"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Jul 9, 2010

Or, why I'll never embrace the wily arguments of the Reverends Ludd...

My argument lies with royal science, not scientific inquiry and observation. Natch, this pleases to no end:

http://www.aolnews.com/health/article/discovery-helps-us-researchers-close-in-on-hiv-vaccine/19547029

4 comments:

Andromeda said...

Now that is wonderful news!

Oddly apropos, given your piece on the replication of power and my comment that power is a virus. ;-)

Donor 45---an unnamed man whose contribution to the human race may be the eradication of HIV.

Mankind is capable of so much: when the polio vaccine was invented by Jonas Salk, he had no interest in personal profit and when asked who owned the patent to the vaccine, he replied, "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"

fwoan said...

Another "punishment from god" taking a back seat to science and reason.

Duncan Mitchel said...

Hm. What's "royal science"? And you know, don't you, that "to no end" means "uselessly," "pointlessly"? What you meant there was just plain "no end."

Personally, I'm wary of claims like this until they actually produce a vaccine. Scientists have a tendency to exaggerate. (This development, comrades, may bring the war with Eurasia within measurable distance of its end!) And I believe I've heard that the Luddites were not the knee-jerk anti-technology maniacs they are usually caricatured as.

Jack Crow said...

"Royal science" comes from Deleuze and Guattari's "Nomadology."

It's one of their better ideas - discussing science which is used to make and hold power, the structures of power, the weapons of power and the institutions of power.

*

And this isn't end result science they're doing. It's tools to make the tools stuff, which is bueno in its own right.