“Tipper Over”

A week or so ago a friend sent me a link to this blog. I don’t know anything about it except what I’ve read on the “About” page, but the comments on this particular thread are a riot.

Thank you.

Some Schools Have Real Standards

Columbia U. Fires Teachers College Professor Accused of Rampant Plagiarism
Columbia University’s Teachers College announced today that it planned to fire Madonna G. Constantine, a tenured professor, for plagiarism. The announcement, which came in a memorandum delivered to faculty members, said Ms. Constantine would be suspended immediately and would be dismissed, subject to a review by a faculty committee.

A law firm hired by the university to conduct an investigation reported in February that Ms. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, had committed more than two dozen instances of plagiarism. Ms. Constantine has vehemently denied the accusations and has, in turn, accused others of plagiarizing her work. She has also accused colleagues of envy and racism.

Last October, Ms. Constantine said a noose was placed outside her office door. The New York City Police Department’s hate-crime unit investigated the incident, but months later still had no suspects. — Thomas Bartlett

We’re still trying to confirm rumors that New Saint Andrews College has recruited Ms. Constantine to fill an empty faculty position. Her moral flexibility combined with her deft ability to reverse the charge while simultaneously playing the victim makes her a virtual lock at the burgeoning school, despite lingering questions about her skill at revising history.

Thank you.

Fascinating Development

This is a fascinating development in the treatment of cancer:

Cancer patient recovers after injection of immune cells
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.

The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.

After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.

Doctors took cells from the man’s own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as “immunotherapy”.

Experts said that the case could mark a landmark in the treatment of cancer.

It raises hopes of a possible new way of fighting the disease, which claims 150,000 lives in Britain every year.

Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “It’s very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body. While it’s always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used.”

However, the treatment could prove extremely expensive and scientists say that more research is needed to prove its effectiveness.

Genetically altered white blood cells have been used before to treat cancer patients but this is the first study to show that simply growing vast numbers of the few immune cells in the body to attack a cancer can be safe and effective.

Normally there are too few of the cells in a patient’s body to effectively fight cancer.

Dr Cassian Yee, who led the team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said: “For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study.”

The work raises hopes that this approach could not only offer a more effective treatment for skin cancer, or melanoma, which kills around 2,000 people in Britain alone, but be applied to other cancers too.

The patient was one of nine with metastatic melanoma, that is skin cancer that has spread, who were being treated in a recently completed clinical trial to test bigger and bigger doses of their own white blood cells.

Larger, more elaborate, trials are now under way.

Almost 9,000 new cases of melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, are diagnosed every year in Britain, and nearly 2,000 patients die from the disease.

Prof Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said: “This is another interesting demonstration of the huge power of the immune system to fight some types of cancer.

“Although the technique is complex and difficult to use for all but a few patients, the principle that someone’s own immune cells can be expanded and made to work in this way is very encouraging for the work that Cancer Research UK and others are carrying out.”

Immunotherapy, in which a patients own immune cells are used to treat cancer, is a growing area of research that aims to develop less-toxic treatments than standard chemotherapy and radiation.

Because cancer occurs when the body’s own cells grow out of control, the immune system only responds weakly.

The ability of the body’s own defences to tackle cancer in this case is all the more remarkable because most deadly feature of the disease is its ability to colonise other parts of the body, when it becomes much more difficult to treat.

A dramatic example of immunotherapy was reported two years ago by one pioneer of the field, Dr Steven Rosenberg of the US National Cancer Institute, who eradicated cancer from two dying men using genetically modified versions of their own cells.

Both Mark Origer and “Thomas M” were suffering from advanced melanoma but the hope is that such methods could be customised to attack other common cancers, notably breast, colon and lung.

Dr Rosenberg told The Daily Telegraph the new work is an “interesting study that helps to confirm the effectiveness of cell transfer immunotherapy for treating cancer patients. We have now treated 93 patients with metastatic melanoma using their own anti-tumour cells with response rates up to 72 per cent. Mark Origer remains disease free now over three years after treatment.”

Thank you.

Justice Delayed

U.S. panel upholds deportation of Nazi guard
By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON, June 16 (Reuters) — A U.S. appeals panel has upheld an order to deport an 83-year-old Wisconsin man accused of serving as a Nazi SS guard whose duty was to finish off dying Jews in a two-day mass execution in Poland that killed more than 40,000, the U.S. Justice Department said on Monday.

The department said the Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed the January, 2007 order to deport Josias Kumpf, 83, to Germany, Austria or his native Serbia.

“Josias Kumpf participated in a 1943 Nazi operation that resulted in the murder of thousands of innocent victims. His culpability in this atrocity does not diminish with the passage of time,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich.

The department said Kumpf had admitted to participating in what the Nazis called “Operation Harvest Festival” in November 1943. About 42,000 Jews were killed over two days in the mass execution at three prison camps in German-occupied Poland.

Kumpf, who had joined the Nazi SS Death’s Head guard in 1942, was serving at the Trawniki slave-labor camp at the time of the massacres, the department said.

“Kumpf stood guard as approximately 8,000 Jewish prisoners, including approximately 400 children, were shot and killed in pits at Trawniki,” the department said. “According to Kumpf, his assignment was to watch for victims who were still ‘halfway alive’ or ‘convulsing.’ If any of the prisoners attempted to escape, he stated, his job was to ‘shoot them to kill.’”

The massacre was “one of the most infamous crimes of the Holocaust,” said Eli Rosenbaum, head of the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations.

The Justice Department said Kumpf had immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1956 and became a U.S. citizen in 1964. The special investigations office and the U.S. attorney for eastern Wisconsin sued in 2003 to strip Kumpf of his citizenship and won the case in 2005.

The office was founded in 1979 and has won cases against 107 participants in Nazi war crimes, the department said.

The United States has stripped the citizenship of 16 former Trawniki guards, the U.S. Holocaust Museum says on its Web site. (Editing by David Wiessler)

Thank you.

Politics

The Washington Post has an excellent article dissecting Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party’s primaries. And in case you’re tempted to fall for Obama’s rhetoric, check out Pamela Gellar’s blog, Atlas Shrugs. Her style reminds me of a certain anonymous attack blogger: she understands that a hostile religion has bad intentions for those who oppose it; she’s a very direct writer; and she’s funny. She gets hits too. In fact, her blog recently placed 174th of all blogs and 42nd in political blogs.

Thank you.

“Ruthlessness gene” discovered

Two things struck me from this article entitled “Ruthlessness gene” discovered:

1. The headline promised more than the article delivered. Obviously this kind of article doesn’t purport to present all of the circumstances of the test nor all of the findings. Nevertheless, they didn’t discover a “ruthless” gene; they observed behavioral tendencies within 200 students who played a modified version of Monopoly and they found that 18% of the so-called “dictators” kept all their money, which amounted to 50 shekels or 14 bucks. Researchers did not indicate if those 18% were hungry for pizza that night. Regardless, and modern science notwithstanding, dictators — those psychopathic beasts — remain “without excuse.”


2. The second thing that struck me was that they cropped the image to fit the web frame. As you can see below, we remedied this horrible injustice to the memory of two of the most sadistic dictators in modern history.

Thank you.

Sola Fidel

Returning from almost 12 busy days away from my fully documented anonymous attack blog, we want to pay tribute to Fidel Castro after he retired from the office of dictator of Cuba and handed the iron fist to his brother Raul, who helped him overthrow the Batista regime decades ago in a violent revolution. Castro and other likeminded communists designed the blueprint for the Federal Vision’s forthcoming new “Reformation” — smash and grab. And if you don’t like it, they’ll smash harder.


Thank you.

OJ

I’m a sports geek (mostly football and boxing) so my drive time consists of listening to ESPN radio, which includes Jim Rome in the morning. My wife says he’s bad for me but she cracks up whenever he’s on and she even tapes his TV show for us to watch.

All that is to set up something I heard Rome say during today’s show. He was commenting on OJ’s appearance in court yesterday, and Rome said,

And how comfortable does OJ Simpson look in the courtroom? Most people would be terrified to be in the there facing the accusations the “Juice” is looking at. But not “Oadge.” He’s right at home. Like seeing someone in their natural habitat. You know, Tiger Woods on a golf course. Michael Jordan on the hardwood . . . and “Oadge” facing criminal charges in a court room. Concerned? He looked downright bored. Like he might fall asleep. Then again, can you really blame the guy? I mean . . . been there, beaten that. They had him dead to rights on a double homicide charge . . . even had his DNA . . . and he walked right out of the courtroom and right onto the first tee at Rancho Park. You think he’s going to sweat something as significant and minor league as a little kidnapping charge? He was probably looking around the courtroom for Marcia Clark and Judge Ito instead of the cat behind the bench with the ponytail. At the risk of getting on the wrong side of every dude watching right now who’s still rocking the ponytail . . . where are you going with that? There’s never going to be another Woodstock. Turn the page, hippy.

Yeah, because “Oadge” is sweating this. Sure he is. He’s probably just waiting for someone to ask him to try on another glove. He’s probably suggesting rhymes to his lawyer for his closing argument. “It was my memorabilia . . . and it’s not like I tried to kill ya.” Or “I didn’t do any kidnapping. How long until I can get back to sand trapping.”

Allow me to save the judge the trouble. Not guilty. Set the “Juice” free. Or in the immortal words of that weirdo with the banner on the 405 freeway “Go, ‘Juice’ Go. Go, ‘Juice; Go.”

I lost it.

This gives me a chance to upload this photo that made the rounds about a year ago. It’s caption read: “Why we can’t find Osama.”

“He’s just so happy to be here”

Great story.

A history of rope, and shame

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

This will be a history of rope.

It strikes me that such a history is desperately needed just now. It seems the travesty in Jena, La., has spawned a ghastly trend. Remember how white students at Jena High placed nooses in a tree last year to communicate antipathy toward their African-American classmates? Now it’s happening all over. . . .