China

China does not want any more trouble.  North Korea should be absorbed by the vastly more successful South in the private views of the Chinese government.  It would make a lot of sense, but a peace treaty between Korea and China, and another one with Japan does not guarantee stability, but 1,000,000 soldiers burning all the oxygen is disproportionate to the potential for goodwill in the world for a resurgent, united Korea.

It would mean the end of fear.  It would be the end of poverty for the population of the North.  Gradually, things would improve because the North would be able to produce something to exchange with the rest of the world.  At the moment all it produces is fear.  China may isolate it, but will it change or will it now start to threaten China also?

Aspirin

Salicylic acid, or Aspirin may be a health food - a naturally occurring plant defense that helps dispose of rubbish (old cells) in the body.  A daily intake of about 75mg has been considered medically a good idea for most although the side effect of intestinal bleeding for 0.1% of the population deters general use.  But for most a daily small dose of Aspirin is an inexpensive way to ward off heart disease, various cancers and dementia.

See: http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Salicylic:acid.html

Sarah Palin gets personal

Sarah Palin's new book explores Obama's background.  Early shots in a nasty campaign to come.

Who is a trusted enemy?

A Taleban "leader" sent to negotiate with Hamid Karzai turns out to be a shopkeeper.

Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AM19920101123

Happiness defined as "Being in the Moment"

If you define happiness as being in the moment, then the corollary sounds logical.

To say that the wandering mind causes depression is to tell every parent to be concerned when their child is introspective. Most intellectual behaviour may be like that.

Dreaming does not result in depression. However, addiction to external stimuli do create patterns in modes of thinking and when the stimuli is removed bad feelings logically follow.

Creativity often involves introspection and the mind wandering. Creativity is being in the moment of thought.

See also:

• Guardian UK
• Full article

The Drug War

From the village folk in the Peruvian jungle product pickups to the corrupt cops and the culture and guns of New York, the drug trade forms a commercial interaction between certain counties. Hardly "fair trade" because of the level of violence and stealth required to achieve such profit levels. There is talk of changing laws, however a recent vote in California that supported continued prohibition of cannabis.

With thugs and guns what otherwise looks exactly like a fertilizer shipping business, the distribution of cocaine or heroin, becomes criminal. Is it so because it is harmful or because there is an untaxed profit? Or is the Afghanistan war part of the war on drugs? What does "winning" mean? Will it change anything?

That the Taleban seem to survive on the export of drugs to a snorting army of customers is the war against the rest of the world. It is as though one country had the one weapon that could destroy whole cities. It wealds power over the part of the world affected by its deadly threat. Nuclear weapons will not return a sustainable profit but the drug trade does.

Edited rap lyrics and music

Political Science

I suspect that politics is not a science. It may be the art of pinching the nose of society while forcing down the wrong medicine. It may seem to be the art of finding an equilibrium by polarising opinion. A bit like saying the art of boiling water by freezing it. And that can be done - as you may find out in the rare air of the tops of mountains. The economics of mountain climbing, if you miscalculate and get it wrong, you run out of breath, not due to a crisis of competition but through engine failure. A traffic jam is made worse by more powerful vehicles spewing their fumes into the air until the drivers are stupefied. The same model of self defeat exists across the political spectrum.

Prince Charles believes in the politics of harmony - being in tune with the direction of nature. The Green movement in varying degrees believe humans to be part of something far greater that affords our respect, our humility. Objectivism at the other extreme believes in the power of individual achievement. When the objective is achieved the result looks tastes and smells like fascism. The rights of ownership and control of assets become the rights of ownership and control of people.

The politics of the "Liberal Democrats" is fundamentally two faced. It is the convenience of truth that informs it. If Liberal means more freedom to exploit and democrat means in the hands of the people, the amalgam of these two ideas is everyone screwing everyone else. No wonder Clegg won so much power.

Strange Events

While cosmic rays hit the earth, we look inside the actions of viruses, how they infect cells by injecting the cell with itself and changing the cell's DNA. But meantime the body has been able to fight viruses by attaching immune cells to the protein well of the virus, and thus being injected with it, attracting special virual cell deconstruction factories that tear the virus cell to pieces. The goings on at the cellular level follow very severe war policies, take no prisoners, in fact, evaporate them!

So research is going on for anti-virals that work in a similar fashion.

"The discovery, which is reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could pave the way for a new generation of antiviral drugs that fight infections by supercharging the body's own defences.

"Future treatments based on James's work are only expected to work against a class of viruses that do not shed their protein coats when they invade healthy cells. Those that do would leave the attached antibodies outside the cells, and so not trigger the cell's own immune attack."

Guardian, Nov 1, 2010

The idea of a virus that sheds its protein coat and thus defeat the virus defences sounds like a virus that would cause a cell to mutate, and as cells become virus factories, effectively grow - a hybrid semi foreign version of the cell. If antivirals can defeat this type of virus, it seems quite possible that there may be hope of attacking the many cancers will may be caused in this way.