TOS Blog: Daily Commentary from an Objectivist Perspective

Monday, April 22, 2013

An Ingenious Invention to Treat Chronic Heartburn

Posted by David Mirman at 11:03 am ET

As reported by the AP, doctors have used a novel device to successfully treat chronic heartburn.

Whereas heartburn, or acid reflux, is familiar to many as an occasional, fleeting pain, in some individuals it occurs chronically and can cause real harm. Such chronic heartburn is called gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and its more serious effects include difficulty sleeping, ulcers, difficulty swallowing, and increased risk of esophageal cancer.

GERD is caused by a failure of the pyloric sphincter, a doughnut-shaped muscle found at the entrance to the stomach. Normally, this muscle holds the entrance closed, keeping stomach acids where they belong, in the stomach. As one swallows, it relaxes momentarily, allowing food into the stomach, then closes the entrance again. When it fails to close the entrance completely, stomach acids may rise into the esophagus, causing heartburn or GERD.

The device, called LINX, is made by Torax Medical Inc. and is ingenius in its simplicity. It consists of a set of magnets arranged on a flexible ring, much like a child’s bracelet made of beads on an elastic string. It is surgically implanted around a defective pyloric sphincter. As food passes, the magnets are forced apart, the ring expands, and the food enters the stomach. Then the magnets pull the ring smaller, closing the entrance to the stomach and preventing acid reflux, just as the muscles of a functioning pyloric sphincter would do normally.

This is yet another example of how reason, science, and human ingenuity can transform raw materials—in this case metal dug from the earth—into a life-improving or even life-saving invention. Here’s to people of reason.

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Posted in: Science and Technology

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Harris-Perry Doubles Down, Promoting “Collective Responsibility”

Posted by Ari Armstrong at 12:00 pm ET

First, television host and university professor Melissa Harris-Perry said that “kids belong to whole communities.” As I pointed out, “a child belongs neither to his parents nor to ‘whole communities,’ but to himself. When someone belongs to someone else or to a group of other people, that person is a slave.”

Ah, but Harris-Perry didn’t really mean it, she claims in a response to her critics. She didn’t mean, for example, that the government may take children away from rights-respecting parents. She says, “That is not what I was talking about, and you know it.”

Leave aside for now why Harris-Perry would make an explicit statement, in a presumably scripted video, which she expects her readers to “know” she didn’t really mean. What position, after further “thought,” does she uphold? She now claims, “We have a collective responsibility to the children of our communities even if we did not conceive and bear them.” This “responsibility,” she suggests, means that the government may forcibly confiscate people’s wealth in order to subject children to government education.

Stepping away from her original position that children are property of the “community,” Harris-Perry now posits that adults are. She argues that “the community”—which, in practice, means whoever controls the government—may force adults to serve the community.

To make her “argument,” Harris-Perry relies on a crude equivocation between forced actions and chosen responsibilities. According to her, the government forcing people to finance the education of others’ children is just like a paid teacher grading a student’s test or a mother volunteering to tutor students. In other words, according to Harris-Perry, a person who finances the education of other people’s children under threat of government coercion—the threat to seize his assets or lock him in a cage—engages in the same sort of “responsibility to the children” as does someone who agrees to teach students for a salary or tutor them for love of the children or the work.

As to why Harris-Perry equivocates on the meaning of her comments, Ayn Rand presciently observed in a 1946 foreword to Anthem:

The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting.

Harris-Perry, we do know what you’re talking about, and so do you and your collectivist cohorts. And we who know what you’re talking about—we who understand the nature and implications of your statements—justly condemn your obfuscation, your collectivism, and your rights-violating policies.

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Image: MelissaHarrisPerry.com

Posted in: Individual Rights and Law

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Update on Joshua Lipana

Posted by Craig Biddle at 7:30 am ET

Joshua LipanaI spoke with Joshua yesterday, and there is some good news. He has had three sessions of chemotherapy in the past several days, and his doctors say the treatments have killed a substantial amount of the leukemia. They are, however, concerned that a lot of the cancer is still “hiding” in Joshua’s bone marrow, so he will need many more treatments in the weeks to come.

The chemo he is currently receiving is a relatively mild formula because his heart is weak due to various complications over the past few weeks (pneumonia, edema, deep vein thrombosis, etc.). As his health with respect to those complications improves, his doctors will increase the strength of the chemo meds and hopefully kill all of the leukemia over time.

The cost for Joshua’s hospital stay and treatments since he checked into St. Luke’s has been about $2,400 per day. So, although we have raised about $18,000 since the cancer relapsed, that money has been spent and we need to raise much more.

If you’ve not yet donated to help Joshua fight leukemia, please consider making a donation today. If you’ve already donated, please consider contributing again. Even small donations help.

You can contribute via Joshua’s GoFundMe campaign or PayPal or check. And if you donate $25 or more and would like some cookies for your generosity, just let Brittney and Ashley know, and they’ll send you a box of their homemade goodies.

Thank you for your consideration. —Craig Biddle

P.S. for those who are unfamiliar with Joshua and his situation, see this post and the links in the first paragraph thereof.

In short, Joshua is a young and very talented freedom fighter who lives in the Philippines and is an assistant editor of TOS Blog. He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2012, at the age of 20, and is now fighting for his life. You can read his writings here and here. In reading his works, you’ll see that a donation to help him beat cancer is an investment in your future.

Posted in: Announcements

Saturday, April 20, 2013

42: The Triumph of Courage and Moral Certitude over Irrationality and Bigotry

Posted by Michael A. LaFerrara at 12:02 pm ET

The movie 42: The Jackie Robinson Story is not a full biography on the life of Jackie Robinson, the black baseball player who broke Major League Baseball’s “color line.” Rather, the film covers the three year period from the 1945 signing of Robinson to a minor league contract by Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey to the end of Robinson’s first year with the Dodgers in 1947.

42’s narrow focus isn’t a drawback, however; it enhances the movie’s theme about the end of racial segregation in baseball, which these two men took the lead in achieving.

Robinson had to perform on the field in the face of extensive racial insults and abuse, nonacceptance from other ballplayers including many of his own teammates, hostile crowds, and repeated death threats. And perform he did, winning the National League’s 1947 Rookie-of-the-Year award as the best of that year’s new players.

Inspiring from beginning to end, 42 shows the power of courage and moral certitude. Just two men—Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson—succeeded against an ocean of irrationality and bigotry. The performances of Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as Rickey are captivating, and the film powerfully portrays the emotionally charged, racist atmosphere in which these two men succeeded.

We who cherish justice owe a major debt of gratitude to Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey (as well as to their 1947 counterparts in the American League—Larry Doby and Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck). These heroic men, in pursuit of their own values, made America a better place for all of us to live.

Don’t miss this beautiful film.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in: History, Sports

Friday, April 19, 2013

Mom Who Regrets Her Children Is Example of Altruism at Work

Posted by Heike Larson at 3:10 pm ET

In an online article that swept the Web, Isabella Dutton, a fifty-seven-year-old mother of two grown children, admits publicly that she regrets having children. She never wanted a child, yet had two because she felt it would be “unfair of me to deny [my husband] the chance to be a dad.” She chose to be a full-time mother, raising them “without any help from nannies or childminders,” because, she felt, “if you take your job as a parent seriously, you always put their needs before your own.” She writes that throughout her life, she “resented the time my children consumed. Like parasites, they took from me and didn’t give back.”

Mrs. Dutton concludes, “I know my life with [my husband] would have been so much happier without children, less complicated and more carefree.”

Here is a woman who has sacrificed her hobbies, her free time, her career, her life, to raise children she didn’t want, in order to make her husband happy; a woman who has put the needs of others first, willfully and intentionally, from the moment thirty-four years ago when she consented to having a child for her husband’s sake, to the present when her life consists of being the caretaker of her unwanted daughter who is suffering from MS; a woman whose life is a vivid example of the morality of altruism in practice.

Altruism holds that “man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”

Many Americans hold altruism as an ideal, and, in fact, hundreds of commenters on this article laud Mrs. Dutton for her life of selfless service.

Yet what did her selflessness achieve? Her life, by her own admission, has been misery—and, as many commenters rightly remarked, her children must have suffered for the lack of a loving and correspondingly engaged mom (not to mention the impact this article must have had on them).

Children can and should bring joy to parents’ lives—but they can do so only if parents choose to have them for rational, self-interested reasons, and embrace them as personal, life-enhancing values.

In parenting, as in all areas of life, rational selfishness, not altruism, is the proper moral code.

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Posted in: Ethics

Friday, April 19, 2013

Why Capitalism is Moral

Posted by Craig Biddle at 7:30 am ET

In the latest episode of Reason at Large, I answer a question from Jason: “You’ve written and spoken at length about why capitalism is the only moral social system, and I find your arguments very convincing. But in daily conversations with people, I don’t have an hour to make the full case. What’s your 5-minute version?”

Although I don’t quite keep my reply to five minutes, I do keep it relatively brief. (You’ve heard the aphorism, “I’d have written a shorter letter if I’d had more time”; it applies to videos too.)
The gist of the discussion is that capitalism is the only moral social system because it’s the only system that legalizes the requirements of human life.

Enjoy the episode and share it with your friends!

If you have a question you’d like me to address in a future episode, email me at cbiddle[at]theobjectivestandard.com. I can’t guarantee that I’ll answer every question, but I read them all, and I aim to answer those that I think will be of general interest to my viewers.

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Posted in: Individual Rights and Law

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

North Dakotans Building First Oil Refinery in 57 Years

Posted by David Biederman at 7:30 am ET

On March 26, construction crews started work on the Dakota Prairie Refinery, the first new oil refinery in the contiguous United States since 1977 and the first in North Dakota since 1956. The new refinery will process 20,000 of the 770,000 barrels of crude that oil producers pump out of the ground every day in the state.

The refinery will be a boon to the region. Its construction will employ some five hundred people through the end of next year, and then its full-time operation will employ one hundred.

The refinery will also meet more of the state’s demand for diesel. The state consumes 53,000 barrels of diesel per day, much of which is used to power the trucks, oil rigs, locomotives, and other heavy equipment used to pump and ship oil and maintain the related infrastructure. The state’s sole existing refinery, Tesoro Mandan, provides about 22,000 barrels of that diesel (the rest is imported), and the Dakota Prairie Refinery promises to deliver another 8,000 barrels.

Aside from regulatory burdens, the refinery faces only one major hurdle. As Jennifer Straumins, CEO of Calumet Specialty Products, explains, “The only risk is finding enough talented employees with North Dakota’s low unemployment rate. We’re recruiting right now.”

Now that’s the sort of “problem” Americans could use more of. Kudos to the producers pushing ahead on this important new refinery.

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Creative Commons Image: Lindsey Gee

Posted in: Business and Economics

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Initial Thoughts on the Boston Marathon Assault

Posted by Stephen Bourque at 1:38 pm ET

We do not yet know who perpetrated yesterday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon—whether it was a “lone wolf” or a group, or whether those responsible are foreign or domestic. Nor do we know whether the attackers were motivated by personal grudges or by ideology, or whether the acts were state-sponsored. Hopefully these questions will be answered soon.

What we do know is that the victims were innocent men, women, and children enjoying life and pursuing their values. They were fathers taking a well-deserved break from work to cheer on a son, daughters delightedly watching their mothers cross the finish line, elated Red Sox fans joining the crowd for further celebration, emergency medical workers cheerfully assisting exhausted runners.

What we know about the event chosen for the assault is that it is a symbol of human achievement and joy. The Boston Marathon is the world’s most celebrated race of its kind. Not only elite athletes, but also tens of thousands of ordinary Americans and people from around the world participate in this display of effort, achievement, and passion for life.

What we know about the specific location of the attack is that it was the finish line of the marathon. The bombs exploded at the moment of triumph—the point at which runners achieved their goals and loved ones rushed to greet and congratulate them.

Who would do this? We all have reasonable suspicions, but, until evidence points to a culprit, we would do well to recognize them as just that.

Hopefully, in the coming days, investigators and law enforcement authorities will learn who committed this atrocity, discover their motivations and any relevant affiliations, and apprehend or kill the perpetrators as necessary.

Join our mailing list to receive our weekly digest. And for in-depth commentary from an Objectivist perspective, subscribe to our quarterly journal, The Objective Standard.

Creative CommonsImage: National Guard

Posted in: History, Sports

Monday, April 15, 2013

Swiss Scientists Create Wireless Implant to Monitor Blood Sugar, Heart Problems, and More in Real Time

Posted by Derrick Nantz at 2:07 pm ET

Scientists at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have recently developed a new medical implant device that works with a person’s smartphone or tablet to relay medical conditions to its receiver. The 14 millimeter device can detect a variety of chemical levels in the blood and warn its user or a doctor of possible medical problems—from high blood sugar levels in a diabetes patient to indicators of an impending heart attack. (In the case of a heart attack, a protein known as troponin is released into the bloodstream hours before a heart attack occurs. EPFL’s medical implant is potentially able to detect this.)

Once implanted under a person’s skin, the device is powered by a process known as wireless inductive charging, and it transmits data via Bluetooth to a patient’s smartphone or tablet device. Once the data is on the patient’s smartphone or tablet, software can monitor the data, trigger an alarm, or message a patient’s doctor.

Although the device is initially being considered for monitoring medical conditions related to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, other possible applications include monitoring the conditions of athletes, women in pregnancy, explorers in extreme conditions, and soldiers in action.

Congratulations—and thank you—to the scientists at EPFL for developing this life-serving technology.

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Image: EPFL

Posted in: Science and Technology

Sunday, April 14, 2013

3D Metal Printing Revolution Makes Possible the “Impossible”

Posted by Ari Armstrong at 7:30 am ET

The revolution in 3D printing—a manufacturing process in which “printers” build plastic or metal components—has taken a big step forward with a new machine purchased by the Anschutz Medical Campus in Colorado.

A news release from the University of Colorado (which houses the medical center) aptly summarizes the potential: “Metal Prototype Machine Could Revolutionize Biomedical Research.” The “laser metal sintering machine” functions by heating metal powder, causing it to cohere in thin sheets of “printed” metal that can be built, layer by layer, into intricate designs. (See the Denver Post’s report for additional details.) The printer is able to build components from titanium, nickel, magnesium, and cobalt.

The medical center focuses on using the machine to develop “prosthetic fingers, hands and arms.” But the technology has far broader possibilities. Once an individual or a group of designers can design and manufacture custom metal and plastic components, they can quickly, easily, and inexpensively produce kinds of machines and tools that already exist—and an unlimited number of machines and tools that have yet to be invented.

Richard Weir, a bioengineer with the university, said of the technology:

It’s a whole new way of thinking about how to make things. . . . The revolutionary aspect is to be able to do stuff that you can’t using conventional technology. There is the possibility to fabricate impossible-to-machine components and to explore whether that confers advantage to the designs we’re working on.

The machine purchased by the medical facility was built by the German company EOS, which calls the technology “e-manufacturing.” The company explains:

Global markets are facing ever shortening product life cycles. At the same time, product variety is on the rise. Manufacturing methods based on economies of scale are no longer in the position to meet these challenges. The credo underpinning conventional manufacturing means selling high volumes of identical products. This prerequisite, however, can no longer be met in today’s competitive environment.

Tool-based manufacturing methods are not suitable for economically fulfilling the increasing demand for customized products. Both product development and manufacturing therefore have to shift their paradigms—moving away from tool-based, static methods in favour of generative and flexible methods. e-Manufacturing can achieve this.

If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to witness the development of a profound technology, whether the automobile, electricity, aircraft, or microcomputer, wonder no more. This—observing the 3D printer revolution—is what it’s like.

Congratulations to EOS for developing this wonderful, world-changing technology, and congratulations to the Colorado researchers working to apply the technology in the field of medicine. What’s next we can only imagine. What has to date been impossible to manufacture is now possible.

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Image: University of Colorado, Denver

Posted in: Science and Technology