Barackface

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Cuba And Cancer: Who Would Have Thought?

English: The Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Español: El líder cubano Fidel Castro. Italiano: Il leader cubano Fidel Castro Français : Le dirigeant cubain Fidel Castro. 日本語: キューバの最高指導者であるフィデル・カストロ Português: O líder cubano Fidel Castro. ‪Norsk (bokmål)â€¬: Cubas statsoverhode Fidel Castro. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have always admired Castro's medicine men. Fidel has done amazing work on basic medicine. He has sent doctors around the world over decades. His was the original Doctors Without Borders. But I had no idea his model also gave him an edge on the cutting edges of medicine.

Americans could soon be thanking Fidel Castro for their revolutionary cancer drugs

an accord between New York’s Roswell Park Cancer Institute and Cuba’s Center for Molecular Immunology that will bring the Cuban lung cancer vaccine Cimavax to the United States for clinical trials ..... While not a cure for cancer by any means, Cimavax is a powerful and incredibly cheap cancer drug in Cuba. “Medical researchers at the Center for Molecular Immunology worked on Cimavax for 25 years before the Ministry of Health made it available to the public — for free — in 2011”

Monday, May 11, 2015

The R Word

Blackmon’s book describes what he calls the “Age of Neoslavery,” in which newly freed slaves found themselves entangled in a legal system built upon involuntary servitude — which included the selling of black men convicted of crimes like vagrancy and changing employers without receiving permission........ “The constitutional amendments that were supposed to free African-American slaves did something for about 10 years, then there was a North-South compact that granted the former the slave-owning states the right to do whatever they wanted,” he explained. “And what they did was criminalize black life, and that created a kind of slave force. It threw mostly black males into jail, where they became a perfect labor force, much better than slaves.” ...... “If you’re a slave owner, you have to pay for — you have to keep your ‘capital’ alive. But if the state does it for you, that’s terrific. No strikes, no disobedience, the perfect labor force. A lot of the American Industrial Revolution in the late 19th, early 20th Century was based on that. It pretty must lasted until World War II.” ....... by the 1970s and 1980s it’s going back to the criminalization of black life.” ....... “It’s called the drug war, and it’s a racist war. Ronald Reagan was an extreme racist — though he denied it — but the whole drug war is designed, from policing to eventual release from prison, to make it impossible for black men and, increasingly, women to be part of [American] society.”