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News Briefs 21-02-2006

By Gregon

Don’t worry, I washed my hands before compiling these news briefs…

Quote of the Day:

Feeling better is not actually being better.

James Randi

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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8 Comments

  1. Bypass surgery could soon be passe
    Gene Therapy Offers New Hope For Heart Patients

    Feb 10, 2006
    AURORA, Colo. Gene therapy research going on in Colorado is showing promising results for new treatments of severe heart disease. The new technique being tested at the Medical Center of Aurora is offering hope to people who can’t be helped by standard treatments like by-pass or angioplasty.

    The gene therapy procedure involves an injection of DNA that causes a patient to grow brand new blood vessels in the heart. It happens during what is basically an outpatient procedure.

    A small catheter is threaded up through the leg to the heart. DNA is on the tip of the catheter. Doctors inject the DNA into the part of the heart they identify as having the poorest blood supply.

    Researchers said it takes about a month for the DNA to start working and grow new blood vessels.

    The study was expected to be done within in about 2 years. At this point, the research is for people with severe chest pain not treatable by other therapies. Doctors said one day it may become more widely used.

    For more information on the study, call (877) 926-4462.

    For those with broadband, here’s
    a video    , which tells more about this exciting research.

    And here’s a more detailed article about this angiogenesis trial, which seeks to license the first gene therapy drug for heart disease. This research trial, which is going on at 32 sites around the U.S., is still accepting patients with severe chest pain, but who are not good candidates for bypass surgery or angioplasty.

    Kat

  2. The Holocaust has became an industry
    If you wish to see genocide at work look no further then Israel. The holocaust has been used again and again as a propaganda tool. If I see one more “Oh My God Jews Died During WW2 Film/Book! ” I will puke! People are dieing today from genocide. But they are not jewish so we don’t see a industry of writing books, making movies and doing tv shows and interviews.
    As for David Irving being jailed for 3 years for not agreeing to the official propaganda, why does the truth need a law for inforcement? Something smells when people die every day from genocide and all we hear over and over again is about an event that happened 60 years ago! What about the millions Stalin killed? What we have here is a thought crime. Mr Irving admitted his guilt, to thinking wrong and gets 3 years. What is next?

    1. You’re mostly right blade
      I agree that no one ever mentions the millions killed by Stalin, Pol Pot or the Vietnam war, and many other horrible instances of killing on a grand scale.
      But I think all these instances should be kept before the public so we can remember them.

      I also think that Irving should not be jailed for what he said.He is a whacko and he is dead wrong when he said that no one died in Auschwitz.
      But if everyone was jailed for what they say or think then we would be back in the days before Voltaire.
      Let the loony go.
      The people who matter know the truth.

      shadows

      1. Thought Crime
        Don’t see people going to jail because they saw Elvis, or for believing no one walked on the moon. And my biggest gripe is the hypocrisy and falseness of the radical Zionests, why or how they justify their actions. More looniness.Just as in the US, Native Americans still get kicked in the butt whenever the goverment gets a chance. Can you trust the goverment, ask an Indian…

      2. I have to ask…
        Shadows, you say: “The people who matter know the truth.” Granted it’s late and I need to get to bed but…which people would those be?

        When Joe Sixpack goes for a walk down Main Street, the thoughts on his mind, assuming he has any, are unlikely to be about Holocaust deniers or Holocaust deniers changing their tune, mostly because his thoughts were quite likely formed by Fox News or other similarly elevated news organs; folks generally want news sources to tell them what they already think they know…that’s why uncritical news sources such as Fox continue to exist.

        Folks who are perhaps a bit more reflective can find information, but first they’d need to want to; people don’t commonly go looking for bad news and that’s understandable, in a way, for who wants to contemplate the frequency with which Man tries to wipe out Man?

        I don’t know if you’ve seen Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel, but I can tell you what I felt there…a sense of impossibility, an unwillingness to grasp that the Human race could do something so horrible; perhaps it’s best summed up by the plaque at the entrance which says, in part, “Try to understand…what is beyond understanding.”

        I can’t speak for what others might have seen there but for my part I saw a prayer that genocide might not happen again; not just to the Jews, but at all, to any people. In my opinion, the point isn’t that nobody should try to wipe out the Jews again, more of a feeling that to wipe out any group is wrong and that we the Human race must never forget that, that killing a race is wrong, that taking a single life is wrong.

        In my opinion, it’s a message which bears repeating and which needs to be repeated because of people’s natural tendency to sweep things under the carpet because if the attempted extinction of one race can be forgotten then the real extinction of another race just became more probable. I don’t know the whole story of the Irving case but I do know this: if he has recanted, there’s any number of Ernst Zundels in the world who are willing to pick up the slack.

        Please don’t take my question personally…it’s just that in reading your post I was reminded of Humbolt’s saying, “Those who do not understand the past, have no future.” The comment isn’t directed at you…I just wish that the Human race had never made it necessary to consider a question which I would rather were beyond consideration.

        Peace

        1. I agree with you
          Binro I agree with every single word you said in your post.I feel the same way as you do.
          I have studied the Holocaust from many angles, a couple of the angles being very personal.

          Irving is scum, he is a bottom feeder, a posturer,a narcisist.I could go on.
          I have seen his website and it is deliberately made to attract the other bottom feeders of the world, the ones with little intelligence or education who are so small in themselves that they need the swastika and uniforms etc to make them noticable.Otherwise they would go unnoticed in a world of ordinary people.

          There does not seem to be any way to stop these people.They are entitled to be in the world the same as we are.
          And they are entitled to say what they wish.
          If they had an ounce of intelligence they would make the effort to find the truth for themselves.
          Most people if they were interested in what Irving says would wonder why the rest of the world insists that many hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Auchwitz and go looking for the truth.
          The people attracted to Irving do not look for the truth.

          That’s what I mean when I say that the people who matter know the truth.
          We can give no credibility to Irving’s followers.
          By jailing him Austria has made a mistake.They have given him an importance he does not have.

          If we stop people saying what they think and feel we are the same as the Nazis.
          We cannot take away peoples’ freedom of thought and what they write.
          We can just ignore it and ask others to ignore it.

          I know that the Holocaust was the only time in history that someone tried to wipe out an entire race of people.
          In Cambodia it was the intellectuals who were the enemy as in China.
          None was worse than the other.All killing is horrible and evil.
          We know more about the Holocaust because it has been documented.Not much has ever been documented about other countries.
          And let’s face it, it happened in Europe.Most of the people killed would have passed as European of no specific nationality.
          The millions who died in China and Cambodia were of the “yellow” race.

          In the overall scheme of things,white races matter more than coloured races.
          Not my idea, but the world’s.

          For many years I lived with a lump in my gut that I finally identified as guilt over the Jews killed in the Holocaust.
          I am part German, and I have Jewish in-laws and other family members.
          The guilt is not mine but our’s.
          It is a collective guilt that we who have lived in this world allowed this to happen.
          Not us personally, but our race, our ancestors maybe.
          The only thing we can do is to make sure it does not happen again.

          What did I just say?
          Stupid person I am.
          It has happened again and in Europe.
          See Bosnia.

          shadows

          1. For what it’s worth…
            I believe the situation is not without hope; allow me to make a case.

            We are generally unsurprised when a parent risks and sometimes loses his/her life to save their child. It’s more or less what we would expect a parent to do, no? We are sometimes surprised to see a person risk and maybe lose his/her life to save the child of a complete stranger. If the first behavior is to be expected, what does the second tell us?

            I would submit that it tells us something about our nature that goes way beyond the mere parental protectiveness seen in many other species. Look at crocodiles, for example: when a young crocodile makes a certain sound any adult hearing it will come to defend the young one, not with a threat display but in full-blown attack, certainly no small part of the species’ survival over so long a time. By the same token, look at lions: when a new male takes over a pride his first action is usually to kill any kittens and try to inseminate all available lionesses; the young of one blood-line are disposed of so that the male can perpetuate his own line. Mother Nature seems a trifle confused…fierce protectiveness on one hand and indifferent slaughter on another.

            There’s a basic difference between the crocodile and the lion, and us: the first two species are hard-wired into their behavior, they have no choice but Humans are something quite different…we are, so far as I know, the only species which will sometimes protect our young and other times ignore them to death. I must draw a distinction here; I’m not referring to the behavior seen in some birds of prey, for example, where if there are two chicks, the parents will feed the one that seems to be prospering…that’s a sensible allocation of resources rather than ignoring one chick. I am rather referring to the behavior that Man sometimes displays, where someone will favour and nurture the young of one group and mercilessly kill the young of another for what is generally no better reason than the putative differences between the groups.

            Off-hand, I can’t think of another species that seeks to break itself down into groups distinguishable one from another by articial means and that’s unfortunate because it is one group viewing itself as being different from another that allows that group to view the other as less than Human and historically that has often resulted in mass murder if not genocide itself. Chief among the artificial distinctions is religion, I believe.

            I’ve never made any secret of my contempt for religion and this is central to my point of view, that a concept, religion, which should in its own terms be promoting fellowship often results in the most horrible of behavior. Why can a Man sometimes act so nobly to another Man under one set of circumstances and yet be so abominable in a different set? Because Man is a conflicted species, I would suggest; why will people risk and sometimes lose their lives for the off-spring of others? Because sometimes the nobility that exists within us rises unbidden, ignoring all other factors, and for a time we act selflessly, solely to protect another life, and therein lies what hope there is to be found. Sometimes we act without thinking to save another life, or at least try to, and sometimes we don’t and sometimes the choice looks like instinct and sometimes it looks like reasoned behavior and one way or another that looks like choice in the grander sense and we can choose to do a good thing if we have the ability to choose to do a bad thing.

            It would obviously be better if the Bosnian genocide hadn’t taken place but while it may be of no comfort to those who died and of little comfort to those who survived, it could so easily have been so much worse. The events in Bosnia, awful as they were, were still the worst example of such behavior in greater Europe since World War 2 and viewed in terms of much of Europe’s history, that’s remarkable. We’re talking about a place where disputes and outright hatreds a thousand years old tried to turn a bit of this Earth into a corner of Hell and as it turned out things didn’t go anywhere near as far as they could have. That may not be perfect but surely it’s a cause to tinge the tragedy with just a shade of optimism.

            I’m not suggesting that the problem will ever go away or that it won’t appear from time to time in various places. Events in Rwanda, for example, got out of hand while people watching the situation cried for help and were ignored and hundreds of thousands of people were hacked to pieces as a result…but I’m going to hold on to the notion that in the absence of having such things not happen at all, we can take some small comfort in such things not being worse. As tragic as Rwanda was, as irrational as the deaths of three-quarters of a million people were, those deaths appear to have galvanised opinion among various countries, to an extent that situations such as now exist in the Sudan may not spiral down into Hell.

            Lacking a perfect world where every life is cherished, can we ignore the possibility of at least limiting the carnage? Personally, I suspect that there will be no shortage of death until this world shakes down to some sustainable Human population, do we need to kill off people for no better reason than supposed differences between one group and another? We certainly don’t. Hitler was an amateur, compared to Stalin or Mao, but while we’re still killing eachother we’re doing so less than once we did and that’s got to be a mildly encouraging thought. Man will likely go on being inhuman to Man but the nobler side of our natures will often rise to the top and stand some chance of limiting the death-toll. That may not sound like much cause to be hopeful but I submit that it shows a situation not entirely hopeless and maybe for the time being that’s the best we can look for…perhaps one day there will truly be a family of Man. We may not see it ourselves but that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen or that it isn’t worth the effort.

            Shadows, Peace to you and Peace to us all. If you’ve read this far, thanks for letting me vent; my rage at Man’s inhumanity to Man sometimes gets the better of me.

            Good night.

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