RUTHANN RICHTER, - Stanford University Medical Center
Stephan: Back in the 1960s and, again, in the 1980s, I had occasion to visit labs where animal testing was going on. Both times the conditions appalled me so much that I made up a reason why I had to leave, and arranged for a later meeting at another site. The cages were perfectly clean, the mice had enough to eat (mostly) and all that. But the mice were always in view, and in light, and the rooms were cold.
I had grown up on a cattle farm where we had an unused stable. A family of mice moved in. I let them be and observed them through the years. It was a stable little world, and I saw that mice left alone don't like to be exposed to light all the the time, and are very careful about their nests when it gets cold. They like to be warm. My cat, Pangur Ban, feels the same way as do I, for that matter. So although the lab mice were treated well as animated objects, there really was no sense of their feelings as beings. It was very sad, and a form of willful ignorance.
This report may seem a small thing, but I think it is part of an emerging new paradigm recognizing that all life is interconnected and interdependent, and I see it as very good news.
I tried to start a biotech company to provide an alternative to animal testing, and I know that animal testing per se is not going to stop completely for many years. So I view this research with hope, and the fervent wish that it takes hold.
STANFORD, Calif. — Nine out of 10 drugs successfully tested in mice and other animal models ultimately fail to work in people, and one reason may be traced back to a common fact of life for laboratory mice: they’re cold, according to a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Laboratory mice, which account for the vast majority of animal research subjects, are routinely housed in chilly conditions, which may affect their well-being as well as the outcome of research studies, said Joseph Garner, PhD, associate professor of comparative medicine.
‘If you want to design a drug that will help a patient in the hospital, you cannot reasonably do that in animals that are cold-stressed and are compensating with an elevated metabolic rate,’ Garner said. ‘This will change all aspects of their physiology – such as how fast the liver breaks down a drug – which can’t help but increase the chance that a drug will behave differently in mice and in humans.’
In a new study, Garner and his colleagues report finding an easy solution to the problem: Simply provide the animals with the proper materials, and they’ll build a cozy nest that allows them to naturally regulate their temperatures to […]
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Katherine Stewart, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: As this report concludes, the Founders were very careful to build a firewall between church and state. Anything else produces bad social outcomes. Throughout the world, in Turkey, Pakistan, Israel, Egypt and dozen other countries -- very much including the United States -- theocratic rightists are attempting to weld a particular view of a particular faith to the state. As Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all understood you start with the schools. An indoctrinated youth in most cases becomes a compliant adult. Bad social outcomes occur when church and state are linked.
Have learnt this lesson, I think, the European states, after almost a millennia of constant wars, in which religion was a huge factor, decided this linkage was a bad idea, and a new critical consensus emerged: religion should be entirely a matter of personal choice having nothing at all to do with the state. I believe that is why the European nations have very low rates of religiosity. The Founders knew this, because they or their families had direct experience with the violence and conflict religion produces, when church and state are intertwined.
Last month, 8,000 public high school students in Montgomery County, Maryland, went home with fliers informing them that no one is ‘born gay’ and offering therapy if they experienced ‘unwanted same-sex attraction’.
The group behind the flier, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), isn’t the kind one expects to find represented in student backpacks. Peter Sprigg, a board member of PFOX who doubles as a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, recently told Chris Matthews that he believes ‘gay behavior’ should be ‘criminalized’. PFOX president Greg Quinlan told another talk show host that gays and lesbians practice ‘sexual cannibalism’.
A number of Montgomery County parents, understandably concerned about the unusual flier, filed a letter of complaint with the school district. ‘Everything in this flier makes it sound like the goal is to be ex-gay,’ said Ms Yount-Merrell, mother of a high-schooler. ‘It reiterates a societal view that there’s something wrong with you
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KENNETH P. VOGEL, - Politico
Stephan: This is what American politics has come to. We have a handful of people, the Koch brothers are not singletons -- just particularly notable because their interest is on behalf of the nastiest, most toxic old energy businesses. The ONLY antidote is the vote. It is the one part of the process the one per cent do not command. They have to court it. People have to go in and vote. Or not. No one should sit out this vote.
The group launching a $3.6 million ad campaign hitting President Barack Obama on gasoline prices has deep ties to the billionaire libertarian industrialists Charles and David Koch.
The American Energy Alliance is the political arm of the Institute for Energy Research, and sources tell POLITICO that both groups are funded partly by the Koch brothers and their donor network.
The groups are run by Tom Pyle, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Pyle regularly attends the mega-donor summits organized by the Koch brothers, including the 2012 winter summit in Indian Wells, Calif., where the Kochs raised more than $150 million to be directed to groups ahead of the general election.
In all, the brothers’ network is aiming to steer significantly more than $200 million to conservative groups for political advertising and organizing ahead of Election Day.
The American Energy Alliance’s ad campaign, which launches Friday in eight states, hammers Obama for his decision on the Keystone XL pipeline and recycles a 2008 quote from Energy Secretary Steven Chu about the benefits of European-level gas prices.
The ads come after the Kochs’ primary political group, Americans for Prosperity, earlier this year launched a $6 million ad campaign calling out Obama over the now-defunct, government-subsidized maker of […]
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Stephan: Just read the first paragraph of this story and think about what it is saying. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars fighting in a country many of whose soldiers would as soon kill our troops as look at them, and increasingly they do so whenever they get the chance. We are training these soldiers to be better warriors, giving them much better equipment than they could otherwise obtain, and we have to have troops guarding our trainers as they are training their potential killers. How crazy is this?
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. and NATO soldiers have been ordered to take extraordinary precautions against being shot by Afghan troops, including designating ‘guardian angels
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