Day: March 12, 2001

Surprise — Pentagon Inefficient

A shocking new report dared to report the obvious — the Pentagon weapons procurement policy is extraordinarily inefficient.

According to the report by the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, weapons systems are often approved despite never being adequately tested. Take the National Missile Defense Program, for example. As the report puts it in Pentagon bureaucrat-ese, the NMD “test content does not yet address important operational questions.” In English that translates to “the system will have to shoot down multiple targets, but the Pentagon insists on testing the system’s viability only against single targets.”

Another classic debacles is the Osprey program. The Osprey is a plane that can take off as a helicopter and then rotate its rotors 90 degrees to fly as a fixed-wing propeller plane. The only problem is that even after spending $40 billion the plane simply doesn’t work as advertised. It tends to fail relatively often (two crashed Ospreys have already resulted in 23 deaths), and requires an inordinate amount maintenance for a plane whose main feature is supposed to be its mission flexibility.

The incoming Bush administration seems willing to reform the process and is set to scrap both the existing NMD system as well as the Osprey program. Bush will have to push for systemic changes, however, if the United States is to avoid future such military boondoggles.

Source:

Pentagon report blasts US weapons. Jonathan Marcus, The BBC, March 8, 2001.

End of the XFL at Hand

Several stories today reported that the XFL managed to halt is ratings slide this week — ratings for Saturday’s game were up to a 2.8. Unfortunately a) that’s still a lousy rating, and b) as USA Today’s Rudy Martzke points out, now the XFL is going to have to deal with competition from March Madness.

I watched half of a game on TNN on Sunday, and they have substantially improved the quality of their broadcasts — that and some nice trick play execution made the game pretty lively — but it’s almost certainly too late to rescue the drowning league.

I’d be very surprised if NBC doesn’t bail out of the XFL altogether. Vince McMahon will probably consider himself lucky if he can convince the network to simply switch the games from their current prime time slot to a daytime Saturday slot (which would make more sense, but probably wouldn’t do much to prevent the XFL from disappearing at the end of its second season at the latest).

Vaccine Prevents AIDS-like Disease in Monkeys

Emory University researchers made headlines around the world after they announced the phenomenal results of their vaccine that stopped AIDS-like infection in monkeys in its track.

Researchers first administered the vaccine to 24 monkeys, who received an initial injection as well as a booster shot. Seven months later they infected all 24 monkeys as well as a 4 monkeys in a control group with a modified HIV/SIV virus.

Within 7 months all of the control monkeys had developed AIDS-like symptoms and were put to sleep. Of the monkeys receiving the vaccinations, however, 23 of 24 test subjects had virus levels so low they were undetectable. The other monkey had very low levels of the virus.

The vaccine contains DNA fragments for three proteins similar to those found in the AIDS virus. When the immune system of the monkeys encountered the vaccine, they quickly developed a sophisticated immune response that persisted over time so that when they were finally exposed to the HIV/SIV virus, their immune system kept the virus in check and the monkeys remained healthy.

Peggy Johnson of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy said, “These are among the very best outcomes we have seen in an animal model.” However, she added, nobody knows if this approach will work in human beings.

“It’s encouraging,” Dr. Bernard Moss, Chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “but we don’t know whether we can translate this information directly from monkey models to protection [in people].”

Resolving that question will take several additional years of research and many more studies. Still, this is an amazing step forward that could light the path for development of an AIDS vaccine, which would be the most effective way to stop the global HIV epidemic.

Sources:

Monkey study shows promise for AIDS vaccine. Reuters, March 8, 2001.

AIDS vaccine experiments promising. The Associated Press, March 8, 2001.

AIDS vaccine shows promise. The BBC, March 8, 2001.

The Original Human Diet — Meat and Lots of It

Despite the abundant evidence presented by the human body itself, some animal rights activists maintain that homo sapiens evolved as a primarily |vegetarian| species and that meat did not make up a large proportion of the human diet until the development of settled agriculture. Unfortunately for this view, research into the diet of the earliest human beings is revealing just the opposite — the first humans ate far more meat than even present day Americans do.

A number of anthropologists, paleontologists and others around the world are beginning to synthesize what they’ve learned about the “evolutionary diet” that human beings ate in the Paleolithic era that extends back several hundred thousand years and ends with the rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

Although there are still some unanswered questions, it is clear that meat formed the single largest source of food for paleolithic human beings. Professor Loren Cordain, among the world leading experts on the this topic, believes the paleolithic diet was likely close to the diet of the few remaining groups of hunters and gatherers. Whereas the average American receives about 38 percent of daily calories from animal products, the typical hunter and gather obtains 65 percent of his calories from animal products.

Ironically, although the typical American eats less than half the amount of meat their paleolithic ancestors did, they consume 50 percent more fat — much of it coming from sources that were unavailable to Paleolithic humans such as diary products and oils. Similarly, the paleolithic diet was much higher in carbohydrates than contemporary Western diets, paleolithic humans obtained carbohydrates from low-sugar and high fiber foods. People in Western countries get most of their carbohydrates from high sugar, low fiber foods.

As John Macgregor sums up the implications of the paleolithic diet for today’s nutrition and diet debates,

The ancestral record does not support the SAD (standard Australian diet) — but neither does it add credence to diets seen as “natural” by vegetarians, fruitarians, natural hygienists, macrobiotic followers and their countless splinter groups.

Just what mainstream dietary experts have long been recommending — people should eat a balanced diet that is low in fat and combine that with regular exercise rather than try to emphasize one food or food group to excess over any other.

Source:

First, catch your cow. John MacGregor, SMH.Com.Au, February 20, 2001.

Lesbians for Bush

Beth Elliott recently wrote a wonderfully provocative column for FrontPageMag.Com about lesbian and gay men supporting George W. Bush for president. Exit polls showed that 25 percent of voters who identified themselves as gay or lesbian voted for Bush.

The libertarian Elliott doesn’t find that result as odd at all. She writes,

One obvious explanation, one that runs counter to the assumptions of both left and right, is that many of us place higher importance on issues like the benefits of constitutional government over statism, or America’s safety in the world, or restoring honor and dignity to our highest institutions, than our particular parochial issues.

Moreover, Elliott contends that gay and lesbian activists need to be more consistent in the way they approach the state,

Ultimately, there is also the matter of following through on positions and applying them not just to ourselves but to others as well. Because we have decried government interference in our lives, and the harmful effects of derogatory stereotypes, it behooves us to be sensitive to similar legitimate complaints from religious conservatives.

Of course Elliott realizes there probably isn’t a lot of room for common ground with social conservatives who, in their own way, are every bit as statist as the Leftists Elliott deplores. Still, she writes, “Even an uneasy peace between conservatives and freedom-loving gay men and lesbians could tip the scales away from statism. We can certainly agree that would make our country a better and freer place for all of us.”

Source:

How gays and conservatives can work together. Beth Elliott, FrontPageMagazine.Com, February 12, 2001.