Category: Uncategorized

Animal Tests for Prion Disease Move Closer

The Scientist published an article this month reporting on advances made by Stanley Prusiner in understanding — and hopefully treating — prion diseases such as CJD, vCJD, and BSE.

In the article, Prusiner — who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for his work on prions — notes that there is still much that researchers do not understand about prion diseases. “We though the number of cases of the disease [vCJD] would increase two to three times,” Prusiner told scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, “but the number of cases in 2001 was similar to the number in 2000.”

That seems to be due to an oddity with vCJD. Whereas CJD generally affects older people, vCJD seems to affect mainly younger people.

The good news is that Prusiner believes there is enough known about prion diseases to start looking at trials to test therapies for the diseases. Some compounds used to treat other diseases also appear to have the ability to prevent normal prions from degenerating into diseased prions that cause CJD.

Prusiner is currently working to develop a mouse model to test such compounds. His plan appears to involve a drug discovery compound to examine 11,000 compounds that might have some effect on prion disease and then test the promising ones in a mouse model before proceeding to human clinical trials.

Source:

Prion-Disease trials on the horizon?. Jennifer Fisher Wilson, The Scientist, 16[6]:28, Mar. 18, 2002.

Poor Gary Yourofsky

Gary Yourofsky recently announced that he was resigning as president of ADAPTT and apparently abandoning animal rights activism for the forseeable future.

In a tear-jerking e-mail, Yourofsky complained about his deteriorating financial position,

I can no longer keep my activism at a much-needed tempestuous pace. Sixty-six months of working for NO PAY has caught up with me. In addition to the debt that I’ve amassed, I’m broke beyond belief with no respite in sight. Technically, I’ve been on the brink of homelessness as well for about six months now. Shacking up with friends, strangers and at motels has run its course.

The burden has overwhelmed those around me who have helped me scrape by. In other words, ALL OF MY RESOURCES ARE COMPLETELY TAPPED! The only way out is to recoup my losses with full-time, overtime PAID employment.

. . .

Reality has forced me to take two jobs (seven days a week) immediately).

. . .

I will remain a vegan humanitarian forever. I will support animal liberation until I die. However, at this juncture, I can no longer be an activist. Only a supporter.

Really? What a shame.

Yourofsky went on to reaffirm is extremist views about animal rights, writing,

To all my enslaved planetary companions, I apologize for discontinuing activism for the time-being, but you can be that I’ll be back in a few years with bigger and better things.

Always support activists, especially those who put their freedom on the line for those who have none. Long live the ALF!

Never have empathy for an animal abuser under any circumstance! Only have empathy for those who are abused, tortured, enslaved and murdered.

Yourofsky was asked last year about what would happen if a medical researcher were murdered, to which he replied, “I would unequivocally support that, too.”

And now, Yourofsky’s out of the movement entirely. Hey, I would unequivocally support that, too.

Source:

Yourofsky resigns as ADAPTT president. Gary Yourofsky, e-mail communication, March 5, 2002.

Columbine Media Lawsuit Dismissed; Michigan Legislators Want Restrictions on Violent Video Games

At the beginning of March a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the family of Dave Sanders, a teacher who was fatally shot during the Columbine massacre.

Sanders’ family had sued Time Warner, Acclaim Entertainment, Atari Corp. and Nintendo of America arguing that movies and videogames produced by those companies unduly influenced gunmen Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17.

The judge ruled that the Kelbold and Harris were responsible for the death of Sanders, not video games and movies the two killers may have watched.

Meanwhile, outraged by the bestselling Playstation 2 game Grand Theft Auto III, legislators in Michigan are pushing for a law that would make it a crime to rent or sell violent videogames to minors. Failing to abide by the law would result in penalty of up to $1,000 and possible jail time.

The Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has decided not to get involved in the legislation, saying it does not pose a risk of censorship. The Detroit Free Press’s quoted its lawyer, Herschel Fink, noting that the same reasoning could be used to prevent children from buying newspapers which might contain graphic descriptions of the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl (or even accounts of the 9/11 terrorist attack for that matter).

Sources:

Bill to keep violent games from minors. Bill Laitner, Detroit Free Press, March 5, 2002.

U.S. judge dismisses Columbine suit against media. Reuters, March 4, 2002.

Joe Sobran Proves William F. Buckley Right

For a long time, Joe Sobran wrote for National Review. Then he was booted out by William F. Buckley who agreed with Sobran’s critics that Sobran was an anti-Semite. Sobran and his supporters have long decried that decision as completely unfair. But in a recent column about Israel (a country which Sobran appears at times to be obssessed about), Sobran writes,

Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review has summed up the situation in one pithy sentence: “The truth is that if we held Israel to the same standards that we apply to Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, U.S. bombers and missiles would be blasting Tel Aviv, and weÂ’d be putting Israeli prime minister Sharon behind bars for war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The Institute for Historical Review is an anti-Semitic organization dedicated to Holocaust revisionism. Weber himself has written that there is no evidence that Jews were mass murdered at Treblinka and that, in fact, the camp was used as a transit camp.

For someone who insists he is not an anti-Semite, Sobran keeps fairly odd company.

Good Riddance, Mary Robinson

United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights Mary Robinson announced she was stepping down. Good riddance. Robinson aptly summed up the entire view that marked her term with this outrageous comment,

The buildings that were destroyed on Sept. 11 can be replaced. But if the pillars of the international system are damaged or demolished, they will not be so easy to restore.

Earth to Mary — we don’t care about the buildings, it’s the almost 3,000 human beings that died on Sept. 11 that count. This statement really puts a capstone on Robinson’s approach to human rights.

The spin from human rights groups is that Robinson ran into trouble because she was willing to criticize the United States. Reed Brody Human Rights Watch told the New York Times, “She has paid a price for her willingness to confront publicly big governments like the United States and Russia when they violate human rights.”

Give me a break. Robinson presided over a conference at which Israel was labeled the only racist country in the world. Yeah, that took a lot of moral courage.

Source:

U.N. Rights Enforcer to Step Down. Associated Press, March 18, 2002.

Here’s What You Can Do With Your Party Line

Last night I spent an hour chatting via IRC with author Wendy McElroy and about a dozen other people. Normally I find chatting a waste of time, but the topic that McElroy wanted to talk about intrigued me — dealing with unreasonable claims/positions/demands by people whom you are ostensibly defending.

In McElroy’s case, she has done a lot to promote the cause of the Men’s Movement and true sexual equality, and in return receive a lot of hostility, anger and even threats from some people involved with that movement. Some of the hostility is downright silly. McElroy calls her position Individualist Feminism, but for some in the Men’s Movement, the “f” word is just too much and they draw a line in the sand — if you’re going to call yourself a feminist, they want nothing to do with you (and, in fact, will react abusively).

One of the really odd things that was apparent from the chat was that many of these people were upset because they believe McElroy has some sort of power or influence and that what she says or does not say has far reaching effects. Now I’m a big fan of McElroy, and am glad she’s been writing for Fox News regularly the past few months because I enjoy reading her work, but power and influence? I don’t think so.

But I wasn’t all that surprised since I’ve had the same argument thrown in my face when it comes to animal rights. One of the things I like about running a web site is the independence — I have considered going to work for organizations in the areas that I write about, but could never be satisfied giving up that editorial independence. There are two things, for example, with which I have problems with in the anti-animal rights community: a) the tendency to support cockfighting (which, in my opinion, is both a dead end morally and politically), and b) the tendency to exaggerate the case against some animal rights groups.

In the last six months after writing about cockfighting and defending an animal rights group against what I thought were baseless accusations of being involved in terrorist activities, I received e-mails from people outraged at the comments. The basic argument was that given the prominence of my site, such comments could only aid the animal rights movement.

Bah! Who cares? What’s the point of rejecting the group think of one movement just to turn around and adopt the very same principles?