Marcy Darnovsky and Jessica Cussins at the Los Angeles Times write that Britain is on the brink of a perilous vote for 'three-person in vitro fertilization':
Britain is about to become the only country in the world to explicitly allow the inheritable genetic modification of humans. With a vote Feb. 3 in the House of Commons, the country has paved the way for "three-person in vitro fertilization," which combines genetic material from two women and a man. […]
Later this month, the House of Lords will get the final say on the regulations. If the bill is approved, it will carve out an exception to British law against the inheritable genetic modification of humans and put the country at odds with laws in 45 countries and provisions in several international treaties.
Crossing this threshold raises a profound societal question that until now has been hypothetical: As biotechnologies improve and enable us to make more specific genetic changes in our offspring, how far will we go? Will "mission creep" expand the genetic manipulations performed on future generations? […]
Technological advances are exciting, but that should not blind us to the scientific evidence — nor the social and policy consequences. Like other powerful emerging technologies, inheritable genetic engineering calls for caution, cross-disciplinary engagement and informed public deliberation.
Check out the pundit excerpts below the fold.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes Beyond ‘Black Lives Matter’:
The Black Lives Matter protesters took some criticism for what others viewed as a lack of clear focus and detailed agenda. But in truth, raising an issue to the point where it can no longer be ignored is the grist for the policy mill. Visibility and vocalization have value.
In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.
Protests following the grand jury decisions in the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner on Staten Island have largely died down. Those stories no longer command front page placement or lead the news. The news machine, hungry for newness, as is its wont, has moved on to measles and back to the Islamic State’s medieval murder tactics.
But, as is often the case, there was no full resolution or reconciliation. The issue of police-community relations was raised but not solved. The memory of mistrust still wafts through the air like the smell of rot being carried by the breeze.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at
The Washington Post writes
Obama’s Christian humility:
President Obama’s speech to the crowd on Thursday did not seem terribly controversial when I first listened. […]
Who knew that denouncing religious extremism and calling on people of all faiths to guard against “a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith” would prove to be so controversial? If a president dares to say anything critical about what Christians may have done at any point in history, he is destined to be attacked for engaging in “moral equivalence” and accused of downplaying present dangers.
Jessica Valenti at
The Guardian writes
If Republicans are to appeal to women, they can't keep looking to the past:
If the 2012 elections were about male Republicans sticking their feet in their mouths and their heads up their asses—“legitimate rape”, “binders of women”, offering women the aspirin-between-the-knees method of birth control—I predict that 2016 will be the year that the Republicans reveal themselves to be the party of, for and by old farts.
Lately, everything old Republican men say—about women, about rape, about marriage equality, even vaccines—sounds more old-fogey than forward-thinking. And while they have never been the party of the young and hip, in the midst of an all-out young feminist revival, Republican rhetoric sounds older and limper than ever.
And as the male Republican guard reveals themselves to be as stale and funky as your grandpa’s drawers, older liberal women are stepping into the limelight as cool and accomplished.
As'ad AbuKhalil at
The Progressive writes
Saudi Funding of 9/11 Attacks Still Cloaked in Secrecy:
The revelation that Zacarias Moussaoui had “high-level” contacts with Saudi officials brought back attention to the Saudi role in the formation and financing of Al-Qaeda. It also revived the debate on whether the U.S. government should release Part 4 of the September 11 report, which deals with Saudi financing of terrorism.
The report remains classified and the U.S. government has been vigilant to protect the Saudi government in court and in Congress. The Saudi government, in typical fashion, dismissed the account of Moussaoui as the product of a deranged mind––just as it accuses all critics of its policies and repression of being deranged. But the American public can never understand the real circumstances of September 11 and the origins of Al-Qaeda without releasing the report and bringing more attention to the role of Saudi Arabia in funding (and arming, as in the case of Syria) of various militant Jihadi terrorist groups. […]
Saudi Arabia is not only financially tied to the world of Jihadi terrorism, it also provides the ideology that motivates Jihadi recruits. It is not mentioned in the American press that the ideology and practices of ISIS don’t deviate from the ruling ideology of Wahhabiyyah in Saudi Arabia, which has been spread by billions of oil revenues. Until the American public demands the full disclosure about the Saudi role, we won’t understand the real circumstances of September 11 and the forming and funding of Al-Qaeda.
Michael T. Klare at
The Nation writes
The Oil Price Collapse Is Not Just Another Bust Cycle:
Oil is the most valuable commodity in world trade, so any significant change in its price—whether upward or downward—has far-reaching economic consequences. Because oil also plays a pivotal role in world politics, such shifts can have equally momentous implications for international relations. It is hardly surprising, then, that the recent plunge in prices has generated headlines around the world. Many giant energy firms have announced massive cutbacks in employment and investment, and major producing countries like Russia and Venezuela have been forced to scale back government expenditures. While some analysts speculate that prices have now reached bottom and will soon begin climbing again, there are good reasons to believe that this descent is not just another cyclical event but rather the product of something far more profound and durable. […]
Were prices to recover quickly, we would likely see a return to business as usual, with mammoth corporate investments in shale and other unconventional sources of crude. This, in turn, would result in rising carbon emissions and pervasive environmental destruction of the sort chronicled in Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything. It would also bolster the coffers of the giant oil companies and their government backers, enabling them to better resist efforts by environmentalists to curb the consumption of fossil fuels. But will this come to pass? Although some increase in prices is inevitable—given that the current cutbacks in investment will produce an eventual contraction in supply—a return to the $100-plus levels of recent years is by no means assured.
Robert Parry at
Consortium News writes
When Silencing Dissent Isn’t News:
So, what if I told you that an internationally known American – a 75-year-old Army veteran and a longtime official at the Central Intelligence Agency, someone who had famously questioned the imperious Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about his Iraq War lies in a public event that led evening newscasts in 2006 – was recently denied entry to a public speech by another Iraq War icon, Gen. David Petraeus, and – despite having paid for a ticket – was brutally arrested by the police and jailed?
Wouldn’t that be a story? Wouldn’t that be something that the news media, especially the “liberal” news media, should jump all over? Wouldn’t a newspaper like the New York Times just love something like that?
But what if I told you that The New York Times wasn’t interested at all? You might think that perhaps the event occurred in some distant hamlet, maybe a small college town where there wasn’t much media, so it just fell through the cracks. […]
As the police pinned his arms behind him—wrenching his injured shoulder—McGovern screamed in pain as bystanders unsuccessfully implored the police not to behave so brutally. The arrest was captured on an amateur video by April Watters). It is not pleasant to watch.
Probably some Americans feel that McGovern got what he deserved for even thinking about posing a pointed question to a “hero” like retired Gen. Petraeus, who was speaking along with one of his neocon friends, Council on Foreign Affairs honcho Max Boot, who, like Petraeus, had been all gung-ho for the Iraq War.
Ken Auletta at
The New Yorker writes
Brian Williams and the God Complex:
...while the spotlight is on Williams’s transgressions, a word about the complicity of NBC and the other networks’ marketing machines. The networks have a stake in promoting their anchors as God-like figures. By showing them in war zones, with Obama or Putin, buffeted by hurricanes, and comforting victims, they are telling viewers that their anchors are truth-tellers who have been everywhere and seen everything and have experience you can trust. On his helicopter in Iraq, Williams was accompanied by an NBC crew. Did they not speak up to correct the record for fear of undermining the powerful anchor? NBC had a stake in promoting Brian Williams as all-knowing, just as a promo ad for ABC anchor David Muir I saw today portrayed the lightly experienced forty year old as worldly. Brian Williams has valuable experience reporting from the White House, but unlike ABC’s Peter Jennings, or Dan Rather for “60 Minutes,” he has never been a correspondent overseas. (Anchoring a broadcast from Baghdad or Moscow is not comparable.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates at
The Atlantic writes
The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast Speech:
People who wonder why the president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one:
Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification. On the cusp of plunging his country into a war that would cost some 750,000 lives, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens paused to offer some explanation. His justification was not secular.
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Nobody Understands Debt:
You might think [the world's] failure to reduce ratios [of GDP to debt] shows that we aren’t trying hard enough—that families and governments haven’t been making a serious effort to tighten their belts, and that what the world needs is, yes, more austerity. But we have, in fact, had unprecedented austerity. As the International Monetary Fund has pointed out, real government spending excluding interest has fallen across wealthy nations—there have been deep cuts by the troubled debtors of Southern Europe, but there have also been cuts in countries, like Germany and the United States, that can borrow at some of the lowest interest rates in history.
All this austerity has, however, only made things worse — and predictably so, because demands that everyone tighten their belts were based on a misunderstanding of the role debt plays in the economy.
You can see that misunderstanding at work every time someone rails against deficits with slogans like “Stop stealing from our kids.” It sounds right, if you don’t think about it: Families who run up debts make themselves poorer, so isn’t that true when we look at overall national debt?
No, it isn’t. […]
Because debt is money we owe to ourselves, it does not directly make the economy poorer (and paying it off doesn’t make us richer). True, debt can pose a threat to financial stability—but the situation is not improved if efforts to reduce debt end up pushing the economy into deflation and depression.