Mastercard stole the word priceless. But even if they hadn’t, the ideas of uniqueness and unquantifiable value only skirt around the edges of intrinsic value.

I think it was the saxophonist, Wayne Shorter, who once said: “You don’t dance to get somewhere.” And that’s the point: intrinsic value has no reason; it is beyond means and ends.

Ownership, on the other hand, is all about means and ends. On the basis of the assertion of ownership, we can then claims rights of control.

If it was once understood that life should not be owned — that life shackled through ownership is a form of death — that knowledge is quickly being erased.

It is being erased by those who see in the building blocks of life, the most lucrative forms of property they can imagine. And the mechanism through which life is being turned into property is patent law, which accords life no intrinsic value.

The Supreme Court will soon be called upon to rule in favor of property or life. Given its record as a resolute protector of commerce, it’s hard to be optimistic about the judgement it will make.

Michael Specter writes: On April 12, 1955, Jonas Salk, who had recently invented the polio vaccine, appeared on the television news show “See It Now” to discuss its impact on American society. Before the vaccine became available, dread of polio was almost as widespread as the disease itself. Hundreds of thousands fell ill, most of them children, many of whom died or were permanently disabled.

The vaccine changed all that, and Edward R. Murrow, the show’s host, asked Salk what seemed to be a reasonable question about such a valuable commodity: “Who owns the patent on this vaccine?” Salk was taken aback. “Well, the people,” he said. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

The very idea, to Salk, seemed absurd. But that was more than fifty years ago, before the race to mine the human genome turned into the biological Klondike rush of the twenty-first century. Between 1944, when scientists determined that DNA served as the carrier of genetic information, and 1953, when Watson and Crick described it as a double helix, the rate of discovery was rapid. Since then, and particularly after 2003, when work on the genome revealed that we are each built out of roughly twenty-five thousand genes, the promise of genomics has grown exponentially.

The intellectual and commercial bounty from that research has already been enormous, and it increases nearly every day, as we learn ways in which specific genes are associated with diseases — or with mechanisms that can prevent them. It took thousands of scientists and technicians more than a decade to complete the Human Genome Project, and cost well over a billion dollars. The same work can now be carried out in a day or two, in a single laboratory, for a thousand dollars—and the costs continue to plummet. As they do, we edge closer to one of modern science’s central goals: an era of personalized medicine, in which an individual’s treatment for scores of illnesses could be tailored to his specific genetic composition. That, of course, assumes that we own our own genes.

And yet, nearly twenty per cent of the genome — more than four thousand genes — are already covered by at least one U.S. patent. [Continue reading…]

“This is as far as possible from a popular revolution in Syria. Who can deny this is a US-run proxy war?” Ali Abunimah tweeted a week ago.

Yes, I can picture John McCain, George Soros, and Gene Sharp, huddled in the basement of the White House, planning attacks against Syrian government forces and handling the logistics of weapon transfers to America’s mercenary fighters in the Al Nasra Front. It is a front after all, and we all know who lurks behind these kinds of fronts: the CIA.

How can we be sure this is not a popular revolution? “Because popular revolutions aren’t trained by the CIA in Jordan.”

Indeed. An armed uprising instigated by Syria and Iran’s enemies in Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, and the United States, would be nothing more than a proxy war if this was where the opposition to Assad had actually first coalesced. But it didn’t — and Abunimah knows as much; he’s just decided that with the war having become so ugly and reasons for hope so few, it’s easier to go back to singing straight from the old anti-imperialist songbook.

Meanwhile, the BBC provides more fodder to those who decry this “proxy war“:

Over the past few months the Americans – without being obliged to announce any policy changes involving military commitments – have apparently tipped the wink to their regional allies, mainly Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to step up the quantity and quality of arms supplies to the rebels.

At the same time, the Americans are reported to be involved in helping train supposedly moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) elements in Jordan and sending them across the border into southern Syria, where the rebels, enjoying better anti-air and anti-armour weapons than before, have begun to make gains that are being compared to their advances in the far north.

With western support being made contingent on loyalty to the FSA and the opposition National Coalition, this has clearly put pressure on the Nusra Front and other jihadi groups.

Many of their followers are believed to have joined up opportunistically because the front had more resources and experience than the other groups.

With that trend now apparently starting to reverse and more resources being routed through the “moderate” groups, al-Qaeda may have judged it timely to remind the jihadists where their loyalties and objectives lie, lest they be lured away.

Knowing that the west is nervous about providing the Free Syrian Army and other “mainstream” rebel groups with serious, balance-tilting weaponry for fear that it may fall into the hands of the radicals, al-Qaeda may have decided deliberately to contaminate the entire opposition by association, and deter western arms to the moderates, in order to preserve the jihadis’ ascendancy on the ground.

The nascent struggle between radicals and others in the opposition is bound to become more acute as regime change moves closer to reality, and if unresolved, will intensify further after it happens, possibly for a long time.

The problem with the concept of a proxy war is that it implies that most of the men with guns and heavier weapons fighting Assad forces are serving as agents of foreign powers — that they are as the Syrian government insists, mercenaries and terrorists.

The reality is that the outside powers, much as they would like to control what happens in Syria, are acutely aware that supplying weapons and determining how they get used are two very different things. Moreover, the high degree of pragmatism among Syria’s fighters means that selective support — arming so-called “moderates” — will not simply have the desired effect of strengthening the “good guys” and weakening the “bad guys.” Instead, it is fueling a struggle within the opposition.

Some conspiracy theorists may argue that this is a divide-and-rule strategy designed to prolong Assad’s rule. I am more inclined to believe that it reflects the simplistic political calculations of politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere whose primary concern is that they neither look impotent nor be accused of supporting terrorism.

As for the ideological purists who will only support a revolution untainted by outside support, the privilege of being able to define a just cause in this way only seems to belong to those who have the luxury of being outside the conflict.