Laying Down The Fog Bank

When talking about illegal aliens, mainly use the word immigrant. Write an editorial about a new overcrowding law titled Manassas's War on Immigrants. What kind of mean American could be against an immigrant?

When talking about embryonic stem cells, use it interchangably with stem cell science as if no other kind existed. Rick Weiss in Stem Cell Advance is Fully Refuted:

The scandal surrounding disgraced South Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk deepened yesterday as an investigator told reporters in Seoul that none of the 11 tailor-made cell colonies Hwang claimed to have created earlier this year actually exist...

The scandal also has delivered a body blow to stem cell science, a field of research born just seven years ago that, despite ethical concerns because of its reliance on human embryos, has generated great public enthusiasm.

Rick Weiss is not this ignorant. He can't be.  Why does he write like this? Why does the Post let him? There is a vibrant and growing world of adult stem-cell research and therapies today that the Post  habitually ignores.

Michael Fumento:

There's no scientific research so promising that it can't be hyped further. Still, the ASCs – which the Democrats won't acknowledge, and which the New York Times  recently claimed have proved futile in treating human illness –  have actually been helping people in the U.S. since 1968. On one website you'll find a list, far from comprehensive, of almost 80 therapies currently using ASCs. This is treatment – not practice or theory.    Incredibly, there are also about 300 clinical trials involving ASCs.    

By contrast, the number of treatments using ESCs is zero. The number of clinical trials involving ESCs? Also zero....

That's from NRO last year. Here's a list of his stem-cell articles. Check it out. This means you, Rick.

Fumento's most recent entry on that list, on Oct. 20, is about curing liver failure:

Until now, the only hope for persons with irreversible liver failure from such diseases as cirrhosis, which kills about 27,000 Americans yearly, was transplantation. This requires permanent use of immunosuppressive drugs which can lead to opportunistic infections and cancer. Most importantly, it requires a new liver. About a thousand Americans are now on a waiting list for one and many will die there.

But scientists from London's Imperial College report in The New Scientist that they have repaired patients' own damaged livers by using bone marrow adult stem cells painlessly collected from their own blood. Five were injected with a drug that stimulated their marrow to produce extra stem cells that were then injected into a blood vessel leading directly to the liver.

It worked. Both liver function and overall health of three out of five treated patients improved significantly within only two months of treatment. The two patients whose health did not improve were left no worse off. ...

Drop me a line if the Post covered this one.

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Comments

[DM]

The editorial today on "Manassas's War On Immigrants" shows how out of touch our elites are on this issue. You can bet that whoever wrote the editorial (it's unsigned) does not live in Manassas and is not seeing their neighborhood become a third-world shithole. It's easy to be sanctimonious when you yourself don't have to deal with the problems.

Anyway, I'm glad to see people waking up to illegal immigration. It's too bad our unelected "elites" in the media aren't coming along for the ride, but the death of print media will seal their fate anyway.

[Michael]

Well, half of the science community wouldn't be rivetted to the unravelling of some Korean charlatan if science were proceeding on a scientific basis here.

You chide the WaPo for implying that all stem cell research is embryonic stem cell research. Why? Because this is another proxy for the abortion debate. Terry Schiavo was abortion by proxy. I'm sick of abortion being the Big Issue in social politics and I'm further sick of it sticking its camel nose under every what-is-life tent it can find.

The fact is that there are eighty zillion fertilized eggs which will never be used because the couples who had them created in fertility clinics have had all the triplets they want. Science can't use them because they're "potential human life" and if you get to do research on them you grease that old slippery slope which makes abortion OK. But noone seriously protests the ferility industry's right to creat eggsicles -- too many middle-class late-marriage boomers have benefited from the wonders of technology. Noone can be against a woman conceiving.

So you fight this derivative third-generation proxy war over whether bubbleheads presenting journalism about scientific topics use the the correct anti-abortion-doctrine-approved shorthand reference to one branch of science, or whether they use the heretical pro-abortion shorthand.

[Christopher Fotos]

Proxy war? I don't know about that. I'll vouch for just a plain old war. It's a war over life. It's terrible that you're sick of it, but that particular battle is not going away.

At a minimum, a science reporter ought to be capable of accurately describing reality, something science is supposedly interested in. Weiss doesn't, reflecting common MSM practice. Next question.

Meanwhile if one of the reasons for embryonic stem-cell research is based on a lie, the debate is corrupted and we're pressured to go down that path on false pretenses. The lie is that we "know" only embyronic stem cells can do all these amazing things. Other lies include claims that the Catholic Church is against stem cell science.

The truth is supposed to matter, to scientists and even to newspapers.