Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds

OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.

SPACEWAR: ‘It’s quite a bit more than we expected’: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering. “An experimental satellite has mapped the scale of GPS jamming across Europe and the Middle East from space for the first time. The data surprised the team behind the project and indicated that satellites orbiting far from Earth aren’t the only ones that experience degradation of their positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals, which could affect their performance and the safety of their operations.”

YES:

FEMINISM IS JUST ANOTHER LEFTY FRONT. THE ISSUE IS NEVER THE ISSUE, THE ISSUE IS ALWAYS THE REVOLUTION.

TRADE NEWS:

HAPPY JUNETEENTH!

UPDATE: From the comments:

EVERY LEFTY SLOGAN HAS AN EXPIRATION DATE:

BOB GRABOYES: Lessons from the Tuskegee Study (Redux): There will never be another Tuskegee. There will always be another Tuskegee.

Ethical breaches associated with Bell’s imperatives for the Deaf, eugenic sterilization, the Tuskegee Experiment, various HeLa experiments, and similar efforts shared a common characteristic—a view that collective good (however defined) outweighed the sanctity of individual lives. In 1910, the American Medical Association’s Flexner Report, which reconfigured the structure of medical education, anticipated traditional medicine’s focus on individual patients giving way to public health’s concern with collective good. The author, Abraham Flexner, saw the physician as a “social instrument… whose function is fast becoming social and preventive, rather than individual and curative.” . . .

Paul Lombardo, a scholar on the history of eugenics, wrote,

“The expansive reach of public health law is justified by the government’s ‘police power,’ the inherent authority to adopt laws to protect health, welfare, and morals, and an exception to the usual expectation that states should not interfere with the property rights or the liberty and bodily integrity of citizens.”

Public health’s enthusiasm for social engineering, Lombardo notes, led to the public health sector’s enforcement roles in preventing marriage between persons with epilepsy, prohibiting interracial marriages, rounding up citizens for sterilization, investigating individuals’ racial ancestry, barring immigrants, as well as the Tuskegee Experiment.

The other common thread in many of these ethical breaches in biomedical research and policy was an illiberal suppression of information flows. Eugenics maintained its respected position longer than otherwise might have been the case, thanks to the stifling of academic dissent.

Superiority complexes lead to morally inferior behavior.

MY OPINION OF BRITAIN HAS DECLINED SHARPLY:

NOT AS GOOD AS “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR,” BUT FIRST CLASS WORK:

OPEN THREAD: Make it march.