If I had all the time in the world...
Feb. 29th, 2008 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThings the campaigns won't discuss:
Singularity Alert: Craig Venter's lab works to scale production of octane-producing bacteria.
Venter has announced that he expects, within two years, to have a carbon-fixing sunlight-fueled bacteria that produces methane or octane, two critical components of common fuels like gasoline, in commercial quantities. "We are a ways away from designing people. Our goal is just to make sure they survive long enough to do that."
Maybe we get to keep those high-performance farm machines and petrofertilizers after all. What was Brad DeLong's point in yesterday's "From Malthus to the Singularity?" Oh, yeah, Malthus was wrong because we've been very good about inventing our ways out of disaster. Let's hope we keep being very good at it. Craig Venter sounds like he's very good at it.
Silly alert: American Family Association utterly shocked to discover gays and lesbians are seeking political office and influence.
The article goes into absurd, hand-wringing detail, claiming to have uncovered "Teh Gay Agenda." The most laughable comment? "Members of the homosexual lobby have done a masterful job of equating their chosen, changeable sexual behavior with immutable characteristics such as skin color."
Tell me your Christianity wasn't a choice. Go ahead.
More silly: Texas Governor Rick Perry says heterosexuals must be sex-obsessed monsters..
Well, no, actually what he claims is that homosexuals are that. But his reasoning equates to the subject:
Sarah Connor Alert: DARPA proposes componentized satellite network.
Way cool, the idea of having communication, routing (and power?), and so forth in hub satellites and then making microsatellites that outsource the bulk of their brains to the hubs. Bluetooth in space, sorta. (Come to think of it, this is exactly the way the Pendorian exploratory space fleets operate; for every manned ship, there are four or five automated outriders with engineering and rescue capability, all run by the AI-- and sufficient space in each for the AI to keep running if necessary.)
William F. Buckley explains the current era:
- The collapsing dollar
- The collapsing Arctic ice sheet
- The collapse of commercial fishing
- The collapse of world biodiversity
- The pending collapse of industrial agriculture, which relies on petrochemicals for its efficiency
- The coming resource wars
- The coming mass migrations due to those wars
Singularity Alert: Craig Venter's lab works to scale production of octane-producing bacteria.
Venter has announced that he expects, within two years, to have a carbon-fixing sunlight-fueled bacteria that produces methane or octane, two critical components of common fuels like gasoline, in commercial quantities. "We are a ways away from designing people. Our goal is just to make sure they survive long enough to do that."
Maybe we get to keep those high-performance farm machines and petrofertilizers after all. What was Brad DeLong's point in yesterday's "From Malthus to the Singularity?" Oh, yeah, Malthus was wrong because we've been very good about inventing our ways out of disaster. Let's hope we keep being very good at it. Craig Venter sounds like he's very good at it.
Silly alert: American Family Association utterly shocked to discover gays and lesbians are seeking political office and influence.
The article goes into absurd, hand-wringing detail, claiming to have uncovered "Teh Gay Agenda." The most laughable comment? "Members of the homosexual lobby have done a masterful job of equating their chosen, changeable sexual behavior with immutable characteristics such as skin color."
Tell me your Christianity wasn't a choice. Go ahead.
More silly: Texas Governor Rick Perry says heterosexuals must be sex-obsessed monsters..
Well, no, actually what he claims is that homosexuals are that. But his reasoning equates to the subject:
INTERVIEWER: But don't you think that homosexuals might also be interested in being loyal and thrifty?Arrgh! The Stupid, It Burns!
PERRY: The argument that gets made is that homosexuality is about sex. Do you agree?
INTERVIEWER: No.
PERRY: Well, then why don't they call it something else?
Sarah Connor Alert: DARPA proposes componentized satellite network.
Way cool, the idea of having communication, routing (and power?), and so forth in hub satellites and then making microsatellites that outsource the bulk of their brains to the hubs. Bluetooth in space, sorta. (Come to think of it, this is exactly the way the Pendorian exploratory space fleets operate; for every manned ship, there are four or five automated outriders with engineering and rescue capability, all run by the AI-- and sufficient space in each for the AI to keep running if necessary.)
William F. Buckley explains the current era:
Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.
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no subject
Date: 2008-02-29 06:08 pm (UTC)Well Mr. Perry it's also called being gay or queer, but I'm just going to ignore that fact for two seconds while I make a point.
Conservatives, especially of the Christian type (and I mean all stripes, not just the fundies or the baptists or the lutherans or the catholics), have a problem with sex. They don't even like the *word* sex. Before HIV made it so that it was a public necessity to talk about sex and STDs on the 6 O'clock news, they were successfully making it so that you couldn't even use the word on TV.
So when "homosexual issues" comes up in front of people like this, who dedicate their lives to the suppression of anything to do with sex, an alarm goes off in their heads saying OMG! ONOZ! SEX! SEX! DEVIANT SEX! SUPPRESS! SUPPRESS! CENSOR! DESTROY!
Nevermind that behaviour like driving your 6 kids around in a minivan, being seen in public with your wife and introducing her as such, enormous public wedding ceremonies, and a mcmansion in the suburbs are all obvious public expressions of heterosexuality. Even effeminate gay men wearing sparkly go-go shorts, and waving enormous rainbow flags couldn't hold a candle to that kind of "rubbing it in your face".
no subject
Date: 2008-02-29 07:13 pm (UTC)You can have hours of fun with that one.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 08:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-29 06:12 pm (UTC)Maybe...
Date: 2008-02-29 10:59 pm (UTC)The dollar isn't collapsing. The current slide against foreign currencies is politically driven, not a consequence of economic factors. The US economy is still growing, and still much stronger than that of any other large nation. Individual productivity in the US is still dramatically better than in any other large national economy. And all that's true in spite of the vast resources we squander every year on personal and corporate welfare, government-mandated busy work, foreign military interventionism, and so on, simply because other countries waste even higher portions of their own productivity.
I don't see what the candidates can do about climate change, since it's primarily driven by the sun. Anything we do to counteract the recent short-term warming trend could turn out to be fatal if the solar output drops dramatically. And guess what, it appears to be doing just that.
http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm
There will be no collapse of "world biodiversity" or "industrial agriculture" and therefore no wars or other problems related to these things. There will certainly continue to be wars, but as usual, they will be driven by bad politics, not by ecological collapse or peak oil or any of that other crap. The solutions to the world's problems certainly will not come from MORE bad politics.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-01 01:28 am (UTC)