Large Alaska earthquake jolts residents, shakes buildings

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A 6.6 magnitude earthquake has rocked buildings in Anchorage and caused lamp posts and trees to sway, prompting people to run out of offices and seek shelter under office desks.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the earthquake Friday morning was centered about 7 miles north of Alaska's largest city.

An Associated Press reporter working in downtown Anchorage saw cracks in a 2-storey building after the quake. It was unclear whether there were injuries.

People went back inside buildings after the earthquake but a smaller aftershock a short time later sent them running back into the streets again.

https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/1068561009453891584

https://www.foxnews.com/us/large-alaska-earthquake-jolts-residents-shakes-buildings

Now a 7.0

>>4086948

do not ever tag me again u shitface

BREAKING: Video of Anchorage, Alaska earthquake aftermath:

>>4087004

No. WE WIN. I AM NOT MAD. I AM ENERGIZED FOR THE FINISH AND UR MY DANGLING DINGLEBERRY that's about to be ripped off my ass hairs

https://www.uscis.gov/news/alerts/uscis-issuing-biometric-appointment-notices-domestic-n-565-and-n-600-applicants

US BIOTECH FIRMS MADE CHINA'S GENE-EDITED BABIES POSSIBLE

IN 2015, THE 12-person organizing committee of the first International Summit on Human Gene Editing—which included Crispr co-inventors Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier—issued a statement on how the world should responsibly push forward the science of permanently altering the DNA of Homo sapiens. Combined with other changes that had sprung biology free from the ivory tower, the concern was that someone with a modicum of expertise would go rogue and start a Crispr-It-Yourself baby project.

Only three years later, we now know that someone is named He Jiankui. On Wednesday, the Chinese-born, American-trained scientist shared details of the first such experiment, in which He claims to have Crispr’d a pair of twin girls and implanted one additional edited embryo in a woman’s womb. The news was met with nearly universal condemnation from the world’s scientists. Chinese government authorities ordered an investigation, calling it a brazen violation of Chinese law and a breach of an ethical bottom line, “which is both shocking and unacceptable.”

On top of all these alleged transgressions, He may have committed one more: the unauthorized use of Crispr components intended only for research purposes. According to the consent form he gave to potential parents, He’s team was using materials purchased from two American biotechnology companies to make edits to human embryos bound for implantation. The documents named Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific as the supplier of Cas9—the bacterial protein that clamps onto DNA and delivers a double-stranded slice—and Bay Area startup Synthego as the maker of its synthetic guide RNA. If gene editing were a butcher shop, Thermo Fisher would craft the knives and Synthego would instruct on which cuts to make.

He may have spent the last two years working in secret, but he hasn’t been working in a void. American Crispr companies, many of them founded or advised by the field’s biggest stars, have also been hard at work to lower the costs and labor associated with gene editing. Their mission is to make Crispr accessible to everyone. And now they’re getting a lesson in what democratization of that technology really looks like.

“The difficult thing is that when materials leave our hands and they’re in someone else’s hands, there’s no way of ultimately controlling it,” says Paul Dabrowski, who co-founded Synthego in 2012 with his brother Michael. Back then, Doudna and Charpentier, along with fellow gene editing pioneer Feng Zhang, had just introduced the world to what was possible with Crispr—faster and easier genome manipulation than ever before. But Silicon Valley technologists like the Dabrowskis (who formerly worked as rocket engineers at SpaceX) looked at all that micropipetting and lines of hand-typed genetic code and saw an opportunity to go even faster.

They started Synthego to bring the best of Moore’s Law—miniaturization, automation, parallelization—to gene editing. By adding in some slick software and artificially intelligent design, Synthego made ordering Crispr constructs to target any human gene a matter of a few clicks, a few hundred dollars, and waiting for the FedEx driver to show up at your door.

https://www.wired.com/story/us-biotech-firms-made-chinese-crispr-babies-possible/?__twitter_impression=true&mbid=social_twitter&utm_brand=wired&utm_campaign=wired&utm_medium=social&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter

Kunstler Exposes The Dire Quandaries Of The Deep State

Watergate had tragic Shakespearean overtones, with Nixon as King Lear, but Russia-Gate - perhaps the last gate America goes through on its giant slalom run to collapse - is but a Chinese Fire Drill writ large.

The reason? In 1973, we were still a serious people. Today, the most lavishly credentialed elite in history believe the most preposterous “stories,” or, surely even worse, pretend to believe them for political advantage.

Now, an epic battle of wills is setting up as Robert Mueller’s investigation concludes its business and its primary target, the Golden Golem of Greatness, girds his loins to push back. Behind the flimsy scrim of Russia collusion accusations stands a bewildering maze of criminal mischief by a matrix of federal agencies that lost control of their own dark operation to meddle in the 2016 election.

The US intel community (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc), with the Department of Justice, all colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the intel agencies of the UK and Australia, to derail Mr. Trump as a stooge of Russia and, when he shocked them by getting elected, mounted a desperate campaign to cover their asses knowing he had become their boss.

The Obama White House was involved in all this, attempting to cloak itself in plausible deniability, which may be unwinding now, too. How might all this play out from here?

One big mystery is how long will Mr. Trump wait to declassify any number of secret files, memoranda, and communications that he’s been sitting on for months.

My guess is that this stuff amounts to a potent weapon against his adversaries and he will wait until Mr. Mueller releases a final report before declassifying it. Then, we’ll have a fine constitutional crisis as the two sides vie for some sort of adjudication.

Who, for instance, will adjudicate the monkey business that is already on-the-record involving misdeeds in the Department of Justice itself? Will the DOJ split into two contesting camps, each charging the other? How might that work? Does the Acting Attorney General Mr. Whitaker seek indictments against figures such as Bruce Ohr, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, et al. Will he also rope in intel cowboys John Brennan and James Clapper? Might Hillary find herself in jeopardy — all the while on the other side Mr. Mueller pursues his targets, characters like Mr. Manafort, Michael Cohen, and the hapless Carter Page?

Or might Mr. Mueller, and others, possibly find themselves in trouble, as spearheads of a bad-faith campaign to weaponize government agencies against a sitting president? That might sound outlandish, but the evidence is adding up. In fact the evidence of a Deep State gone rogue is far more compelling than any charges Mr. Mueller has so far produced on Trump-Russia “collusion.” An example of bad faith is former FBI Director James Comey’s current campaign to avoid testifying in closed session before the House Judiciary and Oversight committees — he filed a motion just before Thanksgiving. Mr. Comey is pretending that an open session would be “transparent.” His claim is mendacious. If he were questioned about classified matters in an open session, he would do exactly what he did before in open session: decline to answer about “sensitive” matters on the basis of national security. He could make no such claims in a closed session. The truth is, his attorneys are trying to run out the clock on the current composition of the house committees, which will come under a Democrat majority in January, so that Mr. Comey can avoid testifying altogether.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-30/kunstler-exposes-dire-quandaries-deep-state