jeaun.com

Challenge Park Photos

I finally got around to posting the photos from Colin's paintball outing.
Don't miss Graver getting the spanking he so sorely deserved.

$50 Post (The Flashback Episode)

When the writers of Family Ties had trouble coming up with a wacky new scheme for Alex, they put their heads together and came up with a ridiculous contrived plot that would allow them to show clips of old episodes and still get paid.

Well, apparently, we've been stricken with writer's block. So much so that the Cock Of Timeless Veneration has offered a fifty dollar reward to the next poster. Of course there is no way for me to make the Cock Of Shiny Bangles pay up, but I'll take the challenge anyway. In the tradition of Susan Borowitz writer of episode 87/88 of Family Ties (A Word To The Wise), here's a few of my favorite jeauns on this jeaun.

The Punchline Is Blasphemy - People usually just stare at me when I read this joke to them in my worst Irish accent.
Sharkleberry Fin & Purplesaurus Rex - Tim gets all "How is possible?" on the Kool-Aid Man
The Good Fights Thread - Bear beats lion, but Christ v. Moses is still up in the air.

What else have we got?

I'm totally getting this airbrushed on lil' white car

I found the funniest website ever. And it has something for everyone. Unicorns with maidens for Tim, unicorns with kittens for Graver, unicorns with wizards for the rest of you...

Is it just me, or do you feel a draft?

So I just got a bulk email from one of the secretaries in my office, who normally forwards silly joke emails along the lines of "Here are some commonly observed differences between men and women, stated in a humorous fashion."

So when I started reading it, I thought it was a joke at first. But it's about reinstating the draft, and it appears to be for real. Which is scary.

I'd heard murmurings about reinstating the draft, but I wrote it all off as a grim joke. I certainly didn't know legislation was already in the works.

Click below to read the article in its entirety. Does anyone who's monitoring the legislature more diligently than I am (Colin?) know more about this?

Pending Draft Legislation Targeted for Spring 2005
The Draft will Start in June 2005

There is pending legislation in the House and Senate (twin bills: S 89 and HR 163) which will time the program's initiation so the draft can begin at early as Spring 2005 -- just after the 2004 presidential election. The administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public's attention is on the elections, so our action on this is needed immediately.

$28 million has been added to the 2004 Selective Service System (SSS) budget to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005. Selective Service must report to Bush on March 31, 2005 that the system, which has lain dormant for decades, is ready for activation. Click here to view the SSS annual performance plan for fiscal year 2004.

The Pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide. Though this is an unpopular election year topic, military experts and influential members of congress are suggesting that if Rumsfeld's prediction of a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan (and a permanent state of war on "terrorism") proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to draft.

Congress brought twin bills, S. 89 and HR 163 forward this year entitled the Universal National Service Act of 2003, "to provide for the common defense by requiring that all young persons [age 18-26] in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes." These active bills currently sit in the committee on armed services.

Dodging the draft will be more difficult than those from the Vietnam era.

College and Canada will not be options. In December 2001, Canada and the U.S. signed a "smart border declaration," which could be used to keep would-be draft dodgers in. Signed by Canada's minister of foreign affairs, John Manley, and U.S. Homeland Security director, Tom Ridge, the declaration involves a 30-point plan which implements, among other things, a "pre-clearance agreement" of people entering and departing each country. Reforms aimed at making the draft more equitable along gender and class lines also eliminates higher education as a shelter. Underclassmen would only be able to postpone service until the end of their current semester. Seniors would have until the end of the academic year.

Even those voters who currently support US actions abroad may still object to this move, knowing their own children or grandchildren will not have a say about whether to fight. Not that it should make a difference, but this plan, among other things, eliminates higher education as a shelter and includes women in the draft.

Checks and balances

So a couple Republicans in Congress have been smoking the crack rock: A bill for congress to overrule SCOTUS decisions

They must have forgotten the whole system....you know...congress making laws, the courts interpreting them...

Our government could implode in a strange loop, with congress passing this law, SCOTUS declaring it unconstitutional, congress overruling, SCOTUS declaring...., etc...ad infinitum...

There goes organic food

I eat organic food. I shop pretty much at Whole Foods, just a little at Jewel. That's because you can't buy a frozen pizza at whole foods that tastes good. My feelings about organic food are pretty damn strong.

I honestly don't understand why all food production isn't organic, well, actually I do, I understand the economies of scale you get by pumping animals and plants full of drugs and pesticides so you can grow/cage them in closer proximity to each other. Call me a damn tree hugger, but I want my steak from a cow that has lived with large outdoor spaces and was then killed while listening to soothing music......not from a cow mashed up against 30,000 others.

Anyway, according to Salon, the USDA is changing the rules, now allowing synthetic pesticides on organic farms, antibiotics in organic milk cows. (As opposed to robotic milk cows, which make Nesquick and are quite vicious....)

This just pisses me off. I'm letter writing and I ask you all the same. I'll have iformation shortly on the comments page to let you know who to e-mail write. In case you're retarded and can't get through the Salon ad of the day, the article is posted in the extended entry.

Whether or not its better for me, I want to be able to trust that organic label. Paranoia just isn't any fun anymore.....

May 21, 2004 | Over the course of 10 days in mid-April, the USDA issued three "guidances" and one directive -- all legally binding interpretations of law -- that threaten to seriously dilute the meaning of the word "organic" and discredit the department's National Organic Program. And the changes -- which would allow the use of antibiotics on organic dairy cows, synthetic pesticides on organic farms, and more -- were made with zero input from the public or the National Organic Standards Board, the advisory group that worked for more than a decade to help craft the first federal organic standards, put in place in October 2002.

The USDA insists that the changes are innocuous: "The directives have not changed anything. They are just clarifications of what is in the regulations that were written by the National Organic Standards Board," USDA spokesperson Joan Shaffer told Muckraker. "They just explain what's enforceable. There is no difference [between the clarifications and the original regulations] -- it's just another way of explaining it."

But Jim Riddle, vice chair of the NOSB and endowed chair in agricultural systems at the University of Minnesota, argues that what the USDA is trying to pass off as a clarification of regulations is actually a substantial change: "These are the sorts of changes for which the department is supposed to do a formal new rulemaking process, with posting in the Federal Register, feedback from our advisory board and a public-comment period. And yet there is no such process denoted anywhere."

Organic activists suspect that industry pressure drove the policy shifts. They point out that the USDA leadership has longstanding industry sympathies: Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman served on the board of directors of a biotech company, and both her chief of staff and her director of communications were plucked right out of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

"Even though it evolved as a reaction against large-scale American agribusinesses, the organic food industry has seen tremendous growth, roughly 20 to 24 percent a year for the past 10 years," said Ronnie Cummins, founder and national director of the Organic Consumers Association. "That, not surprisingly, has brought with it investments from big business and demands for conventional farming practices more favorable to mass production."

One practice favored by large agribusiness is the use of antibiotics on cows, and a guidance [PDF] issued on April 14 will allow just that on organic dairy farms, a dramatic reversal of 2002 rules. Under the new guidelines, sickly dairy cows can be treated not just with antibiotics but with numerous other drugs and still have their milk qualify as organic, so long as 12 months pass between the time the treatments are administered and the time the milk is sold.

"This new directive makes a mockery of organic standards," said Richard Wood, a recent member of the FDA's Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee and executive director of Food Animal Concerns Trust. "Organic farmers that we have talked to are furious because they have been very careful to follow the antibiotics rule. [The rule change] undercuts their ability to make a living doing things right."

Furthermore, said Wood, the use of antibiotics will reduce the pressure on organic farmers to provide healthy accommodations for their livestock. If they know they can pump their animals up with drugs, they won't have to worry so much about disease spreading when cows are penned up in close quarters, or about weaning calves from their mothers at an unnaturally early age.

"It's hard to deny that this looks awfully like a political move by USDA to do the bidding of larger dairy operations that want to produce organic milk by expanding their herds with cattle that were once on non-organic farms," Wood said.

Another new guidance [PDF] put out on the same day would allow cattle farmers to feed their heifers non-organic fishmeal that could be riddled with synthetic preservatives, mercury and PCBs, and still sell their beef as organic.

And the following week, on April 23, the USDA took the particularly egregious step of issuing a legal directive [PDF] that opens the door for use of some synthetic pesticides on organic farms.

Previously, organic farmers were only allowed to use natural, nontoxic pesticides on their crops, which effectively prohibited use of pesticides with hidden ingredients (pesticide manufacturers often don't list certain ingredients, claiming the information is proprietary).

According to the new guidelines, however, organic farmers and certifiers are only required to make a "reasonable effort" to find out what is in the pesticides being applied to crops. "If they can't come up with the info on toxic inert ingredients that may be in their pesticides, they're off the hook" said Liana Hoodes, organic policy coordinator for the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture. "This takes all the pressure off of pesticide manufacturers to reveal their ingredients and develop nontoxic products. In fact, it creates a disincentive."

Last but certainly not least, another guidance [PDF] released on April 14 narrows the scope of the federal organic certification program to crops and livestock, critics say, meaning that national organic standards will not be developed for fish, nutritional supplements, pet food, fertilizers, cosmetics and personal-care products.

"Consumers beware: This basically allows any opportunistic company to put fraudulent 'organic' labels on products outside of the regulated domain, without any liability concerns," Hoodes told Muckraker.

There have never been federal organic standards for these product categories -- which is why you cannot now trust an "organic" label on a bottle of shampoo or a package of farm-raised salmon -- but the USDA had previously said it would develop such standards. In anticipation of that eventuality, many companies have invested millions of dollars over the past decade to develop fish farms and factories for non-agricultural products that adhere to criteria consistent with those for organic crops and livestock.

"All that effort has just flown out the window," Cummins told Muckraker. "It's an outrage for the 30 million consumers who pay a premium for organic products and expect that they can trust the organic claim."

The USDA rejects activists' interpretation of this particular guidance: "There's a process to go through [to develop organic guidelines for non-agricultural categories] and it hasn't happened [yet]," said Shaffer. "It could still happen. I'm not clairvoyant."

Despite the USDA's demurrals, activists view the department's changes as a serious threat to hard-won standards for organic products. The National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture and other groups are investigating possible industry influence into the USDA's process, and some environmental groups are preparing to take legal action.

"Secretary Veneman should withdraw these new directives and follow the appropriate rulemaking procedures," said Riddle of the NOSB. "We want them withdrawn and to do it right."

What do the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation, United Egg Producers and Tyson Foods have in common?

Well, first there's the obvious fowl connection. Then there's the foul connection: Their facilities, known as "concentrated animal feeding operations" (CAFOs), have growing air-pollution problems thanks to the mountains of gas-emitting excrement deposited daily by their tens of thousands of cooped-up feathery charges.

These industry groups also share another connection: membership in the Ag Air Group, a coalition of special interests that includes the National Pork Producers Council and the National Milk Producers Federation (whose hogs and heifers also contribute to malodorous air-quality problems). The group has been helping the Bush EPA create an air-monitoring program that would allegedly pave the way for regulation of this escalating and, at present, virtually unregulated problem -- but the program has a stench all its own.

Over the past decade, the livestock industry has steadily expanded and CAFOs have grown increasingly concentrated, displacing smaller, family-owned farms. As more animals are packed into massive factory farms, the facilities produce ever larger heaps of excreta, which emit noxious air pollutants, including ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, both of which are on par with cyanide and arsenic as hazardous substances, as well as volatile organic compounds and particulate matter from fecal dust.

In the past 10 years, nearly a dozen people have died in CAFOs in the U.S. from exposure to these gases, and according to a study released in February 2002 by Iowa State University and the University of Iowa Study Group, up to 70 percent of workers exposed to pollutants at CAFOs in the U.S. are afflicted with acute bronchitis and 25 percent with chronic bronchitis.

The EPA, though it has taken a number of legal actions against factory farms over surface and groundwater pollution, has been notably slow to act on air-quality problems at CAFOs, despite escalating calls from the environmental community to address the issue.

Michele Merkel, a former staff attorney in the EPA's enforcement division, filed the agency's first suit against a CAFO for Clean Air Act violations in October 1999, under the Clinton administration. The suit charged Premium Standard Farms -- a pork company that owns more than 2.5 million pigs and produces more sewage than the city of St. Louis -- with violating clean-air standards, and was settled out of court. A second such suit filed by the EPA was also settled out of court.

But the Bush administration put the kibosh on these enforcement efforts, according to Merkel. "Once the Bush team came in, I was not allowed to pursue any further air lawsuits against CAFOs," she told Muckraker. "We got political cover to continue what was underway, but I was told that new efforts were off-limits. It wasn't just coming from my EPA superiors, it was coming from the White House." Merkel found it so demoralizing to see the enforcement process hamstrung that she quit.

"But now the problem is only getting worse," she said. "The negligence is leading to a growing incidence of respiratory problems, not to mention olfactory discontent, among the residents in neighboring towns."

Merkel now works at the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, which recently joined the Sierra Club in an effort to obtain under the Freedom of Information Act hundreds of pages of e-mails and meeting records that reveal the backroom negotiations between industry and the EPA as they worked to devise a CAFO-friendly air-regulation program.

The documents, first exposed May 16 in a Chicago Tribune article by Andrew Martin, reveal that the latest draft of the program [PDF], which the EPA intends to release this summer, is remarkably similar to the program proposal [PDF] submitted to EPA in June 2002 by a lawyer and a lobbyist for the Ag Air Group. There's also evidence that EPA officials used a PowerPoint presentation drafted by an industry lobbyist as they explained the proposed air-monitoring program at a National Pork Producers Council meeting last year.

What's the program all about? As enviros see it, the factory-farm industry realized it was a sitting duck, out of compliance with Clean Air Act rules and a prime target for lawsuits, so it approached the EPA with a deal that would stem the threat of litigation. Industry people freely admit concerns about lawsuits: "We don't want to face haphazard, expensive lawsuits," said Richard Schwartz, a lawyer for the Ag Air Group. "It's like being struck by lightning -- that's how random it is."

The program would insulate CAFOs from clean-air enforcement efforts if they volunteer to participate in a two-year monitoring program to measure their air emissions. In 2007, they would be asked to come into compliance with the Clean Air Act during a 120-day "cure period" -- essentially having bought a couple of years of extra time to clean up their acts.

Industry and EPA officials characterize the program as a way to gather emissions data that can be used down the road to create a solid regulatory program; they point out that current methods for measuring CAFOs' emissions are rudimentary and not standardized, so study in this area is needed. "We need standards that will level the playing field and do away with these uncertainties," said Schwartz.

Enviros agree on the need to formulate better standards, but they argue that the EPA doesn't need to cozy up to industry in the process. "The EPA has fully within its authority the power to order the production of air-quality data at each facility that's conducted with a single, standard, government-controlled test, without entering into a deal with industry," said Sierra Club attorney Barclay Rogers, who led the FOIA request.

To take part in the program, a company would be asked to pay a "penalty" (or as critics call it, an "admissions fee") of between $200 and $1,000 per factory farm, depending on the size and number of farms it owns, plus a flat per-factory fee of $2,500 to fund monitoring efforts.

"That's a pittance compared to the statutory penalties available under the Clean Air Act, which are $27,500 per day of violation," said Rogers.

Schwartz made no bones about the program's potential advantages to industry in -- where else? -- Pork magazine. "[Y]ou can view it as a very cheap insurance policy," he's quoted as saying in a May 7 article.

However, he told Muckraker that the program was a reflection of industry's charitable inclinations -- not the EPA's. "To my knowledge, this is the first time industry has gone out of its way to pay for a study to determine its own emissions," he said. "It is extraordinary, that's for sure!"

The EPA did not respond to Muckraker's request for comment.

Rogers is hopeful that the EPA will decide against formally implementing the program, but if the agency goes forward with it, "of course we'll contemplate the appropriate legal actions," he said.

Damnit...

The sploggers don't bother me overly much. They come, they post random foolish things, and Jason makes said things go away. Fine. But just now I accidentally clicked on the linked name of one of them, and it sent me to a site titled, roughly, "pre-teen sex," or some such thing. The problem? I'm at work. In the hospital. Where they aggressively track all web traffic because so much patient data flows around here. Huzzah!

For the love of Jesus

I saw an ad for this on the train the other day and had to look. Nothing exciting, just another format for the "I'm too good/nervous/pretty/ugly/smart/special for the typical singles scene, so I'm going to try this!"

stupid snl

was that jimmy fallon's last show or is he no longer doing weekend update? also, how awful were those damn olsen twins? blech.

Woman Without Part of Skull for Months

Now I know we pretty much all agree on the issue of healthcare. Most of us have been without insurance for some period of time and now how precarious it feels. I don't expect this article to spark much debate... but its a really good example of what's wrong in our medical system.

MIDVALE, Utah - After a lot of red tape, Briana Lane has her skull back in one piece. The 22-year-old woman was injured in an auto accident in January, and doctors temporarily removed nearly half her skull to save her life.
[whole article]

Spoofed

Has anyone else seen this yet?

Kickball and Butterburgers: Healthy Lifestyle Choices

I ate a children's meal at Culvers today, and noticed that the current promotion is to save up points to get a kickball. Or other stuff. But I was excited about the kickball.

So even though they're smaller than WAKA size, it's a sweet kickball. For 10 points. And you get two points per meal (if you sacrifice your right to a scoop of frozen custard.)

There really isn't a point to this entry, other than to note the rise of kickball playin' and whatnot.

Please don't drive drunk

I want to tell you all a story, so gather round children:

Jenny and I drove to Iowa on Monday to get our marriage license for our upcoming nutptials. We met Dan Stevenson and he witnessed it and it was rather easy....

So we drive out to Montezuma, Iowa and return. Way tooo much time in the car...but we finally make it back to Chicago around 8:30 PM. Couldn't find parking near the apartment, so I circle around to look for some parking.

As we're doing this...I see a van backing up out of a driveway. I stop a good length away and start honking, to let him know I"m there and to stop backing up. Nothing...

I lean on my horn for like what seems like half a minute, but must have been shorter. The bastard ROLLS up and crushes our front left quarter, totally flattening our tire. Then, he's obviously on a bump or something, so he gives it more gas, starts squealing the tires, smoke coming up. Finally, we get out, he gets out, the cops come. Turns out he has no license and no insurance and can't speak English and the only ID he has on him is from Mexico. To get the trifecta for being an asshole, he's either drunk or high from what the cops can tell. They take him away and I change a tire and now our insurance willl cover it, which is good.

So please, don't drive backwards down one way streets while too drunk/stoned to hear someone laying on their horn. Be safe. And did I mention I'm glad he's in jail?

Someone has recorded the sound of "passing gas"

I'll Buy It Now! No, Thanks!

Let me ask you a question

A couple of my friends and I were on the platform of the Chicago stop of the Red Line and a strange topic arose. Someone mentioned how bizarre it is that the sparks that happen underneath the train also occur in FRONT of the train, i.e., before the wheels make contact with the track. Someone else said that this is an impossibility. I then took a gander at the approaching train and really didn't see what my friend was talking about, concluding for the moment that if that was what he saw, then it was just an optical illusion--a combination of the train being far away and it being dark.

So the question is: who's on crack here? Is my friend crazy, or am I crazy? Is it possible for blue sparks to fly from a track with which no contact is being made by an outside object (the wheels of the train)? If so, what would cause this occurrence? Or is it an optical illusion? OR, is it no illusion at all, just general delerium?

Help.

Sigh... the hegemony continues

From the NY Times. The rest of the article is below, too, if you don't wanna register.

WASHINGTON, May 4 — The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday.

The film, "Fahrenheit 911," links Mr. Bush and prominent Saudis — including the family of Osama bin Laden — and criticizes Mr. Bush's actions before and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Disney, which bought Miramax more than a decade ago, has a contractual agreement with the Miramax principals, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, allowing it to prevent the company from distributing films under certain circumstances, like an excessive budget or an NC-17 rating.

Executives at Miramax, who became principal investors in Mr. Moore's project last spring, do not believe that this is one of those cases, people involved in the production of the film said. If a compromise is not reached, these people said, the matter could go to mediation, though neither side is said to want to travel that route.

In a statement, Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for Miramax, said: "We're discussing the issue with Disney. We're looking at all of our options and look forward to resolving this amicably."

But Disney executives indicated that they would not budge from their position forbidding Miramax to be the distributor of the film in North America. Overseas rights have been sold to a number of companies, executives said.
"We advised both the agent and Miramax in May of 2003 that the film would not be distributed by Miramax," said Zenia Mucha, a company spokeswoman, referring to Mr. Moore's agent. "That decision stands."

Disney came under heavy criticism from conservatives last May after the disclosure that Miramax had agreed to finance the film when Icon Productions, Mel Gibson's company, backed out.

Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor.

"Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn't mean I listened to him," Mr. Emanuel said. "He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that's why he didn't want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn't want a Disney company involved."

Disney executives deny that accusation, though they said their displeasure over the deal was made clear to Miramax and Mr. Emanuel.

A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax's distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore's film is deemed to be against Disney's interests not because of the company's business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore's film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.

"It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle," this executive said.

Miramax is free to seek another distributor in North America, but such a deal would force it to share profits and be a blow to Harvey Weinstein, a big donor to Democrats.

Mr. Moore, who will present the film at the Cannes film festival this month, criticized Disney's decision in an interview on Tuesday, saying, "At some point the question has to be asked, `Should this be happening in a free and open society where the monied interests essentially call the shots regarding the information that the public is allowed to see?' "

Mr. Moore's films, like "Roger and Me" and "Bowling for Columbine," are often a political lightning rod, as Mr. Moore sets out to skewer what he says are the misguided priorities of conservatives and big business. They have also often performed well at the box office. His most recent movie, "Bowling for Columbine," took in about $22 million in North America for United Artists. His books, like "Stupid White Men," a jeremiad against the Bush administration that has sold more than a million copies, have also been lucrative.

Mr. Moore does not disagree that "Fahrenheit 911" is highly charged, but he took issue with the description of it as partisan. "If this is partisan in any way it is partisan on the side of the poor and working people in this country who provide fodder for this war machine," he said.

Mr. Moore said the film describes financial connections between the Bush family and its associates and prominent Saudi Arabian families that go back three decades. He said it closely explores the government's role in the evacuation of relatives of Mr. bin Laden from the United States immediately after the 2001 attacks. The film includes comments from American soldiers on the ground in Iraq expressing disillusionment with the war, he said.

Mr. Moore once planned to produce the film with Mr. Gibson's company, but "the project wasn't right for Icon," said Alan Nierob, an Icon spokesman, adding that the decision had nothing to do with politics.

Miramax stepped in immediately. The company had distributed Mr. Moore's 1997 film, "The Big One." In return for providing most of the new film's $6 million budget, Miramax was positioned to distribute it.

While Disney's objections were made clear early on, one executive said the Miramax leadership hoped it would be able to prevail upon Disney to sign off on distribution, which would ideally happen this summer, before the election and when political interest is high.

sufficently creepy

link

Lab creates babies as stem-cell donors

May 4, 2004 | CHICAGO (AP) -- In a growing practice that troubles some ethicists, a Chicago laboratory helped create five healthy babies so that they could serve as stem-cell donors for their ailing brothers and sisters.

The made-to-order infants, from different families, were screened and selected when they were still embryos to make sure they would be compatible donors. Their siblings suffered from leukemia or a rare and potentially lethal anemia.

This is the first time embryo tissue-typing has been done for common disorders like leukemia that are not inherited, and the results suggest that many more children than previously thought could benefit from the technology, said Dr. Anver Kuliev, a Chicago doctor who participated in the research.

"This technology has wide implications in medical practice," Kuliev said Tuesday at a news conference.

The Chicago doctors said the healthy embryos that were not matches were frozen for potential future use. But some ethicists said such perfectly healthy embryos could end up being discarded.

"This was a search-and-destroy mission," said Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The chosen embryos "were allowed to be born so they could donate tissue to benefit someone else."

Valparaiso University professor Gilbert Meilaender, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, called the practice "morally troubling."

The council recently called for increased scrutiny of the largely unregulated U.S. infertility industry.

The cases involved prenatal tests called pre-implantation HLA testing, pioneered at Chicago's Reproductive Genetics Institute.

The tests are an offshoot of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which has been done for more than 1,000 couples worldwide to weed out test-tube embryos with genetic diseases such as Down syndrome, or, more recently, for sex selection.

The institute's doctors made headlines four years ago after performing embryo tissue typing plus genetic disease screening for a Colorado couple who wanted to create another baby to save their daughter, who had a rare inherited disease called Fanconi anemia. The resulting baby boy, Adam Nash, donated bone marrow in an operation doctors said was a success.

Since then, embryo tissue typing with genetic disease testing has been performed more than three dozen times worldwide, with most of the cases done at the Chicago institute, Kuliev said.

Kuliev said the latest cases are the first instances in which embryos were tissue-typed but not screened genetically for diseases.

The cases, reported in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association, involved nine couples who submitted embryos that underwent tissue-typing tests during 2002 and 2003. Five had infants considered suitable donors.

So far, stem cells from the umbilical cord blood of one infant have been donated to an ailing sibling, Kuliev said. He called the operation a success but said the older child will need continued monitoring to be sure.

Another baby was born last June to an English couple who traveled to Chicago after British fertility authorities denied them permission to undergo the procedure in England, said Dr. Mohammed Taranissi, a London doctor who co-authored the JAMA report. The couple's older child has Diamond-Blackfan anemia, a rare blood ailment that can lead to leukemia. Taranissi said a transplant from the baby boy's umbilical cord blood is scheduled soon.

Kuliev said the institute has done HLA embryo testing alone for more than a dozen other couples and demand is growing.

More than 13,000 U.S. residents are diagnosed yearly with one of the leukemias involved in the research – acute myeloid leukemia and acute lymphoid leukemia, the most common childhood leukemia.

Taranissi disagreed with ethicists concerned about discarding disease-free embryos. He noted that it often happens with in vitro fertilization, when doctors frequently create more test-tube embryos than are needed.

With tissue-typing embryos, "you're doing this as a lifesaving procedure most of the time," Taranissi said.

For years, families with sick children have conceived babies without costly test-tube procedures, taking a 1-in-4 chance that the child will be a match for the ailing sibling, said University of Wisconsin medical ethicist Norman Fost, who wrote a JAMA editorial.

Some have had abortions when standard prenatal testing showed the child would not be a suitable donor, he said.

The new procedure, he noted, does not involve abortion and poses no known risks to the embryos. Furthermore, parents seeking donor babies typically are well-intentioned and love the donor children, Fost said.

"Of all the reasons people have babies, this would seem to be a wonderful reason. Most reasons are either mindless sex or selfish reasons," he said.

"The Fallen"

Did anyone catch the Nightline episode called "The Fallen" on Friday? I think it was Friday anyway...where Koppel read the names and showed the faces of the 721 Americans that have died in Iraq?

I watched and was moved. I couldn't stop thinking how much that sucks for the families behind those names.

I was wondering what you kids thought about it. Koppel came on at the end and stated very clearly that it wasn't about pro or anti war positions, but just an honest accounting of the price that we've paid. I dig non-partisan shit like this. Word to Koppel.

Big Brother?

How do you y'all feel about GMail. I can't really decide if it's such a bad thing, but I think I'm drawn to the 1 gig of free email storage for life. Besides, I've grown accustom to disregarding those pesky ads on the sides of web pages.

With my new G Mail account please avoid the following phrases:
What's up Limp Dick? - Viagra ads
Sorry to hear about your leaking ass. - Pepto Bismal ads

you get the idea.

Geek notes

Anyone know a good app for converting .wma and other files to mp3?

For Mac OSX, of course.