One class of the unborn deserves very little recognition, and therefore their suffering is of very small concern.  Into this first class fall, for example, the unborn victims of the several wars we are now fighting, those unborn killed by pollution, or directly by hunger, or those unborn poor who need quality healthcare, among other groups too numerous to mention here. Lest we forget, there are many of the born in similar groups who are perishing each and every day.  These very real deaths now also include the first deaths caused by global warming, whose toll shall, with near certainty, dramatically increase every year.

The other class of unborn is so especially deserving of our protection, however, that even though the President has no direct legal authority to protect them, the mere announcement of a candidate of his opposition to a legal precedent enjoins us to put all of our concerns for the first class of the unborn out of our minds, and cast our votes, as unthinking automatons, to continue the wholesale slaughter of those unborn in the first class, while making very slight progress helping those unborn in the second class.

Therefore I, being uneducated by only 2 degrees from Jesuit Universities, must ask those who promulgate this new doctrine of the two unequal classes of the unborn to clarify, with some precision, what are those characteristics of the first class of the unborn that make them so undeserving of our protection and conversely makes those in the second class so especially deserving of our protection?

This question deeply vexes me.

A constitutional amendment that would eliminate any of the benefits of the Bill of Rights from accruing to corporations, and simply state that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights only accrue to natural born persons is exactly the kind of demand that OWS needs to make.  It is a simple demand, and one that, if acted upon would dramatically change the political landscape by allowing all kinds of limits on corporations.  Such an action is a precondition for dismantling incipient corporate fascism before it takes root.

Any one who opposed that would so clearly isolated themselves that they would be committing political suicide. Also, such an amendment would have concrete results, for example, overturning Citizens United.

I like the catchy name Demand Zero, too.

Google faced down demands from a US law enforcement agency to take down YouTube videos allegedly showing police brutality earlier this year, figures released for the first time show.

The technology giant’s biannual transparency report shows that Google refused the demands from the unnamed authority in the first half of this year.

According to the report, Google separately declined orders by other police authorities to remove videos that allegedly defamed law enforcement officials.

The demands formed part of a 70% rise in takedown requests from the US government or police, and were revealed as part of an effort to highlight online censorship around the world.

Figures revealed for the first time show that the US demanded private information about more than 11,000 Google users between January and June this year, almost equal to the number of requests made by 25 other developed countries, including the UK and Russia.

Microbe Outbreak Panics Europe
Spread of rare strain raises questions over surveillance of infectious diseases.

By Marian Turner of Nature magazine

Munich

Confronted with what has become one of the world’s most severe outbreaks of Escherichia coli, physicians and scientists in Germany say that the country’s fractured health-management system has failed to handle the crisis properly. They are calling for major reforms so that outbreaks are reported sooner and more modern technology is used to help identify their source, in order to bring health emergencies under control more quickly.

..

Hospitals recorded the first cases on 1 May, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German federal agency for disease surveillance in Berlin. Yet it was not until 22 May that the first report of an unusual number of EHEC infections in Germany arrived at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control in Stockholm. This was unusually long–it typically takes 14 days to detect an outbreak, says Angelika Fruth from the RKI.

Several factors conspired to cause the delay. EHEC infections are not common in adults–so physicians might have initially diagnosed a Salmonella or viral infection. The microbe also behaves differently to typical EHEC strains when cultured for diagnosis, which hampered scientists trying to identify it. And under the German health system, local authorities only report such infections weekly to state governments–which then have another week to tell the RKI. It was not until 25 May that the rare E. coli strain O104:H4 was named as the culprit.

…

Despite all the obstacles, the outbreak could have been identified earlier, says Flemming Scheutz, head of the World Health Organization Collaborative Centre for Reference and Research on Escherichia and Klebsiella in Copenhagen. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) could have been used to amplify the microbe’s genes, he says, enabling scientists to identify it in hours rather than the days it took to culture and test bacteria from patients’ stool samples. “PCR testing for bacteria is already in routine use in livestock and food, and hospitals already have the technical platforms to do PCR,” says Scheutz, “but these tests just aren’t used regularly in people.”

Fruth agrees that a PCR protocol would be highly desirable. However, even though it is as cheap as culture-based techniques, it is not funded as a standard test for cases of diarrhea by the German health-care system, she notes.

Faster reporting would also help next time there is an outbreak. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, introduced a rapid-surveillance platform called PulseNet following an outbreak of a different EHEC strain, called O157:H7, in 1993. The system rapidly compares the molecular fingerprints of suspected bacterial infections in food or humans with those of known pathogens. The results are uploaded to a national database, which allows real-time tracking of the infection clusters in an outbreak.

If this goes on, and becomes more contentious, it will be interesting to see the quality of the public health reporting. eee_efff will watch and read the public health reporting on this issue, and advise if something gets interesting.

The National Academies Press Makes All PDF Books Free to Download
11-06-07 01:56

* As of today all PDF versions of books published by the National Academies Press will be downloadable to anyone free of charge. This includes a current catalog of more than 4,000 books plus future reports produced by the Press. The mission of the National Academies Press (NAP) — publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council — is to disseminate the institutions’ content as widely as possible while maintaining financial sustainability. To that end, NAP began offering free content online in 1994. Before today’s announcement, all PDFs were free to download in developing countries, and 65 percent of them were available for free to any user.

“Our business model has evolved so that it is now financially viable to put this content out to the entire world for free,” said Barbara Kline Pope, executive director for the National Academies Press. “This is a wonderful opportunity to make a positive impact by more effectively sharing our knowledge and analyses.”…

Printed books will continue to be available for purchase through the NAP website and traditional channels. The free PDFs are available exclusively from the NAP’s website, http://www.nap.edu/, and remain subject to copyright laws. – NAP

http://noladefender.com/content/i-wish-was-urban-design-takeover

http://www.zcommunications.org/zmag