A Timely Dharma Talk - Not Speaking of the Faults of Others - 3-27-16

http://prairiezen.org/Sunday_audio.html

Freedom of Speech - A most important Dharma protection even for those with whom we disagree, especially for those with whom we disagree.

I have written and spoken previously about freedom of speech and the First Amendment of the US Constitution as vital historical factor for the spread of Buddha Dharma in the United States. Some examples of this are at:


http://clouds-genmyo.blogspot.com/2015/10/freedom-of-speech-and-freedom-of-thought.html

http://clouds-genmyo.blogspot.com/2015/07/freedom-dharma-talk-for-july-4th.html

Freedom of Thought, Freedom from Thought   5/22/15

Freedom of Thought, Freedom from Thought Part 2   5/23/15

http://clouds-genmyo.blogspot.com/2015/05/freedoms.html

This issue of freedom of speech and attempts by governmental officials to use their various powers to infringe upon what they consider unpopular speech and science has again been brought to my attention in regards to climate change issues. This is also important in regard the issues raised in the various "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Who guards the guardians?" posts.

While it seems to me that there are certainly changes occurring in the weather patterns and the climate, I do not have the knowledge to evaluate the science regarding this or the causes thereof. However, the closing off of evaluation of unpopular positions or research seems particularly odious and dangerous, especially when the power of the US government, Congress, the Executive Administration and the Courts, are enlisted in suppressing this speech.

Therefore it is interesting that following organization has been created:

The Free Speech in Science Project exists to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding. The Project will fund legal advice and defense to those who need it, while also executing an offense to turn the tables on abusive officials. Scientists, policy organizations and others should not have to labor under the fear that they will be the next victims of the Climate Inquisition, that they may face punishment and personal ruin for engaging in research and advocating their views.

http://www.freespeechinscience.org/

A posted article on this website describing their genesis has the following several paragraphs:


"In September a group of 20 climate scientists wrote to President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch encouraging them to heed (US Senator) Mr. Whitehouse and launch a RICO investigation targeting climate skeptics. This was necessary since, they claimed, America’s policy response to climate change was currently “insufficient,” because of dissenting views regarding the risks of climate change. Email correspondence subsequently obtained through public-records requests revealed that this letter was also coordinated by Mr. Whitehouse.

Reps. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) and Mark DeSaulnier (D., Calif.) followed up with a formal request for the Justice Department to launch an investigation, specifically targeting Exxon Mobil for its funding of climate research and policy organizations skeptical of extreme warming claims. Attorney General Lynch announced in testimony this month that the matter had been referred to the FBI “to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for what we could take action on.” Similar investigations are already spearheaded by state attorneys general in California and New York.

Meanwhile, Mr. Whitehouse, joined by Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), sent letters to a hundred organizations—from private companies to policy institutes—demanding that they turn over information about funding and research relating to climate issues. In his response to the senators, Cato Institute President John Allison called the effort “an obvious attempt to chill research into and funding of public policy projects you don’t like.”

Intimidation is the point of these efforts. Individual scientists, think tanks and private businesses are no match for the vast powers that government officials determined to stifle dissent are able to wield. An onslaught of investigations—with the risk of lawsuits, prosecution and punishment—is more than most can afford to bear. As a practical reality, defending First Amendment rights in these circumstances requires the resources to take on the government and win—no matter the cost or how long it takes.

It also requires taking on the Climate Inquisition directly. Spurious government investigations, driven by the desire to suppress a particular viewpoint, constitute illegal retaliation against protected speech and, as such, can be checked by the courts, with money damages potentially available against the federal and state perpetrators. If anyone is going to be intimidated, it should be officials who are willing to abuse their powers to target speech with which they disagree.

That is why we are establishing the Free Speech in Science Project to defend the kind of open inquiry and debate that are central to scientific advancement and understanding."

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Who guards the people from the "guardian" governmental officials? Another example of our guardians using the power we give them to abuse us rather than guard us from abuse.

The IRS and its defending attorneys, the US Justice department, has been harshly criticized by a US Appeals Court for abusing its powers and abusing the public:

"Writing for the unanimous three-judge appellate panel, Judge Raymond Kethledge observes that mandamus is “an extraordinary remedy reserved to correct only the clearest abuses of power by a district court.” The appeals judges not only found no such abuse; they ordered the IRS to comply with Dlott’s orders. The ruling closes by strongly suggesting that the Justice Department lawyers representing the IRS have been acting in bad faith:

The lawyers in the Department of Justice have a long and storied tradition of defending the nation’s interests and enforcing its laws—all of them, not just selective ones—in a manner worthy of the Department’s name. The conduct of the IRS’s attorneys in the district court falls outside that tradition. We expect that the IRS will do better going forward. And we order that the IRS comply with the district court’s discovery orders of April 1 and June 16, 2015—without redactions, and without further delay."

The Washington Times’s Stephen Dinan sums up the finding: “A federal appeals court spanked the IRS Tuesday, saying it has taken laws designed to protect taxpayers from the government and turned them on their head, using them to try to protect the tax agency from the very tea party groups it targeted.”

For full details see the following article titled "IRS Chutzpah":

http://www.wsj.com/articles/irs-chutzpah-1458753909?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb

What do we need to do and be aware of in order to better prevent future terrorism? What as individual citizens? What if we are political leaders? What as Dharma practitioners? What as fellow beings? Since we are more than one of these, what to do? How to differentiate between radical Islamists and moderate Muslims? In memoriam and service to those killed and injured in Islamic terrorist bombing in Brussels March 22, 2016.

"Not a single day now goes by without an Islamist suicide bombing, rocket attack, shooting spree, kidnapping or stabbing somewhere in the world.

Consider the past 10 days.

On Sunday, March 13, jihadists sprayed gunfire on sunbathers in Grand Bassam, a resort town in the Ivory Coast popular with Westerners and wealthy Ivorians. The attack, which was claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, killed 16 people, including Burkinabe, Cameroonian, French, German, Ivorian and Malian citizens.

On Monday, March 14, two Palestinians fired on Israelis waiting at a bus stop in Kiryat Arba, in the West Bank, wounding one soldier before Israeli forces killed both. A third Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into an Israeli army vehicle in the area and was shot dead. Israel has suffered a wave of Arab knife-and-car attacks for six months, known as the stabbing intifada.

On Tuesday, March 15, al Qaeda’s Somali franchise, al-Shabaab, kidnapped three Red Crescent aid workers in the country’s southwest, according to local media. The abductions followed al-Shabaab’s seizure of a village in central Somalia, amid a broader Islamist resurgence in the Horn of Africa. The aid workers were freed a day later after local villagers pleaded for their release.

On Wednesday, March 16, a pair of female suicide bombers blew themselves up at a mosque in Nigeria, killing 24. No group has claimed credit, but the bombing took place in Nigeria’s Borno state, the birthplace of Boko Haram, an Islamic State affiliate that is Africa’s most savage terror outfit.

On Thursday, March 17, the stabbing intifada claimed a fresh victim when a pair of Palestinian terrorists jumped and wounded an Israeli soldier with a knife in Ariel, in the West Bank. Israeli security forces killed both assailants.

On Friday, March 18, suspected al Qaeda fighters fired rockets at the Salah gas facility in Algeria. No one was injured, but BP and Norwegian oil giant Statoil, which operate the facility, withdrew some staff and suspended operations.

On Saturday, March 19, a bomb went off in a tony shopping district of Istanbul, killing three Israelis (two of whom were U.S. citizens) and one Iranian, and wounding 39 others. This was the fifth mass-casualty terrorist bombing in Turkey in as many months, most of them claimed by or attributed to Islamic State. The same day, a mortar assault on a checkpoint in El-Arish, Egypt, killed 15 policemen. A Sinai-based Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility.

On Sunday, March 20, al-Shabaab overran a Somali military base just 28 miles from the capital, Mogadishu, killing at least one person and seizing several vehicles. Also on Sunday, the Istanbul governorate canceled a hotly anticipated soccer match after receiving “serious intelligence” regarding a planned terror attack.

On Monday, March 21, Islamist fighters likely affiliated with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb targeted a hotel in the capital of Mali, Bamako, that houses a European Union military-assistance mission. EU personnel were unharmed, and one attacker was killed by hotel security.

Brussels was the first major terrorist incident in the West since November’s jihadist killing spree in Paris and December’s in San Bernardino, Calif. You could create a calendar like this one that stretches back for weeks and months, and the above doesn’t even include the civil wars and humanitarian calamities in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan."

What are appropriate and skillful responses to this ongoing terrorism?

The source of the above list and further discussion of the same is at:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/global-jihads-deadly-calendar-1458688588?mod=djemMER

And here are several perspectives on the ISIS response to the bombing:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/isis-propaganda-brussels/475002/ 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3505268/ISIS-celebrate-Brussels-terror-attack-handing-sweets-residents-Syria.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/brussels-attacks-terrorism-isis/474858/

And here is a suggested action plan;

Unite to Defeat Radical Jihadism - It will require Western elites to form an alliance with the citizens they’ve long disrespected.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-defeat-radical-jihadism-1458862004

There is a lack of scientific evidence of the danger of GMO products. Nevertheless, if we as individuals wish not to use GMO products based on what we know, need and feel, that is our choice. However, if our opposition to GMO products for others leads to malnutrition, suffering and starvation, that is another matter and worthy of our reflection of our actions and the consequences thereof. Below are excerpts from a speech by the president of a major agricultural college, Purdue Univerity, at the US Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Outlook Forum in Arlington, Va., Feb. 25, 2016. Following this is a fascinating article about the potentials of CRISPR. Also, a legal case against GM Salmon.

“The attack on GMO technology is the most blatant anti-science of the age, but it is far worse than that,” Purdue University President Mitch Daniels on Thursday (Feb. 25) said. “Lives are at stake, and while scientists, regulators and business people are naturally reluctant to fight back, it’s morally irresponsible not to.”

Daniels cited projections by the United Nations that the global population is expected to grow to more than 9 billion people in 2050, generating a 70 percent increase in the demand for food. He described GMOs as the best hope to ensure the world’s poor have access to an affordable and nutritious diet.

“Thousand of studies and trillions of meals consumed prove the safety of biotechnologies,” he said. “We would never withhold medications with a safety record like that, and it’s just as wrong and just as anti-scientific to do so for food.”

"The threat this time is internal. It will be a self-inflicted wound. What is troubling me, and I hope troubles you, is that there is a shockingly broad, and so far shockingly successful, movement that threatens this important ascent of humankind out of the condition that has plagued us since we first walked upright: of having enough food to meet the most basic, the most elementary need of any living species. That threatens our ascent by choking off the very technologies that could make that next great triumph possible.

I suggest to you that you have a positive duty to do things that probably do not come naturally, to contest and refute junk science and false claims against the technologies that offer so much promise to the world. And not solely on the polite objective grounds that come most naturally to folks in the pursuits represented here, to people who work in the regulation of agriculture and its products, to those who study academically these subjects and work on the new technologies and the policies around them, or to the businesses that produce these products as the technologies become available.

We are used to and only comfortable with polite and civil dialogue: PowerPoints, facts, data at meetings where people have agreed, at least tacitly, to follow the facts where they lead. That is not this argument. We are dealing here, yes, with the most blatant anti-science of the age. But it is worse than that. It is inhumane and it must be countered on that basis. Those who would deny with zero scientific validity the fruits of modern agricultural research to starving or undernourished people—or those who will be, absent great progress—need to be addressed for what they are, which is callous, which is heartless, which is cruel."


Sources for the above are:

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2016/Q1/purdue-president-mitch-daniels-calls-on-leaders-to-counter--anti-gmo-falsehoods.html

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-mitch-daniels-on-anti-gmo-cruelty-1458340376

And here is an outstanding article about newer methods. It is about new gene-editing tool, CRISPR, that is sweeping agriculture.This method can transform the debate over genetic modification. Here it is:

https://research.ncsu.edu/ges/files/2015/11/sci-american.pdf

A legal case against GM Salmon:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/lawsuit-challenges-fdas-right-to-approve-genetically-modified-animals-1459431182 

 

Medications save lives and reduce suffering. What are the best ways to make them available? Here is an interesting excerpt from a response to the election year proposals:

"President Obama’s latest budget includes proposals—echoed or one-upped on the presidential-campaign trail by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton—that would require pharmaceutical companies to release data on the cost of research and development (R&D) and the extent of discounts offered to insurers for each drug brought to market. Yet the key numbers already are disclosed freely—and we know how to get better value from medicines and improve their affordability to patients.

The company I lead, Lilly, discloses its annual R&D spending in audited financial statements every year, like other public companies. Lilly’s number for 2015 was $4.8 billion—part of the $50 billion invested in R&D each year by the members of our industry association alone. That’s more than 20% of all R&D spending by all U.S. businesses. Seen against that staggering total, the proposal to mandate the nearly impossible task of assembling drug-by-drug R&D-spending figures misses the whole point.

Pharmaceutical companies’ R&D feeds innovation from the earliest identification of leads through to clinical trials, real-world data collection and the refinement of existing treatments. It includes the cost of myriad failures—part of every scientific enterprise—along with further research on approved medicines, right up to their patent expirations. Money made on the sale of today’s new medicines feeds all of the indispensable streams in this complex ecosystem.

Averages are easy enough to come by—a new academic study in the Journal of Health Economics says it takes about $2.6 billion in R&D investment per new medicine launched. Calculating a precise number for an individual product is quite another matter. Consider Lilly’s investment of billions of dollars in R&D related to Alzheimer’s disease over the last quarter century. Since there are several candidates in our pipeline that emerged from past work, to which future product and in what proportion should these costs be allocated? And to what end?

The key insight is beyond dispute. Developing medicines is risky, expensive and time-consuming, and everyone would be better off if it were less so. Rather than meaningless disclosure mandates, policy efforts instead should encourage whatever can be done, without compromising patient safety, to shave precious weeks off development and regulatory-approval timelines."

For the rest of this article and comments to it, see:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/an-empty-obama-clinton-sanders-plan-on-drug-costs-1458601547?mod=djemMER

Danger - A Dharma Talk 3-20-16

http://prairiezen.org/Sunday_audio.html