Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

In ‘Twins’, a moderately funny movie with Danny DeVito and Arnold Shwarzenegger, some mad scientists set out to create a superhuman using the sperm from several different men.

You’ll pick your sons, pick your daughters, too, from the bottom of a long black tube -Zager and Evans, In the Year 2525

I guess it was technically science fiction, but science fiction is having a real hard time keeping ahead of just plain science lately.   Just the other day, the British House of Commons voted to allow British doctors to go ahead and do just that, except they are only talking about 3 parents,  and they’re saying the purpose is to avoid genetically transmitted diseases and not to create  superman.  Still, if it can be 3, there’s no reason it can’t be 4, or 5, or 30.  And I’m sure some scientists out there would love to create a superhuman.

What I  find weird is that if the House of Commons just voted to legalize it, at what point in time did they vote to illegalize it?  And if Britain is the first country in the world to legalize it, does that mean that every other country in the world has laws against it?  I doubt it.

My attitude towards the government meddling in research like this is about the same as my opinion on Church and State.  I believe there should be a solid wall between Church and State, and between Sports and State even more.  As far as the government deciding on the ethics of various medical experiments, I don’t think most governments have the right to speak on ethics at all.

Governments should stick to government stuff.  Fixing the roads and bridges, keeping the fresh water system and the electrical grid up and running, maintaining a (somewhat less aggressive than at present)police  department,  keeping the schools  open, stuff like that.  They don’t need to be going to hospitals and telling doctors they can’t create new, 3 parent babies.  That is most definitely a family decision, and none of anybody else’s business.

Also, the fears that this is a slippery slope are exaggerated.  If this becomes available, I imagine within 10 or 20  years, we will see tens, maybe even dozens of such cases.  Enough to be able to do a bit of statistic gathering, maybe even some hands-on  research, but probably not enough to be a threat to the human race.

If people choose to go   for this option in greater numbers, then that’s O.K., too.  We’ve got to evolve some time.

A friend of mine posted  something on facebook today, outlining all the evil stuff the Koch brothers do, highlighting the fact that they plan to spend a billion dollars on the next election, and almost entirely saying stuff I agree with.

Charles and David Koch are horrible people.  They aren’t happy just being rich,  they want the poor to suffer more.  They really have nothing to gain by slashing social security, it’s not as if they are paying a huge percentage of their income in taxes.  Even if they were, they should be arguing for a reduction in the military, because that’s where over half of the money goes.

They are anti-all-environmental-regulations which, as everybody knows, means pro-pollution.   The only reason any corporation opposes environmental oversight is because they are big pigs making a mess  everywhere and don’t want to get called on it.

They want to put a pipeline all the way across the United States, longer than the Mississippi river, which is almost bound to cause serious environmental damage sooner or later.

The one thing I objected to about the meme was that it said “Charles and David Koch are the richest men in the world.”  It’s just not true and, unlike Republicans, we don’t need to lie to make our point.  In fact, it would be better if we didn’t.

Well, I raised that tiny objection and somebody linked to a list of the world’s richest people.

Holy shit.

First, the Koch’s were much higher on the list than I thought, at 5th and 6th place, but that wasn’t the thing that knocked me out.

Secondly, they didn’t count people like Queen Elizabeth and the Pope, because that’s a whole different category, a different (and perhaps impossible) way of calculating, but that wasn’t what knocked me out.

What knocked me out was the number of people on the list and the  huge amounts of money involved.  How much money is in the world, any way?  That is the question.  There were over a thousand people on the list, and the top 200 or so all had more than $10 billion. That’s over  $2 trillion right there.  All together, I’m guessing there was over $10 trillion in the hands of these few (1,000 seems a lot, but not 1,000 out of 7 billion)individuals.

They could easily provide everybody on Earth with clean drinking water.  They could probably, with a bit of clever planning and pooling of resources, make sure everybody on Earth has a decent home.  They could do all that, and still be rich.

But they won’t.  With a very few exceptions (Richard Branson, Elon Musk, maybe Bill Gates but I distrust his motives) they are doing nothing good for the world at all, and a lot of them are actively working to make the world a more horrible place.  Because they are assholes.

Like many other science fiction fans, I have been eagerly awaiting alien contact all my life.  It actually doesn’t look like it’s going to happen any time soon.  The  existence of intelligent life on other planets seems more and more inevitable.  We’re discovering new planets like crazy, we know that Earth size is not an uncommon size, and that water is plentiful throughout the universe.  But, if they’re out there, they are apparently not in any hurry to make contact.

All Ours

We’ll keep looking, of course.  We’ve only begun to explore space,  and all we know about most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered is that they exist. A hundred years from now, if we haven’t discovered intelligent life on other planets, scientists will still say “We’ve only explored a tiny portion of the universe,”  and it will still be true, the universe is that vast.

But, in a way, it is not depressing at all to think we might be alone in the universe. Think about it. It means that all the billions of stars in our own galaxy, all the trillions and trillions of stars in all the galaxies, all the uncountable megagazillions of planets orbiting those stars and moons orbiting those planets, and all the rocks and comets and asteroids and  weird unexplainable objects lying between the solar systems,  belong to us.

The meek may well inherit the  Earth.  The bolder spirits will head out and colonize the universe.  Because it’s ours.  Until we meet somebody  who tells us different.

We make fun of Chris Christie because he’s fat, John Boehner because he’s orange and his name looks like it should be Boner, Mitch McConnell because he looks like a turtle, Rick Santorum because his name is Santorum  (which wasn’t a dirty word until we made it so), Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and Louie Gohmert because they are really dumb,  but come down to election time, it would be a mistake to focus on any of that.  Fat is not a negative, it’s just a physical characteristic.  Mitch McConnell can’t help it that he looks like a turtle, and Boner and Santorum can’t help their names, although Boner could probably   return himself to a normal complexion if he wanted.

Horrible Person Chris Christie

No, the thing we have to remember is that they are all truly horrible people, who want the world to be a  more impoverished and polluted place, or at least are willing to vote that way in return for personal profit.  They know perfectly well that the Earth is on the brink of ecological disaster.  Maybe not Palin, Jindal, Perry, and Gohmert because they are comically stupid in addition to their character flaws, but most of them know that.  Even Hucklepickle, religious fanatic that he is, is not that stupid.    They know that reducing taxes on the rich does not really create jobs.  However, it is their job to make the case that it does.  Truth, history, economics and evidence be damned.

Chris Christie is certainly aware that large numbers of parents refusing to vaccinate their children presents a risk to public health.  He just doesn’t give a shit, because he’s a horrible person.

He deliberately blocked off the George Washington bridge and caused a mega traffic jam just because he was pissed off at the mayor of Fort Lee.  That is seriously a sign of a fucked up person.  That’s why he should never be president.

It’s   got nothing to do with his weight.

This question has come up for me a few times in the past week.  First, one of my friends was complaining about facebook censorship because they wouldn’t let him show a painting called “L’Origine du monde”  by Gustave Courbet.  Actually,  once I linked to a photo of the painting, I could see facebook’s point.  It is a straightforward, extremely realistic painting of a vagina.  It is an oil painting, so in that sense clearly within the definition of art, but I can see how some would view it as porn, or at any rate gratuitous nudity. Not that I’ve got any objection to that, but if those are facebook’s rules….

L’Origine du monde, Gustave Courbet, 1866

On the other hand, there’s a bit of poetry in the title, because the vagina is certainly the origin of the world, as long as you define the world as the world which exists because it is perceived by human beings.  It’s where we all came from.

This morning, someone posted a photo of the scene outside her window.  Generally, when people do that it is a scene of natural beauty, or perhaps there is some extreme weather going on.  But, no, this was more a scene of urban grit, overflowing garbage and cast off furniture.  I suppose it could have been a statement about our urban, consumerist life-style and the decay of modern civilization, but I think she was just trying to say, “See what a fucking pit my neighborhood is?”  Anyway, the comments thread turned into a discussion of “Is it art?” and  somebody said (I paraphrase) “anything that represents reality is art.”  That   strikes me as bullshit.  A map, a blueprint, a mugshot all represent reality.  It’s fairly rare that they rise to the level of art.

Then, this afternoon, Helena suggested we all go for a walk, just because we spend far too much time sitting around the flat, with at least two computers and the TV on all at once, and it was a nice day out, not raining, not snowing, so we went.  We walked up the long, steep stairs to the top of Vitkov, catching some great views on the way.  The kids reached the top well before us,  as we had to stop several times  to catch our breath.  Anyway, since the last time I was in that park they’ve added a few statues.  The shaggy dog (although Helena said ‘Oh, is that what it’s supposed to be?’ and I had to  admit that was just my interpretation) was O.K.,  the thing that looked like one of the walking flying saucers from the War of the Worlds  I thought was rather ugly, and the two  rusty tubes, wide at each end and narrow in the middle, looked to me like something that was left over from a construction project so they decided to just leave them there.

Over all, I felt their net addition to the parks natural beauty was a subtraction.

So, I don’t know exactly what art is and I suppose it’s a good thing that the definition is flexible.  But, as far as I’m concerned, it should be beautiful.  There’s enough ugly in the world as it is.