Want to help cure cancer? AIDS?

The World Community Grid has recently added another weapon to its arsenal: fighting cancer. The Help Defeat Cancer project will analyze scans of cancerous tissue, looking for patterns and markers that will help differentiate the various types of cancer and their signatures. This new project comes only a few weeks after the introduction of the second iteration of the Human Proteome Folding project, which calculates the precise interactions of atoms during protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that fold in precise physical structures. Analysis of these interactions can help cure myriads of diseases, as all biological processes involve protein synthesis and folding for their operations. The FightAids@Home project has already run an astonishing 22,272 years of computing thanks to the participation of its 200,000 members.

"According to the World Health Organization, cancer causes 7 million deaths each year, or 12.5% of deaths worldwide. More than 11 million people are diagnosed with cancer every year, and it is estimated that there will be 16 million new cases every year by 2020" [Help Defeat Cancer | World Community Grid] while "UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, estimated that in 2004 there were more than 40 million people around the world living with HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus." [FightAIDS@Home | World Community Grid]. The threats of terrorism are a mere shadow when stood against the miniature killers that target us all indiscriminately.

You can personally contribute to helping cure cancer, AIDS and a host of other genetic diseases by contributing your wasted computer resources to calculate the causes of those diseases, a different approach from the traditional pharmaceutical method of trial and error on symptoms. Even your most ambitious personal use of your computer's resources waste the vast majority of its potential. If you were to look at the resources you are using (i.e. your cpu and memory usage), you would find that about 95% of the time your cpu is idle, working at a fraction of its gigahertz capacity.

Downloading and running the World Community Grid agent on every computer on which you can (i.e. yours, your parents', neighbours', at work) can have a much greater impact in saving lives than any other significant effort you, or even the world's governments, will ever undertake. If the WCG's efforts in calculating the causes of diseases would yield a cure for cancer, millions of people would escape death every year. Unlike the billions spent on the "war on terror", this minimal effort on your part will yield genuine impact on the world and, litteraly, save millions of lives.

[Cross-published: Newsvine - Want to help cure cancer? AIDS?]

Perpetual war

The war in Iraq has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein and the war on terrorism has little to do with terrorists. There have been dozens of individuals as murderous and unstable as Saddam was in every century of human history. The idea that a few barely organized lunatics are more dangerous than an army that possesses thousands of nuclear warheads is ridiculous. Things should be kept in perspective and skills should not be superhumanly exaggerated.

Both wars have everything to do with national politics. With those never-ending conflicts, both parties do not need to actually work when they are in power. They can both maintain vague policies about security-related probabilities and not be held accountable for actual policy-making. With a constant culture war, dividing the population on emotional issues, policy-making can be easily deflected with rhetorical speech.

As long as we're here, small parentheses should be opened about emboldening and giving aid and comfort to the enemy: it's ridiculous. Any adult who thinks that some actual terrorist out there in, say Yemen, Pakistan or Iraq, is listening to what some people are writing or saying in editorials or speeches is either drunk or delusional. Add to that the fact that all the emboldening and comfort for exercising the fundamental act of criticism and peer-review in political decision-making is not going to do much difference in front of a guided missile or hand weapon, and much of this debate adds up to a content level between kindergarten and 3rd grade.

Since the information media has neither mandate nor incentive to provide understanding of political affairs, it is simple matter to provide incentives to the opposite and maintain sufficient secrecy to minimize accountability. With power should come proportional accountability, which is simply not possible with secrecy. Between secrecy, and its hypothetical efficiency boost, and accountability, which when correctly applied prevents corruption, incompetence, nepotism, war and propaganda, the benefit of the doubt is a foolish gift to grant to politicians.

Harpers published an excellent essay on American right-wing policies and their abuse of executive privilege, at a cost of several trillion and millions of lives: Stabbed in the Back! - The past and future of a right-wing myth, posted on July 14, 2006.

Shorter Bush Administration: $296 billion deficit is good news

In a graphic display of lunacy, the Bush administration has cheered recent news that budget estimates put the federal deficit for 2006 at $296 billion, rather than the previously projected $423 billion.

Sir, you do not have generalized cancer, but rejoice, you have flesh-eating bacteria and we will only need to remove your left leg.

As always, the NY Times provides mandatory cheering for the lunatic fantasies of the Bush Administration: Bush Cheers High Tax Revenues.

Justice Department Lawyer To Congress: ‘The President Is Always Right’

The Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday heard testimony from Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel. When questioned by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on whether the President’s interpretation of the Hamdan case was right or wrong, Bradbury replied, “The President is always right.”

From ThinkProgress: Justice Department Lawyer To Congress: ‘The President Is Always Right’

Biological evolution as the foundation of morality and ethics

A very frequent argument presented by religious folks is that there needs to be a basis for morality and ethical behavior, which religion claims to be. Most humans have very negative views of human nature and believe that most humans cannot act in a moral fashion without a specific set or rules. Religion provides such rules through terror, fear from eternal damnation, and egoistical desires, which the ideas of heaven and God's love provide with convincing images. Fundamentalists are especially hard on individuals who do not follow their respective set of laws, believing they are immoral and therefore justified for forced conversion or murder.

But there is a strong biological basis for morality and ethical behavior, which stands as the foundation of the survival of a species. Any species or group of animals that would conduct themselves without an ethical political behavior would extinguish itself, as inter-species competition is too strong to allow any group weakened by internal violence to survive in the natural environment.

Evolution has woven morality in the genetic code of the surviving species and societies, as all groups that allowed internecine violence to dominate have vanished through self-destruction. For further arguments on this thesis, follow this post at Hell's Handmaiden: Atheists are bad, bad people: The Conclusion!, as well as the earlier portions of this well-written essay: part I and part II.