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But other strands of media use irony to assert their right to have no position whatsoever. So, you take a cover of FHM, with tits on the front - and it's ironic because it appears to be saying "women are objects", yet of course it isn't saying that, because we're in a postfeminist age. But nor is it saying "women aren't objects", because that would be dated, over-sincere, mawkish even. So, it's effectively saying "women are neither objects, nor non-objects - and here are some tits!""I'm not saying what you think I'm saying, but I'm not saying its opposite, either. In fact, I'm not saying anything at all. But I get to keep the tits."
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We could smugly consider ourselves pure, which we did, but what we were really doing was withdrawing from the struggle to reduce suffering. There wasn't the slightest doubt that a Reagan presidency would inflict more suffering than a Carter presidency. Amid all the other beings on the planet, we were so privileged--so very lucky to be who we were, where we were, when we were--and it was not likely that we, callow know-it-all youth, would ourselves much suffer from the shitrain Reagan would bring. So, in our purity, through our neutrality, we were actually advocating that others who were not us suffer.This is from an interesting bit on DailyKos about Obama and FISA, and it ties into some things I've been thinking about a lot lately.
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Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month.But the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand. Stopped clocks and all of that- this is one of the very few times that I'll agree with the White House that the only real chance for this to be effective is to push for privatization. Amtrak needed to be socialized for a long time, because rail travel is important and it would have otherwise died out. But with a growing market for it, there's no reason at all to not toss out a hell of a lot of incentives to any company that starts running their own trains. Long-distance travel in America is going to change no matter what; if high-speed rail is strongly encouraged, then it'll change in really nice ways. Right now, Amtrak trains get the lowest priority on the rails, meaning that if there are twelve freight trains at a crossing, every one of them gets to go before the passenger train is allowed to cross. It takes two and a half hours to get from Dallas to Ft. Worth on Amtrak, a twenty minute drive.
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Army Sgt. Shiloh Harris' doctors applied specially formulated powder to what's left of the finger in an effort to do for wounded soldiers what salamanders can do naturally: replace missing body parts.A key to the research dedicated to regrowing fingers and other body parts is a powder, nicknamed "pixie dust" by some of the people at Brooke. It's made from tissue extracted from pigs.
The pixie dust powder itself doesn't regrow the missing tissue; it tricks the patient's body into doing that itself.
All bodies have stem cells. As we are developing in our mothers' wombs, those stem cells grow our fingers, toes, organs -- essentially, our whole body. The stem cells stop doing that around birth, but they don't go away. The researchers believe that the "pixie dust" can put those stem cells back to work growing new body parts.
The powder forms a microscopic "scaffold" that attracts stem cells and convinces them to grow into the tissue that used to be there.
"If it is next to the skin, it will start making skin. If it's next to a tendon, it will start making a tendon, and so that's the hope, at least in this particular project, that we can grow a finger," Wolf said.
It has worked in earlier experiments. "They have taken a uterus out of a dog, made one in the lab, put it back in and had puppies," Wolf said. Researchers have also regrown a human bladder and implanted it in a person, and it is working as nature intended.
Although the technique has incredible promise, doctors will be watching for unexpected side effects as they follow Harris' recovery. "It could grow a cancer," Wolf said. "We will be closely monitoring for that to make sure that doesn't happen."
If the military's most badly wounded start benefiting, so will civilians. "If we can pull this off in missing parts the next step is, OK, can we grow a pancreas? Can we grow and replace that in a diabetic? And can we do the same thing with a kidney and can we do the same thing with a heart?"
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One day, he hopes, people with heart trouble will be told, "That's OK. We will just grow you another one."
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