I think we all know the answer to this question already, so I won't belabor the point, other then to refer you folks to this Cato report, which gives an excellent discussion about the risks of terrorism, and how they have been grossly inflated -- by politicians to garner our votes…
How red is the country, and how blue are we? Well, even in 2000, I wanted to see the colors of the states mixed, so we could see how purple each one was. Go here to see a variety of ways of looking at the red-blue situation from the 2004…
I’ve been thinking about this since the initial post on our biases and all the responses. In the course of trying to come up with an “appropriate” response to the world, we often find ourselves caught up in endless exception-making, fudging, attempts to shoehorn certain proclivities and habits into convenient moulds so we don’t go through our days constantly flinching at our inadvertant insensitivities.
Does it do any good? The flinching? I mean, after the Sixties, one had to have been living on Mars for half a century not to be aware that there had been a Big Shift away from what might be called Gross Cultural Reliance to a more nuanced approach which has been (often derisively) termed Political Correctness. The former is a condition wherein one “borrows” wholesale from the culture to make associational choices. It doesn’t occur in this instance to question the wisdom of the culture–it’s what it is, and we are part of it, ergo…
But we realized that the Culture At Large was in many ways an Idiot. It stepped on people. It made too little room for variation. It tried to be all things to all people, but it was necessary that all people somehow be The Same in order for that to work. Those with a vested interest in keeping everything the same mightily resisted movement to change the rules.
We never did come up with a solid formulation that allows for prejudice.
You have to, you know. What we ended up …
There wasn't any holding back here. Here's an excerpt from Mayor Rocky Anderson's speech: Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism. A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name…
As reported by the St. Louis Post Dispatch, conservatives got together for a large rally in St. Louis this week. One of the speakers, Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke, argued that it was “the legalized destruction of human life.” A radio executive chimed in: “Have you ever noticed that when the devil tries to sell you an evil idea, he usually wraps it in a lie?”
To what were they referring? The killing of “babies,” they argued. The speakers were arguing that a research procedure called “somatic cell nuclear transfer” (SCNT) was literally killing babies.
Never mind that the 5-day old babies they were talking about are microscopic clumps of cells (containing valuable stem cells). Never mind that they can’t really be considered individuals; they could still split into more than one baby (until 12 days of age) or they might not grow into any baby at all (“God” himself spontaneously aborts hundreds of thousands of these babies every year).
Donn Rubin, the chairman of the Missouri Coalition for Lifesaving Cures, the group promoting a ballot proposal promoting stem cell research in Missouri, condemned the conservative rally. The Coalition’s website describes the Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative in detail. For another description, see also here. Rubin reminded the crowd that the ballot proposal has the support of more than 100 groups, including research centers, health care groups and patient groups.
What is SCNT? Is it really killing babies? According to the International Society for Stem …