Oregon, My Oregon

 PJM's Vicky Taft on  Portland's Predictable Doom Loop

The people elected and selected to run Portland, Oregon, are like kids who get their first car and never think to change the oil. The city is led by a cadre of ardent leftists who thought they could just rev the engine, ignore maintenance, and see the city magically run itself. Instead, they’ve driven the City of Roses into a Doom Loop.

At one time not so long ago, Portland leaders turned the sleepy town into a progressive hub for the creative class, spending billions on 19th-century light rail Choo Choo trains to convey bus riders to their planned utopia. The more the plans failed, the more the planners planned, as Ronald Reagan once said. Because of the hard hand of the planner class, a corrupt system of regulatory capture, and the certitude of those who know better than we do how to run our lives, Portland leaders never really stopped to consider if anyone wanted what they were selling. They went on blithely singing kumbaya and giddily handed the match to the activist left, which lit the Molotov cocktail that sparked the city’s self-immolation.

Now these leaders have regulated, locked down, and scared away a third of the downtown office buildings. When San Francisco hit this marker it was called a “doom loop.”

“Referred to as ‘death lists’ among real estate professionals, the documents outline properties that are economically unsustainable,” according to The Real Deal. These buildings are troubled assets that are in danger of defaulting on loans and handing them over to the bank.

And then, what happens to the bank? They can't sell a property that's economically unsustainable. Eventually, the banks won't do business. 

Willamette Week, the city’s lefty weekly, which did the digging to find out how bad this problem is, concludes that Portland is worse off than other Democrat cities on the doom loop roller coaster because of its Antifa and BLM riots.

The question—and it’s a contentious one—is whether Portland is worse than any place else because of blight. Plywood that went up during the 2020 protests still obscures some downtown storefronts. Homeless camps that took root during the pandemic are only now being removed. On some downtown blocks, you’re just as likely to see someone smoking fentanyl as sipping a Frappuccino.

Well, there's always Baltimore. It's well past Portland on the path of urban decay, and no one is expecting urban revival any time soon. And they keep electing the same old same old.

The question is only contentious in the leftist echo chamber. For the rest of the country, we saw what you did there, Portland.

The unfortunately named Tina Kotek, Oregon’s governor, has convened a blue ribbon panel of all the same lefty friends, NGOs, quasi-governmental groups, and favored business owners to fix the problem they spent years cheerleading.

Doubling down on bad ideas. It's too bad the people of Portland vote poorly. 

Can Lizard Blood Save Our Lives?

It's doubtful, but: The Blood of Komodo Dragons Could Help Us to Slay Antibiotic Resistance

Protein fragments in the blood of Komodo dragons have antimicrobial properties that help them resist toxic bacteria, and they could be used to develop new drugs to counter antibiotic resistance, researchers have found.

The Komodo dragon is the world's largest lizard, growing up to 3 metres (9.8 feet) in length and weighing up to 70 kilograms (154 lbs). It lives on five small islands in Indonesia, where its massive size and sharp teeth enable it to feast on prey as large as water buffalo – but there's another, less obvious reason why you definitely don't want to get bitten by one.

Previous research has found that the mouths of Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis) contain up to 57 kinds of dangerous bacteria.

It's not entirely clear, where this bacteria come from. More recently, scientists have suggested that it stems from Komodo dragons drinking from sewage-contaminated water sources.

Well, they do eat a lot of rotten meat, since their method of killing big prey involves biting it, and letting the bacteria (and the venom they have) give the prey a bad infection. Given such a method of feeding, it would be important to be relatively immune to infection by the bacteria in your prey.

Now researchers have figured out how these lizards became resistant to having such deadly bugs in their mouths.

A team from George Mason University took blood from Komodo dragons, and analysed it to see if they could find traces of what's called cationic antimicrobial peptides (CAMPs).

These protein fragments are produced by nearly all living creatures, and work as an essential part of our innate immune system. Previous research by the team in 2015 had identified these peptides in alligator blood.

Gators aren't particularly closely related to the dragons, each representing very different branches of the reptilian lines. How far does this spread?

"It's that part of your immune system that keeps you alive in the two or three weeks before you can make antibodies to a bacterial infection," biochemist Monique van Hoek said at the time.

"It's part of your generalised immune response to the world."

So this is not really novel to Komodo Dragons, although it may well be better developed in some reptiles.

The team synthesised eight of these peptides, and tested them against two particularly nasty kinds of bacteria that have been labelled 'superbugs': Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus aureus, aka MRSA.

Of the eight synthesised peptides, seven were effective at killing both bacteria in lab-grown cultures, while one was only effective against P. aeruginosa.

I suspect Komodo Dragons make very poor experimental test animals. Even if a reptile is useful in research, perhaps a less obnoxious species could be used.

Linked at Pirate's Cove in the weekly "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup" and links. Wombat-socho has "Rule 5 Sunday: Massachusetts Girl" ready at The Other McCain.

Soldier Died of Antibiotic Resistant Dysentary

Back in 1915, before the invention of antibiotics

Scientists who unlocked the genetic code of bacteria grown from a soldier who died of dysentery in World War I say it revealed a superbug already resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics decades before they were in common use.

The discovery sheds light on the history of antibiotic resistance - now a global health threat. It also offers fresh clues on how to tackle dysentery, a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of children every year in developing countries.

'Even before the description and widespread use of penicillin, this bacterium was resistant to it,' said Kate Baker of Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who worked on the research with colleagues at Public Health England (PHE).

Researchers focused on a bacterial sample retrieved from the British soldier - Private Ernest Cable of the East Surrey Regiment - who died in March of 1915.

Dysentery is a life-threatening disease that is becoming increasingly hard to treat due to its growing ability to evade antibiotic treatment.

It was rife in the trenches during World War I, and still spreads now in unsanitary conditions in poor countries and in conflict zones.

This is less surprising than it sounds. Most antibiotics are natural products produced by fungi or bacteria to inhibit the growth of bacteria that compete with them for substrates or actually infect them. Therefore, bacteria have been intermittently exposed to antibiotics since, well who knows; probably millions if not billions of years, and it's not shocking that many strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria are found in nature. The microorganisms have been conducting chemical war on each other down through evolutionary time.

This does not mean we don't have to worry about accelerating the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria with profligate use of man made antibiotics; quite the opposite, it means the seeds of antibiotic resistance are widely spread in nature, and ready to spring into the gap when antibiotics are used to kill their nonresistant kin.