Daily Archives: 23 May 05
. . . And Fear of the Unknown
Michael Kinsley, who has Parkinson’s Disease, on the Korean stem cell breakthrough:
“Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, greeted this thrilling news with his usual fatuous call for a ‘moratorium’ on the research that produced it while we think through the morality and all that. Kass seems to imagine bioethics researchers beavering away toward a moral breakthrough even as scientists beaver away at a medical one. All he asks is for the scientists to take a break and let the bioethicists catch up.
But no crash research program is going to produce some dazzling bioethical principle we never thought of before. We know all that we’re going to know about the moral issues, and we just have to decide. There are three issues…” (Washington Post )
BTW, here is a page that will remind you of the many notables who have made their Parkinson’s Disease diagnoses public.
Sek Man Ng’s Xanga Site
This shy 18 year-old Queens College (NY) student and his older sister were murdered last week by his sister’s ex-boyfriend, who was implicated in the crime by Ng’s last weblog entry, written on May 12th while his killer waited in the other room. “Hopefully he will leave soon…” Here is New York Daily News coverage. At Ng’s site, hundreds of readers left comments to the post expressing their condolences to him and his sister for their murder.
Leave My Child Alone!
I have written about this provision of NCBA before. It is good to see someone organizing around it:
“Did you know that the infernal Leave No Child Behind Act has a sneaky Pete section requiring high schools to turn over student information to military recruiters?
1. SIGN ON as a citizen co-sponsor of US Representative Mike Honda’s Student Privacy Protection Act.
2. OPT OUT your own child, or learn how the process works so you can tell your friends.
3. ADOPT-A-SCHOOL-BOARD by downloading the Working Assets AASB toolkit: everything you need to know to help your local schools do it right.
4. ATTEND A HOUSE PARTY or Meetup with Leave My Child Alone actions on Wednesday, June 1st.
5. SEND an email to friends and family telling them how to Opt Out.” (A Family Privacy Project of Working Assets, the MMOB, and ACORN)
1. SIGN ON as a citizen co-sponsor of US Representative Mike Honda’s Student Privacy Protection Act.
2. OPT OUT your own child, or learn how the process works so you can tell your friends.
3. ADOPT-A-SCHOOL-BOARD by downloading the Working Assets AASB toolkit: everything you need to know to help your local schools do it right.
4. ATTEND A HOUSE PARTY or Meetup with Leave My Child Alone actions on Wednesday, June 1st.
5. SEND an email to friends and family telling them how to Opt Out.” (A Family Privacy Project of Working Assets, the MMOB, and ACORN)
