James Moore, an author and former Texas television reporter who has spent many years following the fortunes of George W. Bush, often tells the story of a gifted high school athlete from Flint, Mich., named Roy Dukes.
"I ran track against him," Mr. Moore said. "He went to Flint Southwestern High School, and he was amazing."
That was back in the late 1960's. When Roy Dukes strode onto the track for an event, said Mr. Moore, he drew everyone's attention, especially other athletes'. "They stopped their warm-ups or whatever they were doing to watch him because he was just phenomenal."
Mr. Moore lost track of Mr. Dukes for a couple of years. "And then I come home from college one weekend and I open up the paper and there's Roy's picture. He was killed in Vietnam. I was just flabbergasted."
Mr. Moore explores the murky circumstances surrounding President Bush's service in the National Guard in the late 60's and early 70's in a book that is soon to be published called "Bush's War for Re-election." This issue remains pertinent because it foreshadowed Mr. Bush's behavior as a politician and officeholder: the lack of engagement, the irresponsibility, and the casual and blatantly unfair exploitation of rank and privilege.
Mr. Bush favored the war in Vietnam, but he had the necessary clout to ensure that he wouldn't have to serve there. He entered the Texas Air National Guard at the height of the war in 1968 by leaping ahead of 500 other applicants who were on a waiting list.
Mr. Bush was eventually assigned to the 147th Fighter Group (later to become part of the 111th Fighter Interceptor Group), which Mr. Moore described in his book as a "champagne" outfit. "The ranks," he said, "were filled with the progeny of the wealthy and politically influential."
So here's the thing: After strolling to the head of the line, and putting the Guard to the considerable expense of training him as a pilot, Lieutenant Bush didn't even bother to take his duties seriously. He breezed off to Alabama to work on a political campaign. He never showed up as required to take his annual flight physical in 1972, and because of that was suspended from flying.
This cavalier treatment of his duties as a Guardsman occurred as thousands of others were being killed and wounded in Vietnam — youngsters of great promise like Roy Dukes, who was 20 when he died. Having escaped the horror of the war himself, one might have expected Lieutenant Bush to at least take his duties in the National Guard seriously.
Now, more than three decades later, there are questions about the seriousness of Mr. Bush's stewardship as president. He has certainly been profligate with the people's money, pushing through his reckless tax cuts and running up a mountain range of deficits that extends as far as the eye can see.
Citing phantom weapons of mass destruction, he led the nation into a war of choice that has resulted so far in the tragic deaths of more than 500 American troops and thousands of innocent Iraqis, and the wounding of thousands upon thousands of others. Like Mr. Bush during Vietnam, privileged Americans have had the luxury of favoring the madness in Iraq without having to worry about fighting and dying there. If the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful were in danger of being sent to Iraq, the U.S. wouldn't be there.
Neither Congress nor the American people are being told in a timely way how much this war is costing. But powerfully connected corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel have been kept deep inside the loop and favored with lucrative no-bid contracts for their services.
Mr. Bush has been nothing if not consistent. He has always been about the privileged few. And that's an attitude that flies in the face of the basic precepts of an egalitarian society. It's an attitude that fosters, that celebrates, unfairness and injustice.
More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, another war of choice that was marketed deceitfully to the American people.
Mr. Bush's experience in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam years is especially relevant today because it throws a brighter spotlight on who he really is. He has walked a charmed road, with others paying the price of his journey, every step of the way.
To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics — the pictures.
By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River.
It was not ever thus. Bill Clinton's budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not with worshipful photos of the president being presidential.
The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to publish campaign brochures. In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that office.
Operation Flight Suit was only slightly more over the top than other Bush photo-ops, like the carefully staged picture that placed Mr. Bush's head in line with the stone faces on Mount Rushmore. The goal is to suggest that it's unpatriotic to criticize the president, and to use his heroic image to block any substantive discussion of his policies.
In fact, those 27 photos grace one of the four most dishonest budgets in the nation's history — the other three are the budgets released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Just to give you a taste: remember how last year's budget contained no money for postwar Iraq — and how administration officials waited until after the tax cut had been passed to mention the small matter of $87 billion in extra costs? Well, they've done it again: earlier this week the Army's chief of staff testified that the Iraq funds in the budget would cover expenses only through September.
But when administration officials are challenged about the blatant deceptions in their budgets — or, for that matter, about the use of prewar intelligence — their response, almost always, is to fall back on the president's character. How dare you question Mr. Bush's honesty, they ask, when he is a man of such unimpeachable integrity? And that leaves critics with no choice: they must point out that the man inside the flight suit bears little resemblance to the official image.
There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is a man of exceptional uprightness. When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went wrong? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that he is willing to cut corners when it's to his personal advantage. His business career was full of questionable deals, and whatever the full truth about his National Guard service, it was certainly not glorious.
Old history, you may say, and irrelevant to the present. And perhaps that would be true if Mr. Bush was prepared to come clean about his past. Instead, he remains evasive. On "Meet the Press" he promised to release all his records — and promptly broke that promise.
I don't know what he's hiding. But I do think he has forfeited any right to cite his character to turn away charges that his administration is lying about its policies. And that is the point: Mr. Bush may not be a particularly bad man, but he isn't the paragon his handlers portray.
Some of his critics hope that the AWOL issue will demolish the Bush myth, all at once. They're probably too optimistic — if it were that easy, the tale of Harken Energy would have already done the trick. The sad truth is that people who have been taken in by a cult of personality — a group that in this case includes a good fraction of the American people, and a considerably higher fraction of the punditocracy — are very reluctant to give up their illusions. If nothing else, that would mean admitting that they had been played for fools.
Still, we may be on our way to an election in which Mr. Bush is judged on his record, not his legend. And that, of course, is what the White House fears.
Quote: 12:02
Today's Nikkei Newspaper includes a discussion with Nintendo's Yamauchi, as well as an interview with the president of the company, Iwata.
Iwata:
(about the GC)
- The main reason for GC's surge in sales at the end of the year was the price cut
- I heard we even managed to surpass Sony's sales in the US for a moment
- In Europe too, we were up on the previous year
- We have been able to provide proof positive that the GC is not a dying platform
- We were looking for the right time to drop the price from early 2003
(medium term targets)
- Today's games are complex and take time to produce - the age where we would struggle with graphics and memory is over
- How can we expand the industry - the Nintendo DS is one way we are trying to do so
- Yamauchi has the genius perception to see the customers' trends
- I am thinking more from a scientific viewpoint of what we can do to achieve this
(about the next generation)
- I don't think our problems can be solved by just increasing the power of the consoles
- It's not clear what other companies are trying to achieve with their new consoles, we will not make something incomplete just for the sake of it
- Nintendo's hardware development team is thinking about when we should release the next machine
(about online games)
- I wonder how much money companies like Sony and Microsoft are making from this?
- You can't say that appropriate business models are in place yet - customers are also not jumping on board
- But Nintendo doesn't hold a negative view of "net technologies"
- For example, we're thinking about new forms of play using wireless communication
Yamauchi:
- Because of other companies' pricing policies, we had no choice but to cut the price of the GC
- I think the game industry is maturing in different ways to those I imagined
- The industry is displaying certains aspects of being in a crisis
- Gamers don't just want beautiful graphics, sounds and epic stories
- We cannot guarantee interesting and fun games just by using better technology and increasing the functions of the machines
- But makers have plenty of money, so they won't stop making that kind of game
- The truth is, I thought about the idea for DS about 18 months ago
- We plan to show the successor to the GC at next year's E3, even though typical gamers aren't demanding high specs. The people who call it the "next generation" are people who don't know games
- The management are expecting good things from the DS
- If we can increase the scope of the industry, we can re-energise the global market and lift Japan out of depression - that is Nintendo's mission
- If the DS succeeds, we will rise to heaven, but if it fails we will sink to hell
- The next two years will decide Nintendo's fate
- Dual screen games is my final suggestion
- From now on, I won't interrupt management flow, though I can still ask for their strength.
Quote:Resident Evil 4 will no longer use the fixed camera system that has been used in the past. Instead you will now play in one of three views, two of which are over the shoulder 3rd person views, and one of which is actually a first person view. At this time we do not know if the game characters can move in first person mode, or just shoot a la Metal Gear Solid 2. In what appears to be a first for videogames, the game will require a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio for the entire game. This makes the game best suited for HDTV’s and supports 480 progressive scan. Those with the 4:3 aspect ratio televisions are not out of luck. If your TV is not widescreen ready, you will simply play the game in letterbox with black bars on the bottom and top of the screen. The reason for this cinematic view comes by way of the 3rd person camera. The main character Leon evidentially takes up most of the left side of the screen, while the right side shows more of the environment. The special angles are said to give a FPS feeling to the game.
The graphics in the game will also be entirely in real time, with no pre-rendered backdrops, no door animations, and no FMV’s. The levels will be wide open and feature very few load times, but tons of zombie like villagers, who are said to be in a trance like state.
The much-revered and hated control scheme seems to still be intact in RE4. However, “the new views make it feel like an entirely different game.” Despite the unchanged controls, the hub will be slightly different with both health ammo making their way on to the screen.
The post also mentions some story spoilers, so if you don’t want to know, don’t continue reading. Resident Evil 4 takes place 6 years after RE2 in the year 2004. Leon, the main character is hired to protect the President's daughter. Unfortunately for her she is kidnapped and taken to South America where Leon then must dispose of swarms of villagers to save the her. The enemies in RE4 are said to react to specific body damage (think Eternal Darkness), throw sharp objects, and are smart enough to even lead you into ambushes.
Quote:Nintendo should release virtual reality goggles for the GC. That way we can all live out our Johnny Mnemonic and/or Lawnmower Man fantasies. - Mr. Rumbler
Brandon: Yeah, because those are really good movies to live out.
Quote:Pikmin 2, which was delayed from last year's holiday season to some point around this May, will not release until the blunt end of the second quarter, on an undisclosed date in August. Nintendo has not provided any specifics relating to the delay, though it would seem that they just need more time to complete the project to their standard. We'll have more information as it breaks. (wj)
Source: Nintendo
Great, so the first half of 2004 has a total of... two GC games worth getting? Way to go, Nintendo.
Posted by: OB1 - 12th February 2004, 12:25 PM - Forum: Tendo City
- Replies (65)
Wow. This is kind of susprising. But what I want to know is why isn't FRD working on it?? EA has a publishing deal with them and it's obvious that they're still trying to make a Bond game as good as Goldeneye, so why not let the guys who made it do the sequel? Yeesh.
Quote:Cloning Creates Human Embryos
By GINA KOLATA
Published: February 12, 2004
Scientists in South Korea report that they have created human embryos through cloning and extracted embryonic stem cells, the universal cells that hold great promise for medical research.
Their goal, the scientists say, is not to clone humans but to advance understanding of the causes and treatment of disease.
But the work makes the birth of a cloned baby suddenly more feasible. For that reason, it is likely to reignite the fierce debate over the ethics of human cloning.
The work was led by Dr. Woo Suk Hwang and Dr. Shin Yong Moon of Seoul National University and will be published tomorrow in the journal Science. The paper provides a detailed description of how to create human embryos by cloning. Experts in the field not involved with the work said they found the paper persuasive.
"You now have the cookbook, you have a methodology that's publicly available," said Dr. Robert Lanza, medical director of a company, Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., that had tried without success to do what the South Koreans did.
Although the paper, written in dense jargon and summarizing its findings by saying, "We report the derivation of a pluripotent embryonic stem cell line (SCNT-hES-1) from a cloned human blastocyst," its import was immediately clear to researchers.
"My reaction is, basically, wow," said Dr. Richard Rawlins, an embryologist who is director of the assisted reproduction laboratories at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. "It's a landmark paper."
It is what patients with diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes had been waiting for, the start of so-called therapeutic cloning. The idea is to clone a patients cells to make embryonic stem cells that are an exact genetic match of the patient. Then those cells, patients hope, could be turned into replacement tissue to treat or cure their disease without provoking rejection from the body's immune system.
Even though the new work clears a significant hurdle, scientists caution that it could take years of further research before stem cell science turns into actual therapies.
Even before the publication — reported last night by a South Korean newspaper, one day ahead of the embargo imposed by Science — the research was criticized by cloning opponents.
Dr. Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, called for federal legislation to stop human cloning for any purpose.
"The age of human cloning has apparently arrived: today, cloned blastocysts for research, tomorrow cloned blastocysts for babymaking," Dr. Kass wrote in an e-mail message. "In my opinion, and that of the majority of the Council, the only way to prevent this from happening here is for Congress to enact a comprehensive ban or moratorium on all human cloning."
The House has twice passed legislation that would ban all human cloning experiments, most recently in February 2003. But the bills have foundered in the Senate, where many members who oppose reproductive cloning do not want to ban it for medical research.
Dr. Hwang said he knew that the work would elicit strong responses but that the research was so important it should be done anyway, adding that there was strict oversight by an ethics committee.
"Of course," he said, "we acknowledge that there will be controversy. But as scientists, we think it is our obligation to do this."
The paper describes the successful process in detail, with precise information on how to start the embryos growing and what solutions are best to nourish them. That recipe appears to advance the likelihood of reproductive cloning. When fertility laboratories fertilize eggs, grow embryos to the same developmental stage as the embryo clones and implant them in a human uterus, 40 to 60 percent end up as babies.
The scientists stress that all the research was in the laboratory, in petri dishes. No embryo was implanted in a woman. The women who provided unfertilized eggs that were needed to start the cloning process were not paid.
The research was financed by the government of South Korea, where cloning to create a baby is illegal.
Quote:(Page 2 of 2)
Dr. Hwang is an expert in animal cloning, and Dr. Moon is a medical doctor who trained in the late 1980's at a leading American fertility center, the Jones Institute for Reproductive Medicine at the Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk. That is one of the very few places where researchers have extracted human stem cells from embryos that were made the usual way, by using sperm to fertilize eggs.
Until now, no one had even come close to using cloning to create a human embryo or even a monkey embryo, to say nothing of extracting stem cells from one.
Stem cells are the research prize. They appear after an embryo has grown for five or six days, its cells subdividing within the hard casing of the egg. Although the embryo at this stage contains about 100 cells, it is still no bigger than the original egg, nearly invisible to the naked eye.
"If it was floating in water with light underneath, it might look like a speck of dust," said Dr. William Gibbons, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Eastern Virginia.
The defining feature of a blastocyst is that it has a real structure, made of a ball of cells, the inner cell mass, encased in a sphere. The sphere becomes the placenta if the blastocyst is implanted in a woman's uterus, and the inner cell mass becomes the fetus.
But at the blastocyst stage, the inner cell mass consists of cells that are still indeterminate, not yet committed to becoming any particular cell type. They are the stem cells, which can in theory develop into any of the body's tissues and organs. Stem cells from a clone would be genetically identical to the person who contributed cells to make the embryo.
Some scientists want to use stem cells to study how genes cause disease. Others say they may one day use stem cells to grow replacement tissues that are identical to the patient's own cells.
But while most expected that cloning would one day be used to create human embryos for harvesting stem cells, the South Korean research elicited amazement from experienced investigators.
They were particularly surprised that the researchers had managed to assemble so many unfertilized human eggs, 242 in all.
Advanced Cell Technology, the lone American company that has tried to conduct similar research, went through a long and arduous debate with its ethics board before recruiting young women to donate eggs. The board eventually decided that a fair payment for a woman's time and effort would be $4,000.
To donate eggs, women have to inject themselves with hormones to stimulate their ovaries, be monitored with ultrasound to see when the eggs are ready to emerge from the ovaries and then allow doctors to extract the eggs with a thin needle. Advanced Cell Technology advertised for donors and paid them the fee, but ended up with just 19 eggs. The company restarted its program in June, Dr. Lanza said, with "just a few donors.".
In South Korea, Dr. Moon said in a telephone interview, there was no advertising for egg donors and no payments. The 16 women who donated the 242 eggs were "personal contacts," he said, declining to elaborate.
The Koreans are to discuss their findings today in Seattle, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The investigators selected 176 eggs that were in a developmental stage that made success seem most likely. To start the cloning, the team removed the genetic material from the eggs and replaced it with genetic material obtained from cumulus cells, the adult cells that cling to eggs. Cloning experiments with mice had indicated that the cells were especially amenable to the process.
Dr. Moon explained, "The cumulus cell is easy to get," because it is on the surface of the egg.
The abundance of eggs enabled the scientists to experiment with ways of having the egg cells start to divide and of growing the embryos in the laboratory.
"They had an incredible amount of eggs and an opportunity to perfect the protocols," said Dr. Jose B. Cibelli, formerly with Advanced Cell Technology and now a professor of animal biotechnology at Michigan State University. "They tried 14 different protocols."
Dr. Cibelli consulted with the Koreans toward the end of their work and is listed with them as an author of the paper in Science.
The researchers experimented with different timing, between adding the cumulus cell to an egg and activating the egg, making it start to divide with its cumulus cell genes.
"If they waited four hours instead of two hours, it didn't work," Dr. Hans Schöler, a professor of reproductive medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, said.
All along the way, Dr. Schöler added, such small variations in the procedure had marked effects.
"Marginal differences made it work," he said. "If you stepped a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left, it didn't work."
The resulting method yielded blastocysts 26 percent of the time. "That's amazing," Dr. Schöler said.
Eventually, Dr. Hwang, Dr. Moon and their colleagues ended up with 30 blastocysts, from which they were able to extract 20 inner cell masses. One grew into a line of stem cells.
The next step, Dr. Schöler said, will be to improve the success rate of obtaining stem cell lines from blastocysts.
Dr. Ron McKay, a stem cell scientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said the work suggested that it might be easier than anyone thought to make cloned human embryos and extract stem cells from them.
"The next question takes you to the heart of the whole discussion," Dr. McKay said. "Why do it anyway? What's the point? Is there any point?"
Dr. McKay said that for him the point was that such cells could provide a unique opportunity to study human disease. He spoke of a scientist who had died in her 40's from breast cancer. What if her cells had been cloned to make embryonic stem cells and those cells had been directed to turn into breast tissue? That might give scientists a chance to examine how genes for breast cancer altered the cells' susceptibility and might explain how and why the cancer developed in the first place.
Dr. McKay said learning to make embryo clones for research could help people who want to make babies that are clones. But he added that scientists did not always do everything that is possible.
"I really don't want to comment on the slippery slope," he said.
Dr. Cibelli, too, focused on the Koreans' report.
"Now you have the demonstration that everyone was waiting for," he said. "Whether this approach will be applicable to making babies, I don't know. And I hope I never find out."
