...that there is one word for "civil liberties" and another word for "civil rights".

Aren't they really the same thing? In a way, the present usage makes the former sound somehow less important...

In the new work, the team took skin cells -- some from Wood's arm and some from an anonymous Stemagen investor -- and fused them to eggs from women who were donating their eggs to help infertile women. About one-quarter of the resulting clones, or five in all, developed into five-day-old blastocysts...

"I have to admit, it's a very strange feeling. It is very difficult to look at an embryo and realize it is what you were a few decades ago. It is you, in a way."

Well, there is a future shock moment for you.

I'd like to know what folks on MemeStreams think about this, particularly from a bio-ethics perspective. This is a far cry from questions about federal funding for stem cell research. In this case human embryos were created for the purpose of research, and were subsequently destroyed.

Clearly, if you are opposed to abortion, you must also think this murder. In any event it raises the same sort of ethical question. At what point does a blastocyst turn into something that has civil rights?

I think these questions are going to get harder and harder to answer. I'll refrain from offering my own opinion here just yet.

Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells - washingtonpost.com

Secret Service presence has increased for Sen. Barack Obama since his dramatic win in Iowa, amid fears over the safety of the man seeking to become America's first black president.

Obama Protection

dc0de wrote:

The puzzle is how AT&T thinks that its proposal is anything other than corporate seppuku.

Scary article, really important stuff, but I LOVE the line above... :)

What if, instead of filtering out copyrighted material, they used an IPS to filter out exploits instead? Are the civil liberties issues the same when the same sort of filtering is done but in a way that helps, rather than hurts, the user whose traffic is subject to the filtering?

RE: Why does AT&T want to know what you're downloading? - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

Secretary Michael Chertoff, head of the Department of Homeland Security, announced a set of final revisions to the controversial Real ID Act in a press conference this morning. It's not clear at this point how extensive those revisions truly are, but it is clear that DHS feels that the rules are now in their final form and that the period for discussion, revision, and dispute is now over.

Chertoff on final Real ID rules: "Reconfiguring our society"

An excerpt from the 1958 "Disneyland" TV Show episode entitled "Magic Highway USA". In this last part of the show, an exploration into possible future Transportation technologies is made. It's hard to believe how little we've accomplished on this front since 1958, and how limited the scope for imagining such future technologies has become. Witness an artifact from a time where the future was greeted with optimism. Note the striking animation style here, achieved with fairly limited animation and spectacular layouts.

I like how suburban sprawl is anticipated with such glee!

From a technology standpoint, it spans a wide range; some ideas are pure vision, with no sense of reality (cantilevered, fully air-conditioned sky-ways through beautifully desolate mountain ranges?), while others are quaintly myopic (punch cards as storage media for your navigational unit?). Still, a lot of fun.

Magic Highway USA, circa 1958

Fortunately for America's 95 million investors, Adams' secret nine-point formula was finally revealed in "Dilbert and the Way of the Weasels." Notice its simple brilliance in the exact reproduction of his formula:

1.
Make a will
2.
Pay off your credit cards
3.
Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4.
Fund your 401k to the maximum
5.
Fund your IRA to the maximum
6.
Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7.
Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8.
Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
9.
If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

Adams boldly states that this is "everything you need to know about personal investing." In just 129 words, nine simple points, one page you have the unabridged "Unified Theory of Everything Financial." That's it. Everything!

'Dilbert's' 9-point financial plan worthy of economics Nobel - MarketWatch

Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet may have a serious security vulnerability in its onboard computer networks that could allow passengers to access the plane's control systems, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

The computer network in the Dreamliner's passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane's control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals.

Dec0de says: How f*#king stupid can people be?

Well, lets see:

Gunter wouldn't go into detail about how Boeing is tackling the issue but says it is employing a combination of solutions that involves some physical separation of the networks, known as "air gaps," and software firewalls. Gunter also mentioned other technical solutions, which she said are proprietary and didn't want to discuss in public.

"There are places where the networks are not touching, and there are places where they are," she said.

What?! Either the networks are connected or they are not. There is no middle ground. This isn't some enterprise network where you've got to have connectivity and you put in a firewall but every once in a while a virus outbreak happens anyway and you loose a day. This is an airplane. One virus outbreak on your internal network and you kill a lot of people. Conclusion: REAL, REAL f*#king stupid!

FAA: Boeing's New 787 May Be Vulnerable to Hacker Attack

Here's Larry Kudlow:

The key thing to remember is that businesses drive the economy. Businesses create jobs and incomes for consumers to spend.

Larry Kudlow has managed, unfortunately, to transform himself from an inciteful observer of market events into a fairly one dimensional shill for wall street's political interests. This essay (appearing in NRO, not a business journal) is a perfect example. He cites "facts" that have no relationship to reality (holiday sales suprised on the upside?!?), talks about lazzie-faire economics while pining for government assistance in the form of yet another rate cut, and also, in the passage quoted above, manages to treat his readers like children.

The fact is that we are teterring on the edge of an economic precipice built upon phoney growth and no one is quite sure how deep it is. The current housing crisis, which threatens bank failure, was completely predictable and driven by the extremely irresponsible actions of the creditors whose interests Kudlow here represents. Of course they don't want the government to regulate them, they're rich, but the minute hard times beset them they start screaming for government assistance in the form of rate cuts, literally screaming as Kudlow's former cohost famously did on national television in the late summer, and they get them!

The reason Wallstreet has to generate phoney growth in the form of housing inflation is that we're not getting enough real growth in terms of actual middle class purchasing power, and the fundamental reasons for that aren't addressed by a simple tax cut. Despite Kudlows insistance to the contrary, real wage growth has been anemic through-out this recovery, held back by offshoring and H1-B visas. The reason those programs are required to keep American workers "competitive" is our abysmally stupid healthcare system, wherein employers have to pay truck loads for services that no one can refuse to buy.

Healthcare is not like other market commodities because people who need services cannot refuse to purchase them or choose between acceptible and luxury classes of service. You buy it or you die. So in an unregulated environment there is no force that counteracts price increases. And the vested interests that are making a killing offering those services have hired the exact same libertarian idealogs to defend those interests that Kudlow has now joined.

End the upward spiral of healthcare costs and require job mobility and permanent residency for foreign workers imported into the US and you'll see real, sustainable increases in middle class purchasing power, which will drive real economic growth.

Ultimately, if the rewards of business growth, systemically, aren't seen by employees, consumers don't have money to spend on new products, and so businesses can't grow. Instead you see the money all going to shareholders, and so there is all this excess investment capital out there that isn't going to be spent buying things, but instead wants to fund mortages and the like. This sort of concentration of wealth, which is caused by government intervention on behalf of some people and lazzie-faire for others, can strangle the economy by pulling the liquidity out. Thats exactly what caused the great depression.

'Goldilocks needs tax reform ... not root-canal economic populism'

We've had plenty of well deserved criticism for former NAR Chief Economist David Lereah.

So you can imagine how much it tickled our funny bone to see, via Irvine Housing Blog, this updated new book from Lereah:

The Big Picture | Latest Lereah Book