What They Don’t Tell You About Cancer

When I found myself with stage III squamous cell carcinoma, and in need of a year of drastic treatments, I was shaken enough to consume half a bottle of wine and the strongest espresso, to ponder my options.  As it turns out, I would have been much better off planting an almond tree and eating a basket of lemons!  Allow me to explain:

Mysterious Water.. this is where the trouble all begins
(Oil on canvas, Paul Gauguin 1893)

Water, as everyone knows, is H2O.  Two molecules of hydrogen attached to a single molecule of oxygen.  But as you suspected, there’s much more to it!  In water there is generally also a number of hydrogen ions, that is, a water molecule shorn of oxygen and, losing all its property in the divorce, an electron, becoming H+.  There are also hydroxide ions, that is, the newly separated hydrogen and oxygen unit which is now a negatively charged HO-.  Being a hopeless flirt, the hydroxide ion can hook up with a water molecule and become H3O+.  Homewrecker.

The sheer number of these marriages and affairs, as you can imagine, are vaster even than those in New York City – so atoms are measured in “moles”, each mole being 6.022 x 10 to the power 23 or 602 billion trillion.  This is comparable to the number of stars in the universe, which the low estimate puts at 7 x 10 to the power 21 and the higher estimate to the power 23.  To visualise this I once worked out once that if every star was a grain of sand 1mm in diameter, there would be enough to blanket the planet Earth to a depth of about one metre.  So these are not trivial amounts, and nor is it trivial what such atomic conditions, if prolonged, can do to the body.

One of the few scales usefully showing levels from acidic, rising to alkaline, instead of the other way around. Each level has ten times more hydrogen ions than the one above it
http://2009rt8sciafifa.wordpress.com/chemical-interactions-2/

In 1909 a Danish chemist named Sorensen measured the concentration of hydrogen ions per litre of fluid and came up with a scale representing the powers of ten covering the range of moles of hydrogen ions in a litre of water, and then reversed it for clarity.

The blood carefully maintains a pH of close to 7.4 at all costs.  To keep up this balancing act all of our lives, it either pulls alkalinity out of the intracellular environment – the body itself – or dumps acidity into it.  It came as a shock to find that virtually every cancer patient has, at the time of diagnosis anyway, a highly acidic intracellular environment.  I immediately tested my own – you can do this very easily using pH strips on your saliva – and found it was about 5.25 ..in other words, about 75 times too acidic!

Once you see the pH of things we normally eat you realise why the bodies of people on a western diet are so prone to cancer, and how cancer’s inexorable rise follows that of unhealthy food, mirroring that of scurvy under other, self-imposed, diet limitations.   One in three of us will die from cancer – either during treatment or soon after:

Excellent chart from:
http://psoriasisbesymptomfree.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/i-really-believe-that-all-our-searching.html

My diet for at least the year prior to turning to the doctors to see what this annoying lump was in my neck, consisted of practically everything in the 3, 4 and 5 range.  Endless espressos, white wine, pasta, stress and overwork.  Yes, the ones marked “consume sparingly, or never”.

And in two final, freezing months, I had been working flat out on the construction of the first outdoor fresco in the UK, for which I was supremely unqualified: 15 hour days in a panic-ridden state of tension trying to finish applying pigments before the plaster dried, knowing that any variationin line or tone meant hacking the day’s work off and starting again, as well as doing the school runs and maintaining the flow of emails and crises at work.  And as bad situations always get worse, it was over a coffee shop – the owner helpfully offering unlimited amounts in the hope of getting it done quicker.

Notice the highly acidic oranges and yellows – my favourites! They say there’s no coincidences, but this is a large one

Research into cancer’s progress revealed the five year survival rates, which everyone checks first, are based not on the progress of cancer itself, but on the progress of patients who are treated using chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.  The assumption is automatically made that those who were not treated must have died faster, since treatment is always assumed to extend life.  After all, why else would anyone volunteer for these ordeals?

But it turns out this isn’t necessarily true, and especially not in some cases of cancer:

It might be surprising to learn that the presence of the primary tumor serves to inhibit the growth of metastatic cancer elsewhere in the body. The primary tumor produces anti-angiogenic factors which restrict the growth of metastases.

These anti-angiogenic factors inhibit the formation of new blood vessels to potential sites of metastasis. Regrettably, the surgical removal of the primary cancer also results in the removal of these anti-angiogenic factors, and the growth of metastasis is no longer inhibited.

With these restrictions lifted, it is now easier for small sites of metastatic cancer to attract new blood vessels that promote their growth.  Indeed, these concerns were voiced by researchers who declared that “… removal of the primary tumor might eliminate a safeguard against angiogenesis and thus awaken dormant micrometastasis [small sites of metastatic cancer].”

As if the loss of angiogenic inhibition by the primary tumor were not enough of a problem, it turns out the surgery causes another angiogenic predicament. After surgery, levels of factors that increase angiogenesis—also known as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)—are  significantly elevated.

This can result in an increased formation of new blood vessels supplying areas of metastatic cancer. A group of scientists summarized this research quite well when they asserted that “after surgery, the angiogenic balance of pro- and antiangiogenic factors is shifted in favor of angiogenesis to facilitate wound healing.

Especially levels of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) are persistently elevated. This may not only benefit tumor recurrence and the formation of metastatic disease, but also result in activation of dormant micrometastases.”

http://defeatosteosarcoma.org/category/generalcancerresearch/surgery-generalcancerresearch/

No matter what people say, a tumour on its own is unlikely to kill you, unless it’s a fast growing one in your colon, lungs or brain, or pressing on the spinal cord.  There is a patient in Vietnam who, before surgery, was immobilised by a tumour as large as his own body mass, attached to his leg, but which hadn’t metastasised in all those years. How do cancer patients being treated die?  Well, in 2006, of 816 patients in one study, 47% died either from infections or complications in which infection was a major factor.

But cancer isn’t an infection, so the only cause of death could be their immune was demolished, and this can only be attributed to the treatment.  Organ failure was 25%, but if being treated for cancer, if it doesn’t hide a problem with the treatment, this kind of statistic must mean the cancer is winning.  In 1970, out of 506 cases in Roswell Park Memorial, infection caused 36% of the deaths during treatment and was a contributing factor in a further 33% of all deaths, with pneumonia directly causing 18%, and respiratory failure, 19%.

One of the reasons for the apparent rise in success of cancer treatments is that many more cases of skin cancer (melanoma) are now included in statistics even if cases are known to be non fatal.

“After analyzing cancer survival statistics for several decades, Dr Hardin Jones, a professor at the University of California, concluded: ‘…patients are as well, or better off, untreated. Jones’s disturbing assessment has never been refuted.”

..Walter Last, in The Ecologist

“Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.”

..Allen Levin, MD, UCSF, The Healing of Cancer

I recently quoted a doctor who wrote in Scientific American that testing and surgery for prostate cancer has fallen into disrepute because so many cases, left untreated, caused no harm and no threat to the life of the patient even after decades, but treatments often left them a hopeless invalid.  Comisserations from surgeons are no replacement for virility or continence.

As for chemo, when I began to look into why patients who avoided it might, paradoxically, sometimes be better off, I found something very interesting indeed.

The AcrB transporter uses an unusual cyclic mechanism to pump drugs out of the cell. The protein is composed of three identical subunits with slightly different conformations. The structure shown, from PDB entry 2drd, has the antibiotic minocycline bound in one subunit. Left: backbone diagram with the drug in green. If you cut at the red line, on the right is the cut surface showing all three sites. The first binds the drug (green).  The second has shifted to a new conformation opening pathways to the pore at the middle. The final site connects to the membrane (not seen) and thus binds to new drug molecules. Cycling through these three conformations, the transporter pulls drugs out of the membrane and pushes them outside. Illustration: David S Goodsell
(http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/101/motm.do?momID=95)

Contrary to Darwin’s theory of mindless, random engine of genetic mutation, cells are very smart.  They’re not random at all in their behaviour, or in their response to threats, which allows them to survive purposefully under almost any conditions.  After all, these chemo drugs were not known to nature until recently. How then can a supposedly insentient bundle of proteins come up with a device geared to their removal?

When assailed with chemo the indignant cells which do not succumb straightaway devise an ingenious solution: a 2-dimensional blueprint for chemical pumps, which their ribosomes obligingly manufacture at a frantic pace.

1. Clear off, Navelbine – and you, Cisplatin – barred!
2. Come on, love, that trashy tumour’s not worth it..
3. Oi, mate – bone marrow, and step on it!  Wot?  Don’t you know oo I am?!

These are installed so that on entering the cell, the chemical molecules are immediately attached to and ejected faster than a stroppy Big Brother celeb from a posh club.  The cells pass these strips of DNA outside the cell to fellow rebels who import and incorporate them into their humble genome, to make as many of their own bouncers as they like.

Google trend analytics show how often a search term is used over time. pH is gaining momentum. So is chemtrails, by the way – but only in NATO countries or NATO “contender states”.  The idea that these searches are slanted to high tech societies is refuted by “Shell Oil” searches in West Coast African countries, and “sex” in India and some Far East and certain East African states where western values begin to encroach on curious youth

This makes a mob of cancer cells immune not to one chemo drug, but all of them.  They become super-cells – individually invisible to the eye and lethal to the body – created solely by exposure to manmade chemicals.

Chemotherapy may actually make cancer worse, according to a shocking new study.  The extremely aggressive therapy can cause healthy cells to secrete a protein that sustains tumor growth and resistance to further treatment.

Researchers in the United States made the “completely unexpected” finding while seeking to explain why cancer cells are so resilient inside the human body when they are easy to kill in the lab.

They tested the effects of a type of chemotherapy on tissue collected from men with prostate cancer, and found “evidence of DNA damage” in healthy cells after treatment, the scientists wrote in Nature Medicine.

The scientists found that healthy cells damaged by chemotherapy secreted more of a protein called WNT16B which boosts cancer cell survival. “The increase was completely unexpected,” study co-author Peter Nelson of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle told AFP.

The protein was taken up by tumor cells neighboring the damaged cells.  “WNT16B, when secreted, would interact with nearby tumor cells and cause them to grow, invade, and importantly, resist subsequent therapy,” said Nelson.

In cancer treatment, tumors often respond well initially, followed by rapid re-growth and then resistance to further chemotherapy.

Rates of tumor cell reproduction have been shown to accelerate between treatments.  “Our results indicate that damage responses in benign cells… may directly contribute to enhanced tumor growth,” wrote the team.

Apart from this mechanism, chemo also wrecks your immune system, so while you’d expect the bulk of these tumours to melt away at the start – giving cause to celebrate – you’d also expect a number of surviving super-cells to take advantage of the fences being down and make their way to wherever they can find a reasonably acidic environment.  Months or years later, they could erupt in different sites; this is exactly what happens.

The days run along the top from left to right, and I grouped all the different components into immune boosters, detox, tumour assassins (where shown to be effective by in vitro research by entities such as MSK or the Mayo Clinic, or by success in others), lymph support, various therapies and natural alkaline boosters. Lemons for example, are very acidic, but after digestion they leave the body more alkaline than before. You can also raise the pH of water using a small amount of aerobic oxygen, hydrogen peroxide. Drinking water on its own does not trigger digestive acids, which means the maximum benefit of a high pH input.  The tap water tested at an alarming 6

I immediately jettisoned coffee, alcohol, and sugar (as far as it could be detected) and put together a plan of action to boost my immune system, using beta glucans, vitamins and minerals, as well as the body’s pH, to try and make my body an unsuitable place for tumours so the existing pair would find it hard to metastasise.  If it was unlikely to get worse, I could attack it with anything research or other people had found useful.

My spreadsheet recorded all these factors to monitor my progress day by day and later trace changes in trends to changes in input.  I had never thought of food as medicine before, but that’s exactly what it is.  Nature doesn’t expect us to obsess over spreadsheets and molecules, so she makes it easy: look, here are some beautiful foods which taste good.  The red ones are especially important, and coincidentally a colour you can’t miss.

Marketing something that’s supposed to be good for you means make it look attractive. Nature scores very highly here
(photo from curved-light.photoshelter.com)

The only sure fire way to deal with cancer so that the cells can’t adapt is to use the basic nature of those cells, which they cannot change without ceasing to be cancer cells.  They hate oxygen, and they like glucose.  Hemoglobin is known to work poorly in an acidic environment, which is handy for tumours. But as my surgeon cautioned me, all this research is new, despite billions being spent!  And these perfectly sensible ideas are always somehow framed as absurdities by absurd sites like QuackWatch, as if people’s own experiences were not valid, and new ideas not as useful as old, failing ones:

Only recently has it come to light that the dismissal of vitamin C for cancer therapy was based upon oral-dose vitamin C, and subsequent studies found intravenous vitamin C has the potential to be used in cancer therapy. 

According to researchers Hickey and Roberts, repeated doses, and use of a special liposomal form of vitamin C that is absorbed in the gut and then into the liver before it is released into the blood stream, are key to making oral vitamin C therapy effective. Another important factor is to limit the consumption of carbohydrates (refined sugar) which impairs oral absorption of this vitamin.

Dr. John Ely, emeritus professor at the University of Washington, has shown that sugar depletes vitamin C from white blood cells and makes them sluggish. White blood cells are the very cells that attack tumor cells and destroy them.

The liposomal form of vitamin C employed in this study consists of 1-gram (1000 milligram) dose sachets of vitamin C powder encapsulated in lecithin (phosphatidylcholine), as supplied by Livon Laboratories of Henderson, Nevada, USA.

The cancer cell-killing effect of vitamin C is realized by the transient production of hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) within connective tissues (not in blood), which then destroys tumor cells, and subsequently turns to harmless water (H₂O), ensuring non-toxic therapy.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi144.html

After receiving my bottle of liposomal vitamin C I ingested 4 teaspoons, or 4 gm, equivalent to 40 gm IV, and soon after felt a pronounced ache in my lymph gland.  Perhaps any killed cells would be now be waste matter which the lymph would have to deal with rather suddenly.  Needless to say I’m maintaining a high dose while supplies last; more research is needed, as they say.

As for the pH, turns out it’s 20 times more difficult to raise your pH than to lower it, just like it’s easier to fall down a mountain than climb it, or to spend rather than to earn money.  Slow going but a good thing to do – I’m occasionally getting readings of 7.5, which is the high end of healthy, and occasionally slipping back to 5.5 just by enjoying a slice of pizza.

But at least I now have something to talk to strangers about on planes!

They’re cheap and plentiful, and a much more important exam than GCSEs. Should be a required test in every school – and every cancer ward. But it isn’t

Genius and Mystical Experience: Ayrton Senna

Reblogged from ScienceAndReligion.com:

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26th April 2013: I'm reposting this in enthusiasm for Senna, and for the current F1 season, which seems like one of the most interesting so far.  Since I wrote this in 2011 I took my kids to see the film Senna, where in-car footage of the man driving flat out had them riveted to their seats.  Senna is still one of the most widely celebrated individuals in sport, and worth remembering,  19 years on from May 1, 1994.

Read more… 1,841 more words

Cancer: Don’t Shoot the Messenger

It’s never a good sign when after an endless battery of tests, a surgeon advises you to prepare for a lengthy course of drastic treatments, saying it will be “at least a year” before you feel you have survived the treatments alone!

My old friend cancer seems to have made a meandering return; our introduction was literally a poke in the eye with something sharp.  This time, it’s more obvious and a lot bigger.  2002′s choroidal melanoma was barely 2mm but made its presence inescapably obvious by its lifting of the retina.  The advice that I had a 70% chance of surviving five years razed my confidence to the ground, but proved wildly pessimistic.

After five biopsies, an internal exam with a metal snake, blood tests, x-ray, ultrasound, MRI and the most impressive of the lot, a PET scan after which I was radioactive for a week, I have the final opinion.  Squamous cell carcinoma: a 1.5cm tumour at the base of the tongue on one side, and a secondary tumour in the adjacent submandibular lymph which PET technicians say shows a 3cm area of “highly suspicious glucose uptake”.  Both John Diamond and Michael Douglas had the same kind of problem, with very different results.

(The Vancouver Clinic) I wanted to take a photo of my scanner but didn’t think quickly enough – photography violates a regulation somewhere – and so the phone was left in a locker outside with all other magnetic objects.  The NHS system, no matter what anyone says, must be the finest in the world. The staff are patient, enthusiastic, well informed, well organised, kind and considerate. The system is remarkably efficient considering the massive demands placed on it; in and of itself it absolutely can’t be faulted. Is the science behind the treatments sound? That’s a different question, and unrelated to the NHS itself

The PET scan is the most interesting of the lot, and was carried out at the Paul Strickland centre at Mt Vernon, to shed light on a shadow “of concern” at the base of the tongue.  They combine a radioactive isotope with glucose, and inject this fluid directly into the bloodstream.  Tumours have a far higher uptake of glucose than normal cells, because they use this rather inefficiently to generate energy rather than the oxygen which normal cells use, so after 45 minutes they will have drunk their fill of it at the other cells’ expense.  Only the liver lights up the scan to the same degree.

You are strapped into an awesome circular contraption which records the precise location of all this radioactivity, and sure enough, their beautiful, brilliant orange flares matched precisely the area, shape and size of the “concerns” my consultant had.  The size of the secondary tumour puts me in the stage 3 phase, out of 5.  You’re then sent home with a note explaining you need to keep away from people for a few hours, and that you may set off airport detectors for several days.  I did wonder, though, if cancer cells like glucose so much, what about hooking up a poison to it, and putting a lot more of it in the blood.  I later found out that’s apparently what some enterprising chap in America did, combining molasses with baking soda, and demolishing his prostate cancer and some 30 metastasised sites througout his hips.  It’s also a similar idea to the natural occurring B17 molecule, which has an inert molecule of cyanide.

This is not my scan – which remains on electronic file at Bedford Hospital, but looks very similar, and shows the extraordinary accuracy of these scanning devices.  In both cases the primary tumour has metastasised, in my case, to the lymph, the “intense focal uptake” of glucose being 10.9% and 10.7% respectively.
http://www.petscaninfo.com/zportal/portals/pat/physician/head_neck_cancer_utilization/case01

So here was one choice: be out of action for a year, and lose all the glands in my right face and neck,  have the back of my tongue burned away, and endure multiple does of chemo – and after that have a 40% 5 year survival for someone in my stage 3 state.  What about work?  I can’t be off the grid for even a few weeks.  A pause.  “It’s unlikely you’ll be able to work during that year,” was the reply.  When a surgeon says “unlikely” what he really wants to say is forget about it!  Completely!  Are you nuts?!  Just as there may be some discomfort translates to you’ll enter a world of pain.  I later mentioned that I’d wanted to consult with friends and family who underwent chemo, to get their opinion.  “And..?” he ventured.  “They’re all dead.”

But here’s the other choice, an opportunity to become involved in the healing process, rather than just a bystander: learn everything possible about cancer, from the vast amount of research and experience contributed by others all over the world, and try to overcome it on my own.  The surgeon did his professional best to hide his despair, but reminded me this kind of cancer can spread to the cheek, and eventually to the brain.  After three months he could not guarantee any worthwhile treatment.  But sometimes life doesn’t give you two pleasing choices, perhaps because if it did, you could spend a lifetime dithering.  So some decisions are surprisingly easy, and once made, a weight was lifted off me, and I felt free.

After the initial shock I realised there were a few things actually in my favour.  For one thing, my life is flexible enough that I can do any amount of research and rework my diet in any direction without affecting my children or the quality of my technical output.  The other advantage is an intense curiosity about molecules and how they work.  And not least, I have a faith that everything must have a reason.

We live in a law-bound universe, from the molecules to the stars.  The machinery of our body, above all else, is a process of order, not chaos.  I do not believe in Darwin’s idea that at the base of us is a hollow nothing.  At the base of us is order, so concentrated and so intense that it forms an endless field of study.  If cancer is a messenger, it has an urgent message; if I can interpret that, I stand some chance of putting it right.  Cancer got a foothold at a certain time which must say something about conditions at the cellular level, and I want to know what they are.

I don’t believe Nature intended mankind to develop scurvy or cancer.  The two can be equated because though symptoms are extreme, they are indeed symptoms, and the causes must be relatively simple – because life doesn’t particularly favour the polymath.  In some societies, cancer is virtually unknown.  And Japanese women have a very low incidence of breast cancer, but when they move to America, they develop tumours at the standard Western rate. Their genetics remain unaltered – presumably – which only leaves environment, including stresses, and diet.

Armed with that faith, I begin my investigation.  We’ll learn how to approach it, or how not to.. and in the process uncover something which is bound to be extremely interesting.  Wish me luck!

Man vs. Molecule!

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

..Richard Dawkins

In reality, faith is an element of intelligent thought: faith in the cohesiveness and integrity of the mechanism one is investigating, faith in the world itself being a cohesive whole, faith in humanity, or if one has cancer, a healthy faith in the ability to understand the illness, and get better.  It is not faith, but despair which is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.

Evolution and Darwinism are not one and the same.  While genomic evolution is beyond doubt, and the mechanisms even observable in the laboratory, the first practical difficulty with Darwinism’s theory – random, solitary changes to nucleotides being the source of all biological enginering – is that it is nonsense. The second difficulty, almost as great, is that all experimental evidence flatly contradicts it.

The impossibilities saturate every evolutionary stage:

• a random, simple beginning which nevertheless requires all the complex machinery for survival, and duplication
• machinery whose sole function is to root out and eliminate the tiniest error, which has itself been composed only of errors
• a wasteland of failure the size of a planet with barely a pinprick of successful permutations
• the final products: purposeful, rational beings so convinced that life’s machinery is a product of laws that they devote their life to unravelling them

Why would anyone believe a system based on aimless chaos is at the same time law-bound right to the core, and liable to the analysis of science?

• fear that interest in religious metaphors (ancient assumptions about higher intelligences) would immmediately wipe out motorways and the internet, and return us to the caves
• the “argument from personal incredulity” - if we can’t imagine a mind titanic enough to conceive of living matter, there can’t possibly be one
• the average mind does not continually re-think its worldview, which would be a daily effort and source of instability.  An authoritative, eloquent personality is trusted to have done the work.  The crowd simply dons their confidence, catchphrases, and even personality, as if their own
• if “the wider community” rejects an idea, the member feels it must be a reasonable position. This is given momentum by their exclusion of him if he demurs – a frightening thought

Darwinism’s intellectual vacuum is covered up somewhat with the partly credible veil of natural selection.  This ornately embroidered cloth looks good from a distance, but the slightest touch causes it to be sucked into the void, because as  Dutch mutation theorist Hugo de Vries said, it may account for the survival of a species, but never its arrival.

In this jovial essay I try to show the combined engineering of man has, so far, been massively outclassed by that of the humble cell, in an evironment so much more difficult that one scientist likened progress in it to “swimming in molasses”.

An equation dictating the creative success of a (null creative power) x (thousand mutations) x (million procreations) x (billion generations) must produce the value zero, even if the experiment continued until the end of time.  Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy a scenic walk through these engineering triumphs of man and molecule.

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Father Christmas

We all know Santa is a metaphor for selfless generosity.  Santa is a healthy concept for young minds to express gratitude, and emulate in the giving of presents (generating valuable oxytocin in the process) – and especially useful today since there seems no comparable human role model anywhere on the planet.

The concept of Father Christmas also stretches the imagination of young children; they consider their eventual discovery of his mythical status to be something of an achievement, vindication of their grown-up status.  And as Rebecca Watson points out, Dr Marjorie Taylor in Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, concludes:

pre-schoolers with imaginary friends are more creative, more social and more empathic.

But in character and dedication I’m afraid Santa comes a very distant second to the tireless kinesin motor deliverymen within the cell.

The kinesin illustrated above is from a Harvard animation and shows in correct proportion the transport of a sack of proteins from one place in the cell to another on one of the hundreds of thousands of highways which mysteriously build and unravel within every cell.  Kinesin actually walks, step over step, travelling exclusively outwards from the centre of the cell, in strides of 8 nanometres.  It can cope with obstacles in its path while holding onto its bag of goodies.

It covers 1 millimetre in 125,000 steps, making at most a few hundred steps in each journey, at a rate of 100 steps/second.  The 14 variant groups of these motor proteins have been the subject of ingenious research, some of which precisely measured their force in PicoNewtons while striding over nanometre bridges.  The graph is a straight line, meaning they’re as strong at the end of the journey as the beginning: given a surrounding supply of ATP they are literally tireless.

Kinesin’s fuel efficiency is nearly 50% – much more than a gasoline engine, and scaled up, exerts an incredible amount of torque.  It requires no supernatural intervention: in vitro it behaves exactly as in the cell, given ATP, simply due to the arrangement of the amino acid components.  Its step is precisely calibrated to the microtubule segments; the two components are part of one system.

Therefore the distance walked by one of these little Santas in a day is 69 million nanometres, or 6.9 centimetres – small wonder you need your own body weight in ATP each day. Scale him up to our size so his stride is 80 cm rather than 8 Nm with a factor of 100m and he could be covering 4,200 miles in a day.

With perhaps 100,000 at work in a single cell, and with 100 trillion cells, that’s a total distance travelled per day of just under 7 metres per cell, 691 billion km all told.  Even if they only worked half the elapsed time, and then, only for one night – that’s easily enough to visit every house on the planet.

As for the elves, hammering away – clearly a metaphor for the ribosomes!  And Rudolph..  well, perhaps his nose is a phosphate molecule.

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Interplanetary Landers

When NASA went to the moon, they needed a craft landable at almost any angle on an unpredictable, undulating surface.  When Neil Armstrong piloted the capsule in search of a suitable site, confounded by the presence of large boulders and with only a tiny amount of remaining fuel, he propelled the capsule sideways at full tilt to clear the hurdles and land in a safe place – the Sea of Tranquillity.  In the Moscow, his success was closely watched by the CCCP Air Force brass, who spontaneously broke into applause.  They understood the nature of the challenge.

But the design was remarkably similar to the bacteriophage, an impressive piece of nanotech which lands on a host bacteria cell, bringing its tail into contact with the surface and injecting a tightly wound genome through the cell wall.  This is seized by ribosomes within the cell, and more bacteriphages manufactured, which self assemble, as the parts are machined in a certain order.  The DNA is repackaged into the head and fleets of bacteriophages have now infected the cell, and will search for greener pastures.

The study shows that DNA packaging motor is comprised of three primary parts: an elongated prohead that serves as the virus shell, a doughnut-shaped connector that is positioned at the entrance to the virus shell and feeds DNA into the shell, and a novel ribonucleic acid (RNA)-enzyme complex that converts chemical energy to mechanical energy needed for packaging.

The scientists analyzed the structure of the connector – the core of the phi29 DNA packaging motor – to a resolution of 3.2 angstroms, or 3.2 hundred-millionths of a centimeter.

Their findings show that the connector is made up of 12 protein subunits that may serve as “cylinders” in the motor system to pull long chains of DNA through the center of the doughnut-shaped system.

Five identical enzymes, called ATPases, are positioned around the connector, just outside the opening in the virus shell. The enzymes break down the cell’s chemical fuel, called ATP, to produce the energy needed to power the motor.

The researchers postulate that successive chemical reactions produced by the ATP cause the phi29 connector to oscillate and rotate, pulling the DNA into the shell two base pairs at a time.

Sources: Michael Rossmann, mgr@indiana.bio.purdue.edu

Dwight Anderson, dlander@tc.umn.edu

Writer: Susan Gaidos,  sgaidos@purdue.edu

Other source: Timothy Baker, tsb@bragg.bio.purdue.edu

http://www.purdue.edu/uns/mov/rossmann.motormovie.mov

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CNC Machining and One Ruthless Editor

L-R: Computer Numerical Control machine, Precision Engineering; J Jonah Jameson: Marvel Comics; Ribosome: Centre for Molecular Biology, UCal, Santa Cruz.  Parker, these photos are so good I can almost stand living in the same city as that menace, Spiderman. Get me some more! Whaddya waiting for, Parker?  Christmas?!

One machine common to all life on Earth is the ribosome.  Its strongly conserved nature, and the common sense observation that it makes everything else, indicates its central position in evolution.  The ribosome is not a single tool but a workshop split into two major parts, all created (using E. coli as an example) from around 7,400 amino acids, and around 250,000 atoms, all primed to use the strongest possible codon-amino acid mapping out of a practically endless range of possibilities.

Ribosomes can be so numerous as to make up 25% of the cell mass of E. coli. A striking feature of the ribosome is that, even given the large assorted collection of subunits, it self-assembles in vitro!

The core of the ribosome is RNA, supporting the idea that early forms of life relied on RNA rather than DNA.  But if such a workshop is necessary to create proteins, whether from templates of RNA or DNA – from where could the ribosome come from?  More vexing still for Darwinism is how editorial precision could arise in a system in which errors themselves were the key to prolific reproductive success at the start.  Why change a winning hand?

New discoveries are being made about the ribosome all the time.  Relevant to Darwinism, in 2009 Nature published some new discoveries by Johns Hopkins researchers concerning the remarkable actions of the ribosome’s ruthless quality control editor; if you think I tend to anthropomorphise molecules, note how the researchers detail -

..a new “proofreading step” during which the suite of translational tools called the ribosome recognizes errors, just after making them, and definitively responds by hitting its version of a “delete” button.

It turns out.. ..that the ribosome exerts far tighter quality control than anyone ever suspected over its precious protein products which, as workhorses of the cell, carry out the very business of life.

“What we now know is that in the event of miscoding, the ribosome cuts the bond and aborts the protein-in-progress, end of story,” says Rachel Green, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of molecular biology and genetics in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “There’s no second chance.”

“We thought that once the mistake was made, it would have just gone on to make the next bond and the next,” Green says. “But instead, we noticed that one mistake on the ribosomal assembly line begets another, and it’s this compounding of errors that leads to the partially finished protein being tossed into the cellular trash.”

To their further surprise, the ribosome lets go of error-laden proteins 10,000 times faster than it would normally release error-free proteins, a rate of destruction Green says is “shocking” and reveals just how much of a stickler the ribosome is about high-fidelity protein synthesis.

http://phys.org/news150559493.html#jCp

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Electric Motors

(L-R: electric motor patent schematic, electric fan motor (top view), SEM photos of flagellar motor

The earliest forms of life, dating back perhaps three and a half billion years, are assumed to be bacteria, and as far as we observe, every cell comes from a cell. Under episodes of cell stress or genome shock, as Shapiro points out in Evolution, a cell “activates the molecular systems that restructure genomes” (ref. Jorgensen).  This intense scurry for novelty in response to an external threat, and the coding of solutions into DNA which is passed sideways to their peers, is an observed method of evolutionary progress, and as antibiotic researchers will tell you, it is very effective indeed.

These bacteria are some of the most complicated and smartest critters on the planet – the proof being their survival over eons and their central role even in the biology of human beings: you might not want to live with them, but you can’t live without ‘em.

A method of their locomotion so strongly conserved that it still exists today is the flagellar motor.  This cunning device rotates between 20,000 and 100,000 RPM, five times the speed of an F1 engine, and due to the high surrounding pressure at molecular levels (a severe difficulty in nanotech engineering) can stop immediately.  When you assemble these motors, they work automatically in response to signals from within the bacteria – there is no need to invoke the supernatural any more than there is to keep track of your electric fan.

The combination of molecules is so precise, and once correctly assembled, they are so sturdy and incapable of misperforming that they only require the context of the cell with its switches, endless supplies of recyclable fuel, and regulatory systems, to perform their specialised task.

Proton or sodium driven, they are equipped with rotor, clutch, bushings, washers, gearing, and even a tiny printed maintenance schematic:

Osaka Graduate School of Frontier Sciences  (bacteria don’t really have a printed manual. Who could read it anyway, below the wavelength of visible light?)

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Multiple Electric Motors

(L-R: Multi blade copter- http://baltimorehackerspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/quadcopter.jpg, MO-1 bacteria and simulation- http://www.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/news/ResearchRelease/2012/11/20121127_1 )

One motor is fine, thanks, but how about seven, all hooked up in parallel? The MO-1 bacteria has a sheathed stack of seven flagella, interspersed with counter-rotating elements which reduce friction.  This system was analysed by Osaka University in 2012 (see below).  With this multiple motor, it swims at a rate of 300 micron/sec, slightly more than one metre/hour. A grain of talcum powder is about 10 micron in diameter.

The seven filaments are enveloped with 24 fibrils in the sheath, and their basal bodies are arranged in an intertwined hexagonal array.. ..this strongly suggests that the fibrils counter- rotate between flagella in direct contact to minimize the friction of high-speed rotation of individual flagella in the tight bundle within the sheath to enable MO-1 cells to swim at about 300 μm/s.

..http://www.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/news/ResearchRelease/2012/11/20121127_1

These bacteria are about 225 nanometres wide, slightly less than a quarter of a micron – 44 side by side would be no wider than a grain of talcum powder – so if  scaled up to the size of a small speedboat, perhaps 3 metres long, its proportional speed would be in excess of 14,000 kph – about ten times the speed of sound.

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Solar Panels

(L-R: Solar cell roof; photosynthesis process; photosystem i. The photosystem, which the researchers crystallized in its trimeric form, contains 12 different proteins in each monomer, along with 96 chlorophylls and more than 30 other cofactors.The photosystem contains 12 different proteins in each monomer, along with 96 chlorophylls and more than 30 other cofactors. For the first time, the structure allows them to begin to figure out how these molecules work together as a system to gather solar energy and then transfer that energy to the center of the complex, where electron-transfer reactions convert it to the chemical energy that drives almost all life on Earth.

The most basic requirement of plants is the ability to convert sunshine into energy, presumably dating back three billion years, and remaining essential today.  Without this ability leaves are left with only a decorative function.  All the work, as usual, is carried out in the cell.  But what a cell!

The mechanisms and processes are so interdependent one wonders how they could ever work at all. Graham R Fleming, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Physical Biosciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, leading the reasearch team which took ten years of work to finalise the structure of Photosystem I (the large machine to the right) called it “an absolutely spectacular piece of work.”

Mankind recently came up with sloar panels, which are relatively simple by comparison.  Even still, they took some working out.  The idea that plants could have been a self-assembling early form of life is because we see them growing from nothing but dirt and sunshine.  We all assume photosynthesis is a simple process, because this is how it’s first explained:

Sounds simple! http://plantscience4u.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/history-of-photosynthesis.html

But this is how it really is:

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Garbage Grinders

Once proteins are formed in the cell, there are circumstances in which they need to be destroyed, for example, if incorrectly formed or of no further use.  The cells have their own aggressive TSA agents who spot and stamp such proteins with a ubiquitin molecule which alerts other transport systems that the protein needs to be scrapped.  A proteosome is shown to the right (illus: David Goodsell).  This shredder has a twist-open lid which is activated by the unique combination of three destruction tags added to the errant protein.

In the first step, a ubiquitin-activating enzyme (known as E1) hydrolyzes ATP and adenylylates a ubiquitin molecule. This is then transferred to E1′s active-site cysteine residue in concert with the adenylylation of a second ubiquitin.^[34] This adenylylated ubiquitin is then transferred to a cysteine of a second enzyme, ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme (E2).

Could even an aggressive TSA agent, armed with handcuffs, a skull cracking baton, crippling taser and loaded weapon, find a threatening person in under a second?

In the last step, a member of a highly diverse class of enzymes known as ubiquitin ligases (E3) recognizes the specific protein to be ubiquitinated and catalyzes the transfer of ubiquitin from E2 to this target protein. A target protein must be labeled with at least four ubiquitin monomers (in the form of a polyubiquitin chain) before it is recognized by the proteasome lid.^[35]

“I said, business or pleasure? Don’t mess with me, dawg!”

It is therefore the E3 that confers substrate specificity to this system.^[36] The number of E1, E2, and E3 proteins expressed depends on the organism and cell type, but there are many different E3 enzymes present in humans, indicating that there is a huge number of targets for the ubiquitin proteasome system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteasome

Proteins are destroyed only after judgement by a tribunal, but also, cell death is instituted by another three-stage process. If all levels signify their assent, the cell commits suicide, by disassembling itself into components harmless to processes external to the now defunct cell

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Anti Freeze

Cells have developed antifreeze proteins in response to severe cold.  Failure to have done this in time would, of course, have stopped them in their tracks permanently.  The antifreeze molecules lower the freezing point of water contained within the cell, disrupting the freezing process by limiting the growth of water-hungry ice crystals.  Various kinds are shown above (illus: David S. Goodsell)

When water begins to freeze, many small crystals form, but then a few small crystals dominate and grow larger and larger, stealing water molecules from the surrounding small crystals. Antifreeze proteins counteract this recrystallization effect. They bind to the surface of the small ice crystals and slow or prevent the growth into larger dangerous crystals.

Antifreeze proteins lower the freezing point of water by a few degrees, but surprisingly, they don’t change the melting point. This process of depressing the freezing point while not affecting the melting point is termed thermal hysteresis. The most effective antifreeze proteins are made by insects, which lower the freezing point by about 6 degrees. However, antifreeze proteins, even the ones from plants and bacteria that have smaller effects on freezing point, are useful in another way. They are placed outside cells where they control the size of ice crystals and prevent catastrophic ice crystal formation when the temperature drops below the (lowered) freezing point.

http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/101/motm.do?momID=12

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Gearboxes

Motors and gearboxes abound in the molecular world. How else would things get done? Especially interesting is the ingenious viral packaging motor, requiring a self-adjusting gear system to avoid breakage of DNA when being packed into the capsule at the highest rate of speed, and a pressure of 47 atmospheres.

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Changing Rooms

(L-R: Thiemo Sander Changing Room,whitezine.com; Chaperonin molecule by David Goodsell, stage diagram: rcsb.org)

The only thing that stops some proteins forming in the cell once they’ve been printed out of amino acids and welded together is the sheer level of activity around them.  Try getting dressed amidst a riotnig mob!  A molecule can bump into others half a million molecules in a single second. Proteins not only carry out a function, they also act as receptors for messenger molecules which change their conformation, and this difference in conformation is detected by other proteins which are designed to act accordingly.  They therefore act as senders and receivers of messages, in addition to performing their own strictly delineated tasks.

But all this bustle means sometimes privacy is needed to allow new proteins to fold themselves from a long string of amino acids to a final three dimensional structure, a function of the chemical and magnetic attractors and disulphide bridges pre-aligned in the amino acids arrangements, from the nosey and rambunctious behaviour of all the other molecules.  The folding of proteins is itself a puzzle.  If they were to take every possible route to folding, they could take thousands of years.  Instead they tend to snap together in milliseconds, forming disulphide bridges and becoming shapes which are three times harder to compress than water.

Special chaperonin molecules attach to flustered proteins that have got their undies in a twist on the way to the catwalk, and guide them to a special class of chaperonin changing rooms – flasks with twist open lids, and attractive carbon-walled spaces inside.  Ahh, peace at last!  Once the protein has got dressed and ready for work – achieving its tertiary structure – the flask opens and out it goes into the chaos of the working day.

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Shredders

The enzymes created in the body and supplied by, say fruit, are the chainsaws and industrial shredders of the body.  One molecule of bromelain, the enzyme found in pienapples, particularly in the core, can locate, secure, chop, and expel 30,000 proteins in a single second.  This is why it’s so effective in digestion and reducing inflammation.

Papain from papaya fruit works at a similar rate, targeting fibrin – the tough material around cancer cells.  Natural chemo?  Draw your own conclusions!  The fastest enzymes that chemists have been able to create work at a rate of 2 per second.

Despite the fast-growing body of knowledge, there is an ongoing debate as to how enzymes such as ornithine decarboxylase achieve rate accelerations as high as 10 power 17 (that’s 100 thousand trillion) thus performing within milliseconds a reaction that in their absence takes millions of years (Table 1). Furthermore fundamental questions regarding the evolution of enzymes also remain open; for example, how their function is related to their fold and whether, in the formation of enzyme active sites, substrate binding precedes the catalytic chemistry or vice versa.

http://www.weizmann.ac.il/Biological_Chemistry/scientist/Tawfik/papers/Article5.pdf

The dismal failure is explained by the need for chemists to work in a truly Darwinian way, by trial and error combining pieces from a library of genetic strips.  No useful protein is made of less than about 40 amino acids, and the real action only begins at around 50.  The largest libraries created are nucleic acid repertoires containing about 10 power 15 molecules.

To give you an idea of the difficulty, remember these proteins are only measurable in angstroms.  The mass of a fully randomised 50 nucleotide library with 10 power 30 variants is over 25,000 tonnes.

Thus, in practice, the in vitro evolution of an active molecule reelies on the sampling of a neglible faction of the potential consequences.

(ibid)

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Insulated Cables

Left: Dupont cabling; right: nerve bundles indiidually sheathed with myelin, an insulation material which causes the signal to be accelerated by a factor of 50 times.  next time you touch something hot, the speed at which the signal reaches your brain is down to this marvellous dual function protective accelerant.  Essential for survival in a hostile environment.

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Cities and Highways

The transport routes and complexity inside every cell make the comparison to a modern city a fair one.  Activity within the cell proceeds at such a pace that a molecule may interact with others half a million times within the space of a second.  A system of walkways connects the various parts of the cell, and checkpoints abound, especially on the cell wall.  Above is a conceptual cartoon of various motor protein delivery units.

Below is a David Goodsell illustration of a small part of a cell, in which enzymes are shown in blue, with water molecules as small cyan heart shapes.  The level of activity within a cell is simply incredible.  As James Shapiro says in Evolution:

Proteins operate as conditional microprocessors in regulatory circuits.  They behave differently depending on their interaction with other proteins or molecules.

The big problem with claiming the first forms of life were single celled creatures is that, as far as anyone knows, a cell comes only from a cell. last week I was told that there was a workable solution to the origin of life, and that was abiogenesis.  This was accompanied by the usual offhand comment, as a teacher to an errant pupil: “look it up”.

Well, abiogenesis simply means life arose from dead molecules.  It’s rather like the explanation HG Wells’ time traveller gave to his learned audience:  “You simply push this lever forwards to travel into the future, and backwards, to travel into the past.”  This is no explanation, but only a description which anyone could observe for themselves.  But if abiogeneis actually occurred it leaves the problem of where one draws the line between dead and living matter.  If dead matter is so close to living matter, and so prone to jump into life early on in a planet’s formation, then can any matter really be dead?  The development of the required complexity is answered with a word, while the problem remains unsolved.

In any case, a cell without the required components which protect it and yet allow sustenance to enter it, and the machinery to duplicate it, is no cell at all, and cannot even be called a distinct unit. The remarkable thing about life is that it exists in any form at all.

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People Carrying Stuff

Traffic in the cell is well controlled.  Kinesin motors walk outward from the centrosome to the cell wall, and Dynein motors walk the opposite way, their steps neatly matching the tubulin components.  Packages are collected, handed off to others, or delivered.

Above right is the cover of Cell magazine, V 141:2, April 16 2010, and inset, reversed animation still from Science magazine, 4 Mar 2011.  The neat division of directions mirrors our bi-directional motorways.

Interesting fact! Did you know the only pulic road in England where you can legally drive on the right is the entrance to the Savoy hotel, in Lonon’s Strand?  Apparently this was originally so ladies could alight from the carriages.  Since the renovation the restaurants and staff are as fantastic as always, but their new paintings – slightly less so.

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(Reversible) Fuel Generators

Left: proton powered fuel generator by directindustry.com – but it’s not reversible; right, ATP synthase
http://mcb.berkeley.edu/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=99

The fuel in the cell is created by ATP synthase, a stunning piece of design described in more detail elsewhere on this site.  Essentially it continually takes spare hydrogen ions from one side of the periplasm and pulls them into a device resembling a revolver barrel, which  rotates a few degrees around a stator with asymmetrical paddles that create, for every full turn, three adenosine triphosphate molecules, or ATP.  This is achieved by pulling in a similar molecule but in diphosphate form and adding one phosphate, then booting it out for use elsewhere in the cell.  It therefore converts an electrical gradient into a fuel surplus.

The cell’s machinery uses ATP by breaking off a phosphate, and releasing a burst of energy, creating a lone phosphate and ADP, making the fuel 100% recyclable.  And if you think that’s clever, consider this: if there’s a surplus of ATP but not enough electric gradient, it works backwards perfectly – pulling in ATP and breaking off a phosphate, spinning the unit in reverse, and throwing a hydrogen ion out the other side.  This is tantamount to a car engine sucking in exhaust, running backwards, and silling up your petrol tank.

Tens of thousands of these motors work in the nucleus of every cell, and they’re no slackers: they create your own body weight in recycled fuel molecules every day.

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Ribbon Data Cables

The wiring in the brain was recently analysed by building a connectome of a monkey (right). Ribbon cables are very effective for organising data transfer, and, come to think of it, they probably add a great deal of flexible strength to the brain mass as well, which might raise the crisis threshold as far as possible in self-created compression instances, for example when a professional footballer is stopped in his headlong rush by an opposing team member.

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The Spiral Staircase

Why not? A very elegant invention, to be sure! (right: Modern Topics in Biochemistry, 1966)

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Rail Handcars

The rail handcar converts downward thrust provided by one or two passengers into rotary movement, generating forward thrust for the vehicle as a whole.  Devices which proceed along the endless stretches of DNA use ATP to generate circular motion, which generate forward thrust along the double helix.

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Screw Top Containers

Sorry, but it’s a fact – twist lids are nothing new.  They arrived with the cell, and that’s a certainty

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Shoelace Ends

The chromosomes need shoelace tips to stop from fraying. They’re even attached in a neat bow, and we use them in pairs!

Interesting fact: telomerase is generated in abundance in meditators, and telomerase extends the life of the cell by extending the telomerase at the end of the chromosomes.  Just saying!

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Television

The invention of television was certainly ingenious and changed the face of the Earth, and relied on a material called selenium, which converted photon stimulation to electrical signals.  The Russian, Nipkow,  experimented with it in the 1800′s but found it unworkable due to the weak signal and rapid decay.  It was Baird who in the 1920′s, with the advent of electrical amplifiers, realised that the signals all decayed at the same rate, and all that was required was a consistent amplification.  Refining the process was to take up the remainder of his life.

The eye uses a similar system in which retinal, a small molecule which fits into the binding site of a large protein called opsin, making up rhodopsin, is triggered into activity by the sensitivity of the opsin molecule to photon stimulation.  The following chain reaction of chemicals and eventual electrical signals, include feedback loops, timing mechanisms, amplifiers and interpretive mechanisms in the brain woudl fill a book.

Even modern television doesn’t improve on the devices contained within the retina, which are dealt with in greater detail elsewhere on this site.  The chain of events which give rise to sight are so important that the eyes use about 1/5th of the body’s energy; the eyes are constantly in vibratory motion, without which, the signals would cease to be forwarded to the brain.

The eyes include their own immune system, variable blood flow heat sinks behind the RPE controlled by the iris contraction, built in sunglasses, a recycling depot and separate circuits for motion, line detection and binocular perspective. And lastly, remember that all these components are smaller than the wavelength of visible light.  They transmit signals of light for us to use, but in their molecular world, they all work completely in the dark.

Priceless!

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Velcro

How else can cells stick to each other?  Clever stuff.  Illustration (right) by David S Goodsell.

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Darwinism has, by virtue of powerful influences and some regrettable bunk, turned into a kind of cult.  Professor Dawkins believes

“religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”

Well, he’s partly right: Darwinism claims science and logic as its own, while cheerfully rejecting whatever parts of both do not suit it.

Just as the wealthy extol the benefits of money, while keeping it all for themselves, some advocates of freethinking clearly feel free thought is not suited for the likes of us.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.

They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

..JBS Haldane, Possible Worlds

I now believe there is a God…I now think it [the evidence] does point to a creative Intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations.

What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.

..Antony Flew

Specialist Subject: the Trivial!

It’s easy to conclude that Darwinists only solve problems which are trivial!  How many times has a comment praising some aspect of religion, or challenging some point of evolution been casually swatted away with:

“God of the gaps. Solved long ago. Trivial.“

“Selection.  Simple. Look it up.”

“Darwin. Mutation. Go read a book. Easily proven.“

“Vestigial. Proven. It’s not rocket science.“

Since this branch of thought only deals with the most trivial problems, here’s one which won’t be of interest – pointed out by Alfred Schultz, in 1912:

“In medicine the evolutionary hypothesis is practically applied; it has led to the theory of rudimentary organs.  These are organs, the Darwinists say, which in the supposed animal existence were of use to our ancestors, but are now discarded: they testify to some previous stage in our development.

Prof Weidersheim in his Darwinistic intoxication has found 107 rudimentary organs in man.  Mr Houston Chamberlain says it is time to write a book on the Human Body as Nature’s Junkshop for Defunct Organs, and wonders whether the human brain is not the one hundred and eighth.  In medicine the Darwinian disease led to deplorable consequences.  As these organs were declared useless, they were cut out for trivial reasons.

No junk in the ENCODE trunk: co-association between transcription factors (Nature, 6 Sep 2012)

The thyroid gland is a rudimentary organ;  “cut it out,” and it was cut out.  Many victims died from the effects of the operation, all others developed myxedema.  This rudimentary (!) organ was found to have an important function.

The two rudimentary organs still abused are the tonsils and the appendix.  The tonsils have probably a protective function, the active phagiocytosis going on in the most exposed part of the alimentary tract, they frequently become inflamed; they do not become inflamed because they are rudimentary.

Many scalpel wielders consider themselves justified in exsecting every appendix that comes their way.  We do not yet know the purpose of the appendix, but it is certain that it is not placed in the body to give surgeons the opportunity to show their skill.

..Alfred Schultz, The End of Darwinism (circa 1912)

75 years later, tonsils were realised to be part of the lymph system and a vital first line of defence.  My father, a hematologist and former surgeon, mused in the early 90′s that Toronto General was not so quick to excise tonsils as before, because patients who lost them seemed later prone to “some very nasty infections”.  In October 1999, regarding the appendix, Scientific American found:

The appendix is now thought to be involved in immune functions. Lymphoid tissue accumulates in the appendix shortly after birth and reaches a peak between the second and third decades of life, decreasing rapidly thereafter and practically disappearing after the age of 60.

During the early years the appendix has been shown to function as a lymphoid organ, assisting with the maturation of lymphocytes and production of immunoglobulin A antibodies. Researchers have shown the appendix is involved in the production of molecules that help direct lymphocytes to other locations in the body.

In this context, the appendix’s function appears to be to expose white blood cells to the wide variety of antigens, or foreign substances, present in the gastrointestinal tract. Thus, it helps suppress potentially destructive humoral antibody responses while promoting local immunity.

“The appendix takes up antigens from the contents of the intestines and reacts to these contents. This local immune system plays a vital role in immune response and control of food, drug, microbial or viral antigens. The connection between these local immune reactions and inflammatory bowel diseases, as well as autoimmune reactions in which the individual’s own tissues are attacked by the immune system, is under investigation.

..Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology, Oklahoma University

Of course, if “vestigial organs” are taken to mean those which decreased in function during evolution, then much, if not all, of the human body counts as removable – including ears, jaw muscles, chin, buttocks, eyebrows, toes and fingernails.

At least something turned out to be 95% junk!

In 2007, nearly a hundred years after Schultz saw the havoc wreaked by Darwinism, scientists revealed the appendix as a farm for necessary bacteria, a storehouse which was a reboot facility for the gut if at any time it is cleared of bacteria in some crisis of elimination or poisoining. Its inflamation may even be a consequence of the disruptive effects of disinfectants and chemicals on our bacteria.

But if you think Darwinism’s damage is gone and done with, remember research takes a long time to spread – some textbooks still have Haeckel’s 100 year old fraudulent gill slits in the foetus.  So, spare a thought for the patient who read Scientific American just a few days too late to save his reboot facility and antibody generator from the effects of Charles Darwin:

I am 24 and just had my appendix taken out a week ago because my omentum had wrapped itself around the appendix and was causing severe discomfort. My appendix was fine but the surgeon told me that it had no function so he took it out along with a small portion of my omentum to prevent appendicitis in the future.

I wish that I would have seen this article before going to the emergency room… My appendix was definitely “routinely removed and discarded” even though it was healthy.

How much more damage can Darwinism do?  In 1989, perhaps encouraged by Crick’s blithe assumption that most DNA is junk, the planet’s lead Darwinist Richard Dawkins wrote the following, about that magnificent information system within the human cell, namely the human genome:

..it appears the amount of DNA in organisms is more than is strictly necessary for building them: a large fraction is never translated into protein.  Biologists are racking their brains trying to think what useful task this apparently surplus DNA is doing.

But from the point of view of the selfish genes themselves, there is no paradox.

The true ‘purpose’ of DNA is to survive, no more and no less. The simplest way to explain the surplus DNA is to suppose that it is a parasite, or at best a harmless but useless passenger, hitching a ride in the survival machines created by the other DNA.

..Richard Dawkins  The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed., pp. 44-5, Oxford University Press, 1989

This simpleton approach lasted at least two decades more, well into the era in which gebnuine microbiologists considered the genome an information system rather than a dustbin.  So, in a standard attack on creationists, Dawkins said in 2009:

It stretches even their creative ingenuity to make a convincing reason why an intelligent designer should have created a pseudogene — a gene that does absolutely nothing and gives every appearance of being a superannuated version of a gene that used to do something — unless he was deliberately setting out to fool us..

Leaving pseudogenes aside, it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes.

How strange for one claiming to be a scientist to call one’s own presumption a fact.  And how does a sane mind estimate that a perfectly functioning system, known by 2009 to have multiple layers of logic from the study of epigenetics, was 95% waste?  The latest ENCODE revelations show the genome to be crammed full of switches, toolboxes, logic circuits, boosters and suppressors.  A hive of vital system engineering: thank God the surgeons haven’t been able, thus far, to snip it out!

Repeated so many times, so it must be true! But what about survival of the most loved by parents.. survival of members the most collaborative and supportive group.. survival of the best designed.. survival of the most nurtured.. survival of the most inclusive system? No, survival of the fittest is easier to remember!

Darwinism has done immense damage with the catchphrase, “survival of the fittest”, and even though this phrase was not coined by Darwin, it was coined in his defence and repeated ad nauseum ever since.  It ignores that all components must work as a whole, and not with the aim of allowing one survivor.

Darwinists believe first life form was a simple, random arrangement, which nevertheless had all the complexities of reproduction.  Makes sense!

It was Marx who said, “Darwinism suits my purpose.”  And it was Hitler who twisted it into, “he who will not fight, does not deserve to live.”  The capitalists of the 19th century were equally keen to delineate between those who should do well, and those who could be worked to death.  Eugenics had an early start, and is still practiced today.  This all emanated from one bleak, noxious idea: that life was only about survival.

Redundant ideas die hard, if marketed properly. I mean, things go better with Coke – as long as you enjoy diabetes, aspartamine and carcinogens!

Far more truthful – and hardly altering Darwin’s precious theory – would have been “everything has a purpose.”  With that one modification, most of the shameful acts which relied on Darwin’s scientific “credentials” for justification, might never have been committed.  As a matter of fact, On the Origin of Species never dealt with the origin of any species, and nor could it, as those origins are still a mystery.

Survival of the most loved.

Was Dawkins, so fluent in randomese, dismayed by this blow to all he had propounded?  Taken aback, apologetic, remorseful?  Tsk – not at all!  In fact there’s a happy ending for Darwinists.  In a 2012 debate with Chief Rabbi Sacks, on the assumption that ENCODE implied nearly, if not all, the genome to be useful, Dawkins said rather triumphantly: “that nearly all the genome would actually turn out to be useful.. is exactly what Darwinists would hope for.”

Hmmm, now this makes me think: how exactly is Darwinism proved by anything and everything that ever did or didn’t happen..?

..that’s easy. It’s trivial!

Survival of the most co-operative

Knowing, and Observing

The artists of the Renaissance said man’s main concern should be for men, and yet there are other things of interest in the world. Even the artists appreciate sunsets, and the ocean waves, and the march of the stars across the heavens. There is then some reason to talk of other things sometimes.

As we look into these things we get an aesthetic pleasure from them directly on observation. There is also a rhythm and a pattern between the phenomena of nature which is not apparent to the eye, but only to the eye of analysis; and it is these rhythms and patterns which we call Physical Laws.

..Richard Feynman

Exposing people to good things doesn’t usually achieve anything unless people already believe them to be good.  For example, take copies of a very good book and leave one on a tidy, well presented stand in the middle of a road.  People would simply drive around it, irritated, to avoid a collision.  They know it cannot have value, being given away, and left to strangers.

Deposit a pile of gold bars in the same place and they will be immediately carted away on sight.  This is because, jettisoning all their former reasoning, the same people already believe gold to have great value.  If years later, after they have fallen out with their families, tired of large rooms full of freeloaders, or plastic surgeries and holidays, and been declared bankrupt by suprisingly well-heeled accountants they might realise they were wrong: it turns out gold had no lasting value to them.  At least, not in the amount which they found.  They would do the same again, having never changed their original beliefs, because everything would have turned out alright – if only they could have collected more gold!

Only recently I went to the Louvre in Paris and found a massive crowd of American and Japanese tourists scrambling to take photos of themselves in front of the Mona Lisa, a small painting behind plexiglass.  But outside in the corridor were two very large paintings of comparable quality by the same artist, available for close examination.  Nobody was interested because the Mona Lisa, as they certainly knew, was far more interesting.  It was probably not even the original.

This week I meant to assemble a withering attack on Darwinian randomness but when I put all the research together and saw it was an overwhelmingly strong case, exposing a hundred years of bias, and even fraud – both willful and accidental – of utterly desperate escapist reasoning, I realised it would be a complete waste of time.  Those who refused to believe would find a tiny loophole of doubt somewhere; those already realising the 19th century guesswork has long been torn asunder would continue to believe it, but primarily for whatever reasons they did before reading my essay.

In the mind of the atheists, the only alternative to Darwin is an old man in sandals on a hill, capriciously adjusting the universe to fit his violent moodswings.  This idea is at the heart of their mockery of religion, whereas much of religion is based on a solid biological footing – and the reason the religious minded generally live longer than atheists, who not only have the lowest member retention rate of any worldview-based demographic, but the highest suicide rate. With a rock on one side and a hard place on the other, they have no time for subtleties because their intellectual worldview is at stake: any means must justify the end.  Ironically, the only people who actually take such a literal view of an ancient metaphor, are the diehard modern atheists!

So instead I started re-reading one of my favourite books, by the physicist Richard Feynman, called Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman? , a collection of his adventures both in the world of physics, and other unrelated, intriguing, spheres of thought.  Even if you’ve never heard of Feynman, you will have heard of the O-ring problem in the space shuttle Challenger’s fuel cells, which caused the rocket to explode on takeoff.

Richard Feynman as part of the Presidential Commission on the Challenger accident. Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

It was Feynman who deduced that the rubber sealant material shrunk in the cold and took time to reform; under pressure, NASA had scheduled the launch for a very cold morning against advice.  The reduced diameter of the rings allowed fuel to leak, leading to a disaster.  He also worked in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project during the war, and later shared in a Nobel Prize; gifted with astounding mathematical abilities – his brain even showed him equations broken down into colour – he is regarded as one of the top ten physicists of all time.  In the divorce proceedings of his second marriage, his wife complained that he did integral calculus all the time.. while driving, even while lying awake in bed.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Feynman went though a “depression” period in which he felt all planning was useless in the likelihood of much more powerful bombs being used again.  He emerged from this bleak period and was to visit Japan, showing great interest in Japanese culture, and choosing an authentic Japanese hotel in preference to the American one.  In one episode the female Japanese attendants showed no surprise or consternation at all when unexpectedly encountering an exuberant naked guest emerging from a bath, in stark contrast to the way their American counterparts would have shrieked in horror and called for backup.  “How uncivilised we are,” Feynman mused to a colleague, seemingly oblivious to the massive irony.

Expecting physicists to make a mysterious universe conprehensible is a little like hoping a team of mathematicians will compose a beautiful symphony.  It shows we fail to understand the nature of the task, and not only try and delegate a challenge every bit as personal as physical exercise, but apply to it the wrong kind of mind altogether.

As we know, matter is not solid at all, but composed almost entirely of something else.  What it is, and how such a colossal quantity of it comes to be arranged in specific formations we don’t yet know.  Scaling up the almost infitesimal speck of subatomic “matter” at the heart of a comparatively planet sized ball of energy within a proton or electron and expecting it to behave like household objects we understand is pointless, because the qualities of the latter are simply an illusion created by the former.  Everything we label  matter must have some comprehensible element about it, or it could never interact with our consciousness at all.  Our perception is based on space and time, neither of which seems native to the underlying material; only as these infitesimal specks accumulate do they become perceptible to our senses.  This is still something of a trick which physics accepts as reality, but has never actually explained.

Art in the service of physics: inspired by MC Escher, this wonderful illustration communicates the supposed continuity between particle and wave (N Brunner, J Simmonds)

Art is that endeavour in which consciousness imposes an otherwise intangible element of itself onto matter in such a way that it can be decoded by others: it is an alchemy which maths can never analyse or create.  Computer generated art is unconvincing and soon tires a mind searching for meaning, and in slavishly realistic art the artist is lost altogether, indistingsuishable from some other stranger’s super-realism.  Genuine art cannot be defined with equations because it creates a superior impact to them, stimulating and uplifting because some mind was intent on finding his reflection within us.  Without this sympathy we lose interest; stimulating a broader and more long lived reflection is the whole purpose of art.  This kind of resonance must be the same as that witnessed in particles – after all, resonance is resonance!

Brain activity, when faced with dismal or ugly scene

The concepts of a wave or a particle are only imaginations; an electron can behave as one or the other, and even both at the same time; light, too has such a duality while remaining singularly essential to biological life.  Their components remain imaginary concepts, albeit useful ones, because whatever they are, they cannot be only a particle or only a wave.  It is hard to imagine both at the same time: how could anything be solid, isolated, measured in space, and a regional disturbance, measured over time?  If particles become entangled and behave collaboratively like particles in a connected wave, it means there is an underlying form we still have not identified.  Physics does not pretend to overcome this barrier with equations, and only attempts to make the effects predictable, given other assumptions to hold the goalposts in place.  The physics of galaxies is not the same as the physics of our desk, and neither explains the weird behaviour of subatomic particles.

That these particles can disappear and reappear in infitesimally small fractions of a second shows our sense of time is granular, only appearing to be continuous because our brains are synchronised to the same rhythm.  The Brain Book, by Rita Carter (p187) claims our brain takes almost 500ms to process incoming stimuli, but backdates the perceived experiences so that they appear to have taken place immediately.  Of course this seems impossible because the brain is taking actual time to complete the task.  Nevertheless, if you poke yourself with a pin, you can be sure that the pain you feel at that moment, for about half a second, is nothing but an ingenious trick!

Brain activity when viewing beauty

Working with an older physicist named Wheeler and attempting to solve a problem involving electrons emitting energy when shaken, the young Feynman found it perfectly reasonable to propose that packets of energy could travel backwards in time to balance the equations.  He soon found himself lecturing to Einstein and Pauli although the problem, after a lifetime spent working on it, remained unsolved.  Time is certainly an elastic concept, both in the brain and the “material” world.

The discovery that particles can be entangled over any distance means our ideas about space also do not apply on the subatomic scale.  Exactly opposite to what we would expect, space – as well as time – can become meaningless at the level of the very small.  Small particles should have far more trouble exchanging information over vast distances than we do, but they actually have no trouble at all.

Screen pixels show us a covincing and useful image, but though we can imagine half or a third of a pixel existing, they cannot be shown on the screen itself, and so such states disappear unless combined into larger forms.  Our  mind must have a similar granular, stepped nature, meaning we cannot hope to comprehend reality until we know the granularity and undulations in the mirror we must use when beholding its reflection – the mind.  Even after decades of intense effort by the brightest physicists and enough books to fill the Grand Canyon, we are forced to examine ourselves before we can really know the universe.

Even then, human language is inadequate to express what we found: the experience is non transferable.  The mystical language of the Vedas was expressed in twilight language, to which the keys had to be understood first.  Jesus’ revelations were in parables, and Buddha urged us to seek within.  There is no description of the mystical state in the few treatises which mankind has that compare to the experience itself, and the inverse is true of Darwinism: despite the endless stream of books and lectures and museums, there is no reproducable reality behind them.  Evolution remains a fact, while Darwinism is simply escapist literature.

The most successful minds in physics were not typical of mathematicians: Einstein was a mystic and humanist; Feynman was an adventurer, musician and artist.  In fact at the age of 44 he decided to draw, not for any exercise of faculties but because:

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.  It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion.

It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is.

It’s a feeling of awe — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.

..Richard Feynman

His first drawing shows the hold which the conceptual mind usually has over the observing one, and which deters most people from attempting the required internal change:

An eye is known to be an oval inside which is a circle; a mouth is known to be two shapes divided by a horizontal line, and so on.  The mind observes the features of a face, but falls back on its preconceived ideas, which exist only in the imagination.

Undaunted, Feynman persisted and became an accomplished artist.  Realising his work would be uncritically liked if it were known to have come from a well known physicist, he created the nom de plume of Ofey, from the French “au fait” meaning, “it is done”.  Within only a year or two he had calmed the conceptual one and awakened his observing mind, along with the fine motor control to express himself.  I believe he continued to draw until the end of his life.

Beliefs are strong, and open minds rare.  A much discussed 1981 talk by Colin Patterson at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to the Systematics Discussion Group was secretly recorded and a transcript disseminated, by a creationist.  Most notoriously Patterson was said to have asked, “can you tell me anything about evolution, any one thing which is true?”

I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence.

I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of Evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time, and eventually one person said, “I do know one thing – it ought not to be taught in high school”.

The transcript’s accuracy was derided in evolutionary circles, which cast doubt on the quote itself; in the wake of Mayr’s 1981 paper in Science criticising what he saw as the “exceedingly tenuous connection” cladistics and phenetics had to genuine evolutionary theory, Patterson actually intended to compare the vapid effect of systematics with that of pre-Darwinian creationism, which he described as a void that explained nothing.

And yet he did not dispute the authenticity of the notorious quote itself.  In explaining its context in 1993 Patterson claimed the question still mattered. He had indeed expressed an agnosticism about evolution, and in 1981 had said:

“I had been working on this stuff for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it”.

The Reality of Chemical Spraying: peculiar air in NATO countries!

I’m in the UK, and very new to this whole chemtrails idea, but I’m also an occasional artist and noticed over the last couple of summers that it was impossible to get a clear blue colour in the sky as a reference.  The skies were whited out with fimy, translucent silvery clouds that cut the sun off from mid morning.  Even if you know your lapis lazuli from your cerulean, this is a pain in the neck.

In an effort to counteract the puzzling “Metabunk Syndrome”, I made a series of images to show people what a genuine, ordinary, harmless, normal aircraft contrail actually looks like. Debunkers play on people’s unwillingness to believe a problem could be so widespread in order to convince them that chemical sprays covering a formerly  pristine sky even in the height of summer and spreading to the point of completely blotting out the sun, is a perfectly normal feature of all aircraft. Only a very little investigation shows that none of them are CAA approved

I put it down to bad luck but when my Nokia ceased to function I finally bought an iPhone. One of the apps I downloaded was planefinder.net; as all ADS-B tracked commercial traffic was on there, with the known exception of the shorthaul Flybe fleet.  Apart from them, it’s only military aircraft which don’t show up.  This would be very useful as my day job is to run a database of both scheduled and charter flights, which we sell on to agents and operators. We think we have pretty well all the UK departing flights on there.

Planefinder: pretty comprehensive

When I’d try to match a comparative blue from the sky and found it messed up with swirling strings of white muck, I would get the planefinder app out to identify the culprit only to find not a single spray plane turned up on it.  A white jet would be directly overhead, spraying away, but no commercial air traffic was present on planefinder over a 15 mile radius. I double checked with Daniels of pinkfroot and he assured me, yes, all commercial traffic, private planes etc, would be on there, in real time. All of them bar FlyBe? YES, he said.

11 October: one of the last really warm days of 2012. This was the view overhead in the morning.  NATO states experience different rules of chemistry than other countries! Or is NATO air just different?

I started to watch them more closely, and read about the Appleman chart which shows conditions at which contrails form: this is a combination of pressure, relative humidity and temperature, all of which can vary by altitude.

Taken with an iPhone, April 16th 2013. Even the most ill-informed debunker will realise something is wrong here. The circled  inset is a genuine CAA approved flight on the same day a short time earlier, taken with the same iPhone and the same focus level, and overlaid with the chemtrails laid at the top (+10 min) and bottom (+30 min) to show identical scale and relative sizes.  No high altitude jet engine should produce great swirling, persistent clouds when ordinary CAA approved planes – using the same fuel and virtually identical engines – do not.

I also found a meteorological weather balloon site supplying these readings at all altitudes over Nottingham thus giving a very good idea of conditions over this area.  Even on the hottest days of the year, the sky was STILL criss-crossed with this weird, solid white muck from planes.  The white would turn to spidery trails which congealed with others to form a dull white mist over the entire sky.  If this was condensation, it was a radical and stubborn new form of it.

And this was the view on planefinder application. Hitchin is about 17 miles to the south, Northampton about 20 miles northwest, Cambridge the same distance northeast. You will observe there are no commercial planes at all anywhere in the vicinity

We had a river festival in July; perhaps 10,000 people wandering out by the river. The sky went from a glorious blue in the morning to a zig zag, criss cross of white muck and spidery smut from at least 50 concurrent trails, more simultaneous ones than I’ve ever seen before. Why would anyone be carrying out this activity on such a beautiful, hot day when so many people were outside enjoying the weather?

This was the view overhead by late afternoon. All the mess you see here, with the exception of some cumulus at the upper left edge, was hours-old trails from jets overhead, with fresh ones visibly being laid. The difference in size shows the colossal spread from a single, high density line.   Rather than dissipate as condensation would naturally do, these chemicals are highly persistent

So I checked the upper altitude readings and they were low minus 20′s – at least 15 degrees warmer than contrail air. At those temperatures contrails are impossible, not because I say so, but because of the laws of chemistry! Persistent, 6 hour white smuts are even more impossible than impossible, if such a thing could be.  Clearly these were chemicals. And strangely all the white smuts took the same shape and had the same persistence, on any and all days and altitudes, which you wouldn’t expect considering the huge variety of condensation dissipation and movement possible under all different conditions of air movement.

Just as a reminder, the image below is what a normal condensation trail looks like from a normal passenger jet, flying at about 17,000 feet.  Planes at 30,000 feet are very hard to spot unless they have some small condensation trail.

Normal passenger jet, around 17,000 feet, along with planefinder.net readounts. All pictures, including screenshots, were captured onsite using an iPhone.

These condensation trails cannot persist except under simultaneous conditions of very low temperatures and very high humidity at that altitude. There are some who, afflicted perhaps with “metabunk syndrome” (the psychological flaw requiring them to repeat verbatim everything which their government prints on paper, or recites into a microphone) deliberately confuse massive swathes of all-day chemicals so solid they cast shadows and resist even the dispersal effect of the wind, with tiny, localised conditions of frozen condensation.

These are photos taken from my garden, the left ones about 2 hours prior to the ones on the right. Top left, an EasyJet flight to East Midlands from France, and below, a Lufthansa flight in the same direction, photographed from a different angle to show the moon; you can just make out the orange livery of the EZ flight. On the right, you have the colossal stream of characteristic twists, which all behave identically and resist dissipation, lingering and spreading out over quite extraordinary distances for frozen water in relatively warm sunshine.

That the trails observed over Bedford were all identical, regardless of varying temperature, relative humidity, natural cloud cover, time of day, plane direction, season or altitude can only mean their chemical composition imposes itself on the surrounding air, and not the other way around.

Knowing the altitude of BA and AF jets from planefinder’s readouts to be 30,000 feet (9144 metres) and that they look roughly a third the size of spray jets and seem to move at a much slower speed relative to the ground, the spray planes must be operating much lower, perhaps around 20,000 feet, which on the day in question, had a temparature of -20.7C.

Here’s the Appleman chart, showing that permanent contrails were impossible that day whether at 20,000 or 30,000 feet. At 30,000′ the pressure was 304 and relative humidity 23%. But at 20,000 feet the temperature was only -21.5C with 30% relative humidity. The commercial planes at intervals throughout the day left at most a tiny white comma, and many times not even that: the trails were just not there.  The only trails were left by jets which did not show up as civilian, commercial or private traffic.  This conclusion isn’t open to debate, and it isn’t a theory – it is a fact which can be verified by anyone with an iPhone and at least one eye, and the ability to tilt the head skyward.

On consecutive days I measured the weather and noted commercial air traffic on our database (for example 468 Luton flights compared to 465 the previous day, 379 against 385 from Stansted) when the skies seemed identical in the first hours of morning at 07:30. On one, the sky would be a pristine blue with the odd AF or BA jet leaving a minuscule white exclamation mark at 30,000 feet as shown on planefinder.

On the other, the sky would be filled from horizon to horizon with a grid of disgusting white muck.  Having lived on the flight path to Heathrow in the 1960′s, and the flight path to Gatwick in the 1980′s, and having often travelled to Gatwick in the 1990′s to carry out work for tour operators I wrote software for, I can assure you the ugly smuts were never seen then, no matter the air traffic or time of year.

One last piece of evidence is a whistleblower, an ex-sergeant named Kristen Meghan, who after ten years quit her USAF bio-environmental engineering job in disgust when she found that attempting to warn colleagues they were being exposed to hazardous chemicals sprayed from USAF jets would get her 220 days in a military jail without interview.  The video is only about 14 minutes long, but it gives an idea of the anger which the governent’s increasing appearance as a military dictatorship generates even in its own employees.

Even those with advanced Metabunk Syndrome – the need to mindlessly defend anything which the government writes on a piece of paper or reads into a microphone – will have a hard time dismissing Meghan’s inside story of hazardous chemicals sprayed from USAF jets

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

An adjoining day with virtually identical air traffic and temperatures

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about geoengineering, the idea of dumping reflective aerosols at high altitudes from planes, to reflect sunlight away from the planet.  The engine mods are nil even if these aerosols are added to the fuel (as shown on the Disocvery Channel) because the only effect of the particles is to clean the turbines; the material must actually be injected into the exhaust stream because many witnesses, myself included, have seen rapid bursts of chemicals twisting in the wind, left hanging in the air, as if tubes were being flushed out at the end of their run.  Another common sight is the switch on, switch off of chemical trails, so that a completely clean jetstream is immediately followed by a clogging spray of chemicals.

Previous form:

FOI requests confirmed that in the 50′s and 60′s, cities across America were sprayed with radioactive zinc cadmium sulfide to see how many cancers would result. In St Louis, rooftop pumps saturated the Prewett Eigel Housing Complex – selected as it was home to 10,000 people, 7,000 of which were children under 12: the ideal way to test how deadly the long term effects would be.

Details in declassified papers reveal the proposed response to patients presenting themselves with radiation sickness.  US Radium was the American company linked to the experiment; they were the subjct of dozens of lawsuits after producing a radioactive fluorescent paint which killed many women handling it when embellishing watch faces.  This was the ideal substance for the military to add to their sprays; their experiments would certainly have impressed the notorious scientist Josef Mengeles.

The military used planes to spray the toxic chemicals in Texas, while using pumps on rooftops or mobile flat beds around St Louis.  The official line now? “That was a long time ago.. it’s time to move on.. it would be inappropriate to comment.”  Just to be on the safe side and obliterate evidence, the government then demolished the same St Louis housing complex they had been spraying morning, noon and night.

Combined with some form of chemical filament, the highly reflective alumina particles remain aloft for hours because of air currents and variations in atmospheric pressures.  The idea came from observing the effects of the Mt Pinatubo eruption, after which there was a decrease in temperatures around the world as the massive cloud blocked the sunlight.  Foremost among the expectant scientific types recommending money be put their way are David Keith from the University of Calgary, and Ken Caldeira, backed by Carnegie Mellon.

There’s clearly a lot of money at stake despite the whole project being dubbed “reasonably priced” at around £5 bn per year.  May I say, as a taxpayer, how delighted I am to be funding the desecration of our skies and the injection of chemicals into our breating apparatus.  Money well spent, I feel certain!  Lots of consultancy funds can be found in this gravy train, and for a scientist, these chances to get a long stretch of paid research by big institutions don’t come along every day.

Especially bearing in mind how science has taken some massive blows to its credibility recently.  Sir John Beddington easily became the most derided geek in history when he gave a seminar to MPs that Fukushima was a storm in a teapot.  The same day the MPs dutifully disseminated this advice, the reactor exploded and thousands fled for their lives.  Workers volunteered to commit suicide attempting to put the fires out, and managers scrambled to hide the fact that reactor waste had been carelessly overstacked, to save a bit of money off the bottom line.  Beddington, unperturbed, looked up briefly from his microscope and said Britain had nothing to worry about – the worst thing that could happen would be a few thousand children dying of cancer, mainly confined to Japan – so who really cares?  It’s not our problem  – calm down dear!  Knowing his reputation now rendered him useless, cooler heads kept this brilliant scientist out of sight ever since.

25 Jul 2011: the town of Namie was completely abandoned after Beddington declared the disaster a trifle of no concern. His inability to form a cohesive picture of an utter disaster revealed a leading scientist as a dangerous imbecile. An area of 4,000 square miles still needs to be decontaminated – an impossibility; evacuated residents will never see their homes again.  Meh – so what? seemed to say the Chief Scientist

The GM experiment has shown that toxin-producing DNA stuffed into crops now lives in our gut thanks to horizontal DNA transfer, something strictly forbidden by Darwin but carried out by bloody-minded bacteria who refuse to read his books on vertical inheritance.  The heavily white lab-coated chemo industry is under fire, as doctors have admitted they’d never allow their family to suffer it, because it seems to actually spread cancer cells throughout the body while killing the patient off in a miserable, lingering death.  The steadily growing awareness that fruit and seeds contain much stronger cancer-killing machinery than science could ever imagine producing has also tended to put the boot in rather swiftly and firmly.

Even the Washington Post had to report the huge rise in protests against the appointment of former Monsanto executive Michael Taylor as Obama’s senior adviser to the FDA. They created a new position for him to decide what went on food labels – very useful for Monsanto, whose scientists thought it a brilliant idea to create corn that manufactured neurotoxins in every cell. The great part was it created indestructible weeds and bugs, but was sold to humans – as long as the labels didn’t let on! Scientists start to look like highly dangerous lunatics

To all this we should add the discovery in 2012 that most of our genes are not “junk DNA” after all, a weird Darwinist idea pushed by scientists and based on the vestigial organs.  The same vestigial idea applied to tonsils and appendices, and as a result they were whipped out at every turn by surgeons dismissive of Nature’s sloppy engineering – only to find quite recently they were, respectively, a first line of immune defence, and a bacterial farm essential for digestion.  Their absence causes serious problems for the hapless victim, but no concern to the white coat brigade eagerly in search of fresh opportunities to display their ravishing skills.

The junk DNA gibberish was touted by Richard Dawkins to support the idea of a random creation – after all, what self-respecting Creator would burden a genome with 95% garbage to be faithfully duplicated at vast costs of energy by the work-weary cells? Creationists should note “..95% of the genome may as well not be there, for all the good it does.. the genome is littered with discarded genes that never worked, and never will.. 95% of the genome is nothing but useless junk.”

But when the discovery was made last year that this Darwinian scrapyard was actually a stupendous arrangement of switches, spare components, templates and toolkits, instead of apologising unreservedly for the ignorant slur on biological engineering, in debate with Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks Dawkins triumphantly announced it was exactly what a Darwinist would expect.  Of course it was.  Why, they probably knew it all along!

Strontium, barium, magnesium and aluminum? To David Keith, poisoning the planet is nothing to worry about – our grandkids can try and clear up the mess!

Be all that as it may, at a recent conference on geoengineering Keith welcomes further oprobium on the heads of micro-focused scientists by exposing his own – far from uncharacteristic – reckless personality.  When questioned about the morality of dumping ten million tons of aluminum patricles into the stratosphere without having done any toxicology studies, and without bothering to read the ones already done which reveal that 10 micron particles of aluminum are extremely dangerous to human health, he grinned and shrugged:

“I don’t see it as a moral issue.. it’s more like freeriding on our grandkids.”

I’ve been in touch with Ken Caldeira and David Keith and they have nothing to say about chemtrails at all: they say their geoengineering would look more diffused, being at higher altitudes, and they swear it isn’t them.  Like many intellectuals, they live in a bubble, think in a bubble, work in a bubble, and focus on whatever is on the tip of their nose: unconcerned about the sensibilities of people who see something seriously amiss in the skies – and failing to see that whether responsible or not, the inevitable exposé will wreck their own credibility – they casually waft away the danger posed by injecting 10 megatons of 10 micron particles into our lungs. After all, what interests them is the science.  Now, that is fascinating. All else, including the devastation of the planet on which they live, is a trifle of no concern.

Pounds, Shillings and Sense

I noticed a very odd phenomenon recently, and that is the appearance of shills.  The word, bandied about by bloggers, puzzled me until I understood that a shill is a person usually without any personal backstory and no credible web identity.  They spend virtually all their time online “debunking” the ideas of activists trying to draw the public’s attention to strange phenomena such as chemtrails, or massive concrete and steel buildings collapsing without any apparent cause, but being blamed on bogeymen – that is to say, invisible, super-powered terrorists.

One particularly noxious individual on YouTube claimed it “proven” that an aircraft had hit the Pentagon’s accounting offices on 9/11, when the hole was not quite that of a garage door.  When I asked why the Pentagon had failed to release any photos from around 86 cameras, plus cameras over the motorway, plus local hotel cameras which could easily have shown a colossal aircraft a few yards away to shut everyone up, he simply said, “it’s been proven.”  Asked how the Pentagon could have produced the DNA (which denatures at about 60C) from all passengers (excepting a four year old child – nobody’s perfect!) if the plane had vaporised, as claimed, in what must have been a 3000C fireball.  But if the plane had vaporised on impact, how did another hole appear three concrete layers deeper in the Pentagon? And if the plane really did fly at ground level at 500 mph, why didn’t the ground effect suck the wings into the ground, when the lawn directly beside the tiny hole remained unscathed? “It’s all been proven,” he limply replied.

I later found out, through his own admission on a separate site, that he had been sectioned for a psychological disturbance and had been given the task of “debunking” to secure an earlier release.  In due course his profile disappeared, to be followed by another in which the same coarse grammar and the same debunking claims were bandied about, with the same obnoxious, and yet ignorant, manner.

Having made a few observations about chemtrails in the online world, I was intrigued to see the appearance last week of one Michael Vargas on twitter, denouncing me as a crazed conspiracy nut.  Every attempt to introduce credible scientific evidence was met with a hail of sneering, caustic abuse.  Having dealt with militant atheists I was used to this, but ever curious, I read through around a hundred of his most recent tweets and found every single one devoted to denouncing chemtrail activists.

Ever the opportunist, I contacted all his opponents and managed to widen my activist circle by about a dozen goodnatured people, all of whom had credible evidence of some kind of geoengineering activity directly over their heads, something apparently common to all NATO countries.  Some had rainwater samples showing thousands of times higher readings of barium and aluminum than was deemed safe, and one had even registered radioactive snow, using a geiger counter which ticked merrily away.

Perfect for spray days and holy days! The KC30 and KC135 in Meghan’s spray ops resemble commercial aircraft, and for good reason – they’re all made by Boeing

But reading Vargas’ “blog” I saw it had ceased being updated somewhere in 2011; apart from information about a VW camper for sale, it offered marketing scam after marketing scam, from pet food wholesaling to retail investment expertise.  The writing was also curious: although purportedly by an individual, it seemed generated by a corporation, something easily discerned after a few paragraphs.  On Vargas’ twitter account there were no personal photos, no identifying information of any kind.

So I was fascinated to read about the experiences of a paid shill who found himself unable to continue a lifestyle based on deception, understandably so as the normal mind prefers truth to lies, and even the most dishonest individuals eventually find a way to unburden themselves of past deceits.  There are those who make good money from debunking sites – easily detected by their mindless parroting of everything the government either writes on a piece of paper or recites into a microphone, from fluoride to 9/11.  The question is, who is paying for all this debunking?  Follow the money, and you’ll have your answer.

But these shill sites rely on ignorance, and their credibility is severely dented by the unexpected appearance of individuals such as Kristen Meghan the former USAF biologist (see photo, above).  Initially skeptical of chemtrails, she noticed that unmarked planes laying massive white smuts overhead were identical to the refitted, white-sprayed KC30 and KC135 on her base.  Part of her job was to sign for canisters whose material data hazard sheets revealed carcinogenic metals, oxides and powders.  Her suspicions were confirmed when soil samples from her back yard located on the flightline, revealed sky high levels of the same materials.  It doesn’t take a Nobel Prize winner to figure out what was happening, and that NATO was a part of it.  “When people deny chemtrails,” she said in one radio interview, “I just laugh. You can show some people the actual evidence and they still won’t believe you.”

Whatever is going on, is being done with our money: the difficulty is not just getting people to think critically about what they see in the skies – it’s also in getting them to look up.

London, August 16th 2012 – the hottest day of the year! The Mayor of London’s office replied to my query with: “we can’t stop planes flying overhead” .  I wonder, can even politicians be this ignorant, or are they simply running out of excuses?