The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy, Funding

The Fight to End Aging Gains Legitimacy, Funding

If we never died, would we fight wars? Would our bodies have a greater degree of priority over the environment, and therefore is humans being able to live two or three times as long not environmentally hazardous? Will there be warnings in generontological pill boxes, warning, taking these may make the future more unpleasant?

Does not the cold thrill of death, the end, the finish, the waste of everything the hard reality that makes it possible for us to appreciate bliss and procreate madly, rather than trying to make that same nebulous "everything" (a meaningless word if there ever was one) - somehow stretch further than it can before the rate of human progress makes your cost to the world unbearable?

If we have to confont living for ever, it may seem the answer to millions of dreams. Even if everyone got 100 more years. What would happen to the world? Much change. Much unplanned change. Slowly inexorably it would change. People would compensate by being careful to have less children. With current life spans, this is already happening.

The trend here is inward. The attention is on the self. Wanting to live forever is going to take quite some getting used to...

Justice for America?

As rats desert sinking ships, the question of justice for Americans becomes urgent. Should Haliburton get away with the effective theft of middle class wealth, by requiring miliary expansionalism to excecise its hardware muscle most profitably they effectively planted their CEO into the White House and look at the result.

It is not only that the acts of Bush-Cheney led the USA to war on false pretexts but the vice-president's company stood to profit from those invalid decisions and that damaged the average American. The direct cost to the citizens of the USA was hidden by inventing sub-prime mortgages that creating billions of dollars of vapour wealth based on greed and irrational risk. This was deliberate transfer of your wealth to Dick Cheney's old company. Is that not called conspiracy?

After 9/11 Bush had a mandate to defeat his enemy. Instead he stirred a hornet's nest in a lurching dive for oil control. Instead of that he has handed his perceived enemy an economic whip of unbelieveable consequence. All for the SUVs and industry, unregulated are that affecting the air we breathe.

If it were not for the imperatives of not polluting the atmosphere so our children will breathe - it is the imperatives of disasterous climate change gripping the world with a peak of apocalyptic fear not unlike that which peaked around AIDS, SARS or Bird Flu. The media get excited and focus on the issue of the day. Sorry, we are being misled. AIDS is more dangerous today everyday. SARS may reappear as something else we do not understand yet. And Bird Flu does not depend on the continued interest of journalists or anyone.

Recent events of Biblical proportions appear to be submerging cities from the American landscape, climate change? Or just normal?

You can find "right thinking" rationales that we must keep on polluting as its progress - because 1934 was the hottest year recorded which "disproves Global Warming".

Eh? This trend of creating a layer of unrestricted pollution in our atmosphere is most probably the real cause of intergenerational acceleration of cancer, heart and resporatory problems. This stuff, this industrial scale pollution is not just changing the chemistry of the air. It is becoming part of our cellular makeup, our children are sicker and more problematic for it, and its certainly is therefore the very opposite of progress.

Is this the start of the new dark ages?

Jailbreak

Terrorist Jail Break in Afghanistan

Suicide bombers and militants coordinate an attack on Khanadar's main prison releasing 1000 Taleban POWs back to the wilds.

Afghanistan worsens

As Dennis Kuchinich reads his charges for impeachment of GW Bush and Dick Cheney, the folly of their actions is starting to kill more Americans in Afghanistan than Iraq, for the last month at least. This is partly due to "the surge" in Iraq reducing insurgency by killing more "terrorists" and others, but also to increased Taleban activity and the Al Qaeda leadership who continue to find sheltered and a base of resistance in Pakistan. But there are so many more soldiers in Iraq that each American death in Afghanistan is proportionately more "damage value" to the opposing side.

Reading the article linked above (click on the heading, or right-click to open it in a new tab*) makes me feel that there is an effort to say it is too hard to find Osama and this will be - or will be attempted to justify a limited nuclear strike to cut the head from the dragon, so to speak. There does seem to be a gathering force to expose evident obsessiveness of the American leadership combined with moral blindess and apparent illiteracy. Heading his old Press guy go public with his New York Times best seller - you distictly get the impression that as long as these guys run the USA, the world is playing Russian Roulette.

That another irrationally struck war or action this President could take to ease his frustration with the non-progress on his "War on Terror" - terrorism is worse than before but draconian Homeland Security has increased the risk to Al Qaeda operatives. As unbelieveablely huge and inefficient the DHS may be, it does require terrorists to fill out lots of forms, a sort of medevil test of guilt, perhaps.

But the DHS is more effective than the US forces are fighting a nonsensical war against all takers who want to try their luck in this human landscape video game emulation. It is a failure of Islam to allow youths to be so stupidly killed by overwhelming force. It is a failure of Christianity to allow its leader to justify committing crimes against humanity with a pack of lies.

The fierce war in Afghanistan/Pakistan threatens the United States of America. The insurgency in Iraq is a self inflicted wound.


*or update your browser to the latest Firefox 3, or Opera, or IE8 when it arrives

The end of war

The End of War is a notion, certainly, but it is also a statement of intent. Many do not understand war as anything other than a force that some evil leads our side into, until our side bluffs its way into warfare and we then question if our leadership really does know what it is doing, what right it has to life and death and what the limits on use of armies as police are, and why.

Leadership has to be more than bravery and, let's face it, being suckered up to by the manufacturers of weapons that require Governments to consume their armanents to stay in business is a source of election funding.

Americans may blame Jimmy Carter for things that were economic consequences of the massive cost of Vietnam. When shall we learn the Republican adventure is actually a larger and more expansionalist form of Government?

On the brink

As the days tick by, the world seems to be waiting for the relief of the commencement of battle between Barack Obama and John McCain. The disquieting suspense of the inevitable is becoming unbearable, but if Hillary Clinton now wins, well...

It does seem to me that she is more likely to take the Presidential election without effort from John McCain. Which one would you buy an insurance policy from? Politically, that is exposure to a weakness.

In contrast, Barack Obama will have to fight and decimate McCain on the pulpit of leadership. There is a chance, from that, will emerge a leadership that can take the fight to and defeat a far larger dragon.

It seems to me that Barack Obama has it over the other two in terms of command presence. John McCain is too likely to have ideas based on the history of the Middle East and Europe and so antagonise a war between East and West - whereas Barack Obama is the only leader who sees his country's many problems as a non-unique status in the world.

He appears to be the one leader who can reconcile the American dream so that it does not appear like a nightmare to the rest of the human race.

Red Alert

Ever wonder how the ingenious Dept of Homeland Security Alert System of colour coded warnings was derived?

Take a look at the linked movie. Click the title. It explains the design team's philosophy and perhaps explains why the Dept of HS is so effective at stopping terrorists (except white ones) from being able to harm Americans. Damn! It is so effective that even GW got it almost immediately!

Here is the link again:

Baby Trees (donationware)

You can spend a few dollars and fund planting a baby tree in the forests of Indonesia. If you want a good look at the forests of Borneo and the Amazon, check out Microsofts' super globe and sky examination tool downloadable on www.worldwidetelescope.org - one of the finer Microsoft implementations. Beautiful. Here is a "fair use" clip that shows its LOD (level of detail) of how humans hack into the Amazon rain forest.

WWT has less resolution at this stage than Google Earth; but the upward view of the galaxy is this product's strength. Yes, the view of this planet is rather good, notwithstanding the ability to use your mouse wheel and once the images resolves, but the a space eye view through one of the world's great telescopes of some of the largest works of natural art you will see. Nebulae and the huge huge galaxies dotted through space like sand. You see a night sky, and can zoom into The Plaiedes - like in this image clip. In the WWT you see it full screen.



Download WWT and maybe you will understand the world's climate when you look at the Southern Ocean and its furious cloudscape.

And anyone who plants a baby tree - let me know. It would be fun to watch it grow here! We could have a baby tree forest.

The new Obama

After confirmation of the Democratic nomination the guns train on the opponent - not the rival. John McCain may be a maverick Republican, but he firmly believes in respecting the historical emnity between "The West" and "The Axis of Evil".

GW Bush has been the "big game player" taking the very foolish and risky path into the Iraqi quagmire. If he had doubled his efforts in Afghanistan now, Al Qaeda may no longer be motivating and enabling young criminals to walk bombs into crowds of innocents or plant incendiaries aimed at US military targets in Iraq.

Or has the cancer spread on a train of its own infamy? Such a belief is frankly, madness. When GW Bush started to try and move against "the enemies of freedom" he did so in order to go to war in Iraq as that was his primary intention. Going to war in Afghanistan seems a pretext by Bush to secure involvement of NATO to reduces the military cost to the USA. He hoped for a coalition force in Iraq but few could take that faith electorially. Except Tony Blair.

Now, the USA is sick of being seen as an invalid invader and this is more than likely to be the meme during November more than the colour of either candidates' skin. In the end the logic of solving the problems of extraction is a military one, rather than a political one. And so Mr Obama enters the argument with an agressive and just approach constrasts starkly with McCain - stay there at all costs - logic.

During the presidential debate, I would not be suprised to hear more aggressive tactics in Obama's speaches - the Left will not lose faith as he has already expressly committed to ending the Iraq calamity - and when it comes down to it, even with GW Bush at the helm, the USA has just about survived. There is plenty of reasons that a message of hope is going to work with the democratic voice of Americans - but unless they dispose of the voting machines or audit them - there is no chance that it will be a fair fight.

The new Obama - the gloves can come off for the battle with McCain. Whomever the Democrat candidate is will face an ugly Republican attack. They call it "free speech" and that makes it okay and "constitutional".

Obama expresses a more detailed and diplomatic approach. He sees the value of winning the war in Afghanistan by not fighting one in Iraq but preventing one from brewing in Pakistan.