The success of Silvio Berlusconi’s hair transplant, four years ago, relied on the fact that the septuagenarian prime minister had enough of a thatch on the back of his head to enable some of it to be transferred to his thinning top. Although hair transplants have advanced to the stage where they are virtually undetectable (no more plugs of hair), they still rely on moving hairs from one place to another. So, though hairlines such as Mr Berlusconi’s can be thickened up, or even straightened, there may well not be enough material available to lower a hairline to its former, youthful level.
Finite supply remains the main drawback of this sort of transplant surgery. The most common form of hair loss in men is “male pattern baldness”, characterised by a receding hairline and the thinning of the hair on the crown. It is caused by hormones and mediated by genetic predisposition. Hair transplants work because the hairs at the back of a man’s head are not vulnerable to hormonal attack, and will thus grow quite contentedly in their new home—assuming there are enough of them to transplant.
For those so follicularly challenged that they have little hair to move around in this way, however, there is now hope. This comes not in a jar, but in a test-tube from a Manchester-based company called Intercytex. The firm’s technique exploits the regenerative properties of what are known as dermal papilla cells. These are the cells that create hair follicles in the first place. They remain at the base of the hair when they have finished their job.
http://louisfjfsheehan.blogspot.com
Some years ago it was discovered that when these cells are relocated, an entirely new hair will grow. That observation is only useful, though, if you can multiply dermal papilla cells—and do so in a way that allows them to keep their ability to induce hair growth. For, in normal culture, dermal papilla cells quickly lose this sought-after ability.
This, says Nick Higgins, Intercytex’s boss, has taxed scientists for years. Intercytex appears to be working on two solutions. Although it is understandably tight-lipped about the exact mechanism behind its success, one probably enlists the help of cells called keratinocytes, which interact naturally with the dermal papilla cells of the hair follicle and secrete a chemical factor that supports their growth. At present, the identity of this growth factor is a mystery. However, it is likely that one of Intercytex’s methods involves supplying this factor to cultured dermal papilla cells. Intercytex’s second approach seems to involve culturing the dermal papilla cells with proteins that take part in signalling during the process that creates hair.
The long and short of it is that being able to multiply these cells while preserving their efficacy opens the way for unlimited supplies of head hair. Intercytex is therefore conducting a trial of the technology in Manchester. Nineteen “patients” have had a small amount of hair removed, follicles and all, from the backs of their heads. Their dermal papilla cells have been extracted, multiplied and re-injected into their scalps. The trial’s full results will not be available until March 2009, but the company has already said that at least two-thirds of its patients have generated new hair within six months.
Unfortunately for eager baldies, regulations require more trials. As a result it is likely to be five years before any product is on the market. Nor will Intercytex’s technique do anything about that other bane of ageing, the tendency of hair to go grey. For the time being, even Mr Berlusconi will have to continue to dye his locks.
Organ-transplant data provide more evidence that stem cells cause cancer
Doctors track the long-term health of organ-transplant patients in registries. Such registries make it possible to uncover trends or long-term problems in the population that may be missed in smaller samples. But they can also be pressed into service to support basic research. And a group of researchers led by Sanford Barsky of Ohio State University College of Medicine in Columbus has done just that. As they reported on June 2nd to a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, in Chicago, they have used one such registry to support the increasingly popular idea that many if not all cancers are caused by stem cells gone bad.
Each organ and tissue in the body has its own collection of stem cells. When these cells divide, they produce two very different daughter cells. One resembles the parent stem cell and thus allows the whole process to continue. The progeny of the other differentiate into mature cells within the skin, kidney, lung or what have you. This is how organs renew themselves over the life of an individual. In a healthy organ, the stem cells divide only when needed—usually in response to injury or when other cells have died. Some cancer scientists, however, think that stem cells can lose this control function and thus divide endlessly, leading to tumours.
Dr Barsky reasoned that if the cancer stem-cell hypothesis is true, then stem cells from a donor organ may cause cancer somewhere else in a transplant recipient’s body. Looking in a patient registry, he identified 280 people who had undergone an organ transplant and later developed a solid tumour. In nearly half of these cases donor and recipient were of different sexes, which means the cells from each would have different sex chromosomes (women have two X chromosomes, men an X and a Y). http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com
That makes a cancer derived from the transplant easy to identify.
To find out if the tumour cells were the same sex as the body they inhabited, Dr Barsky labelled slices of tumour with green fluorescent tags that bind to the X chromosome and red tags that bind to the Y. And he found transplant-derived cancers in abundance: in 12% of cases, the sex of the tumour matched the donor rather than the recipient. For example, a 48-year-old woman developed skin cancer nine months after receiving a bone-marrow transplant from a man. The tumour cells had a Y chromosome, indicating that the cancer arose from the donated bone marrow. In another case, a 62-year-old man developed colon cancer ten years after receiving a kidney transplant from a female donor. The colon-cancer cells lacked a Y chromosome.
Closer examination of the DNA in the tumour cells and surrounding tissue showed that the tumours definitely did originate from the donor organs, not the recipients. Dr Barsky also found that if a tumour formed in the transplanted organ, it could be derived from either recipient or donor cells.
In each of these cases, the tumour that formed resembled any other tumour that would form in that site. The 48-year-old woman’s looked like skin cancer, not cancer of the bone marrow. The 62-year-old man’s looked like colon cancer and not like a kidney tumour. Thus, once a cell migrated to a new site, it took on the behaviour and appearance appropriate to that location—losing the identity it had held in its organ of origin.
This observation does not absolutely prove that the migrating cells are stem cells, but it would be astonishing if fully differentiated cells from one tissue could up sticks to another organ and then take on the characteristics of that organ. Besides, biologists do know that stem cells in the bone marrow move into the blood stream. Thus the formation of donor-derived tumours in distant tissues after a bone-marrow transplant is not entirely unexpected. A few reports also exist in the medical literature of donor-derived tumours arising after a solid organ, such as a liver or a kidney, has been transplanted. Dr Barsky’s data, though, show that this is not such a rare event after all. Stem cells in one organ thus seem malleable enough to adopt a whole new developmental programme in another organ, even late in a person’s life.
More important, though, in Dr Barsky’s opinion, is that the new data support the idea that tumours arise from stem cells that have gone wrong. It is not clear whether those stem cells are healthy when they migrate to a new site and mutate into cancer stem cells after they have taken up residence, or if they mutate first and then migrate. Either way, however, transplant registries may just have shed light on a fundamental question in cancer biology. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com
What happened after California abolished bilingual education
Ten years to the day after California banned teaching in any language other than English, Erlinda Paredes runs through a new sentence with her kindergarten class. “El payaso se llama Botones”, she intones—“the clown’s name is Buttons”. When a pupil asks a question in English, she responds in Spanish. It is an improbable scene. But the abolition of bilingual education has not worked out in quite the way anybody expected.
Before 1998 some 400,000 Californian children were shunted into classes where they heard as little as 30 minutes of English each day. The hope was that they would learn mathematics and other subjects in their native tongue (usually Spanish) while they gently made the transition to English. The result was an educational barrio. So that year Ron Unz, a software engineer, sponsored a ballot measure that mandated teaching in English unless parents demanded otherwise. Proposition 227 passed easily, with considerable support from Hispanics. Voters in two other states, Massachusetts and Arizona, have since followed suit.
In Santa Ana, a mostly poor Latino city in Orange county, the number of children in bilingual classes promptly halved. Demand would have been even less had schools not prodded parents to request waivers for their children. In the past few years demand for bilingual education has fallen further. This year 22,000 pupils in Santa Ana are enrolled in “structured English immersion” programmes, where they hear little but that language. Just 646 are taught bilingually.
It has been a smooth transition, disappointing the many teachers and Latino politicians who forecast imminent doom for immigrant children. Yet the revolution in standards promised by Mr Unz’s supporters has not come to pass either. State tests show that immigrants are indeed doing better in English. But so are native English speakers. In the second grade (ages seven and eight) the gap in reading ability between natives and the rest has narrowed only slightly; in higher years it has not narrowed at all. The results of national tests are even less encouraging.
Before 1998 many poor immigrant children in California received a dismal education informed by wrong-headed principles. They now just suffer from a dismal education. Fully 74% of English learners in the fourth grade read at “below basic” level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In 2006 a study found that, after six years, just one-quarter of Hispanic pupils could expect to be reclassified as fluent in English—which is, admittedly, a pretty high bar. This augurs badly for their economic future. And, since more than one immigrant child in five lives in California, it is also bad news for America’s largest state.
Howard Bryan, who is responsible for English learners in Santa Ana, says that formal teaching methods matter surprisingly little. Pupils in well-run schools with demanding teachers, who are encouraged by their parents, tend to succeed whatever the language.
The problem is that many parents are unwilling or unable to push their children, and most programmes are weak. The abolition of bilingual education has revealed a much bigger problem. California’s public education system is sclerotic, with a meddlesome central bureaucracy and mighty teachers’ unions. Until it is reformed, immigrants will continue to struggle.
Few such problems afflict Ms Paredes’s pupils. Hers is a “two-way” bilingual class in which exactly half of the children already speak English fluently. Most of them are the offspring of upper-middle-class Hispanics who worry that their children will grow up knowing no Spanish. The class is drip-fed English according to a strict formula. In kindergarten pupils speak English 10% of the time; by fifth grade they speak it 50% of the time. Not surprisingly, given the pupils’ backgrounds, such classes score remarkably well in tests, Partly for this reason, two-way bilingual education is entirely uncontroversial.
Although such two-way programmes are much rarer than old-fashioned bilingual education, they have roughly doubled in number in the past ten years. They have even popped up in affluent white areas like Santa Monica. While the teaching of English to immigrants is not going too well, the teaching of Spanish to natives is going swimmingly. The clearest change wrought by Proposition 227 is that Spanish has turned from a remedial language into an aspirational one.
FEW people, other than scholars, will be familiar with the story of the Cambridge don whose study of China’s scientific history helped to change the West’s appraisal of a civilisation once thought hopelessly backward. By the time Joseph Needham died in 1995, he had published 17 volumes of his “Science and Civilisation in China” series, including several that he wrote entirely on his own.
http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com
The Chinese began printing 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany. They built the first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans. And they made use of a magnetic compass at least a century before the first reference to it appeared elsewhere. So why, in the middle of the 15th century, did this advanced civilisation suddenly cease its spectacular progress?
So powerful has Needham’s contribution been to the historiography of Chinese science that this conundrum is still known as “The Needham Question”. Even the Chinese themselves use it: the phrase in Mandarin is Li Yuese nanti.
Simon Winchester’s lively biography (see article) focuses on what drove Needham to wrestle with this issue. In 1936 three Chinese assistants came to work in his biochemistry laboratory. One, Lu Gwei-djen, who came from Nanjing, began teaching him Chinese, which ignited Needham’s interest in the country’s technological and scientific past. He retrained as a Sinologist and took a job in Chongqing as Britain’s scientific emissary.
Mr Winchester draws much from Needham’s diaries which describe an unconventional lifestyle, an open marriage and numerous extra-marital affairs, as well as exotic adventures travelling across China in search of its science.
Among Needham’s destinations in his Chevrolet truck was Dujiangyan, a city badly hit by the recent earthquake in Sichuan Province. There he was able to study a huge irrigation project that was created 2,300 years ago and which still stands today, though now cracked by the earthquake. At that time, only the Mesopotamians had made such strides in controlling their rivers, Mr Winchester says.
Needham’s focus on China’s achievements naturally won him praise there. The Republican government granted him one of its highest honours shortly before it was overthrown by the Communist Party in 1949. But Needham also had strong ties with China’s new rulers. This controversial relationship threatened to blight his career. His participation in a Chinese-led inquiry into alleged American use of germ warfare during the Korean war, together with his failure to be more sceptical about what many believe to have been Soviet and Chinese fakery, prompted many of his peers in the West to shun him.
Needham’s Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius, however, retained its faith in his scholarship and gave him extraordinary freedom from normal academic duties to pursue his book-writing.
Needham never fully worked out why China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.
With its unreformed one-party system, its rote-learning in schools and state control of big businesses, “new China” is hardly a haven for innovative thinking. Yet the Chinese continue to fret about the Needham question. A Communist Party chief of a middle school in central China recently said that it deserved deep thought and that the answer lay in an education system that fails to emphasise improving “character”. A former government minister also referred to Needham’s lament that China had produced no idea or invention of global impact for more than 500 years. Its contribution henceforth, the official said, should be “harmony”.
Lord Levy was the son of the shammas in the local Orthodox synagogue, himself the son of a Polish immigrant, who lived in contented poverty. There was no chance that the clever boy, Michael, would go to university. John Prescott was the son of a railwayman who was an active trade unionist. He failed the 11-plus and when he left secondary school at 15, the headmaster told his mother that he would never amount to much. He became a steward on ocean liners sailing out of Liverpool. Mrs Blair’s father was a well-known Liverpudlian actor called Tony Booth, a boozer who abandoned his family before Mrs Blair was ten years old. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com
She had a strict Catholic education. The nuns identified her as an ill-disciplined child who would never make prefect, never mind head girl, but she was clever and independent-minded. She chose to study law at the London School of Economics, where she was able to shower every day in her student residence instead of sharing a bath with the rest of her family once a week.
Lord Levy and Mr Prescott freely admit to having a chip on their shoulders, and a streak of vanity which drove them on. Mr Prescott became an MP sponsored by the National Union of Seamen, rising to become Labour’s leading class warrior, and deputy prime minister. Lord Levy, who started a record label (his star performer was Alvin Stardust) and became rich when he sold it, was a celebrated fund-raiser for Jewish charities. He performed the same role for Tony Blair so successfully that he became known as Lord Cashpoint.
Mrs Blair became a QC, and the story of her legal career is rather more interesting than her score-settling account of life as the prime minister’s wife. She was a junior in the chambers of the future Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, and watched him in combat with Tom Bingham, later Lord Chief Justice. “Derry was like an attacking rhinoceros. Tom Bingham on the other hand was like a snake, smooth, charming, almost hypnotic, exposing the weakness in the other side’s argument without ever raising his voice. Bingham subsequently became my role model. As a woman I could never have been as aggressive an advocate as Derry.”
Where did it all go wrong? Mr Prescott felt deeply that he was unappreciated: “I got branded as an uneducated yob. It was an image I suppose never left me. I began to hate the press.” He developed bulimia, caused in part, he says, by stress. An affair with his diary secretary tore at the last vestiges of his authority. His book, which is a lazy, once-over-lightly non-apology of a life, does not restore it.
Lord Levy comes across as a more sympathetic character. He has written the case for his defence in the recent cash-for-honours scandal that involved even Mr Blair. As a vain man, he was particularly proud of his role as Mr Blair’s Middle East envoy, but he acknowledges that he suffered from hubris. “I sometimes revelled in the public attention. In politics I had sometimes been blinded by the light.”
Mrs Blair’s problem is that she could never keep quiet: “I have never been taught the meaning of the phrase ‘discretion is the better part of valour’.” She is a doughty hater, with Gordon Brown as her principal antagonist, and Alistair Campbell and the Princesses Margaret and Anne not far behind. Her loyalty to Mr Blair is absolute: “There were times when I faltered…But I knew him and knew he would never do the wrong thing.” Her book is easily outselling the others, and deserves to, but each leads irresistibly to the same conclusion: there are very few happy endings in British politics.
Tens of thousands of teachers formed picket lines outside nearly 900 schools here Friday morning to protest cuts to education financing proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to help close California’s projected $17 billion budget gap.
If passed, the cuts would reduce financing for Los Angeles schools by $340 million next year, said A. J. Duffy, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, the local teachers union.
Mr. Duffy said the union, which represents 48,000 teachers, had announced plans for the hourlong protest more a month ago, allowing principals and teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest K-12 public school system, to work together to plan supervision of almost 700,000 students between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. Substitute teachers and administrators from neighboring districts were brought in to sit with students in auditoriums, gymnasiums and on playgrounds, he said.
When the protest ended at 8:30 a.m., teachers reported to their classrooms for their regular duties. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
School district officials said they opposed the budget cuts, but denounced the protest as a disruption of the school day. The district failed to win a court injunction in early May to prevent teachers from leaving their classes to take part in the protest.
On Thursday night, Superintendent David Brewer sent an automated call to parents, notifying them of the protest and calling it “the wrong message” to send to legislators and to the community.
At 7:30 Friday morning, teachers wearing red T-shirts and carrying signs with slogans like “Honk for No Budget Cuts” were joined by some parents on sidewalks outside their schools. Many smiled and waved at morning commuters, some of whom sounded their horns.
Retirements are increasing from a baby boomer generation of teachers and others in the state’s public education system, taking with them years of invaluable classroom experience.
As many as 12,000 retirements are expected this year alone by the Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement System, while the Pennsylvania State Education Association says 30 percent of the state’s teachers — there were more than 123,000 in the profession as of 2005-06 — are within five years of their normal retirement age.
Officials of several midstate school districts say colleges are producing enough capa ble graduates and that many are more sophis ticated in technology and other modern edu cation than prior generations.
But short ages exist in key subjects such as math, language, physics and chemistry — skills needed by employers and ones that likely are going to become even more crucial in the future. There also continues to be a lack of minorities going into teaching, an issue that urban districts in particular are finding challenging.
The Harrisburg School District, for example, had a 94.7 percent minority student population last year, but only 23 percent of its teachers represented minorities.
There is much to be said for teacher training and majoring in education in terms of one’s ability to be effective in the classroom. But the retirement wave on top of shortages of teachers in certain subject areas and the dearth of minorities reinforce the need to revisit federal and state certification requirements that have been tightened in recent years under the No Child Left Behind Act and Pennsylvania’s Teachers for the 21st Century Initiative.
Although perhaps well-intentioned, they have presented huge obstacles for nonteaching professionals looking to make a career change and who have much to offer students. Prior to No Child Left Behind, a school district would take a person with an MBA and a background conducive to teaching math, economics or business, put him or her in the classroom immediately and have the individual work toward completing a list of courses needed for teaching certification.
Now, the certification must come first, meaning the applicant would likely have to bear the financial hardship of quitting his or her job while taking classes.
They do have the option of taking and passing the national teachers exam, something Mark Holman, director of human resources for the Harrisburg School District, has compared to “trying to pass the bar exam before going to law school.”
Meanwhile, since the 2003-04 school year, the initiative launched under the Ridge administration require teachers graduating college to have a 3.0 grade point average. But some students for reasons of maturity, homesickness or personal hardship struggle with their studies their freshmen and sophomore years, then turn it around and become A and B students their remaining years. In those cases, the GPA is misleading.
The state should reconsider these GPA requirements and Congress should revisit the certification issue while debating reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Not only have the federal and state governments usurped local discretion in the hiring process, they are keeping some potentially good teachers out of the classroom.
Hose or no hose? That’s the working woman’s dilemma around this time of year. The weather grows warmer, and the debate heats up: Are bare legs proper?
In today’s casual workplaces, many women have peeled off the panty hose, and it is now common to see bare legs even on conservative Wall Street and at business events. Yet the transition has highlighted a generational divide. For women who entered the work force before the 1990s, hose were considered as necessary as underwear. But many twentysomethings have never worn panty hose at all. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com
The fashion shift has left some baby boomer managers feeling that their hose make them look frumpy. Kathy Garland, the 54-year-old chairwoman of the Northern Dallas area for the National Association of Women Business Owners, says she finally threw out a bag full of hose last week. An executive coach herself, she noticed a few years ago that she was the only woman wearing hose at a formal business fund-raiser. “Younger women don’t even think about panty hose,” she says.
There are certainly weightier issues to ponder these days, what with a presidential election and a war going on. But to managers in offices encompassing several generations, panty-hose policies are an opportunity to set fair rules.
Attached to this memo is an update of our dress code that I have approved and is effective immediately, subject to final approval of our Board (as are all official policies).
This change makes the wearing of hose by females optional with both business and business casual. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
Our standards are based on what is generally and widely accepted as the professional dress standard consistent with conservative professional appearance. The reason for this change is a result of legitimate questions by prospective staff members about this standard. Kristen contacted nearly two-dozen local financial institutions about their standard in this area. She also contacted the Wichita Eagle, and I consulted with the professional business-wear reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The vast majority responded that hose was an option with dresses, skirts and slacks in the professional world. Since this is the marketplace standard, we are adopting it.
Please be aware that these are minimum standards. What we truly want is for our members to see us in the most professional light that is reasonable. We encourage you to look your best with these minimum standards as your guide.
Personally, I believe hose enhance a woman’s professional appearance and would be the preferred choice for upwardly mobile women both here and in other professional organizations. Please feel free to make the choice you believe presents you in the most professional way to our members-our ultimate judge.
This is the issue that lately has occupied the mind of Jim Holt, president of Mid American Credit Union, a small financial institution in Wichita, Kan. Mr. Holt is 58 and a three-decade member of the U.S. Army Reserves. He joined Mid American, which has 50 employees, four years ago, inheriting a dress code that prohibited, for women, such things as boots and mules, or backless shoes. The company required “hose” at all times — even under pants.
When Mr. Holt attended a dress-for-success seminar that year, he got advice that caused him to loosen the reins on women’s boots and mules. But not bare legs. The rule, “nylon hose and dress shoes are to be worn at all times,” applied even to business-casual contexts. “We’re not New York or San Francisco,” Mr. Holt says, wearing ironed khaki slacks, an ironed golf shirt, and crisply creased socks. “We’re the Midwest.” http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
If there is a male equivalent of panty hose — forcing wearers to balance comfort and formality — it is probably the tie. Ties aren’t required at Mid American. “The revolution has already taken place in the tie area,” says Mr. Holt. He wears ties only on Mondays for his weekly Rotary Club luncheons.
As for fairness, it’s hard to say whether ties or panty hose are more uncomfortable. One male reader of this newspaper, after making a bet with a female co-worker, attempted to discover the answer by secretly wearing panty hose under his business suit for several weeks. He claims ties are worse.
About a year and a half ago, Mr. Holt hired Kristen Spear as executive director of administration and human resources. Ms. Spear is 28. Like Ms. Garland in Texas, Ms. Spear found that wearing hose to professional events sometimes made her stand out awkwardly. Yet it was her job to counsel wayward employees on Mid American’s dress code, which she did dutifully if not enthusiastically.
One bare-legged 23-year-old clerk in indirect loans — where she dealt with customers by phone — confessed she had never owned a pair of hose. Hose are “so foreign right now to Gen Y or Gen X,” Ms. Spear says.
Ms. Spear encouraged Mr. Holt to reconsider his stand on hose. “According to her local research, hose are optional,” Mr. Holt said in a recent email to me.
He relented just last week. “I didn’t want to be so old-fashioned that people would be like, ‘Do you require corsets, too?’” he said.
Mid American’s newly loosened dress code, allowing bare legs, will be announced to employees in coming weeks in a series of meetings. Women at the credit union would be well-advised to listen closely. Mr. Holt says that when evaluating employees’ performance in dress, as well as workmanship, he’ll make a distinction between “who is meeting the minimum standards and who is exceeding them.” In other words, hose will be optional but advised. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
I suspect it is only a matter of time until Ms. Spear’s point of view wins out entirely.
For the time being, Ms. Spear says she’ll wear hose to board meetings “or if there is reason to exude the highest professional appearance. I will not wear them if I will be in the office all day, because I believe one can be professional-looking without wearing hose.”
How to Date a Playboy Bunny
Step1
Be attractive. While you do not have to be the best looking person in the world, you do have be attractive or at least have an attractive personality trait. No Bunny wants to date a loser. You may need to have plastic surgery done to improve your appearance.
Step2
Find a retired Playboy Bunny. You need to find someone who worked as Bunny. You can hire a private detective, or you can attend one of the advertised events that the Bunnies hold. These events are generally charity fund-raisers. You could also plan to attend a Playboy Club reunion. The reunion is for former Playboy Club employees, but you can generally find the location for the event.
Step3
Visit the Playboy Mansion. While most of the women at the mansion are Playmates and might make you forget your quest to date a Bunny, a few Bunnies have been known to visit. You can also meet people who know Bunnies and can put you in contact with them.
Step4
Be open sexually. The premise of Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy” is open sexuality. If you are not comfortable with your sexuality, you are in the wrong arena for dating. Some Bunnies prefer women, others look both ways and some just want to have an open relationship.
Step5
Watch for international Bunnies. Hugh Hefner currently has plans to revive the Bunnies at a new Playboy Mansion planned to open in China.
Dr. Jacob Robbins, whose studies of the thyroid gland at the National Institutes of Health helped explain how it helps govern metabolism and how thyroid cancers caused by radiation may be treated or possibly prevented, died on May 12 in Bethesda, Md. He was 85.
The cause was heart failure, his family said.
With another endocrinologist at the health institutes, Joseph E. Rall, Dr. Robbins embarked on a study of thyroxine, an important hormone produced by the thyroid that helps regulate metabolism. In the 1950s, the two researchers theorized that levels of thyroxine might vary in the bloodstream, but that the level of thyroxine actually in use would often be markedly lower. They found that thyroxine had to be “free,” or not bound to globulin and other plasma proteins, to be effective, whatever the overall thyroxine level in the bloodstream.
The findings of Dr. Robbins and Dr. Rall yielded insights about what are “normal and pathologic states in the thyroid, and how to distinguish between them,” said Dr. Phillip Gorden, an endocrinologist who directed the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the N.I.H. from 1986 to 1999. The observations have also aided physicians and pharmaceutical companies in developing targeted dosages of thyroxine, which in some pregnant women helps prevent or treat hypothyroidism, a hormone deficiency that can cause lasting developmental problems in infants.
In further fruitful collaborations with Dr. Rall and others, Dr. Robbins studied incidences of thyroid cancer in patients exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear testing. Earlier, in the 1950s, he had examined the therapeutic properties of radioactive iodine when used to pinpoint and treat cancer in the thyroid. In the decades that followed, Dr. Robbins became an authority on the harmful effects of radioactive iodine released spontaneously into the atmosphere.
At the health institutes, Dr. Robbins helped direct long-term studies of the survivors of nuclear tests and accidents, and he followed the health effects of iodine fallout after the Chernobyl reactor meltdown in Ukraine in 1986 and after American weapons testing in the Marshall Islands from the 1940s to the 1980s. He joined a vocal group of scientists who called for wider availability of a drug that can help prevent thyroid cancers from showing up after intense exposures to radiation. That drug, potassium iodide, is taken orally and floods the thyroid with iodine to block the absorption of radioactive iodine.
Dr. Robbins argued that people living near commercial nuclear reactors, particularly children, should have immediate access to potassium iodide. He urged the federal government to stockpile the drug and widen its potential distribution. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com
In 2001, he told The New York Times, “To me, the smart thing to do would be to have it in homes, in blister packs with adhesive backs.”
Jacob Robbins was born in Yonkers. He studied chemistry at Cornell before earning a medical degree there in 1947.
Dr. Robbins joined the health institutes as an investigator in 1954. He was chief of the clinical endocrinology branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases from 1963 to 1991. The health institutes named him a scientist emeritus in 1995.
Dr. Robbins was a president of the American Thyroid Association. From 1968 to 1972, he was editor in chief of the journal Endocrinology.
Dr. Robbins is survived by his wife, the former Jean Adams. The couple lived in Bethesda. He is also survived by a son, Mark, of Seattle; two daughters, Alice of Amherst, Mass., and Susan of Shelburne Falls, Mass.; a brother, Lionel, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; a sister, Evelyn Savitzky of Pittsboro, N.C.; and four grandchildren.
how the business works and how the operators of the state’s estimated 500 dispensaries deal with the high risks and high costs of working in a legal gray area (cnbc.com).
Medical marijuana is legal in California, but federal law still bans sales. Amid the uncertainty that this creates — including the occasional raid by federal agents — a full-fledged industry has blossomed, taking in about $2 billion a year and generating $100 million in state sales taxes, CNBC reported.
Setting up a clinic “can cost as much as a hundred grand,” Ms. Wells reports. The equipment, the cuttings from which plants are grown and office space all tend to be expensive. And from there, the costs only grow, mostly in the form of legal fees. Many clinics keep lawyers on retainer.
Nonetheless, “this is the business model of the future,” says JoAnna La Force of Farmacy, an herbal remedy shop in Southern California. Ms. LaForce says her business is close to breaking even (medicalmarijuanafarmacy.com).
A slew of ancillary businesses has grown up around medical marijuana. Bill Britt, identified on the Web site as a patient, has found a new career as an expert witness in cases brought against dispensaries and patients, earning $250 to $350 a case.
He gained his expert knowledge by attending Oaksterdam University, a trade school in Oakland, Calif. At Oaksterdam (oaksterdamuniversity.com), students learn everything from “The Politics of Cannabis” to botany to business operations.
Getting into the quasi-legitimate marijuana business is a challenge, says Jeff Jones, chancellor of Oaksterdam’s Los Angeles campus. But, he adds, “The investment is well worth it, except for the federal risk.”
As air travel grows increasingly nightmarish even as it gets more expensive, Patrick Smith, writer of Salon’s Ask the Pilot column, has been singing the praises of Southwest Airlines, the (relatively) cut-rate, bare-bones carrier.
Southwest recently took first place in a survey of airline satisfaction conducted by the University of Michigan.
Mr. Smith’s initial explanation was this: “People don’t expect much. Southwest Airlines is nothing if not unpretentious” and has “mastered the art of get-what-you-pay-for satisfaction.”
His readers, though, thought otherwise. Many wrote to say that, though Southwest dispenses with a lot of perks, it offers a basic level of customer service that bigger airlines often do not.
Mr. Smith acknowledged that Southwest’s comparatively small size gave it an advantage in maintaining a consistent level of service. Nevertheless, it is “the last of a nearly vanished breed: an airline with a true personality, that large numbers of fliers have unwavering fondness for.”
As a test of airport security, a customs officer planted marijuana in the side pocket of a random suitcase at Narita International Airport in Tokyo, the BBC reports (news.bbc.co.uk).
The test failed when the sniffer dogs were unable to detect the pot. But the officer could not remember which bag he had used.
Using an actual passenger’s suitcase is against regulations, and the airport’s customs service has apologized.
Meanwhile, the marijuana is still out there. “Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs officials,” according to the BBC. So far, nobody has spoken up. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com
For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.
President Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the virtues of “clean coal.” All three candidates to succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically begging for the technology.
But it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.
In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.
Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.
Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.
“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Coal’s had a tough year,” said John Lavelle, head of a business at General Electric that makes equipment for processing coal into a form from which carbon can be captured. Many of these projects were derailed by the short-term pressure of rising construction costs. But scientists say the result, unless the situation can be turned around, will be a long-term disaster.
Plans to combat global warming generally assume that continued use of coal for power plants is unavoidable for at least several decades. Therefore, starting as early as 2020, forecasters assume that carbon dioxide emitted by new power plants will have to be captured and stored underground, to cut down on the amount of global-warming gases in the atmosphere.
Yet, simple as the idea may sound, considerable research is still needed to be certain the technique would be safe, effective and affordable.
Scientists need to figure out which kinds of rock and soil formations are best at holding carbon dioxide. They need to be sure the gas will not bubble back to the surface. They need to find optimal designs for new power plants so as to cut costs. And some complex legal questions need to be resolved, such as who would be liable if such a project polluted the groundwater or caused other damage far from the power plant.
Major corporations sense the possibility of a profitable new business, and G.E. signed a partnership on Wednesday with Schlumberger, the oil field services company, to advance the technology of carbon capture and sequestration.
But only a handful of small projects survive, and the recent cancellations mean that most of this work has come to a halt, raising doubts that the technique can be ready any time in the next few decades. And without it, “we’re not going to have much of a chance for stabilizing the climate,” said John Thompson, who oversees work on the issue for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.
The fear is that utilities, lacking proven chemical techniques for capturing carbon dioxide and proven methods for storing it underground by the billions of tons per year, will build the next generation of coal plants using existing technology. That would ensure that vast amounts of global warming gases would be pumped into the atmosphere for decades.
The highest-profile failure involved a project known as FutureGen, which President Bush himself announced in 2003: a utility consortium, with subsidies from the government, was going to build a plant in Mattoon, Ill., testing the most advanced techniques for converting coal to a gas, capturing pollutants, and burning the gas for power.
The carbon dioxide would have been compressed and pumped underground into deep soil layers. Monitoring devices would have tested whether any was escaping to the atmosphere.
About $50 million has been spent on FutureGen, about $40 million in federal money and $10 million in private money, to draw up preliminary designs, find a site that had coal, electric transmission and suitable geology, and complete an Environmental Impact Statement, among other steps.
But in January, the government pulled out after projected costs nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion. The government feared the costs would go even higher. A bipartisan effort is afoot on Capitol Hill to save FutureGen, but the project is on life support.
The government had to change its approach, said Clarence Albright Jr., the undersecretary of the Energy Department, to “limit taxpayer exposure to the escalating cost.” http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com
Trying to recover, the Energy Department is trying to cut a deal with a utility that is already planning a new power plant. The government would offer subsidies to add a segment to the plant dedicated to capturing and injecting carbon dioxide, as long as the utility bore much of the risk of cost overruns.
It is unclear whether any utility will agree to such a deal. The power companies, in fact, have been busy pulling back from coal-burning power plants of all types, amid rising costs and political pressure. Utility executives say they do not know of a plant that would qualify for an Energy Department grant as the project is now structured.
Most worrisome to experts on global warming, the utilities have recently been canceling their commitments to a type of plant long seen as a helpful intermediate step toward cleaner coal.
In plants of this type, coal would be gasified and pollutants like mercury, sulfur and soot removed before burning. The plants would be highly efficient, and would therefore emit less carbon dioxide for a given volume of electricity produced, but they would not inject the carbon dioxide into the ground.
But the situation is not hopeless. One new gasification proposal survives in the United States, by Duke Energy for a plant in Edwardsport, Ind.
In Wisconsin, engineers are testing a method that may allow them to bolt machinery for capturing carbon dioxide onto the back of old-style power plants; Sweden, Australia and Denmark are planning similar tests. And German engineers are exploring another approach, one that involves burning coal in pure oxygen, which would produce a clean stream of exhaust gases that could be injected into the ground.
But no project is very far along, and it remains an open question whether techniques for capturing and storing carbon dioxide will be available by the time they are critically needed.
The Electric Power Research Institute, a utility consortium, estimated that it would take as long as 15 years to go from starting a pilot plant to proving the technology will work. The institute has set a goal of having large-scale tests completed by 2020.
“A year ago, that was an aggressive target,” said Steven R. Specker, the president of the institute. “A year has gone by, and now it’s a very aggressive target.”
The inhabitants of Israel’s Village of the Blind, near Gedera, are shown off so often that they have become indifferent to visitors. But today, in words of Dr. Nissim Hagel, blind director of the village, they welcomed Helen Keller “not as a guest but as a sister.”
Helen Adams Keller was born on 27 June 1880 in Tuscumbia, a small rural town in Northwest Alabama, USA. The daughter of Captain Arthur Henley Keller and Kate Adams Keller she was born with full sight and hearing.
Kate Keller was a tall, statuesque blond with blue eyes. She was some twenty years younger than her husband Captain Keller, a loyal southerner who had proudly served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War.
The house they lived in was a simple, white, clapboard house built in 1820 by Helen’s grandparents. At the time of Helen’s birth the family were far from wealthy with Captain Keller earning a living as both a cotton plantation owner and the editor of a weekly local newspaper, the “North Alabamian”. Helen’s mother, as well as working on the plantation, would save money by making her own butter, lard, bacon and ham.
Helen falls ill
But Helen’s life was to change dramatically. In February 1882, when Helen was nineteen months old, she fell ill. To this day the nature of her ailment remains a mystery. The doctors of the time called it “brain fever”, whilst modern day doctors think it may have been scarlet fever or meningitis. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com
Whatever the illness, Helen was, for many days, expected to die. When, eventually, the fever subsided, Helen’s family rejoiced believing their daughter to be well again.
However, Helen’s mother soon noticed how her daughter was failing to respond when the dinner bell was rang or when she passed her hand in front of her daughter’s eyes.
It thus became apparent that Helen’s illness had left her both blind and deaf.
The following few years proved very hard for Helen and her family. Helen became a very difficult child, smashing dishes and lamps and terrorising the whole household with her screaming and temper tantrums. Relatives regarded her as a monster and thought she should be put into an institution.
By the time Helen was six her family had become desperate. Looking after Helen was proving too much for them. Kate Keller had read in Charles Dickens’ book “American Notes” of the fantastic work that had been done with another deaf and blind child, Laura Bridgman, and travelled to a specialist doctor in Baltimore for advice. They were given confirmation that Helen would never see or hear again but were told not to give up hope, the doctor believed Helen could be taught and he advised them to visit a local expert on the problems of deaf children. This expert was Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, Bell was now concentrating on what he considered his true vocation, the teaching of deaf children.
Alexander Graham Bell suggested that the Kellers write to Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, and request that he try and find a teacher for Helen. Michael Anagnos considered Helen’s case and immediately recommended a former pupil of the institution, that woman was
Anne Sullivan had lost the majority of her sight at the age of five. By the age of ten, her mother had died and her father deserted her. She and her brother Jimmie were sent to the poorhouse in February 1876.
Anne’s brother died in the poorhouse. It was October 1880 before Anne finally left and went to commence her education at the Perkins Institution. One summer during her time at the institute, Anne had two operations on her eyes, which led to her regaining enough sight to be able to read normal print for short periods of time.
Anne graduated from Perkins in 1886 and began to search for work. Finding work was terribly difficult for Anne, due to her poor eyesight, and when she received the offer from Michael Anagnos to work as the teacher of Helen Keller, a deaf-blind mute, although she had no experience in this area, she accepted willingly.
Helen meets Anne
On 3 March 1887 Anne arrived at the house in Tuscumbia and for the first time met Helen Keller. Anne immediately started teaching Helen to finger spell. Spelling out the word “Doll” to signify a present she had brought with her for Helen. The next word she taught Helen was “Cake”. Although Helen could repeat these finger movements she could not quite understand what they meant. And while Anne was struggling trying to help her understand, she was also struggling to try and control Helen’s continuing bad behaviour.
Anne and Helen moved into a small cottage on the land of the main house to try and get Helen to improve her behaviour. Of particular concern were Helen’s table manners. She had taken to eating with her hands and from the plates of everyone at the table.
Anne’s attempts to improve Helen’s table manners and make her brush her own hair and button her shoes led to more and more temper tantrums. Anne punished these tantrums by refusing to “talk” with Helen by spelling words on her hands. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire
Over the coming weeks, however, Helen’s behaviour did begin to improve as a bond grew between the two. Then, after a month of Anne’s teaching, what the people of the time called a “miracle” occurred.
Helen had until now not yet fully understood the meaning of words. When Anne led her to the water pump on 5 April 1887, all that was about to change.
As Anne pumped the water over Helen’s hand , Anne spelled out the word water in the girl’s free hand. Something about this explained the meaning of words within Helen, and Anne could immediately see in her face that she finally understood.
Helen later recounted the incident:
“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.”
Helen immediately asked Anne for the name of the pump to be spelt on her hand and then the name of the trellis. All the way back to the house Helen learned the name of everything she touched and also asked for Anne’s name. Anne spelled the name “Teacher” on Helen’s hand. Within the next few hours Helen learnt the spelling of thirty new words.
Helen’s progress from then on was astonishing. Her ability to learn was far in advance of anything that anybody had seen before in someone without sight or hearing. It wasn’t long before Anne was teaching Helen to read, firstly with raised letters and later with braille, and to write with both ordinary and braille typewriters.
Michael Anagnos was keen to promote Helen, one of the numerous articles on her that he wrote said of Helen that “she is a phenomenon”. These articles led to a wave of publicity about Helen with pictures of her reading Shakespeare or stroking her dog appearing in national newspapers.
Helen had become famous, and as well as again visiting Alexander Graham Bell, she visited President Cleveland at the White House. By 1890 she was living at the Perkins Institute and being taught by Anne. In March of that year Helen met Mary Swift Lamson who over the coming year was to try and teach Helen to speak. This was something that Helen desperately wanted and although she learned to understand what somebody else was saying by touching their lips and throat, her efforts to speak herself proved at this stage to be unsuccessful. This was later attributed to the fact that Helen’s vocal chords were not properly trained prior to her being taught to speak.
On 4 November 1891 Helen sent Michael Anagnos a birthday gift of a short story she had written called “The Frost King”. Anagnos was so delighted with the story that he had soon published it in a magazine hailing its importance in literary history.
However, it was soon discovered that Helen’s story was the same as one called “The Frost Fairies” by Margaret Canby. This was ultimately to be the end of Helen and Anne’s friendship with Michael Anagnos. He felt he had been made to appear foolish by what he considered to be Helen’s deception.
There had to be an investigation and it was discovered that Helen had previously been read the story some years before and had obviously remembered it. Helen always claimed not to recall the original story and it should always be remembered that Helen was still only 11 years old, however, this incident created a rift that would never heal between Helen, Anne and Anagnos. It also created great doubt in Helen’s own mind as to whether any of her thoughts were truly her own.
In 1894 Helen and Anne met John D Wright and Dr Thomas Humason who were planning to set up a school to teach speech to the deaf in New York City. Helen and Anne were very excited by this and the assurances of the two men that Helen’s speech could be improved excited them further. Helen thus agreed to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf.
Unfortunately though, Helen’s speech never really improved beyond the sounds that only Anne and others very close to her could understand.
Helen moved on to the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in 1896 and in the Autumn of 1900 entered Radcliffe College, becoming the first deafblind person to have ever enrolled at an institution of higher learning.
Life at Radcliffe was very difficult for Helen and Anne, and the huge amount of work involved led to deterioration in Anne’s eyesight. During their time at the College Helen began to write about her life. She would write the story both in braille and on a normal typewriter. It was at this time that Helen and Anne met with John Albert Macy who was to help edit Helen’s first book “The Story of My Life” which was published in 1903 and although it sold poorly at first it has since become a classic.
On 28 June 1904 Helen graduated from Radcliffe College, becoming the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.
John Macy became good friends with Helen and Anne, and in May 1905 John and Anne were married. Anne’s name now changed to Anne Sullivan Macy. The three lived together in Wrentham, Massachusetts, and during this time Helen wrote “The World I Live In”, revealing for the first time her thoughts on her world. It was also during this time that John Macy introduced her to a new and revolutionary way of viewing the world. And in 1909 Helen became a member of the Socialist Party of Massachusetts.
In 1913 “Out of the Dark” was published. This was a series of essays on socialism and its impact on Helen’s public image was immense. Everyone now knew Helen’s political views.
Helen tours the World
Helen and Anne filled the following years with lecture tours, speaking of her experiences and beliefs to enthralled crowds. Her talks were interpreted sentence by sentence by Anne Sullivan, and were followed by question and answer sessions.
Although Helen and Anne made a good living from their lectures, by 1918 the demand for Helen’s lectures had diminished and they were touring with a more light-hearted vaudeville show, which demonstrated Helen’s first understanding of the word “water”. These shows were hugely successful from the very first performance, a review of which read as follows:
“Helen Keller has conquered again, and the Monday afternoon audience at the Palace, one of the most critical and cynical in the World, was hers.”
At this time they were also offered the chance to make a film in Hollywood and they jumped at the opportunity. “Deliverance”, the story of Helen’s life, was made. Helen was, however, unhappy with the glamorous nature of the film and it unfortunately did not prove to be the financial success that they had hoped for.
The vaudeville appearances continued with Helen answering a wide range of questions on her life and her politics and Anne translating Helen’s answers for the enthralled audience. They were earning up to two thousand dollars a week, which was a considerable sum of money at the time. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
In 1918 Helen, Anne and John moved to Forest Hills in New York. Helen used their new home as a base for her extensive fundraising tours for the American Foundation for the Blind. She not only collected money, but also campaigned tirelessly to alleviate the living and working conditions of blind people, who at that time were usually badly educated and living in asylums. Her endeavours were a major factor in changing these conditions.
Helen’s mother Kate died in 1921 from an unknown illness, and this left Anne as the sole constant in Helen’s life. However that same year Anne fell ill again and this was followed in 1922 by a severe bout of bronchitis which left her unable to speak above a whisper and thus unable to work with Helen on stage anymore. At this point Polly Thomson, who had started working for Helen and Anne in 1914 as a secretary, took on the role of explaining Helen to the theatre going public.
They also spent a lot of time touring the world raising money for blind people. In 1931 they met King George and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace, who were said to be deeply impressed by Helen’s ability to understand what people said through touch.
All the while Anne’s health was getting worse, and with the news of the death of John Macy in 1932, although their marriage had broken up some years before, her spirit was finally broken. She died on 20 October 1936.
When Anne died, Helen and Polly moved to Arcan Ridge, in Westport, Connecticut, which would be Helen’s home for the rest of her life.
After World War II, Helen and Polly spent years travelling the world fundraising for the American Foundation for the Overseas Blind. They visited Japan, Australia, South America, Europe and Africa.
Whilst away during this time Helen and Polly learnt of the fire that destroyed their home at Arcan Ridge. Although the house would be rebuilt, as well as the many mementoes that Helen and Polly lost, also destroyed was the latest book that Helen had been working on about Anne Sullivan, called “Teacher”.
It was also during this time that Polly Thomson’s health began to deteriorate and whilst in Japan she had a mild stroke. Doctors advised Polly to stop the continuous touring she and Helen did, and although initially they slowed down a bit, the touring continued once Polly had recovered.
In 1953 a documentary film “The Unconquered” was made about Helen’s life, this was to win an Academy Award as the best feature length documentary .It was at the same time that Helen began work again on her book “Teacher”, some seven years after the original had been destroyed. The book was finally published in 1955.
Polly Thomson had a stroke in 1957, she was never to fully recover and died on March 21, 1960. Her ashes were deposited at the National Cathedral in Washington DC next to those of Anne Sullivan. It was the nurse who had been brought in to care for Polly in her last years, Winnie Corbally, who was to take care of Helen in her remaining years.
The Miracle Worker
It was in 1957 that “The Miracle Worker” was first performed. A drama portraying Anne Sullivan’s first success in communicating with Helen as a child, it first appeared as a live television play in the United States.
In 1959 it was re-written as a Broadway play and opened to rave reviews. It became a smash hit and ran for almost two years. In 1962 it was made into a film and the actresses playing Anne and Helen both received Oscars for their performances.
Helen retires from public life
In October 1961 Helen suffered the first of a series of strokes, and her public life was to draw to a close. She was to spend her remaining years being cared for at her home in Arcan Ridge.
Her last years were not however without excitement, and in 1964 Helen was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, by President Lyndon Johnson. A year later she was elected to the Women’s Hall of Fame at the New York World’s Fair.
On June 1, 1968, at Arcan Ridge, Helen Keller died peacefully in her sleep. Helen was cremated in Bridgeport, Connecticut and a funeral service was held at the National Cathedral in Washington DC where the urn containing her ashes would later be deposited next to those of Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.
Helen’s legacy
Today Helen’s final resting place is a popular tourist attraction and the bronze plaque erected to commemorate her life has the following inscription written in braille:
“Helen Keller and her beloved companion Anne Sullivan Macy are interred in the columbarium behind this chapel.”
So many people have visited the chapel, and touched the braille dots, that the plaque has already had to be replaced twice.
If Helen Keller were born today her life would undoubtedly have been completely different. Her life long dream was to be able to talk, something that she was never really able to master. Today the teaching methods exist that would have helped Helen to realise this dream. What would Helen have made of the technology available today to blind and deafblind individuals? Technology that enables blind and deafblind people, like Helen, to communicate directly, and independently, with anybody in the world.
Helen Keller may not have been directly responsible for the development of these technologies and teaching methods. But with the help of Anne Sullivan, through her writings, lectures and the way she lived her life, she has shown millions of people that disability need not be the end of the world.
“The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to strive to realise, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the best of himself so that he can win light through work.”
Further reading
The world has changed a lot since Helen’s time. The internet now gives people the freedom to learn and communicate equally. From emailing, browsing, learning online, playing games, downloading music and shopping, it has opened up a new world to blind and partially sighted people. Find out how web designers can make their websites accessible to people who are deaf and blind – Web Access Centre.
We are UK’s leading charity offering information, support and advice to over two million people with sight problems. Find out more about RNIB.
Up to three million adults and children in the UK who are blind, partially sighted or have a reading disability such as dyslexia are denied the right to read. Support our Right to Read campaign.
More families are looking right under their feet to ease the problem of high food prices.
As consumers balk at the rising cost of groceries, homeowners increasingly are cutting out sections of lawn and retiring flower beds to grow their own food. They’re building raised vegetable beds, turning their spare time over to gardening, and doing battle with insect pests. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com
At Al’s Garden Center in Portland, Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have jumped an unprecedented 43% from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and shrubs are up 17%. Sales of flower perennials, on the other hand, are down 16%. It’s much the same story at Williams Nursery, Westfield, N.J., where total sales are down 4.6% even as herb and vegetable-plant sales have risen 16%. And in Austin, Texas, Great Outdoors reports sales of flowers slightly down, while sales of vegetables have risen 20% over last year.
The grow-your-own trend comes as the price of food has skyrocketed. The government recently reported that April’s 0.9% increase in food prices from the previous month was the fastest pace in 18 years — a reflection of global pressures, from drought in Australia to increased demand in India and China.
For Michele von Turkovich in South Burlington, Vt., those pressures hit home when she noticed her average grocery bill hit $800 a month. “I reached for the organic strawberries the other day and realized, ‘I can’t buy organic,’ ” says the research-lab technician and mother of three teenage daughters.
After chatting with a neighbor who has a large garden, Ms. von Turkovich in April decided to dig up a 10-by-12-foot patch of lawn struggling on the side of her house to plant vegetables. Her neighbor helped her to think about making the best use of the space so that there would always be something in the garden to harvest.
So far, the lettuce is an inch high, and she’s looking forward to radishes in about a week. Also sprouting are about a dozen varieties of greens, including Swiss chard, kale, scallions and endive. A used soccer net serves as a makeshift trellis for the peas she is expecting. It’s a lot of toil, though. Ms. von Turkovich says she typically spends at least an hour after work each day on her garden and about half the weekend. “It takes a significant amount of my spare time.”
Even before this year’s food-price crunch, the vigor for veggies was already gaining momentum. An annual survey of more than 2,000 households by the National Gardening Association shows the average amount spent per household on flowers was flat in 2007 compared with a year earlier. But spending on vegetable plants rose 21% to $58 per household last year, and spending on herbs gained 45% to $32.
Bruce Butterfield, the association’s research director, expects 2008 will be another strong year for vegetable gardening thanks to “the combination of gas prices, food prices, and people staying at home because the world’s gone crazy,” he says. “At least they can have some control over their backyard.”
George Ball, chief executive of seed giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster, Pa., says he thinks the veggie-gardening rage is prompted by more than just food costs. His business has seen more baby boomers “entering their prime gardening years,” he says. Now, this generation has “a lot of time, the rat race is over, a home that is likely to be their last, and kids past puberty,” he says. Burpee’s sales of vegetables and herbs are up about 40% this year, twice last year’s growth rate. Tomatoes, summer squash, onions, cucumbers, peas and beans continue to be top sellers. “We’re running out of things like onions, that you think would never be that hot and raging,” he says.
In West Columbia, S.C., Sarah Rosenbaum ripped up about a quarter of her family’s landscaped yard to install six raised vegetable beds. “You get a pack of seeds for a dollar or two, and you have got a whole bed of organic vegetables for a fraction of what you’d pay at the store. And they taste better.”
The project got under way in early March when Ms. Rosenbaum, her partner and his 12-year-old twins started seeds indoors for all their vegetables — from bok choy to zucchini. “We’re out in the garden after work every day, pretty much” she says. “We love doing the work, so it doesn’t really feel like work.” She hopes the experience will also inspire the twins to eat more vegetables.
To be sure, a new gardener can find himself plunking down a significant amount of money to get started. Ms. Rosenbaum says that the initial investment in her vegetable garden was around $500 for everything from lumber to wire cages. While that may seem high for someone trying to save on food costs, she plans on reusing the materials year after year. “We’re even planning to save seeds for next year,” she says.
In the Garden Grove neighborhood of Portland, Ore., a community garden got a big makeover. Not only did the 15 participating households decide to double the garden’s size and install a rain-sensitive sprinkler system; they also set aside a section so that each family gets its own subplot. “I’m in no way a tie-dye wearing granola hippie,” says Garden Grove resident Dylan T. Boyd, a vice president at an email marketing company and father to two small boys. “But I was looking at the price of blueberries the other day — $5 for a fistful. I thought, ‘Are you kidding me?’ “
While it’s a time commitment, he says, the payback is far greater. “It’s so much easier to walk to the top of the street and grab your lettuce and tomatoes for dinner, fresh every day.”
Talk to your local nursery or check the seed packet for instructions on ideal planting times, which vary depending on what part of the country you live in. Here are some other things to consider:
If you live near an industrial plant or even in an old house where lead-based paint may have seeped into the soil, you should consider getting the soil checked for contaminants. A cooperative extension affiliated with a state university can usually do this.
http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com
If you build a separate or raised bed filled with compost and topsoil, you can forgo testing the soil you’re worried about.
You can also buy a soil-testing kit at a garden center which will tell you the pH and key nutrient levels. Optimum pH for growing vegetables is generally slightly acidic (between 6.5 and 7). If you don’t have enough nitrogen, phosphorous or potassium you should add organic matter, such as good compost mixed in with your existing soil. Also consider organic fertilizers to boost those nutrients, such as blood meal, alfalfa meal, sea kelp or fish emulsion.
Most vegetables do best when they get plenty of sun, so pick a spot that gets optimum sunlight, at least six to eight hours of direct sun daily. Leafy greens such as lettuce and spinach can tolerate shadier conditions. Also, those leafy vegetables typically want to be planted in the cooler part of the season, before average temperatures go much past 70 degrees. Vegetables that do best in the hotter months include tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and squash. To conserve space, consider planting lettuce underneath tomato vines or even mixing them in other parts of the garden, where the foliage, vines and flowers can be captivating in their own right.
“Sometimes people think they have to be in perfect rows, but there’s no reason you can’t put them in a little closer and mix them in with flower gardens,” says Lori Bushway, a gardening outreach specialist at Cornell University. She adds that doing so is also a good foil for pests that tend to zero in more rapidly on plants that are massed together. When distributed around the landscape, “they’re harder to find,” she says.
If you see a pest, find out what it is before reaching for that scary-sounding spray can. “People are buying sprays without even knowing what the problem is in the first place,” says John Traunfeld, director of the home and garden information center at the University of Maryland’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. The local cooperative extension can help identify the problem and suggest the best remedy. “A lot can be taken care of by just hand picking,” he says.
Do Americans save enough? That depends on what the meaning of the word “enough” is. Enough for our own good? Enough for that of our neighbors? Our grandchildren? Our neighbors’ grandchildren and our grandchildren’s neighbors?
Ronald T. Wilcox, a business professor at the University of Virginia, acknowledges that these are very different questions, but he believes that they all have the same answer. By any standard that Mr. Wilcox can imagine, he is sure that we save too little.
By most standards, he is probably right. Like philanthropy, saving is an act of self-denial that enriches your neighbors (by leaving more goods available for them to consume). But unlike philanthropy, saving is punished by the tax system (via the taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains and inheritance). That’s nuts. When you tax saving, you encourage people – wealthy people in particular – to spend more and grab a larger share of the consumption pie. “More consumption by the rich” should not be among the primary objectives of the tax code.
The alternative is to tax consumption. Mr. Wilcox thus believes (as do I and probably most economists) that a consumption tax is better than an income tax, at least in principle. But he withholds his full endorsement for a variety of spurious reasons, mostly born of his false assumption that any consumption tax must be levied at the point of sale. He worries, for example, that a consumption tax is necessarily nonprogressive. But you can easily implement a consumption tax with a Form 1040 that says: “How much did you earn this year? How much did you save? Now pay tax on the difference.” And you can make that tax as progressive as you like.
The tax code alone is reason to believe that Americans don’t save enough. Mr. Wilcox offers a menu of other reasons, not all of them convincing. He repeats the canard, popularized by Robert Frank of Cornell University, that “keeping up with the Joneses” is a force for excessive consumption. One could argue equally well that it is a force for excessive saving. If I am trying to outshine the neighbors’ Mercedes, I might well decide to be extra frugal until I can afford a Rolls Royce.
Mr. Wilcox makes another fundamental error when he points to high foreign savings as a cause of excessive U.S. consumption. When foreigners save, U.S. interest rates drop. This makes it smart for Americans to consume more. “More” is not always the same as “excessive.”
Such errors aside, traditional economic theory does suggest that we save too little for the general good. It denies, however, that we save too little for our own good. Regarding the second point, I suspect, along with Mr. Wilcox, that traditional economic theory is wrong. Smart people make stupid investment decisions all the time. They thoughtlessly accept the default asset allocations in their retirement plans; they fail to grasp the miraculous power of compound interest; they hire financial advisers to help them pick individual stocks; they choose taxable savings vehicles instead of IRAs. I know an internationally renowned economist who, for 10 years, unknowingly put all his retirement savings in bonds instead of equities because he had checked the wrong box on a form.
Mr. Wilcox does an excellent job of addressing these problems. He stresses education, and indeed the single best investment you can make in your children’s future is to teach them the returns to saving. You can do that by pointing to some of Mr. Wilcox’s graphs, or you can just quote the numbers I always quote to my students: Invest $1,000 a month in 3% bonds and in 40 years you’ll have almost a million dollars. Invest the same $1,000 a month in a diversified portfolio of stocks earning the historical average of 8% and you’ll have more than $3.5 million. Give it 50 years instead of 40 and that $3.5 million grows to $8 million. (All these numbers are corrected for inflation. If inflation runs at 2%, you can expect a 10% return on the stock market. In the end, you’ll have the equivalent of eight million of today’s dollars; if prices double, you’ll have 16 million instead of eight.)
It is worth noting that a 1% management fee on your mutual fund can easily eat up two of those eight million. Yet almost nobody pays attention to these fees. Moral: Stick with low-fee funds. Bigger moral: There are some very simple things that we can all do to become wiser investors. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com
In “Whatever Happened to Thrift?,” Mr. Wilcox draws these morals and others to help individual savers. He also has advice for paternalistic employers who want their workers to save more: Offer a limited number of low-fee mutual funds; offer targeted financial education; above all, reset the defaults on your pension plans to something other than 100% cash, and so that 401(k) plans are opt-out rather than opt-in.
The idea here is to increase employee pension-fund participation, which means that you’ll probably have to cut back on matching funds. That’s good for your financially naïve employees but bad for the financially savvy ones who would have participated anyway. Mr. Wilcox acknowledges this fact but fails to acknowledge that your financially savvy employees are likely to be smarter and more valuable. (Interestingly, he makes this very observation earlier in the book but seems to forget it by the end.) I’m not sure that it is good company policy to make your most productive workers subsidize the rest.
Mr. Wilcox has an enviably lively prose style and an admirable commitment to brevity. Not everything he says is correct, but much of what he says is both correct and valuable. A conscientious reader could easily secure a comfortable retirement by taking his advice to heart.
Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs.
The study is based on dosing mice with resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. Some scientists are already taking resveratrol in capsule form, but others believe it is far too early to take the drug, especially using wine as its source, until there is better data on its safety and effectiveness.
The report is part of a new wave of interest in drugs that may enhance longevity. On Monday, Sirtris, a startup founded in 2004 to develop drugs with the same effects as resveratrol, completed its sale to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.
Sirtris is seeking to develop drugs that activate protein agents known in people as sirtuins.
“The upside is so huge that if we are right, the company that dominates the sirtuin space could dominate the pharmaceutical industry and change medicine,” Dr. David Sinclair of the Harvard Medical School, a co-founder of the company, said Tuesday.
Serious scientists have long derided the idea of life-extending elixirs, but the door has now been opened to drugs that exploit an ancient biological survival mechanism, that of switching the body’s resources from fertility to tissue maintenance. The improved tissue maintenance seems to extend life by cutting down on the degenerative diseases of aging.
The reflex can be prompted by a faminelike diet, known as caloric restriction, which extends the life of laboratory rodents by up to 30 percent but is far too hard for most people to keep to and in any case has not been proven to work in humans.
Research started nearly 20 years ago by Dr. Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed recently that the famine-induced switch to tissue preservation might be triggered by activating the body’s sirtuins. Dr. Sinclair, a former student of Dr. Guarente, then found in 2003 that sirtuins could be activated by some natural compounds, including resveratrol, previously known as just an ingredient of certain red wines.
Dr. Sinclair’s finding led in several directions. He and others have tested resveratrol’s effects in mice, mostly at doses far higher than the minuscule amounts in red wine. One of the more spectacular results was obtained last year by Dr. John Auwerx of the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France. He showed that resveratrol could turn plain vanilla, couch-potato mice into champion athletes, making them run twice as far on a treadmill before collapsing.
The company Sirtris, meanwhile, has been testing resveratrol and other drugs that activate sirtuin. These drugs are small molecules, more stable than resveratrol, and can be given in smaller doses. In April, Sirtris reported that its formulation of resveratrol, called SRT501, reduced glucose levels in diabetic patients.
The company plans to start clinical trials of its resveratrol mimic soon. Sirtris’s value to GlaxoSmithKline is presumably that its sirtuin-activating drugs could be used to treat a spectrum of degenerative diseases, like cancer and Alzheimer’s, if the underlying theory is correct.
Separately from Sirtris’s investigations, a research team led by Tomas A. Prolla and Richard Weindruch, of the University of Wisconsin, reports in the journal PLoS One on Wednesday that resveratrol may be effective in mice and people in much lower doses than previously thought necessary. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com
In earlier studies, like Dr. Auwerx’s of mice on treadmills, the animals were fed such large amounts of resveratrol that to gain equivalent dosages people would have to drink more than 100 bottles of red wine a day.
The Wisconsin scientists used a dose on mice equivalent to just 35 bottles a day. But red wine contains many other resveratrol-like compounds that may also be beneficial. Taking these into account, as well as mice’s higher metabolic rate, a mere four, five-ounce glasses of wine “starts getting close” to the amount of resveratrol they found effective, Dr. Weindruch said.
Resveratrol can also be obtained in the form of capsules marketed by several companies. Those made by one company, Longevinex, include extracts of red wine and of a Chinese plant called giant knotweed. The Wisconsin researchers conclude that resveratrol can mimic many of the effects of a caloric-restricted diet “at doses that can readily be achieved in humans.”
The effectiveness of the low doses was not tested directly, however, but with a DNA chip that measures changes in the activity of genes. The Wisconsin team first defined the pattern of gene activity established in mice on caloric restriction, and then showed that very low doses of resveratrol produced just the same pattern.
Dr. Auwerx, who used doses almost 100 times greater in his treadmill experiments, expressed reservations about the new result. “I would be really cautious, as we never saw significant effects with such low amounts,” he said Tuesday in an e-mail message.
Another researcher in the sirtuin field, Dr. Matthew Kaeberlein of the University of Washington in Seattle, said, “There’s no way of knowing from this data, or from the prior work, if something similar would happen in humans at either low or high doses.”
A critical link in establishing whether or not caloric restriction works the same wonders in people as it does in mice rests on the outcome of two monkey trials. Since rhesus monkeys live for up to 40 years, the trials have taken a long time to show results. Experts said that one of the two trials, being conducted by Dr. Weindruch, was at last showing clear evidence that calorically restricted monkeys were outliving the control animals.
But no such effect is apparent in the other trial, being conducted at the National Institutes of Health.
The Wisconsin report underlined another unresolved link in the theory, that of whether resveratrol actually works by activating sirtuins. The issue is clouded because resveratrol is a powerful drug that has many different effects in the cell. The Wisconsin researchers report that they saw no change in the mouse equivalent of sirtuin during caloric restriction, a finding that if true could undercut Sirtris’s strategy of looking for drugs that activate sirtuin.
Dr. Guarente, a scientific adviser to Sirtris, said the Wisconsin team only measured the amount of sirtuin present in mouse tissues, and not the more important factor of whether it had been activated.
Dr. Sinclair said the definitive answer would emerge from experiments, now under way, with mice whose sirtuin genes had been knocked out. “The question of how resveratrol is working is an ongoing debate and it will take more studies to get the answer,” he said.
Dr. Robert E. Hughes of the Buck Institute for Age Research said there could be no guarantee of success given that most new drug projects fail. But, he said, testing the therapeutic uses of drugs that mimic caloric restriction is a good idea, based on substantial evidence.
Now, some of the same collection agencies, as well as other firms that purchase debt outright, have begun participating as bidders in online auctions, in which they buy the debt or provide guaranteed payments to hospitals for access to the unpaid accounts. Some experts say this gives them more reason to aggressively pursue patients in arrears. Auctions can drive up the amount paid for debt, meaning a collector must recoup more money from patients to cover its initial investment and turn a profit. And the winning bidders often get to keep all the money they collect on the auctioned debt.
Winning bidders may “have to work harder” to make a profit from auctioned debt, says Michael Klozotsky, an analyst at Kaulkin Ginsberg Co., a collections-industry strategic-advice company. “Working harder means sometimes using strategies that are more aggressive.”
Many of the auctions of hospital debt have been done through Web site ARxChange.com1 — shorthand for “accounts receivable exchange” — owned by TriCap Technology Group. Another site is medipent.com2, run by Medipent LLC. The auction-site owners, both small companies based in New York, say their systems create safeguards that protect patients from potential abuse. Collection firms are vetted for their tactics and approach to patient needs and concerns before they are allowed to participate in auctions, the site owners say. The site owners also try to ensure that collectors comply with hospital rules — whether they must record phone calls, for instance, or get the hospital’s permission before initiating a lawsuit against a patient. Hospitals have final say over who bids on their accounts, and, on ARxChange.com, don’t necessarily award the contract to the highest bidder.
Hospitals “don’t want a black eye from a PR standpoint,” says Joseph LaManna, TriCap’s chief executive. Both TriCap and Medipent receive fees from the hospitals and collectors, based on the size of the winning bid.
The auctions reflect hospitals’ continuing search for ways to collect from the uninsured and underinsured. In 2006, nearly 5,000 community hospitals provided uncompensated care totaling $31.2 billion — mostly unpaid patient bills or charity care — representing nearly 6% of all costs, according to the American Hospital Association.
The amount of debt auctioned so far is relatively small. ARxChange.com says it has handled more than $400 million in patient debt in about 27 auctions, involving nine hospital systems and four individual hospitals. Medipent.com says it has hosted events involving 12 New York hospitals and $60 million of debt.
Participating hospitals say they are still testing the process, often putting up for bid some of their older debt with a low likelihood of being repaid. Bidders typically offer just pennies or fractions of pennies on each dollar owed, reflecting the small amount they expect to collect from patients while still pulling in a profit.
Woman’s Christian Association Hospital of Jamestown, N.Y., last fall auctioned about $7 million of debt on ARxChange.com that had already gone through collection efforts by the hospital’s staff and by CBJ Credit Recovery, an outside collection agency. CBJ decided to take another shot at the accounts and submitted the winning bid, an agreement to pay the hospital $80,000 over the course of a year in exchange for keeping what it collects from the debtors. “Even though [the unpaid bills] were very old, it was additional value we were able to extract from them,” says Chuck Iverson, chief financial officer at the hospital.
CBJ co-owner Andrew Hartweg says his firm is approaching the collection effort in the same way it would if it were working on a traditional contingency basis. This generally involves sending letters to debtors, calling them on the phone, reporting them to credit bureaus and, as a “very last-ditch effort,” getting clearance in court to garnish their paychecks, he says. Mr. Hartweg wouldn’t say how much CBJ has collected so far on the accounts, but said it has extracted payments on bills dating back to 2003 and anticipates making a profit.
Consumer advocates say patients are less likely to successfully dispute bills or negotiate them downward if they are dealing with a third-party collector rather than a hospital directly. Collectors also are further removed from hospitals’ financial-assistance policies.
“The hospital is an institution in the community, has a reputation, in many cases has a nonprofit mission to uphold,” says Anthony Wright, executive director of the consumer-advocacy coalition Health Access California. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com
“Once it goes to collections, that starts a process that can get a lot more antagonistic, a lot more aggressive, and a lot more damaging to a family’s credit history and financial future.”
One health system that has backed away from the online auctions is St. John Health. The Detroit system, which owns six hospitals, says it learned recently that, without its knowledge, some of its patient debt had been posted on ARxChange.com by Accretive Health, an outside company that manages collections for St. John. The hospital system says it “expressed our displeasure” to Accretive and told it not to continue because “we do not believe an environment such as a Web site is appropriate in dealing with patient accounts.” No transaction was completed, St. John says. Accretive declined to make a statement about its business with St. John.
The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and some state laws govern how debt collectors can treat consumers. For instance, debt collectors aren’t allowed to harass consumers or make false statements, including implying they will sue if they don’t intend to do so. Consumer groups say calling the medical provider or your insurer could help clarify any confusion about what you owe. The hospital also could provide information about financial assistance or charity-care.
What the hospitals can do to help patients may depend on the terms of their agreement with the collector, says Mark Rukavina, executive director of the Access Project, a research and advocacy group that focuses on medical debt. Many hospitals include provisions in their contracts with the debt buyers that allow the hospitals to help resolve confusion over bills and retrieve patient accounts from the firms in circumstances such as charity-care qualification. (TriCap also says it looks for charity-care cases prior to auctions by guessing at incomes based on factors such as ZIP Codes.)
“We do not want our patients’ debt handled in any egregious manner,” says Neal Somaney, vice president of business office operations at Vanguard Health Systems, a Nashville, Tenn., company that owns 15 hospitals in four states. When Vanguard sold $48.8 million of patient debt in an auction in January on ARxChange.com, it chose to award the contract to a firm it had worked with previously and trusted, says Mr. Somaney.
New Island Hospital of Bethpage, N.Y., participated in medipent.com’s first health auction last year, offering $7.3 million of unpaid patient bills that ranged from about four to 15 months old. Drew Pallas, New Island’s chief financial officer, says the hospital received complaints from two debtors about the collection agency. But when the hospital subsequently listened to recordings of the agency’s calls to those people, it determined that the collector had acted with professionalism, he says.
“I do not doubt that most or all of the facts in the article have a place, but they are a drop in the ocean. THERE IS NO ATMOSPHERE OF FEAR in the country, though the journalist is subtly painting the picture of a ‘bloody regime’ that pressures its citizens.
We do have problems and we will solve them in time. Democracy is great when you live under a warm roof and have your piece of bread with butter for lunch. For now, the people do not need democracy, but the possibility to live humanely.
Please, do not teach us how to live.” dmlord
“Russia has always needed to have a czar who tells people how to live and condemns things that are not right.” victor_aka
“You’re facing an uphill perception battle. Your article is a piece of investigative journalism; to you — but not to your audience. Most of what’s published in this genre in Russian are thinly veiled, slanted opinion pieces masquerading as reporting. Your work, to a greater or lesser extent, will be read in the same vein.” muphta
“We criticize our own government with pleasure, as well as the way of life that they impose on us. But we will never allow non-Russians to criticize our Motherland. Even Pushkin noted that.” 3rd_world_kid
“If it’s a propaganda material, it is very stupid and weak. If it’s a journalist’s text, such journalists have to fired for professional incapacity. It’s better not to translate such a nightmare into Russian. One can only repeat what McCain’s wife said: I am ashamed for The New York Times.” panam
“Anti-American propaganda is under the Russians’ skin, and will be for a long time.” Sashapyls
“It is funny to read this from people who, for 10 years, have invaded other countries, toppled the stable regimes that ruled and enforced their rules there. Especially funny to read it if you don’t forget about prisons and torture in Guantánamo. And completely funny when you recall how these people hanged the former president of the country they invaded. Why am I saying this? Because Mr. Putin and his team are evil, of course. And only cattle vote for him. BUT these are OUR problems. And WE will sort them out.” happy_bra
“People in Russia today have still failed to learn how to really look at things. For many Russians, it is still easier to blame some ‘enemy’ for all of their problems than to look for solutions to those problems.”
“How frightening it is to live in this country.” ouks
“This article is somehow strongly reminiscent of an editorial in Pravda from the Soviet days. The journalistic brainwashing techniques are identical.” Yurvur
“So much noise, so much noise and the article itself is absolutely objective, it tells truth. Why attack it? Yes, the newspaper does not depend on any authorities, it’s difficult for the Russian bloggers to imagine it.” boris_petrov
“Americans don’t understand an elementary thing.
There is no real opposition, not because ‘Putin banned’ it, but because it has discredited itself.” archer5
“Ah, freedom of speech, the foundation stone of democracy. How you got me with your ‘denunciation’ of the Putin regime. Sometimes I think that the majority of people see more ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘dictatorship’ and other frightening words than there is in reality, much more.
My grandmother told me how in the 1940s at night they came and took people. That was a police state.” chiga28
“Looks like everything is correct and that overall, the quite ugly picture of political reality in Russia is outlined with high authenticity.
But why do I have such an unpleasant feeling from what I’ve read?
As the patriots correctly noted, the opinion of the reporter is too contemptuous, which is very close to America’s and Americans’ foreign political views on the outside world.” mark_ars
“This can be a first pebble skipped on the water, just to send out feelers and find a pretext to start a dialogue. Not a dialogue between Bush and Putin, but between our peoples, who are neither dumb nor bright, simply different.” falcon icp
After years of watching President Bush ignore Congress, at best, or disdain it, at worst, there is relief in listening to the British prime minister face questions in Parliament. As seen on C-Span, these events feature literate parries and thrusts, complete sentences, artful arguments, all to a chorus of noisy yeas and brays.
Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee for president, has now promised that if elected, he will bring this hallowed British tradition to America.
http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com
This is a daring idea. The public might learn a great deal about its leaders both in the White House and in Congress. Of course, an American question time horrifies some politicians. Some argue that America is different. Congress is not a parliament. Some even contend that the president is elected to lead everybody, not just his or her party — a quaint notion to anyone who has paid attention in the last seven years. Mainly, the politically experienced say the idea is a death wish.
British experts like Peter Riddell of The Times of London suggest that the real problem might not be the president’s inability to answer questions, but getting members of Congress to ask decent ones. British queries tend to be short, fast and bitingly to the point, a skill set not widely available in Washington.
The high-wire displays required in the British Parliament also display a leader’s debating prowess. Or not. Margaret Thatcher was less than a natural but eventually she could show off better than the best of them. Tony Blair played the verbal ping-pong like a professional. Harold Macmillan once confessed that the thought of question time almost made him sick.
If a president did have the gumption to answer Congress face to face, there would certainly be rules. The prime minister’s question time lasts for about 30 minutes on Wednesdays. Some questions are submitted in advance, but the debate is often heated and unpredictable. Fortunately, there are limits. Calling the prime minister a liar (not an unknown event in the House of Commons) can earn a timeout. In Australia recently, one member of Parliament was barred for a day after calling the prime minister’s representative a “chicken man.”
Both sides would have to agree that the goal is exchanging information, openly. That would mean minimal preening, no long-winded questions or answers, and a dose of spontaneity. If that could happen, it would be a boon for democracy, not to mention for YouTube.
Question: Is “First Do No Harm” From the Hippocratic Oath? Myth vs Fact
Answer: A question was raised in the Ancient / Classical History forum:
“Having just read the translation to English of Hippocrates’ oath, I was surprised to see that ‘first do no harm’ did not appear in the text as is commonly quoted. Any idea where the quote comes from?”
You’re right, the dictum first do no harm doesn’t exactly come from the Hippocratic Oath, but it does come from the Hippocratic Corpus, at least in esssence. A related section from the Hippocratic Oath has been translated as
I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art. I will not cut persons laboring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.
But while not harming the patient is explicit, this section doesn’t make doing no harm the first concern of the Hippocratic physician. The Hippocratic writing Epidemics is considered the more likely source:
5. With regard to the dangers of these cases, one must always attend to the seasonable concoction of all the evacuations, and to the favorable and critical abscesses. The concoctions indicate a speedy crisis and recovery of health; crude and undigested evacuations, and those which are converted into bad abscesses, indicate either want of crisis, or pains, or prolongation of the disease, or death, or relapses; which of these it is to be must be determined from other circumstances. The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future – must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm. The art consists in three things – the disease, the patient, and the physician. The physician is the servant of the art, and the patient must combat the disease along with the physician.
When Pure Digital Technologies Inc. introduced its Flip point-and-shoot camcorder a year ago, it dramatically simplified video recording. The Flip measured the size of a small digital still camera, cost less than $150 and its videos could be emailed in one quick process. Consumers gobbled up the tiny, nonintimidating device.
But to the style-conscious set, the Flip looked like a clunky Fisher-Price toy — especially when compared with a sleek, new iPod or more-sophisticated digital cameras — and was too thick to comfortably slip into a pocket. Last fall, Pure Digital introduced an enhanced version: the Flip Video Ultra, but its biggest aesthetic difference was new orange, pink and green colors.
See clips of the Mino in action. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.blogspot.com
Today, the company will begin sales of its $180 Flip Video Mino (pronounced “minnow”), the hippest offering yet from Pure Digital. This 60-minute Flip includes many firsts for the company: rechargeable batteries; touch-sensitive buttons rather than old-school, push-down buttons; and a thinner build that measures 40% smaller, overall. The Flip Mino is also the first one in the family to enable publishing to MySpace; prior software limited Web-site sharing to YouTube and AOL Video.
I’ve been using a glossy, black Flip Mino (it also comes in white) for the past two weeks and it looks much cooler than older models. Its newly positioned USB adapter pops up from the top of the camera like something from a Swiss Army Knife. The Mino offers features such as the ability to lock the delete button, so no one accidentally deletes your videos, and mute all camera sounds, so as to record silently during quiet moments like wedding ceremonies or speeches.
I brought it along with me almost everywhere I went because of its small size and light weight, even fitting it into a thin clutch purse with a cellphone and BlackBerry. I used the Mino in various situations ranging from bright, scenic outdoor settings to indoors while eating dinner in a candle-lit restaurant. Overall, I was pleased with the sound and picture quality of the Mino, and I found its built-in software, which automatically starts when the camera plugs into your Mac or Windows PC, to be a pleasure to use.
Today, Pure Digital Technologies introduced its $180 Flip Video Mino, a thinner, more stylish version of its point-and-shoot camcorder.
It took just a few minutes to trim excess footage from my videos before saving them to my computer or sharing them with friends and family. Another way to share videos from the Flip Mino is via Pure Digital’s server, which sends emails with embedded video links, saving upload and download time on both ends. Though I didn’t publish any of my videos on a public Web site, AOL, MySpace and YouTube were just one step away.
The Flip Mino’s touch buttons, while stylish, were difficult to use at first. I missed the tactile feel of physical buttons as I tried to hold this small video camera and press the zoom buttons using just one hand. The new, touch-sensitive buttons weren’t as satisfying and stable to use, and I pressed them accidentally more than a few times. For instance, the Zoom Out button is directly below Record, making it easy to mistakenly touch it. After about a week of using the Mino, I grew more accustomed to using these new touch buttons, but it shouldn’t take so long to make the adjustment.
Just looking at the Flip Mino’s fresh new exterior makes it hard not to think about the things that this redesigned camcorder is still lacking, like a larger viewing screen (the Mino screen is 1.5 inches, no larger than that of the Flip Ultra), high definition video and wireless sharing capability. These features would likely raise the price and/or tax the battery, and many users of the Flip flock to it for its low price and simplicity. Still, Pure Digital says that it will offer HD video and a larger screen on a product within a year, and is looking into features that might include wireless transferring.
I grew fond of the Mino’s rechargeable battery. Whenever I plugged this gadget into my computer to transfer videos, my Mino charged up via USB without me having to think about it. A full charge lasts four hours and recharging a dead battery takes about three hours.
Pure Digital says that the sound quality and lighting are improved in this model. Like previous models, this Flip records in 640×480 pixels at 30 frames per second.
The Mino didn’t have a problem with lighting in most situations; indeed it did a nice job of capturing images of my family sitting around a table in a restaurant with little more than candlelight to brighten the picture. It doesn’t use a flash or a built-in light, but instead uses automatic sensors to adjust to various levels of light.
This svelte camcorder seemed to handle noise more evenly than I remembered in prior Flip models. It didn’t make my voice sound unbearably louder than everyone else’s, even though I was closest to the camera’s microphone, yet it managed to detect voices across the room. I did have some trouble on a windy day: While recording a quick video of a golf course in San Diego, wind audibly muffled my voice during a few moments in the video.
Along with the delete-lock and sounds-off settings, this Mino has a few other tricks up its sleeve. Each of the touch-sensitive buttons is designed to glow only when usable, so as to better help people who might not know which buttons to press while using this camcorder. For example, only the zoom buttons glow while recording since the other buttons (volume, play/pause and delete) can’t function in this setting.
Shortcuts built into each button provide more functions: Holding the play/pause button down will set the playback mode to play all videos on the Mino; holding the seek ahead or seek back buttons while watching a video will fast-forward by seconds within that video; pressing the record button as the camera starts up opens up the settings menu.
In conjunction with the Flip Mino’s introduction Wednesday, prices of the former Flip Ultra model will drop to $150 for the 60-minute model. The Flip Ultra 30-minute model will be phased out, as will the Flip Classic, which will cost $130 for a 60-minute unit.
Though the Flip Mino’s touch-sensitive buttons look great, they aren’t as functional as they needed to be. But if you really want a sleek, hip-looking gadget, you’ll learn to adjust to these new buttons. No matter which Flip you choose, Pure Digital’s software changes the way people capture and share videos, and that’s a great thing.
There’s something very English about the way William Hague’s eyes light up when he spies crab cakes on the menu at a Midtown Manhattan bistro. Although they’ve lived with crabs for centuries, the English have still not mastered the art of rendering them as patties, and I’ve yet to meet a visitor from the scepter’d isle who will not eat a crab cake while stateside — given half a chance.
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Distinctly un-English, however, is the diligence with which he sticks to a single glass of wine through lunch. But if there’s one Englishman who can sparkle conversationally without the assistance of alcohol, it is this very charming, very loquacious, very precocious politician — leader of Britain’s Conservative Party at age 36, now its shadow foreign secretary at a relatively creaky 47.
Mr. Hague is in town to promote his book on William Wilberforce, the man who engineered the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. This massive biography — to be released in the U.S. on June 16 — is his second, his first being one of William Pitt the Younger, published in 2005. Taken together, the two books amount to almost 1,000 pages of serious text: How does he do it? Where on earth does he find the time?
“Well, I only found the time after I was out of what we might call the front line of politics — when I resigned as leader of the party in 2001, after losing that election. I remained a Member of Parliament, but suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands, and I decided to do all the things I’d always wanted to do — and that included earning a lot more money than is normally possible as a politician, and writing a book.”
With a New Yorker’s vulgarity, I ask if he’s made any money off his books. “It’s not been anything like the amount I’ve earned from after-dinner speaking, or my business activities. Let me put it this way: I wouldn’t want to live entirely off writing! Although I also took up a weekly newspaper column in the News of the World.”
That paper is arguably Britain’s lowest-brow tabloid. Is it safe to presume, therefore, that there’s no overlap between the readers of his books and those of his columns? “Probably none at all,” he says with a chirp. But as a politician, he’s used to changing gear: “You handle everything from a constituency surgery, where literally one minute you’re dealing with Mrs. Smith’s drain — it needs unblocking and she’s come to you to sort it out — and the next minute you’re on the phone dealing with issues of Iranian nuclear weapons.”
So why do politicians write biographies? Are they identifying with their subjects, or claiming grandeur by proxy? “A mixture of factors,” says Mr. Hague, savoring his crab cake, which is a plump little thing. “In Britain, there’s a strong tradition of politicians who have written works of history. Roy Jenkins [a leading Labour MP, later president of the European Commission] is a part of it . . . Winston Churchill was very much a part of it.
“But you make a good point about identifying with one’s subject, and in my case that did help start me off with William Pitt the Younger. I really did feel I could be inside his mind, and explain the way he did things and would have looked at things, having been a particularly young politician myself. And Pitt is the ultimate young politician, much more successful than me, having been prime minister at 24.” Still there’s one way in which Mr. Hague has had more luck than Pitt, who served as PM for 19 years: Pitt never made it to Mr. Hague’s current age. “He died at 46,” his biographer notes.
Here, as an uxorious aside, Mr. Hague tells me that his wife, Ffion Jenkins, has just finished her own first book, “The Pain and the Privilege,” about the women in the life of David Lloyd George, the only Welshman to have served as prime minister. “It’s not a scurrilous book; it’s about Mrs. Lloyd George and his mistress in parallel for 30 years, and his daughter and mother. As I did to the life of Pitt, my wife brings something to this story, too. She’s a native Welsh speaker, and she’s married to a politician . . . ” A politician who, presumably, does not have a mistress, I interject.
Mr. Hague laughs heartily. “Definitely not! Let me make that very clear! And so, for her, this is a great place to start. The mistress of Lloyd George was his private secretary, and my wife was my private secretary, and private secretary to other cabinet ministers, so she has a triple additional insight into the subject. So when you start writing in an ambitious way, you have to bring something extra to the party.”
What drew Mr. Hague to Wilberforce? “Doing Pitt introduced me to the friends of Pitt, and one of the great — but contrasting — friends was Wilberforce. Pitt was the ultimate career politician, and Wilberforce the ultimate non-career politician, who never sought high office other than being a member of Parliament. Yet he accomplished — through his eloquence and his morality — much more than the vast majority of politicians who have achieved high office.”
William Pitt, William Wilberforce. Will his next subject be yet another William? William the Conqueror, perhaps, or William Jefferson Clinton? “No,” he says, with jovial emphasis. “I’m not writing now. I’ve gone back into the front line. I’m too busy. You know, the plan is to help the Conservative Party be elected in the next elections, and then to be in the next Conservative government.”
So if all goes according to plan, I observe, he won’t be writing a book anytime soon. “Not for a few years! However, I don’t see myself as a career politician anymore. This is the nice thing now: Although I’ve come back into politics, I don’t need it. I know I can live without it.”
Is that liberating? “Yes! I don’t ever want to be the leader of the party, and therefore the PM, in the future. And that allows me to approach politics on a completely different basis. As long as I’m of use to David Cameron [leader of the Conservatives] and my colleagues, I’ll take part, but I don’t want to be doing it all my life. At some point I’ll get back to writing, and the electorate can decide how soon that is. And then . . . to answer your question — will I do another William? Well, I might do William Pitt the Elder.” (Toward the end of lunch, he ventures an interest, also, in Robert Clive and Warren Hastings — “perhaps the two of them together, as a way of looking at a period of the British Empire in India.”)
Who taught Mr. Hague the art of biography? “I had a wonderful lunch with Roy Jenkins,” he says, “a few weeks before he died [in January 2003]. And I was very lucky, because he handed down, as it were, the tips for a politician writing a biography. First of all, he said, ‘Start tomorrow. . . . You will think you have to get the whole structure of the book ready first. This is nonsense.’
“Roy said, ‘Keep the artillery barrage just in front of the infantry,’ by which he meant just keep the research ahead of where you are . . . so you’re really immersed in whichever part of the person’s life you happen to be in. You need to read around the whole subject and have a general view, but trying to understand the detail of your subject’s final few weeks at the same time as his early education just won’t work. Roy said, ‘Just get going!’ So I got going.”
Mr. Hague reveals that Mr. Jenkins also told him that “the publishers will tell you to write so many words, but the first thing to know is to ignore them completely. If you’re enjoying it, it doesn’t matter how long the book is. So both my books are twice as long as had been asked for.”
Is there anything, I ask Mr. Hague, that he regards as the acme of the biographical form? “Yes, there is,” he says quite loudly, as if unable to contain himself. “And through your columns, I want to send the author a message.”
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He then cites “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” by Robert Caro, a three-volume biography — so far. “The last volume was ‘Master of the Senate,’ and to me these are the most magnificent books about politics, of the biographical sort, that I’ve ever read. Anyone who wants to understand politics needs to read Robert Caro’s books.”
If you buy a new Windows Vista PC, it comes with a decent built-in Web browser, Internet Explorer 7. If you buy a new Macintosh computer, it comes with a decent built-in Web browser, Safari 3.0. So why would you want or need a different Web browser?
That is the question that Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that makes the leading alternative browser, hopes to answer this month when it releases version 3.0 of its Firefox Web browser. In some tech-industry circles, Firefox already is preferred over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari, but it still isn’t used by most people, and Mozilla is hoping to broaden its appeal.
The new version will be released simultaneously for Windows and the Mac’s OS X operating system, as well as for Linux. While each of the three editions will have the visual style of the operating system on which it runs, all three will have the same features.
I’ve been using prerelease versions of Firefox 3.0 for months, and have recently been testing a near-final version and comparing it closely to IE and to Safari. I have tested it on multiple Windows PCs and Macs, on desktops and laptops, over slow connections and fast ones. I have tried it with well over 100 Web sites.
My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user. It can be downloaded, free, at mozilla.com1 by clicking on “Firefox 3 Sneak Peek.”
This situation may change. Microsoft is working on a new version of IE, scheduled to be unveiled later this year, with some impressive new features. And Apple is always working on new iterations of Safari, though it is secretive and hasn’t disclosed its plans. But for now, in my view, Firefox 3.0 rules on both Windows and Mac.
I couldn’t find any significant downsides to Firefox 3.0. Every page I tried rendered properly and rapidly on both platforms. I ran into only one glitch, in a preference setting. That problem appeared on only one of my four test machines and was fixable with the help of Mozilla, albeit via a geeky method.
In the one or two cases where Firefox lacked a feature I thought important, such as the “auto fill” feature in Safari that can quickly fill out an online form, I was able to find an add-on that did the trick from Mozilla’s vast library of add-ons, which are written by people all over the world. (One caution: Some existing add-ons won’t work with the new version until their authors update them.)
When Firefox first came out, it was the fastest browser, but it lost that title over the years. However, in my tests, this new third version of Firefox regained the speed crown. It beat IE 7 handily on my test Windows computers and edged Safari slightly on my test Macs.
For example, using a new Dell XPS One desktop, I opened identical folders containing the same 16 bookmarks on both IE 7 and Firefox 3.0. IE took 37 seconds to completely display the 16 pages, but the new Firefox did it in just 23 seconds. On a new Apple iMac, I did a similar, but more daunting, test — opening identical folders containing 24 bookmarks. Safari rendered all of the pages in 36 seconds, but the new Firefox finished the job in 32 seconds.
The latest Firefox has a number of new and improved features. If you type any word or phrase into its address bar, the browser instantly searches your history and bookmarks for a possible match, to save you from typing or combing through your bookmark list.
The whole process of managing bookmarks has been vastly simplified. Every Web address is accompanied by a star icon at the right. To bookmark the site, you just click the star once. No other action is required. To specify where to file the bookmark, you click the star twice. You also can remove bookmarks by clicking the star. And you can tag bookmarks with key words, to make it easier to find them.
There are also smart bookmark folders, which gather your most visited sites, or most recently bookmarked sites, automatically into folders. You also now can more easily back up and restore your bookmarks, complete with tags.
Security is also improved. The old version of Firefox would warn you when a site you were visiting appeared to be a fake, designed to steal your identity. (IE has a similar feature, though Safari doesn’t.) But Firefox 3.0 now warns you about sites that are known for trying to plant viruses, spyware and other malicious software on your computer, a warning the other big browsers don’t yet provide.
With one click, Firefox 3.0 also provides details about who owns the site you’re visiting, and whether it’s encrypted, if the site owner has adopted a special type of security certificate.
My bottom line: Even though you already have a built-in browser, Firefox 3.0 can improve your Web experience.
A couple of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we’ve all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I’d written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists’ search for nature’s deepest laws — the soldier’s letter might strike you as, well, odd.
But it’s not. Rather, it speaks to the powerful role science can play in giving life context and meaning. At the same time, the soldier’s letter emphasized something I’ve increasingly come to believe: our educational system fails to teach science in a way that allows students to integrate it into their lives.
Allow me a moment to explain.
When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones, iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it’s easy to see how science (and the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and diminishing resources, we don’t hesitate in turning to science to gauge the problems and find solutions. http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com
And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there’s simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future.
These are the standard — and enormously important — reasons many would give in explaining why science matters.
But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.
As a practicing scientist, I know this from my own work and study. But I also know that you don’t have to be a scientist for science to be transformative. I’ve seen children’s eyes light up as I’ve told them about black holes and the Big Bang. I’ve spoken with high school dropouts who’ve stumbled on popular science books about the human genome project, and then returned to school with newfound purpose. And in that letter from Iraq, the soldier told me how learning about relativity and quantum physics in the dusty and dangerous environs of greater Baghdad kept him going because it revealed a deeper reality of which we’re all a part.
It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world.
If science isn’t your strong suit — and for many it’s not — this side of science is something you may have rarely if ever experienced. I’ve spoken with so many people over the years whose encounters with science in school left them thinking of it as cold, distant and intimidating. They happily use the innovations that science makes possible, but feel that the science itself is just not relevant to their lives. What a shame.
Like a life without music, art or literature, a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.
It’s one thing to go outside on a crisp, clear night and marvel at a sky full of stars. It’s another to marvel not only at the spectacle but to recognize that those stars are the result of exceedingly ordered conditions 13.7 billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang. It’s another still to understand how those stars act as nuclear furnaces that supply the universe with carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, the raw material of life as we know it.
And it’s yet another level of experience to realize that those stars account for less than 4 percent of what’s out there — the rest being of an unknown composition, so-called dark matter and energy, which researchers are now vigorously trying to divine.
As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work — we begin life as little scientists. But most of us quickly lose our intrinsic scientific passion. And it’s a profound loss.
A great many studies have focused on this problem, identifying important opportunities for improving science education. Recommendations have ranged from increasing the level of training for science teachers to curriculum reforms.
But most of these studies (and their suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue: in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details.
In fact, many students I’ve spoken to have little sense of the big questions those technical details collectively try to answer: Where did the universe come from? How did life originate? How does the brain give rise to consciousness? Like a music curriculum that requires its students to practice scales while rarely if ever inspiring them by playing the great masterpieces, this way of teaching science squanders the chance to make students sit up in their chairs and say, “Wow, that’s science?”
In physics, just to give a sense of the raw material that’s available to be leveraged, the most revolutionary of advances have happened in the last 100 years — special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics — a symphony of discoveries that changed our conception of reality. More recently, the last 10 years have witnessed an upheaval in our understanding of the universe’s composition, yielding a wholly new prediction for what the cosmos will be like in the far future.
These are paradigm-shaking developments. But rare is the high school class, and rarer still is the middle school class, in which these breakthroughs are introduced. It’s much the same story in classes for biology, chemistry and mathematics.
At the root of this pedagogical approach is a firm belief in the vertical nature of science: you must master A before moving on to B. When A happened a few hundred years ago, it’s a long climb to the modern era. Certainly, when it comes to teaching the technicalities — solving this equation, balancing that reaction, grasping the discrete parts of the cell — the verticality of science is unassailable.
But science is so much more than its technical details. And with careful attention to presentation, cutting-edge insights and discoveries can be clearly and faithfully communicated to students independent of those details; in fact, those insights and discoveries are precisely the ones that can drive a young student to want to learn the details. We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.
Science is the greatest of all adventure stories, one that’s been unfolding for thousands of years as we have sought to understand ourselves and our surroundings. Science needs to be taught to the young and communicated to the mature in a manner that captures this drama. We must embark on a cultural shift that places science in its rightful place alongside music, art and literature as an indispensable part of what makes life worth living. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com
It’s the birthright of every child, it’s a necessity for every adult, to look out on the world, as the soldier in Iraq did, and see that the wonder of the cosmos transcends everything that divides us.
How much Robert Vesco stole no one knew for certain. America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was after him for more than $224m, or more than $1 billion in today’s money, which was then the biggest financial fraud in history. But oddly, once the crack teams of lawyers and accountants were on the case, they recovered almost twice as much. And they were still nowhere near the bottom of the schemes that brewed in Mr Vesco’s head, behind the pencil moustache, the slicked-back hair and the dark glasses, the very essence of a Hollywood fraudster.
Money being such liquid, transient stuff, it is hardly surprising that financiers should be fugitive. But Mr Vesco capped them all. He was on the run for 35 years, sometimes in a million-dollar yacht eluding the FBI in the blue seas between the Bahamas and Antigua, sometimes in his own Boeing 707, the Silver Phyllis, steaming with a variety of nymphs in the on-board sauna or gyrating in the on-board discotheque. He became Tom Adams, a Canadian with four bodyguards and several addresses, and sported a dyed beard. Meetings with Arthur Herzog, his biographer, were held in the dark; once, Mr Vesco kept his back to him. For years only blurred telephoto shots gave proof he was alive. And those were dubious. To some, Mr Vesco’s ultimate scam was to suggest that the emaciated man snapped last November in a coffin, with his friends grieving round it, had something to do with him.
A few of the stories about him may have been true. He was said to have poured $60m into the economy of Costa Rica, to which he fled in 1973, propping up single-handedly its ranching, industrial and oil sectors and being kicked out, in 1978, because he wanted to set up a machinegun factory. He was said to have offered Billy Carter, the president’s brother, $10m in 1977 to persuade the Carter administration to sell C130 aircraft to Libya (which Mr Vesco could smuggle in on good terms, together with cocaine and Howitzers). Fidel Castro allegedly received a hefty bribe for sheltering him in Cuba after 1982, where he travelled in a convoy of Mercedes from his yachting berth to the golf club.
As long as he had money Mr Vesco was welcome all round the Caribbean, and extradition treaties with America were hastily rewritten to keep him and his dollars in place. But the charges were piling up and the money, after a while, ran out. In 1996 the Cubans sent him to jail for peddling to investors a spurious wonder-drug, Trixolane, as a cure for cancer and AIDS. The conman’s patter could run out, too.
Crime, however, was not his whole career. Playing the 1960s markets like a violin was no offence. A clutch of failing machine shops in New Jersey were combined with a Florida public company called Cryogenics to form the dodgy-sounding International Controls Corporation (ICC) and take him public, in 1965, without an SEC filing; by the age of 30, Mr Vesco was a paper millionaire. He perfected the art of the hostile takeover when it was still new, spotting weak companies a mile off and gobbling up shares almost before the victim was aware of it. His buying strategy, sketched out in Magic Marker on flip-charts, was to borrow hugely in order to repay in dollars devalued by inflation, and his sweetest hunting ground became the then unregulated universe of offshore mutual funds.
The quarter-of-a-million dollars he siphoned away at one swoop had originally been invested by thousands of small depositors in Investors Overseas Services (IOS), owned by the arch-scammer Bernie Cornfeld. Mr Vesco, on his hostile takeover of IOS in 1971, immediately began to shift its assets into entities under his control. He meant to set up an independent company somewhere in the Azores, or Morocco, or off Haiti, and do lots of deals with the money; and he wanted to call it RPL, for “Rape, Plunder and Loot”. This may have drawn the SEC’s attention.
Under all the oversell, an inferiority complex drove him. His background was poor, Sicilian-American in Detroit, his father a car-worker. He dropped out of school, and fiddled round with bricklaying and gaming parlours before starting to buy companies. On Wall Street his small but ravenous ICC cut no ice with the Lehmans and the Loebs; his rudeness and his loud jackets did not match the mahogany, and he was not invited back.
His chips-on-shoulders and paranoias made him more a potential soulmate of Richard Nixon, and when the SEC charges began to bite in 1972 a cash contribution of $200,000, stuffed in a briefcase, was handed over to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. It didn’t work. Nor could Mr Vesco persuade John Mitchell, then attorney-general, to take pity on him. He sometimes interrupted meetings to take calls from him; but whether it was actually Mitchell, no one knew.
Rather than be a fugitive, which was tiring, he wanted to be untouchable. In 1981 or so he tried to buy half of the island of Barbuda, off Antigua, to set up “the Principality of the Sovereign Order of New Aragon”. There, on the vast pink beaches swept by frigate birds and scattered with the wreckage of other people’s ships, the Feds could never get a hand on him. And indeed, save for a not-quite-reliable death certificate, they never did.
In 1997, a man’s love for Julie Couillard forced him to make a tough decision, choosing to marry her over his successful career as a Hells Angels drug dealer.
It was a decision Stéphane Sirois would later regret. But it also set off a chain of events that turned him into one of the best witnesses to testify against the Hells Angels in Quebec.
Couillard has caused a storm on Parliament Hill. While recently dating Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier, the 38-year-old Laval resident drew public attention in August by wearing an eye-catching dress to the ceremony at Rideau Hall where the minister was sworn in. Now questions have been raised about her past relations with men in Quebec’s murky underworld.
But there was nothing mysterious about the clear ultimatum Maurice (Mom) Boucher put to Sirois more than a decade ago.
With the biker gang war at its violent peak in 1997, the Hells Angels leader was seeing potential police informants underneath every rock.
So he wanted to be sure Sirois understood he had to make a clear choice between marrying Couillard, who had previously dated a man Boucher suspected was an informant, or continuing his life dealing drugs in Anjou and Tetreauville as a member of the Rockers, the Hells Angels puppet gang.
Sirois chose Couillard and later came to regret it. But, as he would later testify in court, it was also a choice that ultimately turned his life around. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
Sirois’s marriage to Couillard lasted only two years before the couple divorced. The marriage seemed doomed from the start. Just hours before the wedding, members of the Rockers gang paid Sirois a visit and claimed he owed the gang $5,000.
Feeling that his life was in ruins, Sirois sunk into a deep depression in 1999 when he suddenly remembered the business card a police investigator gave him just after he married Couillard.
The Wolverine Squad, a collection of elite police investigators from various police forces assembled to target the province’s biker gangs, knew Sirois had fallen out of favour with the Rockers by marrying Couillard and they took a chance and approached him about working for them.
“I told them clearly that I was not interested,” Sirois would later say during a 2002 trial in reference to the Wolverine Squad’s initial approach.
“I was already married and had been on my honeymoon. Two detectives from the Wolverine Squad approached me. I told them no. I kept their card.”
Then in 1999, with his life in an mess, Sirois pulled out the business card and contacted Robert Pigeon, the investigator who gave it to him. It was the first step on a path towards becoming an undercover agent and one of the best witnesses used against the Hells Angels during the trials that followed the 2001 roundup of Boucher’s monopolistic drug trafficking network. (By the time Sirois first testified Boucher had already been convicted of ordering the deaths of two provincial prison guards.)
Sirois signed a contract to work for the police in June 1999. His mission was to get back into the good graces of the Rockers by offering them his services as a drug dealer. Within months Sirois was given back his Rockers patch while he secretly recorded his conversations with fellow gang members and took careful notes on their activities.
It was Sirois who gathered perhaps the most damaging proof that the Hells Angels’s Nomads chapter, run by Boucher, was seeking to kill any members of their rivals in the Rock Machine. While wearing a secret recording device called a bodypack, Sirois recorded a fellow Rocker while they dined at a Montreal sushi restaurant. When Sirois asked what it would take to impress their bosses in the Hells Angels, the Rocker revealed the biker gang was willing to pay up to $100,000 to kill off a full-fledged member of the rival gang.
Sirois would say in 2002, he rejoined the Rockers with trepidation because of Couillard. André Chouinard was the first Rocker to return Sirois’s calls after he and Couillard split. Sirois testified that he felt it was necessary to clear the air about Couillard. He said he had confided a lot to her during their brief marriage and heard that she might have betrayed those confidences as their relationship fell apart.
“The contact went well. (Chouinard) made small talk at first. After that we got on to important subjects,” Sirois said.
“The important subject, firstly, was about the person I had married. There were stories she had told certain people in the milieu. I wanted to see how they had been perceived. (The Rockers) told me to forget about them. They were the stories of a slut.”
“I asked André Chouinard questions about that subject in particular for several minutes. I also told him I wanted to go back to work. I wanted to go back to the (Rockers). When I married (Couillard) they told me I didn’t have the right to work.”
When Sirois testified at a later trial in 2003 he elaborated more on what he told Couillard when they were married. He alleged that Boucher was so suspicious of Couillard he once had a contract out on her. Sirois said Couillard went around asking people tied to the Hells Angels if this was true.
Boucher’s problem with Couillard apparently had to do with the fact she had previously dated Gilles Giguère, a close associate of Robert Savard, a notorious loanshark who operated in Montreal with Boucher’s blessing.
Giguère was shot to death in April 1996 and his body was left in a ditch next to a road in L’Épiphanie. Although the slaying remains unsolved the Sûreté du Québec has long believed Giguère was killed by someone he knew.
In 1995, Giguère, Savard and lawyer Gilles Daudelin were arrested along with Couillard after the Wolverine Squad investigated alleged threats and the attempted extortion of a Montreal real estate agent.
Couillard was quickly released without being charged and reportedly filed a complaint to the provincial police ethics commissioner. According to a representative at the commissioner’s office the complaint never made it to the hearing stage.
The charges against Savard, Giguère and Daudelin in the extortion case were eventually dropped. But Giguère was still in trouble.
It was later revealed in court that the Hells Angels thought Giguère turned informant while he was facing a possible trial for illegally possessing firearms and marijuana.
Sirois testified that when he started dating Couillard, shortly after Giguère’s death, the relationship clearly bothered the Hells Angels. Eventually the issue was brought to Boucher.
“The choice was imposed on me by Maurice (Mom) Boucher,” Sirois said during a 2002 trial. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com
The choice meant Sirois had to turn over his drug trafficking business to another Rocker. By his own estimate, Sirois was making between $8,000 and $12,000 in profits per month selling cocaine and marijuana for the Rockers.
The movie title: “Another Harvest Moon.”
The movie plot: Four elderly friends living in a nursing home struggle with the issues of quality of life versus quantity of life after one of the characters suffers a series of strokes.
The cast: Academy Award winner Ernest Borgnine, Doris Roberts, Anne Meara, Piper Laurie and Cybill Shepherd.
The location: Harrisburg State Hospital.
An action-packed summer blockbuster in the making? Hardly.
“There’s not going to be a boat chase on the Susquehanna or any skydiving,” said Camp Hill native Greg Swartz, the director, who on Tuesday stood before a two-story brick building being primed for shooting. “This film sinks or swims on this cast more than anything else.”
“Another Harvest Moon,” to be filmed starting Monday, joins the growing roster of films being shot in Pennsylvania as movie producers take advantage of friendly tax laws.
In July, state legislators approved a tax credit for productions spending 60 percent of their budgets in-state. Those productions are eligible for a 25 percent refund.
“All of us that are doing this are really trying to bring films to where we’re from,” Swartz said. “This area is underrepresented in film. There are stories to be told here.”
“Another Harvest Moon” is not the first movie to be shot on the former state hospital grounds. The 1999 film, “Girl, Interrupted,” which starred Angelina Jolie, Winona Ryder, Clea DuVall and Whoopi Goldberg, was filmed there. Jolie won an Academy Award for best supporting actress for her role.
This current production features a more experienced cast.
Borgnine, 91, has a lifetime of film and TV work that includes an Academy Award for his 1955 portrayal of the title character in “Marty.”
Spending time in Russia is a bit like taking the psychotropic anti-malarial drug Lariam: anyone with a propensity to anxiety should probably avoid it. Jonathan Dimbleby, an accomplished British broadcaster, was by his frank admission in a state of considerable emotional turmoil when he travelled from the Arctic city of Murmansk to Vladivostok. The overwhelming landscape and the people who were often so rude did not help his mood, but his responses—awe, horror and frustration—were perhaps more acute as a result.
The ugly authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin and Russia’s hydrocarbon-fuelled diplomatic bolshiness are now well documented. There are fewer worthwhile accounts of ordinary life across the vast, eccentric Russian continent in the Putin era. Mr Dimbleby’s perceptive travelogue is one of them. He describes the spookiness of St Petersburg; the micro-cultures (and pointy shoes) of the Caucasus; the desolation of Beslan; the magic of Tolstoy’s country estate; the ludicrously dangerous roads and dreadful hotels. He captures the way Russians are transformed by toasts, the romance of long-distance train rides and the squalor of train stations. He encounters a Karelian witch, a Siberian shaman and wild horses in the Altai mountains. He visits a plush Moscow banya. He drinks a lot of vodka.
Along the way he offers lively summaries of some of the key dramas of Russian history, including the exploration of Siberia, the tragic nobility of the Decembrists and the unspeakable siege of Leningrad. He meets the kind of near-saints that only places with so much bad history can produce: suicidally brave journalists in Samara; campaigning environmentalists in the Urals; a heroic AIDS worker in Irkutsk. They vary what might otherwise have become a dismal parade of villainy.
“We steal,” a Caspian sturgeon poacher says, “and we think nothing of stealing because everyone is stealing.” Mr Dimbleby notes the gangsterism of government at all levels, the brazen rackets and the cradle-to-grave corruption that Russians must negotiate to survive. He nicely portrays the fatal combination of savage indifference on the part of the country’s rulers and the enraging fatalism of the ruled. He is perpetually baffled by what, to his Western ears, sound like contradictory attitudes: the Russians he meets are sophisticated, acquisitive and yet cynical to the point of hostility towards democracy. “Crypto-fascist” is his label for the system Mr Putin has built.
Mr Dimbleby loves Russian literature, and he hears Tolstoyan and Gogolian echoes as he travels. But he is not a Russia expert (he undertook the journey for a BBC television series), and makes some mistakes and simplifications, over Chechnya and the Yukos affair, for example. That, however, is also his book’s main virtue. His novice’s eye sees the moral outrage in everyday injustices—the use of malnourished teenaged conscripts as slave labour, say, or the routine persecution of migrant labourers—to which more practised Russia-watchers are too often desensitised. His disgust is mitigated by the fascination that Russia somehow inspires too, even in the most sceptical visitor.
“The whole thing is sort of a study,” Swartz said. “I’d say it’s a comic drama. You don’t put Doris Roberts and Anne Meara in a movie without comic moments.”
http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com
Roberts is widely known for her role in CBS’ sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Anne Meara has appeared in television shows and movies, but is perhaps best known for her son, actor Ben Stiller, and her husband, Jerry Stiller, of CBS’ sitcom “The King of Queens.”
Laurie’s trademark role was as the mother in “Carrie,” and Shepherd, an award-winning TV actress, starred in “Cybill” and “Moonlighting.”
The actors begin filming in Harrisburg on June 14.
According to Michael Chapaloney, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Film Office, several films are currently being made in Pennsylvania: “My Bloody Valentine,” “Hollywood & Wine,” “Shannon’s Rainbow,” “Fleas,” “The Nail” and “Transformers 2.”
“Happy Tears,” “Marley & Me” and “Dare” are wrapping up production in the state, Chapaloney said.
“Another Harvest Moon” is being produced by Aurora Films of Lancaster. Chad Taylor, who plays guitar for the band Live, is one of the partners of the company. Taylor, who lives in Lancaster, is a producer of “Another Harvest Moon.” He also worked as a producer on the full-length film “Home,” which was produced by Haverstick Films. “One of my key roles will be to leverage my success in the entertainment industry to get the product out to a wider audience than it would otherwise,” he said.
Swartz and Taylor said neither the release date nor distribution details have been set.
“We’re certainly targeting theatrical releases, and we feel that our cast has put us in a good position to do that,” Swartz said. “This is a smaller film than a lot of them are used to. None of them are getting a new pool out of this.”
Word spread like wildfire in Catholic circles: Douglas Kmiec, a staunch Republican, firm foe of abortion and veteran of the Reagan Justice Department, had been denied Communion.
His sin? Kmiec, a Catholic who can cite papal pronouncements with the facility of a theological scholar, shocked old friends and adversaries alike earlier this year by endorsing Barack Obama for president. For at least one priest, Kmiec’s support for a pro-choice politician made him a willing participant in a grave moral evil.
Kmiec was denied Communion in April at a Mass for a group of Catholic business people he later addressed at dinner. The episode has not received wide attention outside the Catholic world, but it is the opening shot in an argument that could have a large impact on this year’s presidential campaign: Is it legitimate for bishops and priests to deny Communion to those supporting candidates who favor abortion rights?
A version of this argument roiled the 2004 campaign when some, though not most, Catholic bishops suggested that John Kerry and other pro-choice Catholic politicians should be denied Communion because of their views on abortion.
The Kmiec incident poses the question in an extreme form: He is not a public official but a voter expressing a preference. Moreover, Kmiec — a law professor at Pepperdine University and once dean of Catholic University’s law school — is a long-standing critic of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.
Kmiec, who was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the late 1980s, is supporting Obama despite the candidate’s position on abortion, not because of it, partly in the hope that Obama’s emphasis on personal responsibility in sexual matters might change the nature of the nation’s argument on life issues.
Kmiec has drawn attention because he is one of the nation’s leading “Obamacons,” conservatives who find Obama’s call for a new approach to politics appealing. Kmiec started life as a Democrat. His father was a soldier in the late Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago political machine, and Kmiec’s earliest political energies were devoted to Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 campaign.
But like many Catholic Democrats, Kmiec was profoundly attracted to Ronald Reagan. For him, five words in Reagan’s 1980 acceptance speech summarized the essence of a Catholic view of politics: “family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.”
In an interview over the weekend, Kmiec argued that 35 years after Roe, opponents of abortion need to contemplate whether “a legal prohibition” of abortion “is the only way to promote a culture of life.”
“To think you have done a generous thing for your neighbor or that you have built up a culture of life just because you voted for a candidate who says in his brochure that he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade is far too thin an understanding of the Catholic faith,” he said. Kmiec, a critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, added that Catholics should heed “the broad social teaching of the church,” including its views on war.
Kmiec shared with me the name of the priest who denied him Communion and a letter of apology from the organizers of the event, but he requested that I not name the priest to protect the cleric from public attack.
The priest’s actions are almost certainly out of line with the policy of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. In their statement”Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” issued last November, the bishops said: “A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voter’s intent is to support that position.”
The “if” phrase in that carefully negotiated sentence suggests that Catholics can support pro-choice candidates, provided the purpose of their vote is not to promote abortion.
Already, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City has played an indirect role in the 2008 campaign by calling on Kathleen Sebelius, the popular Democratic governor of Kansas who has been mentioned as a possible Obama running mate, to stop taking Communion because of her “actions in support of legalized abortion.”
But because Kmiec is a private citizen and has such a long history of embracing Catholic teaching on abortion, denying him Communion for political reasons may spark an even greater outcry inside the church.
Kmiec says he is grateful because the episode reminded him of the importance of the Eucharist in his spiritual life, and because he hopes it will alert others to the dangers of “using Communion as a weapon.”
Stuhlinger was a German atomic, electrical and rocket scientist. After being brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip, he developed guidance systems with Wernher von Braun’s team at the US Army, and later, NASA. He was also instrumental in the development of the ion engine for long-endurance space flight, and a wide variety of scientific experiments.
Stuhlinger was born in Niederrimbach, Germany, near Wurzburg in Bavaria. He earned his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Tubingen at age 23. In 1939 he went to work in Berlin, working on cosmic rays and nuclear physics. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com
Despite showing promise, in 1941 Stuhlinger was sent to the Russian front where he was wounded during the Battle of Moscow, and was one of the few members of his unit to survive the Battle of Stalingrad. His service complete, in 1943 he joined Dr. Wernher von Braun’s team at Peenemünde, where he worked in the field of guidance systems.
Ernst Stuhlinger (middle) and Wernher von Braun signing U.S. citizenship certificates. The members of the Peenemünde team and their family members were awarded the United States citizenship on
Stuhlinger was one of the first group of 126 scientists who immigrated to the United States with Dr. von Braun after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. In the 1950s Stuhlinger worked at the Redstone Arsenal, primarily on guidance systems. He played a small but important role in the race to launch a US satellite after the success of Sputnik 1. As there was little time to develop and test automated systems like guidance or staging systems, Stuhlinger developed a simple spring-powered staging timer that had to be triggered from the ground. On the night of January 31, 1958, Stuhlinger was at the controls of the timer when the Explorer 1 was launched, triggering the device right on time. He became known as “the man with the golden finger.” On April 14, 1955, he became a naturalized United States citizen along with the other Paperclip members.
Stuhlinger spent much of his spare time developing designs for solar-powered spacecraft. The most popular of those designs relied on ion thrusters, which use ionize either caesium or rubidium vapor and accelerate the positively charged ions through gridded electrodes. The spacecraft would be powered by the one kilowatt of solar energy. He referred to the concept as a “sunship”. He is considered as one of the pioneers of electric propulsion having, among many contributions, authored the classic textbook Ion Propulsion for Space Flight (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964). In 2005, he was honored by the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society, and awarded its highest honor “The Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Electric Propulsion.” http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
Stuhlinger was director of the space science lab at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, from its formation in 1960 until 1968, and then its associate director for science from 1968 to 1975, when he retired and became an adjunct professor and senior research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Among his many other works at Marshall, he directed early planning for lunar exploration, worked on the Apollo Telescope Mount that produced a wealth of information about the Sun, led planning for the three High Energy Astronomical Observatorys, and worked on the initial phases of what would become the Hubble Space Telescope.
After retiring, Stuhlinger and historian Frederick Ordway collaborated on the biography Werhner von Braun: Crusader for Space. In it, Stuhlinger downplayed claims that von Braun had mistreated prisoners working on the V-2 program during the war. Author Michael Neufeld has called these claims highly dubious in his book, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, stating that Stuhlinger was not personally involved in these areas and would have no first-hand information. Stuhlinger reiterated the point that their aim was ultimately peaceful; in an Associated Press article, he wrote: “Yes, we did work on improved guidance systems, but in late 1944 we were convinced that the war would soon be over before new systems could be used on military rockets. However, we were convinced that somehow our work would find application in the future rockets that would not aim at London, but at the moon.”
Operation Paperclip (also credited as Project Paperclip) was the code name under which the U.S. intelligence and military services extracted German scientists from Nazi Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. In 1945 the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency was established and given direct responsibility for Operation Paperclip.
Following the German failure of its invasion of the Soviet Union (codenamed Operation Barbarossa) and the entry of the US into WWII, the strategic position of Germany was at a disadvantage since German military industries were unprepared for a long war. As a result, Germany began efforts in spring 1943 to recall scientists and technical personnel from combat units where their skills could be used in research and development.
‘Overnight, Ph.D.s were liberated from KP duty, masters of science were recalled from orderly service, mathematicians were hauled out of bakeries, and precision mechanics ceased to be truck drivers.’
— Dieter K. Huzel
The recall effort first required identifying such personnel and then tracking them (particularly for loyalty), which culminated in the Osenberg List by Werner Osenberg, a University of Hannover engineering scientist who headed the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft (English: Military Research Association). In March 1945, a Polish laboratory technician found the shredded pieces of the Osenberg List in a toilet that hadn’t flushed properly. US Army Major Robert B Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the US Army Ordnance in London, subsequently used the Osenberg list to compile the Black List, the code name for the list of scientists targeted for interrogation, with the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun’s name at the top.
The original unnamed plan to interview only the rocket scientists changed after Major Staver sent a cable (signed by Colonel Joel Holmes) to the Pentagon on May 22, 1945 of the urgency to evacuate the German technicians and their families as “important for Pacific war.”Likewise, an equally strong desire was to deny German expertise to the Soviet Union. In the Operation Alsos case of Werner Heisenberg, a principal scientist in the German nuclear energy project: “…he was worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans.”
In addition to scientists specialising in rocketry and nuclear physics, various Allied teams were also searching for experts in chemistry, medicine, and naval weapons. An effort that predated Overcast was the US Navy’s acquisition in May 1945 of Dr. Herbert A. Wagner, who worked at Naval Air Station Point Mugu in 1947.
The majority of the scientists were involved with the V-2 rocket, and the rocket group was initially housed with their families at a housing project in Landshut Bavaria. Operation Overcast was designated by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff on July 19, 1945, but when the nickname “Camp Overcast” was being openly used for the housing, the code name was changed to Paperclip.
By 1958, many aspects of Paperclip had become common knowledge. It was openly mentioned in a Time magazine article about von Braun.
In early August 1945, Colonel Holger N. Toftoy, chief of the Rocket Branch in the Research and Development Division of Army Ordnance, offered initial one-year contracts to the rocket scientists. After Toftoy agreed to take care of their families, 127 scientists accepted the offer. In September 1945, the first group of seven rocket scientists arrived from Germany at Fort Strong in the US: Wernher von Braun, Erich W. Neubert, Theodor A. Poppel, August Schulze, Eberhard F. M. Rees, Wilhelm Jungert and Walter Schwidetzky.
http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com
Eventually the rocket scientists arrived at Fort Bliss, Texas for rocket testing at White Sands Proving Grounds as “War Department Special Employees.”
In early 1950, legal status for some “Paperclip Specialists” was obtained when visas were issued at the US consulate in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; from which the scientists legally entered the US.[2] In later decades, some scientists’ WWII wartime activities were investigated — Arthur Rudolph was linked to the Mittelbau-Dora slave labor, and Hubertus Strughold was implicated in Nazi human experimentation.
Eighty-six aeronautical experts were transferred to Wright Field, which had also acquired aircraft and other equipment under Operation Lusty.
The United States Army Signal Corps employed 24 specialists — including physicists Drs. Georg Goubau, Gunter Guttwein, Georg Hass, Horst Kedesdy, and Kurt Levovec; physical chemists Professor Rudolf Brill and Drs. Ernst Baars and Eberhard Both; geophysicist Dr. Helmut Weickmann; technical optician Dr. Gerhard Schwesinger; and electronics engineers Drs. Eduard Gerber, Richard Guenther and Hans Ziegler.
The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946.
In 1959, 94 Paperclip individuals went to the US, including Friedwardt Winterberg, Hans Dolezalek, and Friedrich Wigand. Through 1990, Paperclip acquired a total of 1,600 personnel,with the “intellectual reparations” taken by the U.S. and the UK (mainly German patents and industrial processes) valued at close to $10 billion.
They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.
So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal “What Happened,” as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.
Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.
How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?
It turns out that our president is a one-man refutation of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “Blink,” about the value of trusting your gut.
Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.
It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.
We already know What Happened, but it feels good to hear Scott say it. His conscience was spurred by hurt feelings.
In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.
The people who should be sounding the alarm for democracy’s sake, and the sake of all the young Americans losing lives and limbs, get truly outraged only when they are played for fools and fall guys, when their own reputations are at stake.
It was not the fake casus belli that made Colin Powell’s blood boil. What really got Powell disgusted was that W. and Dick Cheney used him, tapping into his credibility to sell their trumped-up war; that George Tenet failed to help him scrub his U.N. speech of all Cheney’s garbage; and that W. showed him the door so the more malleable Condi could have his job.
Tenet was privately worried about a war buildup not backed up by C.I.A. facts, but he only publicly sounded the alarm years later in a lucrative memoir fueled by payback, after Condi and Cheney tried to cast him as the fall guy on W.M.D.
McClellan did not realize the value of a favorite maxim — “The truth shall set you free” — until he was hung out to dry by his bosses in the Valerie Plame affair, repeating the lies Karl Rove and Scooter Libby brazenly told him about not being the leakers.
“Clearly,” McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a Victorian romance, “I had allowed myself to be deceived.” He felt “something fall out of me into the abyss.”
And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.
“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”
He recalled the first time that he had begun to suspect that W. might be just another dissembling pol: when he overheard his boss, during his 2000 bid, ludicrously telling a supporter that he couldn’t remember, from his wild partying days, if he had tried cocaine. http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com
“He isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie,” McClellan said, but added, “I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true.” He’d see a lot more of it over the next six years before Bush tearfully booted him out.
W.’s dwindling cadre hit back hard. In Stockholm, Condi — labeled “sometimes too accommodating” by the author — scoffed: “The president was very clear about the reasons for going to war.”
She’s right. He was very clear about it being because of W.M.D. Then he was very clear about it being to rid the world of a tyrant. Then he was very clear about it being to spread democracy. When that didn’t work out, he was very clear about it being that we can’t leave because we can’t leave.
He was always wrong, but always very clear.
Werner Dahm Rocket engineer. . Member of the German Rocket Team in the United States after World War II.
German aerodynamicist, working in guided missiles during World War II. His studies at the University of Aachen were interrupted by the war, and he was assigned to do research with Versuchskommando Nord. At Peenemuende he was involved in the aerodynamic design of the A9/A10, A7, A4b, and Wasserfall winged missiles. As of January 1947, was living at Bohn am Rhein. Thereafter evacuated to Bavaria. He returned to Aachen and finally completed his diploma in 1947. He then went to the United States and became part of Von Braun’s rocket team at Huntsville. As of 1960, Head of Aerodynamics Analysis Branch, Aeroballistics Division, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.
2 December 1960 – Apollo Technical Liaison Groups assignments. Representatives of Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) were assigned to eight of the nine Apollo Technical Liaison Groups by H. H. Koelle, Director, Future Projects Office, MSFC. They were Rudolph F. Hoelker (Trajectory Analysis), Edward L. Linsley (Configurations and Aerodynamics), Werner K. Dahm and Harvey A. Connell (Heating), Erich E. Goerner (Structures and Materials), David M. Hammock and Alexander A. McCool (Onboard Propulsion), Heinz Kampmeier (Instrumentation and Communications), Wilbur G. Thornton (Guidance and Control), and Herman F. Beduerftig (Mechanical Systems). Dual representation on two of the Groups would be necessary because of the division of technical responsibilities within MSFC.
Bibliography and Further Reading
* Objective List of German and Austrian Scientists, Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, 2 January 1947.
* Neufeld, Michael, interviewer, Inteviews with Peenemuende Veterans, National Air and Space Museum archives.
The Shakespeare Authorship Coalition (SAC) is pleased to announce that Sir Derek Jacobi has agreed to join Mark Rylance as a Patron of the SAC. As you may recall, Mark and Sir Derek teamed up to launch the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt in Chichester, England, last year following the final performance of Mark’s play, “I Am Shakespeare.” The event, held on 8 September (dubbed “Doubters’ Day”), was a smashing success; so we are pleased to be able to keep this outstanding team together. Sir Derek has long been an outspoken supporter of the view that the Shakespeare Authorship Issue should be taken seriously. It is therefore extremely gratifying to us that, in addition to very publicly signing the Declaration, he is also willing to serve in this capacity. Thank you, Sir Derek Jacobi!
Although the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) declined our invitation to participate in the declaration-signing event in Chichester, we certainly got their attention. The September 27, 2007, issue of The Stage magazine featured an article by SBT Chairman Stanley Wells in which he criticized Mark and Sir Derek for signing the Declaration, warning them that they risked ending up in a lunatic asylum, like Delia Bacon. (“Beware, Mark and Sir Derek!”) Openly angry at the Declaration, and especially at Mark and Sir Derek for promulgating it, Wells nevertheless controlled himself long enough to offer a number of specific criticisms. The current issue of The Stage contains Mark’s reply, in which he refers readers to the SAC website where they can read Prof. Wells’ original article, Mark’s reply, plus a point-by-point rebuttal to Wells’ specific criticisms of the Declaration. http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com
To read this online “debate,” go to the Contrary Views page on our website. See for yourself who has the better argument — Mark in saying there’s reasonable doubt, or his former Globe Theatre colleague, Wells, in claiming certainty?
(The entire exchange can also be read and downloaded in PDF format at the website of the Shakespearean Authorship Trust, of which Mark Rylance is chairman. The SAT will be holding its annual lecture series in London during the month of November again this year. Please check back at their website closer to that time for the specifics of the SAT lecture series.)
Over 1,300 people have now signed the Declaration, including more than 1,000 since the Chichester event. These include 223 (17%) current or former college/university faculty members, 177 (13.5%) with doctoral degrees, and 274 (21%) with master’s degrees. The largest category by academic field continues to be English literature graduates (222), followed by those in the arts (134), theatre arts (89), education (80), math, engineering & computers (70), social sciences (68), history (64), natural sciences (57), medicine & health care (55), law (53), other humanities (52), management (45), and psychology (40). (The number residing in lunatic asylums was minuscule, so relax, Professor Wells.) We urge everyone to continue your efforts to recruit additional signatories, especially academics and other highly credible individuals. The Declaration is the best brief introduction to the authorship issue.
Finally, we would like to ask for your support. As a non-membership organization, the SAC charges no dues. We depend entirely on voluntary donations. We publish no newsletter, hold no conferences, and charge no fee to sign the Declaration. We are completely focused on promoting the Declaration, and on legitimizing the Authorship Issue in academia. Our expenses are low, but we do need money to operate our website, collect signatures, and seek publicity. Even small donations ($10 – $20) are very helpful. Please visit the Donations page on our website and make a tax deductible donation today, or send a check to: Shakespeare Authorship Coalition, 310 North Indian Hill Blvd., #200, Claremont, CA 91711.
The three major bond-rating firms are set to overhaul the way they collect fees as part of a settlement with New York state’s attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, that could be announced as soon as this week, people familiar with the matter said.
If a deal is reached, it could change the $5 billion-a-year bond-rating industry as fundamentally as Mr. Cuomo’s predecessor Eliot Spitzer did six years ago with his settlement with Wall Street firms over stock-research analysts whose recommendations were compromised by investment-banking ties.
Terms of Mr. Cuomo’s settlement with Moody’s Corp.’s Moody’s Investors Service; McGraw-Hill Cos.’ Standard & Poor’s unit; and Fimalac SA’s Fitch Ratings deal with what many critics claim has been a chronic problem with bond ratings: They are paid for by the entities being rated. That financial dependence has been blamed for the industry’s failure to predict that risky subprime mortgages would crumble, resulting in losses and shaken confidence.
The accord attempts to change the incentive structure for the ratings agencies. Now, while more than one ratings agency reviews most deals, not all of them actually rate the deal and get paid. That gives the agencies an incentive to go easy on their rating in order to win the business.
Under the Cuomo settlement, which would cover the hardest-hit portions of the mortgage market, the firms would get paid for their review, even if they didn’t end up getting hired to rate the deal. This would mean the firms would get paid even if they were tough. The plan, which requires final agreement by Mr. Cuomo’s office and the rating firms, wouldn’t dictate the exact fees rating firms could charge. But the firms would be required to charge more than a nominal fee for their preliminary work.
The bond-rating firms also have tentatively agreed to disclose on a quarterly basis the fees they’re paid for nonprime-mortgage-backed securities, which includes subprime mortgages and so-called Alt-A mortgages that don’t conform with the standards of government-sponsored mortgage companies. Such disclosures are seen as a potential red flag to help investors detect instances where bond issuers or their bankers may have essentially pitted different rating firms against each other in order to get a higher rating.
In an interview in December, Brian Clarkson, then the president and chief operating officer of Moody’s Investors Service, acknowledged that “there is a lot of rating shopping that goes on…What the market doesn’t know is who’s seen” certain transactions but wasn’t hired to rate those deals. Last month, Mr. Clarkson, who once ran the Moody’s group overseeing mortgages and other structured-finance products, stepped down, effective in July.
The settlement is unlikely to satisfy critics who have urged that bond-rating firms stop being paid altogether by bond issuers or that the firms be permitted to rate any deal they choose, regardless of whether the issuer cooperates. Following the settlement, bond issuers still would get a strong say over which firms published the final rating, as well as those invited to look over a pool of loans in the first place.
For Moody’s, S&P and Fitch, the agreement largely eliminates the possibility of a nasty showdown with Mr. Cuomo, whose office has been investigating the industry for about nine months, poring through thousands of pages in documents and emails and interviewing senior executives at each of the three big rating firms, people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Cuomo has leverage over the bond-rating industry partly because Moody’s and S&P are based in New York. The attorney general also has one of the most powerful legal tools in the nation: the 1921 Martin Act, which spells out a broad definition of securities fraud without requiring that prosecutors prove intent to defraud.
In a statement, Deven Sharma, S&P’s president, said the firm “is pleased to work with New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and other rating agencies on these important measures, which we believe will help ensure our ratings process continues to be of the highest quality.” http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com
Moody’s and S&P shares rose after The Wall Street Journal reported news of the settlement talks Tuesday afternoon. As of 4 p.m. composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Moody’s was at $38.45, up $1.80, or 4.9%. McGraw-Hill was up 38 cents at $41.20.
As the probe proceeded, attorneys in Mr. Cuomo’s office concluded that rating firms could be more effective if Wall Street had less control over which ones were paid, these people said. As part of the deal, the firms would cooperate with Mr. Cuomo’s continuing investigation into investment banks and other financial firms that issued mortgage-backed securities later plagued by high levels of defaults. The New York attorney general is trying to determine if banks intentionally overlooked or hid flaws in loans that were securitized and sold to investors.
The decision not to seek fines from the three major bond-rating firms partly reflects Mr. Cuomo’s firm but less-confrontational style than that of Mr. Spitzer. The 50-year-old Mr. Cuomo, elected in 2006, has promised to aggressively pursue financial wrongdoing, and the likely pact shows he believes investor confidence can be shored up without an all-out attack on the bond-rating industry.
Mr. Cuomo’s final settlement will likely be structured in a way that doesn’t contradict rules being proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission or European regulators. The deal also needs to address antitrust concerns at investment banks that pay rating fees, but rating firms will continue to determine the level of fees they charge on mortgage deals.
LIMA has long been a cosmopolitan city hesitant to embrace its diversity. A capital founded by Spanish conquistadors that subsequently exploded with influxes from Asia and then from Peru’s own Andean highlands, it has remained a city of fairly segregated neighborhoods. But led by Lima’s cuisine — which is rapidly gaining worldwide renown for its freshness and creativity — that is changing. Sushi and ceviche chefs are learning from one another. The most popular street food is “five flavors” a rice and pasta dish with Italian, Chinese, Andean, Japanese and African influences. Restaurants that once hid their existence from all but the “in the know” are now advertising their presence with Web sites and — gasp — signs out front. For the tourist, it means days of exploring neighborhoods and attractions with distinct cultures and histories, interspersed with the spicy, sweet, and subtle gastronomic experience of how it all comes together.
Friday
4 p.m.
1) SINS OF THE SEA
In Lima, food rules. And in the cocina limeña, seafood is king. Just a block or two from the ocean with ceramic tile floors and an open-air foyer, Pescados Capitales (Avenida La Mar 1337; 51-1-421-8808, www.pescados-capitales.com) combines the relaxation of the beach with the European refinement of Lima’s upper caste. “Pecados capitales” refers to the seven deadly sins, all of which can be ordered from the menu. Start off with a little Freudian Lust (lujuria freudiana, grilled baby calamari for 26 soles), and then chow down on some creamy, indulgent greed (avaricia sole Rockefeller, 40 soles) or simple infidelity (infidelidad grilled swordfish, 34 soles) if you fear that your stomach may not forgive so easily.
6 p.m.
2) PARK IT IN THE PARKS
Far from the city center but right up against the beach is the upscale neighborhood of Miraflores, which roughly translates as “look at all the pretty flowers,” Miraflores’s parks of irises, cactuses, and palms make for a good stroll and introduction to Lima. Start off at Parque Kennedy at the heart of the neighborhood, which often holds spoken-word poetry and outdoor art exhibitions. Cross the Diagonal to Café Haiti (Diagonal 160; 51-1-445-0539) an old-school hangout of the Lima literati with bamboo chairs and a sidewalk cafe where you can sample Peru’s signature beverages: a tangy pisco sour for the alcoholically inclined (9 soles, or about $3.20 at 2.8 soles to the dollar), and the lemony-sweet hierba luisa (4 soles) for the abstainers.
9:30 p.m.
3) PYRAMIDS AND PIE
For dessert, take a quick cab (5 soles) to La Bodega de la Trattoria (General Borgoño 784; 51-1-241-6899), the casual wing of La Trattoria, run by the South American television dessert diva Sandra Plevisani. Get a table out on the patio and order a bocanera de chocolate, a fudge-filled chocolate soufflé (22 soles), looking out at Huaca Pucllana, the complex of Incan structures across the street.
Saturday
9 a.m.
4) HEART OF THE CITY
Start the morning with a stroll up Jirón de la Unión, the pedestrian zone that leads to the Plaza Mayor, Lima’s main square. Pass modish shops and colorful 200-year-old colonial facades and emerge into a wide square surrounded by some of Lima’s finest architecture. This is the spot in which Francisco Pizarro founded the city in 1535 and in which Peruvians declared their independence in 1821. Tour the gold-leaf altars and paintings of the Lima Cathedral on the eastern edge, and if you have the time, visit the Church of San Francisco a couple of blocks northeast with its 17th-century convent and extensive network of catacombs (Plaza San Francisco; 51-1-427-1381; www.museocatacumbas.com).
Noon
5) CHIFA, CHIFA, EVERYWHERE
From the city center, walk east a few blocks and a full hemisphere to Calle Capón, Lima’s Chinatown. As a product of early-20th-century immigration, Peru has a large Chinese population, a fact observable by the proliferation of chifa (Peruvian-Chinese) restaurants all over the city. Chifa is spicier than traditional Chinese food, relying more on seafood and sauces and less on vegetables. One of the best spots is Salon Capón (Jirón Paruro 819; 51-1-426-9286), where you can try steamed langostino dumplings with tamarind sauce (7 soles) and spicy garlic-fried calamari (calamar chiu jin, 28 soles). Afterward, stroll through the pedestrian zone with the classic Chinatown arch on either end, stopping to have your palm read, the smell of sandalwood incense filling the air.
1 p.m.
6) X-RATED POTTERY
Through December 2008, if you can make it to only one museum in Lima, it should be the Museo Rafael Larco Herrera (Avenida Bolívar 1515; 51-1-461-1312; www.museolarco.org) in the Pueblo Libre district, which showcases pre-Columbian artifacts. The Gold Museum (www.museoroperu.com.pe) is another popular choice, but this year the Larco is featuring a collection of gold headdresses, ornaments and jewelry that rival the Gold Museum’s in quality, if not quantity. The Larco’s real appeal, however, is its collection of erotic pottery dating from the first millennium A.D., which begins with the expected giant phalluses and moves on to detailed depictions of sexual acts that are otherwise unviewable outside seedy video stores and corners of the Internet.
3 p.m.
7) DESERT WORSHIP
Peru is known for the Inca, but Lima is a city built by and for the Spanish conquerors. Still, Inca sites remain, so take a cab to Pachacamác (20 to 25 soles from Miraflores; www.pachacamac.net; entry fee 6 soles), an archaeological site that housed an important oracle for more than 1,500 years with a beautifully restored Temple of the Moon. Skip the tour loop unless you pay your cabbie to drive you around, but shell out the extra 20 soles for a guide, since you can’t get into the areas under work (which are many) without one. Bring a hat and sunglasses, because a visit to Pachacamác reminds you that Lima is one of the world’s largest desert cities.
6 p.m.
MAKE MINE A MAKI
Not many cities offer both a world-class culinary scene and a currency significantly weaker than the dollar, so take advantage by visiting Matsuei (Manuel Bañon 260; 51-1-422-4323), a restaurant in San Isidro co-founded by Nobuyuki Matsuhisa of Nobu fame and Lima’s best spot for sushi.
http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com
The Japanese settled in Peru around the same time as the Chinese, even eventually sending one of their own, Alberto Fujimori, to the presidency (and lately, to the jailhouse). Fish as fresh as Lima’s makes ideal ingredients in maki acevichado, a Japanese roll with the classic Peruvian ceviche sauce (30 soles), and pick up sushi (fried calamari with shrimp, salmon, and rice tartar, 24 soles).
10 p.m.
9) DISCOS ON THE OUTSKIRTS
Lima’s great population boom came in the 1950s when the Andean people migrated to the city in large numbers, creating scores of young towns, or pueblos jovenes, on the outskirts. These young towns have grown up and are now sporting some of Lima’s best night life in the form of a strip of clubs in the town of Los Olivos. Join the multigenerational crowds at the Karamba “salsoteca” for salsa music in a two-tiered club with dancing coconuts painted on the walls, or Kokus if you prefer rock, both on Boulevard Los Olivos, (www.boulevard-losolivos.com for both).
Sunday
10 a.m.
10) BOHEMIAN LIFE
If Miraflores is Lima’s Upper West Side, then Barranco is Greenwich Village. Home to Lima’s bohemian upper crust like Mario Vargas Llosa, this onetime summer resort neighborhood is filled with art galleries, European style parks and pubs. From the marigold-studded Plaza de Armas, walk west down to the Bridge of Sighs, an old wooden bridge over a bougainvillea-lined walkway that when accompanied by guitar players and women selling single roses, manages to be both touristy and romantic. Wind your way over to the Lucia de la Puente gallery (Paso Sáenz Peña 206A; 51-1-477-9740; www.gluciadelapuente.com), in Barranco, which has contemporary art exhibitions like an Incan ruin reconstructed out of old computer keyboards, changing monthly.
1 p.m.
11) GETTING CRAFTY
Rather than shopping the Inca Market’s repetitive stalls of textiles and figurines, walk across the street from Lucia de la Puente to the artisans’ collective Dédalo (Paseo Sáenz Peña 295; 51-1-477-0562), in Barranco. Each room in the labyrinthine century-old mansion houses a different type of craft, from jewelry and picture frames to lamps and leatherwork from more than 1,000 different local artists. A cafe in the back serves coffee, tea and selections from a decent wine list. It’s a nice spot to sit and figure out how to explain to your partner the beautiful but useless blown glass vase you just bought.
THE BASICS
Continental, LAN and American (through LAN) are among airlines that fly from the New York area to Lima at prices starting around $900 for June, according to a recent online search. Peru has no visa or special entry requirements.
Miraflores makes the best base for a visit with a wide range of quality hotels and a beachfront location. The Hotel Señorial (José Gonzáles 567; 51-1-445-0139; www.senorial.com), in Miraflores, is a lovely, relaxed place with a flowery courtyard and hearty breakfast at a nice price (216 soles, or about $77 at 2.8 soles to the dollar, for a double).
For upscale lodging, you can’t do better than the Miraflores Park Hotel (Avenida Malecón de la Reserva 1035; 51-1-610-4000, www.mira-park.com), also in Miraflores, with double rooms starting at $435 (rates are given in dollars). A taxi from Jorge Chávez Airport should be about 35 soles to both these locations.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 8, 2008
The 36 Hours column last Sunday, about Lima, Peru, referred incorrectly to the hours of operation for Pescados Capitales restaurant. It is open only for lunch, closing at 4:30 p.m., and is not open for dinner.
While pregnant with her first child, Meridith Duffy cried nearly every day — to her dog trainer.
She feared she’d have to part with her pit bull, Haley, when her child was born. Haley “had never bitten anyone,” says Ms. Duffy, who lives in Braintree, Mass. “But I knew she had that potential, and I was nervous.”
The trainer had a solution: a program to get Haley used to having a baby around. Soon, Ms. Duffy was walking through the house with a stroller, playing a CD of annoying baby cries, and tugging the dog’s ears and tail the way a toddler might. Haley also got many hours of obedience classes. “We had to learn that she was a dog, not a person,” Ms. Duffy says. “That was hard for us.”
Jenifer Vickery of The Pawsitive Dog helps new parents train their dogs to behave safely and comfortably around new infants. Dave Pickford reports.
The Duffys, whose baby, Isabella, arrived 19 months ago, are part of a new breed of parents-to-be who pay to baby-proof their dogs. At least a half-dozen dog-baby books and DVDs are on the market, with titles like “Your Baby and Bowser.” A canine re-education course called Dogs & Storks, launched in 2006, now has 35 affiliated trainers in the U.S. and Canada, with hundreds of graduates.
“It’s catching on because people are choosing to have kids later, and their dogs are really their first baby,” says the course’s creator, Jennifer Shryock of Cary, N.C., who sells it to trainers for $300.
Dogs bite about 4.7 million people a year in the U.S., the majority of them children, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. Bonnie Beaver, a Texas vet and past president of the group, says that of the 15 to 20 people a year who die from dog bites, about 80% are children.
Ms. Shryock tells expectant parents, “When the baby comes, you are going to look at your dog for the first time as an animal. You will feel different about Fluffy.”
That came as a shock to Tracy Fuquay, of Raleigh, N.C. For six years, her Shih-poo, Marcy, was the family princess: She traveled in a purse, dressed in colorful sweaters, sundresses or a denim jacket with heart sequins. When Ms. Fuquay graduated from the Raleigh School of Nurse Anesthesia in August 2006, Marcy wore a cap and gown.
In the eighth month of her pregnancy, Ms. Fuquay finally started saying no to Marcy. The dog was no longer allowed to ride in Ms. Fuquay’s lap as she drove, and was banned from her bed. The result: “Marcy became racked with anxiety.” http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com
Things got worse after baby Leah’s birth in December. Marcy now often cowers, and she urinates on the rugs. “I’m cleaning as much dog pee as I am changing diapers,” the new mom says. “My husband is ready to give the dog away, but I can’t.”
She paid Ms. Shryock $160 for a two-hour house call. The result was a sobering assessment: “Because Marcy was used to being treated as ‘the baby’ for years, she will have a more difficult time and longer adjustment time to learn that she is not the only one needing attention.”
Christopher Reggio, a publisher of pet-care books, says demand for prenatal dog prep is rising because “dogs today are real family members. They aren’t ‘owned’ by people, they’re ‘parented’ by people.” His TFH Publications Inc. in Neptune, N.J., last year released “And Baby Makes Four: A Trimester-by-Trimester Guide to a Baby-Friendly Dog.”
Natalie Rivkin is in the final days of her third trimester. But in her mind she’s already been a mom for nearly six years — to Luca, her chocolate Lab. “My schedule is built around her. When she’s sick, I worry,” says the high-school math teacher in Boston.
One recent day, Luca watched as Ms. Rivkin reached into her sport-utility vehicle, gently lifted a plastic doll in a blue “onesie” from the infant car seat and buckled it into a new stroller, then began pushing the stroller and doll through a local arboretum.
“Hey, that’s not a real baby,” yelled a passing runner. It was hard to know what Luca thought; she was busy nibbling grass.
Ms. Rivkin was doing her homework for Barks & Babies, a seminar taught to 10 couples at a local maternity store. Her instructor, Jenifer Vickery, owner of the Pawsitive Dog in Boston, suggests practicing with a fake baby four weeks before mom’s due date. Other prebirth strategies: ignoring the dog more, and scenting dog toys with almond oil to distinguish them from baby toys.
Like older siblings, dogs can act out when stressed by a change like a new baby, trainers say. Barking, biting and soiling the house can all happen if dogs get less attention and exercise, feeling sidelined.
“It’s harder to be a dog today,” says Sue Sternberg of Accord, N.Y., a trainer and specialist in testing dogs’ temperaments.
Not necessarily, though, for Phoebe and Zack, two large members of the Joe and Joelle Coretti household in Milford, Conn. Phoebe is an 85-pound golden retriever, and Zack, a German shepherd, weighs in at 120 pounds. “I was nervous about how big they were and how they might think the baby was a toy to play with,” Ms. Coretti says. “But I was also nervous — since they were our first babies — that they might have some issues with the new baby. I wanted the dogs to feel they were still part of the family.”
Ms. Coretti went to a Dogs & Storks Seminar and picked up some training tips. After she gave birth last year, her husband brought home the baby’s T-shirt and cap for the dogs to sniff. Baby Kyle, age 1, now plays with the giant dogs, “who,” Ms. Coretti adds, “still sleep in our bed.”
Lynda Vanderhoven of Boston practiced relegating Bailey, her yellow Labrador puppy, to his “doggie den” in the house so she would be able to attend to her new son, Sam, when necessary. One difference between her two “babies,” she says, is that the dog “can be legally locked in a crate.”
By the time Susie Flaherty gave birth in 2006, her pit bull and Labrador mix, Rudy, had completed dozens of private and group classes. But it was hard for her and her husband to impose limits on Rudy, who’d been abused as a puppy. “He was our first child, and he was such a loving dog,” she says. “Our need for the love and comfort he provided…made us inconsistent — when we needed it, we had him up on the couch with us.”
Shortly after her son, Angus, was born, Ms. Flaherty, a personal trainer in South Boston, couldn’t cope. Unable to cuddle Rudy while breast-feeding around the clock, “I felt horribly guilty,” she says.
She gave the dog to her childless brother in San Francisco. Rudy recently got a Facebook page so he can keep in touch.
As for Meridith Duffy and her husband, Keith, a marketing executive, they continue to send Haley, their female pit bull, to anger-management class. It seems to have worked. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com
“People think you’re crazy to have a pit bull in the first place,” Mr. Duffy says. “But now the dog lies down and the baby pokes her in the eye and pulls her ears, and she just takes it.” A second Duffy baby is due June 7.
Michael Price has made millions buying shares in battered financial stocks. But he isn’t buying Wachovia Corp. And the bank’s dumping of its chief executive doesn’t change his mind.
Mr. Price, who led the Mutual Series funds group and later sold it to Franklin Templeton Investments, isn’t one who delights in piling on to wounded financial firms.
[Chart]
In the family portfolio that Mr. Price now runs, MFP Investors, he has sold Wachovia shares short, meaning he makes a profit if the stock declines. The reasons for Mr. Price’s bearish bet: He said Wachovia is going to book much higher credit losses on its holdings of adjustable-rate mortgages.
As a result, Wachovia, which raised $8 billion in fresh capital in April after raising a combined $5.8 billion by selling preferred shares in December and February, will have to do another big round of fund raising, Mr. Price said.
“They are going to have to come back to the market and raise more money,” he said.
During this credit crunch, plenty of investors have tried picking the bottom on names like Wachovia, only to see the stocks hit another low as the lenders reported more bad news.
But Mr. Price uses the balance sheet to get an idea of where the floor might be.
Put simply, he takes a bank’s common equity — the net worth available to common stockholders — and slices and dices it to come up with a price target. Mr. Price has used this approach to buy shares recently in Sovereign Bancorp Inc., another lender that got hit hard in the mortgage crisis.
At Wachovia, removing goodwill and other intangible assets, as well as preferred shares, gets to a book value of about $14.80 a share, after the most recent capital raise. That is well below Wachovia’s closing price Monday of $23.40, down 1.7%, or 40 cents, in 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
But Mr. Price notes that Wachovia deserves some credit in this calculation for its low-interest-rate deposits, for which potential acquirers likely would pay a premium. Assuming a 5% premium on the bank’s $278 billion of low-interest-rate deposits, $6.60 a share would have to be added to the $14.80 a share in book value. This gets to an approximate share-price target of $21.40, not that far below Monday’s close.
But the bank has $121.2 billion of adjustable-rate mortgages, most of which were taken onto its balance sheet when it acquired Golden West Financial Corp. Any value calculation for Wachovia has to take into account the losses the bank likely will have to book as it builds its loan-loss reserve against defaults on these mortgages.
Mr. Price believes a new CEO at Wachovia likely would be more aggressive in recognizing the ARM problems. “More losses are coming. They need to fess up,” he said.
The financial pain from doing that could be intense. At the end of March, the loan-loss reserve for Wachovia’s adjustable-rate mortgages was equivalent to 1.55% of the $121.2 billion total, which looks too low given how fast they are going bad.
If Mr. Price is right, Wachovia’s share price is wrong.
‘Breakfast at Citi’ for Vikram Pandit
Vikram Pandit must feel like Holly Golightly staring into the windows of Tiffany’s in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Wachovia and Washington Mutual Inc. are sitting behind the glass, ripe for the taking. Though both are somewhat tarnished, they each would solve Citigroup Inc.’s need for a big deposit base that would serve as a source of cheap funding.
[But Mr. Pandit likely will remain on the sidewalk since Citigroup isn't in the position to do any kind of deal.
That leaves J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon, who has made no secret that he wants to expand in the Southeast, which argues for Wachovia, and has already bid for WaMu. But Mr. Dimon would have a tough time pulling off a deal.
First, J.P. Morgan is busy integrating Bear Stearns, though in terms of size and cost, Bear isn't significant enough to keep J.P. Morgan from trying to do another deal. The bigger roadblocks are price and accounting. Neither bank's board likely would make a deal without a significant premium given the banks' low valuations, as well as the big recent capital raisings each has completed.
J.P. Morgan could pay the premium, but it would need to be pretty steep because an acquirer would have to mark to market the acquiree's entire balance sheet. According to Merrill Lynch & Co., that would add at least $15 billion to $20 billion to the purchase price.
That might be too much for Mr. Dimon to stomach. As for Mr. Pandit, he will be staring at the diamonds in the window for a long time to come. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com
Pancho is a long, small dog with big ears who was adopted from the Berkeley Humane Society in 2003. Everyone who meets him has her own guess at Poncho's mysterious parentage: a terrier mix, a little pit bull, or perhaps a Chihuahua-pit bull mix, otherwise known as a Chia pit?
Sixty-five dollars and a simple swab of the inside of the cheek could finally solve that riddle. A new genetic test, marketed by Maryland-based MetaMorphix, can determine a dog's mix of breeds with 90 percent accuracy. The company has processed thousands of tests since the product went on the market in February, CEO Edwin Quattlebaum said at the Biotechnology Industry Convention in Boston earlier this week.
Because many canine diseases are linked to particular breeds, the results could help owners make health decisions about their dogs. The test has also garnered interest from animal shelters: shelter employees say that being able to provide a bit of a dog's "back story" encourages people to adopt. "Owners get a kick out of knowing the heritage of their dogs," says Quattlebaum.
The test assesses genetic markers known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. Each breed--the test can currently detect 38 of the most common--has a different SNP profile. The test is made possible by massive efforts to sequence the genome of different breeds of dogs, such as the dog genome project.
MetaMorphix, which also does genetic testing for the American Kennel Club, is now starting to use its canine DNA database to hunt for genetic variations linked to diseases. Its first target is chronic hip dysplasia, a degenerative joint disease most often seen in large breeds, such as German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, rottweilers, Great Danes, and golden retrievers. "Eventually, people buying dogs could use this test to ensure their dog is not predisposed to this disease," says Quattlebaum. "And breeders could use it to try to breed [that variation] out of their dogs.”
Victoria Jaschob, Pancho’s devoted human companion, says that she’s thought about ordering the test. But for now, “we just use the generic term ‘Pancho dog’ to describe any small, long dog with short legs and big ears,” she says. “There’s a million of them out there.”
We all bristle at people who put themselves ahead of the common good, whether it is by evading taxes, shirking military service, cheating on bus fares or littering. Many of us will go out of our way to shame, shun or otherwise punish them, researchers have shown. That’s how we foster a community that benefits everyone, even at some cost to ourselves.
Economists analyzing ingredients of the social glue that holds us all together wonder whether that public spirit of rebuke and reward is an innate human value or a byproduct of the particular society in which we live. Until recently, however, they rarely have reached across cultural boundaries to compare how people in disparate communities actually weigh private gain against public good.
In the most sweeping global study yet of cooperation, a team of experimental economists tested university students in 15 countries to see how people contribute to joint ventures and what happens to them when they don’t. The European research team discovered startling differences in how groups around the world react when punishment is handed out for antisocial behavior.
WSJ’s Robert Lee Hotz speaks to Kelsey Hubbard about an important study that looked at how people responded to peer pressure in cooperative ventures across many societies.
In some countries, researchers found, almost no good turn went unpunished. “What kept popping up is this element of retaliation,” said economist Benedikt Herrmann at the U.K.’s University of Nottingham, who reported the experiment this past March in Science. “It took us by surprise.” http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
Among students in the U.S., Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had given most to everyone’s benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the helping hand.
To explore cooperation across cultures, Dr. Herrmann and his colleagues recruited 1,120 college students in 16 cities around the globe for a public-good game. The exercise is one of several devised by economists in recent years to distill the complex variables of human behavior into transactions simple enough to be studied under controlled laboratory conditions.
The volunteers played in anonymous groups of four. Each player started with 20 tokens that could be redeemed for cash after 10 rounds. Players could contribute tokens to a common account or keep them all to themselves.
After each round, the pooled funds paid a dividend shared equally by all, even those who didn’t contribute. Previous research shows that a single selfish individual riding on the generosity of others can so irritate other players that contributions soon drop to nothing.
http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
That changes when players can identify and punish those who don’t contribute (in this case, by deducting points that can quickly add up to serious money). Once such peer pressure comes into play, everyone — including the shamed freeloader — starts to chip in.
“Freeloaders are disliked everywhere,” said study co-author Simon Gachter, who studies economic decision-making at Nottingham. “Cooperation always breaks down if people can’t punish.”
The students behaved the same way in all 16 cities until given the chance to punish those taking a free ride on the shared investment. Punishment was done anonymously, and it cost one token to discipline another player.
[Science Journal reading]
Studying peer pressure in 15 countries, economist Benedikt Herrmann at the UK’s University of Nottingham reported on “Antisocial Punishment Across Societies”3 in Science.
The researchers also ranked the national responses against the World Values Survey4, which periodically assesses values and cultural changes in societies all over the world.
Searching for the origins of economic behavior, an international research team studied 15 primitive cultures in 12 countries and reported their findings in
“In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies”5
We may be hard-wired to care about social standing, scientists at the US National Institute of Mental Health reported in “Know Your Place: Neural Processing of Social Hierarchy in Humans.”6
At Japan’s National Institute for Psychological Sciences, researchers reported in “Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum”7 that reputation activates the same brain areas as money.
Free-market philosopher Adam Smith, author in 1776 of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations8 wrote first in 1759 on praise, blame, ethics and human nature in The Theory of Moral Sentiments9.
Among those punished, differences emerged immediately. Students in Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in Russia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to take revenge by deducting points from other players — and to give up a token themselves to do it.
“They didn’t believe they did anything wrong,” said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most, suspecting they must be to blame.
Such a readiness to retaliate, researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80 societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the researchers found.
“The question is why?” said Harvard political economist Richard Zeckhauser.
No one is sure. The freeloaders might be angry at being trumped by strangers, or be unwilling to share with people they don’t know. They also might believe they are being treated unfairly.
But social appearances and the good opinion of others do regulate our behavior. In the only other major cross-cultural study of this sort, Dr. Gintis and his colleagues several years ago examined 15 primitive societies of farmers, foragers, hunters and nomads in 12 countries, not unlike those in which humanity might have first evolved. The researchers found that these people all cared as much about fairness as the economic outcome of a trade. “They care about the ethical value of what they do,” said Dr. Gintis.
Independent brain-imaging teams in Japan and the U.S. have shown just how valuable approval can be, as they reported in April in Neuron. Researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Psychological Sciences found that when they watched the brain respond to reputation and social status, the excited synapses looked awfully familiar: They were the same ones activated by money.
Kapustin Yar is a Russian rocket launch and development site in the Astrakhan Oblast, between Volgograd and Astrakhan in the town of Znamensk. It was established 13 May 1946 and in its beginning used technology, material, and scientific support from the defeated Germany. The first rocket was launched on October 18, 1947. It was one of eleven German A-4s (the V-2 rocket) that had been captured. Numerous test rockets for the Russian military, satellite and sounding rocket launches were also carried out at the site.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
The 4th Missile Test Range “Kapustin Yar” was established by a decree of the Soviet Government “On Questions of Jet Propelled Weapons” on the 13th May 1946. The test range was created under the supervision of General-lieutenant Vasily Voznyuk (commander in chief of the test range 1946-1973) in the desert north end of the Astrakhan region.
The State R&D Test Range No 8 (GNIIP-8, “test range S”) was established at Kapustin Yar in June 1951.
Five air nuclear tests of small power (10-40 kt) were performed over the site in 1957-1961 [1].
With the further growth and development, the site became a cosmodrome and served in this function since 1966 (with interruption in 1988-1998). A new town was established, Znamensk, to support the scientists working on the facilities, their families and supporting personnel. Initially this was a secret city, not to be found on map and inaccessible to outsiders.
Evidence of the importance of Kapustin Yar was obtained by Western intelligence through debriefing of returning German scientists and spy flights. The first such flight took place in 1953 using a high flying Canberra aircraft from the RAF.
Kapustin Yar is also the site of numerous Soviet-era UFO sightings and has been called “Russia’s Roswell”.
It’s Tuesday and we’re having dinner in a cavernous fish place in Washington Harbour. It’s been a couple of days since Mr. Nader – again an independent candidate for president in this year’s election – demanded the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. “You must be the only man in America,” I say to him, “who has called for the impeachment of Bush and Bill Clinton.”
Mr. Nader laughs, his face breaking briefly into good cheer. “I’m a little bit more insistent with Bush and Cheney. I think Clinton was terrible. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
But there’s no comparison between him and the more clinical high crimes and misdemeanors of Bush.”
Would Al Gore have made a better president than George Bush? “Yes,” says Mr. Nader, looking, for all the world, as if I’d asked him the silliest question. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“Bush is the worst president we’ve ever had – in terms of damage to the nation, and incapacity.”
So does he regret that his own run for president in 2000, as the Green Party’s candidate, might – as Democratic demonology would have it – have cost Al Gore the White House? “No . . . If the premise is that we have an equal right to run for election, no one’s a ’spoiler’ – unless we’re all ’spoilers’ of one another. So when they say, ‘You cost Gore the election,’ I say, ‘I thought Bush took more votes from Gore.’”
This subject gets Mr. Nader quite indignant. “The smartest people,” he continues – leaving a forkful of halibut with tequila-lime sauce unattended – “people like Larry Tribe, descend to a subelementary level of analysis when it comes to the results, and the tallies. If I ask them, ‘Do you think Gore won the 2000 elections?’ and they say ‘Yes,’ I say ‘Well, who took it away from him? Was it Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush and the five Republican politicians on the U.S. Supreme Court? Well then, why don’t you go after them? Why are you picking on the Green Party?’”
Here, Mr. Nader observes tartly that if Mr. Gore had carried his own state, Tennessee, and if “a quarter of a million Democrats hadn’t voted for Bush in Florida,” his Green Party run wouldn’t have figured so prominently in the “Democrat Party’s” arithmetic of betrayal. (Mr. Nader and I spoke for over two hours, and not once did he say “Democratic Party.” Many Democrats would regard his usage, more common among Republicans, as a political slur.) http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com
“The Democrats,” he continues, “hadn’t been challenged from my side of the political spectrum since Henry Wallace,” FDR’s vice-president, who ran for president in 1948 as the nominee of the Progressive Party. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
“They’re not used to third-party challenges, while the Republicans are challenged by the Libertarians all the time. So they still scapegoat the Green Party, instead of looking in the mirror and asking, ‘Why didn’t we landslide this bumbling governor from Texas?’ And that’s what they’ve been doing for eight years!
“Some of them even tried to ascribe Kerry’s loss in 2004 to me, and I say, ‘Wait a minute, Kerry lost by three million votes’ . . . And he lost Ohio without my help, because the Democrats sued us: they got us off the ballot in Ohio, as they did in other states.”
Mr. Nader, never lost for a fact or figure, points out that the “Democrat National Committee filed 24 lawsuits in 18 states in 12 weeks in ‘04 to get us off the ballot.” http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
It’s halfway through our bottle of Cabernet that the subject of Sen. Obama comes up. I ask Mr. Nader: Why run against him when he’s carrying a progressive reform banner into the campaign? “He isn’t,” is the swift riposte.
“I think the central issue in politics in this country is the domination of corporations over our government, and over our elections, and over so many things where commercial values used to be verboten . . . I mean, they’re commercializing childhood, they’re commercializing universities. What’s happened in the last 25 years is an overwhelming swarm of commercial supremacy, and he, Obama, has bought into that.”
I point out here that Mr. Obama has opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, and said that he wants it renegotiated; that he’s chastised the Big Three in Detroit for opposing higher CAFE standards; and that he emphasizes at every opportunity that he takes no money from lobbyists. What does Mr. Nader think of that?
“You see, that’s all permissible populist rhetoric that the corporations understand and wink at. Look at who gets the corporate money. Six out of seven industries giving money, through PACs and individual executives, etc., are giving more money to the Democrats than to the Republicans. I mean, John McCain’s having trouble raising money, even now.
“Obama’s taking large money from the securities industry, the health insurance industry . . . I’ve gotten used to this ritual where the companies give Democrats this leeway, and say, ‘Well, Obama’s gotta say that stuff, but he’ll come around. There’s no way he’ll touch Nafta or touch the WTO.’”
So is it all just a charade? “Yes,” says Mr. Nader, implacably, “a charade. His health-insurance plan lets the health insurance companies continue their redundant, wasteful, often corrupt – in terms of billing fraud – ways, ripping off Medicare. My vice-presidential candidate, Matt Gonzalez, has written a 3,000-word tract on Obama that’s on our Web site, VoteNader.org1. You should read it.”
I persist with Mr. Obama, pointing out that a lot of Democrats would find it hard to accept Mr. Nader’s characterization of him as an agent of corporate America. After all, many non-Democrats find Mr. Obama disconcertingly left wing.
“He’s not an agent,” Mr. Nader grants, “but he moves in an environment that’s conditioned by corporate power. If he wins, you’ll see his appointments in the Defense department, the Treasury and so on, they’ll be pretty much what the lobbies and PACs want.”
Mr. Nader is clear that he prefers Mr. Obama to Hillary Clinton. “With her, we’ll just get what Bill gave us. I think she’s like Bill Clinton. With Obama, there’s the possibility of some fresh start, just like Kennedy did the Peace Corps. You see, when Obama got out of Harvard Law School, he went to work for a short period with a group I started in New York, the New York Public Interest Research Group. Then he went and did neighborhood work in Chicago, so it’s not like he’s coming off some corporate mountain.
“But he’s made up his mind to be a very conciliatory, concessionary, adaptive politician to the reality of corporate power. And people like him are told, ‘Look, if you don’t adhere to certain parameters and expectations, you’re going to have a hard time winning any nomination or election.’ And Obama’s made his peace with that.”
Proof of this, in Mr. Nader’s view, is Mr. Obama’s position on Israel. “So many people in Chicago regaled him because he was for Palestinian rights, a two-state solution. Now, he won’t say many things on behalf of the Palestinians. After a while, you get an idea of his political character, his political personality. He’s not a transforming leader. He was not a transforming senator. He was not a challenging senator, the way [the late Paul] Wellstone was.”
What is it exactly that Mr. Nader would like Barack Obama – and the Democratic Party – to do in order to be kosher in his eyes? “Where do I start?” he asks with a twinkle. “Labor reform, repealing Taft-Hartley. You see, the labor unions line up in favor of the Democrat Party and they get nothing. For heaven’s sake, they went ‘x’ number of years without even adjusting the minimum wage to inflation. I’ve never seen a less demanding organized labor movement, but what have the Democrats given them?”
Mr. Nader wants an end to “lip service” on Nafta and the WTO, and “better protection of individual investors’ rights, rights that corporate capitalism violates repeatedly.” On health care, “we believe in single-payer health, full Medicare for all.” He is also “opposed unalterably to nuclear power. We think the country should go solar, in all of its different manifestations, including passive solar architecture.” The Democrats are a world away from that position. http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com
There’s more: Mr. Nader wants to slash “the bloated, wasteful military budget. This thing is so out of control that it’s unauditable. But Obama wants to increase the military budget, which is currently distorted away from soldiers and towards these giant weapons systems, and keeping troops in Korea and Japan.” And as for the tax system, Mr. Nader wishes that the Democrats would adhere to his philosophy, which is that “we should first tax things that we like the least, or dislike the most, as a society, before we tax human labor, and necessities . . . through a sales tax.
“So we should tax securities speculation first, before we tax labor. If you go to a store and buy $1,000 worth of products, you pay a sales tax. You buy $1 million worth of derivatives, you pay no sales tax!”
Has he had trouble getting his message out to the American voter? Here, Mr. Nader shows a mild – and understandable – flash of anger over being shut out of the televised presidential debates.
He is also critical of the media. “Since I announced my run, I can’t get on Charlie Rose. Or Diane Rehm or Terry Gross [of NPR]. I haven’t been on Jim Lehrer yet. I got on Wolf Blitzer twice, on CNN. Fox News calls me more than anybody. They have the same attitude, of course – ‘Here comes the spoiler!’ But how can you spoil something that’s spoiled already?
“I don’t complain much publicly. I’ve been told by a lot of the television bookers around the country, ‘Ralph, they don’t like you.’ So the door is shut. But I say to myself, ‘Should we close down and go to Monterey and watch the whales?’ No. Better to fight when you have a small chance, than to fight later when you have no chance at all.”
Those stirring last words are from Winston Churchill, and Mr. Nader quotes the old conservative with relish – even though his favorite British politician, he tells me, is Aneurin Bevan, the man who gave Britain its National Health Service after World War II. Bevan and Churchill were from different planets, and we chuckle at the incongruity of Mr. Nader’s rhetorical inspiration. Then we rise slowly from our table and leave – I for my hotel room in Georgetown, and he for the battle that never ends.
Stem Cells found in most, if not all, multi-cellular organisms. They are characterized by the ability to renew themselves through mitotic cell division and differentiating into a diverse range of specialized cell types. Research in the stem cell field grew out of findings by Canadian scientists Ernest A. McCulloch and James E. Till in the 1960s. The two broad types of mammalian stem cells are: embryonic stem cells that are found in blastocysts, and adult stem cells that are found in adult tissues. In a developing embryo, stem cells can differentiate into all of the specialized embryonic tissues. In adult organisms, stem cells and progenitor cells act as a repair system for the body, replenishing specialized cells, but also maintain the normal turnover of regenerative organs, such as blood, skin or intestinal tissues.
As stem cells can be grown and transformed into specialized cells with characteristics consistent with cells of various tissues such as muscles or nerves through cell culture, their use in medical therapies has been proposed. Louis Sheehan
In particular, embryonic cell lines, autologous embryonic stem cells generated through therapeutic cloning, and highly plastic adult stem cells from the umbilical cord blood or bone marrow are touted as promising candidates
The classical definition of a stem cell requires that it possess two properties:
* Self-renewal – the ability to go through numerous cycles of cell division while maintaining the undifferentiated state.
* Potency – the capacity to differentiate into specialized cell types. In the strictest sense, this requires stem cells to be either totipotent or pluripotent – to be able to give rise to any mature cell type, although multipotent or unipotent progenitor cells are sometimes referred to as stem cells. http://louis_j_sheehan_esquire.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog
Pluripotent, embryonic stem cells originate as inner mass cells within a blastocyst. The stem cells can become any tissue in the body, excluding a placenta. Only the morula’s cells are totipotent, able to become all tissues and a placenta.
Pluripotent, embryonic stem cells originate as inner mass cells within a blastocyst. The stem cells can become any tissue in the body, excluding a placenta. Only the morula’s cells are totipotent, able to become all tissues and a placenta.
Potency specifies the differentiation potential (the potential to differentiate into different cell types) of the stem cell.
* Totipotent stem cells are produced from the fusion of an egg and sperm cell. Cells produced by the first few divisions of the fertilized egg are also totipotent. These cells can differentiate into embryonic and extraembryonic cell types.
* Pluripotent stem cells are the descendants of totipotent cells and can differentiate into cells derived from any of the three germ layers.
* Multipotent stem cells can produce only cells of a closely related family of cells (e.g. hematopoietic stem cells differentiate into red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, etc.).
* Unipotent cells can produce only one cell type, but have the property of self-renewal which distinguishes them from non-stem cells (e.g. muscle stem cells).
The practical definition of a stem cell is the functional definition – the ability to regenerate tissue over a lifetime. For example, the gold standard test for a bone marrow or hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) is the ability to transplant one cell and save an individual without HSCs. In this case, a stem cell must be able to produce new blood cells and immune cells over a long term, demonstrating potency. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
It should also be possible to isolate stem cells from the transplanted individual, which can themselves be transplanted into another individual without HSCs, demonstrating that the stem cell was able to self-renew.
Properties of stem cells can be illustrated in vitro, using methods such as clonogenic assays, where single cells are characterized by their ability to differentiate and self-renew.[4][5] As well, stem cells can be isolated based on a distinctive set of cell surface markers. However, in vitro culture conditions can alter the behavior of cells, making it unclear whether the cells will behave in a similar manner in vivo. Considerable debate exists whether some proposed adult cell populations are truly stem cells.
(ES cell lines) are cultures of cells derived from the epiblast tissue of the inner cell mass (ICM) of a blastocyst or earlier morula stage embryos. A blastocyst is an early stage embryo—approximately four to five days old in humans and consisting of 50–150 cells. ES cells are pluripotent and give rise during development to all derivatives of the three primary germ layers: ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm. In other words, they can develop into each of the more than 200 cell types of the adult body when given sufficient and necessary stimulation for a specific cell type. They do not contribute to the extra-embryonic membranes or the placenta.
Nearly all research to date has taken place using mouse embryonic stem cells (mES) or human embryonic stem cells (hES). Both have the essential stem cell characteristics, yet they require very different environments in order to maintain an undifferentiated state. Mouse ES cells are grown on a layer of gelatin and require the presence of Leukemia Inhibitory Factor (LIF). Human ES cells are grown on a feeder layer of mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) and require the presence of basic Fibroblast Growth Factor (bFGF or FGF-2). Without optimal culture conditions or genetic manipulation, embryonic stem cells will rapidly differentiate.
A human embryonic stem cell is also defined by the presence of several transcription factors and cell surface proteins. The transcription factors Oct-4, Nanog, and SOX2 form the core regulatory network that ensures the suppression of genes that lead to differentiation and the maintenance of pluripotency. The cell surface antigens most commonly used to identify hES cells are the glycolipids SSEA3 and SSEA4 and the keratan sulfate antigens Tra-1-60 and Tra-1-81. The molecular definition of a stem cell includes many more proteins and continues to be a topic of research.
After twenty years of research, there are no approved treatments or human trials using embryonic stem cells. ES cells, being totipotent cells, require specific signals for correct differentiation – if injected directly into the body, ES cells will differentiate into many different types of cells, causing a teratoma. Differentiating ES cells into usable cells while avoiding transplant rejection are just a few of the hurdles that embryonic stem cell researchers still face. Many nations currently have moratoria on either ES cell research or the production of new ES cell lines. Because of their combined abilities of unlimited expansion and pluripotency, embryonic stem cells remain a theoretically potential source for regenerative medicine and tissue replacement after injury or disease.
To ensure self-renewal, stem cells undergo two types of cell division (see Stem cell division and differentiation diagram). Symmetric division gives rise to two identical daughter cells both endowed with stem cell properties. Asymmetric division, on the other hand, produces only one stem cell and a progenitor cell with limited self-renewal potential. Progenitors can go through several rounds of cell division before terminally differentiating into a mature cell.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
It is possible that the molecular distinction between symmetric and asymmetric divisions lies in differential segregation of cell membrane proteins (such as receptors) between the daughter cells.
An alternative theory is that stem cells remain undifferentiated due to environmental cues in their particular niche. Stem cells differentiate when they leave that niche or no longer receive those signals. Studies in Drosophila germarium have identified the signals dpp and adherins junctions that prevent germarium stem cells from differentiating.
The signals that lead to reprogramming of cells to an embryonic-like state are also being investigated. These signal pathways include several transcription factors including the oncogene c-Myc. Initial studies indicate that transformation of mice cells with a combination of these anti-differentiation signals can reverse differentiation and may allow adult cells to become pluripotent. However, the need to transform these cells with an oncogene may prevent the use of this approach in therapy. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1
Medical researchers believe that stem cell therapy has the potential to dramatically change the treatment of human disease. A number of adult stem cell therapies already exist, particularly bone marrow transplants that are used to treat leukemia.In the future, medical researchers anticipate being able to use technologies derived from stem cell research to treat a wider variety of diseases including cancer, Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injuries, and muscle damage, amongst a number of other impairments and conditions.However, there still exists a great deal of social and scientific uncertainty surrounding stem cell research, which could possibly be overcome through public debate and future research, and further education of the public.
Stem cells, however, are already used extensively in research, and some scientists do not see cell therapy as the first goal of the research, but see the investigation of stem cells as a goal worthy in itself.
There exists a widespread controversy over human embryonic stem cell research that emanates from the techniques used in the creation and usage of stem cells. Human embryonic stem cell research is controversial because, with the present state of technology, starting a stem cell line requires the destruction of a human embryo and/or therapeutic cloning. However, recently, it has been shown in principle that embryonic stem cell lines can be generated using a single-cell biopsy similar to that used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis that may allow stem cell creation without embryonic destruction. It is not the entire field of stem cell research, but the specific field of human embryonic stem cell research that is at the centre of an ethical debate.
Opponents of the research argue that embryonic stem cell technologies are a slippery slope to reproductive cloning and can fundamentally devalue human life. Those in the pro-life movement argue that a human embryo is a human life and is therefore entitled to protection.
Contrarily, supporters of embryonic stem cell research argue that such research should be pursued because the resultant treatments could have significant medical potential. It is also noted that excess embryos created for in vitro fertilisation could be donated with consent and used for the research.
The ensuing debate has prompted authorities around the world to seek regulatory frameworks and highlighted the fact that stem cell research represents a social and ethical challenge.
* and Gopal Das present scientific evidence of adult neurogenesis, ongoing stem cell activity in the brain; their reports contradict Cajal’s “no new neurons” dogma and are largely ignored.
* 1963 – McCulloch and Till illustrate the presence of self-renewing cells in mouse bone marrow. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
* 1968 – Bone marrow transplant between two siblings successfully treats SCID.
* 1978 – Haematopoietic stem cells are discovered in human cord blood.
* 1981 – Mouse embryonic stem cells are derived from the inner cell mass by scientists Martin Evans, Matthew Kaufman, and Gail R. Martin. Gail Martin is attributed for coining the term “Embryonic Stem Cell”.
* 1992 – Neural stem cells are cultured in vitro as neurospheres.
* 1997 – Leukemia is shown to originate from a haematopoietic stem cell, the first direct evidence for cancer stem cells.
* 1998 – James Thomson and coworkers derive the first human embryonic stem cell line at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
* 2000s – Several reports of adult stem cell plasticity are published.
* 2001 – Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology clone first early (four- to six-cell stage) human embryos for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells.
* 2003 – Dr. Songtao Shi of NIH discovers new source of adult stem cells in children’s primary teeth.
* 2004-2005 – Korean researcher Hwang Woo-Suk claims to have created several human embryonic stem cell lines from unfertilised human oocytes. The lines were later shown to be fabricated. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com
* 2005 – Researchers at Kingston University in England claim to have discovered a third category of stem cell, dubbed cord-blood-derived embryonic-like stem cells (CBEs), derived from umbilical cord blood. The group claims these cells are able to differentiate into more types of tissue than adult stem cells.
* August 2006 – Rat Induced pluripotent stem cells: the journal Cell publishes Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka, “Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Mouse Embryonic and Adult Fibroblast Cultures by Defined Factors”.
* October 2006 – Scientists in England create the first ever artificial liver cells using umbilical cord blood stem cells.
* January 2007 – Scientists at Wake Forest University led by Dr. Anthony Atala and Harvard University report discovery of a new type of stem cell in amniotic fluid This may potentially provide an alternative to embryonic stem cells for use in research and therapy.
* June 2007 – Research reported by three different groups shows that normal skin cells can be reprogrammed to an embryonic state in mice.[35] In the same month, scientist Shoukhrat Mitalipov reports the first successful creation of a primate stem cell line through somatic cell nuclear transfer.
* October 2007 – Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans, and Oliver Smithies win the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on embryonic stem cells from mice using gene targeting strategies producing genetically engineered mice (known as knockout mice) for gene research.
* November 2007 – Human Induced pluripotent stem cells: Two similar papers released by their respective journals prior to formal publication: in Cell by Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka, “Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors”, and in Science by Junying Yu, et al., from the research group of James Thomson, “Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells”: pluripotent stem cells generated from mature human fibroblasts. It is possible now to produce a stem cell from almost any other human cell instead of using embryos as needed previously, albeit the risk of tumorigenesis due to c-myc and retroviral gene transfer remains to be determined.
* January 2008 – Human embryonic stem cell lines were generated without destruction of the embryo.
* January 2008 – Development of human cloned blastocysts following somatic cell nuclear transfer with adult fibroblasts.
* February 2008 – Generation of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Mouse Liver and Stomach: these iPS cells seem to be more similar to embryonic stem cells than the previous developed iPS cells and not tumorigenic, moreover genes that are required for iPS cells do not need to be inserted into specific sites, which encourages the development of non-viral reprogramming techniques.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Leave him alone. He wrote a book. It is true or untrue, accurately reported or not. If not, this will no doubt be revealed. It is honestly meant and presented, or not. Look to the assertions, argue them, weigh and ponder.
That’s my first thought. My second goes back to something William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: “The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony.” History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. “I was there, this is what I saw.” History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth.
In that sense one should always say of memoirs of those who hold or have held power: More, please.
Scott McClellan’s book is the focus of such heat, the target of denunciation, because it is a big story when a press secretary breaks with a president. This is like Jody Powell turning on Jimmy Carter, or Marlin Fitzwater turning on Reagan. That is, it’s pretty much unthinkable. And it’s a bigger story still when such a person breaks with his administration not over many small things but one big thing, in this case its central and defining endeavor, the Iraq war. The book can be seen as a grenade lobbed over the wall. Thus the explosive response. He is a traitor, turncoat, betrayer, sellout. If he’d had any guts he would have spoken up when he was in power.
I want to quote his defenders, but he doesn’t have any.
Those in the mainstream media who want to see the president unmasked, who want to see the administration revealed as something dark, do not want to be caught cheering on the unmasker.
The left, while embracing the book’s central assertions, will paint him as a weasel who belatedly ‘fessed up. They’re big on omertà on the left. It’s part of how they survive. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The right will—already has—pummel him for disloyalty. But those damning him today would have damned him even more if he’d resigned on principle three years ago. They—and the administration—would have beaten him to a pulp, the former from rage, the latter as a lesson: This is what happens when you leave and talk.
And Americans in general have a visceral and instinctive dislike for what Drudge called a snitch. This is our tradition, and also human nature.
So Mr. McClellan defends himself in the same way he defended the administration, awkwardly. He could not speak earlier because he did not oppose earlier; he came to oppose with time and on reflection. He is trying, now, to tell the truth.
He is a man alone, “a pariah,” as Matt Lauer put it.
He does not appear to have written his book to bolster his reputation. He paints himself as a loser. “I didn’t stay true to myself”; he loved “the theatre of political power” and “found being part of the play exciting”; he tried to play “the Washington game” and “didn’t play it very well.” But soon the mea culpa becomes a you-a culpa.
He has nothing to say, really, about the world he entered, about what it was to be there. His thoughts present themselves as clichés. Working in the White House is “a wow.” Seeing it lit up at night “never got old.” He’ll never forget where he was on 9/11. He claims he was taught to “communicate” by Karen Hughes. This is all too believable. I did learn that the word visit— “Got a moment to visit?”—is apparently Texan for “I’m about to kill you” or “Let’s conspire.”
The book is not quite a kiss-and-tell, smooch-and-blab or buss-and-bitch. It is not gossipy, or fun, or lively. It is lumpy, uneven and, when he attempts to share his historical insights—the Constitution, he informs us, doesn’t mention the word “party”— embarrassing.
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
And yet the purpose of the book is a serious one. Mr. McClellan attempts to reveal and expose what he believes, what he came to see as, an inherent dishonesty and hypocrisy within a hardened administration. It is a real denunciation.
He believes the invasion of Iraq was “a serious strategic blunder,” that the decision to invade Iraq was “a fateful misstep” born in part of the shock of 9/11 but also of “an air of invincibility” sharpened by the surprisingly and “deceptively” quick initial military success in Afghanistan. He scores President Bush’s “certitude” and “self-deceit” and asserts the decision to invade Iraq was tied to the president’s lust for legacy, need for boldness, and grandiose notions as to what is possible in the Mideast. He argues that Mr. Bush did not try to change the culture of the capital, that he “chose to play the Washington game the way he found it” and turned “away from candor and honesty.”
Mr. McClellan dwells on a point that all in government know, that day-to-day governance now is focused on media manipulation, with a particular eye to “political blogs, popular web sites, paid advertising, talk radio” and news media in general. In the age of the permanent campaign, government has become merely an offshoot of campaigning. All is perception and spin. This mentality can “cripple” an administration as, he says, it crippled the Clinton administration, with which he draws constant parallels. “Like the Clinton administration, we had an elaborate campaign structure within the White House that drove much of what we did.”
His primary target is Karl Rove, whose role he says was “political manipulation, plain and simple.” He criticizes as destructive the 50-plus-1 strategy that focused on retaining power through appeals to the base at the expense of a larger approach to the nation. He blames Mr. Rove for sundering the brief post-9/11 bipartisan entente when he went before an open Republican National Committee meeting in Austin, four months after 9/11, and said the GOP would make the war on terror the top issue to win the Senate and keep the House in the 2002 campaign. By the spring the Democratic Party and the media were slamming back with charges the administration had been warned before 9/11 of terrorist plans and done nothing. That war has continued ever since.
Mr. McClellan’s portrait of Mr. Bush is weird and conflicted, though he does not seem to notice. The president is “charming” and “disarming,” humorous and politically gifted. He weeps when Mr. McClellan leaves. Mr. McClellan always puts quotes on his praise. But the implication of his assertions and anecdotes is that Mr. Bush is vain, narrow, out of his depth and coldly dismissive of doubt, of criticism and of critics.
If that’s what you think, say it. If it’s not, don’t suggest it.
When I finished the book I came out not admiring Mr. McClellan or liking him but, in terms of the larger arguments, believing him. One hopes more people who work or worked within the Bush White House will address the book’s themes and interpretations. What he says may be inconvenient, and it may be painful, but that’s not what matters. What matters is if it’s true. Let the debate on the issues commence.
What’s needed now? More memoirs, more data, more information, more testimony. More serious books, like Doug Feith’s. More “this is what I saw” and “this is what is true.” Feed history. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us
Da Vinci Code Decoded Box Set: Totally Decoded
by Metzger, Richard (director)
Published at $39.98. Description: “The definitive documentary exploration of Dan Brown’s thrilling novel The Da Vinci Code, answers the questions everyone is asking! What exactly was Leonardo da Vinci trying to tell us in his coded paintings? Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene? Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Who were the Knights Templar? What is the secret of the mysterious church at Rennes-le-Chateau? What is the Priory of Sion? What secret did the real life Saunire know that threatened the Church? What are the Gnostic Gospels? Did Roman emperors rewrite the New Testament to control the population?” 360 minutes + 120 minutes bonus footage.
Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg (Hardcover)
une 1863. The Gettysburg Campaign is in its opening hours. Harness jingles and hoofs pound as Confederate cavalryman James Ewell Brown (JEB) Stuart leads his three brigades of veteran troopers on a ride that triggers one of the Civil War’s most bitter and enduring controversies. Instead of finding glory and victory-two objectives with which he was intimately familiar-Stuart reaped stinging criticism and substantial blame for one of the Confederacy’s most stunning and unexpected battlefield defeats. In Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg, Eric J. Wittenberg and J. David Petruzzi objectively investigate the role Stuart’s horsemen played in the disastrous campaign. It is the first book ever written on this important and endlessly fascinating subject.
Stuart left Virginia under acting on General Robert E. Lee’s discretionary orders to advance into Maryland and Pennsylvania, where he was to screen Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell’s marching infantry corps and report on enemy activity. The mission jumped off its tracks from virtually the moment it began when one unexpected event after another unfolded across Stuart’s path. For days, neither Lee nor Stuart had any idea where the other was, and the enemy blocked the horseman’s direct route back to the Confederate army, which was advancing nearly blind north into Pennsylvania. By the time Stuart reached Lee on the afternoon of July 2, the armies had unexpectedly collided at Gettysburg, the second day’s fighting was underway, and one of the campaign’s greatest controversies was born.
Did the plumed cavalier disobey Lee’s orders by stripping the army of its “eyes and ears?” Was Stuart to blame for the unexpected combat the broke out at Gettysburg on July 1? Authors Wittenberg and Petruzzi, widely recognized for their study and expertise of Civil War cavalry operations, have drawn upon a massive array of primary sources, many heretofore untapped, to fully explore Stuart’s ride, its consequences, and the intense debate among participants shortly after the battle, through early post-war commentators, and among modern scholars.
The result is a richly detailed study jammed with incisive tactical commentary, new perspectives on the strategic role of the Southern cavalry, and fresh insights on every horse engagement, large and small, fought during the campaign. About the authors: Eric J. Wittenberg has written widely on Civil War cavalry operations. His books include Glory Enough for All (2002), The Union Cavalry Comes of Age (2003), and The Battle of Monroe’s Crossroads and the Civil War’s Final Campaign (2005). He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
J. David Petruzzi is the author of several magazine articles on Eastern Theater cavalry operations, conducts tours of cavalry sites of the Gettysburg Campaign, and is the author of the popular “Buford’s Boys” website at www.bufordsboys.com. Petruzzi lives in Brockway, Pennsylvania.
REVIEWS
From Civil War Times Illustrated”A fast paced, well told yarn… exhaustively researched… the definitive analysis.”
“..a well detailed history, that no matter what side one might view the ride, it would be a fair objective account…well-researched book on all points clearly and cleverly argued.”Midwest Book Review, March 2008. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
I do not like to use “definitive”, “settles the question” or “finial word” when reviewing books. Some questions will never be settled, someone will always have another thing to say and in time, even Coddington’s book on Gettysburg could become second best. While I firmly believe the above to be true, I do not think that this book will see a superior treatment of this question for a very very long time.
“Has anyone seen JEB Stuart?” “Where is my cavalry?” were questions that Robert E. Lee often asks in the days preceding the Battle of Gettysburg. Stuart, commander of his cavalry, was missing separated from Lee by a Union army. Arriving at Gettysburg, his command exhausted by a grueling ride around the Union Army, complete with battles and numerous skirmishes. Stuart is greeted with an icy reception from Lee. The next day, on the East cavalry Field, his command is defeated and the Union right holds. Lee chose to ignore this and other actions by his subordinates during the battle, assuming full responsibility for Gettysburg.
Louis J. Sheehan
In time, Gettysburg looms larger and larger in Civil War lore. One battle becomes the reason for the Confederacy’s defeat. Right or wrong, this idea becomes the foundation of the story of the South’s defeat. The story is accepted and endlessly repeated until it becomes an American tragedy. Years later, after Lee’s death, questions raised in 1863 became accusations as the finger pointing begins. General Lee cannot be wrong at the most important battle of the war. The rank and file cannot be less than heroic. Somewhere, somehow a failure or a series of failures have to occur that undermine General Lee’s perfect plan and cause the battle to be lost.
The authors first present a straightforward campaign history of Stuart’s orders, decisions and the resulting actions. This history builds the foundation for the history of the controversy that is the second half of the book. Both sections are detailed, well written, intelligent and very readable. Systematically, the reader sees how Stuart’s orders caused him to embark on what was potentially a risky idea. Movement of the Union army blocks expect routes, causing detours and delays leading to a series of battles. Wittenberg and Petruzzi can write about cavalry operations with authority and full knowledge. They impart a confidence in their work that comes with knowing the background and the ability to communicate the right level of detail. Again, Savas Beattie has taken the time and spent the money to give us the maps and illustrations needed to make this an enjoyable learning experience. The reader is able to follow the cavalry battles because of excellent well-placed maps coupled with very good writing.
The second part of the book is a history of how “Stuart lost the Battle of Gettysburg”. I find the history of the history of the Civil War almost as much fun as the history of the war. This book combines both into one very readable volume, giving me two books for the price of one. The indictment and defense of JEB Stuart runs from the late 1870s on. Presenting both sides, for the most part in their own words, giving the reader a good perspective of what is happening. The 30-page conclusion is balanced, detailed and comprehensive. This book changed my thinking on the subject to “Plenty of Blame to Go Around”.
To complete things, we have a driving tour. Civil War books do not get better than this! Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions (Paperback)
by Eric J. Wittenberg (Author), D. Scott Hartwig (Foreword), Eric Wittenberg (Author)
“For too many years the cavalry, especially the Federal cavalry, and their contribution to the success or failure of the armies to which they belonged has been largely ignored. Over the last decade that has slowly begun to change. Amid the continuing flood of publications on the battle of Gettysburg one might wonder in disbelief that any aspects of the battle are still ‘unknown’, but three cavalry actions on July 3rd on the southern flank of the armies fall into that category, especially Merritt’s fight on South Cavalry Field. Eric Wittenberg’s Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions rights that wrong. Whether the proper term is forgotten, unknown, or ignored, few people visit these three fields. After reading this book that will change. Armed with Eric’s account, John Heiser’s maps and some tantalizing ‘what ifs’ tomorrow’s visitors to the park will discover an aspect of the great battle that few before have seen or appreciated, and finally the soldiers who fought and died there will take their rightful place alongside their more well known comrades.”
Book Description
This book describes and analyzes the little-known cavalry actions during the Battle of Gettysburg – Farnsworth’s Charge, South Cavalry Field, and Fairfield, Pa.
Coming into Gettysburg from the south you will find cavalry markers on the roadside, most will drive by eager to get to the “good stuff” on Cemetery Hill. Very few that stop know about or understand the nasty little action fought in the fields in front of them. On July third, the Union Cavalry face Longstreet’s regulars under command of Evander Law. The Union Cavalry probed, pushed and finally attacked the AoNV’s right flank in the ill-advised Farnsworth’s Charge. This small book covers the almost forgotten battles in this area. Eric J. Wittenberg has given as a readable and informative book on this aspect of the Battle of Gettysburg. Coupled with “Protecting the Flank: The Battles for Brinkerhoff’ Ridge and East Cavalry Field” this book gives one of the most detailed accounts of the Union Cavalry on July 2 – 3, 1863.
The Cavalry at Gettysburg: A Tactical Study of Mounted Operations during the Civil War’s Pivotal Campaign, 9 June-14 July 1863 (Paperback)
by Edward G. Longacre
“For cavalry and/or Gettysburg enthusiasts, this book is a must; for other Civil War buffs, it possesses the qualities sought by students of the conflict. . . . [It] bristles with analysis, details, judgements, personality profiles, and evaluations and combat descriptions, even down to the squadron and company levels. The mounted operations of the campaign from organizational, strategic, and tactical viewpoints are examined thoroughly. The author’s graphic recountings of the Virginia fights at Brandy Station, Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville, the Pennsylvania encounters at Hanover, Hunterstown, Gettysburg, and Fairfield, and finally the retreat to Virginia, are the finest this reviewer has read under a single cover. For those who enjoy the thunder of hoofbeats, the clang of sabers, and the crack of pistols and carbines, this book has all of it. Generals and privates share the pages, as the mounted opponents parry and thrust across hundreds of miles of territory from June 9 to July 14, 1863.”-Civil War Times Illustrated (Civil War Times Illustrated ) http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
“Edward Longacre’s study is a much-needed, long overdue piece of the complex mosaic which makes up the Gettysburg story. No Civil War Library should be without it. The volume adds an important perspective to one’s understanding of this critical military operation.”-Military Images (Military Images )
This book, authored by Edward Longacre, tells the tale of Union and Confederate cavalry during the Gettysburg campaign–from Brandy Station to Lee’s retreat to Virginia. As such, it does a good job of describing this subject. Longacre notes the value of this book (Page 9): “. . .no full length book has ever considered the contributions made by the mounted forces of the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac between 9 June and 14 July 1863.”
The book begins with the structure of cavalry forces on each side, noting commanders down to the regimental level. The first full chapter described the Confederate cavalry, led by the flamboyant Jeb Stuart. The second chapter, likewise, explores the Union cavalry and its leadership structure. The key players on each side are noted. Confederate leaders of note: Fitzhugh Lee, Wade Hampton, Rooney Lee (Robert E. Lee’s son). On the Union side: John Buford, David Gregg, Judson Kilpatrick (whose nickname was “Kill-Cavalry,” given his reckless style). Other interesting figures: George Custer, Elon Farnsworth, Irvin Gregg, Thomas Devin, “Grumble” Jones, John Imboden, and Thomas Rosser.
The action begins at Brandy Station, as the Union cavalry showed greater ability than expected and surprised Stuart’s cavalry, indicating that the northern mounted arm had become a force to be reckoned with. Then, the ongoing effort by Union cavalry to penetrate Stuart’s screen of the southern infantry moving north to ascertain the Confederate columns’ structure and progress(to no great success).
The story of Stuart’s circuitous raid to the east, losing contact with Lee’s army, is well told. As is John Buford’s movement to Gettysburg, and his gutsy decision to take on Confederate infantry that would arrive on July 1st to begin the sanguinary struggle. The role of the mounted forces on both sides on the second and third days is well told, with the high point perhaps being Stuart’s cavalry taking on the Union forces on the third day, ultimately unsuccessful.
The book closes with the telling of the role of cavalry on both sides as Lee’s army retreated to the Potomac.
In the end, this is a useful depiction of the role of cavalry on both sides during the Gettysburg campaign. On both sides, cavalry played an important role. For those curious about the cavalry’s place in this campaign, this would be worth looking at.
Of all the telltale signs of aging, the scariest are those that affect the mind. I sometimes think of one word and type another, an unsettling trait for a journalist. It’s usually a word that’s close to the one I want, like “of” instead of “for,” or “there”
