Why not get mad at Warren Buffet for hoarding his money until his death?

Specter's obviously on his deathbed. It was grossly irresponsible for him to run last year, and even worse for his friends and colleagues to not tell him he wasn't possibly healthy enough to serve. It is absurd to think that he's up to leading the Judiciary Committee hearings coming up for SCOTUS...

It gets embarassing to hear the constant babblings of our senior citizen branch of the legislature, the Senate.

Prima donnas like Kennedy, Hatch, Boxer, Specter, etc. appear to believe we crave to hear their latest version of wisdom from the center of government. If only that were true, senators wouldn't look so foolish.

Mr. Judd;

Weren't you a big fan of Specter back when he was in his primary? Why yes, you were. In fact, you said

Once again the President put his own political capital and credibility on the line for the sake of the Party and once again he won. You'd have to assume that the next time he really needs the vote of Senator Specter or another congressman in a similar situation he'll have it.

Yes. It's better to have Specter than a Democrat.

Except that when, later this year (or so it appears), Specter goes to that great stem cell in the sky, we still get a Democrat. One who doesn't even have to go through the bother of getting elected.

Would've been better to take our chances with someone who didn't know he wasn't going to live out the term, even if he didn't have the advantages of being an incumbent Seneator-for-Life. Then again, like all his colleagues, Specter has never shown any hint of self-sacrifice or an ability to think beyond the next election, so why should he change?

At least, on the bright side, Specter might be replaced by a real conservative Chairman of the Justice Committee who will finally get something done.

I hold no brief for or against him, but it is depressing to see a Republican conservative inject the personal into public issues this way. We've come a long way very fast since Princess Diana, and it isn't a healthy road.

An openly corrupt Canadian government survived last month in part because one right-wing independent MP from B.C., suffering from terminal cancer, reported that his constitutents were telling him they didn't want an election, which was surprising because everyone else in the West sure seemed to. He passed on a couple of days ago. R.I.P. We still have the government.

Stem cell research doesn't violate public ethics or societal morality, not in the U.S., at least.

America is a nation that is willing to wound, maim, and kill tens of thousands of already-born, ensouled people, including her own citizens, simply to retain access to cheap oil.

This was made explicit on October 2, 1989, when President George H.W. Bush signed secret National Security Directive 26, which begins, "Access to Persian Gulf oil and the security of key friendly states in the area are vital to U.S. national security."

Also, we were willing to support and extend the Iran - Iraq war, which killed over 300,000, and further wounded perhaps a million, for the same purpose, ignoring the use of WMD. During that conflict, nerve gas agents killed about 20,000 Iranian soldiers, and many others were hit by mustard gas, resulting in around 100,000 casualties due to poisonous gasses.

Furthermore, 308 Iraqi missiles were launched at Iranian cities between 1980 and 1988, resulting in around 13,000 civilian casualties.

Starting in 1982, after Iranian success against Iraq, the United States changed its less announced policy of backing Iraq to direct support, supplying it with intelligence through Saudi Arabia, economic aid, and normalizing relations with Iraq, broken during the 1967 Six-Day War.

Although much of what Saddam received from the West were not arms, they were dual-use technology: Computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, etc.
There was also the Iraqi-owned, British-based precision tooling firm Matrix Churchill, whose U.S. operations in Ohio were linked to an Iraqi weapons procurement network.

From 1983 to 1990, the US government approved around $200 million in arms sales to Iraq.
The sales amounted to less than 1% of the total arms sold to Iraq, but the US also sold Iraq helicopters which, although designated for civilian use, were immediately deployed by Iraq against Iran.

U.S. government economic assistance to Iraq allowed Hussein to continue using resources for the war which otherwise would have been diverted. Between 1983 and 1990, Iraq received $5 billion in credits from the Commodity Credit Corporation program, run by the Department of Agriculture.
Further, the Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying partially on US taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989.

Also, in December 2002, Iraq's 1,200 page Weapons Declaration revealed a list of Western corporations and countries that had exported chemical and biological materials to Iraq in the past two decades.
Alcolac International, for example, a Maryland company, transported thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor, to Iraq. A Tennessee manufacturer contributed large amounts of a chemical used to make sarin, a nerve gas.
On 25 May 1994, The US Senate Banking Committee released a report in which it was stated that pathogenic, toxigenic and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq, licensed by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The report then detailed 70 shipments (including anthrax bacillus) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years.
Those microorganisms were identical to those the UN inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program.

During the '90 - '91 Desert Shield/Desert Storm, there were 378 coalition force deaths (about half from combat), with the U.S. suffering 293, and the UK 47. The number of coalition wounded was around 1,000.

On the Iraqi side, there were perhaps 12,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the air campaign, and 10,000 casualties in the ground war.

In the current Persian Gulf War, as of yesterday there have been 1,946 coalition force deaths, (1,756 American and 90 British), as well as about 2,600 fatalities among the Iraqi Army and police forces.
There have also been almost 6,500 U.S. military members wounded badly enough that they did not return to duty within 72 hours.

The number of Iraqi civilians killed and wounded due to the invasion and the unrest thereafter is unknown, and unknowable.
It can be said that a few thousand Iraqi civilians have been killed or wounded by explosive devices, and several hundred that have worked with the coalition forces have been assassinated.

None of these deaths and injuries were in the service of acquiring critical and irreplaceable petroleum supplies for America, they were simply suffered to assure a supply of cheap oil.

As Robert Schwartz recently pointed out:

"[L]iquid and gas hydrocarbons can be made out of coal (even low grade coal), water and air. The process was first devised in the 19th century, was refined and used by the Nazis in WWII, and used by the South Africans during the apartied era."

Not to mention, we could simply switch to biodiesel.

Or, say, use less.

So...
Americans are willing to let 2,100 Americans die, (and counting), and let another 7,000 be badly wounded or maimed, and directly kill possibly 30,000 Iraqis...
To say nothing of assisting in the killing and wounding of over a million Iranians.
All to save a buck a gallon at the gas pump, and to avoid having to drive a smaller vehicle, or fewer miles.

Those figures were all of born, ensouled people.
American public ethics and societal morality allow us to kill and murder for simple convenience, and for profit.

Why should we call unensouled simple human cells "humans" ?

And even if we did, why wouldn't we use those never-to-be-born cells in exactly the way that we currently are ?

If the fetuses are already dead, why is there such a problem with using them for stem cell research? How is this any different from any other donation of body parts for medical use?

Exactly.

My "Exactly" is in response to Michael, who is on the cusp of real insight into the American psyche, and not to Bart, who isn't.

Bart: The fetuses are not dead, but ready for implantation. What to do about them is a serious moral issue. We don't allow organ donation without the donor's permission. There have been suggestions that parents be able to "donate" on their fetuses' behalf, but that is somewhat problematic. What we want to avoid, at all costs, is the creation of human beings in order to harvest their stem cells. This is especially true if, as seems more and more likely, there is little or no advantage to using fetal stem cells rather than adult stem cells.

Michael:

That's mere legality.

bart:

permission

David,

Nobody other than perhaps Dr. Frankenstein is in favor of creating life for the purposes of harvesting their body parts.

In the event a fetus would otherwise be dead, why not allow the parents to donate the stem cells. If the fetus came to term and died in childhood, nobody would object to the parents donating its body parts for medical purposes, research or the eye bank.

The question of whether there is no advantage to using fetal stem cells is a matter for scientists to decide not for politicians or lawyers and certainly not professional busybodies like clergymen.

If immortality came from eating newborns, we could solve two problems at once.

No, seriously, I found him this way so I just started eating his liver. Why let it go to waste....

Hey, when you're done with the liver, don't throw the rest away. The Soylent Green company will pay good money for a mostly intact corpse. Must be part of their research program into providing cheap protein for starving people everywhere. They're almost as publicly-minded as Microsoft.

David Cohen:

I'm flattered, but you'll have to break it down for me, since my position is exactly the same as bart's.

I'm just more verbose in attempting to show why that position is of a kind with other decisions that the American people have made - mostly by default, to be sure.
More of a congregation of actions, or failures to act, than a governing philosophy.

Or, do you agree that killing A-rabs and letting our youth get killed, so that we can continue to drive SUVs, is both crass and stupid ?

The zygotes aren't even fetuses yet, and they're clearly not human beings, just potential human beings. They're clusters of cells owned by their donors, that can be given to the medical system, just like blood.

If not, if we need to protect them from being used for medical research, then we should also protect them from...
Their parents.
Or more specifically, their potential mothers.
It's common to implant multiple zygotes in the hopeful mothers, since most of 'em don't take. Wouldn't the fact that few or none of the implanted zygotes in any given attempt mature into babies mean that the female patient had allowed these supposed "human beings" to die, through reckless disregard for a known and common fatal hazard, i.e., unsuccessful implantation ?

That's got to be some kind of manslaughter charge.

Orrin:

Stem cell research is legal too, and when you attempt to argue that it somehow violates the American moral order, you have to resort to a fantasy about what that order should be, not what it is.

bart sez: "Nobody other than perhaps Dr. Frankenstein is in favor of creating life for the purposes of harvesting their body parts."

Sigh. Is there any doubt that the following is going to happen--

Embryonic stem cell research will go on completely unencumbered, and probably occasionally federally funded. Sometime soon one quickie Nature article with an actual positive result will make such funding permanent and immense, even if other groups can't duplicate the results. As the years go by, companies will begin to claim to be on the cusp of huge breakthroughs that will cure everything (oh wait, they already do that...). But the claim will be that stem cell lines won't be able to fulfill their true promise unless they are personalized to each patient. And how, praytell, can you do that? Well, you see, you take DNA from the patient, and you put it in an empty cell, and you just let it grow for a while until it produces enough stem cells...

Does anyone honestly see another direction this will lead?

And once that happens, why not let that cell develop for just a bit longer, until it has lungs and kidneys and a liver and corneas and other useful scraps of tissue?

Michael:

Legal, but so morally objectionable that we don't fund it, just like abortion.

Michael: All your talk of "zygotes" and "fetuses" sounds like soothing, reassuring words of wisdom, but is quite irrelevant considering the rest of your argument. Legally, "we" have decided that a full-term ensouled(?) baby (oops, there I go using loaded terminology) that hasn't crowned yet is completely equivalent to a fertilized egg sitting in a lab as far as possessing any rights (yet if everything BUT the head is out, you can still crush the skull and "kill" whatever you call this 9+ month old thing--go figure). Of course, "we" have "decided" no such thing. As you imply, most of us don't even want to think about such things, so we have made the choice to let old folks in robes do the thinking for us. And given what they've decided, medical research on 9+ month old things should be perfectly acceptable. So spare us the gentle words and follow your logic where it leads.

Guys, make me do more work than just scrolling down the page.

David Cohen:

We can make diesel oil out of human corpses, so why feed them to the poor ?

Let 'em eat mung beans and rice.

b:

[Y]ou take DNA from the patient, and you put it in an empty cell, and you just let it grow for a while until it produces enough stem cells...

Does anyone honestly see another direction this will lead?

[W]hy not let that cell develop for just a bit longer, until it has lungs and kidneys and a liver and corneas and other useful scraps of tissue?

That is EXACTLY what is going to happen, all of it.

However, we need not grow an entire organism to get the organs we want; we needs just grow those specific organs.

No humans will be harmed in the making of the replacements - unless you count the original patient being stuck with rather large gauge needles, to gather the DNA samples.

All your talk [...] sounds like soothing, reassuring words of wisdom

Mainly because they are.

Legally, "we" have decided that a full-term ensouled(?) baby [...] that hasn't crowned yet is completely equivalent to a fertilized egg sitting in a lab as far as possessing any rights [...] Of course, "we" have "decided" no such thing.

Inaction in the face of need is a decision.

I rather doubt that God will accept: "I didn't want to look, so I did nothing".

So spare us the gentle words and follow your logic where it leads.

I thought that I had.

Where do you think that it leads ?

If you're talking about the full-term fetus vs. the sixteen cell zygote, and you intend to argue that both are ensouled, then you certainly have fellow believers, but that has nothing to do with logic.

>Where do you think that it leads ?

You're being deliberately obtuse, Michael. It leads to Dr. Tiller turning over the refuse of his procedures to researchers and those in need of the organs. Isn't incinerating them incredibly wasteful?

As Robert Schwartz recently pointed out:

"[L]iquid and gas hydrocarbons can be made out of coal (even low grade coal), water and air. The process was first devised in the 19th century, was refined and used by the Nazis in WWII, and used by the South Africans during the apartied era."

True. Of course, there is absolutely no way that the NIMBYs (e.g. Ted Kennedy), BANANAs (the Sierra Club),or the Mad Men in Black Robes (the Federal judicary), will let one be built. Which is why noone in his right mind has volunteered to build one.

Michael: Your insight into the American character is that we will go to war for oil and hold foreign life cheap, but would rather die than use embryonic stem cells.

b:

You're being deliberately obtuse, Michael.

Never deliberately.
What would be the point, in this forum ?

It leads to Dr. Tiller turning over the refuse of his procedures to researchers and those in need of the organs. Isn't incinerating them incredibly wasteful

I presume that you mean the guy from Kansas.

Yes, incinerating them could possibly be incredibly wasteful.

Whether the remains are incinerated or not, the fetuses are going to die. Nothing done with the remains affects that basic fact.

Further, what does this have to do with zygotes, unless you believe that zygotes are ensouled ?

Michael: I confess that I have no clue what souls have to do with your argument at all. (Do you even believe in the concept of a soul, or are you just trying to score cheap points?)

I'm no lawyer, but I'm fairly certain that there is no legal consideration of "ensoulment". Legally a 9+ month old unborn child has pretty much exactly the same status as a zygote. So your argument that we can destroy a zygote for medical purposes applies equally to 9+ month old unborn children. Heck, we KNOW that others could get definite medical assistance from the latter--whether that can be said of the former is mere conjecture.

Michael/Bart:

Mary's Ghost

'Twas in the middle of the night,
To sleep young William tried,
When Mary´s ghost came stealing in,
And stood at his bed-side.

O William dear! O William dear! 5
My rest eternal ceases;
Alas! my everlasting peace
Is broken into pieces.

I thought the last of all my cares
Would end with my last minute; 10
But tho´ I went to my long home
I didn´t stay long in it.

The body-snatchers they have come,
And made a snatch at me;
It´s very hard them kind of men 15
Won´t let a body be!

You thought that I was buried deep
Quite decent like and chary,
But from her grave in Mary-bone
They´ve come and boned your Mary. 20

The arm that used to take your arm
Is took to Dr. Vyse;
And both my legs are gone to walk
The hospital at Guy´s.

I vow´d that you should have my hand, 25
But fate gives us denial;
You´ll find it there, at Dr. Bell´s
In spirits and a phial.

As for my feet, the little feet
You used to call so pretty, 30
There´s one, I know, in Bedford Row,
The t´other´s in the city.

I can´t tell where my head is gone,
But Doctor Carpue can:
As for my trunk, it´s all pack´d up 35
To go by Pickford´s van.

I wished you´d go to Mr. P.
And save me such a ride;
I don´t half like the outside place,
They´ve took for my inside. 40

The cock it crows - I must begone!
My William we must part!
But I´ll be yours in death, altho´
Sir Astley has my heart.

Don´t go to weep upon my grave, 45
And think that there I be;
They haven´t left an atom there
Of my anatomie.

--Thomas Hood

Robert Schwartz:

Perhaps it's simply that such plants aren't yet economical to build - although I see that you once claimed that the oil from such a plant would cost $ 35/bbl to produce, which would make it profitable on today's market.

The Carthage, MO thermal depolymerization plant got built, and in fact the town was quite happy to get it, at least at first.

It too could turn coal into diesel fuel, although not for $ 35/bbl.

There have to be hundreds of small communities and Indian reservations around the Southwest that would be thrilled to have a coal-oil plant located nearby.

David Cohen:

Your insight into the American character is that we will go to war for oil and hold foreign life cheap, but would rather die than use embryonic stem cells.

Unfortunately, we will go to war for oil, and we certainly rarely value foreign lives as highly as our own.

However, neither I nor Orrin believe that last part to be true. We both believe that such will occur.

It's just that I believe it to be fine, morally speaking, and he considers it to be the blackest of evils.

Why should Americans value potential life, that will never be realized, so highly that we fail to pursue avenues of knowledge that might, possibly, save the lives of actual born humans, (which almost all law recognizes takes precedence over unborn life), if we're throwing born people into meatgrinders to save society a few dollars ?

It's arbitrary, hypocritical, and ignorant.

Also, believing that zygotes are human beings requires a belief that humans are ensouled at conception, which is not widely believed in American culture.

Further, since possibly HALF of all fertilized eggs don't implant, or they spontaneously abort, ensoulment at conception would require either that God be a moron, or that many beings don't require an actual full carnal life to fulfill their terrestrial purpose.
If the latter is true, then using zygotes for research isn't any affront to God or humans, since those beings would already be done with their bio-vessels.

Also, what of the mother-to-be that has four fertilized eggs implanted, of which only one is carried to term.
Did she just kill three human beings ?
If not, then how is a researcher killing human beings by using zygotes ?

b:

Well...
I did think that by using, (or trying to use), the nomenclature of right-wing religious nuts, my argument would be stronger, so I guess in that sense I was just trying to score cheap points.

You're very perceptive.

Peter B:

Nice.
Amusing, well written...

And right on point.

Michael: Which is it? Are you not a human being or were you never an eight-celled embryo?

Embryos are potential humans.

Wheat is potentially bread, but there are a few steps in between.

Thus, everyone who has been born has been an embryo, but not every embryo becomes a person.

The rest should be fed into ovens. Once you dehumanize people the rest follows.

And thus an eight-celled embryo is what a human being looks like when it's an eight-celled embryo. We suggest treating it like a human being. You suggest treating it like wheat. If we start treating human beings like wheat, there's no way to stop at eight-cells.

Besides, don't you agree that embryonic Michael was you in a way that your father's sperm or your mother's egg was not? I can think of 23 ways right off that bat.

Interesting discussion. Great poem by Thomas Hood.

I wonder if Hood ever visited the catacombs in Rome. If he did, he would see that Nature takes your atoms away just the same, except it takes longer. Reusing one's atoms is part of God's design. From The Bible, Genesis iii 19 'Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.' Of course having it done unnaturally and against the person and his /her family's wishes is bad. But if all concerned agree to it, why not ?

I myself prefer to see cells cloned by greedy "moms" than see babies abandoned to eat plaster and get burned on meth cooking stoves by the same greedy moms (see my homepage link). Or beaten to death, abused, sold for crack by their family or foster parents.

I also notice that the compassion for unborn babies doesn't extend to a sick man facing his death like Specter..