I have speculated before that a lot of clergy may be closet atheists and that over time more and more will emerge. This article says that, “A study by the Free University of Amsterdam found that one-in-six clergy in the PKN and six other smaller denominations was either agnostic or atheist.”
[Read more…]
Rachel Maddow has compiled the great thoughts of the religious people invited to Texas governor Rick Perry’s day of prayer on August 6 to which he has invited all his fellow state governors. (Via Pharyngula.)
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
There is an outfit called ‘The International House of Prayer’? Who knew? Why isn’t IHOP suing for trademark infringement?
The group Lulzsec briefly hacked into website of the Murdoch tabloid The Sun and published a spoof front page.
I received the following joke from my sister that I thought was worth sharing:
In a small town, a person decided to open up a brothel, which was right opposite to a church. The church and its congregation started a campaign to block the brothel from opening with petitions and prayed daily against his business.
Work progressed. However, when it was almost complete and was about to open a few days later, a strong lightning struck the brothel and it was burnt to the ground.
The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, till the brothel owner sued the church authorities on the grounds that the church through its congregation and prayers was ultimately responsible for the destruction of his brothel, either through direct or indirect actions or means.
In its reply to the court, the church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection that their prayers were reasons for the act of God. As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork at the hearing and commented, “I don’t know how I’m going to decide this case, but it appears from the paperwork, we have a brothel owner who believes in the power of prayer and we have an entire church that doesn’t.”
In an article titled Patently Unjust in the June 2010 issue of The Progressive (not available online), Kari Lydersen describes a similar issue to the one involving Henrietta Lacks, where private companies are making a bundle out of publicly funded research. In this case, the publicly funded Human Genome Project has made freely available the full human genome but some private companies have obtained patents over individual genes.
The particular case that Lydersen deals with involves the genes known as BRCA1 and BRCA2. Certain mutations in these genes are predictors of breast and ovarian cancer, since women with such mutations are five times more likely to develop breast cancer and ten to thirty times more likely to develop ovarian cancer. We are now able to test if a woman has these mutations in which case they have to make difficult decisions about whether to preemptively remove their breasts and ovaries. These genes were discovered as part of the genome project.
It turns out that a single company named Myriad Genetics holds several patents on the genes and as a result claims exclusive rights to the tests they developed to detect the mutations. They charge about $3,000 for the test, which prices many women out of the market. They claim that if companies could not make money, they would not have the incentive to develop the tests. There is some truth in this but it is also true that a huge amount of federal (i.e. public) research funding went into the research that provided the basis for the company’s work, which should also be a factor. If the public funds something, the public should also benefit.
The reasons given by the company’s founder for the high price they charge for the tests is revealing about the why medical costs are so high in the US. He says, “In the U.S. what you charge for a test is a complex equation of what it costs you to do it and what people will pay” (my italics). This is part of the problem in a system with employer-based private health insurance coupled with monopoly providers. Well-to-do groups with power can pressure their insurance companies to cover the costs of tests which enables the testing companies to charge higher prices than they need to merely cover costs and provide a reasonable profit. The price then becomes prohibitive for those without insurance and drives up the cost of health care. I have written about this before.
As Lydersen writes, this is a widespread problem.
Myriad is far from the only patent holder on human genes; about 20 percent of the human genome is patented. This basically means that only the patent holder can offer testing and other services related to a specific gene. Patents currently cover genes related to other diseases, including Alzheimer’s, asthma, colon cancer, muscular dystrophy, and spinal muscular atrophy, a hereditary disease that kills children at a young age.
What is worse, because the company claims exclusive rights to the genes, women cannot get a second opinion on such a major question. At a minimum, what is needed is at least for more than one company to be able to provide services so that they can compete with each other. Giving private companies monopoly power over the use of research results that were largely publicly funded seems wrong.
The intricacies of patent law are too subtle for me to get into but on the surface the U. S. Patent Office seems to have been too generous in allowing companies to patent genes. It is illegal to patent a product of nature but the US Patent Office has granted Myriad and similar outfits patents on the genes on the basis that they were able to isolate them from their natural state and purify them. But others argue that this is far too expansive a view. After all, just because you develop a technique to highly purify gold (say) should not enable you to claim the patent to gold. I can understand patents being awarded to the purifying process because that is something the company did develop. That would reward their intellectual contribution while yet preserving the right of other companies to invent alternative methods of purification of the same gene and thus develop competing tests.
The right of private companies to patent genes was litigated and Lydersen writes that in March of 2010 US District Judge judge Robert W. Sweet ruled that Myriad’s claims did not meet the test of what makes something derived from nature patentable and invalidated the patents, saying in his ruling:
“The patents issued by the USPTO are directed to a law of nature and therefore were improperly granted,” Sweet wrote. “DNA represents the physical embodiment of biological information, distinct in its essential characteristics from any other chemical found in nature…. DNAs existence in an ‘isolated’ form alters neither this fundamental quality of DNA as it exists in the body nor the information it encodes. Therefore, the patents at issue directed to ‘isolated DNA containing sequences found in nature are unsustainable as a matter of law and are deemed unpatentable subject matter.”
Patents are valuable things and protect the rights of inventors and other creative people but the Patent Office should be wary of taking the claims of private companies too much at face value, especially when it comes to patenting things in nature like bits of DNA.
Myriad has appealed the ruling to the US Court of Appeals and much hangs in the balance.
She talks to Stephen Colbert about the Henrietta Lacks case.
A BBC report highlights a heartening story of social consciousness taking precedence over hysterical fear and self-interest.
A group of more than 200 Japanese pensioners is volunteering to tackle the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima power station.
The “Skilled Veterans Corps”, as they call themselves, is made up of retired engineers and other professionals, all over the age of sixty.
One of the group, Yasuteru Yamada, told the BBC’s Roland Buerk that they should be facing the dangers of radiation, not the young.
The important point is that although these people are brave and noble, they are not being mindlessly heroic and self-sacrificial. They have a done a logical risk-benefit analysis and concluded that having old people take the risk of radiation makes the most actuarial sense.
A dog tries hard to coax a man seated on a bench holding a ball to play fetch. The problem is that the man is a statue.
Via Matthew Cobb, who adds that the statue is that of Alan Turing, the brilliant computer scientist and Artificial Intelligence pioneer who committed suicide in 1954 supposedly by eating a cyanide-laden apple (which is the ‘ball’ in the statue) because of a British government prosecution over his homosexuality.
In 2009, the government apologized.
For obvious reasons, it is generally considered a crime for any government to engage in extra-judicial killings, in effect executing people without giving them the benefit of a trial. The governments that are infamous for operating such death squads are looked upon as rogue regimes. There are some occasions where the killing may be justified, such as on a battlefield or someone who is violently resisting arrest. If such restrictions are removed, governments could (and would) send people around the world to kill anyone they perceive as an enemy. This is why the Obama administration created those lies in the immediate aftermath of the bin Laden killing, that he was armed and resisted arrest and that he died in a firefight.
But in the euphoria that followed the bin Laden killing, the country seems to want to ignore the potential illegality of the act and the Attorney General has even promulgated the extraordinary doctrine that his killing was an “act of national self defense”, presumably to pre-empt any talk of illegality. In the Great and Glorious War on Terror, we have now given the US government the unilateral power to kill anyone it pleases and simply make up reasons why it is allowed to do so.
Those who raise concerns about such behavior are dismissed because it seems self-evident to many people that bin Laden deserved to die and they don’t care how he died. But, as Noam Chomsky points out, there is a real danger in giving the government this kind of freedom to kill people with impunity because governments never have enough power and will use any event to further chip away at all the restraints on them. The Obama administration was quick to take advantage of this freedom. Just a few days later there are reports that the government tried to kill the Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen with a targeted missile strike that missed him but killed two other people.
It is important to realize why this is so serious and has to be vigorously protested. al-Awlaki is a US-born citizen who is not a soldier and was not even on a battlefield when the attempt to kill him was made, since the US is not at war with Yemen, at least not yet though with the number of wars expanding this may just be a matter of time. Furthermore, he has not been accused of committing any actual crime. What he is accused of is inciting other people to attack US government targets, which by itself is not a crime. If it were, any number of militia movements in the US would have all their members in jail. Furthermore, these are just accusations and have only been made by the government to the media. As far as I know, there have been no formal grand jury indictments against him.
So what we have now is a situation in which the government has simply asserted the right to declare a US citizen guilty by press release, and then kill him anywhere in the world even if he is not on a battlefield. It so happens that al-Awlaki was in Yemen when the attempt to murder him occurred but this is a technicality. If the government is allowed this extraordinary leeway, what is to prevent it killing US citizens even in the US? If this power is left unchecked, it means that no one is safe from summary execution by the agents of the US government.
There is no question that the Obama administration will use the support generated by its killing of bin Laden to expand its power even further and there is no telling where this process will end up. This is why Democratic administrations are so dangerous to basic liberties. So many of the people who would have vociferously protested this assault on the basic rule of law if Bush or any other Republican were in office are now nowhere to be found or are making excuses for these actions or even glorying in showing that Democratic presidents can also be ‘tough’.
It is of course true that the US government has over its history ordered the killing of many people it considered inconvenient. The CIA has long been in the political assassination business. But the government knew that such actions were illegal and thus they were done covertly and officially denied. And there was always the remote possibility that someone could be held accountable for doing something illegal and this served as a check on more rampant abuses.
But that slim restraint been removed altogether and now government officials proudly announce their illegal attacks. Are we really willing to officially create rogue governments by giving them the right to murder you or me simply on the say so of some official in the government? The acid test is how we would react if a foreign government sent out death squads to the US to kill US citizens that it deemed as ‘enemy combatants’. As Chomsky says, “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”
Glenn Greenwald has more on the al-Awlaki killing attempt.