machine – mackaycartoons

Thursday September 22, 2016

September 21, 2016 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday September 22, 2016

Donald Trump Jr. Compares Syrian Refugees to Skittles That ‘Would Kill You’

Donald Trump Jr. is facing intense backlash on social media after he posted a message on Twitter Monday night that compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles sprinkled with a few that “would kill you.”

November 20, 2015

“This image says it all. Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first,” the post said.

Mr. Trump, a top adviser in his father’s presidential campaign, appeared to suggest that the nation was faced with a blind selection process in which a few potentially poisoned pieces would be lurking among the thousands of Syrians fleeing a brutal five-year-old civil war.

November 18, 2015

The post, shared widely on Twitter, drew swift condemnation and comparisons to white supremacist memes.

Social media users shared images of displaced residents in the region. President Obama’s chief speechwriter, Jon Favreau, invoked Omran Daqneesh, the bloodstained, dust-coated boy who was shown sitting in an ambulance after an airstrike and who became a symbol of the suffering in Aleppo, Syria.

July 22, 2016

The post also spurred a strong response from Wrigley, the owner of Skittles:

“Skittles are candy. Refugees are people. We don’t feel it’s an appropriate analogy. We will respectfully refrain from further commentary as anything we say could be misinterpreted as marketing,” the company said in a statement that was emailed on Tuesday by a spokeswoman and that initially appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. (Source: New York Times)

Saturday, September 16, 2006

September 16, 2006 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, September 16, 2006

Rare gene machine stirs Mac researcher

McMaster University took delivery of a very special package this week.

It contained what could well be described as a time machine — one with the power to create an exact picture of organisms and environments that existed long before recorded history.

The machine is a genome sequencer — one of fewer than 40 in the world and one of only two in Canada — and is capable of doing in hours what had until recently taken scientists years.

The sequencing machine, developed by Swiss giant Roche Diagnostics and introduced last October, is neither pretty nor cheap.

It is as plain as a large photocopier on a rolling stand, and it plugs into the wall like any common appliance. But at $750,000, it does much more than anything you’ll find at Office Depot.

Specifically, the genome sequencer reads and analyzes DNA bases, at a speed scientists had never previously imagined. A large mammal such as a human might have 2.8 billion base pairings. (Hamilton Spectator)