Liberum Arbitrium: April 2007

welcome to the desert of the real

The Eiffel Tower, Paris - Las Vegas

Your weird fact of the day: the Las Vegas Strip is not actually in Las Vegas, Nevada. Most of the Strip lies in the unincorporated Clark County township of Paradise, Nevada for a variety of legal and tax purposes.

what timing

Two stories leap out of the news today, the first from the Times in the UK:

Diabetics using stem-cell therapy have been able to stop taking insulin injections for the first time, after their bodies started to produce the hormone naturally again.
In a breakthrough trial, 15 young patients with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes were given drugs to suppress their immune systems followed by transfusions of stem cells drawn from their own blood.
The results show that insulin-dependent diabetics can be freed from reliance on needles by an injection of their own stem cells.

In fact, the US Congress is taking up this very issue right now, which you political junkies will remember, spurred Bush to use his first veto of his term in office to ban embryonic stem cell research. Well this is such an unpopular stance from an unpopular lame duck that there may be the votes in both houses for the first veto override of the Administration. Key swing vote is John Sununu, Senator from New Hampshire up for re-election next year in an increasingly blue-trending state. This limitation on our science prevents us from saving hundreds of millions of our loved ones, friends and family from ailments, the cure for which now hangs just outside our grasp. Call the good Senator (800-828-0498) and tell him to save our families and not cast another party-line vote for medical know-nothingism.

public service announcement

This Wednesday afternoon, before snow showers blanketed the area, a 22-year old man was struck by a taxi on Huntington Avenue in Boston near Forsyth Street. The taxi clipped the cyclist's rear wheel, sending him under the rear wheels of a dump truck full of scrap concrete. Despite a helmet and other protective gear, the bicyclist was pronounced dead once transported to Brigham & Women's Hospital. The cyclist was a recent Mass Art graduate whose artwork can be seen above, taken from where it hangs on my wall.

I know I have not been the most considerate driver towards cyclists in the past and expressed contempt for cyclists who think they 'own the road', but I've also been a cyclist who realizes that most drivers resent having to share any of the road with a guy on a bike and will make this known in no uncertain terms.

Boston is not one of the easiest places for cyclists to get around, despite efforts in recent years to improve bikeways made from old train railbeds. Critical Mass is planning on putting a ghost bike there to memorialize the killed cyclist. A ghost bike is a junker bike that has been painted stark white and affixed to the site where a cyclist has been hit or killed by a car driver.