetts Bay Charter. The object of all men of good faith must be to eradicate the modern day Leviathan of "global governance" and return to the principle of a harmony of sovereign nations that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had envisaged when he admonished Churchill that the U.S. would no longer tolerate the rot of British Empire's colonial methods.

The Least of These

The BBC reports (crocodile tear fashion) today on the ongoing looting of the U.S. by the chicanery of the financial "families" interests (longtime endowers of the BBC, don't you know)  in an article entitled "The scandal of the Alabama poor cut off from water." 

But the story is a paradigm of how  illegitimate speculation takes its toll from the very weakest. Social Darwinism in the 21st century is named derivatives speculation. And there is no bottom to the descent into a new dark age so long as we shamefully tolerate this state of affairs...

Financial Comic Relief

According to Reuters today, a regulator, heading the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's review of the MF Global debacle, Jill Summers, not intendimg any irony, declared, "Now it's just finding out which ones of those transactions are legitimate and which ones of them are illegitimate."

Now, of course, in any sane world, the whole kit and caboodle of these hedge funds activities selling financial futures  would be prima facie illegitimate. But, dear friends, we apparently live in some strange corner of a delirious mathematician's nightmarish sort of multiverse where "all is permitted." The never never land where financial leverage may legitimately be used to take down the very means of sustaining the future well being of our nation. So long as it is done according to the tune of the statistical formalae spewing from Wall Street's idiot savants otherwise known as "quants."   

 

The Age of Space: from Christopher Columbus to JFK

The dream of a new home far from the clutches of the empire of Moloch has been ever and anon the aspiration of humankind. Its constitution has been indelibly written upon the pages of the Epimethean giants of history. Thus did Nicholas of Cusa summon a council in Florence his call for ecumenical peace among nations and a declaration of the universal rights of freedom to create society fit for humanity free from the shackles of feudalism.

Nicholas of Cusa

Thus did Cusa befriend and collaborate with the Florentine mapmaker who inspired Columbus, Toscanelli to nurture the possibility of a new and unfettered haven upon these shores.

Toscanelli

And it is therefore in the spirit of this mission that we cannot but proceed to the new worlds that will complete the triumph over the age old enemy of civilization. For it is in that undertaking that we come into further agapic filiation, as Cusa would have it,  with our past and future.

Columbus

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

JFK

"Roll-up" Demystified

500 Year Old Global 'Roll-Up' Founders?

Saturday, December 10, 2011 – by Anthony Wile

Anthony Wile

And another one gone, and another one gone ... Another one bites the dust − Queen
"Is it possible that the biggest roll-up in history is foundering?
What roll-up? Well ... roll-up, of course, is a money-industry term of art. It means that someone − an enterprising banker backed by big money − begins to buy up mom and pop shops to turn them into one large industry with "economies of scale" and an intrinsic value that is larger than its individual moving parts.
In this case, the roll-up that is taking place is of nation-states.

The bankroll comes from central banks."


Silly me, I thought of the term "roll-up" as in the Tavistock/MI6/Occult Bureau's Beatles lyrics "Roll up for the Mystery Tour." Of course, the Magical Mystery Tour promotion of the present day multi-billion dollar drug counterculture was in the tradition of that bulwark of drug trafficking East Indies Company. In fact, the City of London/ British Empire was quite in the tradition of John Dees 007's Occult Bureau/MI6 asset and Beatles' hero Aleister Crowley's Order of the Golden Dawn. Why, such untrammeled money laundering of drug profits by the City today might do "old Adam" Smith proud. 

Our Financial Overlords and Aristotle's Definition of Art

If you wish to undergo the hardship of tuning into the sickening claptrap of Wall Street oracles on the Internet or television, you will hear the growing chorus of demands that the world must save the financial system by sacrificing the weakest of its members to more and more savage austerity. Thus, the pantheon of "superstars" of all that we are told by the selfsame mass media that we must worship as the measure of worldly success will be safeguarded. The 2 and sometimes 3-D colored pictures transmitted via a digital code to our latter day "cave walls" prove to us that this is the way of the world. After all, isn't all that can be seen with our own two eyes common sense reality? Or should we perhaps heed the lessons of "classical" antiquity and once more break free from the mentally self inflicted shackles that bring us to the present crisis?

But how can we solve this crisis if our very vision for futurity is the captive of and governed by nothing but ugliness?  Has it ever come to your mind that "human nature" will have to be elevated once and for all out of the superstition of its fearful obeisance to the powers that be if we are ever to bring about the exploration and colonization of space? Yet look at the Hollywood depictions of the future and what is there but the rankest fear mongering of "science" fiction? Why? What is it that has caused such forlorn and childish pessimism such that the vaunted and ordained "geniuses" of astrophysics can declare that alien civilizations would of course desire to eliminate humanity? What other than the worldview imposed by age old belief that we are ruled by the whims of unfathomable chaotic forces that can only at best be temporarily appeased?

That our "entertainment" must be restricted to a kind of purgative for our emotional disturbances in the face of such irrational fears that we mere mortals are "subject" to? And this "ideal" for "art," dear reader, traces back to  the subject of today's "blog": Aristotle. Everything that is deemed monetarily valuable as "modern art" today is nothing more than an extension of Aristotle's dogma of the apotheosis of the fear of the irrational. Of course, this doctrine did not originate with Aristotle, it is actually as old as the superstitious worship of the muck of "mother earth" in whatever "civilization" it rears its ugly head, be it Erde, Gaia, Isis, or Bhudevi.

Phyllis Riding Aristotle

Ah, but it has its equivalence in supposed "Christian morality" as well. And it appears most starkly in the slavish worship of the invisible hand  magic of the marketplace, otherwise personified as (old) Adam Smith. For it was the Smith who so sententiously opined that ours is not to fathom the why and wherefore of the irrational and arbitrary passions that move history. "We cannot foresee the consequence of these, only god (sic) may do so. Why it would be hubris to suppose otherwise, would it not? Nay, we may only know that the frailties of human nature will ever be such and learn to profit (quite richly) from that knowledge."

Raphael's Polemic of Plato versus Aristotle: Beauty in Truth or Irrational Fear?

Michelangelo's Paean to the Superstition of the drugged up Delphic Sibyl

Leonardo (who is honored as Raphael's model for Plato above) humorously condemned Michelangelo's  representation of the human form for its resemblance to a bag of walnuts!

Question For Our Illustrious Legislators

 If one questions the constitutionality of a law (Senate Bill 1867) that promotes indefinite detention of its citizens who are "substantially aiding" terrorists, couldn't that act be regarded as a substantial aid of terrorists in and of itself? And who is to decide this? Will there have to be secret Star Chamber courts set up perhaps modeled on the practice of renditions?

Today's Political Pawns And Edgar Allan Poe's Enemies of Yore

With the current break up of the world's monetary system the chessboard is being toppled and many human pawns are being sacrificed now by "hidden hands" the world over. Such as the so-called progressive hedge fund billionaire George Soros. The pawns' twittered opinions of what is motivating them to act out is of little moment in the geopolitical Great Game of divide and conquer...

 Queen Victoria and her Literary Knight Benjamin Disraeli

The British empire's East Indies Company's nineteenth century Great Game was not waged just in the cockpit of the Caucasus but the world over.  This emphatically included the sponsorship of radical social movements.  At the time that Edgar Allan Poe waged a literary battle with the likes of Transcendentalist's Margaret Fuller, AKA Marchessa Ossoli. Fuller went to London where another of Poe's enemies Thomas Carlyle introduced her to "Young Italy's" Guiseppe Mazzini. The Young America that supported the Confederacy was part and parcel of the same "strategy of tension."