A short piece on the achievements of the kibbutzim, the Israeli social community that proves that Socialism can really do well, thrive and create wealth. Kibbutzim are integral part of Israel and the key for a lot of it success. Sadly, many of the so called Progressive and leftists blindly criticize Israel, without looking this real victory of communitarism, self organizing and cooperation. Israel is not perfect and should not be given a free pass just because of the kibbutzim, but criticism should be more rational that "those damn evil Zionists beating poor Arabs", which is the most usual verssion.
My good friend Muhammad Ahmad, from Pakistan, living in Minneapolis now, created a very interesting website about Islam and Science Fiction, where he reviews several Science Fiction books and stories that deal one way or another with Muslims and Islam.
Muhammad is one of the smartest people I have ever met and even if our encounter was brief, it was really enlightening, one that taught me a lot about Islam, Muslims and the relationship between them and emerging technologies.
Now Muhammad has edited A Mosque Among the Stars, an anthology about Islam and Science Fiction, which is available here. I haven't had the pleasure to read it yet, but this a project that I am deeply interested in. After all, in this era, we are globally connected and the future is our collective creation, progressive Muslims like Muhammad show us a very different aspect from Islam that we are used to, from the old stereotypes.
Our Muslim brothers and sisters are all around the world and I am happy that Muhammad and the ones like him are building all sort of weird and beautiful bridges for the dialog.
All but one member of the 100-seat national parliament belong to the PDGE or are aligned with it. The opposition is severely hampered by the lack of a free press as a vehicle for their views. Around 90% of all opposition politicians live in exile, 550 anti-Obiang activists have been jailed unfairly, and several killed since 1979.
In July 2003, state-operated radio declared Obiang to be a god who is "in permanent contact with the Almighty" and "can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell." He personally made similar comments in 1993. Despite these comments, he still states that he is a devout Catholic and was invited to the Vatican by John Paul II and again by Benedict XVI. Macías had also proclaimed himself a god.[2]
Ms. Rice said that Obiang was "a good friend". I can believe that, after she belongs to a regime of tortures, law breakers, fear mongers, bible thumpers and enemies of freedom.
Usually, I avoid discussing Venezuelan politics in this blog, not only because it is not related to the subject of this blog, but also because some of the things that happen here are hard to believe and the sources in English about it are scarce.
Most of the best resources to understand the Venezuelan situation are created and kept by grassroots activists, as opposed to media machines and think tanks that either support the government (and are sponsored by it many times) or are blatantly supportive of some of the worst elements of the Venezuelan opposition. So, many of the best points of view, against this government, but also against an unfair and corrupt system that existed before it (and that somewhat, keeps existing), are lost to the eyes of the foreign observer.
As I decided to stay here in Venezuela instead of going abroad, it is necessary for my sanity to try to ignore the political hullabaloo and focus in my work and life, try to be not too grumpy. But the current environment of arbitrariness, xenophobia and fascist violence is too much to endure while being silent. So, when Chavez decided to shut stores and schools to celebrate the anniversary of his ascent to presidency, at first I felt broken, devastated for such abuse of power, for realizing how much power a damn politician has, no questions asked by his servants, and horrified for seeing how much more he intends to take. Then I decided that to get the opposition appalled and depressed, feeling powerless is exactly the aim of such displays of power.
I wrote a brief summary of the situation and sent it to BoingBoing, if I cannot do anything about this, at least I can try to be listened to. As much of the crowd that hangs there are progressive and left wingers, I tried to explain my feelings and give hard data about the situation, to wash a bit the somehow understandable affair of so many progressive people with this tyrant that is the Venezuelan president.
This time, unlike in previous years, I had a new, wonderful tool: Automated translations that do not suck that much! These translations are not perfect yet, but they are good enough for rough communication. When confronted with an apparent absence of sources, I decided to quote not only statistics that defy the official version, but also analysis from the Anarchist publication "El Libertario" and several other blogs and newspapers that not only describe what this land has become, but also reflect on the harm that Chavez does to true progressives, as right wingers in the future will use him as bogeyman to prevent any change. I could give a broader view thanks to these viewpoints, different from the aseptic news and propaganda from both sides, which are the texts that usually get translated. This grassroots efforts often lacks funds for translations, but with Google and its translations, I could overcome this, use an artificial translation to get my message across, use a neural prosthesis that lies outside my skull to deliver information to support the arguments that come from inside it.
This is another sign of this age where the ones that were oppressed now can talk. Having an Internet connection is not enough to send your message, if you do not speak the right language; A lot of people will ignore you and your voice will be silenced by the much more powerful voices of the ones with enough money to set up pretty websites and translated propaganda. But now, thanks to these rough translations, at least a bit of it can be understood and make others wonder if everything that the Big Brother says is true. Thanks to these new prostheses of the mind, a rudimentary dialog can be established and sometimes, as in my case, arguments can be enhanced and supported with local sources.
I am happy that technology keeps enabling people to be heard, sometimes in unexpected ways. The dispossessed might not remain silent for much longer, as computers drop their prices and automatic translation improves. But, will the world react to these distorted voices in pain?
RepRap, the prototype for a autoreplicating (but not self assembling) machine finally is able to build all of its parts.
This is thrilling and possibly a milestone in a future Agalmics history. It is quite reassuring to see these bottom-up efforts to bloom and spread, to be the heralds of a better, decentralized tomorrow, where, as the RepRap motto says, there will be "wealth without money".
Hopefully some day with future versions RepRap or something similar, and with distributed biotech and Open Source protocols for culturing meat and other protein sources, we will be freer from the tyranny of having to sell ourselves in order to survive.
Some of us have been asking for public policies for supporting Biotech and educating the people better about the promises and risks of Genetically Modified Organism (GM) crops.
Maybe this crisis will prove to be the factor that triggers better acceptance of GM food. Hopefully this support will promote the growth of GM projects from small teams, with a set of OS tools, with non-profit purposes instead of the current system, where only the big players can afford to create new crops tailored to their commercial interest, as they are the only ones who can afford the expensive trials and the huge lobbying needed to get these crops approved.
Paradoxically, by insisting on moratoriums and strict bans, consumer activists and ecologists reduce the possible GM diversity and concentrate the power of determining the course of research in agriculture in a few corporate hands. Their actions lead to a future that many of us deem as undesirable. We cannot let those few companies determine the fate of the new crops according to commercial interests, we must fight for more diversity in the food chain and tailor crops to local growing needs.
The Zambian president, Levy Mwanawasa, asked other African countries to boycott the arms ship heading to Zimbabwe.
According to the BBC, Mwanawasa said: "We don't want a situation which will escalate the [tension] in Zimbabwe more than what it is,".
Finally some common sense coming from a top politician in Africa about Zimbabwe. But, to be fair, his mild words are complemented by others government's decisions of not allowing the cargo in and the position of the International Transport Workers Federation.
No matter how hard the lesson has been. No matter how much we have suffered, no matter how others need our support and empathy, we never fucking learn.
I wish I could express my outrage concerning the South African policy to Zimbabwe. The SA government does not only support Mugabe's atrocities, but also they allow to go through their territory new arms for Mugabe's government, even when they know the episodes of political violence and the tyranny of the current government of Zimbabwe.
It seems that Thabo Mbeki and his allies have forgotten how the UN enforced an arms embargo against the Apartheid supporting regime of their nation. It seems they have forgotten what happened in Rwanda not long ago, when we chose to look elsewhere. It seems they lack not only memory, but also compassion and common sense.
And now, in this age of political correctness, we must be cheerful, nod and say yes, the Emperor's new clothes are beautiful. We must be soft, we cannot say "You are awful", we must not offend and agree politely that genocide and oppression are cultural peculiarities. The age of irony, sarcasm and dissent seems gone.
I dream of those times, when you could tell truths without being accused of bigotry.
We need to be blunt and shocking, we need to change.
Here, a memory of a past long gone, when calling an asshole an asshole was not frowned at:
Disclaimer:
I KNOW that all white South Africans were not racists. I know that there was a lot of pain and struggle before black people were granted equality, it did not happen out of the blue. I know that much of the arms embargo was nothing but lip service. I know the fact that the UN decided to not support the apartheid government was not magical. But even knowing all this I just cannot avoid to think that the acts of the South African govt. are not very different from supporting the old apartheid system.
A Chinese student at Duke who participated in pro-Tibet protests on campus -- after befriending her Tibetan dorm-mate -- has become the target of brutal online and offline attacks. Thousands of nationalist Chinese thugs (some claiming to be Duke students) see her actions as "traitorous," and have threatened her with personal attacks in comment threads and, apparently, in person.
Online, the bullies have posted her photograph, her US phone number, Chinese identity card number, her parents' address and home number in China. Offline, her parents' home in Qingdao is said to have been attacked with rocks, and her parents are now in hiding.
Another example of how silly, irrational, evil and dangerous can patriotism be.
It seems that 2007 was a good year to be a lab mouse.
Some outstanding developments in cell biology, genetics, evo-devo, and several other branches of Biology, have improved the murine condition and given more lifespan, strength or stamina to mice. Exactly what we, transhumanists hope to achieve for our own kind. These mice, as the Betterhumans motto says, are “better than well”.
We were used to seeing mice with impaired functions, some of them extremely dysfunctional and with shocking phenotypes. Often they died before long, destroyed by its own conditions, after a painful life. Now, after understanding better the mechanisms of several body systems, after gaining a better viewpoint of genetic regulatory circuits, we have begun to tinker more delicately and exquisitely with the genes of these mice, now with superb results that give us hope and further enthusiasm for the promise of enhancing human capacities. This new generation of mice is only the beginning of a new era of improved mammals that will beat their natural counterparts in several aspects and aren't impaired in any sense, compared to them.
The first of these mice is only a mouse with scientific and aesthetic value, as its phenotype is not visible and not useful for itself, but to us, human experimenters. The Brainbow mice express genes for Green, Yellow, Red and Cyan. Fluorescent Proteins are coupled to the Cre/lox recombination systems. A probabilistic recombination event renders these genes functional and the combined expression of several (but not all at the same time, as the recombination is an stochastic event, different in every cell) different genes create as many as 90 possible shades of colors for each neuron (or any other cell). The differential gene expression and coloring of each cell allow experimenters to keep track of individual cells, which have the same color across all their lengths. Yes, this modification is not helpful to its bearers, but surely is interesting, beautiful and offers interesting body modification perspectives if it were possible to achieve in adult individuals rather than only in embryos. Coupling the expression of Cre to a Turing Pattern-like expression system would lead to extremely interesting skin color patterns, similar in shape to tigers or leopards, but with many different colors in a random way. Maybe we could even figure how to tweak cell receptors and gene expression to create fractal patterns on skin. Maybe in the future tattoos will be induced spreading different substances over the skin, one for each color, and maybe this gene expression could be turned off and return skin to its normal state. In any case, this is good news for Morphological Freedom fans.
I already commented on another post about one of the star mice from this year, the myostatin deficient mice that develop four times more muscle than regular mice. In this case, possibly we could mimic the effects of the alterations using drugs that modulate the activity of these proteins and therefore we would not need any gene modification to have the effect in humans. Possibly these drugs will be heavily regulated and their use for other than medical conditions as muscular dystrophy, deemed illegal, however, they are going to be used for other purposes, whether we like it or not. Again, I would say that the honest thing to do would be to end the hypocrisy and allow this kind of modification to be used in professional sports, but only limited to a league of enhanced athletes, separated from regular athletes, as pairing unaided persons with the ones who use this kind of tech would be unfair. What will happen with public attention to both leagues? Would it lead to a mass approval and support of transhumanist points of views, once the people realize that their beloved sport heroes are de facto transhumans? I do not have the slightest idea, but certainly that is going to be very interesting.
The overexpression of the SAC domain of the prostate apoptosis response-4 gene causes resistance to tumors in mice, both spontaneous and induced by oncogenes. The SAC domain seems to induce apoptosis when the cell machine gets out of control, not in normal or immortalized cells, where proliferation is out of control. This apoptosis is independent of p53 and other tumor supressor genes. The specificity of the action is conferred by Protein Kinase A, an enzyme that has increased activity in tumoral cells. The overexpression of SAC does not affect the growth, development or lifespan of mice, that stay tumor free and normal in every other sense.
Maybe the most impressive performance of the year is the one from PEPCK-mus mice. These mice overexpress the enzyme PEPCK in muscle, that converts Phosphoenol Pyruvate to Oxalacetate, generating ATP from ADP in the process and bypassing lactic acid production. This might sound dull and uninteresting, but the effects are simply breathtaking. PEPCK-mus mice can run more than ten times the normal distance that regular mice can run, at higher speeds. The levels of lactic acid in the cells of these mice remain the same during heavy exercise as during rest. Here's the video of the comparison between both mice:
Simply impressive. I barely have words to describe what I feel when I see this. These mice also remain fertile for a longer time and live longer than normal mice. These are truly transmice, improved, enchanced. However, there are problems, as they eat more food (but they stay fit) and have slightly more agressive behaviour. These drawbacks must be studied in depth before we can port the mechanism to humans (And it might be not possible due to physiological differences), but overall, the sole fact that it is possible to achieve such effects overexpressing a single gene is tremendously encouraging.
I think that the experiment that will beat the current M Prize holder is already on its course or will begin in 2008 and that even more interesting mice will show up this year at an even faster pace. Maybe we are at the point where we need a metric that accounts for the number of modified genes in a mouse, the number of ways in that it differs from regular mice and how different it is. Maybe a better option is some ratio between the number of genes modified and the number of pathways that are affected by these genes, multiplied by some measure of longevity. Maybe this hypothetical number is impossible to calculate, as we would have to assign values to staying cancer-free, running for longer, seeing in the ultraviolet region, or being able to photosynthetize and digest cellulose. This is utterly absurd, but maybe we could find a measure other than the lifespan of the enhanced mice, maybe the resistance of cultured cells to carcinogenic agents, its behavior concerning fasting or radiation poisoning. It is a complex issue but I still think it would be worthy to acknowledge the fact that as a result of several extensive modifications these new mice show improved phenotypes. The crux of the problem, I guess, is that we would be trying to assign values to what we think that ultimately would lead to improved humans themselves, and there is no single concept of what it means to be “better” when options, situations and viewpoints are almost endless. But even for something as widely adopted as Moore's law, measuring the speed of the processor alone, without accounting for software requirements is not a reliable way to predict end-user experience, as a relatively new processor with Windows Vista can do much worse than an older one running an older version of Windows or a lightweight distro of Linux, so maybe sticking to a number as a guide of what's inside the mouse is not as crazy as it sounds.
When will the Transhuman Year arrive? Hard to say. All these developments have been used to create new animals, not applied to an existing mouse that then changed its phenotype. Before we can benefit form this research we still have to develop safe ways of transfecting genes into existing animals and triggering their expression in a controlled fashion. Current viral vectors are unreliable and dangerous, however, even if safer methods are developed, they still will have to go through a regulatory nightmare before we are able to use them, unless unethical paradises and biotech havens arise, probably in developing countries. A way to get funding for clinical tests and support a successful industry before human application of the tech is ready could be use the technology in pets: life extension, rejuvenation, enhancing of beloved pets, selling colorful kittens, extra fast greyhounds for racing, developing dogs and cats that will live for longer but that won't reproduce unless given a pill, avoiding the need of neutering processes. This temporary and selective sterilization would be fairly easy to develop given that we have safe transfection vectors. Then it could be applied to existing animals, inoculating the vector on them and maybe help to solve the problem of urban canine overpopulation. I think that a lot of people would buy these treatments for their pets, if the alternative is death or hurting them with unnecessary organ removals, and that revenue could be used to fund further research in humans.
It has been a good year for H+ ideas, a good year for scientific research and a good year for mice. There are a lot of unsolved issues and a lot of problems that require not tech solutions but political and social ones. Sadly we cannot do much about it, other than keep trying to give education and critical thinking tools to as many people as possible. Expose people to other world views and experiences, so they realize that life can be different, can be improved. That leaders should be accountable for their actions and that the real wealth of nations lies not on the land, the industry or even on computers, but on human ingenuity and love for knowledge.
The view from my corner of the world. A world of promises, a world of perils. A world open in a way never seen before. A world I crave for. I pledge allegiance to Mankind, not to any nations or gods.
