Six Ways Socialism is Anti-Social

From Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org (Dec. 4, 2022):

Here’s a question for a PhD dissertation: How did something so radically anti-social ever get the name, social-ism?

I leave that vexing matter to whoever wants to write it up. Meantime, I can assist the project by offering some of the reasons why socialism is a self-evidently anti-social contrivance.

First, what is socialism? For a definition, socialists themselves offer numerous moving targets. For example:

It’s happy talk and sharing things even though under socialism there’s less to share and be happy about.

It’s free stuff until the bills come due.

It’s the welfare state, where the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare. (See “John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia and Reflections on the Welfare State”).

It’s bread lines that bring us all together, somehow. Remember that Bernie Sanders once proclaimed that people lining up for food in communist countries was a blessing in disguise.

It’s government ownership of the means of production so the economy can hum with the efficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

It’s when workers run the factories that somebody else invested in.

It’s when clueless elites tell the economy what to do.

It’s Scandinavia (which isn’t socialist).

It’s communal utopia where everybody gets an equal portion regardless of effort, until they nearly starve. The Pilgrims tried it until forced to replace it with private property. (See also “The Dark Side of Paradise: A Brief History of America’s Utopian Experiments in Communal Living”).

It’s Venezuela, or it was Venezuela until it didn’t work.

If it seems like socialists don’t really know what it is, that’s only partly true. In most cases, they just don’t want YOU to know what it really is. The best charlatans are always the clever ones.

Socialism is rightly and widely perceived as diametrically opposed to capitalism. So it can’t possibly be acts of caring, sharing, giving and being compassionate toward the needy. There is demonstrably more caring, sharing, giving, and compassion toward the needy under capitalism!

Even when it comes to foreign aid, capitalist countries are the donors and socialist countries are the recipients. You can’t give it away or share it with anybody if you don’t create it in the first place, and socialism offers utterly no theory of wealth creation, only wealth confiscation and consumption.

Another way to think of the distinctions between these two opposing systems is this: Capitalism is what happens when free and peaceful people are left alone. In that sense, it’s natural and spontaneous. Socialism is nothing more than the presumptuous plans of bullies and know-it-alls who impose their plans at gunpoint. In that sense, it’s unnatural, contrived, arbitrary and officious.

Socialists are math-challenged: They’re good at division and subtraction but are unaware of addition or multiplication. If your second grader tells you that 3 + 2 = 1, you know he’s a future socialist. Likewise if he tells you that taxes on cigarettes discourage smoking but taxes on investing, hiring or starting a business have only beneficial effects. The economics knowledge of socialists is even more dismal: They think supply and demand means the people demand and the government supplies.

In my book, Was Jesus a Socialist? I blew away the smoke bombs to reveal what socialism really is:

It is the concentration of power in the hands of the State, which then deploys legal force for one or more of these purposes (and usually all three to one extent or another): the redistribution of income, government ownership of property, and the central planning of economic life.

Note that socialists do not propose to accomplish their objectives by mutual consent. They do not advocate raising the money for their plans by way of bake sales or charitable solicitations. Your participation is not voluntary. From start to finish, socialism’s defining characteristic is not so much the promises meant to beguile but rather, the method by which it implements its agenda—FORCE. If it’s voluntary, it’s not socialism. It’s that simple. [read more]

Socialism is definitely evil. Anti-God.

Here are the reasons socialism is anti-social:

• The Plans of Socialists Are More Important Than Yours
• Socialists Are Know-It-Alls and Know-Nothings, Simultaneously
• Socialism Rejects Biological Science
• Socialists Call the Cops for Everything
• Socialism Is Anti-Capital
• Conflict Is Their God

How a US lab created energy with fusion—again

From Pop Sci.com (Aug. 13, 2023):

About eight months ago, scientists at a US-government-funded lab replicated the process that powers stars—nuclear fusion—and created more energy than they put in. Now, physicists and engineers at the same facility, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Northern California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, appear to have successfully created an energy-gaining fusion experiment for the second time.

NIF’s latest achievement is a step closer—the second step down a very long road—to a dream of fusion providing the world with clean, abundant energy. There is a long way to go before a fusion power plant opens in your city. But scientists are optimistic.

“It indicates that the scientists at [NIF] and their collaborators understand what happened back in December well enough that they have been able to make it happen again,” says John Pasley, a fusion scientist at York University in the UK who wasn’t part of this experiment.

NIF declined to comment, noting that the facility’s scientists had not yet formally presented their results. Until that happens, there’s a lot we won’t know about the specifics of the experiment, which took place on July 30.

There are multiple ways of achieving fusion, and NIF works with one, called inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In NIF’s setup, a high-powered laser beam splits into 192 smaller beams, showering a capsule that scientists call a hohlraum. Inside the hohlraum’s walls, this barrage spawns X-rays that crash into the capsule’s filling: a pellet of deuterium and tritium, super-squeezing it at temperatures and pressures more intense than the sun’s, initiating fusion.

The goal of all this work is to pass the break-even point and create more energy than the laser puts in: an achievement that fusion scientists call gain. In December’s experiment, 2.05 megajoules of laser beams elicited 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy. We won’t know for sure until NIF releases its data, but unnamed sources told the Financial Times that this second success created even greater gain. [read more]

Nice! Hopefully, the lab can scale up the fusion.

US researchers develop revolutionary 'cancer-killing' pill

From J Post.com (Aug. 2, 2023):

US researchers at City of Hope have found a new way to treat cancer via a targeted chemotherapy pill that can kill solid tumors, according to a recent study.

The findings of this study were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Cell Chemical Biology.

The drug in question, dubbed AOH1996, works by targeting a specific cancerous protein variant called a proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA).

This protein is vital in DNA being able to replicate and therefore tumors being able to spread.

How does AOH1996 help treat cancer?

This is where AOH1996 differs from other targeted cancer treatments. Most others tend to focus just on a single pathway. However, that method can result in the cancer mutating and becoming more resistant to treatment.

"PCNA is like a major airline terminal hub containing multiple plane gates. Data suggests PCNA is uniquely altered in cancer cells, and this fact allowed us to design a drug that targeted only the form of PCNA in cancer cells. Our cancer-killing pill is like a snowstorm that closes a key airline hub, shutting down all flights in and out only in planes carrying cancer cells," said City of Hope Prof. Linda Malkas in a statement. 

"Results have been promising. AOH1996 can suppress tumor growth as a monotherapy or combination treatment in cell and animal models without resulting in toxicity. The investigational chemotherapeutic is currently in a Phase 1 clinical trial in humans at City of Hope."

In tests, AOH1996 was found to be useful in treating breast, prostate, brain, ovarian, cervical, skin, and lung cancers. It selectively kills cells by disrupting how those cells reproduce. This process is known as apoptosis and it prevents cells with damaged DNA from spreading throughout the body.

More clinical trials are slated to help test this drug for future use.

"No one has ever targeted PCNA as a therapeutic because it was viewed as 'undruggable,' but clearly City of Hope was able to develop an investigational medicine for a challenging protein target," said Long Gu, lead author of the study and an associate research professor in the Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics at Beckman Research Institute of City of Hope.

"We discovered that PCNA is one of the potential causes of increased nucleic acid replication errors in cancer cells. Now that we know the problem area and can inhibit it, we will dig deeper to understand the process to develop more personalized, targeted cancer medicines." [source]

Nice. Hope the drug is a success and gets approved.