Iida Ruishalme | May 22, 2015 | Genetic Literacy Project
“Yes, Monsanto is
pure evil,” I said. This was about a year ago, in 2013, and I was defending
science and nuanced thinking in the same sentence, no less. “Monsanto is pure
evil,” I said, “but genetic engineering is just a tool and in itself is neither
good or bad.” My University course literature had given a balanced view of many
possible benefits to GM while highlighting a couple of areas of caution. My
main insight on Monsanto came from the movie Food Inc., confirmed by
plenty of common internet knowledge and a couple of trusted friends of mine……..
In 2012, a new tool was invented that revolutionizes how
scientists can examine—and manipulate—plant genetic processes. It’s called
CRISPR-Cas9, and unlike its predecessors in the world of genetic modification,
it is highly specific, allowing scientists to zero in on a single gene and turn
it on or off, remove it or exchange it for a different gene. Early signs
suggest this tool will be an F-16 jet fighter compared with the Stone Age spear
of grafting, the traditional, painstaking means of breeding a new plant hybrid.
Biologists and geneticists are confident it can help them build a second Green
Revolution—if we’ll let them……
Benghazi
Treason
…. plain and simple. This president and apparently our next one are guilty of
treason. And America is down with this? She’s the favorite. The country
is broken — whether it is irretrievably broken remains to be seen. Treason? “What difference does it make?”
“leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya
policy from start to finish,” says an email written by one of Clinton’s top
aides--and forwarded to Clinton herself--as the Libyan rebellion that sought
the overthrow of Muammar Qadhafi appeared to be nearing a triumphant moment. The
email is one of those the State Department has thus far given to the House
Select Committee on Benghazi. It is among 349 pages of those emails that were obtained
by the New York Times and that the Times has
posted online in a PDF.
Civil Rights
This is
the fight. This is where we make our stand. The Democrats are the party
of treason. So this is expected, but the Republicans must be taken to the
woodshed on this.
This is the new reality: not
only is anyone who stands for the freedom of speech excoriated, mocked and
shunned, but the emboldened thugs also now issue threats even to teenagers in
high school. France and the West are in for a troubled, bloody future. Teachers,
parents and media freedom activists are urging police action after death
threats against a French teenager over a school newspaper issue about the
extremist attack against satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The
17-year-old student, chief editor of the paper at the Marcelin Berthelot school
in the Paris...
Economics
Richard Ebeling, Epic
Times
CBO calculates that
by 2025 “modest” annual budget deficits will add more than $7.5 trillion to the
existing $18.3 trillion of federal government debt, for a total a decade from
now of almost $26 trillion. This will be more than a 40 percent increase in the
federal government’s debt over the coming ten-year period. Patent law is not something most Americans are passionate about or have ever contemplated — which is exactly why the Obama White House and Congress got away with making radical changes to our time-tested traditions of protecting the fruits of entrepreneurial inventors' labor. It's yet another progressive horror story of abandoning what works in the name of what's politically trendy. For left-wing saboteurs and their Big Business GOP enablers, this means throwing our unique patent system and its constitutional underpinnings under an 18-wheeler. So-called "patent reform" proposals continue to plague Capitol Hill. But like health care "reform" and education "reform," these government cures are worse than any purported disease.
Education
Pity poor Emma Sulkowicz lugging a mattress around the Columbia University campus now for almost a full academic year.
This act, recalling Christ carrying his cross (that is if
any on our college campuses know about this part of our Judeo-Christian
heritage any more) has drawn attention to her alleged rape by fellow student
and one-time lover, Paul Nungesser, who in turn has filed a Title IX suit
against the university for allowing the campaign of harassment against him.
Nungesser was cleared by a “campus
court” (itself a disturbing extra-legal development).
Sulkowicz’s back-bending activity, however, is actually
her senior thesis, “Carry
That Weight,” directed by Jon Kessler, a professor in the School of
Visual Arts. Kessler, who has received several grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts, in the 1980s and 1990s made “kinetic sculptures,” and
used video and surveillance equipment in his work to express “political urgency”
after 9/11.
Sulkowicz seems to have learned from her professor about
the new academic requirements and purposes of art, as her words
in an email to AP reveal:
“I think it’s ridiculous that
Paul [Nungesser] would sue not only the school but one of my past professors
for allowing me to make an art piece. It’s ridiculous that he would read it as
a ‘bullying strategy,’...when really it’s just an artistic expression of the
personal trauma I’ve experienced at Columbia. If artists are not allowed to
make art that reflect on our experiences, then how are we to heal?”
Sadly, Sulkowicz’s performance art project reflects a
growing trend of professors giving students assignments that have little to do
with real academics. Most colleges now require (or at least allow students to
get credit for) service-learning, a sort of charity for liberal
causes that garners academic credit. The exercises typically require work in
homeless shelters, inner-city schools, parks, and even prisons.
For example, at Boise State University students taking Advanced
Spanish Conversation and Composition (SPAN 303) last month went to Idaho
Correctional Center in order to translate letters by Hispanic inmates for the
American Prison Writing archive page. Students also learned about the
collection in the prison library and job training programs for the inmates.
Predictably, the students’ “reflection papers,” many
handwritten and on posters interspersed with photos, testified to how the
program succeeded in changing stereotypes they held about prisoners. No doubt,
the professor, Doran Larsen, whose c.v. includes a collection of prisoners’
writings, was pleased.
In this advanced Spanish language course, discussions
with inmates and casual writing (in English) pushed aside hours of study that
could have been devoted to Cervantes and Marquez. Likewise, the assignments
accompanying service-learning projects are a degraded form of academics.
“Reflection papers” replace traditional essays and research papers. One
handwritten reflection paper on a poster board display paper looks like a
third-grader’s journal. In the past, it would have been their language skills
and knowledge about Spanish that mattered. Today, however, students are judged
by their attitudes, not their knowledge.
Even in composition classes, reflection papers and participation
in preselected protests, such as “Take Back the Night,” take the place of
writing formal essays. Composition teachers, as I learned at the 2011 Conference
on College Composition and Communication, take students on protests to
study the “rhetoric” of slogans and “bodies,” instead of having them read
classic works.
Such ideological and emotional assignments, and
“performance art,” grew out of the 1960s protest movement and the rejection of
Western standards. The radicals who went into academe embraced the new
standards and have passed them on.
Performance art has become a favorite of feminists, who
follow theorist Helene Cixous, who insisted, “Women must write through their
bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions,
classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes...."
One of the most famous purveyors of this mode is Karen
Finley, who in her younger days famously smeared chocolate and honey over
her body to express her feelings about the objectification of women. She then
took her outrage over the revoking of funding by the National Endowment for the
Arts to the Supreme
Court, where she, along with her three co-litigants, lost. What is such a
transgressive artist going to do without public funding?
She soon found a teaching position at New York
University.
She landed there after she was denied a position at
Georgia State University (where I earned my master’s degree) as a visiting
professor after she refused to sign Georgia’s loyalty oath (requiring that
applicants promise not to overthrow the government by violent means). At a 2009
South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting, English department co-chair
Matthew Roudané introduced her and related the story about how he had offered
her the position after her NEA difficulties.
In her presentation, Ms. Finley recounted going into “a
subtle form of body trauma” after seeing Georgia’s loyalty oath.
“You have to start with an individual, emotional place,”
she insisted, describing her principled resistance and her form of art.
She would have fit in at Georgia State. One of my
professors allowed another graduate student to write her final paper in the form
of a “quilt” of colored paper. A feminist, she was defying the linear,
patriarchal form of writing, i.e., organized with a thesis statement and argued
logically.
Students are now being asked to follow the lead of
performance artists like Finley and do assignments in
the nude. This is the case of a visual arts class at UC-San Diego taught by
Roberto Dominguez, who famously concocted an electronic Transborder Immigrant
Tool, winning awards from the Endowment for Culture Mexico-US. In 2010 he
used students to conduct a virtual sit-in
to protest cuts in the budget for the California state university system.
Dominguez, naturally, has given a different version to
the original complaint by a parent. He told Inside
Higher Ed that students have two “clothes-free” options for the
class: “The students can choose to do the nude gesture version or the naked
version (the naked gesture means you must perform a laying bare of your
‘traumatic’ self, and students can do this gesture under a rug or in any way
they choose—but they must share their most fragile self—something most students
find extremely hard to do).”
In contrast, “’The nude self gesture takes place in
complete darkness, and everyone is nude, with only one candle or very small
source of light for each individual performance.... A student may decide to
focus on their big toe, their hair, an armpit, as being a part of their body
that is ‘more them than they are.’”
Presumably, this should alleviate parental concerns. But
a room with naked (in distinction from nude) students in front of their nude
professor blubbering about how they feel about their armpits illustrates
vividly the decay of academe.
Such assignments do not prepare students for the world of
work and adult responsibilities, where their emotions do not factor in
performance reviews, where they are expected to communicate in a clear and
logical manner, and where they will have to know certain facts in order to
build a bridge, argue a legal case, treat a heart attack victim, or teach
children to read. Nor do such assignments prepare them to participate as free
and literate citizens in a constitutional republic.
So where is the oversight? In the case of the Boise State
prison service-learning program, we can see that the inmates are indeed running
the asylum. Sadly, this is happening in most of our institutions of higher
learning.
Heartland Senior
Fellow Bruno Behrend joins Dave Elswick to discuss the latest on Common Core.
Behrend and Elswick talk about the popular perceptions of Common Core and
public education, and why even more government control is not the solution to
our educational problems.
Energy
Ron Arnold, The
Daily Caller
John Kerry talks a
good game about how we should all reduce our carbon footprint, but he doesn’t
put his wife’s money where his mouth is. Kerry invests in at least 365
securities connected to fossil fuel industries. Among the “sinners” in Kerry’s
portfolio: ExxonMobil and a Canadian firm with ties to the Keystone XL
pipeline.
James M. Taylor and
Justin Haskins, Forbes
Fracking for oil
and natural gas has created thousands of jobs in the United States. With those
jobs come billions of dollars in government tax revenues and immeasurable U.S.
economic benefits. What’s not to like? Democratic Party strategist Robert Weiner
claims, implausibly, that America’s new energy boom will cause a new Great
Depression.
Global Warming
Jim Lakely, Somewhat
Reasonable
Carol Andress,
director of legislative operations for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF),
was humiliated in a televised debate with CFACT’s Marc Morano. It is impossible
to overstate what a blow-out this debate was for Morano. He was the Harlem
Globetrotters to EDF’s Washington Generals.
Health Issues
May 22, 2015
Hardly a week goes by without a “surprise” popping up in
the world of cancer research. The understanding of how genetic mutations cause
certain cancers continues to evolve, and this is radically changing how we view
cancer, which could lead to a revolution in its treatment.
For example, should all leukemias be treated with
leukemia drugs? Five years ago there was not much choice. But, back in February
we discussed an article
by Gina Kolata of The New York Times, which gave us a preview of an
entirely new paradigm in cancer research. An elderly woman was extremely ill
with a rare (and essentially untreatable) form of leukemia. But instead of
trying another leukemia drug, her doctors gave her a melanoma drug. Her
response was astounding.
Why give a patient who has leukemia a melanoma drug?
You’d have to be out of your mind, right?
Actually, it’s quite the opposite. The genetic mutation
that was responsible for the woman’s cancer was the same one that causes at
least certain melanomas, and this explains why the drug worked. A completely
different way of looking at cancer.
It is important to note that the article was based on a
single example, and this type of approach has failed far more than it has
succeeded. But the the real story is the concept—examining the genetics of the
tumor rather than using a drug that has historically worked against a
particular cancer in large populations. This is the essence of personalized
medicine.
An article
in the May 21st Wall Street
Journal gives us another surprise — courtesy of gene sequencing. It
sounds crazy, but there appears to be a relationship between breast cancer in
women and prostate cancer in men.
Dr. Charles Sawyers, the chairman of the Human Oncology
and Pathogenesis Program at Sloan Kettering Cancer and colleagues reported in
the journal Cell that when samples of tumors from men with late-stage
prostate cancer were examined, 15 percent of them contained mutations in the
n0w-famous (because of Angelina
Jolie) BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes. (Despite the fact that the BRCA stands for
breast cancer,
men also carry these genes.)
Dr. Sawyers said, “Prior to this no one would have
entertained treating these patients with those drugs.”
More importantly, the Sloan study demonstrated that 89
percent of these patients had known genetic mutations that could respond to
other drugs that would have not have been used to treat prostate cancer. This
is incredible.
ACSH’s Dr. Josh Bloom cautions, “These revolutionary
concepts of how to view cancer are in their infancy. There will be some
spectacular successes and almost certainly many more failures. The entire
strategy could even end up being a dead end. It is way too early to predict how
this plays out.
“But,” he adds, “Medical breakthroughs do happen and the
results can be spectacular. If someone was infected with HIV in 1985, they
died. But if it was in 1995, there is a good chance they are still alive. No
one in 1985 would have predicted that people who were HIV-positive would, 30
years later, have a nearly normal life span. Unfortunately, many died during
the time this research was being done, and the same will certainly be true in
this case. This is the nature of biomedical research. Breakthroughs are nearly
impossible to anticipate.”
Sean Parnell, The
Heartlander
“The real scandal
here is the citizens of states send their tax dollars to Washington, DC and the
feds will only let them have their money back if they do what Washington wants
them to do. It would be a great campaign theme for the various presidential
candidates: The only tax money going to Washington should be for what the
federal government needs to fulfill its limited, constitutional obligations.”
Jim Waters, The
Heartlander
Yet another
Obamacare promise broken: Three-quarters of doctors responding to a nationwide
survey conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians indicate they
have seen an increase in ER visits since Obamacare became law.
Heartland Senior
Fellow Dr. Brad Rodu urges the Food & Drug Administration to “show its
work.” Rodu says the raw data of taxpayer-funded studies on tobacco use are
being kept from the public. Meanwhile, government agencies selectively release
sound-bites to media outlets and spin the story towards preferred narratives.
Internet Control
Warner Todd Huston,
The Heartlander
“Net neutrality is
massive regulatory protectionism for government-crony businesses,” said Seton
Motley, president of Less Government. “It outlaws charging bandwidth-hog
companies for being bandwidth-hog companies, which means our Internet access
prices skyrocket to augment the profits of companies like Google and Netflix.”
Privacy Rights
Jen Kuznicki, The
Heartlander
“It’s alarming that
one company said they gathered about three million records a day, scooping up
info to sell to other companies and possibly the government,” said Melissa Ngo,
privacy consultant and former senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information
Center. “This is personal information about where you’ve been and where you’re
likely go to, because most of us have set patterns for work, school, and home
life.”
Rape!
Another in an endless line of horror stories hit the UK media today about yet another Muslim child sex trafficking gang. Thousands of young girls raped, trafficked, tortured with nowhere to turn. Members of a “horrifying” child sex ring abused two schoolgirls, taking advantage of their vulnerability on a “massive scale”, a court has heard. One girl, who was aged 12 or 13 at the time, alleges that throughout the period she was abused, she was passed between 60 men who had sex with her Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Eleven men are on trial accused of committing sexual offences against the youngsters, who had allegedly been conditioned into believing that what they were being subjected to was...
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