Pop quiz:
If your answer is to any of these is “yes” you may be surprised to learn you’ve been misinformed, and a conference being held at CMU is just what you need.
Woohoo! The Allegheny County Council has passed a ban on smoking in public buildings (Fedora Tip: The Burgh Blog )! I guess smokers will have to find another way to get their fix away from home . 😉
Addendum: I keep hearing that it's not the government's job to protect us from harmful substances. Really? Then what's the point of the FDA?
"The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere." – Abraham Lncoln
I'd argue that addiction weakens the will sufficiently that individuals lose the ability, partialy or totally, to protect themselves.
Update: Just hours after the county passed the ban, the PA state senate exempted casinos from all smoking bans . What a crock of $#*%! Now the county ban is in jeopardy. Why do casinos deserve preferential treatment over bars and restaurants? Stupid greedy politicians. I guess now there's another reason to sweep more incumbents out .
Arlen Specter reamed out Advanced Cell Technologies scientist Rober Lanza for their hype about having found a way to non-lethally harvest embryonic stem cells. As you may have heard, this development was only theoretical, as all of the embryos were destroyed so all their cells could be harvested and the chances of getting viable embryonic stem cells would be optimized. And since the success rate was two percent, "optimized" is very relative. We therefore cannot say that we have a non-lethal (let alone non-harmful) method of harvesting human embryonic stem cells (hESCs).
At first, ACT was only guilty of hype, which it has done before, but now folks on the web are calling out Lanza for having left out some critical details: when the AJOB blog, which is very pro-embryonic research, has an entry called "Paging Dr. Hwang?", you know something juicy came out.
What folks now say is that ACT soaked the harvested cells (blastomeres, to be precise) in the same dish as the original embryo, providing some cellular signals that would help the harvested cells live and be viable embryonic stem cells. This doesn't nullify the ultimate premise of their research, but it's black eye for Nature and a further disgrace to ACT. Perhaps ACT wanted this technique for themselves, and while they wanted the hype of a Nature article, they didn't want competitors replicating those results.
(HT: Wesley Smith, who has posted half a dozen entries on this topic. You'd be well-served to read his and AJOB Blog's many fine points about this issue, particularly AJOB's entry on the "Kevorkianization of Stem Cell Research"–I'll even forgiven them for conflating all stem cell research with embryonic stem cell research…this time. 😉 )
September 11, 2001 was indeed a sad and tragic day that will haunt Americans for years to come. I mourn the loss of life and my heart goes out to those who lost loved ones. However, I cannot and will not jump on the rah-rah "Let's Roll" bandwagon of melodrama mixed with hawkish propaganda.
If the lives of ~3000 who died at the hands of terrorist scum mean so much to us, why aren't we doing anything in Darfur, Sudan where tens – perhaps even hundreds – of thousands of people have died, are dying, and will die at the hands of genocidal scum? If we're so gung-ho about kicking Evil's ass, why didn't we do it in Congo , where millions died – not by a swift crash, explosion, or building collapse, but by starvation?
Before we get all Toby Keith about 9/11 again, let's have a reality check and decide whether America's innocents are more important to protect than any other country's.
Rob at UnSpace asks an interesting question. He wonders if the following quote from Dick Cheney clashes with just war theory.
“He’d done it [created WMD] before,†Cheney said. “He had produced chemical weapons before and used them. He had produced biological weapons. He had a robust nuclear program in ’91.â€
The U.S. invasion “was the right thing to do, and if we had to do it again, we would do exactly the same thing,†he said.
In other words, even if the intelligence had indicated no WMD, it would have been right to invade anyhow. As Rob points out, such a statement casts doubt on Bush’s sincerity when he claimed to be pursuing every diplomatic option to avoid war. Does it also make the way unjust? Did we have sufficient moral reason or obligation to depose Hussein? John Paul II didn’t seem to think so, even before the intelligence was found to be faulty. What do you think?