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Relics Of Antiquity In An Algorithm World
A young man recently asked, "Why save the elephants when there are children dying of hunger?" It's not an uncommon question.

How do we begin to explain why elephants are worth saving? Do we begin with the interconnectedness of all beings? Do we use mutually assured destruction to advance the argument? Do we explain that in every environment there are keystone species whose impact is so significant the ecosystem will be dramatically altered without them. Humans are a keystone species; so are elephants.

If these approaches don't work, then perhaps the most persuasive argument is a more practical one: What can humans learn from an animal whose evolutionary history on this planet dwarfs our own?

In the film, When Giants Fall, Dame Daphne Sheldrick -- who raises orphaned elephants in Kenya believes, "They are just like us, but better than us... It takes two years to make an elephant in the womb and only nine months to make a man... and I think that says it all."

And maybe, it does.

Over the millions of years of their complex evolution, elephants learned to get along. Together, these mighty packs charted migratory paths travelled for millennia. Compassion, devotion, empathy -- these are the qualities which held herds together, the secrets of their long survival.

Elephants celebrate life and mourn their dead. They protect injured calves, they rally around the most vulnerable among them, loyal until death. They do not divide. Elephants do not rape, murder, steal or deceive.

They are master gardeners. As they migrate, their dung fertilizes and spreads seeds that restore health to the Earth and create a vast biodiversity. Even an elephant's footprint creates vital habitat for smaller creatures. Elephants are stewards of their environment, living without violence in their natural state.

By contrast, since the advent of agriculture just over 12,000 years ago, humans have altered nearly every ecosystem on the planet. Our lust for fossil fuels and the growth it creates has led to an extinction rate 1000 times greater than the background extinction rate of nature. We are watching the glorious diversity of our planet collapse, yet we refuse to halt our growth.

Sadly for the elephant, their fate is tied to our own. They are now refugees surrounded by human violence. Many on the ground who risk their lives to save elephants call the massive scale of their slaughter a holocaust. Elephants look to the sky where helicopters carry poachers with AK-47s. Rain turns to bullets. Terrorists groups buy arms with the proceeds of blood-ivory, making it an immensely valuable commodity so long as there are buyers.

The Chinese, Africa's most recent colonizers, have built hundreds of new mining operations across the continent -- leading to the pollution of watering holes. In Zimbabwe, cyanide was thrown into elephant watering holes in an effort to kill entire herds without ever firing a shot. Robert Mugabe's government sells orphaned calves to Chinese zoos.

In the town of Lewa, Kenya, conservationists built a safety-corridor underneath a roadway that blocked the elephants' migratory path from Kenya to Tanzania. His elders all dead, a young elephant named Mountain Bull met a daunting challenge. He had to lead. That meant he had to go under the roadway first. Waiting on the other side of the protected corridor were three poachers hiding in trees high overhead. They dropped poison spears with heavy weights on Mountain Bull's back. He fought so hard to get the spears out, the thrashing knocked down full grown trees. This is how he was found: His tusks chopped from his body. No elephant is safe.

Just one hundred years ago, an estimated ten million African elephants roamed the continent. Today, after a century of war and "progress," less than four hundred thousand still roam free. The toll of this indiscriminate slaughter has been severe for the herds that remain. In the film, When Giants Fall, one conservationist laments, "They are like the kidnapped children of The Lord's Resistance Army. In many cases, they are psychologically dead already."

But we can stop this.

On Sept. 24, in more than 130 cities across six continents, thousands of people will take to the streets to raise awareness about elephant and rhino conservation. The Global March for Elephants and Rhinos will happen on the same day as the opening of the CoP17 conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Conference of the Parties is the world's largest and most influential meeting on international wildlife trade. They cannot keep blood ivory out of the hands of poaching syndicates and terrorist groups, but they can give elephants in all 54 countries greater protection.

Let's take to the streets here in the United States, so the world knows we care about keeping this magnificent species on the planet. Here is a list of continents and cities where marches are scheduled on September 24th.

Meantime, the next time I'm asked, "Why save the elephants?", maybe I'll try this one: Because our world will be a lot less interesting without them.

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Too Much Bull
I'm with the thousands of Spaniards who recently demonstrated in Madrid for an end to bullfighting.

We obviously share the opinion that the ritual killing is an inhumane, blood-soaked exercise rather than a cultural art form projecting Spain's image to the world. And we are not alone.

A recent Spanish poll found 57 percent of the respondents repudiating bullfighting, even though through the ages the activity has been widely regarded as Spain's signature recreational pastime.

As humanity's technological capacity to destroy the planet has grown, attitudes have begun to change. Ethics have crept into mankind's treatment of the animal world, even in respect to species earmarked for human consumption. It reflects an increasing sentiment that lower life forms are sentient organisms that ought to be dealt with as humanely as possible.
Hence, for growing numbers of Spaniards as well as members of other nationalities, the spectacle in the bull ring has become a glorified exercise in animal cruelty and assassination.

That certainly is how I viewed it after attending my first and only bullfight years ago in Madrid's main arena.

The featured matador that day was billed as an exciting newcomer on the verge of challenging the more prominent members of his profession. As usual, a soon-to-be slain bull was released into the ring where it was repeatedly stabbed by lancers on horseback and jabbed from behind by sneaky junior matadors on foot. Consequently, the mutilated animal was soon bleeding and understandably boiling with rage (which was the general intent of the violent foreplay).

That was the cue for the "promising" young matador to enter the arena. He proceeded to use his cape to entice the charging bull into some breathlessly close passes. Unfortunately, his taunting nonchalance betrayed him as he sought to exert a hypnotic mastery over the pain-riddled beast. In a blink of an eye, the young matador was lifted from the ground by the bull's massive horns and catapulted a dozen or so feet into the air before landing flat on his back in a motionless heap. He was carried out of the arena as the junior matadors rushed to maneuver the exhausted bull in position for the fatal sword thrust. Suddenly, the crowd gasped as the wounded matador miraculously staggered back into the arena to dispatch the animal, which by this time appeared more dead than alive. Its breath was short as it stood shakily in the center of the ring, pawing the ground, almost begging to be put out of its misery. Moments later, it submitted docilely to the matador's fatal thrust and sank slowly to the ground.

Two fatalities were the product of that afternoon confrontation--the bull, and the young matador who died in a hospital from his wounds the following day.

Defenders of bullfights contend an animal's quick death in the ring is more merciful than its demise in a slaughter house. Only the end of life is not always so quick. Matadors' initial thrust of the sword frequently misses the fatal artery, causing further internal bleeding and a slow agonizing death. It should also be noted that in preparation for their appearance in the ring, bulls are frequently drugged, half-blinded, confined to unlighted quarters, and have pins inserted into their genitals to assure they are sufficiently "enraged".

It's time for bullfighting aficionados to concede that purposely inflicting torment falls far short of sport or a noble expression of courage.

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"Testing in the East": An Episode in Cold War Bioethics
Co-author: Ulf Schmidt, Professor of Modern History, University of Kent, Canterbury, England

In 2013 the influential German magazine Der Spiegel published an expose about clinical trials conducted by Western drug companies in East Germany during the Cold War. The magazine reported that at least 50,000 people had been test subjects for around 900 studies done by manufacturers that included leading companies from Switzerland, the United States, and West Germany. Fifty hospitals were sites of the research, including the prestigious Charite in East Berlin. The principle motivation for the East Germans was money: they desperately needed hard currency for their failing medical system. For their part the companies appreciated the far greater efficiency of recruitment in the East, and paid the East Germans up to 800,000 West German marks per study.

The agency responsible for setting up these contracts? The notorious Stasi, the East German secret police force that included hundreds of thousands of paid agents and hundreds of thousands of more informants.

Der Spiegel's series about the drug trials contained language and themes familiar to many landmark bioethics cases. The revelations were described as a scandal that used the oppressed East Germans as human guinea pigs, including deaths and injuries that had not been properly reported, the indiscriminate use of low-birthweight infants and depressed patients, inadequate informed consent, powerful drug companies and physicians largely eager to cooperate in spite of the occasional protest. Complete with interviews with former test subjects and regretful doctors, the study had all the elements of a classical bioethics case study that could take its place along with the U.S. Public Health Service's Tuskegee syphilis study; the Guatemala sexually transmissible disease experiments; and some of the well-documented human radiation, biological, and chemical warfare experiments in the U.S. and the U.K. The magazine's series concluded on a hopeful note that justice would be served when the distinguished German medical historian, Volker Hess, reviews the study archives.

Hess and two co-authors recently concluded their exhaustive review, published in German as Testen im Osten or "Testing in the East." They concluded that, far from the scandal that the press anticipated, the East German trials were conducted largely within acceptable standards of medical ethics, especially by the conventions of the day. The authors do allow that consent procedures might not have been as thorough as in the West and in some cases there are serious questions about placebo controls and the adequacy of comparative treatment arms, but the practices were not dramatically different from those in West Germany at the time, they say.

Several other groups of historians and ethicists in Germany have also examined the material and published their results. Yet this dramatic episode has received virtually no attention in the bioethics literature, in spite of the fact that it raises compelling questions about the functioning of medical ethics standards and practices in an authoritarian system. With the glaring and extreme exceptions of the Nazi concentration camp experiments and the abuses of Soviet psychiatry, these are questions that are largely absent from the literature. Medical ethics in Central and Eastern Europe during the socialist period is a matter of near total ignorance among scholars.

In the years ahead other scholars will want to weigh in on the conclusions of Hess and others. But one lesson that can already be drawn is that expectations about medical ethics in authoritarian regimes should be critically received. More investigation needs to be conducted about these seemingly contrarian results. Usual explanations don't seem to be available. For example, although East Germany was not a member of the World Medical Association and therefore not philosophically committed to its Declaration of Helsinki, they do not appear to have violated that international agreement. And although Western firms had good reason to want to conduct trials that were in line with Helsinki requirements in order to ensure that their intellectual property would be protected, they often seem to have breached those requirements in other parts of the world. And yet in East Germany they seem to have complied with those requirements. Why was this the case?

Understanding the unique conditions of medical ethics in East Germany and the other socialist states in that period will require incorporating expertise from cultural history, law, and the social sciences, as well as dogged archival work. Challenging though it is, this often troubled region presents an exceptional opportunity to assess the development, interpretation, and application of ethical theories, standards, and practices under circumstances that were quite different from those anywhere else in the world, and to obtain an illuminating comparison with our own place and time.

Originally published on the Hastings Bioethics Forum, September 21, 2016.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Wellcome Trust.

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A Life-Saving Clean Power Plan in the Hands of a US Court
Your future and that of your family is on trial at a court in Washington, DC. On Sept. 27, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear oral arguments about the Clean Power Plan (CPP), the country's most relevant federal initiative to fight climate change, and then decide whether it will ever be implemented.

Attorneys from both sides will present their views and answer the judges' questions about the legal arguments submitted to the court months ago.

And for us Latinos, this is a critical decision. We disproportionately suffer the consequences of climate change and the fossil fuel pollution that causes it.

The Obama administration's EPA finalized the CPP in 2015 to curb power plant carbon emissions for the first time ever. These plants generate 40 percent of the climate change pollution. The initiative would reduce these emissions by 32 percent in relation to 2005 levels by 2030.

For Latinos these reductions are literally a matter of life and death. Almost 40 percent of us live dangerously close to a coal-burning plant, which translates into high rates of asthma --especially among our children--, emphysema, heart disease, cancer and premature death.

By 2030, according to the EPA, the CPP would prevent 3,600 premature deaths, 1,700 heart attacks, 90,000 asthma attacks and the loss of 300,000 school and work days every year. Also annually, the plan would save us all some $54 billion in health care costs, prevent the emission of 870 million tons of carbon and drastically reduce the dumping of toxic compounds, such as sulfur and nitrogen oxides.

Speaking of savings, the CPP could bring down your electric bill by up to $17 a month, something hundreds of thousands of Latino households would really welcome as we pay a higher percentage of our income in power bills.

And to top it all off, the CPP could usher in a full-force clean energy economy generating millions of jobs, mainly in the sectors of the economy that employ the most Latinos, such as construction and manufacturing.

A plan that fights climate change and the fossil fuel pollution that causes it, that saves money for electricity users and creates good paying jobs? It's no wonder 82 percent of Latinos support the immediate implementation of the CPP. Yet some environmental justice groups do not support the CPP because it does not go far enough to secure reductions of pollution in communities of color.

However, attorneys general from 27 states, upon the urging of the dirty energy industry, early this year persuaded the Supreme Court to stay the implementation of the CPP, while the Circuit Court decided the merits of this brilliant idea.

The plaintiffs and their allies brandish the absurd argument that the hopes of our community's prosperity rest on a dirty energy economy, which in reality inflicts a daily punishment on the health of millions of Latinos and puts the future of the planet in grave risk.

The fossil fuel industry are trying to scare us all with fantastic predictions of impending ruin if the initiative is implemented, the same predictions polluters and the dirty energy industry have been foretelling for decades and that have never become reality.

A few weeks ago, Pope Francisco warned the world that destroying the environment is a sin, urging us all to act on the climate crisis. He added taking care of the God's creation must be added to the traditional Christian acts of compassion, including feeding the hungry and caring for the sick.

It would be a great idea for the enemies of the Clean Power Plant to heed the Pope's teachings, because as a matter of fact denying us and the rest of humanity a clean and bright future is a sin.

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No End To The Cold War's Expensive Nuclear Legacy
It was the Cold War, and it was a potential race to Armageddon. The Soviet Union produced an excessive number of nuclear warheads, and we did likewise.

Now another war rages bitterly-- but not on the front pages -- over what to do with the legacy of cold war: plutonium from the warheads.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and in the honeymoon period that followed between Russia and the United States, it was obvious that there were way too many warheads and the number needed to be reduced. In particular the key ingredient, plutonium, had to be contained and, preferably, disposed of.

In 2000, the United States and Russia agreed to dismantle large numbers of nuclear warheads known as "pits."

But getting rid of plutonium is not easy. It is a transuranic element, made in special reactors and, up to this point in time, with only one purpose: to make hydrogen bombs. It also is possible to use it as a fuel in power reactors, if they are the light water reactors now in service around the world. This can be done by mixing the plutonium with uranium reactor fuel in the proportion of 95 percent uranium to 5 percent plutonium.

This is not a great rate of disposal, but it works.

The French process is the one the Clinton Administration committed to using to burn up 34 metric tons of pit plutonium from warheads being dismantled at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.

The Russians committed to burning their equivalent excess plutonium in fast reactors. These are reactors with a high-neutron-flux -- a technology that the United States abandoned during the Carter Administration.

To accomplish the U.S. commitment to the Russians and get rid of the plutonium, the Department of Energy commissioned the building of a facility at its huge Savannah River Site nuclear reservation (310 square miles) near Aiken, S.C., on the Georgia border.

The plant -- a massive structure with double walls (each 10-feet thick) of the highest grade concrete and with a dense matrix of steel reinforcing -- is as close as humans can come, in my view, to building something that will last for thousands of years. It is awesome.

But the plant is troubled.

The DOE wants to halt construction and abandon the idea in favor of mixing the plutonium with a granular substance and burying it in a waste facility in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which is having its own difficulties after an accident. The process is called "down blending." It does not get rid of the plutonium which, with a half-life of 240,000 years, is essentially indestructible, unless it is burned in a reactor. It just stabilizes it and makes it hard to retrieve.

The suggested change has exacerbated tensions with Russia at a difficult time in U.S.-Russia relations. Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the proposed change of plan, saying, "This is not what we agreed on."

John MacWilliams, the DOE's point man on the issue, told me that the root of the problem is money. The South Carolina facility, known as the MOX (mixed oxide fuel) plant, has cost more than anticipated with $5 billion spent and a dispute over how far along construction is.

The DOE maintains that it is only 40 percent complete, and the contractor says it is 70 percent complete. Both have relied on outside consultants for their numbers.

Secretary of Energy Ernie Moniz, himself a nuclear scientist, told a meeting in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 13 that the South Carolina plant would cost $50 billion to $60 billion over its life-cycle. He estimated it would cost between $15 billion and $20 billion for the alternative down blending proposal. That is a number that is likely to be challenged in Congress.

The South Carolina congressional delegation and other supporters, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), are passionate in their support for MOX. But Congress is funding the construction at just $350 million a year, less than the $500 million needed to keep to the construction schedule, thus making the whole enterprise more expensive.

One way or another the Cold War is going to keep on costing for a long, long time. -- For InsideSources

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And Bill Gates approves

Otherworldly by Nathaniel Merz

Yellowstone is one of those places that at times can seem down right otherworldly.

Girl under the window by WEIER CHEN

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Above the Bankers by BRXSON

Sitting on TD Canada Trust Tower's neon green sign, accompanied by my neon green socks.