"It's catching on because people
are choosing to have kids later, and their dogs are really their first
baby," says the course's creator, Jennifer Shryock of Cary, N.C., who
sells it to trainers for $300.
Dogs bite about 4.7 million people a
year in the U.S., the majority of them children, according to the American
Veterinary Medical Association. Bonnie Beaver, a Texas vet and past president
of the group, says that of the 15 to 20 people a year who die from dog bites,
about 80% are children.
Ms. Shryock tells expectant parents,
"When the baby comes, you are going to look at your dog for the first time
as an animal. You will feel different about Fluffy."
That came as a shock to Tracy Fuquay,
of Raleigh, N.C. For six years, her Shih-poo, Marcy, was the family princess:
She traveled in a purse, dressed in colorful sweaters, sundresses or a denim
jacket with heart sequins. When Ms. Fuquay graduated from the Raleigh School of
Nurse Anesthesia in August 2006, Marcy wore a cap and gown.
In the eighth month of her pregnancy,
Ms. Fuquay finally started saying no to Marcy. The dog was no longer allowed to
ride in Ms. Fuquay's lap as she drove, and was banned from her bed. The result:
"Marcy became racked with anxiety." http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com
Things got worse after baby Leah's
birth in December. Marcy now often cowers, and she urinates on the rugs.
"I'm cleaning as much dog pee as I am changing diapers," the new mom
says. "My husband is ready to give the dog away, but I can't."
She paid Ms. Shryock $160 for a
two-hour house call. The result was a sobering assessment: "Because Marcy
was used to being treated as 'the baby' for years, she will have a more
difficult time and longer adjustment time to learn that she is not the only one
needing attention."
Christopher Reggio, a publisher of
pet-care books, says demand for prenatal dog prep is rising because "dogs
today are real family members. They aren't 'owned' by people, they're
'parented' by people." His TFH Publications Inc. in Neptune, N.J., last
year released "And Baby Makes Four: A Trimester-by-Trimester Guide to a
Baby-Friendly Dog."
Natalie Rivkin is in the final days of
her third trimester. But in her mind she's already been a mom for nearly six
years -- to Luca, her chocolate Lab. "My schedule is built around her.
When she's sick, I worry," says the high-school math teacher in Boston.
One recent day, Luca watched as Ms.
Rivkin reached into her sport-utility vehicle, gently lifted a plastic doll in
a blue "onesie" from the infant car seat and buckled it into a new
stroller, then began pushing the stroller and doll through a local arboretum.
"Hey, that's not a real
baby," yelled a passing runner. It was hard to know what Luca thought; she
was busy nibbling grass.
Ms. Rivkin was doing her homework for
Barks & Babies, a seminar taught to 10 couples at a local maternity store.
Her instructor, Jenifer Vickery, owner of the Pawsitive Dog in Boston, suggests
practicing with a fake baby four weeks before mom's due date. Other prebirth
strategies: ignoring the dog more, and scenting dog toys with almond oil to
distinguish them from baby toys.
Like older siblings, dogs can act out
when stressed by a change like a new baby, trainers say. Barking, biting and
soiling the house can all happen if dogs get less attention and exercise,
feeling sidelined.
"It's harder to be a dog
today," says Sue Sternberg of Accord, N.Y., a trainer and specialist in
testing dogs' temperaments.
Not necessarily, though, for Phoebe
and Zack, two large members of the Joe and Joelle Coretti household in Milford,
Conn. Phoebe is an 85-pound golden retriever, and Zack, a German shepherd,
weighs in at 120 pounds. "I was nervous about how big they were and how
they might think the baby was a toy to play with," Ms. Coretti says.
"But I was also nervous -- since they were our first babies -- that they
might have some issues with the new baby. I wanted the dogs to feel they were
still part of the family."
Ms. Coretti went to a Dogs &
Storks Seminar and picked up some training tips. After she gave birth last
year, her husband brought home the baby's T-shirt and cap for the dogs to
sniff. Baby Kyle, age 1, now plays with the giant dogs, "who," Ms.
Coretti adds, "still sleep in our bed."
Lynda Vanderhoven of Boston practiced
relegating Bailey, her yellow Labrador puppy, to his "doggie den" in the
house so she would be able to attend to her new son, Sam, when necessary. One
difference between her two "babies," she says, is that the dog
"can be legally locked in a crate."
By the time Susie Flaherty gave birth
in 2006, her pit bull and Labrador mix, Rudy, had completed dozens of private
and group classes. But it was hard for her and her husband to impose limits on
Rudy, who'd been abused as a puppy. "He was our first child, and he was
such a loving dog," she says. "Our need for the love and comfort he
provided...made us inconsistent -- when we needed it, we had him up on the
couch with us."
Shortly after her son, Angus, was
born, Ms. Flaherty, a personal trainer in South Boston, couldn't cope. Unable
to cuddle Rudy while breast-feeding around the clock, "I felt horribly
guilty," she says.
She gave the dog to her childless
brother in San Francisco. Rudy recently got a Facebook page so he can keep in
touch.
As for Meridith Duffy and her husband,
Keith, a marketing executive, they continue to send Haley, their female pit
bull, to anger-management class. It seems to have worked. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com
"People think you're crazy to
have a pit bull in the first place," Mr. Duffy says. "But now the dog
lies down and the baby pokes her in the eye and pulls her ears, and she just
takes it." A second Duffy baby is due June 7.
Michael Price has made millions buying
shares in battered financial stocks. But he isn't buying Wachovia Corp. And the
bank's dumping of its chief executive doesn't change his mind.
Mr. Price, who led the Mutual Series
funds group and later sold it to Franklin Templeton Investments, isn't one who
delights in piling on to wounded financial firms.
[Chart]
In the family portfolio that Mr. Price
now runs, MFP Investors, he has sold Wachovia shares short, meaning he makes a
profit if the stock declines. The reasons for Mr. Price's bearish bet: He said
Wachovia is going to book much higher credit losses on its holdings of
adjustable-rate mortgages.
As a result, Wachovia, which raised $8
billion in fresh capital in April after raising a combined $5.8 billion by
selling preferred shares in December and February, will have to do another big
round of fund raising, Mr. Price said.
"They are going to have to come
back to the market and raise more money," he said.
During this credit crunch, plenty of
investors have tried picking the bottom on names like Wachovia, only to see the
stocks hit another low as the lenders reported more bad news.
But Mr. Price uses the balance sheet
to get an idea of where the floor might be.
Put simply, he takes a bank's common
equity -- the net worth available to common stockholders -- and slices and
dices it to come up with a price target. Mr. Price has used this approach to
buy shares recently in Sovereign Bancorp Inc., another lender that got hit hard
in the mortgage crisis.
At Wachovia, removing goodwill and other
intangible assets, as well as preferred shares, gets to a book value of about
$14.80 a share, after the most recent capital raise. That is well below
Wachovia's closing price Monday of $23.40, down 1.7%, or 40 cents, in 4 p.m.
New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
But Mr. Price notes that Wachovia
deserves some credit in this calculation for its low-interest-rate deposits,
for which potential acquirers likely would pay a premium. Assuming a 5% premium
on the bank's $278 billion of low-interest-rate deposits, $6.60 a share would
have to be added to the $14.80 a share in book value. This gets to an
approximate share-price target of $21.40, not that far below Monday's close.
But the bank has $121.2 billion of
adjustable-rate mortgages, most of which were taken onto its balance sheet when
it acquired Golden West Financial Corp. Any value calculation for Wachovia has
to take into account the losses the bank likely will have to book as it builds
its loan-loss reserve against defaults on these mortgages.
Mr. Price believes a new CEO at
Wachovia likely would be more aggressive in recognizing the ARM problems.
"More losses are coming. They need to fess up," he said.
The financial pain from doing that
could be intense. At the end of March, the loan-loss reserve for Wachovia's
adjustable-rate mortgages was equivalent to 1.55% of the $121.2 billion total,
which looks too low given how fast they are going bad.
If Mr. Price is right, Wachovia's
share price is wrong.
'Breakfast at Citi' for Vikram Pandit
Vikram Pandit must feel like Holly
Golightly staring into the windows of Tiffany's in "Breakfast at
Tiffany's." Wachovia and Washington Mutual Inc. are sitting behind the
glass, ripe for the taking. Though both are somewhat tarnished, they each would
solve Citigroup Inc.'s need for a big deposit base that would serve as a source
of cheap funding.
[But Mr. Pandit likely will remain on
the sidewalk since Citigroup isn't in the position to do any kind of deal.
That leaves J.P. Morgan Chase &
Co. CEO James Dimon, who has made no secret that he wants to expand in the
Southeast, which argues for Wachovia, and has already bid for WaMu. But Mr.
Dimon would have a tough time pulling off a deal.
First, J.P. Morgan is busy integrating
Bear Stearns, though in terms of size and cost, Bear isn't significant enough
to keep J.P. Morgan from trying to do another deal. The bigger roadblocks are
price and accounting. Neither bank's board likely would make a deal without a
significant premium given the banks' low valuations, as well as the big recent
capital raisings each has completed.
J.P. Morgan could pay the premium, but
it would need to be pretty steep because an acquirer would have to mark to
market the acquiree's entire balance sheet. According to Merrill Lynch &
Co., that would add at least $15 billion to $20 billion to the purchase price.
That might be too much for Mr. Dimon
to stomach. As for Mr. Pandit, he will be staring at the diamonds in the window
for a long time to come. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com
Pancho is a long, small dog with big
ears who was adopted from the Berkeley Humane Society in 2003. Everyone who
meets him has her own guess at Poncho's mysterious parentage: a terrier mix, a
little pit bull, or perhaps a Chihuahua-pit bull mix, otherwise known as a Chia
pit?
Sixty-five dollars and a simple swab
of the inside of the cheek could finally solve that riddle. A new genetic test,
marketed by Maryland-based MetaMorphix, can determine a dog's mix of breeds
with 90 percent accuracy. The company has processed thousands of tests since
the product went on the market in February, CEO Edwin Quattlebaum said at the
Biotechnology Industry Convention in Boston earlier this week.
Because many canine diseases are
linked to particular breeds, the results could help owners make health
decisions about their dogs. The test has also garnered interest from animal
shelters: shelter employees say that being able to provide a bit of a dog's
"back story" encourages people to adopt. "Owners get a kick out
of knowing the heritage of their dogs," says Quattlebaum.
The test assesses genetic markers
known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. Each breed--the test can
currently detect 38 of the most common--has a different SNP profile. The test
is made possible by massive efforts to sequence the genome of different breeds
of dogs, such as the dog genome project.
MetaMorphix, which also does genetic
testing for the American Kennel Club, is now starting to use its canine DNA
database to hunt for genetic variations linked to diseases. Its first target is
chronic hip dysplasia, a degenerative joint disease most often seen in large
breeds, such as German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, rottweilers, Great
Danes, and golden retrievers. "Eventually, people buying dogs could use
this test to ensure their dog is not predisposed to this disease," says
Quattlebaum. "And breeders could use it to try to breed [that variation]
out of their dogs."
Victoria Jaschob, Pancho's devoted
human companion, says that she's thought about ordering the test. But for now,
"we just use the generic term 'Pancho dog' to describe any small, long dog
with short legs and big ears," she says. "There's a million of them
out there."
We all bristle at people who put
themselves ahead of the common good, whether it is by evading taxes, shirking
military service, cheating on bus fares or littering. Many of us will go out of
our way to shame, shun or otherwise punish them, researchers have shown. That's
how we foster a community that benefits everyone, even at some cost to
ourselves.
Economists analyzing ingredients of
the social glue that holds us all together wonder whether that public spirit of
rebuke and reward is an innate human value or a byproduct of the particular
society in which we live. Until recently, however, they rarely have reached
across cultural boundaries to compare how people in disparate communities
actually weigh private gain against public good.
In the most sweeping global study yet
of cooperation, a team of experimental economists tested university students in
15 countries to see how people contribute to joint ventures and what happens to
them when they don't. The European research team discovered startling
differences in how groups around the world react when punishment is handed out
for antisocial behavior.
WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz speaks to Kelsey
Hubbard about an important study that looked at how people responded to peer
pressure in cooperative ventures across many societies.
In some countries, researchers found,
almost no good turn went unpunished. "What kept popping up is this element
of retaliation," said economist Benedikt Herrmann at the U.K.'s University
of Nottingham, who reported the experiment this past March in Science. "It
took us by surprise." http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
Among students in the U.S.,
Switzerland, China and the U.K., those identified as freeloaders most often
took their punishment as a spur to contribute more generously. But in Oman,
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Greece and Russia, the freeloaders more often struck
back, retaliating against those who punished them, even against those who had
given most to everyone's benefit. It was akin to rapping the knuckles of the
helping hand.
To explore cooperation across
cultures, Dr. Herrmann and his colleagues recruited 1,120 college students in
16 cities around the globe for a public-good game. The exercise is one of
several devised by economists in recent years to distill the complex variables
of human behavior into transactions simple enough to be studied under
controlled laboratory conditions.
The volunteers played in anonymous
groups of four. Each player started with 20 tokens that could be redeemed for
cash after 10 rounds. Players could contribute tokens to a common account or
keep them all to themselves.
After each round, the pooled funds
paid a dividend shared equally by all, even those who didn't contribute.
Previous research shows that a single selfish individual riding on the
generosity of others can so irritate other players that contributions soon drop
to nothing.
That changes when players can identify
and punish those who don't contribute (in this case, by deducting points that
can quickly add up to serious money). Once such peer pressure comes into play,
everyone -- including the shamed freeloader -- starts to chip in.
"Freeloaders are disliked
everywhere," said study co-author Simon Gachter, who studies economic
decision-making at Nottingham. "Cooperation always breaks down if people
can't punish."
The students behaved the same way in
all 16 cities until given the chance to punish those taking a free ride on the
shared investment. Punishment was done anonymously, and it cost one token to
discipline another player.
[Science Journal reading]
Studying peer pressure in 15
countries, economist Benedikt Herrmann at the UK's University of Nottingham
reported on "Antisocial Punishment Across Societies"3 in Science.
The researchers also ranked the
national responses against the World Values Survey4, which periodically
assesses values and cultural changes in societies all over the world.
Searching for the origins of economic
behavior, an international research team studied 15 primitive cultures in 12
countries and reported their findings in
"In Search of Homo Economicus:
Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies"5
We may be hard-wired to care about
social standing, scientists at the US National Institute of Mental Health
reported in "Know Your Place: Neural Processing of Social Hierarchy in
Humans."6
At Japan's National Institute for
Psychological Sciences, researchers reported in "Processing of Social and
Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum"7 that reputation activates the
same brain areas as money.
Free-market philosopher Adam Smith,
author in 1776 of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations8 wrote first in 1759 on praise, blame, ethics and human nature in The
Theory of Moral Sentiments9.
Among those punished, differences
emerged immediately. Students in Seoul, Istanbul, Minsk in Belarus, Samara in
Russia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Athens, and Muscat in Oman were most likely to
take revenge by deducting points from other players -- and to give up a token
themselves to do it.
"They didn't believe they did
anything wrong," said economist Herbert Gintis at New Mexico's Santa Fe
Institute. And because the spiteful freeloaders had no way of knowing who had
punished them, they often took out their ire on those who helped others most,
suspecting they must be to blame.
Such a readiness to retaliate,
researchers said, reflected relatively lower levels of trust, civic cooperation
and the rule of law as measured by social scientists in the World Values
Survey, which periodically assesses basic values and beliefs in more than 80
societies. In countries with democratic market economies, peer pressure goaded
people to cooperate. Among authoritarian societies or those dominated more by
ties of kinship, freeloaders instead lashed out at those who censured them, the
researchers found.
"The question is why?" said
Harvard political economist Richard Zeckhauser.
No one is sure. The freeloaders might
be angry at being trumped by strangers, or be unwilling to share with people
they don't know. They also might believe they are being treated unfairly.
But social appearances and the good
opinion of others do regulate our behavior. In the only other major cross-cultural
study of this sort, Dr. Gintis and his colleagues several years ago examined 15
primitive societies of farmers, foragers, hunters and nomads in 12 countries,
not unlike those in which humanity might have first evolved. The researchers
found that these people all cared as much about fairness as the economic
outcome of a trade. "They care about the ethical value of what they
do," said Dr. Gintis.
Independent brain-imaging teams in
Japan and the U.S. have shown just how valuable approval can be, as they
reported in April in Neuron. Researchers at Japan's National Institute for
Psychological Sciences found that when they watched the brain respond to
reputation and social status, the excited synapses looked awfully familiar:
They were the same ones activated by money.
Kapustin Yar is a Russian rocket
launch and development site in the Astrakhan Oblast, between Volgograd and
Astrakhan in the town of Znamensk. It was established 13 May 1946 and in its
beginning used technology, material, and scientific support from the defeated
Germany. The first rocket was launched on October 18, 1947. It was one of
eleven German A-4s (the V-2 rocket) that had been captured. Numerous test
rockets for the Russian military, satellite and sounding rocket launches were
also carried out at the site.
The 4th Missile Test Range
"Kapustin Yar" was established by a decree of the Soviet Government
"On Questions of Jet Propelled Weapons" on the 13th May 1946. The
test range was created under the supervision of General-lieutenant Vasily
Voznyuk (commander in chief of the test range 1946-1973) in the desert north
end of the Astrakhan region.
The State R&D Test Range No 8
(GNIIP-8, "test range S") was established at Kapustin Yar in June
1951.
Five air nuclear tests of small power
(10-40 kt) were performed over the site in 1957-1961 [1].
With the further growth and
development, the site became a cosmodrome and served in this function since
1966 (with interruption in 1988-1998). A new town was established, Znamensk, to
support the scientists working on the facilities, their families and supporting
personnel. Initially this was a secret city, not to be found on map and
inaccessible to outsiders.
Evidence of the importance of Kapustin
Yar was obtained by Western intelligence through debriefing of returning German
scientists and spy flights. The first such flight took place in 1953 using a
high flying Canberra aircraft from the RAF.
Kapustin Yar is also the site of
numerous Soviet-era UFO sightings and has been called "Russia's
Roswell".
It's Tuesday and we're having dinner
in a cavernous fish place in Washington Harbour. It's been a couple of days
since Mr. Nader – again an independent candidate for president in this year's
election – demanded the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
"You must be the only man in America," I say to him, "who has
called for the impeachment of Bush and Bill Clinton."
Mr. Nader laughs, his face breaking
briefly into good cheer. "I'm a little bit more insistent with Bush and
Cheney. I think Clinton was terrible. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
But there's no comparison between him
and the more clinical high crimes and misdemeanors of Bush."
Would Al Gore have made a better
president than George Bush? "Yes," says Mr. Nader, looking, for all
the world, as if I'd asked him the silliest question. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
"Bush is the worst president
we've ever had – in terms of damage to the nation, and incapacity."
So does he regret that his own run for
president in 2000, as the Green Party's candidate, might – as Democratic
demonology would have it – have cost Al Gore the White House? "No . . . If
the premise is that we have an equal right to run for election, no one's a
'spoiler' – unless we're all 'spoilers' of one another. So when they say, 'You
cost Gore the election,' I say, 'I thought Bush took more votes from
Gore.'"
This subject gets Mr. Nader quite
indignant. "The smartest people," he continues – leaving a forkful of
halibut with tequila-lime sauce unattended – "people like Larry Tribe,
descend to a subelementary level of analysis when it comes to the results, and
the tallies. If I ask them, 'Do you think Gore won the 2000 elections?' and
they say 'Yes,' I say 'Well, who took it away from him? Was it Katherine Harris
and Jeb Bush and the five Republican politicians on the U.S. Supreme Court?
Well then, why don't you go after them? Why are you picking on the Green Party?'"
Here, Mr. Nader observes tartly that
if Mr. Gore had carried his own state, Tennessee, and if "a quarter of a
million Democrats hadn't voted for Bush in Florida," his Green Party run
wouldn't have figured so prominently in the "Democrat Party's"
arithmetic of betrayal. (Mr. Nader and I spoke for over two hours, and not once
did he say "Democratic Party." Many Democrats would regard his usage,
more common among Republicans, as a political slur.) http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com
"The Democrats," he
continues, "hadn't been challenged from my side of the political spectrum
since Henry Wallace," FDR's vice-president, who ran for president in 1948
as the nominee of the Progressive Party. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
"They're not used to third-party
challenges, while the Republicans are challenged by the Libertarians all the
time. So they still scapegoat the Green Party, instead of looking in the mirror
and asking, 'Why didn't we landslide this bumbling governor from Texas?' And
that's what they've been doing for eight years!
"Some of them even tried to
ascribe Kerry's loss in 2004 to me, and I say, 'Wait a minute, Kerry lost by
three million votes' . . . And he lost Ohio without my help, because the
Democrats sued us: they got us off the ballot in Ohio, as they did in other
states."
Mr. Nader, never lost for a fact or
figure, points out that the "Democrat National Committee filed 24 lawsuits
in 18 states in 12 weeks in '04 to get us off the ballot." http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
It's halfway through our bottle of
Cabernet that the subject of Sen. Obama comes up. I ask Mr. Nader: Why run
against him when he's carrying a progressive reform banner into the campaign?
"He isn't," is the swift riposte.
"I think the central issue in
politics in this country is the domination of corporations over our government,
and over our elections, and over so many things where commercial values used to
be verboten . . . I mean, they're commercializing childhood, they're
commercializing universities. What's happened in the last 25 years is an
overwhelming swarm of commercial supremacy, and he, Obama, has bought into
that."
I point out here that Mr. Obama has
opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, and said that he wants it
renegotiated; that he's chastised the Big Three in Detroit for opposing higher
CAFE standards; and that he emphasizes at every opportunity that he takes no
money from lobbyists. What does Mr. Nader think of that?
"You see, that's all permissible
populist rhetoric that the corporations understand and wink at. Look at who
gets the corporate money. Six out of seven industries giving money, through
PACs and individual executives, etc., are giving more money to the Democrats
than to the Republicans. I mean, John McCain's having trouble raising money,
even now.
"Obama's taking large money from
the securities industry, the health insurance industry . . . I've gotten used
to this ritual where the companies give Democrats this leeway, and say, 'Well,
Obama's gotta say that stuff, but he'll come around. There's no way he'll touch
Nafta or touch the WTO.'"
So is it all just a charade?
"Yes," says Mr. Nader, implacably, "a charade. His
health-insurance plan lets the health insurance companies continue their
redundant, wasteful, often corrupt – in terms of billing fraud – ways, ripping
off Medicare. My vice-presidential candidate, Matt Gonzalez, has written a
3,000-word tract on Obama that's on our Web site, VoteNader.org1. You should
read it."
I persist with Mr. Obama, pointing out
that a lot of Democrats would find it hard to accept Mr. Nader's
characterization of him as an agent of corporate America. After all, many
non-Democrats find Mr. Obama disconcertingly left wing.
"He's not an agent," Mr.
Nader grants, "but he moves in an environment that's conditioned by
corporate power. If he wins, you'll see his appointments in the Defense
department, the Treasury and so on, they'll be pretty much what the lobbies and
PACs want."
Mr. Nader is clear that he prefers Mr.
Obama to Hillary Clinton. "With her, we'll just get what Bill gave us. I
think she's like Bill Clinton. With Obama, there's the possibility of some
fresh start, just like Kennedy did the Peace Corps. You see, when Obama got out
of Harvard Law School, he went to work for a short period with a group I
started in New York, the New York Public Interest Research Group. Then he went
and did neighborhood work in Chicago, so it's not like he's coming off some corporate
mountain.
"But he's made up his mind to be
a very conciliatory, concessionary, adaptive politician to the reality of
corporate power. And people like him are told, 'Look, if you don't adhere to
certain parameters and expectations, you're going to have a hard time winning
any nomination or election.' And Obama's made his peace with that."
Proof of this, in Mr. Nader's view, is
Mr. Obama's position on Israel. "So many people in Chicago regaled him
because he was for Palestinian rights, a two-state solution. Now, he won't say
many things on behalf of the Palestinians. After a while, you get an idea of
his political character, his political personality. He's not a transforming
leader. He was not a transforming senator. He was not a challenging senator,
the way [the late Paul] Wellstone was."
What is it exactly that Mr. Nader
would like Barack Obama – and the Democratic Party – to do in order to be
kosher in his eyes? "Where do I start?" he asks with a twinkle.
"Labor reform, repealing Taft-Hartley. You see, the labor unions line up
in favor of the Democrat Party and they get nothing. For heaven's sake, they
went 'x' number of years without even adjusting the minimum wage to inflation.
I've never seen a less demanding organized labor movement, but what have the
Democrats given them?"
Mr. Nader wants an end to "lip
service" on Nafta and the WTO, and "better protection of individual
investors' rights, rights that corporate capitalism violates repeatedly."
On health care, "we believe in single-payer health, full Medicare for
all." He is also "opposed unalterably to nuclear power. We think the
country should go solar, in all of its different manifestations, including
passive solar architecture." The Democrats are a world away from that position.
http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com
There's more: Mr. Nader wants to slash
"the bloated, wasteful military budget. This thing is so out of control
that it's unauditable. But Obama wants to increase the military budget, which
is currently distorted away from soldiers and towards these giant weapons
systems, and keeping troops in Korea and Japan." And as for the tax
system, Mr. Nader wishes that the Democrats would adhere to his philosophy,
which is that "we should first tax things that we like the least, or
dislike the most, as a society, before we tax human labor, and necessities . .
. through a sales tax.
"So we should tax securities
speculation first, before we tax labor. If you go to a store and buy $1,000
worth of products, you pay a sales tax. You buy $1 million worth of
derivatives, you pay no sales tax!"
Has he had trouble getting his message
out to the American voter? Here, Mr. Nader shows a mild – and understandable –
flash of anger over being shut out of the televised presidential debates.
He is also critical of the media.
"Since I announced my run, I can't get on Charlie Rose. Or Diane Rehm or
Terry Gross [of NPR]. I haven't been on Jim Lehrer yet. I got on Wolf Blitzer
twice, on CNN. Fox News calls me more than anybody. They have the same
attitude, of course – 'Here comes the spoiler!' But how can you spoil something
that's spoiled already?
"I don't complain much publicly.
I've been told by a lot of the television bookers around the country, 'Ralph,
they don't like you.' So the door is shut. But I say to myself, 'Should we
close down and go to Monterey and watch the whales?' No. Better to fight when
you have a small chance, than to fight later when you have no chance at
all."
Those stirring last words are from
Winston Churchill, and Mr. Nader quotes the old conservative with relish – even
though his favorite British politician, he tells me, is Aneurin Bevan, the man
who gave Britain its National Health Service after World War II. Bevan and
Churchill were from different planets, and we chuckle at the incongruity of Mr.
Nader's rhetorical inspiration. Then we rise slowly from our table and leave –
I for my hotel room in Georgetown, and he for the battle that never ends.
Stem Cells found in most, if not all,
multi-cellular organisms. They are characterized by the ability to renew
themselves through mitotic cell division and differentiating into a diverse
range of specialized cell types. Research in the stem cell field grew out of
findings by Canadian scientists Ernest A. McCulloch and James E. Till in the
1960s. The two broad types of mammalian stem cells are: embryonic stem cells
that are found in blastocysts, and adult stem cells that are found in adult
tissues. In a developing embryo, stem cells can differentiate into all of the
specialized embryonic tissues. In adult organisms, stem cells and progenitor
cells act as a repair system for the body, replenishing specialized cells, but
also maintain the normal turnover of regenerative organs, such as blood, skin
or intestinal tissues.
As stem cells can be grown and
transformed into specialized cells with characteristics consistent with cells
of various tissues such as muscles or nerves through cell culture, their use in
medical therapies has been proposed. Louis Sheehan
In particular, embryonic cell lines,
autologous embryonic stem cells generated through therapeutic cloning, and
highly plastic adult stem cells from the umbilical cord blood or bone marrow
are touted as promising candidates
The classical definition of a stem
cell requires that it possess two properties:
* Self-renewal - the ability to go through
numerous cycles of cell division while maintaining the undifferentiated state.
* Potency - the capacity to differentiate into
specialized cell types. In the strictest sense, this requires stem cells to be
either totipotent or pluripotent - to be able to give rise to any mature cell
type, although multipotent or unipotent progenitor cells are sometimes referred
to as stem cells. http://louis_j_sheehan_esquire.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog
Pluripotent, embryonic stem cells
originate as inner mass cells within a blastocyst. The stem cells can become
any tissue in the body, excluding a placenta. Only the morula's cells are
totipotent, able to become all tissues and a placenta.
Pluripotent, embryonic stem cells
originate as inner mass cells within a blastocyst. The stem cells can become
any tissue in the body, excluding a placenta. Only the morula's cells are
totipotent, able to become all tissues and a placenta.
Potency specifies the differentiation
potential (the potential to differentiate into different cell types) of the
stem cell.
* Totipotent stem cells are produced from the
fusion of an egg and sperm cell. Cells produced by the first few divisions of
the fertilized egg are also totipotent. These cells can differentiate into
embryonic and extraembryonic cell types.
* Pluripotent stem cells are the descendants of
totipotent cells and can differentiate into cells derived from any of the three
germ layers.
* Multipotent stem cells can produce only cells
of a closely related family of cells (e.g. hematopoietic stem cells
differentiate into red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, etc.).
* Unipotent cells can produce only one cell
type, but have the property of self-renewal which distinguishes them from
non-stem cells (e.g. muscle stem cells).
The practical definition of a stem
cell is the functional definition - the ability to regenerate tissue over a
lifetime. For example, the gold standard test for a bone marrow or
hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) is the ability to transplant one cell and save an
individual without HSCs. In this case, a stem cell must be able to produce new
blood cells and immune cells over a long term, demonstrating potency. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
It should also be possible to isolate
stem cells from the transplanted individual, which can themselves be transplanted
into another individual without HSCs, demonstrating that the stem cell was able
to self-renew.
Properties of stem cells can be
illustrated in vitro, using methods such as clonogenic assays, where single
cells are characterized by their ability to differentiate and self-renew.[4][5]
As well, stem cells can be isolated based on a distinctive set of cell surface
markers. However, in vitro culture conditions can alter the behavior of cells,
making it unclear whether the cells will behave in a similar manner in vivo.
Considerable debate exists whether some proposed adult cell populations are
truly stem cells.
(ES cell lines) are cultures of cells
derived from the epiblast tissue of the inner cell mass (ICM) of a blastocyst
or earlier morula stage embryos. A blastocyst is an early stage
embryo—approximately four to five days old in humans and consisting of 50–150
cells. ES cells are pluripotent and give rise during development to all
derivatives of the three primary germ layers: ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm.
In other words, they can develop into each of the more than 200 cell types of
the adult body when given sufficient and necessary stimulation for a specific
cell type. They do not contribute to the extra-embryonic membranes or the
placenta.
Nearly all research to date has taken
place using mouse embryonic stem cells (mES) or human embryonic stem cells
(hES). Both have the essential stem cell characteristics, yet they require very
different environments in order to maintain an undifferentiated state. Mouse ES
cells are grown on a layer of gelatin and require the presence of Leukemia
Inhibitory Factor (LIF). Human ES cells are grown on a feeder layer of mouse
embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) and require the presence of basic Fibroblast
Growth Factor (bFGF or FGF-2). Without optimal culture conditions or genetic
manipulation, embryonic stem cells will rapidly differentiate.
A human embryonic stem cell is also
defined by the presence of several transcription factors and cell surface
proteins. The transcription factors Oct-4, Nanog, and SOX2 form the core
regulatory network that ensures the suppression of genes that lead to
differentiation and the maintenance of pluripotency. The cell surface antigens
most commonly used to identify hES cells are the glycolipids SSEA3 and SSEA4
and the keratan sulfate antigens Tra-1-60 and Tra-1-81. The molecular
definition of a stem cell includes many more proteins and continues to be a
topic of research.
After twenty years of research, there
are no approved treatments or human trials using embryonic stem cells. ES
cells, being totipotent cells, require specific signals for correct
differentiation - if injected directly into the body, ES cells will
differentiate into many different types of cells, causing a teratoma.
Differentiating ES cells into usable cells while avoiding transplant rejection
are just a few of the hurdles that embryonic stem cell researchers still face.
Many nations currently have moratoria on either ES cell research or the
production of new ES cell lines. Because of their combined abilities of
unlimited expansion and pluripotency, embryonic stem cells remain a
theoretically potential source for regenerative medicine and tissue replacement
after injury or disease.
To ensure self-renewal, stem cells
undergo two types of cell division (see Stem cell division and differentiation
diagram). Symmetric division gives rise to two identical daughter cells both
endowed with stem cell properties. Asymmetric division, on the other hand,
produces only one stem cell and a progenitor cell with limited self-renewal
potential. Progenitors can go through several rounds of cell division before
terminally differentiating into a mature cell.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
It is possible that the molecular
distinction between symmetric and asymmetric divisions lies in differential
segregation of cell membrane proteins (such as receptors) between the daughter
cells.
An alternative theory is that stem
cells remain undifferentiated due to environmental cues in their particular
niche. Stem cells differentiate when they leave that niche or no longer receive
those signals. Studies in Drosophila germarium have identified the signals dpp
and adherins junctions that prevent germarium stem cells from differentiating.
The signals that lead to reprogramming
of cells to an embryonic-like state are also being investigated. These signal
pathways include several transcription factors including the oncogene c-Myc.
Initial studies indicate that transformation of mice cells with a combination
of these anti-differentiation signals can reverse differentiation and may allow
adult cells to become pluripotent. However, the need to transform these cells
with an oncogene may prevent the use of this approach in therapy. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1
Medical researchers believe that stem
cell therapy has the potential to dramatically change the treatment of human
disease. A number of adult stem cell therapies already exist, particularly bone
marrow transplants that are used to treat leukemia.In the future, medical
researchers anticipate being able to use technologies derived from stem cell
research to treat a wider variety of diseases including cancer, Parkinson's
disease, spinal cord injuries, and muscle damage, amongst a number of other
impairments and conditions.However, there still exists a great deal of social
and scientific uncertainty surrounding stem cell research, which could possibly
be overcome through public debate and future research, and further education of
the public.
Stem cells, however, are already used
extensively in research, and some scientists do not see cell therapy as the
first goal of the research, but see the investigation of stem cells as a goal
worthy in itself.
Louis Sheehan
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