Day: January 7, 2002

Indianapolis to Pay Heavy Price for Video Game Ban

Indianapolis wanted to be the first city in the United States to prevent minors from playing violent or sexually explicit video games without the consent of their parents. Instead, it ended up spending more than $700,000 in its failed attempt to save children from themselves.

The city spent $400,000 researching and defending the ordinance required public arcades to obtain proof of parental consent from minors before they could be allowed to play violent or sexually explicit video games. When the video game industry sued the city, Indianapolis city attorney Scott Chinn bragged that the group would lose and have to pay the costs of litigating the issue.

Instead, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that there was no evidence that playing violent video games leads minors to engage in violent behavior, as the city had claimed. The Appeals Court ruled the law unconstitutional saying that the attempt to shield children from violent images would be “not only quixotic, but deforming.”

The city appealed to the Supreme Court which declined to hear the case, and the district court ordered Indianapolis to pay $318,000 to cover the legal expenses of the video game industry.

Now, maybe I can hike down there and have one of these kids teach me how to beat that new-fangled Mortal Kombat game I’ve been hearing about.

Source:

Video game judgment to cost city. Maureen Groppe, The Indianapolis Star, January 4, 2002.

Sickle Cell Anemia Advance in Mice

In December researchers announced they had used a modified form of the human immunodeficiency virus to successfully treat Sickle Cell Anemia in a mouse model. Future studies of the technique in mice and non-human primates will determine if and when human trials of this advance might begin.

Sickle cell anemia is a genetic disease which affects 70,000 Americans and is most prevalent in African Americans and Hispanics (it is an unfortunate side effect of genetic protection against diseases such as malaria). The disease causes the production of an abnormal hemoglobin which often forms into a sickle shape. These abnormal hemoglobins clog capillaries and cause a number of problems from anemia and stroke to bouts of severe pain and organ damage. Although there have been a lot of advances in treatment of the disease, the life expectancy of those afflicted with the disease is still only 43 years.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto collaborated in an extremely sophisticated effort to cure mice of the disease.

First, they removed bone marrow from mice afflicted with the disease. They then ablated the marrow — treating it to remove the disease. After this was accomplished, they injected the tissue with a modified version of HIV which carried a gene designed to prevent the disease.

The bone marrow was then injected back into mice, who were free of sickle cell anemia for 10 weeks. Ongoing monitoring of the mice will continue to see how long the protection lasts and as a springboard for developing future studies of the technique.

The process of ablating bone marrow used by the researchers it too toxic to be attempted with humans, but research is underway in several other laboratories to find method of ablating that human beings could tolerate.

Similarly, there are concerns about the possibility that the modified HIV virus might cause untoward side effects in human beings. “There’s a very small possibility of that [HIV-related problems] occurring and it hasn’t been demonstrated to date,” researcher Robert Pawliuk told Wired.

Source:

Sickle cell therapy shows promise. Kristen Philipkoski, Wired, December 13, 2001.

Sickle cell anemia cured in lab mice. Associated Press, December 13, 2001.

PETA's Christmas Toy Recommendations

In early December, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals released a list of “nice” and “naughty” toys to “help compassionate Santas choose” gifts, which was typical of PETA’s over-the-top nonsense.

The animal rights group, for example, panned “Toy Biz’s violent Electric Whac-A-Mole Game, a dangerous toy considering that the link between cruelty to animals and violence toward humans is well known.”

It also complained about a “Got Milk?” puzzle claiming that, “Milk is cruel to cows and has been linked to childhood ailments including earaches, allergies, juvenile diabetes, and obesity.”

PETA’s press release quotes its education manager Danielle Moore saying,

Everyone is truly thinking about peace on Earth and goodwill to all now — and that has to include the animals, too. Gifts can be great for encouraging kindness to animals and empathy.

If Moore really wants to encourage empathy, maybe she could convince PETA to stop openly promoting animal rights violence.

Source:

PETA’s annual “naughty,” “nice” lists help compassionate Santas choose. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, December 5, 2001.

Meat, Milk Contribute to Cancer — Or Do They?

A study published in the January 2002 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that people who ate diets high in red meat and/or milk had much higher rates of stomach and esophageal cancer than those who did not. Some animal rights groups and activists are trumpeting this as the latest evidence that meat is not good for you. The activists might want to read the fine print since the study actually reinforces common sense advice about a balanced diet as exemplified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutrition guidelines — guidelines which have been much derided by animal rights activists and groups.

The study by Honlei Chen examined the dietary patterns of white adult residents of eastern Nebraska. The study included 124 subjects whom had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, 124 who had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and 449 healthy controls. Researchers asked the subjects about their eating habits and they were then classified into groups such as “healthy,” “high meat,” “high milk,” etc.

Right off the bat there are a lot of limitations as to how generalizable the results of this study are due to its size and other related issues, but lets ignore those objections. What did the study actually find?

The result that made headlines was that people who ate “high meat” diets had 3.6 times the risk of esophageal cancer and twice the risk of stomach cancer compared to those eating a “healthy” diet, while those who had “high milk” diets had a 2-fold risk of both esophageal and stomach cancers compared to the “healthy” diet group.

The first thing to note is that the “healthy” eating groups were those who followed existing USDA dietary guidelines — they ate about five servings of fruit and vegetables, lots of servings of grains, bread and pasta, and only 2-3 servings of meat daily. These are the same guidelines, of course, which groups like the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine have attacked as dangerous and racist (for their inclusion of milk).

Second, as with similar studies, what the study really seemed to track is not meat eating per se, but rather calorie consumption and lack of fruits and vegetables. The group designated as “healthy” consumed the fewest calories which should not be surprising given that someone who eats a lot of meat and/or drinks a lot of milk is very likely to be consuming a lot of calories (it would have been interesting to know about the weight distribution of the individuals in the various groups).

Similarly, recent studies have suggested that consumption of fruits and vegetables may play a role in reducing cancer risk, so people who consume lots of calories and get those calories mainly from meat without adequate fruits and vegetables may be increasing their risk of cancer due to not eating fruits and vegetables rather than from eating meat.

The upshot is that this is the latest study which simply reaffirms commonsense dietary advice. People need not adopt a strict vegan or vegetarian to reduce their risk of cancer and other diseases, but they do need to eat sensibly, consuming lots of fruits and vegetables and eating meat in moderation.

Source:

New research links meat with cancer. Reuters, December 20, 2001.

Diets high in red meat linked to stomach and esophageal cancers. Press Release, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, December 14, 2001.

Judge Fines Women for Violating Restraining Orders They Asked For

Kentucky Judge Megan Lake Thornton is drawing the ire of some domestic violence activists by issuing contempt of court citations to women who obtain restraining orders against their partners and then return to the men who were allegedly abusing them.

Thornton told the Lexington Herald-Leader that she was tired of seeing women come before the court and receive a preliminary restraining order, only to learn that the women had returned to the men named in the restraining order before a follow-up hearing which normally occurs two weeks later. Thornton said,

In my experience on the bench, I have found that there has been a number of petitioners who have chosen to come and get an order, and then ignore the order. I think that both parties are obligated to follow through with the order. You can’t have it both ways.

Domestic violence activist Sherry Currens said that this policy may discourage women from seeking help. “The risk here is that women will be discouraged from asking for an order if they think it can get them into trouble later, or if they think a judge is going to chastise them in a courtroom,” Currens said.

But the bottom line is this — if a man is going to be punished for violating a restraining order when a woman voluntarily returns (and Judge Thornton also cited the men in each of these cases for contempt of court as well), it only makes sense to cite the women as well. Otherwise this creates the bizarre legal outcome that if there is a restraining order barring two people from having contact, and those people nonetheless consent to be in each other’s company, that only one is committing a crime.

There have been a number of egregious examples where this has happened, including a man who was arrested at his own wedding for violating a restraining order against his fiance, although no action was taken against the fiance. In other cases, individuals with restraining orders have used trickery to cause the person named in a restraining order to come into their presence and then call police (for example, when a woman might call up the individual named in the restraining order, ask him to come to clear out his things from her apartment, and arrange to have police waiting to arrest the man for violating the restraining order — which has actually happened).

There is some speculation in the Herald Leader about whether or not a restraining order in fact does apply to both parties, but whether or not it currently does, it most assuredly should or otherwise it creates a severe imbalance that is likely to be exploited and abused.

Source:

Judge fines women who return to their alleged abusers. John Cheves, Lexington Herald-Leader, January 3, 2002.