Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Scientists have recently discovered, as they tend to  do every few months, or whenever it’s a slow day in the science world, that perhaps bits of interstellar dust may have harbored water molecules, and primitive life.  It could be.  But.

1. Occam’s Razor would indicate to me that when you’ve got a planet with ocean’s full of water, plenty of sunshine, and lots of weird gases in the atmosphere, it is more likely to generate life spontaneously than to have it delivered via interstellar winds from some planet kazillions of miles away, or maybe Mars, the ancient civilizations of Mars.

What this place needs is some life!

2. The very best they can prove is that it would have been possible.  They can’t prove that it’s what happened.  Nobody was there at the beginning of life.  And it probably didn’t leave much of a fossil record.  I’m pretty amazed that scientists can look at a crater in Mexico and know what happened there 65 million years ago.  Or they can examine some bones and say if it was a man or a woman and how old and what they did for a living and what they’d just had for breakfast before they up and died, and whether they liked cats.  But they don’t have a time machine.

3. What of it?  Of course, there’s the pure science angle, this stuff is interesting to know and it bears on our future as a species and may give us valuable knowledge we will need if we colonize other planets, but that  isn’t the way it’s being sold.

Whether the original spark of life happened in a shallow pool in an indentation of a rock by the side of an earthly ocean during an almighty sky splitting, deafening, blinding thunderstorm, or whether we were borne here on the breeze,  like Mary Poppins, it doesn’t change our relationship to the Earth, it doesn’t change who we are as a species.

We are the children of the Earth, even if we are the adopted children, and whether we drifted here like interstellar hitchhiking sperm cells or were left on the Earth’s doorstep by the Clathonians, doesn’t matter.

We need to respect the planet.

Oh, I’m sure he’s not through.  A drunk driving arrest, drag racing, and smoking a little bit of dope won’t cost him his fans.  His fans are 14 year old girls who think he is the second coming of Michael Jackson, and if they will forgive him for pissing in buckets in the kitchens of restaurants and spitting at them off of balconies, they will forgive him for this.

Justin Bieber

And I probably shouldn’t hate him as much as I do.  I still go to Woody Allen movies, so if I can brush aside the child molestation charges, his fans are justified in ignoring this.  After all, I can’t object to him smoking pot, because I smoke pot.  The drunk driving thing is pretty uncool in modern society, but I’m glad I did most of my drinking in a laxer time.  I’d have spent time in jail, for sure.  So, I’m no better than he is on that score.  I think it’s the fact that he was drunk driving in a Lamborghini that  bothers me.

Also, the fact that he and his droogies (including his  father) took it upon themselves to block off a couple of city blocks where they were drag racing.  It’s pretty arrogant.  It looks like they have decided they are above the law.

Maybe it’s because he claims to have a personal relationship with Jesus, and people buy that, and then he pulls shit like this.

Maybe it’s because  there’s sort of a bond between celebrities and the public: we let them be rich and famous, because the world needs rich and famous people, role models for the rest of us, someone to take about, the modern  version of royalty.  But, we feel that gives us the right to judge them.  It does and it doesn’t.

Really, I don’t have any right to bitch.  I’m not one of his fans.  If he’s decided this is the way he wants to go, this is the way he’s going to go.

Wanker.

Bill Gates is in the news twice tonight.  First, because he made the rather optimistic statement that no nation will be in extreme poverty by 2035.  Admittedly, there are some weasel words in there.  It’s not the nation’s level of poverty that’s critical, it’s the individuals within that nation.  Saudi Arabia has a high average per capita income, but that’s because of all the rich, oil types.  There are plenty of people still wandering around the desert with their camels and their tents and not a whole lot of cash at all.  Then there’s the “extreme” qualifier.  At exactly what level of misery does that “extreme” appellation kick in?

Bill Gates

Nonetheless, it would mark an  improvement over what we have now and I sure hope he’s right.

But, nobody  can predict the future with certainty, not even Bill Gates, although he’s  better at it than most.  I think what old Bill is actually saying is we could end poverty by 2035.  Heck, we could end poverty in a year or two, if we put our minds to it.  Just hire all the poor people to build the infrastructure for a sustainable society, a water system that takes fresh water to wherever it’s needed and sucks it right out of wherever it’s not wanted, houses for everybody, schools, hospitals, high speed trains, and cities under the sea.

The only problems are the political, legal, and bureaucratic problems that governments and corporations deliberately put into place to guarantee that poverty will continue to exist, because they are monstrous pricks.

Money is not a problem.  There’s plenty of money.

That brings up the other way Bill Gates was in the news tonight.  Apparently, the 85 richest people (of whom Gates is one) in the world have as much money as the poorest 50% of the people in the world.  Shocking, but once you  enlarge that wealthy group a tad, you find that the wealthiest 1% of people in the world (the wealthiest 70 million people) have, among them, about $112 trillion.  They could finance a permanently sustainable, worldwide, anti-poverty infrastructure, and still be rich.

Piece of fucking cake.

One of the things I really like about living in a European city with good public transportation is that I never need to drive a car, and as long as you don’t drive a car, your contacts with police are minimal, or so the theory goes, at least.

From what I’m reading from back in  the  States, police are stone cold busting into people’s houses and shooting them dead.  You’d think you were safe in the cinema, but noooo…..

A man in Columbus, Ohio went to the movies with his wife recently, to see Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and while they were sitting there minding their own business FBI agents confronted him, seized the google glasses from off his face, and hauled them downtown for questioning.

She sees things you don’t

They said he was filming the movie.  He wasn’t.

It strikes me, at first, as a piss poor allocation of law enforcement personnel.  Pirating a movie?  That’s a  case for the FBI?  Cinema personnel could have just asked him to take off the glasses.

But, reading the comments after the article, I see the issue goes deeper.  A lot of people, who would gladly watch  a pirated video of a current film if they got one slipped under their door for free and not feel even a tiny, little twitch of conscience, were totally taking the cops’ side.

I just hate google glass, many of them said.  Glad they knocked him off his smug, arrogant, yuppie face. 

This is not an argument, people.  This is just jealousy.  Be patient.  In five years, you’ll have a pair yourself and then you’ll be pirating like Johnny Depp, and checking out the personal profiles of any linked up women you see passing by.

People who have these think they are better than others, one person said.  They are unnatural, said another.  Well, in the sense of being better positioned to take advantage of the social and business opportunities that surround us (and pirate movies at the very moment you’re watching them, effortlessly, which is sort of like a superpower) they do, indeed, make their wearers somewhat superior. 

As far as unnatural, you know what seemed unnatural to me, at first?  Mobile phones.  If people want to call me, they can call me when I’m at home, I figured.  The first time I got a call in the middle of a park I was hooked.

It will be the same with google glasses.