Wednesday, August 7th, 2019
Nicola Davis, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: It has been a while since I have done anything on this trend in genetic engineering, the creation of chimeras, human-animal combinations. This research has been going on for some years, and in the past I have covered it because I think it raises profound ethical issues.
I am not the only one concerned about this, in the medical ethics literature periodically it comes up. How many human cells in a pig or a primate does it take to make that being a "human." No one has a clear answer but, more importantly, why is this research funded at all? To what end? This article presents the issues.
The human-monkey chimeras have reportedly only been allowed to develop for a few weeks.
Credit: Xinhua/Barcroft Images
Efforts to create human-animal chimeras have rebooted an ethical debate after reports emerged that scientists have produced monkey embryos containing human cells.
A chimera is an organism whose cells come from two or more “individuals”, with recent work looking at combinations from different species. The word comes from a beast from Greek mythology which was said to be part lion, part goat and part snake.
The latest report, published in the Spanish newspaper El País, claims a team of researchers led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute in the US have produced monkey-human chimeras. The research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues”, according to the report.
Chimeras are seen as a potential way to address the lack of organs for transplantation, as well as problems of organ rejection. Scientists believe organs genetically matched to a particular human recipient could one day be grown […]
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Wednesday, August 7th, 2019
Ginger Thompson, - truthout
Stephan: Do you think of America as a prison nation? If you don't you should.
This story, and the one that follows are "insider" accounts of two manifestations of the American Gulag, by law enforcement officers who broke the institutional silence to tell the truth.
These are nasty brutish accounts about a part of America that in my view should not exist, and existing should cover us with shame. We need to clean house, flush out of the Congress and the presidency, the president senators, and representatives, and the people they have approved, who run the gulag.
U.S. Border Patrol
The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been assigned to the agency’s detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day at the end of June.
Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members appeared stunned.
Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm. One lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to her ear, her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. “There’s a crisis down here,” the agent recalled her shouting.
At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that something in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center. “I don’t know why she’s shouting,” he remembered thinking. “No one on the other end of the line […]
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Wednesday, August 7th, 2019
Walter Einenkel, Staff Writer - Daily Kos
Stephan: About 10 days ago I published my essay The Gulag: America's Moral Cancer. This article by an honorable man, describes that world from the inside.
A former police officer who, after spending eight weeks undercover in a prison, resigned from law enforcement in disgust.
The joke always goes that if you end up in prison you are going to be raped. “Hilarious” when you are 12 years old and the general concept of sex, let alone the absolute violation of sexual assault, is so profoundly uncomfortably out of your ability to comprehend that you must laugh in order to not lose your mind. Not hilarious when you consider that people that go to jail are people. Even the most frightening of those people are still people. However, while losing one’s freedom to participate in society while being rehabilitated so that one can be reintroduced into the human community should be the goal we set for our prison system, we all know that it isn’t. In fact, we all know—and accept—that prisons are scary places where the threat of violence, and even murder, lurk everywhere. A&E has a documentary television series called 60 Days In. The idea is to take […]
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Tuesday, August 6th, 2019
GRETCHEN LIVINGSTON and DEJA THOMAS, Senior Researcher / Research Assistant - Pew Research Group
Stephan: This report describes an important trend that is important for a variety of reasons. First, this decline not only in birth rates but in sexual activity amongst the young is not specific to America, but is seen all over the developed world. The fact is that none of the world developed nations has a sustainable birthrate, that is 2.1 births for each death. This means that the great fear of over-population that skewed much of futurist thinking in the 70s through 90s is just wrong. And that decline must also be seen in the context of what climate change is going to do, which is cause the death of millions of people -- no one can actually predict how many.
Second, this data also shows once and for all that all the anti-abortion arguments are crap, I'm not going to be nice about it. If you want to reduce abortion you don't make it illegal, that just moves it underground, you teach kids proper sex education, and you make contraceptives easily available. Study after study has shown that abstinence-only is the creationism of sex education.
Third, this data is telling us that the vast wealth inequality that is the hallmark of an American culture that only values profit is having an unanticipated effect on the formation of families, to the detriment of social wellbeing.
The teen birth rate in the United States is at a record low, dropping below 18 births per 1,000 girls and women ages 15 to 19 for the first time since the government began regularly collecting data on this group, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released data from the National Center for Health Statistics. (Emphasis added)
In 2018, the birth rate among 15- to 19-year-old girls and women was less than half of what it had been in 2008 (41.5 births per 1,000). Asians and Pacific Islanders led the way over this time, followed by Hispanics, with teen birth rate declines of 74% and 65%, respectively. Rates for white and black teens fell by more than 50% over the past decade as well.
Despite rapid declines in teen birth rates across all major racial and ethnic groups, disparities persist. In 2018, the birth rate for Hispanic and black teens ages 15 to 19 was almost double the rate among white teens and more than five times as high as the rate among Asians and Pacific Islanders.
Teen birth rates […]
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Tuesday, August 6th, 2019
Stephan: In the previous article you got some actual data on birth rates and what is affecting them.
I have chosen to publish this story because in contrast to actual facts about reducing abortion, and STDs, what we have in this report is what the Republicans are trying to do. As I said in my previous comment, it is crap from start to finish, and the results that arise from this anti-abortion nonsense, we know from the data, is increased pregnancies from improperly educated teenagers and increased STD rates.
Once again, one is forced to conclude that Republicans cannot govern because their priorities are profit and christofascism instead of the wellbeing of American society.
Republican-backed legislation in Ohio would mandate that teachers use anti-choice talking points in sex education classes.
Credit: Don Mason / Getty
As GOP-majority state legislatures pass laws aimed at drastically restricting access to abortion care, Republican lawmakers are seeking to control education and public messaging about abortion, pregnancy, and reproductive health.
Ohio Republicans are pushing a measure that would create a public school curriculum infusing anti-abortion language into health and science education standards and restricting students’ access to information about their options when facing an unintended pregnancy. Oklahoma lawmakers passed similar legislation in 2016, but have not yet implemented the anti-abortion curriculum due to budget constraints.
House Bill 90, pending in Ohio’s House of Representatives, would require the state’s health department to design a curriculum centered on the “humanity of the unborn child” that provides detailed information about fetuses and gestation.
“What we see with this bill is an intent to start using language that motivates emotions, and using those emotions to advance a cause,” Diego […]
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