Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
– Bill Gates
– Bill Gates
I’m sure today’s Vista rollout will show that Bill hasn’t done much learning since Windows XP.
In other news, the new Norah Jones cd comes out today. 🙂
31 Comments
continues unabated: NYT
Of course they’re concerned about the EPA and OSHA. Can’t have the governement serving the people instead of corporate interests, now, can we?
Steven D has a front-page diary on this now.
Who would have thought we’d win the cold war only to become the new Soviet Union?
who thinks this is going too far? NYT
It seems frankenstein-ish to me. And that so many women are so desperate to become medical guinea pigs? At least the article mentions some of the real medical concerns too:
What do you all think?
It’s a little sad that they appear about to take advantage of women who want children so badly that they are willing to sacrifice their own health. Think this is bad? Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present was covered last week on DemocracyNow! and that report made me sick for days.
Corporate version: a penis transplant, complete with a year’s supply of Viagra and tickets to Vegas. [snort]
Considering all the issues that are in play w/ organ transplant (as the bottom paragraph highlights) combined w/ the health of a newly forming baby. Seems very risky to me.
And on another level, after reading through the article and in particular this paragraph:
Makes me think of this.
That is exactly what I find so creepy about it – it seems like there is an intense focus on women as baby-making machines that must produce at all costs. And I don’t like where that idea leads…
After reading your story and the comments here, it certainly brings home that one trait of modern Americans is an inability to accept that sometimes bad shit just happens. We’re so used to technologies that allow us to control every aspect of our lives we lose sight that maybe sometimes it’s better not to wrench control of the system from nature. The more powerful the tools, the greater the need to use them wisely.
And given the complications and risks in this new technology, it certainly seems it’s not ready for widespread adoption, and perhaps will never be.
If you’ve never read Frankenstein, you owe it to yourself to download it from Project Gutenberg (audiobook also available) or some other free website and read it. It’s more timely than ever, and only takes maybe three hours to read at most.
That’s part of it too. Why is there so much focus on “fixing” the physical problem? Why put so much pressure on women to bear their own children, when maybe that’s just not in the cards for some? I would think crap like this makes it harder for people to accept that not everything in life goes the way you want it to.
I don’t know. I guess my thought on transplanting uteruses is “Just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it.”
to erect the Chapel of the White Woman Womb! The sweet nest that all patriotic Americans dwell within before they are launched on the world. I bet they are drawing up plans for it at the Dobson compound.
I have never had to contend with not having the ability to have my own child genetically linked to me so that I can very clearly see all of my flaws outlined in stark distinction. If I had been in that boat though I do not see me signing up for any kind of freakshow uterus transplanting project. It’s gruesome to me! We have millions of children on this globe in need of a parent, love, food, shelter…..adopt for crying out loud. Giving birth is nice in some ways but then there are stretch marks, hemorrhoids, peeing on yourself when you can’t get to a bathroom fast enough and you’re huge, one of my friends even had a small stroke due to her pregnancy that paralyzed half of her face. I guess it’s human nature to want that one thing we feel is being denied us so fine…..have your hemorrhoids and maybe you can even get lucky enough to have the kind that never go away!
Nuts beyond crazy!
Frankenstein is about right. The doctors are souless ghouls.
No sane person would want to have a baby this way.
With the self-serving “values” of the “market”, we are entering the era of malign medicine.
It will get worse.
Link
Shell has signed an important deal to help Iran develop a major gas field, ignoring growing pressure from George Bush to isolate the country for being part of what he alleges is an “axis of evil”.[snip]
The move is a bold one by Shell because its arch-rival BP has declared itself unwilling to invest in Iran at a time when the international political climate surrounding the country is so forbidding.
Shell just had to turn over some holdings in Russia to the Kremlin and is trying to get in to Iran before the rush, which will happen the second Bush is out of office and politics change. Those energy companies are just so unappreciative of neocon politics… don’t they know that Bush is the decision maker/decider? He’ll decide what they can do and where. (ha!)
Why does Shell hate Amerika?
African snub to Sudan over Darfur
Link
Some say Pentagon hides full impact of the war toll
Washington- Officially, more than 23,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in combat in Iraq. But more than double that number have fallen ill or been injured in what the Pentagon considers “nonhostile” action, a way of counting that critics say hides the war’s full toll.
If the Pentagon also counted soldiers who were hurt in crashes or circumstances not directly involving skirmishes with the enemy, and those so sick that they required air transport, the figure would come to about 50,000, the Pentagon’s own figures show.[snip]
Stephen Robinson, a Washington-based veterans advocate and former Army officer, said the Pentagon purposely misleads the public with its counting methods. For example, he said, the Pentagon has not counted some injuries from chain-reaction crashes as combat-related, even when the crashes resulted from an insurgent’s attack on another vehicle in a convoy. By counting them as motor-vehicle accidents, Robinson said, the Pentagon avoids adding injuries to the war’s combat toll.
Smoke and mirrors, at the expense of our men and women fighting in Bush’s ego war. The really sad part is how the media eagerly reports fudged numbers with a smile and a wink, never questioning the Pentagon’s methods.
I’d guess that by undercounting injuries they probably also reduce some kind of liability on the government’s part in caring for these soldiers.
there would be motive for what they’re doing other than just attempting to mislead you on Iraq, but it doesn’t change their liability in any way. Being injured in a war zone or killed in a war zone all pays the same and it doesn’t matter who did the injuring or killing. It just all goes by “War Zone” if there is some sort of distinction made in life insurance benefits or long term health coverage. I’m not even sure they are making that distinction any longer when it comes to life insurance.
More Africa news.
What are the chances that an AU force will be more effective in Somalia than the case has been in Darfur…
African leaders mull Somali force
KP will probably have more on this later.
Melting of glaciers ‘speeds up’
Link
US military: Afghan leaders steal half of all aid
Corrupt police and tribal leaders are stealing vast quantities of reconstruction aid that is intended to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans and turn them away from the Taliban, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
In some cases, all the aid earmarked for an area has ended up in the wrong hands. Defence officials in the United States and Britain estimate that up to half of all aid in Afghanistan is failing to reach the right people.
Nato forces in the south of the country say some Afghan police are guilty of corruption and will steal aid if it is handed out. Tribal and mosque elders have also been accused of seizing goods, including building materials and fuel, and selling them in markets. A Pentagon official said thousands of cars and trucks intended for use by the Afghan police had been sold instead.
Isn’t Bush about to ask for another $10 billion for Afghanistan “reconstruction”? A recent Pentagon/State Dept report says that the Afghanistan Police are so corrupt that they are completely ineffective. Hmmm, corrupt AND incompetent; I suppose that qualifies them to be considered Republicans in training.
Now that leaves me with a hole in the pit of my stomach. Once we get rid of Bush the Destroyer we in this country had better be ready to make severe changes fast.
The IPCC report will stun people if it gets only a fraction of the media attention it deserves. Whether it will is an open question, of course…
The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has shut down after an electrical failure, NASA has said. Engineers said only one-third of the camera’s functions were likely to be restored, but Hubble will receive a new camera during a planned servicing mission by space shuttle in 2008. This should recover all of the capability lost in the latest failure.
Mountain glaciers are shrinking three times faster than they were in the 1980s, scientists have announced. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, which continuously studies a sample of 30 glaciers around the world, says the acceleration is due to climate change.
The tiny skeletal remains of human “Hobbits” found on an Indonesian island belong to a completely new branch of our family tree, a study has found. The finds caused a sensation when they were announced to the world in 2004. But some researchers argued the bones belonged to a modern human with a combination of small stature and a brain disorder called microcephaly. That claim is rejected by the latest study, which compares the tiny people to modern microcephalics.
U.S. search engine giant Google Inc. has joined a group of 16 universities and national labs building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The 27 1/2-foot telescope will survey the entire visible sky every week, investigating dark matter and dark energy, as well as fast-changing objects such as exploding supernovae, near-Earth asteroids and distant Kuiper belt objects beyond Pluto. The collaboration with Google is designed to organize, process and analyze the data – more than 30 terabytes of images every night for a decade – the project will generate.
What grizzly bears eat, how much of it will be available in the future, and where, all hinges on the mountain pine beetle and the whitebark pine. And warming temperatures are threatening the pines that feed grizzlies and other wildlife.
… but check out the BBC’s photo of 2006 by Max Pickering of the aurora borealis … Wow.
also, a magnificent photo of McNaughts’ Comet, taken by McNaught himself…from last night’s FBL courtesy of Head
Hugo Chavez, the dangerous leader of Venezuela, has begun a pilot program of organic gardens in an urban context…not dissimilar to the green roof programs beginning to appear in Europe and some american cities.
Think globally, act locally
© BBC
Winning hearts and minds and delivering democracy across the world.
Linkage: here
Just when I think it cannot get worse….