The Mack Attack

Thought-provoking clap-trap for the skeptic-minded

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Friday, October 27, 2006

DROWN THE BASTARDS!
WASHINGTON - Dick Cheney, US vice-president, has endorsed the use of "water boarding" for terror suspects and confirmed that the controversial interrogation technique was used on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the senior al-Qaeda operative now being held at Guantánamo Bay.Cheney was responding to a radio interviewer from North Dakota station WDAY who asked whether water boarding, which involves simulated drowning, was a "no-brainer" if the information it yielded would save American lives. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney replied.The comments by the vice-president, who has been one of the leading advocates of reducing limitations on what interrogation techniques can be used in the war on terror, are the first public confirmation that water boarding has been used on suspects held in US custody."For a while there, I was criticized as being the 'vice-president for torture'," Cheney added. "We don't torture ... We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth."But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture and we need to be able to do that."Cheney said recent legislation passed by Congress allowed the White House to continue its aggressive interrogation program.But his remarks appear to stand at odds with the views of three key Republican senators who helped draft the recently passed Military Commission Act, and who argue that water boarding is not permitted according to that law."[It's] a direct affront to the primary authors of the Military Commission Act in the Senate * John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Warner * all of whom have publicly stated that the legislation signed by the president last week makes water boarding a war crime," said Jennifer Daskal, advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. "This is Cheney ignoring the consensus of his own Pentagon," she said, referring to comments by senior officials that harsh interrogation techniques do not produce reliable intelligence.John Bellinger, the State Department legal adviser, last week declined to answer specific questions on water boarding, saying Congress would have to determine whether specific interrogation techniques were permissible under the Geneva conventions. The Bush administration was forced to work with Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act after the Supreme Court ruled that al-Qaeda suspects were entitled to some protections under the Geneva convention. "Any procedures going forward would have to comply with the standards of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva conventions], including the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment," Bellinger said. "Congress would have to agree that they are permitted under the law."Asked in the radio interview whether he would agree that the debate over terrorist interrogations and water boarding was "a little silly", Cheney responded: "I do agree"."I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation," he said.

Thursday, October 26, 2006

NAILING IT

The Late A. J. Liebling occasionally used his "Wayward Press" column in the New Yorker magazine to contrast how various newspapers reported on the same story, who got it first, and how it circulated.
Perhaps most famously, Liebling tracked coverage of the death of a notorious Soviet dictator, whose lingering serious illness apparently befuddled the press in the 1950s.
Liebling wrote: "Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments."
This week, I couldn't help but wonder what Liebling would have made of August Voegl and the recent media coverage that has made him famous, at least in certain circles.
I first came upon Voegl's story Monday, reading an online account that was published in Sunday's Edmonton Journal in Canada.
The headline read: "Roofer nails down new-found notoriety."
And the story: "August Voegl, 59, nailed himself to the roof of a house in Jennersdorf (Austria), when he ... accidentally shot a four-inch nail into his left testicle with a compressed-air nail gun.
"Apparently the construction worker slipped while working and the nail gun misfired. ... Once Voegl realized he was unable to extract the nail or pull himself away from the roof, paramedics were called in.
"The roofer was airlifted to a nearby hospital where he is apparently recovering nicely after the injury."
That was a tough thing to read on a Monday morning, although reading about it no doubt paled in comparison to Voegl's actual experience.
Curious as to how other papers had covered Voegl's misadventure, I checked around and found that it had been taken seriously in Germany ("Man Nails Testicle to Roof") and somewhat less so in South Africa ("His fiddling on the roof got him nailed").
As best I could tell, the story was broken by Austria Today, a publication in Voegl's home country, in the paper's Oct. 16 print edition.
The story had this memorable lead: "An Austrian roofer who slipped on the job ended up nailing himself to the roof - through his wedding tackle."
Wedding tackle?
That might well have been that, but two days later, the story went on the Austria Today Web site and was thus launched into cyberspace, where it was greedily grabbed by the Web site
Ananova.com, which bills itself as "news on the move from the leading site for breaking United Kingdom and world news, sport, entertainment, business and weather stories and information."
At which point the story was picked up by news and entertainment outlets around the world, most of whom then credited Ananova with the story.
I went on the Ananova.com Web site and found Voegl's story in a section called "Quirkies."
Among the other stories was one from the Sun, a British tabloid, under the headline "
Dog cocks leg and cuts off power."
The story began: "A dog cut off the power in 148 homes when it cocked its leg on a power cable."
This happened in County Durham, in northeast England. The Sun continued: "Bailey, a Staffordshire bull terrier, went for a wee against a faulty pylon.
"His owner Gary Davies said, "There was an almighty explosion and the whole street lit up. I turned around and the dog was on fire."
The power was off for five hours, the Sun reported, but the good news is "Bailey is recovering at home after being treated for burns."
There was also this: "Aussies told to stop singing in the shower." And the story: "Australians have been told to stop singing in the shower in an attempt to save electricity and water.
"Power supplier Energy Australia says exercising the vocal cords in the bathroom adds an extra 9.08 minutes to a shower."
They must all be singing "Stairway to Heaven."
There was one story from the United States (Florida, of course). The headline: "Gold teeth stolen while owner slept." And the story: "A Florida man claims someone reached into his mouth and stole his gold teeth as he slept.
"Bryan Osteen rang police to complain about the theft (and) told officers that someone entered his bedroom and took the teeth out of his mouth. He said he had friends at his home and believes one of them had something to do with the crime. Osteen said he did not wake up because he is a heavy sleeper."
What would A. J. Liebling have made of the Internet? Liebling used to chide publishers by noting that "a free press belongs to the man who owns one." The Internet belongs to no one, and so to everyone. I think Liebling would have had a grand time covering it. Imagine the headlines if August Voegl had been working on a wall instead of a roof.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

FDA Approves Milk, Meat from Clones

Three years after the Food and Drug Administration first hinted that it might permit the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals, prompting public reactions that ranged from curiosity to disgust, the agency is poised to endorse marketing of the mass-produced animals for public consumption.
The decision, expected by the end of this year, is based largely on new data indicating that milk and meat from cloned livestock and their offspring pose no unique risks to consumers.
"Our evaluation is that the food from cloned animals is as safe as the food we eat every day," said Stephen F. Sundlof, the FDA's chief of veterinary medicine, who has overseen the long-stalled risk assessment.
Farmers and companies that have been growing cloned barnyard animals from single cells in anticipation of a lucrative market say cloning will bring consumers a level of consistency and quality impossible to attain with conventional breeding, making perfectly marbled beef and reliably lean and tasty pork the norm on grocery shelves.
But groups opposed to the new technology, including a coalition of powerful food companies concerned that the public will reject Dolly-the-Lamb chops and clonal cream in their coffee, have not given up.
On Thursday, advocacy groups filed a petition asking the FDA to regulate cloned farm animals one type at a time, much as it regulates new drugs, a change that would drastically slow marketing approval. Some are also questioning the ethics of a technology that, while more efficient than it used to be, still poses risks for pregnant animals and their newborns.
"The government talks about being science-based, and that's great, but I think there is another pillar here: the question of whether we really want to do this," said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America.
That there is a debate at all about integrating clones into the food supply is evidence of the remarkable progress made since the 1996 birth of Dolly, the world's first mammalian clone, created from an udder cell of an anonymous ewe.
Scientists have now applied the technique successfully to cattle, horses, pigs, goats and other mammals. Each clone is a genetic replica of the animal that donated the cell from which it was grown.
Cloning could solve a number of long-standing farm problems. Many prize males are not recognized as such until long after they have been tamed by castration. With cloning, that lack of semen would not matter. Cloning also allows farmers to make many copies of exceptional milk producers; with natural breeding, cows have only one offspring per year, and half are males.
In the eyes of many in agriculture, cloning is simply the latest in a string of advances such as artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization that have given farmers better control over animal reproduction.
"Clones are just clones. They are not genetically engineered animals," said Barbara Glenn, chief of animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
The FDA agrees with that distinction, Sundlof said. The agency has already said it will regulate transgenic animals -- those that have been engineered by adding specific, valuable genes -- in much the way it regulates pharmaceuticals, under a new category called "New Animal Drugs." No such animals are currently on the market.
By contrast, proponents say, clones are simply twins, albeit born a generation apart.
It was October 2003 when the FDA released its first draft document concluding that clones and their offspring are safe to eat, prompting several cloning companies to scale up their operations.
But an agency advisory panel and the National Academies, while generally supportive, raised flags, citing a paucity of safety data.
That, and opposition led largely by the International Dairy Foods Association, which represents such large, brand-sensitive companies as
Kraft Foods, Dannon, General Mills and Nestlé USA, put FDA approval on hold. For years the agency has asked producers to keep clones off the market voluntarily while the issues got sorted out, a delay that bankrupted one major company and has left others increasingly frustrated.
But now a large collection of new data submitted to the FDA has revitalized the effort, according to government officials and others.
The biggest new study is a detailed comparison of meat from the offspring of cloned and conventional boars created by Austin-based ViaGen Inc., a major producer of cloned farm animals. Company scientists agreed to share key results with a reporter but withheld details as required by the journal Theriogenology, which will publish the full report in its January issue.
Semen from four clones and three conventional boars was used to inseminate 89 females. A total of 404 progeny (242 from clones) were raised identically by government scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Meat Animal Research Center in Clay, Neb., and slaughtered when they reached market size. (Because clones are so valuable, companies for now anticipate sending only their offspring to market.) Of the 14,036 measures of protein composition, fatty acid profiles and other meat components done on the offspring of clones by an independent lab, all but three were within the same range as those of the conventional animals, and only one was outside what the Agriculture Department considers normal.
The other large research report came from Cyagra, a cloning company in Elizabethtown, Pa.
In that study, 80 blood and urine measures, including various hormone levels, were taken in 10 newborn, 46 weanling and 18 adult clones. Results were indistinguishable from those obtained from conventional animals. Then 79 biochemical measurements from three cuts of meat taken from five male and six female adult clones were compared with those from matched cuts from conventional animals. Again, no differences were found, said Cyagra's director of marketing, Steve A. Mower. The results have been submitted to the FDA and are being reviewed by a scientific journal.
"The data are very clear," said ViaGen President Mark Walton. "You really can't tell them apart."
In light of the new findings, and the FDA's near completion of a complicated, interagency review demanded by the White House Office of Management and Budget, Sundlof anticipates releasing a formal draft risk assessment by the end of the year, along with a proposed "risk management" plan. Those documents would allow the marketing of clones and their offspring for food and milk after a final period of public comment.
Unless, that is, the opponents manage to stop the process, which they are trying to do on two fronts.
One is the petition filed Thursday by the Washington-based Center for Food Safety. It asks the FDA to regulate clones, not just transgenics, as New Animal Drugs. It also calls for environmental impact statements to evaluate the environmental and health effects of each new proposed line of clones.
"The available science shows that cloning presents serious food safety risks, animal welfare concerns and unresolved ethical issues that require strict oversight," the petition states.
Industry scientists derided the petition's safety concerns, built largely on a theoretical possibility that subtle genetic changes seen in some clones may alter the nutritional nature of meat. If those genetic changes were significant, Mower said, they would cause biochemical changes in milk or meat, none of which have been found.
But issues of ethics and public acceptance are not easily dismissed, several experts said.
Surveys show that more than 60 percent of the U.S. population is uncomfortable with the idea of animal cloning for food and milk. The single biggest reason people give is "religious and ethical," with concerns about food safety coming in second, said Michael Fernandez, executive director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a nonpartisan research and education project.
Those sentiments are a big concern to dairy companies, which fear that any association with cloning could harm milk's carefully honed image of wholesomeness.
Confidential documents from the International Dairy Foods Association, obtained by The Washington Post, indicate the group has played a key role in slowing FDA action and propose a strategy for blocking any future FDA approval.
Association spokeswoman Susan Ruland said the group opted not to adopt the lobbying strategy described in those documents, which included using friends in Congress and "continued outreach to the White House."
In any case, Sundlof said, the FDA has no authority to make decisions based on ethics concerns. Nor is it inclined to call for labeling of products from clones, as some have demanded. For one thing, clonal meat or milk would be impossible to authenticate, since there is no way to distinguish them from conventional products.
The FDA may already be too late. Several owners of clones have been selling semen to farm clubs and others vying to grow prize-winning cattle. Most of those animals end up being slaughtered, sold and eaten, experts said.
"That you can go online today to any number of different Web sites and purchase semen from cloned bulls tells you there are cloned sires out there fathering calves in the food supply," Walton said.
Like it or not, Walton and others said, the clones are out of the barn.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

What does this make Cheney--Satan?

MILWAUKEE - A university instructor who came under scrutiny for arguing that the U.S. government orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks likens President Bush to Adolf Hitler in an essay his students are being required to buy for his course.
The essay by Kevin Barrett, “Interpreting the Unspeakable: The Myth of 9/11,” is part of a $20 book of essays by 15 authors, according to an unedited copy first obtained by WKOW-TV in Madison and later by The Associated Press.
The book’s title is “9/11 and American Empire: Muslims, Jews, and Christians Speak Out.” It is on the syllabus for Barrett’s course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Islam: Religion and Culture,” but only three of the essays are required reading, not including Barrett’s essay.
Barrett, a part-time instructor who holds a doctorate in African languages and literature and folklore from UW-Madison, is active in a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The group’s members say U.S. officials, not al-Qaida terrorists, were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
“Like Bush and the neocons, Hitler and the Nazis inaugurated their new era by destroying an architectural monument and blaming its destruction on their designated enemies,” he wrote.
'An insult to Hitler'Barrett said Tuesday he was comparing the attacks to the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, in 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship.
“That’s not comparing them as people, that’s comparing the Reichstag fire to the demolition of the World Trade Center, and that’s an accurate comparison that I would stand by,” he said.
He added: “Hitler had a good 20 to 30 IQ points on Bush, so comparing Bush to Hitler would in many ways be an insult to Hitler.”
Moira Megargee, publicity director for the Northampton, Mass., publisher Interlink, said the book is due out at the end of November and the editing isn’t finished.
“It is not final and for all we know that essay may not be in the book or may be edited,” she said.
The university’s decision to allow Barrett to teach the course touched off a controversy over the summer once his views became widely known.
Sixty-one state legislators denounced the move. One county board cut its funding for the UW-Extension by $8,247 — the amount Barrett will earn for teaching the course — in a symbolic protest, even though the course is unrelated to that branch of the UW System.
Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and his Republican challenger, Mark Green, have both said they believe Barrett should be fired.
One essay Barrett is requiring students to read is entitled: “A Clash Between Justice and Greed,” and argues that conflicts between Islam and the western world were made up after the “collapse of the Soviet Union to justify U.S. ’defense’ spending, and to provide a pretext of controlling the world’s resources.”
The author of another essay, “Interpreting Terrorism: Muslim Problem or Covert Operations Nightmare?,” contends some western intelligence agencies are committing acts of terrorism to make them look like the work of radical Islamics.
The university’s chief academic officer, Provost Patrick Farrell, decided to retain Barrett for the course after reviewing his plans and qualifications. He said Barrett could present his ideas during one week of the course as long as students were allowed to challenge them.
He later warned Barrett to stop seeking publicity for his personal political views.
Farrell said he has not seen the essay, but faculty can assign readings that may not be popular to everyone.
“I think part of the role of any challenging course here is going to encourage students to think of things from a variety of perspectives,” he said.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

HASTERT KNEW

Speaker Dennis Hastert's political support showed signs of cracking on Wednesday as Republicans fled the fallout from an election-year scandal spawned by steamy computer messages from disgraced Rep. Mark Foley to teenage male pages.
At the same time, the congressional aide who last week counseled Foley to quit said in an Associated Press interview he first warned Hastert 's aides more than three years ago about Foley's worrisome conduct toward pages. That was long before GOP leaders acknowledged hearing of it.
The aide, Kirk Fordham, who resigned Wednesday, said he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene" at the time.
He made his comments as Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri, third-ranking leader, told reporters he would have handled the matter differently than Hastert , had he known of it.
And Rep. Ron Lewis of Kentucky, in a tougher-than-expected re-election race, abruptly canceled an invitation for Hastert to join him at a fundraiser next week.
"I'm taking the speaker's words at face value," Lewis told the AP. "I have no reason to doubt him. But until this is cleared up, I want to know the facts. If anyone in our leadership has done anything wrong, then I will be the first in line to condemn it."
Ron Bonjean, Hastert 's spokesman, declined to comment on the claim made by Fordham.
He said the entire issue had been referred to the House ethics committee. "We fully expect that the bipartisan panel will do what it needs to do to investigate this mater and protect the integrity of the House," he added.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a statement saying that Hastert and the rest of the GOP leadership should be "immediately questioned under oath" by the panel.
"The children, their parents, the public, and our colleagues deserve answers and those who covered up Mark Foley's behavior must be held accountable," she said.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

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