Writing & Naming: the Medicine of Acquiring Knowledge

Through the work of writing, I have learned first and foremost that nothing is what it tells us it is, because there is always another level, another way to play at naming, with reality, to bend untruths to be more true, as medicine, as savior, as demon filtered for taste, as a ritual mark of remembrance of tensile perceptual realities, disputed, fought for and reclaimed. There is a line after which language becomes less a tool for understanding and more a mechanism for undermining it, but that line is constantly in motion, and in language, as in physics, we now understand “reversibility generally does not exist”, as per Poincaré.

Medvedev Calls for Sweeping Democratic Change in Russia

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has called for sweeping political and economic reforms, designed to make Russia a modern, advanced democratic society. In his state of the nation address, Pres. Medvedev said Russia needs to evolve from being a “primitive” economy based on raw materials and natural resources to an advanced economy based on unique innovative human knowledge. He also said the new Russia needs to be one of “intelligent, free and responsible people”, not one where political bosses dictate policy.

Berlin Commemorates Fall of Berlin Wall, 20 Years Later

The Berlin Wall separated East and West Berlin, ensuring that capitalist and democratic West Berlin remained surrounded on all sides by the communist German Democratic Republic, where a permanent state of martial law kept millions prisoner for decades. West Germany was forced to move its seat of government to Bonn, to protect against a potential hostile siege from the East German regime, strongly backed by the Soviet Union. But on 9 November 1989, a spreading movement of ground-up resistance and reform climaxed in what seemed like the sudden unraveling of an empire that covered half the continent.

House Passes Health Bill 220 to 215

At 10:59 pm Saturday evening, a 15-minute vote was called. Members of the House were then to vote yea or nay by electronic device. By 11:01 pm, the vote was 197 to 184 and moving quickly. The vote tally will not be final until the Speaker drops the gavel to close the vote. By 11:03 pm, 36 Democrats had voted against the measure, making the special Saturday vote a case of high legislative drama.

Republican No-vote on Health Reform Could Hurt Party’s Electoral Chances

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign demonstrated an unprecedented level of achievement for organizing new voters and winning donations from lower-income voters, then mobilizing millions of supporters to fan out across the country and disseminate the campaign’s message of positive change. Republican opponents of healthcare reform are engaged in a high-stakes political gamble, banking on the likelihood that the massive numbers of uninsured will not organize against them if they vote against healthcare reform.

Semenya Case Shows How Complex is Ethics of Fairness in Sport

Caster Semenya, the 18-year-old track-and-field phenomenon from South Africa, is a woman whose hormonal chemistry is unusual for the average adult female. Test results are reported to show that her body naturally secretes three times the normal female levels of testosterone, the dominant “male” hormone, which some competitors say gives her an “unfair advantage”. The issue has raised perhaps the most serious challenge to the notion of fairness in sport, and to conventional attitudes about gender.

California Could Build Renewable Resource Export Economy

One solution for California would be the expansion of its efforts across the region and the nation, to spur the creation of a full-scale renewable resource-based power grid, to optimize both generative capacity and distribution. The question is, now that the decision has been made to shift toward renewables, how can California go beyond the 1/3 threshold and build a strong renewable-energy export economy?

Does Anyone Know What Capitalism Is?

Capitalism is “survival of the fittest”… capitalism is rooted in the idea of merit; everyone should be compensated according to his or her contribution (to the common good?)… capitalism is about the movement of capital; the more it moves, the richer everyone gets… capitalism is an upgraded feudalism, where the capitalist is an overseer of an abstract terrain made up of investments, not of arable lands… capitalism is democracy; the free spirit of an open society requires capitalism to support the liberties of individual citizens, and protect against government overreach… capitalism is virtue… or, capitalism is the absence of virtue…

Artificial Intelligence: Will It Understand or Reject Our Human Qualities?

Is the very thing we demand of our computers the thing that will make them intolerant of our humanity, if and when they awaken to an artificial intelligence? One of the fundamental problems in achieving a state of computational agility and independence that would allow us to say a synthetic entity has acquired ‘artificial intelligence’ is the problem of autonomy. If we give real autonomy to artificially intelligent machines, can we trust them to cooperate with us, in the ways we, as human beings prefer?

Physicians for Human Rights says Doctors Aided in Torture

After reviewing the CIA inspector general’s (IG) report on prisoner abuse during and surrounding the Bush-era “war on terror”, the watchdog Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) says doctors not only attended and supervised prisoner abuse, but recorded information that “may amount to human experimentation”.

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