Sunday, April 17, 2011

Terry Eagleton is right...

In Praise of Marx - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

In Praise of Marx - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "April 10, 2011
In Praise of Marx

By Terry Eagleton

Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx's ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands?

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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Friday, May 14, 2010

DNA nano-bots

As long as we are dominated by the capitalist dictate of short term profit, new and highly promising technologies will bring with them the threat of new unprecedented disasters. An economic system organized around the principle of the greatest benefit to all, controlled collectively by the people actually doing the work, could develop this technology much more rapidly and at the same time much more carefully. -DougN

"An industrial assembly line includes a factory, workers and a conveyor system," said Dr. Seeman. "We have emulated each of those features using DNA components."

By triggering different DNA sequences, the researchers could order up to eight different combinations in their experimental product line.

"It is very significant," said California Institute of Technology bioengineer Paul Rothemund, who was not involved in either project. "This is the kind of thing that happens in living cells all the time."

Biochemist Lloyd Smith at the University of Wisconsin in Madison cautioned that it may be a decade or more before DNA nanotechnology leads to any useful applications.

"This is a field to watch," Dr. Smith said. "But this is still fundamental research to find out what ability mankind has to make molecules that can do its bidding."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704247904575240380352719428.html

Thursday, January 7, 2010

"Free the Troops, End Stop Loss"

Someone just commented on my 8 month old video so I figured it must still be fresh enough to post to my blog.
How many people would honk if you held a banner on an overpass outside a military base with the slogan, "FREE THE TROOPS, END STOP LOSS? I bet more than you would think!

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Bernie the Quitter

Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders spoke for months about his “historic” efforts to get a vote on a single-payer health care bill in the Senate. While we all knew the outcome was going to be a rather miserable failure, it was a tiny crumb being flicked to those of us who still believe in both real solutions to the health care crisis AND the possibilities of democracy.
Sanders was correct to intuit that this kind of vote is essential to keep a movement alive, offer some hope, and simply record the moment in history. The entire effort is about seeing where we stand, knowing how far we have to go, and putting both the general public and the electoral elite on notice that we know where we’re going.
Historically, similar “failed” measures were introduced to end slavery, to give women the right to vote, to provide equal rights to minorities and – yes – to end wrong-headed wars. An effective movement must know which side everyone is on, and such votes – albeit failures – provide that organizational and motivational insight.
Bernie had all of this in mind while he talked the talk in the months preceding the historic single-payer health care vote. Because Bernie knows his history, and he also knows – like the rest of us who utilize common sense know – that a single-payer health care system provides the only path to justice.
“The upcoming vote on my single-payer health care bill will be an historic moment in the halls of Congress,” Bernie declared recently on a national radio talk show. “While I know it will fail, it is essential to bring it forward, have the debate, and record the vote so that we can continue to build the movement and move toward single-payer as our ultimate goal.”
Well, Bernie had his moment yesterday. And, as we all know now, he quit on us.
Read the rest on this blog: http://broadsides.org