Category: Uncategorized

Wall Street Journal Nails Terrorist Apologias

James Taranto of OpinionJournal.Com (which is owned by the Wall Street Journal) takes just a few sentences to show the complete and utter absurdity of those who ventured that American foreign policy or poverty or oppression or [insert excuse here] was the “root cause” of the 9/11 attacks.

Taranto is writing about the arrest last night of two Jewish Defense League members who allegedly were planning to blow up a mosque and other targets. After outlining the basics of the arrest, Taranto writes,

Watch for the root-cause crowd to come forward with the usual explanations: The poverty and oppression under which L.A. Jews live makes this sort of thing understandable, if not inevitable; they did it as a protest against U.S. foreign policy; their alleged targets need to ask themselves: Why do they hate us? Yeah, we expect to hear this stuff any minute now.

They’re Praying for Me

Sometimes I write something and I know people are going to run across it and send me nasty or bizarre e-mail. Other times, I am surprised at how much people have personally vested in things that I have dismissed or slammed.

For example, John Edward turns out to have fans who are almost as dedicated as animal rights activists in coming to his defense. I’ve written a couple of things about Edwards, and received quite a bit of e-mail.

Several of his fans demanded that I either prove to them that it was impossible to communicate with the dead or else apologize to Edwards. A couple folks rather impolitely suggested that I was simply jealous of Edwards’ abilities and should get a life (that’s my G-rated version of their missives).

But the real kicker was the one I received yesterday from a person who said that she is going to pray for me to overcome my “doubtful mind” and insists that once I “cross over” I’ll understand where Edwards was coming from (and she did reassure me that despite my doubts, God will still accept me in the hereafter).

No Bow Hunting on Sundays?

One of the most ridiculous appeals this writer has seen from an animal rights group was issued recently by the League of Animal Protection Voters which wants to make certain that bow hunters in New Jersey cannot kill deer on Sundays.

Apparently, at the moment it is illegal to bow hunt on Sundays in New Jersey, which is absurd. I’ve heard of places where you can’t buy alcohol on Sundays, but hunt? Stuart Chaifetz, a co-founder of the League of Animal Protection Voters, claims that the ban on Sunday bow hunting is needed because Sunday is, “The only day in which they [families] have to walk peacefully on our woods.” Chaifetz notes that two people were recently killed in hunting accidents in New Jersey.

But if the goal is to save the lives of innocent people just trying to enjoy themselves, New Jersey would be better off banning a truly dangerous activities like swimming on Sundays, rather than bow hunting.

The League of Animal Protection Voters’ real agenda, of course, is an outright ban on hunting, period. In its press release opposing a bill that would eliminate the no hunting on Sundays rule, the LAPV argues that,

Bow hunting is barbaric entertainment that best deserves to reside in the dark ages, not in the 21st century and not in a country that deems itself humane. We must not only defeat the Sunday hunting bill, but we must as a people turn our eye and conscience to this most bloody and unnatural ‘sport’ and defeat it as well.

Source:

League exposes brutality of bow hunting, opposes bill that allows bow hunters to kill on Sundays. League of Animal Protection Voters, December 6, 2001.

Harvard Study: Risk of Mad Cow Disease in the United States is Low

On November 30 the U.S. Department of Agriculture release a study concluding that the risk of a Mad Cow disease outbreak in the United States is very low. The three-year study, conducted by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, concluded that current regulations governing the import of cattle as well as bans on feeding meat and bone meal to cattle make it extremely unlikely that U.S. cattle will become infected with the disease.

According to the report,

There appears to be no potential for an epidemic of BSE resulting from scrapie, chronic wasting disease or other cross-species transmission of similar diseases found in the U.S.

The current major debate over Mad Cow disease in the United States is whether or not cattle herds should be tested for the disease. So far, the United States has test only 12,000 head of cattle out of an estimated population of 100 million. In 2002, the USDA plans to expand that testing to 12,500 more animals.

In its coverage of the report, The New York Times quoted Mad Cow researcher Thomas Pringle as saying that such limited testing was a mistake. Pringle noted that nations claiming to be BSE-free had, in fact, found cases of the disease after ordering testing of cattle herds. Japan, for example, recently discovered several cases of Mad Cow disease after believing the disease had not reached its shores.

Still, American Meat Institute president J. Patrick Boyle argued that, “America’s B.S.E.-free status is not luck. The U.S. is free of many animal diseases that plague other nations, testaments to the success of government-industry efforts.”

Sources:

U.S. Mad Cow Risk is Low, A Study by Harvard Finds. Elizabeth Becker, The New York Times, December 1, 2001.

Report has final word on mad cow disease. Kay Ledbetter, The Amarillo Globe News, December 9, 2001.

Camel Antibodies and Human Disease

Could antibodies from camels fight human disease? A United Arab Emirates researchers thinks so and wrote an article for the British magazine The Biologist on the medical research potentials of camels.

Dr. Sabah Jassim argues that camel antibodies would make a good research tool since camels are highly resistant to a wide variety of diseases. Camels obviously evolved in an extremely harsh environment and are immune to diseases such as rinderpest and foot-and-mouth that afflict other mammals.

Moreover, because camel antibodies are both smaller and much simpler than human antibodies, Jassim argues they could be reproduced easily and could penetrate parts of the human body that antibodies from other species could not.

As it turns out, there is already some research being conducted in this area, including research to test the feasibility of using modified camel antibodies to create new generations of protease inhibitors. One of the diseases camels are immune to is river blindness, and research is also underway to clone the antibodies which provide this protection and develop a treatment for the disease in human beings.

Source:

Camels could help cure humans. David Bamford, The BBC, December 10, 2001.

Study Claims Victims of Female Stalkers Not Taken Seriously

A conducted by Australian researchers and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that law enforcement and agencies dedicated to helping crime victims do not take seriously people who claim to be stalked by women.

Researchers Rosemary Purcell, Michele Pathe and Paul Mullen studied 190 stalkers — 150 men and 40 women — who had been referred to mental health facilities from 1993-2000. They found that female stalkers were rarely prosecuted for stalking. The three researchers, each who run centers that deal with stalking and threat management, reported that victims of female stalkers frequently reported difficulties getting law enforcement and other agencies to take them seriously.

“I think when someone is involved in stalking, it should be treated seriously according to the behavior shown, not the gender of the perpetrator,” Purcell told Australian newspaper The Age.

The study did find important differences between women and men stalkers. Female stalkers were far less likely to assault their victims than men, which is consistent with other findings about aggressive behavior in men vs. women, but they did threaten their victims and commit acts of property damage as their male counterparts.

Ninety-one percent of the male stalkers targeted women, whereas female stalkers were as likely to harass other women as they were men.

Source:

Victims of female stalkers ‘not taken seriously’. Peter Gregory, The Age, December 1, 2001.