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Let's say you run a multibillion-dollar football league. And let's say the scientific community—starting with one young pathologist in Pittsburgh and growing into a chorus of neuroscientists across the country—comes to you and says concussions are making your players crazy, crazy enough to kill themselves, and here, in these slices of brain tissue, is the proof. Do you join these scientists and try to solve the problem, or do you use your power to discredit them?
On a foggy, steel gray Saturday in September 2002, Bennet Omalu arrived at the Allegheny County coroner's office and got his assignment for the day: Perform an autopsy on the body of Mike Webster, a professional football player. Omalu did not, unlike most 34-year-old men living in a place like Pittsburgh, have an appreciation for American football. He was born in the jungles of Biafra during a Nigerian air raid, and certain aspects of American life puzzled him. From what he could tell, football was rather a pointless game, a lot of big fat guys bashing into each other. In fact, had he not been watching the news that morning, he may not have suspected anything unusual at all about the body on the slab.
The coverage that week had been bracing and disturbing and exciting. Dead at 50. Mike Webster! Nine-time Pro Bowler. Hall of Famer. "Iron Mike," legendary Steelers center for fifteen seasons. His life after football had been mysterious and tragic, and on the news they were going on and on about it. What had happened to him? How does a guy go from four Super Bowl rings to...pissing in his own oven and squirting Super Glue on his rotting teeth? Mike Webster bought himself a Taser gun, used that on himself to treat his back pain, would zap himself into unconsciousness just to get some sleep. Mike Webster lost all his money, or maybe gave it away. He forgot. A lot of lawsuits. Mike Webster forgot how to eat, too. Soon Mike Webster was homeless, living in a truck, one of its windows replaced with a garbage bag and tape.
It bothered Omalu to hear this kind of chatter—especially about a dead guy. But Omalu had always fancied himself an advocate for the dead. That's how he viewed his job: a calling. A forensic pathologist was charged with defending and speaking for the departed—a translator for those still here. A corpse held a story, told in tissue, patterns of trauma, and secrets in cells.
In the autopsy room, Omalu snapped on his gloves and approached the slab. He noted that Mike Webster's body was sixty-nine inches long and weighed 244 pounds. He propped up the head and picked up his scalpel and sliced open the chest and cracked open the ribs. He took out the heart and found everything he expected of a man who was believed to have died of a heart attack, as was the case with Webster. Then he made a cut from behind the right ear, across the forehead, to the other ear and around. He peeled the scalp away from the skull in two flaps. With the electric saw he carefully cut a cap out of the skull, pulled off the cap, and gently, like approaching a baby in the birth canal, he reached for the brain.
Omalu loved the brain. Of all the organs in the body, it was easily his favorite. He thought of it sort of like Miss America. Such a diva! So high-maintenance: It requires more energy to operate than any other organ. The brain! That was his love and that was his joy, and that's why his specialty was neuropathology.
Omalu stared at Mike Webster's brain. He kept thinking, How did this big athletic man end up so crazy in the head? He was thinking about football and brain trauma. The leap in logic was hardly extreme. He was thinking, Dementia pugilistica? "Punch-drunk syndrome," they called it in boxers. The clinical picture was somewhat like Mike Webster's: severe dementia—delusion, paranoia, explosive behavior, loss of memory—caused by repeated blows to the head. Omalu figured if chronic bashing of the head could destroy a boxer's brain, couldn't it also destroy a football player's brain? Could that be what made Mike Webster crazy?
Of course, football players wear helmets, good protection for the skull. But the brain? Floating around inside that skull and, upon impact, sloshing into its walls. Omalu thought_: I've seen so many cases of people like motorcyclists wearing helmets. On the surface is nothing, but you open the skull and the brain is mush._
So Omalu carried Mike Webster's brain to the cutting board and turned it upside down and on its side and then over again. It appeared utterly normal. Regular folds of gray matter. No mush. No obvious contusions, like in dementia pugilistica. No shrinkage like you would see in Alzheimer's disease_. _He reviewed the CT and MRI scans. Normal. That might have been the end of it. He already had a cause of death. But Omalu couldn't let it go. He wanted to know more about the brain. There had to be an answer. People don't go crazy for no reason.
He went to his boss, pathologist Cyril Wecht, and asked if he could study the brain, run special tests, a microscopic analysis of the brain tissue, where there might be a hidden story.
There was nothing routine about this request. Another boss might have said, "Stick with the protocol," especially to a rookie such as Omalu, who had not yet earned a track record, who was acting only on a hunch. But Wecht was famously never one to shy away from a high-profile case—he had examined JFK, Elvis, JonBenét Ramsey—and he said, "Fine." He said, "Do what you need to do."
A deeply religious man, Omalu regarded Wecht's permission as a kind of blessing.
It was late, maybe midnight, when Bob Fitzsimmons, a lawyer working in a renovated firehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, got a call from the Pittsburgh coroner's office. It was not unusual for him to be at the office that late; he was having a bad week. He struggled to understand the man's accent on the phone, jutted his head forward. "Excuse me? You need what?"
The brain. Permission from the Webster family to process Mike Webster's brain for microscopic examination.
Oh brother was Fitzsimmons's initial thought. As if the Webster case wasn't already complicated enough.
Fitzsimmons had first met Webster back in 1997, when he showed up at his office asking for help untangling his messed-up life. Webster was a hulk of a man with oak-tree arms and hands the size of ham hocks. Fitzsimmons shook his hand and got lost in it, mangled fingers going every which way, hitting his palm in creepy places that made him flinch. It seemed like every one of those fingers had been broken many times over. Mike Webster sat down and told Fitzsimmons what he could remember about his life. He had been to perhaps dozens of lawyers and dozens of doctors. He really couldn't remember whom he'd seen or when. He couldn't remember if he was married or not. He had a vague memory of divorce court. And Ritalin. Lots of Ritalin.
"With all due respect, you're losing your train of thought, sir," Fitzsimmons said to Webster. "You appear to have a serious illness, sir." Not a pleasant thing to tell anyone, and here was a hero, a famous football player Fitzsimmons once bowed to, as did all young guys worth the Terrible Towels they proudly waved in the 1970s. The Dynasty! The black and the gold! It fueled optimism here, up and down the rivers, mill towns held tight in the folds of the Allegheny Mountains. And here was Iron Mike himself.
As a personal-injury lawyer, Fitzsimmons thought what he saw in Webster was an obvious case of a man suffering a closed-head injury—the kind he'd seen plenty of times in people who had suffered through car crashes and industrial accidents. No fracture, no signs of physical damage to the skull, but sometimes severe psychiatric problems, memory loss, personality changes, aggressive behavior.
"Please help me," Mike Webster said.
It took Fitzsimmons a year and a half to hunt down all of Webster's medical records, scattered in doctors' offices throughout western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He sent Webster for four separate medical evaluations, and all four doctors confirmed Fitzsimmons's suspicion: closed-head injury as a result of multiple concussions.
Fitzsimmons filed the disability claim with the NFL. There are several levels of disability with the NFL, and Mike Webster was awarded the lowest one: partial, about $3,000 a month.
Fitzsimmons said, "Oh, please." He said if ever there was a guy who qualified for the highest, it was Mike Webster. The highest level was "total disability, football-related," reserved for those who were disabled as a result of playing the game. It would yield Webster as much as $12,000 a month. Fitzsimmons said to the NFL, "Four doctors—all with the same diagnosis!"
The NFL said no. Four doctors were not enough. They wanted Webster seen by their own doctor. So their own doctor examined Webster...and concurred with the other four: closed-head injury. Football-related.
The NFL pension board voted unanimously for partial disability anyway.
Fitzsimmons said, "You have got to be kidding me." He filed an appeal with the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, where the pension board is headquartered. The judge reversed the decision of the NFL pension board—the first time in history any such action had been taken against the NFL.
And yet still the NFL fought. They took the case to federal court. They said Mike Webster—who had endured probably 25,000 violent collisions during his career and now was living on Pringles and Little Debbie pecan rolls, who was occasionally catatonic, in a fetal position for days—they said Mike Webster didn't qualify for full disability.* ****
Mike Webster and Bob Fitzsimmons grew close during those days. In fact, Mike Webster clung to Fitzsimmons like a baby to his mamma. He took to sleeping in the parking lot, waiting for Fitzsimmons to show up for work. He would stay there all day, just watching, waiting, and when Fitzsimmons would go home, Mike Webster would go back to his truck and write him letters. Hundreds and hundreds of letters. "Dear Bob, Thank you for helping me. We've got to keep up the fight. We have to see this thing through." And then he would start talking about wars. And blood splattering. The letters would inevitably trail off into the mutterings of a madman.
And now he was dead.
Bob Fitzsimmons did not know what in the world to say, in 2002, to the man with the thick accent who called from the Pittsburgh coroner's office, four days after Mike Webster died of a heart attack, asking to study Webster's brain. Fitzsimmons was, in truth, grieving his client's death deeply; Mike Webster had been living for nothing but the case, the appeal, the last victory against a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry that seemed to have used him, allowed him to become destroyed, and then threw him away like a rotten piece of meat.
And now he was dead.
"Yes," Fitzsimmons said. And he gave Omalu the brain.
Days and nights went by. Weekends. Slicing, staining, ordering slides. It got so Omalu was embarrassed in front of his co-workers at the morgue. "He's gone mad!" he imagined them reasonably thinking. "He won't stop looking at that brain! He's here at 2 a.m.!"
So Omalu put Mike Webster's brain in a plastic tub and took it home to his condo in the Churchill section of Pittsburgh. He put it in the corner of his living room, where he set up a table, a cutting board, some knives, and a microscope, where he could work without shame as long as he wanted and as hard as he wanted, no one looking over his shoulder except Prema, his sympathetic wife. "What the mind does not know, the eye cannot see," he would say to her, explaining the piles of books and journal articles cluttering the house, the sheer volume of research on trauma, on football, on helmets, on Alzheimer's disease, on concussions, on impact, on g-force, on protein accumulation, on dementia pugilistica. He had to learn more so he could see more so he could learn more so he could see. For months it's all he thought about. It became for him a calling. He was after all a spiritual man, and he came to know Mike Webster in the most personal way. "Help me" is what he heard Mike Webster say.
One day he started on a new set of slides, prepared for him by a lab at the University of Pittsburgh where he had ordered specialized staining. He was ordering so many slides, he had to start paying for this out of his own pocket. He put the first slide from the new set under his microscope and looked in.
"What is this?" he said out loud. "Geez. Gee! What is this?"
Brown and red splotches. All over the place. Large accumulations of tau proteins. Tau was kind of like sludge, clogging up the works, killing cells in regions responsible for mood, emotions, and ecutive functioning.
This was why Mike Webster was crazy.
Omalu showed the slides to Wecht and to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh. Everyone agreed: This was a disease, or a form of it, that no one had ever seen before. Omalu wondered what to call it. He wanted a good acronym. Eventually, he came up with CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He wrote a paper detailing his findings. He titled it "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player" and put it in an envelope and sent it to the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Neurosurgery. He thought NFL doctors would be pleased when they read it. He really did. He thought they would welcome a finding as important as this: scientific evidence that the kind of repeated blows to the head sustained in football could cause severe, debilitating brain damage. He thought they could use his research to try and fix the problem.
"I was naive," he says now. "There are times I wish I never looked at Mike Webster's brain. It has dragged me into worldly affairs I do not want to be associated with. Human meanness, wickedness, and selfishness. People trying to cover up, to control how information is released. I started this not knowing I was walking into a minefield. That is my only regret."
Nothing was welcoming, nothing was collegial, about the NFL's reaction to Omalu's article that appeared in the July 2005 edition of Neurosurgery. In a lengthy letter to the editor, three scientists, all of whom were on the NFL payroll, said they wanted Omalu's article retracted.
"We disagree," they said.
"Serious flaws."
"Complete misunderstanding."
The scientists, Ira Casson, Elliot Pellman, and David Viano, were all members of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee. In tone their letter to the editor struggled to remain calm, but everyone could read the subtext: We own this field. We are not going to bow to some no-name Nigerian with some bullshit theory.
The attack against Omalu was that he had misinterpreted his own neuropathological findings. In his calmer moments, Omalu considered the fact that neither Casson, Pellman, nor Viano were neuropathologists. He wondered, How can doctors who are not neuropathologists interpret neuropathological findings better than neuropathologists?
But mostly Omalu did not remain calm. In fact, he sweated profusely when he heard that the NFL had written demanding a retraction. It took a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker Red before he could even summon the courage to read their letter, after which he tore it up in disgust.
Omalu began to question the integrity of the MTBI committee. It was one thing to not even put a neuropathologist on the committee, quite another to have the committee headed by...a rheumatologist, as was the case with Pellman.
A rheumatologist? You picked a joint guy to lead your brain study?
What the NFL couldn't have known then, of course, is that by the time Omalu's article was published, he had already gotten a second brain, that of former Steelers guard Terry Long, who died at 45 after drinking antifreeze.
Same morgue. Same slab. Same story. Terry Long had a clinical history similar to Webster's. Depression. Memory loss. Crazy behavior. In and out of psych wards. He was bankrupt, living destitute and alone. He tried rat poison. He tried other cocktails. Nothing worked until finally he got it right.
Omalu took Terry Long's brain home, sliced it, sent it in for stains, ran the same tests, found the same splotches, the same tau proteins. "This stuff should not be in the brain of a 45-year-old man," he said. "This looks more like a 90-year-old brain with advanced Alzheimer's."
So Omalu wrote another paper. He called it "Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part II" and put it in an envelope and sent it to Neurosurgery, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal that did not, in the end, accept the NFL's request to retract the first one and went ahead and published the second.
The news of CTE, of retired athletes possibly suffering debilitating brain damage, was now hitting the mainstream press. The NFL responded with denial and attack against the young pathologist in Pittsburgh, who surely had no idea what he was talking about.
"Preposterous," they said to reporters.
"It's not appropriate science."
"Purely speculative."
Omalu did not like the education he was receiving. He felt he was learning something very ugly about America, about how an $8 billion industry could attempt to silence even the most well-intentioned scientist and in the most insidious ways. He was becoming afraid. Friends were warning him. They were saying, "You are challenging one of the most powerful organizations in the world. There may be other things going on that you're not aware of. Be careful!"
Then came a bright spot. Maybe the best day of his life. Omalu got a phone call from Julian Bailes, a neurosurgeon of considerable renown who had for a decade worked as a Steelers team doctor. Bailes, chairman of neurosurgery at West Virginia University Hospitals, had known Mike Webster well, was friends with the family. And he knew Terry Long. He knew brains. He knew concussions. In his lab in West Virginia he was concussing rats, examining the resulting damage to brain tissue. He knew retired football players, was co-chairing a study at the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, suggesting a link between concussions and clinical depression. Bailes had experience that touched and intersected and paralleled Omalu's research in the way of all fascinating coincidences.
On the phone, Bailes introduced himself. He said, "Dr. Omalu, I'm calling to tell you I believe you."
It was the first time anyone who ever had anything to do with the NFL had validated Omalu's work. He ran home and told his wife. She said, "How do you know? It could be a trick!" They were becoming increasingly fearful. From his village in Nigeria, Omalu's father would call. "Stop doing this work, Bennet. I have heard not nice things about the NFL; they are very powerful, and some of them not nice!" It didn't much help that one day Omalu got a visit from a sports reporter who had come for some quotes, who saw Webster's and Long's brains sitting in tubs in the living room and had said, "Get these out of your house! Someone could come in and kill you and steal these brains! Do you know what you're dealing with?"
In the end, Omalu sent all his brain tissue to Bailes to store in his lab in West Virginia. Bailes met Fitzsimmons, and that became the team, a kind of brotherhood with a mission: to learn more about the disease, to understand the NFL's obstinate, perilous denial, and to break them of it.
The third case was Andre Waters—hard-hitting safety for the Philadelphia Eagles—who was denied disability under the NFL retirement plan despite numerous concussions, constant pain, and crippling depression. On November 20, 2006, at 44, he shot himself in the mouth.
Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.
The fourth case was Justin Strzelczyk, the youngest of all, just 36 when he died a most dramatic death. Offensive lineman for the Steelers through most of the 1990s, Strzelczyk was popular in the locker room, a big mountain man of a guy with a banjo at the ready. Just a few years after his retirement, the downward spiral began. He started hearing voices from "the evil ones," who he believed were in constant pursuit. He stopped at a gas station on a highway outside Buffalo, New York. He tried to give some guy 3,000 bucks, told him to head for the hills! The evil ones are coming! Then he got in his truck and sped away, ninety miles an hour, eventually with the cops chasing him for forty miles. The cops threw metal spikes, blew out his tires, but he kept going and kept going, until finally he swerved into opposing traffic and smashed into a tanker carrying corrosive acid, and everything, everything, exploded.
Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.
_Why these guys? _Omalu and Bailes wondered. Why not other guys? Not every retired NFL player, after all, goes crazy and kills himself. How many had died young and had never been diagnosed? Why were so many retired players suffering from depression and signs of Alzheimer's? Omalu and Bailes would sit and think and talk and think. Head trauma, sure. But what else? Did these guys take steroids? Other drugs? Were there genetic markers? Did it matter when the head injuries occurred? It was a fascinating puzzle from a medical point of view—and they thought it would have been fascinating from the NFL's point of view, too. Omalu had, in fact, asked. Way back after diagnosing Webster, he'd sent a letter to the Hall of Fame proposing a comprehensive, longitudinal study—take every Hall of Famer, get his genetic profile, get a baseline, monitor him every six months for depression and other neuropsychiatric symptoms, and look at his brain when he died.
Omalu did not get a response to that letter. So he sent a follow-up six months later. No answer.
Omalu, Fitzsimmons, and Bailes formed an organization, the Sports Legacy Institute, with the intention of studying CTE, furthering the science. They were joined by a fourth, Chris Nowinski, who had been helping broker brain deals with families—getting brains for Omalu to study. Nowinski was not like the others. He seemed to be on a different mission. It was hard to put your finger on it, exactly. "We must not go running to the press with every new case!" Omalu would tell him. "We need to study, we need to learn." Nowinski had bigger ideas. He said CTE was a public-health issue and the public had a right to know. He believed the Sports Legacy Institute—SLI—could and should make headlines.
No one could blame Nowinski, really, if he was on some sort of crusade. He was not a scientist. He was a former WWE wrestler who had fought under the stage name Chris Harvard—the only Harvard-educated wrestler in the WWE. He had played football in college, but it was the head bashing as a wrestler that did him in, especially that last one, at the Pepsi Center in Albany, when a Dudley Death Drop ("3D") engineered by the Dudley Boyz sent poor Chris Harvard's head smashing through a table to the cheers of thousands.
Vision loss, ferocious migraines, loss of balance, memory problems; he was 24 years old and feeling some days like a feeble old man. He went to eight doctors before anyone took the time to tell him what was going on. Those were concussions. All those times. Not just the times he had become unconscious. But all those times, perhaps one hundred times, that he saw stars, suffered a "ding"—any loss of brain function induced by trauma was a concussion, and all of them were serious, all of them were brain injuries, all of them required attention, not the least of which was the time to heal before suffering another one. No one had ever told him that. No one had ever told him that the job he returned to each day was potentially brain damaging. No one until Nowinski met a world-renowned concussion expert who explained it all, and so Nowinski quit the WWE.
He wrote a meticulously researched book, Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis, got himself on a lot of TV shows, and took the Chris Nowinski CTE show on the road.
Omalu did not understand what was happening. Bailes and Fitzsimmons did. They would look at each other and say, "Uh-oh."
In the summer of 2007, Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, convened a meeting in Chicago for the first league-wide concussion summit. All thirty-two teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting. It would be a chance for the NFL to talk about this and hear from independent scientists, many of whom they also invited to the meeting—300 participants in all.
They asked Bailes to come. They did not ask Omalu.
"Why did they not invite me?" Omalu said to Bailes. "Why does the NFL not want to speak to Dr. Omalu?"
Bailes had no easy answer. He knew those guys. He knew who was in and who was out and how dirty the politics could get. "They were trying to blackball him, lock him out, marginalize him," Bailes says. "He was the whistle-blower."
"You will present my work, then," Omalu said to Bailes. "You will take my slides. You will take my research. You will show them what Dr. Omalu has found!" Not that it was news. He had already published the papers. Why weren't they listening?
So that's what Bailes did. Packed up Omalu's slides and downloaded his PowerPoint presentation and headed to Chicago.
By this point, the NFL had made some progress in admitting to a concussion problem. For one thing, Pellman, the rheumatologist, had stepped down as chair of the committee. Also, the committee announced a new concussion study that would blow everyone else's out of the water. (It involved a battery of clinical testing on 120 retired NFL players and would take at least until 2012 to finish. Bailes, in fact, was already working on a similar study, due out next year.)
But there was real, actual progress. The NFL instituted standards for concussion management: "Medical decisions must always override competitive considerations." They would do neuropsychological baseline testing on all NFL players—use that as a tool to assist in determining when, after a head injury, a player could return to the field.
(On hearing of the NFL's concussion guidelines, Omalu said: "You mean they never had any concussion guidelines before now? Geez.")
Perhaps most encouraging was the 88 Plan, a display of humanity on the part of the NFL and its treatment of retired players suffering dementia. The 88 Plan grew out of a letter written by Sylvia Mackey, wife of Hall of Famer John Mackey, who wore number 88 for the Colts. His existence, she said, had become a "deteriorating, ugly, caregiver-killing, degenerative, brain-destroying tragic horror," and the $2,450 per month pension he was receiving from the NFL could not begin to cover the institutionalization he needed. And so the 88 Plan, which offered up to $88,000 per year to former players with dementia.
Not that the NFL accepted any actual responsibility for this mess. Its MTBI committee published scientific studies claiming that repeated head bashing did not cause brain damage. On a 2007 HBO special, co-chair Casson was asked six different ways if repeated football-related concussions could result in brain damage, dementia, or depression. Six times he said no.
In Chicago, Bailes stood up there with evidence to the contrary. Scientific proof. Tissue damage in the brain. He saw guys rolling their eyes. He heard the exasperated sighs. He thought about Omalu and why he was doing this—how he had nothing against the NFL, how he had barely known what the NFL _was _before he looked at Webster's brain. He thought about how Omalu was about as pure a scientist as anyone could bring into this equation, and how he had spent $100,000 of his own money to get to the bottom of this.
So Bailes stood up there and he showed slides of Webster's seemingly perfect brain on the cutting board. He showed the slices. He showed the tau, that sludge that did him in. He showed Long, and he showed Waters, and he showed Strzelczyk. He showed that he believed in Omalu's work.
The meeting was closed to media, but Bailes remembers it well. "They didn't say, 'Thanks, Doc, that's great.' They got mad at me. We got into it. And I'm thinking, 'This is a new disease in America's most popular sport, and how are its leaders responding? Alienate the scientist who found it? Refuse to accept the science coming from him?' "
At a press briefing afterward, Omalu's name kept coming up, and so Casson responded: "The only scientifically valid evidence of chronic encephalopathy in athletes is in boxers and in some steeplechase jockeys. It's never been scientifically, validly documented in any other athletes."
A total dismissal of Omalu's work.
And what about the other studies? What about Bailes's report in 2003 out of the University of North Carolina with Kevin Guskiewicz, a leading expert in sports medicine, which, based on surveys of thousands of retired players, found that players who had suffered multiple concussions were three times more likely to suffer clinical depression?
The NFL concluded that that study was "flawed."
And what about the UNC follow-up study in 2005 that showed that repeatedly concussed NFL players had five times the rate of "mild cognitive impairment," or pre-Alzheimer's disease. That study showed retired NFL players suffering Alzheimer's disease at an alarming 37 percent higher rate than the average guy walking down the street.
The only experiments that were not flawed, then, were the studies conducted by the scientists paid by the NFL, which just happened to disagree with a growing number of researchers. "That's just unprecedented in science," says Bailes. "That would be like the American Heart Association saying, 'Hey, if it's not our sponsored research, we don't acknowledge it or comment on it. Only _we _can figure out heart disease!' "
Or it would be like the tobacco industry in the 1980s—everyone saying cigarettes caused cancer except for the people making money off cigarettes.
It would have been laughable, if it weren't so irresponsible.
At stake, after all, were people's lives. Athletes suffering head injuries, pressured anyway by a culture of machismo that says: Get back in the game! _Man up! Don't ever show it hurts. _To say nothing of the college football players, the high school football players, the Pee Wee leaguers, who dreamt of going pro.
On this point alone Bailes goes ballistic:
"Here we have a multi_billion-_dollar industry. Where does their responsibility begin? Say you're a kid and you sign up to play football. You realize you can blow out your knee, you can even break your neck and become paralyzed. Those are all known risks. But you don't sign up to become a brain-damaged young adult. The NFL should be leading the world in figuring this out, acknowledging the risk. They should be _thanking _us for bringing them this research. Where does their responsibility begin?
"Look, there was a seminal study published by the University of Oklahoma two years ago. They put accelerometers, which measure acceleration, in the helmets of University of Oklahoma players. And they documented the g-force. So we know the g-force for a football player being knocked out is about sixty to ninety g's. To compare, a fighter pilot will pass out at five or six g's, but that's over a long period of time. These football g-forces are just a few milliseconds, very brief—boom! And they found that in the open field, the dramatic cases of a receiver getting blindsided is about one hundred g's. It knocks them out. Very dramatic, everybody sees it. But the linemen? They were actually getting twenty to thirty g's on every play. Because they start out and they bang heads. Every play.
"Helmets are not the answer. The brain has a certain amount of play inside the skull. It's buoyed up in the cerebral spinal fluid. It sits in this fluid, floats. When the head suddenly stops, the brain continues, reverberates back. So when I hit, boom, my skull stops, but my brain continues forward for about a centimeter. Boom, boom, it reverberates back. So you could have padding that's a foot thick. It's not going to change the acceleration/deceleration phenomenon. And a lot of these injuries are rotational. The fibers get torn with rotation. You've got a face mask that's like a fulcrum sitting out here: You get hit, your head swings around. That's when a lot of these fibers are sheared—by rotation. A helmet can't ever prevent that.
"And have you seen helmets lately? In the old days of football, you had this leather cap to protect your ears. That was it. You'd never put your head in the game. You'd be knocked out after the first play! Even in the '60s, the helmet was a light shell. The modern helmet is like a weapon.
"So I told the NFL, I said, 'Why don't you take the head out of the game? _Just take it out of the game! _Let the linemen start from a squatting position instead of getting down for head-to-head. Have them stand up like they do on pass protection. So there's not this obligatory head contact.'
"Nothing. They had nothing to say. Who am I? I'm only a guy who has concussed hundreds of rats in the lab, a player for ten years, and a sideline doctor for twenty years. What do I know? Some stupid neurosurgeon.
"Instead of answering anything we bring to them, the NFL is ducking and shooting arrows at us. Criticizing us. Saying our work is a bunch of bunk. They have only attacked us."
The sixth case was Tom McHale, offensive lineman for nine seasons, most of them with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Depression and chronic pain in his joints had led him to discover oxycodone and cocaine. On May 25, 2008, at age 45, he died of a lethal combination of both.
Omalu got his brain, examined it, and found CTE.
He decided not to release the McHale case to the press. The NFL was already plenty pissed off. They had refused to acknowledge CTE or any of Omalu's research or, really, Omalu himself. It seemed they wanted to simply pretend Omalu did not exist, and he was sick of it, sick of insisting that _yes, Bennet Omalu is a real person who has discovered a real disease that is really damaging real people even as you sit there denying it. _The public debate with the NFL was a distraction from his research. He would continue his work quietly, examining brains. He would set his sights on curing the disease. He would prepare scientific papers; the proof would be in the science.
Ideas like that caused the Nowinski connection to crumble. Continue the work quietly? But Nowinski was building SLI; he was making a name for himself. The split was abrupt, ugly, and to this day neither side agrees on what happened. Nowinski took SLI and teamed up with the Boston University School of Medicine to create the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. He started a brain bank under the direction of Ann McKee, an expert in neurodegenerative diseases, and they went on to do important work, diagnosing more cases of CTE and starting a registry of over one hundred athletes who have agreed to donate their brains for study after they die.
Indeed, the casual observer who wants to learn more about CTE will be easily led to SLI and the Boston group—there's an SLI Twitter link, an SLI awards banquet, an SLI Web site with photos of Nowinski and links to videos of him on TV and in the newspapers. Gradually, Omalu's name slips out of the stories, and Bailes slips out, and Fitzsimmons, and their good fight. As it happens in stories, the telling and retelling simplify and reduce.
History gets written. People shout and claim turf. Heroes get invented.
The Boston group wanted to see the Tom McHale brain, and at the request of the family Omalu agreed. So he sliced the brain in two and sent one half via UPS to Boston. He said please don't release the diagnosis to the press; he was preparing a scientific paper identifying CTE subtypes. Nowinski remembers this conversation very differently. He says Omalu never returned calls, and to this day he vehemently defends his decision to go ahead and announce the McHale diagnosis anyway, in Tampa, during the week of the 2009 Super Bowl. He made national headlines announcing that the Boston group, and not Omalu, had diagnosed CTE in yet another NFL player. (Nowinski says he was acting on behalf of the McHale family.)
"Geez," Omalu said, watching the CNN coverage. "That's my brain! They are lying about who diagnosed that brain!"
It was enough to tempt a man to become wicked, to lead him to thoughts of lawsuits and vengeance.
But Omalu did not become wicked. He reminded himself of who he was. "I perform autopsies on dead people every day, so every day I'm reminded of my mortality. It has made me become very religious. I know I'm going to die someday, I know I'm going to be judged by God, and I have work to do while I am here on the earth."
Morgantown, West Virginia, is surrounded by blue firs and green hardwoods, a town tucked in the folds of the Appalachian Basin, where coal still moves sleepily in and out on barges along the slim Monongahela River. The university—and its world-class health care complex—is by far the biggest thing going.
In Bailes's office, Becky, his secretary, just accepted a package and is digging through Styrofoam peanuts. It used to disturb her to reach into a cardboard box and pull out a jar full of brains, but by now she is used to it.
In the jar is Omalu's fifteenth confirmed case of CTE—the most dramatic he's seen. He is not ready to release it to the press.
"Your brain made it," Becky says to Omalu, who has himself just arrived. He doesn't like traveling with brains. He trusts UPS. "You had a good trip?"
"Sure, sure, sure," Omalu says. His face is walnut dark and boyishly round. His movements are smooth, calm, and efficient; the overall effect is of a nattily dressed man who might at any moment start whistling. "But my tailor was not in!" he tells Becky. Omalu moved to California two years ago—where he accepted a post as chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County—but he still buys all his suits from one tailor in Pittsburgh. Nearly all of them are wide blue pinstripe, vaguely flashy, with impeccable fit. Custom-made. Shirts, too. He does not like pockets. If you have a shirt with a pocket, you run the risk of lint collecting at the bottom of the pocket. That is his position. Do away with the pocket—no lint. This is simply logical.
Fitzsimmons arrives, slim with a broad grin and quiet attire. "How you doing, buddy?" he says to Omalu. "Got the red tie going today, huh?" The two men embrace, slap each other's backs.
Eventually, Bailes comes flying in, still in scrubs, just out of surgery, his mask hanging half off. He is carrying a Diet Coke. "You guys want nuts? Something to eat? Crackers? I haven't eaten."
They stretch out in the conference room, visit like country people, tell jokes, and forget about time.
"And so this guy, he calls from some smart-guy science magazine," Omalu is saying. "And he says, 'Dr. Omalu, you are a brilliant man! Why did you fizzle?' And I told him, I said, 'Dr. Omalu did not fizzle!' "
"Fizzle," Bailes says, shooting a grin at Fitzsimmons. The admiration the two share for Omalu is protective and fatherly. Even his vocabulary is raw innocence.
Then they get down to business, and Fitzsimmons pulls out the papers.
"Do I need to read it?" Bailes says.
"I'm your lawyer, and I say sign it," Fitzsimmons says, and all three men get out their pens and find their names, which together are "hereinafter referred to as 'The Brain Injury Group.' "
A brain bank. The Rockefeller Foundation. A brand-new $30 million research facility. The Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute opened a year ago across the street from Bailes's office—a slick building, 78,000 square feet of state-of-the-art laboratory space. It's the only nonprofit independent institute in the world exclusively dedicated to the study of human memory and memory disorders, a partnership with West Virginia University and Johns Hopkins University. Senator Jay Rockefeller named it after his mom, Blanchette, who had Alzheimer's and died in 1992. And now, on the first floor, will be Webster's brain and Long's brain and all the rest—a whole laboratory dedicated to brain injuries and the study of CTE. They are gathering more brains, and more still; they would like to get Steve McNair's brain, and the boxer Roy Jones Jr. just signed on to donate his brain when he dies. The new center launches this month.
Omalu has set his sights on curing CTE. And why not? "You pop a pill before you play, a medicine that prevents the buildup of tau," he says. "Like you take an aspirin to prevent heart disease." Why not? "This is how we now need to talk. Not this back-and-forth of human selfishness. Not this NFL politics and meanness. Anybody still denying the disease is out of his mind. The issue now is treatment. That is my next step, now that I understand the pathology."
The Brain Injury Group is preparing seven new scientific papers. New findings. Subcategories of CTE. A possible genotype. Omalu has anything but fizzled. He took the conversation out of the public domain, got to work, and Fitzsimmons got to work on the Rockefeller deal, and Bailes on the scientific papers, and really, what they want is the NFL to join them in trying to figure this thing out.
It appears highly unlikely. The last they heard from the NFL was when the NFL called in 2008 in what seemed like a final attempt to disprove Omalu's work. We have been speaking to a scientist. The world's leading authority on tau proteins. We would like to send him to West Virginia to look at your work.
Bailes agreed.
Neuropathologist Peter Davies of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York has been studying Alzheimer's and tau proteins for more than thirty years. He receives no money from the NFL, not even parking fare. He was more than a little doubtful about what he would find in West Virginia. He had examined thousands of brains, and he'd never seen anything even close to the degree of tau accumulation that Omalu was describing in his papers. He believed that Omalu was well-intentioned but naive and mistaken. "I was very skeptical," he says. "I didn't think there was anything there."
So when Davies got to West Virginia in October 2008, he smiled politely and walked into Bailes's lab, and Omalu handed him the first slide, and he looked in the microscope, and he said, "Whoa." He said, "Wow." He said, _"What the hell is this?" _
It went on like this for two days, slide after slide. It got to the point where the only doubt Davies had left was on the staining of the slides themselves. Perhaps the technicians were not using state-of-the-art equipment and solutions. He asked Omalu if he would give him tissue samples, pieces of brain to take back to his lab in New York, where he could make new slides with his own equipment, his own technicians, his own sophisticated stains.
"Sure, sure, sure," Omalu said. "You take some pieces home, talk to your guys, see what you think."
In his lab in New York, Davies ran his tests, and when he looked in the microscope, he was stunned. The tau pathology was even worse—even more pronounced—than what he'd seen in West Virginia. "Come look at this!" he said, calling in his team of researchers. "What the hell am I looking at? This will blow your socks off! And it's not just in one case. I have three separate cases here. Bucket loads of tau pathology, and the one guy wasn't even 40 years old...." It was far more severe than anything they'd ever seen in the most advanced Alzheimer's cases—and in completely different regions of the brain.
"My God, this is extraordinary," Davies said. "We have to get involved." He wrote to Bailes and Omalu. He said Omalu was right.
"The credit must go to Bennet Omalu," he says today, "because he first reported this and nobody believed him, nobody in the field, and I'm included in that. I did not think there was anything there. But when I looked at the stuff, he was absolutely right. I was wrong to be skeptical."
The NFL never released Davies's report, never made it public. And they never talked to Omalu, Bailes, or Fitzsimmons again.
They called another meeting, much smaller than the Chicago summit, in May 2009, to talk again about concussions and the progress of the MTBI committee's work. They invited researchers from the Boston group. They invited Davies, who told them about what he saw in West Virginia.
"There is no doubt there is something there," Davies said. But he differs on the conclusion. He does not believe the main cause of CTE is concussion or trauma. He has even designed studies, principally on rats, to test his own hypothesis that the main cause is steroid use. He admits freely, however, that he is not a trauma expert, like Bailes, that he has not spent his career, like Omalu, looking at brains that have suffered repeated trauma. He's an Alzheimer's guy who believes that there has to be some reason he's never seen brains like this, and he believes the reason is steroid use. Plenty of people, after all, suffer concussions—not just athletes. Wouldn't he have seen _some _evidence of CTE in brains of regular folks over all these years? But only athletes take steroids, and so that is the link he is following.
Bailes, who co-authored a book on steroids and sports, does not rule out steroids or any other contributing factor to CTE, but points out that synthetic steroids were not even invented until 1959—thirty years after brain changes were first identified in boxers in the form of dementia pugilistica.
Either way, the steroid theory is not, in itself, a cheerful hypothesis for the NFL to consider. What of its vaunted drug-testing policy? What of the way fans have been coad to blithely accept that the reason these big fast guys keep getting bigger and faster every year is...natural. Not because of performance-enhancing drugs.
Whether it's concussions or steroids or a combination of both, the NFL has a problem to solve that is becoming impossible to deny.
Ira Casson, co-director of the MTBI, was at the May meeting, and he came away from it still committed to the NFL's talking points—the ones he had first put out in 2005 when he co-authored the letter asking for the retraction of Omalu's article in Neurosurgery.
Has Casson's position changed, now that scientists from across the country have come to accept the research as sound?
"No," he says. "Nothing has happened that has changed any of our opinions about what we wrote in those letters. Is there a relationship between professional football, a career in the NFL, and changes in the brain? Well, we don't know. Maybe."
So why does he think so many independent scientists are saying there is?
"I think there are a lot of...gaps," he says. The main problem, as he sees it, is that all scientists have really looked at, after all, are dead people. There has been very little clinical data, he says, collected on living people—which is what the MTBI committee's study is designed to do.
"Essentially," he says, "if you look at the cases that have been reported in the medical literature—and I don't include The New York Times as medical literature—for the most part, the clinical data was collected posthumously: interviews with families, 'people told me this,' and so forth. You don't see any data that says, well, here's what a doctor found when they examined him; here's what their psychiatric evaluation showed; here's what their neurologist found. There's none of that!
"To me that creates a question of what exactly is the clinical picture? I don't think it's fair to jump from a couple cases that were suicides to assume that some of the others that, well, the guy was driving fast down the highway, it must have been a suicide. Well, we don't know that. I don't think anybody can tell you that unless you had a psychiatrist who was treating the person. I think there's a lot of people jumping to conclusions."
"Very little clinical data."
Fitzsimmons and Bailes and Omalu are sitting in Bailes's conference room in West Virginia, contemplating what Casson has said.
"Very little clinical data?" Fitzsimmons says. But he had five doctors, including one from the NFL, who examined Mike Webster and concluded he had a closed-head injury. "I had a file this thick of clinical data."
"Why is he doing this?" Bailes says. "I just don't understand why the NFL is doing this. You know, pick up a textbook." He picks up a textbook, the kind you'd find in any neurosurgery department of any medical school. "Here's The Neuropathology of Dementia. It describes, in great detail, tau pathology. There's a whole chapter here about trauma causing dementia. That's why this is very quixotic to me that's there's even any resistance. It's well-known that brain trauma is a risk for dementia. Why are we arguing this? Why can't we accept this and move on and try to prevent it?"
"Clinical data?" Omalu says. "_Clinical _data? Pardon me, but what is the gold standard for diagnosis? Autopsy! That is the gold standard for diagnosis. Only when you open up the body, look at the tissues, do you find proof of disease."
They have proof of the fifteenth case right here, sitting in a jar, a story still to tell.
And then there is the sixteenth case: Gerald Small, Dolphins cornerback in the 1980s. He was found dead at 52 in Sacramento, California, where he was unemployed, living with an aunt, drunk. The Sacramento coroner sent the brain to Omalu, who is by now well-known on the coroners' circuit.
Omalu got the brain, examined it, and found CTE.
The seventeenth case is Curtis Whitley, center for the Chargers, Panthers, Raiders, in the 1990s. He was just 39 when he was found facedown in the bathroom of a rented trailer in West Texas, shirtless, shoeless, wearing blue warm-up pants.
Omalu got his brain, examined it, and found CTE.
"You would think that sooner or later, like most things in life, you have to deal with the truth," says Bailes. "I think that was part of the NFL's intent on sending their expert to Morgantown. Maybe they're planning their strategy now, I don't know."
*On December 13, 2006, seven years after the initial filing and four years after Webster's death, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the ruling that Webster had been totally and permanently disabled as a result of brain injuries from playing professional football. The ruling, a 3-0 decision, resulted in an award of more than $1.5 million to Webster's four children and former wife.


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Editor's note: The following article ran in the March 2011 edtion of Dairy Herd Management.
A Florida grazing operation has found it is better off feeding a commercial colostrum replacer than maternal colostrum.
Because there are a large number of cows calving on a seasonal basis — upwards of 50 a day in the fall and early winter — it is difficult to manage the colostrum from that many individual cows on a consistent basis. And, the farm's nutritionist does not like the idea of pooling colostrum, since it creates biosecurity concerns.
"I believe if you keep things simple, they will get done," says nutritionist Joey Ricks. "And, (the way things were set up previously) that colostrum program was not simple and it was not getting done."
So, during his first year on the job, Ricks began feeding commercial colostrum replacer to the calves, and the results have been astounding. Of 780 heifer calves born this past calving season, the farm has lost just 23 of them — a death loss of 2.9 percent. It is a vast improvement from previous years.
"Death loss, I feel, is costly and limits our rate of expansion through internal growth," Ricks says. "And, right now, we are in expansion mode."
There are definitely situations where the quality of maternal colostrum cannot be guaranteed and a colostrum replacer should be considered.
A widespread problem
The fact of the matter is, many farms fail when it comes to colostrum management.
"A significant percentage of the calves either aren't being fed quality colostrum or they are being fed later than they should be," says calf-care expert Jim Quigley, vice president and director of calf operations at APC, Inc. in Ankeny, Iowa.
Over the past two years, Quigley and co-workers at APC cooperated with Iowa State University and Fresno State University to survey colostrum management on farms across the U.S. Based on these studies, it is Quigley's observation that most farms have some problem with colostrum management, whether the colostrum is too low in protective immunoglobulins, or it's too high in bacteria or other contaminants, or it's not being fed to the calves in a timely manner.
In fact, nearly half of 890 samples tested in the Iowa study had bacteria above the critical level of 100,000 cfu/ml or greater, considered the upper limit for acceptable quality. The research in California collected more than 500 colostrum samples and indicated that the degree of contamination varies by farm, level of management, season and whether the colostrum is supplemented with commercial supplements.
Avoid problems
Sam Leadley, calf/heifer management specialist at Attica Veterinary Associates in upstate New York, has had situations where he is called onto a farm to fix a problem and colostrum replacer is short-term solution until the farm can get a better handle on things.
"The most obvious example is disease control, and the most obvious disease is Johne's," he says. With Johne's, until you can establish which cows are high-risk, you have to assume that all cows can pose a risk to the calves, he adds. In that case, it may be prudent to switch to a colostrum replacer.
At other farms where calf mortality is high — 10 percent to 20 percent — a colostrum replacer can give you some breathing room until the problem is diagnosed and fixed.
"The chances are probably two out of three that the colostrum-management program (on those particular farms) is badly broken," Leadley says. In many cases, the colostrum that's being fed is no longer colostrum; it's bacterial soup, he adds.
And, while there are emergency situations for feeding colostum replacers, there are other situations where colostrum replacers are fed because they are convenient.
Perhaps a farm will want to feed maternal colostrum to its calves during the day, when the herdsman and others are normally there. But, it may be more convenient for the night crew to feed colostrum replacer if it is busy with other chores.
"I think it's a staffing question, I think it's a convenience question," Leadley says. "A lot of the time, the night crew has very little time to take care of newborn calves."
Joey Ricks, the nutritionist who works with a grazing operation in Florida, says he has decided to use colostrum replacer for four reasons:
1. To ensure a high level of antibodies in the form of immunoglobulin.
2. To keep the colostrum free of pathogens.
3. To make it simple and easy for the hired labor.
4. To make it easy to store and handle.
Granted, maternal colostrum is still the gold standard. But, a number of farms still aren't providing the kind of maternal colostrum that calves need. In this case, a colostrum replacer can be a bridge between the high expectations people have for their calves and reality.
Decision-tree approach
You might consider using a colostrum replacer if:
• Maternal colostrum is not of high-enough quality. Are you ensuring quality with a colostrometer or Brix refractometer? Feed colostrum that registers in the "green" zone on a colostrometer or 22 percent or higher on a Brix refractometer. Periodically check the status of calves by taking blood samples at 24 to 72 hours of age and have those checked for either serum total protein (on a refractometer) or serum immunoglobulin "IgG" by your veterinarian.
"Total protein values can vary depending on the globulin protein source," says David Carlson, technical services manager for Milk Products in Chilton, Wis. "Total protein measured by a refractometer may be the most practical way to assess passive transfer on farm, but the cut-point of 5.2 g/dL (considered the minimum for successful passive transfer) is the most applicable to calves fed maternal colostrum." If you are using a colostrum replacer, this number could be lower, as colostrum replacers are typically very concentrated, and the total amount of non-globulin protein is often lower than in maternal colostrum. The amount of IgG or globulin protein in a colostrum replacer should be guaranteed on the package, but absorption varies by product. Your veterinarian can advise on how to test for serum IgG to confirm that the product you are using is effective.
• Maternal colostrum is contaminated with too much bacteria. Again, take samples and have them tested. Target bacteria count (also known as Standard Plate Count) is less than 100,000 cfu/ml. Target coliform bacteria count is less than 10,000 cfu/ml.
• There is the possibility of disease transmission through the colostrum, such as Johne's.
• There are staffing issues where it is difficult to ensure that maternal colostrum can be delivered in a consistent manner. Colostrum replacers are usually more convenient to administer.


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Twins relievers effective despite heavy workload
DETROIT -- With Twins starters not going deep into games, the club's relievers have been called on to eat innings but have stayed effective.
The Twins haven't had a starter go more than five innings since Vance Worley went six on Friday against the Red Sox. But Worley only went 3 2/3 innings on Wednesday and was optioned to Triple-A Rochester after his start.
So manager Ron Gardenhire has been going to his bullpen much earlier than he's wanted, which caused the Twins to call up an eighth reliever in Caleb Thielbar before Monday's game in Atlanta.
"We've been using a lot of them," Gardenhire said. "We're just going based on how they're feeling but we're not trying to kill any of them. We'd like to go every other day with some of these guys. But it would be nice to get a deep start and use the right guys at the end."
With the starting rotation struggling, Minnesota relievers have combined to throw 160 2/3 innings entering Thursday, which ranks as the third-highest total in the American League, but they've still been able to post a 3.08 ERA that ranks third in the AL.
"They've had to a pitch a lot but they've pitched well," Gardenhire said. "But they're just pitching a lot."
Rhett Bollinger is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his blog, Bollinger Beat, and follow him on Twitter @RhettBollinger. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.


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NBAA and the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) are closely watching developments at the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in Montreal involving the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS). On Tuesday, GAMA president and CEO Pete Bunce said at the organization's yearly press briefing that both associations are also working closely with the International Business Aviation Council on this matter.
In November, the European Commission agreed to suspend the application of the carbon tax for international flights to and from European airports on the condition that the 2013 ICAO Assembly agrees to a global alternative to ETS at its meetings in September and October. But if an agreement is not reached then, the EU plans to re-impose ETS for international operations.
"If we don't have some type of resolution on a global basis," Bunce said, "the question becomes, 'What do the Europeans do next?'" He added that–with last year's passage of an anti-EU-ETS bill that prohibits U.S. aircraft operators from participating in the EU-ETS–the U.S. government sent a clear message.
Progress on the climate talks appears to be "mixed," Bunce said, adding that NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen is "very concerned about this, and we are too, because right now the system that is set up for ETS disenfranchises business aviation tremendously. We have to get this fixed."
Lyle Peterson (not verified)
February 15, 2013 - 3:22pm
They do absolutely nothing for global warming, if it, in fact exists. Carbon Credits do a lot for the bean counters in the front office. Rather than spending money to reduce emissions they will pay someone else for a permit to violate emissions standards.
The next beneficiary of Carbon Credits is the market where they are traded.
Carbon Credits are total nonsense. Most of the emission standards are also nonsense driven by hysterical thinkers who have found a way to make change, whether change is needed or not.
T.D. Welander (not verified)
February 15, 2013 - 5:35pm
The latest science is the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean volcanic rifts emit over
100 times, could be over 1000 times the heat additions of all of humanity
on the planet. So the carbon credit plan is worse than a serious fraud.
Anyone who implements such a fraud should go to jail for it.
Will this highly false carbon plan stop? Only if a group of prosecutors
bring the facts forward. Hope, hope, hope springs eternal. It is looking
like the world court is going to be busy refuting this incredible foolishness.
Carbon credits should go the way of spontaneous generation,
or/ and other absolutely absurd notions.
It only took around 100 years to look under a microscope and see micro organisms turn into macro organisms disproving spontaneous life generation
thinking of the 18th and 19th centuries.
We are ahead of the game here. It has only been 20 to 40 years since the speculators have been blaming humanity for global warming. We can
shoot this one in the butt tomorrow. Which prosecutor or prosecutors
will do it?
Venus Savage (not verified)
February 16, 2013 - 12:58am
It's become obvious to just about everyone that carbon credits are a scam.
That said, how many of us have been at the airport, flogging a humble 172 in the pattern, only to see a G550 or Falcon 7X touch down, taxi to the jet center, and disembark two or three passengers to a lineup of full size SUVs?
It's pretty clear that business aviation is an ostentatiously energy intensive activity; carbon credits are simply another response to that reality.
Just because something furthers capitalism in some way or another, doesn't mean it should be necessarily immune from regulation.
T.D. Welander (not verified)
February 16, 2013 - 11:36am
So you said carbon credits are a scam. I take this to mean there is no harm to the environment by biz jets or anything else humanity does. Natural pollution sources are the problem by at least 100 to 1; maybe as much as 1000 to 1. This means to me we agree humanity is out of the pollution picture; except perhaps to stop any real outrageous problems like the BP gulf oil spill. If we are in fact in agreement and you want to be a lawful U.S. citizen, you will respect these biz jets owners bill of rights to spend their money any way they please. Or is my assumption that the U.S. Bill of Rights do not apply to you false, or you do not respect them?
If so, please say so. I will then know if we have even a starting point for any further discussions. The U.S. Bill of Rights is the starting point for practically
all clear thinking Americans. The American government nearly routinely violates the Bill of Rights in one subtle form or another these days; and has made themselves one hell of nuisance for it. Or forcing a downsizing of government in a big way to allow the economy to grow again and some kind of regrowth of the
middle class has become imperative. Helping people see the big picture is critical. Are we on the same page?
J CARLOS (not verified)
February 16, 2013 - 1:16am
The europeans should start to blame the neighbors,like starting from Rusia ,then should continue with the thousand of merchant and cargo ships,and final should not start to blame our comercial aviation . the ammount of planes arriving in Europe from different parts of the world are 65% from american companies and there is where the money should flow to the E U .Fresh needed money to support another ficticion program ,when in reality they should thank us for bringing bussines to them .
william (not verified)
February 18, 2013 - 11:00am
Carbon credits are a scam. The EU has created the ETS to accomplish what? The only thing that can reduece emissions is the continual development of more efficient engines and airframes or just stop flying or using any combustion engine for that matter. Charging an operator a fee for something that does absolutely nothing but line the pockets of greedy politicians is wrong. Hopefully the EU will wake up or have the same thing imposed upon them and their operators by other countries. Everyone needs to quit being so politically correct and call the EU what it is. A bunch of thieving crooks.


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Et Alors Cologne
By Dina Cosmetics for Men
Et Alors Cologne by Dina Cosmetics, Et alors is a richly blended fragrance that has the freshness of a mid-summer's breeze, accented by some spice and wood notes . Surprising your senses, it opens with bergamot. In the heart, it has precious spices like nutmeg and cardamom, along with some patchouli and cedar wood. The bottom notes are sandalwood and musk. All products are original, authentic name brands. We do not sell knockoffs or imitations. ... Read More
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Fighting robots for the kiddie set...
San Diego Comic-Con coverage brought to you by Tonner, Collectibles Insurance, and Big Bad Toy Store.
Its shocking, but its not just adult collectors who love Transformers! Specifically for the kids Hasbro has the Robo Power series, full of fun toys that dont have complicated transformations. In the Transformers area of the Hasbro booth at Comic-Con were battling Bashbots, pull back and go Go Bots, one-click transforming Activators, action figure-like Robo Fighters, and a selection of role play and dress up toys.
Check out the full photo gallery HERE!


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XPro1595 uses DN-TNF technology to neutralize soluble TNF to prevent chronic inflammation and nerve death, the hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's disease. Because XPro1595 does not inhibit trans-membrane TNF or bind to TNF receptors, it has dramatically different biologic effects on the CNS compared to currently approved, non-selective TNF inhibitors. In addition to its anti-inflammatory effects, XPro1595 promotes nerve cell survival and remyelination, and increases CNS plasticity. This disease-modifying therapy has potential in the treatment of neurologic diseases where chronic neuroinflammation and nerve cell death are part of the core pathology, including ALS, MS, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
Malu Tansey PhD., associate professor of physiology at the Emory University School of Medicine, is a leader in the role of TNF and neuroinflammation in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory diseases. The TDI award is the latest in a series of grants to Dr. Tansey's laboratory supporting the development of XPro1595 as a treatment for Parkinson's disease. "The Michael J. Fox Foundation was one of the first to recognize the importance of chronic neuroinflammation in the pathophysiology of Parkinson's disease", says Dr. Tansey, "and their support has been essential in the development of this promising therapeutic strategy in this devastating disease."
FPRT Bio was formed to develop XPro1595 for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases and explore its application in other indications. XPro1595 was discovered and developed at Xencor Inc. "The support of the Michael J. Fox Foundation highlights the potential of this novel therapeutic strategy in the treatment of Parkinson's disease" said RJ Tesi MD, CEO of FPRT Bio. "Because safety pharmacology and toxicology testing is complete, and a large scale GMP manufacturing process has been established, we can quickly transition into the clinic." FPRT Bio will be presenting XPro1595 at the Biotech Showcase 2013 in San Francisco on January 7th and 8th, 2013.
About The Michael J. Fox Foundation
As the world's largest private funder of Parkinson's research, The Michael J. Fox Foundation is dedicated to accelerating a cure for Parkinson's disease and improved therapies for those living with the condition today. The Foundation pursues its goals through an aggressively funded, highly targeted research program coupled with active global engagement of scientists, Parkinson's patients, business leaders, clinical trial participants, donors and volunteers. In addition to funding more than $304 million in research to date, the Foundation has fundamentally altered the trajectory of progress toward a cure. Operating at the hub of worldwide Parkinson's research, the Foundation forges groundbreaking collaborations with industry leaders, academic scientists and government research funders; increases the flow of participants into Parkinson's disease clinical trials with its online tool, Fox Trial Finder; promotes Parkinson's awareness through high-profile advocacy, events and outreach; and coordinates the grassroots involvement of thousands of Team Fox members around the world. Now through December 31, 2012, all new and increased giving to The Michael J. Fox Foundation, as well as gifts from donors who have not given since 2010 or earlier, will be matched on a dollar-for-dollar basis with the $50-million Brin Wojcicki Challenge, launched by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki.
About Emory University School of Medicine
Emory University School of Medicine is ranked among the nation's finest institutions for education, biomedical research and patient care, with more than 3,200 regular and volunteer faculty and more than 530 students. The school trains over 1,100 residents and fellows in 88 accredited programs, and has five health professions programs. The school is known for its research and treatment in heart disease, cancer, neurosciences, transplantation, infectious disease, orthopaedics, renal disease, ophthalmology and geriatrics. Physician faculty in Emory's hospitals, affiliate teaching hospitals, and outpatient venues are responsible for 4 million patient service visits annually.
FPRT Bio Contact:
RJ Tesi, MD CEO and President
3 W. Olive Street, Suite 205
Scranton, PA 18508


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Martin has 'no regrets' about how things turned out
BRADENTON, Fla. -- Standing outside his new clubhouse, outfitted in yellow and black, Russell Martin said he has "no regrets" about the way things worked out over the offseason, though the former Yankees catcher admits to still being a little surprised that he isn't wearing pinstripes this spring.
Martin has settled in nicely as a veteran voice behind the plate for the Pirates, who gave him a two-year, $17 million deal this past winter -- one that the Yankees said they could not match. Martin said he understands the business side of the game, but he was open to coming back to New York.
"It's disappointing because of the guys," Martin said. "I was a part of that team, the overall atmosphere. But it's mostly the people that were there: the coaches, the players -- that's what I'm going to miss more than anything."
Martin said that there are no hard feelings between him and the Yankees, and that he has been having a good time getting to know the Pirates.
"It's a different atmosphere, a younger team, so because of that it's a bit different," Martin said. "It's a good group of guys, too. I'm enjoying myself. It's still baseball; just less media."
The Yankees did make Martin a contract offer last spring, believed to be three years at $20 million. But Martin said he had no second thoughts about turning down that proposed extension.
"There's no regrets, that's all I can say," Martin said. "I have no regrets. I am where I am. I'm happy, and I'm just ready to take on the season and see what happens."
From the outside looking in, Martin said that the Yankees appear to be facing "an uphill battle" in the American League East, with a different bench and numerous injuries. He does not think that the Yankees will have any issues with their pitching staff or the planned catching tandem of Francisco Cervelli and Chris Stewart.
"Both those guys can catch. I like both of them," Martin said. "I learned some stuff from Stewart last year -- just on how quick he is, first of all, just throwing the ball to second base, and how quick his hands are. His game calling is really good, his receiving [is] really good.
"So defensively, both those guys have got a lot of upside. Offensively, they don't have the most power in the world, but that's not the most important part of the game. Taking care of the pitchers is what's going to get you to the playoffs, and I think they're going to do a fine job."
Bryan Hoch is a reporter for MLB.com. Follow him on Twitter @bryanhoch and read his MLBlog, Bombers Beat. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.


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Happy Birthday Tech N9ne!Published: November 8, 2011 in Tech N9ne by Jeff Nelson
Today not only marks the arrival of the Tech N9ne Collabos album Welcome To Strangeland, but something much more special, the birthday of the Strange Music general, the one and only King of Darkness, Tech N9ne.
Today marks the Alucard of Hip Hop's 40th birthday. From his start as a head-turner in Kansas City to a worldwide independent superstar, Tech N9ne has filled many of our lives with great music, touching our lives with his charisma, talent, and boundless enthusiasm.
Wish Tech N9ne a very special Happy Birthday in the comments section below.
Some things to think about…
- How has Tech N9ne touched you in your life?
- How did you first hear Tech N9ne?
- What is your favorite song or album and why?


text: Her heart is filled with love for those special to her, and with this personalized My Loving Hearts t-shirt, she can bring those loved ones with her everywhere she goes. This comfy tee can be created for Mom, Grandma, Aunt, teacher or anyone else, and it is sure to become your recipient's all-time favorite. Your custom Loving Hearts shirt will be personalized with any title (up to 16 letters) and as many as 30 kids' names (up to 12 letters per name) placed around the shirt in various hearts. This adorable design comes on our 100% preshrunk cotton t-shirt in violet. It's machine washable and available in adult sizes S-3XL.


text: WELCOME to the exciting world of Dog Mountain Antiques! We are a family owned business thirty-five years strong!! While we predominantly purchase vintage and antique military items, and old ephemera we are known for finding the unexpected and placing it in our store. All our items are originals, unless we state as otherwise. Most items are from New England, specifically Maine, but recently we have been traveling the world, exploring new locations to find new and interesting items to place in our store.


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Sausage, Mushrooms, and Feta Baked with Eggs
This dish is browned turkey breakfast sausage, sauteed mushrooms, and Feta cheese baked with just a little egg to hold it together, so that the emphasis is on the other ingredients and not so much on the eggs. Before I discovered Jimmy Dean's Low-Fat and Pre-Cooked Turkey Breakfast Sausage, I used to make this with a higher-fat sausage that I would simmer in water for a few minutes before browning to remove some of the fat. I'm glad I can skip that step now, but if you can't find a low-fat type of sausage it's still a good trick.
And oh my goodness, is this ever a delicious breakfast option! Of course it's no secret that I'm nuts for Feta cheese, and the combination of the Feta and the seasoned turkey breakfast sausage was perfect in this recipe. This is one of my top ten low-carb breakfasts to make on the weekend and eat all week long; hope you enjoy!
Now about those earlier photos. Here's the one from 2011, which was not horrible but not great.
And as promised, here's the one and only original photo from this recipe back in 2006! Oh my.
Sausage, Mushrooms, and Feta Baked with Eggs
(Makes 6 generous servings or 8 small servings, recipe created by Kalyn.)
12-14 oz (12-14 links) turkey breakfast sausage
16 oz. sliced mushrooms (I buy pre-sliced mushrooms for this.)
1-2 tsp. olive oil, depending on your pan
1/2 – 3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese, about 4 oz.
8 eggs, well beaten
2 T half and half or milk (use milk for South Beach Diet)
1 tsp. Spike Seasoning (Use any all-purpose seasoning blend that's good with eggs if you don't have Spike.)
fresh-ground black pepper to taste
Sliced green onions (optional, but good)
(If you don't find low-fat turkey sausage, you can put the sausage in pan with small amount of water and simmer about 10 minutes to cook out some of the fat. Remove sausage, and drain well.)
Heat a little olive oil in a non-stick pan. Cut each piece of sausage in half or thirds, then brown sausage lightly in frying pan. Put sausage into casserole dish, rinse the frying pan if you need to, then add a little more olive oil if needed and saute mushrooms until they're softened and starting to brown.
Bake 30-40 minutes, until eggs are well set and barely starting to brown on top. (I baked the one in these photos for about 36 minutes.) Serve hot.
This will keep in the fridge for at least a week and can be quickly reheated in a microwave. (Don't reheat for too long or the eggs will get rubbery.
Low-Carb Diet / Low-Glycemic Diet / South Beach Diet Suggestions:
This recipe would be a good breakfast for most low-carb or low-glycemic eating plans and all phases of the South Beach Diet. Use the lowest fat turkey sausage you can find if you're making this for South Beach, or simmer in water to remove some of the fat. Other low-carb diets may not care about the fat, but if you use pork sausage, I'd drain it well.
Find More Recipes Like This One:
Nutritional Information?
More Tasty Ideas for Breakfast:
Slow Cooker Breakfast Recipes Photo Index Page ~ Slow Cooker from Scratch
Cottage Cheese and Egg Breakfast Muffins with Mushrooms and Feta from Kalyn's Kitchen
Crustless Spinach, Onion, and Feta Quiche from Baking Bites
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Topic: Stage IV - Bile duct/liver/lymph nodes
I just joined this site and am looking for some feedback.
My dad was diagnosed about 8 weeks ago with a klatskin tumor that is on the liver and the lymph nodes. No surgery option. We were told chemo would prolong lofe 6-12 months.
He had plastic stents put in in November and Metal stents in December. After 6 weeks, the jaundice is still not any better and the itching has begun.
They have not started chemo b/c of the jaundice.
Anyone ever been in this situation?
He seems to be shutting down and the doctors don't say anything.


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David N. Snyder wrote:contemplans wrote:(1) In sensible things we find an order of efficient causes.
(2) It is impossible for this order of causes to proceed to infinity.
(3) There must be a first efficient cause.
(4) This first cause is God.
There is no logic at all in the above. The premises and the conclusion do not follow at all. Here are some other so-called arguments for the existence of a supreme being which also contain many logical fallacies:
http://sdhammika.blogspot.com/2011/03/l ... ology.html
The logical fallacies are so easy to spot, they might even be humorous.
Dan74 wrote:Regarding the first cause, just two quick points:
1. I don't see where above you show that an infinite chain of causes back in time is impossible. Why does there have to be a first?
2. Physicists are quite comfortable with the Big Bang originating by itself. Causation only operates within time, but prior to the Big Bang, there is no time, hence no prior to the Big Bang. I am not a physicist, but as a mathematician, I see a fallacy of applying the our usual logic to a situation where it is inapplicable.
For centuries the greatest minds have attempted to prove the existence of God and failed. I don't think the Church maintains that God is a logical necessity. It is not a subjective necessity either - I certainly see many people living exemplary lives without a theistic belief. But if it makes sense to you, then it makes sense. There are also many people living exemplary lives with theistic beliefs.
contemplans wrote:I am just trying to see if anyone sees an absolute basis for any Buddhist teaching, including the Four Noble Truths, and if so, then where do they think such an absolute comes from. This is worthy of inquiry, since later Buddhists often took up theistic teachings and beliefs, and in our time many take up atheistic teachings and beliefs. How can any ethical system be worthy of practice that is not absolute on its key teachings? I am truly wondering how some reconcile this with the wider Buddhist teaching. Or maybe some just haven't asked themselves what is the basis for the ethical teachings.
Khalil Bodhi wrote:Well, unsurprisingly, your response to my question was unsatisfying and didn't really address the question of praxis. The argumentation and eel-wriggling here really doesn't have much on the fruits of the Dhamma-vinaya of the Lord buddha. I wish you happiness with whatever path you choose and will now bow out. Mettaya!
DarwidHalim wrote:
Four Noble Truth is not absolute. It is relative.
Which part of four noble truth tell us absoluteness?
There is nothing absolute in any Buddhist teaching.
In case you can show me just 1 example which is absolute, I will buy you
Contemplans wrote:
But you'd have to go back to the four nobles truths, and question in light of new evidence if dukkha is the supreme evil of life.
How about the precept which says that drinking intoxicants is bad karma.
contemplans wrote:I am just trying to see if anyone sees an absolute basis for any Buddhist teaching, including the Four Noble Truths, and if so, then where do they think such an absolute comes from. This is worthy of inquiry, since later Buddhists often took up theistic teachings and beliefs, and in our time many take up atheistic teachings and beliefs. How can any ethical system be worthy of practice that is not absolute on its key teachings? I am truly wondering how some reconcile this with the wider Buddhist teaching. Or maybe some just haven't asked themselves what is the basis for the ethical teachings.
contemplans wrote:As for fallacy, please explain the fallacy in this argument:
a) Whatever is in motion, is moved by something else.
b) We cannot regress to infinity in the series of moved movers.
daverupa wrote:contemplans wrote:As for fallacy, please explain the fallacy in this argument:
a) Whatever is in motion, is moved by something else.
b) We cannot regress to infinity in the series of moved movers.
a), on its own, disproves an unmoved mover, or a prime mover.
In fact, holding that a) is true actually demands infinite regress (a Buddhist would prefer to say that "a beginning is not discerned").
Holding that b) is true means a) has at least one exception, which requires that the term "whatever" be modified.
Furthermore, b) has no evidence - "we cannot" is hardly convincing, ultimately resolving into argumentum ad ignorantiam.
contemplans wrote:If it is a unsound/false argument, then please address the material proposed in the paragraph which fleshes it out.
contemplans wrote:(1) In sensible things we find an order of efficient causes.
(2) It is impossible for this order of causes to proceed to infinity.
(3) There must be a first efficient cause.
(4) This first cause is God.
As for fallacy, please explain the fallacy in this argument:
a) Whatever is in motion, is moved by something else.
b) We cannot regress to infinity in the series of moved movers.
Big Bang has either God as cause, or Big Bang isn't the start. That's it. Big Bang doesn't cause being to come to be. The Big Bang is not God, but an process/event. And let's be quite clear, the Church teaches that God can be known *with certainty* through observation of the created world. Not that we can understand Him completely. While we conclude that logic says God, it does not mean we have all the answers as to why and how.
That is where Revelation and Faith come in, which supply some of the why and how of all this. Those are not always drawn from reasoned logic, although they don't against reason either. They are outside the scope of reason (that's why they are propositions of belief).
contemplans wrote:A long one.
contemplans wrote:
As for fallacy, please explain the fallacy in this argument:
a) Whatever is in motion, is moved by something else.
b) We cannot regress to infinity in the series of moved movers.
contemplans wrote: Buddhism is not immune from any of these things. Buddhism posits a world view, beliefs....
contemplans wrote:The path involves investigation into reality, so why is this investigation outside of the path to truth.
contemplans wrote:Prasadachitta , I appreciate your candor. What I don't understand is why the Buddhist path is a noble truth then, if it is applicable to each person with no reference to all people. .
Every religion worthy of mention says that the absolutes are applicable to each person uniquely.
But the Buddha did say that over your particular application, there are these universals which govern the pariculars -- karma, rebirth, dukkha as undesireable, etc. Nibbana is universal in that it is the goal of all beings.
Karma is universal in that all beings get to the goal through skillful karma and go away from it through unskillful karma. Dukkha is bad because beings universally desire lasting happiness. The Buddha takes the universals and sets out a universal path, which we take and apply to our particulars. At least this is what it should be, it seems
Sam Vega wrote:So I would be interested to know why you feel one (Christian, Thomistic) conception is such that we are somehow compelled or even advised to accept it. I ask this not to set out my stall, or far less a linguistic trap, but in a mood of genuine curiosity to see if there is something I am missing.
I answer that, Absolutely speaking, it is not possible to proceed indefinitely in the matter of ends, from any point of view. For in whatsoever things there is an essential order of one to another, if the first be removed, those that are ordained to the first, must of necessity be removed also. Wherefore the Philosopher [Aristoltle] proves (Phys. viii, 5) that we cannot proceed to infinitude in causes of movement, because then there would be no first mover, without which neither can the others move, since they move only through being moved by the first mover. Now there is to be observed a twofold order in ends--the order of intention and the order of execution: and in either of these orders there must be something first. For that which is first in the order of intention, is the principle, as it were, moving the appetite; consequently, if you remove this principle, there will be nothing to move the appetite. On the other hand, the principle in execution is that wherein operation has its beginning; and if this principle be taken away, no one will begin to work. Now the principle in the intention is the last end; while the principle in execution is the first of the things which are ordained to the end. Consequently, on neither side is it possible to go to infinity since if there were no last end, nothing would be desired, nor would any action have its term, nor would the intention of the agent be at rest; while if there is no first thing among those that are ordained to the end, none would begin to work at anything, and counsel would have no term, but would continue indefinitely.
On the other hand, nothing hinders infinity from being in things that are ordained to one another not essentially but accidentally; for accidental causes are indeterminate. And in this way it happens that there is an accidental infinity of ends, and of things ordained to the end.
I answer that, It is impossible for one man's will to be directed at the same time to diverse things, as last ends. Three reasons may be assigned for this. First, because, since everything desires its own perfection, a man desires for his ultimate end, that which he desires as his perfect and crowning good. Hence Augustine (De Civ. Dei xix, 1): "In speaking of the end of good we mean now, not that it passes away so as to be no more, but that it is perfected so as to be complete." It is therefore necessary for the last end so to fill man's appetite, that nothing is left besides it for man to desire. Which is not possible, if something else be required for his perfection. Consequently it is not possible for the appetite so to tend to two things, as though each were its perfect good.
The second reason is because, just as in the process of reasoning, the principle is that which is naturally known, so in the process of the rational appetite, i.e. the will, the principle needs to be that which is naturally desired. Now this must needs be one: since nature tends to one thing only. But the principle in the process of the rational appetite is the last end. Therefore that to which the will tends, as to its last end, is one.
The third reason is because, since voluntary actions receive their species from the end, as stated above [Article 3], they must needs receive their genus from the last end, which is common to them all: just as natural things are placed in a genus according to a common form. Since, then, all things that can be desired by the will, belong, as such, to one genus, the last end must needs be one. And all the more because in every genus there is one first principle; and the last end has the nature of a first principle, as stated above. Now as the last end of man, simply as man, is to the whole human race, so is the last end of any individual man to that individual. Therefore, just as of all men there is naturally one last end, so the will of an individual man must be fixed on one last end.
I answer that, We can speak of the last end in two ways: first, considering only the aspect of last end; secondly, considering the thing in which the aspect of last end is realized. So, then, as to the aspect of last end, all agree in desiring the last end: since all desire the fulfilment of their perfection, and it is precisely this fulfilment in which the last end consists, as stated above [Article 5]. But as to the thing in which this aspect is realized, all men are not agreed as to their last end: since some desire riches as their consummate good; some, pleasure; others, something else. Thus to every taste the sweet is pleasant but to some, the sweetness of wine is most pleasant, to others, the sweetness of honey, or of something similar. Yet that sweet is absolutely the best of all pleasant things, in which he who has the best taste takes most pleasure. In like manner that good is most complete which the man with well disposed affections desires for his last end.
I answer that, As the Philosopher [Arsitotle] says (Phys. ii, 2), the end is twofold -- the end "for which" and the end "by which"; viz. the thing itself in which is found the aspect of good, and the use or acquisition of that thing. Thus we say that the end of the movement of a weighty body is either a lower place as "thing," or to be in a lower place, as "use"; and the end of the miser is money as "thing," or possession of money as "use."
If, therefore, we speak of man's last end as of the thing which is the end, thus all other things concur in man's last end, since God is the last end of man and of all other things. If, however, we speak of man's last end, as of the acquisition of the end, then irrational creatures do not concur with man in this end. For man and other rational creatures attain to their last end by knowing and loving God: this is not possible to other creatures, which acquire their last end, in so far as they share in the Divine likeness, inasmuch as they are, or live, or even know.
Hence it is evident how the objections are solved: since happiness means the acquisition of the last end.
I answer that, As stated above [Question 1, Article 8], the end is twofold: namely, the thing itself, which we desire to attain, and the use, namely, the attainment or possession of that thing. If, then, we speak of man's last end, it is impossible for man's last end to be the soul itself or something belonging to it. Because the soul, considered in itself, is as something existing in potentiality: for it becomes knowing actually, from being potentially knowing; and actually virtuous, from being potentially virtuous. Now since potentiality is for the sake of act as for its fulfilment, that which in itself is in potentiality cannot be the last end. Therefore the soul itself cannot be its own last end.
In like manner neither can anything belonging to it, whether power, habit, or act. For that good which is the last end, is the perfect good fulfilling the desire. Now man's appetite, otherwise the will, is for the universal good. And any good inherent to the soul is a participated good, and consequently a portioned good. Therefore none of them can be man's last end.
But if we speak of man's last end, as to the attainment or possession thereof, or as to any use whatever of the thing itself desired as an end, thus does something of man, in respect of his soul, belong to his last end: since man attains happiness through his soul. Therefore the thing itself which is desired as end, is that which constitutes happiness, and makes man happy; but the attainment of this thing is called happiness. Consequently we must say that happiness is something belonging to the soul; but that which constitutes happiness is something outside the soul.
I answer that, It is impossible for any created good to constitute man's happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired. Now the object of the will, i.e. of man's appetite, is the universal good; just as the object of the intellect is the universal true. Hence it is evident that naught can lull man's will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation. Wherefore God alone can satisfy the will of man, according to the words of Psalm 102:5: "Who satisfieth thy desire with good things." Therefore God alone constitutes man's happiness.
I answer that, As stated above (1, 8; 2, 7), our end is twofold. First, there is the thing itself which we desire to attain: thus for the miser, the end is money. Secondly there is the attainment or possession, the use or enjoyment of the thing desired; thus we may say that the end of the miser is the possession of money; and the end of the intemperate man is to enjoy something pleasurable. In the first sense, then, man's last end is the uncreated good, namely, God, Who alone by His infinite goodness can perfectly satisfy man's will. But in the second way, man's last end is something created, existing in him, and this is nothing else than the attainment or enjoyment of the last end. Now the last end is called happiness. If, therefore, we consider man's happiness in its cause or object, then it is something uncreated; but if we consider it as to the very essence of happiness, then it is something created.
contemplans wrote:Their view, which can be argued of course, is that rational inquiry is a valid and good expression of our humanity, and leads us further on the goal of our existence (which happens to be the same as what the Buddha said -- eternal unchanging happiness -- read below, if anything for a good review of what Christians hold in this regard). Even Thomas Aquinas had a mystical experience toward the end of his life which led him to say all his great work was mere straw (mihi videtur ut palea). So I do support that direct experience is greater than rational inquiry, but I also hold that the experience needs to be informed so it doesn't go shipwreck on our subjective experience.
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