Iraqi Writers....

"There were amazing scenes; not very likely to [be] seen anywhere else. There were acts of heroism. Abdul Amir Kadhim, saw a man whom he suspected to be a suicide bomber, he threw himself on the man before he could get to the waiting line of people; and sure there was an explosion and this young man gave his life to save the others. Prime Minister Allawi paid tribute to this heroism. At one station there was a suicide attack and several people fell; when people of the neighborhood heard of this, the waiting line suddenly swelled to three times in size; people rushed out of their homes and came running to wait in line; it was their way to express their defiance and anger at this crime. The examples of bravery and courage are too numerous to recount."
The Messopotamian

"Yet we have been telling you this all along; we have been telling you ever since this blogging movement started. Do you now see that we were not representing minority views, that we were not some CIA agents trying to make propaganda?

I find it difficult right know to write coherently; I just want to convey to you some of the tremendous feelings overwhelming my soul now.

As for some of the Arab scum and other detractors, they are appearing on TV screens looking like they have just swallowed a cockroach, or perhaps had some awful lizard creeping up their backsides; They fidget, they try hard to find some words, some way to get round this, to belittle, twist to distort facts; but it is not easy, not easy when the entire world, the entire humanity are watching intently this incredible event. Finally, we heard the speech of President Bush Loud and clear. He, and the American people and their British and other valiant allies have much to do with this event.

Well, thank you Mr. President, we heard you; and I am sure you also heard us. Peace be upon you all and the mercy of Allah and his blessings." (Ib.)

That is not quite what you will read in the Old Press, nor in the press of the "Arab scum." It is too bad that the Old Press seems to have more in common with moral degenerates than Iraqis writing or fighting for Liberty.

(The Old Press takes the views typical to "objective" journalists and anthropologists, views that have already been written of here.)

Resistance to judicial diktat in history,

“[I]s [Lincoln] ready to endorse the sham Dred Scott decision and deny that a colored man….can be a citizen of this nation, although the foundation of its Government and Constitution is the legal equality of all its subjects?
…..
Will he stand up boldly, face to face, before the people of this land, and take that Pro-Slavery decision as authority and law? Will he assert with Wickliefe and the like that this is the ‘white man’s land,’ and that negroes under the Constitution can be neither ‘citizens’ nor even ‘people?’ Will he maintain that the colored citizens of Rhode Island, or any other State, are not also citizens of the Union?
…..
The assumption that men of African descent are not equal in law to others, and cannot be citizens under our national Constitution, and the attempt, in the Dred Scott case, to foist this doctrine into the law of the land as an irrepealable interpretation, is a part, and no unimportant part, of the Pro-Slavery abominations and encroachments which called the Republican party into existence….

.…all these wrongs and base violations of our Constitution must be done away before we shall stand as a nation upon safe and immovable ground. It is in vain to take these lies in our right hand, or attempt to put them as true stones in our building-we must sooner or later renounce them, or truth and right will renounce us. So long as this wrong to the whole colored race continues to be the prevailing practice of the nation, so long, I feel assured, will the displeasure and the pursuing and fierce judgments of God rest upon us.”

(Drafting Negroes
The New York Times, Aug 21, 1862
Editorial, pg. 2)

Me blog...

...it suffers a bit. But I've been having some fun again. I'll make some time for here, sometime.

Words...

Sometimes I let the concepts of my words do my talking for me, to see what they have to say. They have their say, in what I say.

You might say that my words speak for me.

(I don't want to push off an ongoing discussion. So here is the link (on anthropology) so that any involved or interested can still click to it through the front page. Bogging Blogger still has no recent comments, so that's the way I'll do things until they do.)

Index, III

Index, I

Index, II

Index, III:

The Art of Knowledge

To have a prayer...

Signs and Wonders

The Parable of the Detectives

A Story of Nipples

A Plain Parable

A Logical Parable

The Story of the Herd

Little Timmy's Story

The Parable of the White Southerner

The Gridiron

Biologists, a Parable

The Garden, I

The Garden, II

The Garden, III

The Garden, IV

The Garden, V

The Garden, VI

Archive...

One of the accomplishments of living systems which is, of course, quite without any analogy in the field of our own technology is their capacity for self-duplication. With the dawn of the age of computers and automation after the Second World War, the theoretical possibility of constructing self-replicating automata was considered seriously by mathematicians and engineers. Von Neumann discussed the problem at great length in his famous book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, but the practical difficulties of converting the dream into reality have proved too daunting. As Von Neumann pointed out, the construction of any sort of self-replicating automaton would neces sitate the solution to three fundamental problems: that of storing information; that of duplicating information; and that of designing an automatic factory which could be programmed from the infor mation store to construct all the other components of the machine as well as duplicating itself. The solution to all three problems is found in living things and their elucidation has been one of the triumphs of modern biology.

So efficient is the mechanism of information storage and so elegant the mechanism of duplication of this remarkable molecule that it is hard to escape the feeling that the DNA molecule may be the one and only perfect solution to the twin problems of information storage and duplication for self-replicating automata.

The solution to the problem of the automatic factory lies in the ribosome. Basically, the ribosome is a collection of some fifty or so large molecules, mainly proteins, which fit tightly together. Altogether the ribosome consists of a highly organized structure of more than one million atoms which can synthesise any protein that it is instructed to make by the DNA, including the particular proteins which compromise its own structure — so the ribosome can construct itself!

The protein synthetic apparatus is also, however, the solution to an even deeper problem than that of self-replication. Proteins can be designed to perform structural, logical, and catalytic functions. For instance, they form the impervious materials of the skin, the contractile elements of muscles, the transparent substance of the lens of the eye: and, because of their practically unlimited potential, almost any conceivable biochemical object can be ultimately constructed using these remarkable molecules as basic structural and functional units. The choice of the protein synthetic apparatus as the solution to the problem of the automatic factory has deep implications. Not only does it represent a solution to one of the problems of designing a self- duplicating machine but it also represents a solution to an even deeper problem, that of constructing a universal automaton. The protein synthetic apparatus cannot only replicate itself but, in addition, if given the correct information, it can also construct any other biochemical machine, however great its complexity, just so long as its basic functional units are comprised of proteins, which, because of the near infinite number of uses to which they can be put, gives it almost limitless potential.

It is astonishing to think that this remarkable piece of machinery, which possesses the ultimate capacity to construct every living thing that ever existed on Earth, from a giant redwood to the human brain, can construct all its own components in a matter of minutes and weigh less than 10^16 grams. It is of the order of several thousand million million times smaller than the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man.

(Evolution: A Theory in Crisis
By Michael Denton :337-338)