RUTHFULLY YOURS

The chaos in Charlottesville is about two groups of fascists taunting each other in the public square and fighting it out
If President Trump called out each right-wing bigot that invaded Charlottesville, it would not be enough. Some obsessive Trump antagonist standing behind the arc of Klieg lights while holding a microphone would find that somehow, somewhere, he had left out something.

If there is anything we can agree on, say liberal pundits, it is that fascism is evil, and Trump should have rushed to condemn them after the vehicular assault on demonstrators.

James Fields, the alleged perpetrator of the vehicular assault in Charleston, is identified as a white nationalist but belonged to no group. Moreover, he seems to be mentally ill.

The Army discharged Fields after a few months in a manner that bespeaks mental problems — but let’s not raise that issue. It will prevent us from feeling sanctimonious about condemning the right.

We most certainly would not want to put Fields in the same category as Major Nidal Hassan, He committed that act of workplace violence at Fort Hood, slaughtering fellow soldiers while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

When former attorney general Eric Holder jumped into the discussion of the Charlottesville vehicular killing, calling it terrorism, he was summarily mocked for his contrasting depiction of Hassan as merely a perpetrator of workplace violence. The hypocrisy was palpable.

Of course, nearly everyone wants Trump to condemn only the right. Far be it for us to examine the politics of the left.

If we think of fascism as a system of authoritarian rule, the suppression of basic liberties, a belief system organized around hatred for the “other” and the inevitability and glory of war (or violence) as a solution to political problems, there were a lot of candidates for the label in the streets of Charlottesville. Some of them were most definitely from the left.

If we can all agree that fascists should be condemned, let’s not stop with the neo-Nazis and white nationalists, let’s demand that the President condemn all the fascists.

The American Jewish Committee has called on President Trump to condemn the far-right groups in Charlottesville. Let us disabuse them of the idea that only the far right is anti-Semitic. One thing nearly every one of the major groups in the street shared is their antipathy toward Jews.

Yet the AJC depicted the events in Charleston as a conflict between the voices of hate and those who chose to stop hate in its tracks. We wonder if the AJC bothers to read the news or just dreams up this material. Since when are Black Lives Matter and Antifa concerned about stopping hate, especially hatred against Jews?

While progressive Jews were being warriors for social justice and the causes of others, the far left and their Muslim allies were building intersectionality, whose very foundation is anti-Semitism. Intersectionality singles out the world’s only Jewish state as a source of oppression and the denial of human rights. Not only is the characterization mindless, but every Muslim state busy stoning gays and female rape victims is given a pass.

That’s why Jews and Jewish symbols were bluewashed from Chicago’s Dyke March and Jews were found to be of insufficient virtue to participate in the city’s Slut Walk.

First there was the Civil War, which ended in 1865, and then there was the postwar era of Reconstruction, which is generally said to have ended in 1877. The war concluded with the surrender of the Confederate armies, but there’s a real sense in which Reconstruction is still a work in progress. And if the Charlottesville confrontation is any measure, Reconstruction won’t be over soon.

Civil War historians enjoyed four tremendous years between 2011 and 2015, when almost every day was the occasion for some Civil War sesquicentennial event. But so far no similar celebrations have followed to mark the sesquicentennials of Reconstruction.

One reason for this is that Reconstruction simply doesn’t have the cinematic fizz of Pickett’s Charge or Appomattox. But far worse is the sense that the Reconstruction years were somehow one long, uninterrupted botch. White Southerners denounced Reconstruction as the imposition of corrupt Northern rule by bayonet. White Northerners grew tired of paying the costs and wanted an exit strategy. Southern blacks, newly freed from slavery, stood for a brief moment in the sunshine of freedom, casting their first votes and owning their own property, until they were dragged into the new bondage of segregation.

A better question to ask is whether Reconstruction could have turned out differently. There is a deep temptation to blame the entire mess on white racism and wonder why Americans in the 1860s couldn’t have shown the same gumption in tackling race issues that Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy did a century later. But race was only one of several obstacles in Reconstruction’s path, and the others were enough to make even the flintiest pessimist weep.

The first obstacle to a different Reconstruction was economic. The Civil War clobbered the Southern economy, costing the South $13.6 billion (U.S. national debt at the end of the war was $2.7 billion). Abolishing slavery alone wiped out between $1.6 billion and $2.7 billion in capital investment. But the South still produced the finest species of the world’s most marketable commodity, cotton, and cotton swiftly returned to its old prewar profitability. So did the prewar owners of the land on which it grew.

In an area known as the “black belt” in western Alabama, 236 landowners possessed at least $10,000 in real estate in 1860; by 1870, 101 of those same landowners still owned that land. This was about the same rate of persistence that had prevailed before the war.

Radical Republicans hoped the war would allow them to end not only slavery but the entire plantation system, and replace it with New England-style capitalism, characterized by manufacturing, finance and small-scale commercial farming. They understood that confiscating and subdividing the plantations of Confederate leaders as traitors was the only way to break the stranglehold of the South’s feudal elite. But the Constitution prohibits permanent property confiscation—“bills of attainder”—even in cases of treason. The war ended, the old masters came back, and the master class spent freely in organizing restless whites to suppress black votes. The labor system changed—but only from slavery to serfdom. CONTINUE AT SITE

When Ben Franklin proposed in 1749 what eventually became the University of Pennsylvania, he called for an academy to teach “those Things that are likely to be most useful.” Today the university lays claim to having incubated the world’s biggest cancer breakthrough. In 2011, a team of researchers led by immunologist Carl June, a Penn professor, reported stunning results after genetically altering the T-cells of three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a cancer that affects white blood cells.

The patients had failed to respond to many different traditional therapies. Yet two of the three patients experienced miraculous recoveries after Dr. June and his team gave them infusions of their own doctored white blood cells. Seven years later they remain cancer-free. The third patient died after showing improvements, though might have been saved had the treatment begun earlier.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2011, opened the field of cancer immunotherapy. “It was a tipping point,” recalls the 64-year-old Dr. June. “There was an amazing outpouring because we showed for the first time that it could work.”

And it worked spectacularly well—more than 90% of pediatric patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in a subsequent clinical trial went into remission after being infused with Dr. June’s CAR T-cells (the acronym stands for “chimeric antigen receptor”). Last month an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration unanimously approved the therapy to treat acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The FDA is likely to give final approval within weeks.

Dr. June sat down at his office at Penn Medicine’s Smilow Center for Translational Research—near where then-Vice President Joe Biden launched the U.S. government’s cancer “moon shot” initiative in 2016—to discuss the development of CAR T-cell therapy, its potential to cure other cancers, and the challenges ahead—both scientific and regulatory.

“Cancer immunotherapy isn’t a new idea,” he says. “It’s been around for 100 years, but everybody has always snickered at it because it had always failed, and we didn’t understand the complexity.” Scientists once thought cancers were usually caused by viruses: “It wasn’t until the 1970s that we understood that most cancers are caused by mutations.”

Dr. June graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1975 and was trained as an oncologist. But while serving in the Navy Medical Corps, he studied infectious diseases. “My first research was with HIV,” he says. Later he would use the virus as a tool to treat patients.

The characteristic that makes HIV so deadly—it incorporates its DNA directly into host cells’—also makes it pliable for gene therapy. In the 1990s, Dr. June’s lab at Penn experimentally treated HIV patients using a re-engineered form of the virus. The researchers used modified HIV cells as a tool to alter the DNA of T-cells, which prevented the virus from replicating. Dr. June calls the cut-and-paste job “an anti-HIV molecular scissors.”

About 15 years ago he first considered using HIV to kill cancer cells. At the time, he says, “the rest of the community that did cancer immunotherapy had all been using viruses out of mice, called gammaretroviruses. And it turns out the HIV works better with human T-cells than the mouse virus does.”

Dr. June pauses for a quick tutorial on the human immune system: “There are two major cell types in our acquired immune systems that distinguish us from flies, and those are B-cells and T-cells.” T-cells are a sort of offensive weapon, destroying viruses and bacteria. B-cells are more like a shield. They produce antibodies that detect and swat down foreign invaders based on unique molecular characteristics. A CAR T-cell is a “chimera”—Greek for a fusion of two animals. It combines the “killing machinery” of T-cells with the precise antibody targeting of B-cells.

A CAR T-cell is designed to bind to a particular site on the cancer cell. That means, unlike with chemotherapy and radiation, other cells in the body aren’t damaged when patients receive CAR T-cell infusions. The result is fewer unpleasant long-term side effects.

When a CAR T-cell binds to the target, the immune system responds the same way it does to a virus: T-cells kill the cancerous cells and then proliferate. Once all the cancer is destroyed, CAR T-cells remain on what Dr. June calls “memory level”: “They are on surveillance, we now know, for at least seven years.”

There is, however, a hitch or two. After being cured, patients must receive blood infusions every few months to prevent their immune systems from killing off their B-cells. And about a third of patients undergoing treatment with CAR T-cells experience a violent immune-system reaction known as cytokine-release syndrome. When cancer cells die, they release inflammatory proteins called cytokines that can cause high fevers and leave patients comatose.

Cytokine-release syndrome almost ended the therapy in its infancy. In 2012, Dr. June’s first pediatric patient, 6-year-old Emma Whitehead, developed a 106-degree fever and experienced multiple organ failure. “We thought she was going to die,” he recalls.

The Permian Basin is a sedimentary basin largely contained in the western part of the U.S. state of Texas and the southeastern part of the U.S. state of New Mexico.

the experts in our industry have historically massively underestimated the resource potential.

Allen Gilmer, chairman and CEO of Drilling Info, speaks at the Hart Energy DUG Eagle Ford Shale conference in San Antonio, Texas. Photographer: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg

Allen Gilmer, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at DrillingInfo, Inc., is not a man who minces words, an attribute that has served him well during a long career in the oil and gas industry. When it comes to the Permian Basin and the amount of oil and gas resource contained in it, he becomes positively loquacious.

“We should view the Permian Basin as a permanent resource,” he says, “The Permian is best viewed as a near infinite resource – we will never produce the last drop of economic oil from the Basin.”

No one disputes that the resource in the Permian is huge, but ‘infinite’ is a big word. I asked him to expand on that concept. “That is the practical reality with the amount of resource that is in the ground,” he says, “The research we’ve done indicates that we have at least half a trillion barrels in the Permian at reasonable economics, and it could be as high as 2 trillion barrels. That is, as a practical matter, an infinite amount of resource, and it is something that has huge geopolitical consequence for the United States, in a very good way. It has a huge consequence in terms of GDP, and right now it is creating an American energy global ascendancy.”

Obviously, it is also a practical matter that the pace at which the industry produces the crude resource that underlies the Permian region in multiple formations will be constrained to some extent by commodity prices, costs, infrastructure and other potentially limiting factors. We have seen the Basin go into another boom over the last 12 months despite relatively low prices and, more recently, rapidly rising costs. Gilmer believes that infrastructure will be the most significant constraint going forward.

“The biggest thing that will get in the way of the Permian’s growing to its full potential is infrastructure,” he says, “I’m not sure you can really put any more trucks on that main highway [US 285] that goes up from Fort Stockton to Carlsbad.” He relates a story of a recent trip he and his wife took to Ruidoso, where his family has a home, and sitting at single highway intersection for more than 45 minutes because there was a mile-long backup of mostly oilfield service trucks trying to get through. “That used to be the back road I would take to go home to Ruidoso when I was a kid. Those roads can’t take that – you literally cannot put 50%, or even 20% more traffic on them. So we are reaching infrastructure limits in the basin.”

I had the idea for this interview when I saw Gilmer give a presentation at a conference in April, during which he discussed his view of the Permian, classifying it as America’s “Super Basin.” The data he presents to support his findings was stunning, and compelling. Gilmer says one of the main reasons he’s been giving a series of presentations this year was as a response to the current “Keep it in the Ground” movement coming from the anti-fossil fuel community.