Beard Of Wisdom.com

A couple of years back, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang of South Korea published false stem cell/cloning research. While his initial claim to have successfully performed the first stem cell extraction from a cloned human embryo turned out to be false, however, a BBC article indicates that he might have stumbled upon another discovery. Apparently, the stem cells that he worked with “may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by the so-called ‘virgin birth’ method, or parthenogenesis.”

The article continues:

Professor Surani [from the University of Cambridge] said Hwang’s unwitting step forward might actually prove more useful than efforts to clone human embryos, which he had claimed fraudulently.

“I’ve always promoted the idea that efforts should be made to produce embryos from human eggs - it is far less ethically challenging, and the efficiency of these cell lines is likely to be higher than those produced from cloned embryos,” he said.

“Far less ethically challenging”? Now I am no scientist, but I find it hard to believe that forcing parthenogenesis in a lab is any less ethically challenging than cloning a human in a lab. The same questions remain over whether it is ethical to actually extract stem cells from embryos in the first place (regardless of whether the embryo is created through the traditional sexual reproduction, through in vitro fertilization, cloning, or parthenogenesis). The same questions remain concerning whether it is ethical to create or force the creation of someone in a lab, even if it is something that has happened naturally in other species of animals. At root, the exact same questions are raised concerning the beginning and sanctity of human life.

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There’s a fantastic editorial by Canadian MP Michael Ignatieff in the NYT today. A few quotes:

“The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting.”

“The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.”

“Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology.” [He goes on, without explicitly saying so, to basically endorse the paleoconservative critique of the Iraq War, not the DailyKos critique. Definitely worth reading, coming from a Canadian member of the Liberal Party.]

And best of all: “The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid.” [So, are political scientists doing the right thing by talking about Theory all the time, or are historians really on the right track?]

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Belatedly following the advice of Capt. Travis Patriquin, the army is apparently trying hard to work with Sunni sheikhs, many of whom have become disillusioned with al Qaeda. Patriquin was killed while this strategy was just getting off the ground (pay link), but it seems to be having some success–for example, Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon claim that al-Anbar province is now one of the safest areas in Iraq. A Lexis Nexis search shows only 4 references to the Sunni Triangle in US newspapers in June and July of this year, down from 19 in the same period last year.

This makes a lot of sense for tribal leaders. They have always jealously guarded their power, against the Ottoman Empire, against the British, and even against Saddam. In 2003, the biggest threat became the US-backed provisional government, which as Patriquin’s slide show pointed out, sought to dismantle tribal leadership and centralize power with Shi’a government in Baghdad. So most of the Sunni sheikhs were willing to cooperate first with their old rivals the Ba’athists, and then with al Qaeda.

But in 2007 it seems pretty ridiculous to suggest that the Shi’a government in Baghdad is actually going to exert centralized control over Anbar. The problem for the sheikhs now is that the (often foreign) terrorists they invited in aren’t willing to leave, and are trying to become an independent power player in the Sunni Triangle, with their own ideological agenda. In much of Iraq, sectarian power struggles drive the violence, and provide an incentive to paper over intra-sectarian differences. But there are no Shi’a in al Anbar, and the Baghdad government is a paper tiger, so the sheikhs are free to turn against al Qaeda. When the US Army comes around at the same time offering money and support to do what you want to do anyway, why not cooperate?

In Baghdad’s confused tangle of sects, people are putting aside jihad against the Crusaders in order to kill each other for more mundane political advantages. In Anbar, the sheikhs line up with the US to hunt down terrorists. But in both cases, al Qaeda is being beaten only because it gets in the way of Iraqi interests hammering out their own future.

Optimistically, I hope the situation in al Anbar offers some small hope for a balance of power between the government and various factions in Iraq, perhaps leading to a sort of de facto federalism. On the other hand, an Iraq which is even partially stabilized by co-opting the tribal power structure won’t be an Iraq with real democracy, individual rights, freedom of religion, women’s rights, or even a government that doesn’t brutalize its own people.

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I’m so glad the government is looking out for my best interests. I mean, as someone who’s never had cable in his life and who currently owns the cheapest TV Wal-Mart sells, HDTV obviously means a lot to me. Since I know the market would never provide me with HDTV, I’m glad the FCC is making sure that my TV will soon be useless.

But wait! The government is doing me another favor, by handing out coupons to buy a converter to make my TV able to receive HD signals!

Leave aside for the moment whether it’s wise or moral for the government to use tax money for this purpose, and consider that right now you can get a standard-definition TV for less than $100 at Wal-Mart. The coupons will cover up to $80 toward the purchase of converter boxes “expected to cost between $50 and $70 apiece.” It doesn’t seem too outlandish to assume that by early 2009 a low-end HDTV will cost about the same as a low-end non-HDTV now. So the projected cost of a converter box is only about $30 less than what it would cost to buy a new TV. Without the coupons, who’d buy a converter for $70 instead of spending $100 to replace your old non-HD TV? It’ll break soon enough anyway, and then you’ll throw out the useless converter box and buy an HDTV after all.

So in the end you’ll spend your $100 on a new TV, and the taxpayers will be out the $70 you spent on your converter box. Only the converter box companies win, since they’ll have made $1.5 billion off of devices no one would buy except for government subsidies.

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Marilyn Manson, Nazi memorabilia, the skeleton of a young Chinese girl. Ripe for a lawsuit. (Page Six)

Clever lawyering in an attempt to protect a 14-year-old’s image from the pornography industry. (Above the Law)

Also, a couple of books to consider this Friday.

Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist by Tyler Cowen (Amazon, discussion at Volokh)

Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor by Robert D. Lupton (Amazon, discussion at WORLD [$])

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You mean, it wasn’t an exorcism? (WRTV)

“I recall, President [Clinton/Obama] when you filibustered our last president’s judicial nominees. Why treat your nominees any differently?” (Volokh)

Harry Potter never got his Due Process. (Concurring Opinions)

Sen. Leahy doesn’t seem to understand how the Supreme Court works. (Politico)

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Go read an alternate storyline — Harry Potter and the Showdown. Apparently people have been hard at work in China cranking out stories to meet the voracious demand from readers. Some even think that these stories could be better than the ones written by Rowling herself!

Some homegrown “Harry Potter” authors are also unabashed about their forays into publishing.

One such writer is a manager at a Shanghai textile factory named Li Jingsheng. “I bought Harry Potter 1 through 6 for my son a couple of years ago, and when he finished reading them, he kept asking me to tell him what happens next,” he explained. “We couldn’t wait, so I began making up my own story and in May last year, I typed it up on my computer. I had to get up early and go to bed late to write this novel, usually spending one hour, from 6 to 7 in the morning and 10 to 11 in the evening to write it.”

The result was “Harry Potter and the Showdown,” a 250,000-word novel, the final version of which he placed recently on Web sites, followed by a notice saying he was looking for publishers. The book quickly logged 150,000 readers on a popular Chinese site, Baidu.com’s Harry Potter fan Web page.

“This is fantastic,” Gu Guaiguai, an admiring reader, wrote online about “Showdown.” “I wonder if Rowling would bother to continue to write if she had read it.”

Another reader was even more breathless. “You are the pride of our Harry Potter fans,” he wrote, adding, “We expect you to go on and write Harry Potter number eight,” which Mr. Li has in fact already begun.

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Battling over the rights to the ocean floor could be much more rewarding (in the short run anyway).

“For the first time in history people will go down to the sea bed under the North Pole,” Balyasnikov told The Associated Press. “It’s like putting a flag on the moon.”

Russian scientists hope to dive in two mini-submarines beneath the pole to a depth of more than 13,200 feet, and drop a metal capsule containing the Russian flag on the sea bed.

Balyasnikov said the dive was expected to start Thursday morning and last for several hours.

The voyage, led by noted polar explorer and Russian legislator Artur Chilingarov, has some scientific goals, including the study of Arctic plants and animals. But its chief goal appears to be advancing Russia’s political and economic influence by strengthening its legal claims to the gas and oil deposits thought to lie beneath the Arctic sea floor.

The symbolic gesture, along with geologic data being gathered by expedition scientists, is intended to prop up Moscow’s claims to more than 460,000 square miles of the Arctic shelf — which by some estimates may contain 10 billion tons of oil and gas deposits.

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Development in Africa has been a huge concern for many people. The folks over at ONN weigh in on the issue.
Their comments about Fisher Price were particularly insightful…

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