8/09/2009
What would America's Founding Fathers do today to protect their individual liberties? Regardless of whether the ruling political party calls itself liberal or conservative, in western nations since World War II the trend has consistently been transferring more money and power formerly held by citizens into the hands of political elites. Might 20,000 floating nations above the sea offer a way to preserve freedom for individual citizens?

North America and Europe are rapidly becoming Africa-lite, following in the footsteps of the countries of Africa, the poster-continent for massive political corruption and systems that massively under-deliver on the potential of the people and societies.

Are smallish city states of 100,000-200,000 people on islands or floating seasteads the only way to maintain an acceptable level of individual liberties? Are larger nations states just inevitably fated to be ruled by a corrupt political elite and sink into a sea of inefficiency, massive government debt, money debasement, crony capitalism, outright corruption, and eventually, inevitably, massive exploitation of their citizens?

With each passing year it looks more likely, those who value individual liberty are going to be required to find a better alternative for the preservation of those liberties than the failed nation state model.

See also: Seasteading Institute announces winners of this year's design contest

Labels: Memes, Next

8/05/2009
One moribund nation or hundreds of dynamic city-states? How can a struggling country break free of poverty if it's trapped in a system of bad rules? Economist Paul Romer unveils a bold idea: "charter cities," city-scale administrative zones governed by a coalition of nations. Could Guantanamo Bay become the next Hong Kong? Only if ways can be found to get around the stifling rules of nation-states to allow wealth creation. Romer proposes a radical new model of growth and governance, which calls for the establishment of city-scale special administrative zones.

I'll go one step beyond Romer and suggest that we would all be better off if governance throughout the world were right-sized into city-scale zones. Nation-scale governance will always devolve over time into regulation that is grossly inefficient, ineffective and indeed harmful to those under its control. One size can never fit all situations across a large region. A hundred city states tied together with an open trade agreement will always be able to produce more prosperity than if those same cities are forced to labor under the thumb of a nation-state's armies of politicos and bureaucrats.

Labels: Memes, Next

7/26/2009
The only thing we have to fear from a singularity, is fear itself From the New York Times [clueless old media requiring registration]:

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society's workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Unfortunately, the original Vernor Vinge essay that popularized the concept of a singularity, presented the concept covered in a veil of fear. This helped create a wave of media paranoia about smart machines that has spawned thousands of anti-science articles, TV shows and movies. Fear of a singularity could wind up doing as much to stall human progress as any of the more doltish dogmatic dictates of any of the world's most popular religions.

If you work around the technically oriented, you probably already know smart people that seem to spend much of their life playing computer games. The same why worry about anything when the rapture will be here any day now attitude prevalent among the religious faithful is also frequently seen among the singularity faithful.

As the dinosaurs and millions of other extinct species on just our single planet vividly illustrate, in this Cosmos any species that fails to get smart enough, fast enough, will wind up going extinct.

Fail to anticipate an asteroid impact or a super volcano eruptions that turns your planet into a giant ice ball. Don't realize that a mega solar flare or a gamma ray burst is capable of toasting the surface of your planet to snuff out all life. Fail to prepare for the day when a perfect human pathogen is engineered and released into the wild by some rouge microbiologist. Do any of these things or many others and only fossils will remain to mark the passing of your species. Failure to get smart enough to anticipate and develop the scientific tools necessary to cope with events like these is a death sentence for entire species in our Cosmos. You can even think of our Cosmos as an intelligence generation engine. Because the only way to survive long term in this Cosmos is to get much smarter and develop much more capable technologies than humans currently possess.

The only way that intelligent creatures descended from us are going to still exist a billion years from now is for us to get more of our best minds pulling on the oars of scientific discovery to get humanity's boat moving at top speed.

Unthinkable numbers of human beings have died down through history in squabbles over who's creator is the true creator of our Cosmos. Real data on how the Cosmos got here is way too sketchy to be sure of any answer to this question. An early pioneer in artificial intelligence loved to upset his academic colleagues by pointing our that since science is becoming all about creating better and better computer simulations. Billions upon trillions of perfect simulations of our current reality will get created by future graduate students. Thus, since for every actual reality there will be trillions of simulations, the creator of our particular Cosmos is almost certainly a graduate student.

So until we have much more evidence, opinions will vary. But there are things we do know. We know that all down through human history dogmas have brought violent conflict, death and destruction. This although, you can see at a glance that the most successful lives are never about slavish adherence to dogmas. They are all about constantly rethinking, refining and adjusting your techniques to better meet the opportunities and challenges ahead. If there is a creator's mind to be glimpsed, unraveling the mysteries all around us is where it can be found.

It isn't preachers who spend their lives studying every nuance of ancient dogma from Bronze Age books that have made the discovers giving us the technological tools that have improved our health, extended our lives, kept us warm and dry on cold, wet nights and made our labors less grueling and more productive. These things have come to us from those who spend their time systematically studying, with open minds, the true nature of the world all around us. Theirs is the real ecstasy of rapture, when they foster a new breakthroughs necessary to stave off our extinction and allow our progeny to spread outward to the stars.

Labels: Memes

7/23/2009
An artificial human brain within 10 years -- we don't need no stinking singularity For the last 30 years, researchers have been coming out of their labs and claiming that they will be able to build a human-equivalent artificial intelligence within ten years. Typically, whenever this claim is made, that project falls apart a short while later.

The latest 10-year claimant is Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, who says that he will be able to model the human brain artificially within ten years. Professor Markram and his team have picked apart the structure of the neocortical column and they are now using IBM's Blue Gene Machine supercomputer with 10,000 processors to model a human brain.

While all those reaching for the brass ring have fallen off their horses in the past, other more practical researchers have been busy learning how to effectively use and extend the capabilities of limited function smart bots. The results of these efforts have been powerful and profitable cognition-extending engines like Google.

While some await the emergence of an AI God from a mythical singularity. Other are building and utilizing limited-function smart bots to do the research necessary to greatly extend our own minds and lifespans and develop the technologies necessary to spread our kind across the Cosmos.

The handful of practical, functional smart bots running on my netbook are worth far more to me than all the mythological AIs out in some nebulous singularity. We don't need an AI singularity. Just continuing to incrementally improve the capabilities of the smart bots we are all using now, will eventually take us to the stars.

Labels: Bots, Memes, Neuro

7/22/2009
Jupiter pummeled leaving bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean
Something slammed into Jupiter in the last few days, creating a dark bruise about the size of the Pacific Ocean. The bruise was noticed by an amateur astronomer on Sunday, July 19. University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Paul Kalas took advantage of previously scheduled observing time on the Keck II telescope in Hawaii to image the blemish in the early morning hours of Monday, July 20. The near infrared image showed a bright spot in Jupiter's southern hemisphere, where the impact had propelled reflective particles high into the relatively clear stratosphere. The price for failing to spread our kind across multiple star systems quickly enough is the loss of millions of future generations of our kind due to our extinction.

Labels: Memes

7/22/2009
Evidence found that a comet struck in North America approximately 12,900 years ago
Nanosized diamonds found just a few meters below the surface of Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Santa Barbara provide strong evidence of a cosmic impact event in North America approximately 12,900 years ago, according to a new study by scientists. Their hypothesis holds that fragments of a comet struck across North America at that time. The price for failing to spread our kind across multiple star systems quickly enough is the loss of millions of future generations of our kind due to our extinction.

Labels: Memes

7/14/2009
Why are our trusted institutions proving to be so corrupt? "The very fabric of society is breaking down around us," said Charlie Brooker in a recent piece in a British newspaper. "What the hell is there left to believe in?" Charlie went on to observe:

It's all gone wrong," Our belief in everything has been shattered by a series of shock revelations that have shaken our core to its core. You can't move for toppling institutions. Television, the economy, the police, the House of Commons, and, most recently, the press ... all revealed to be jam-packed with liars and bastards and graspers and bullies and turds. And we knew. We knew. But we were deep in denial, like a cuckolded partner who knows the sorry truth but tries their best to ignore it. Over the last 18 months the spotlight of truth has swung this way and that, and one institution after another was suddenly exposed as being precisely as rotten as we always thought it was.

Indeed, all the old religious, political and economic institutions are looking profoundly ineffective and corrupt these days. Because the meme-sets on which they rely are fatally flawed in fundamental ways that hold back human intellectual growth and progress.

For thousands of years, ministers of religions that provide the belief system for most of the world's population have been assuring their flocks that the world will end very soon. About half of the world's Christians believe that it will end in their lifetimes. So why would they ever give a seconds thought to protecting the future of humanity? None of us have ever seen religious beliefs move the mountains they claim to be able to move, but we most assuredly have seen those beliefs bring down our skyscrapers and spawn wars that have taken uncountable number of innocent lives. And millions more lives have been lost by the postponed introduction of lifesaving technologies like blood transfusion, which Christians once opposed by claiming that something called a soul circulates around the body in your bloodstream, so transfusions would mix together souls. And their flawed meme-set keeps them from ever growing any wiser, so they are repeating the same deadly insanity today with their opposition to stem cell research.

What we need is a new open source meme-set. A new worldview that can inspire us and guide us in the building of a new set of coordination mechanisms that really can help to make our lives more comfortable and not become the cause of our own extinction.

And the stakes are really that high, avoiding extinction for our species, because if we allow religious bigotry to mix with today's powerful new bio-engineering technologies. We will find ourselves facing a 100% fatal, incredibly contagious engineered plague unleashed by the fundamentalist followers of some religious or idealogical death dogmas.

The Cloud can allow us to design cooperative mechanism that are effective and resilient enough to actually solve today's complex problems. Mechanisms that access reputation and skill set databases and channel the toughest challenges to ad hoc groups of those with the skills and experience best suited to finding a solution.

We either fix this or humanity will inevitably follow our old, failed institutions into extinction.

Labels: Memes, Next

7/14/2009
How that cloud of tiny armed spy bots overhead, watching your protest, will be powered
That cloud of small but highly lethal attack/spy bots, designed to fly over any city and keep restive urban populations in check, will be powered by flexible dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) says the US Air Force. The choice of DSSCs is due to their better power to weight performance than other types of solar cells, a very critical spec for an aerial bot that needs to orbit overhead for hours on end. So when that food price protest you are leading in 2014 gets out of hand and the crowd trashes a fast food chain outlet. Thanks to DSSCs, those clever mesh-net aerial bots overhead will be able to track you back home and terminate you quietly by releasing a small guided probe that deposits a lethal heart attack inducing toxin onto your skin. See also: Iraq offers the perfect excuse for developing WOMO (Weapons Of Mass Oppression)

Labels: Bots, Memes, Watts

7/14/2009
The fatal flaws in our financial system Since the Fed was created in 1913 the dollar has lost at least 95 percent of its value. If the much-maligned gold standard had produced such a result we'd never hear the end of it, but in our system the Fed is, for whatever reason, curiously exempt from criticism. Under the Fed, therefore, people have lost an option they once had: accumulating savings in cash. Under a commodity standard, people could save for the future simply by accumulating precious-metal coins - which, back when they functioned as money, held or even increased their value. No one has that option any longer. In other words, only a fool would try to save by piling up dollar bills. Instead, everyone is forced to become a speculator, and to invest in securities markets they know little about and that can wipe them out entirely if times turn bad.

Labels: Memes

7/10/2009
Which is most vital resilience or efficency? I once walked into a steak house for lunch and found pandemonium. The system that sent orders back to the screens in the kitchen had crashed and no one could fix it or find the supply of paper order tickets that was the prescribed backup. I didn't go hungry, because there was redundancy. The many other restaurants around insured a resilient system.
Now imagine a failure without resilience. Our Congress is currently spending $2 for every $1 that they take in from taxes. What if this were to spook foreigners sufficiently that they lost faith in America and stopped accepting our dollars. This has happened to other nations in the past. Without foreign fuel, farmers could not grow enough food to prevent starvation. Without foreign fuel, truckers could not get the food farmers were able to grow to market and without foreign fuel, you couldn't drive to your local grocery story to buy it.
As the humods open source meme-set teaches, in our Cosmos challenges constantly arise, causing resilient systems/lifeforms to survive and highly specialized systems/lifeforms to go extinct.

Labels: Memes

7/08/2009
The laughter heard around the world The business site Bloomberg is running a story today titled Yuan Deposes Dollar on China's Border in Sign of Trade's Future. [Interestingly, after being up for over an hour, this story suddenly went away between 1 and 2 am. Before coming back in what seemed like a slightly less hard hitting form.]

When Treasury Secretary Geithner spoke on June 1st to students at Peking University and claimed that America was in good shape and China's dollar investments were safe. His assurances were greeted with loud hoots of laughter from the assembled students, many of them the sons and daughters of China's elite. Geithner humiliation was barely reported in America, but it seemed to resonate much more strongly elsewhere around the globe. Spawning many stories similar to the story running today at Bloomberg.com about how people are digging up that jar full of dollars and replacing them with gold or border traders switch from dollars to other currencies. The disbelieving laughter of China's students may well mark a sea change. The begin of the end for the dollar's reign as the world's reserve currency. With America's politicos planning to spend approximately double what they expect to collect in taxes this year, it is easy to see why the students were amused by Geithner posturing. But the chaos that will ensue if a dollar crisis were to suddenly force America's politicos to start living within America's means won't be funny.

Labels: Memes

7/04/2009
July 4th seemed more like a wake than a celebration The world changing innovation of America economic culture was the shifting of power away from entrenched elites that controlled most existing utility to entrepreneurial upstarts eager to create lots of new utility. Creative destruction was accelerated and America's entrepreneurial prosperity machine was born. But elites despise how it can upset their profitable old apple carts and that is why today's corporate elites are buying up the loyalties of politicos with cushy, high paying jobs for their wives, sons and daughters, campaigns funds, and endless other perks, seeking to turn back the clock to the days when elites ruled the roost unchallenged.

We can see their progress clearly in the unwillingness of both of our political parties to jail any of the bankers that recently perpetrated the greatest financial fraud in human history. These crooks fleeced investors of hundreds of billions by arranging to get fraudulent triple A ratings put onto loans that they would snicker and call liar loans in the privacy of their offices. Instead of the jail time they deserve, politicos have rewarded them with hundreds of billions in taxpayer's bailouts to replace the lost cash flow from their fraudulent scam. Entrenched industrial elites in Europe and America have even gotten their politicos to pass laws requiring new entrepreneurs to pay the old elite for the right to pollute, actually turning their poisoning of the planet into an cash asset, what a scam.

With the engine that build our freedom and prosperity now being systematically dismantled by crooked corporate executives and politicos, the 4th of July can no longer stand as a celebration. Perhaps we should think of it as an Irish wake in remembrance of the Great American Entrepreneurial Culture that was born on July 4th, 1776 and passed away early in the 21st century.

Labels: Memes

7/04/2009
Stephen Hawking talks about our humods future
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking recently outlined his personal philosophy, which turns out to include most of the humods memes. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations." But now, says Hawking, we are entering a new phase of "self designed evolution" in which we will extensively modify our own DNA. "At first, these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects controlled by single genes." Then humans will move on to modding more complex combinations . "I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence and instincts like aggression," says Hawking.

Hawking also points out the importance of another key part of the humods worldview, the vital importance of advancing our species by developing and spreading the most effective memes. "Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes."

Labels: Memes, Next

6/30/2009
Suggestions for surviving in troubled times There is growing evidence for the theory that the last half of the 20th century was a period of extraordinary stability. But now we have returned to the more typical human condition, as previously experienced in the first half of the 20th century. A period that saw two World Wars, a flu outbreak that killed 50 to 100 million, a Great Depression and numerous 'great leaders' that slaughtered tens of millions of their own citizens to consolidate their power.

Let's hope things won't get that bad, but a good Civilization 2.0 thinker, John Robb over at Global Guerrillas, has some interesting suggestions for surviving in troubled times.

Labels: Memes

6/30/2009
A 'perfection tool' that will let Big Brother track you everywhere It's a frequent scene in television crime dramas: clever police technicians zoom in on a security camera video to read a license plate or capture the face of a hold-up artist. But in real life, enhancing low-quality video has not been an easy task -- until now. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a new video perfection tool that can see what the naked eye cannot in either live or recorded video, in either color or black-and-white. "This enhancement of resolution can be a critical factor in locating terrorists or identifying criminal suspects," says Prof. Yaroslavsky.

The millions of security video cameras being installed are on the verge of being able to track you everywhere you go. Do you really want to live in a Big Brother state?

Labels: Memes, Mods

6/27/2009
'Neurologgers' reading bird brains in flight Using a "neurologger" specially designed to record the brain activity of pigeons in flight, researchers have gained new insight into what goes through a birds' brain as it flies. "We've successfully applied electrophysiological methods, previously used for the investigation of brain functions in the lab, to a freely flying bird in nature," said Alexei Vyssotski of the University of Zurich.

Research into neuro loggers and controllers is getting more sophisticated by the day. If we let it happen, agents of Big Brother will probably one day be routinely scanning everyone's mandatory "neurologgers" to make sure we aren't thinking any disloyal thoughts about the state.

Labels: Memes, Neuro

6/25/2009
Why dogs get far more advanced medical treatment than you do You can chalk it up to politicos catering to religious ignorance. It has been going on since blood transfusion use was delayed for decades because the ignorant Christians in those days thought the soul traveled around the body in the blood stream, so a transfusion would "mix souls." Now they are on again about tiny little bundles of a few dozen undifferentiated cells having "souls," because they could potentially become human beings. As one scientist recently pointed out, with today's technology any cell in your body can become human. So when your preacher stops spewing deadly ignorance from his pulpit for a moment, to scratch his nose, he has actual just engaged in a holocaust, destroying millions of cells that could potentially become human beings.


Various embryonic and adult stem cell therapies in animals are producing simply amazing results. Old dogs with bad hips frolic like puppies. Race horses with injuries come back to become world class winners. One such racehorse, Be A Bono, won 16 out of 24 starts, earned more than 1.3 million in prize money, and was the 2004 World Champion Quarterhorse. All after a stem cell treatment.

Soon, hopefully, Christians will finally get past their ignorance about stem cells. Just like they finally got past their earlier ignorance about blood transfusion. Unfortunately, only after that ignorance had caused millions of unnecessary deaths by blocking blood transfusions for nearly half a century.

People complain about Bush causing the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein, but those numbers pail in comparison to the millions forced to suffer pain, suffering and early deaths due to our former president's efforts to gain a few more votes from those suffering from religion-induced ignorance syndrome.

Help stamp out deadly ignorance by helping to spread a far better way of thinking.

Labels: Memes, Mods

6/19/2009
Keynesian bubble economics is destroying our lives John Maynard Keynes did more damage to our civilization than any other pseudo-scientist.

Prior to the adoption of Keynes ruinous ideas, many nations had money with the more stable, intrinsic value of being backed by precious metals and market forces, not politicos running central banks, controlled interest rates. In those days, the value of your money did not erode away and interest tended to give you a reasonable return on your capital.

Up until the end of the 1960's in the USA, you could still work hard, put your money in the bank or Government Savings Bonds, and be assured of a comfortable retirement.

Then Keynes' fiat money system was imposed on America by politicos who wanted to buy votes by handing out freebies at home, while simultaneously taking on the costly role of creating an American world economic empire. This caused the buying power of the dollar to plunge. For fifty years the price of a Hershey bar at the neighborhood store where I grew up was 5 cents. Then when America replaced our gold-backed money with Keynesian fiat money, the price of that Hershey bar skyrocketed: [1969] 10 cents, [1974] 15 cents, [1977] 20 cents, [1978] 25 cents, [1982] 30 cents, [1983] 35 cents, [1986] 40 cents, [1991] 45 cents, [2002] 59 cents, [2009] 89 cents. Along with the price of nearly everything else we all buy regularly.

You could no longer simply work hard, save your money and be assured of a comfortable retirement. Because politicos were inflating away the value of your savings at a rapid clip, and keeping interest rates so artificially low that you couldn't keep up.

Low interest rates, easy credit, massive creation of money through the printing press and fractional reserve lending had to be put into place to keep all the negative effects of Keynes ideas from being seen, to keep an economic system being slowly strangled to death, walking. But like any Frankenstein, our undead economy was unable to walk smoothly, but instead had to lurch from one hastily inflated economic bubble to the next, with each new bubble seeming to take more monetary stimulus to inflate than the last one.

Without your knowledge, you had been robbed of the ability to save your money for a comfortable retirement. This was no longer an option, since fiat money inflation would destroy the buying power of your savings to quickly and interest rates on savings had to be kept artificially low, to keep our dying economy walking.

In order to protect the buying power of our savings, we were all forced into becoming speculators. We had to keep taking on more and more risky investments keep our dreams of retirement from being stolen by the politicos pushing the new Keynesian bubble economic system that gave them far more power at your expense.

Wall Street's big firms profited as never before from selling investors more speculative investments and joined with Washington to keep the destructive Keynesian delusion alive.

Eventually, things got to the point that what I have called the king has no clothes recognition avoidance mechanism began to take effect. We in the west knew that our portfolios would be utterly wiped out if any of us said anything about the fact that Lord Keynes was prancing around the kingdom not wearing any clothes. So we all tightly closed our eyes to avoid seeing what had become obvious to any thinking person, that all the Keynesian clowns running our Treasury Department and Central Banks were running around stark naked.

The work of Lord Keynes supports the empowerment of economic and political elites at the expense of ordinary workers and investors, who's ability to save and retire is severely impaired.

Economists are richly rewarded by these political and economic elites for supporting Keynes and that insidious feedback loop is the only reason Keynes ruinous economic ideas persist.

Now though, the voices of reason, pointing our that Lord Keynes' followers are wearing no clothes are growing stronger.

Recently, Dr Xu, who has a doctorate from the University of California and was formerly managing director of the China's biggest investment bank began calling western leaders to account for remaining stuck in the failed Keynesian bubble economy mind set, saying: "It's time to announce Keynesianism's failure, time to announce the emperor Lord Keynes has no clothes." He went on to accuse the west many Keynesian politicos of "casting a moral verdict without seeming to care about truth or logic".

At least in Asia, reason seems to be returning. In the west, I fear we have more pain to endure before we again begin to see the light.

Labels: Memes, Next

6/16/2009
How to keep the Earth habitable for an extra 1.3 billion years (65 million more human generations)
Scientists at Caltech have figured out how to counteract the changes in our sun to keep the Earth habitable for humans for another 1.3 billion years. That is long enough to give another 65 million generations of humans the opportunity to be born on humanity's home world.

As the sun has matured over the past 4.5 billion years, it has become both brighter and hotter, increasing the amount of solar radiation received by Earth, along with surface temperatures. Earth has coped by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thus reducing the warming effect. The pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has dropped some 2,000-fold over the past 3.5 billion years.

The problem, says Caltech Professor Joseph L. Kirschvink is that "we're nearing the point where there's not enough carbon dioxide left" in the atmosphere to regulate temperatures by lowering it. Essentially, even taking atmospheric CO2 to zero will not be enough to overcome the Sun's increased heat generation. The solution for preventing Earth from becoming uninhabitable due to our Sun's increasing energy output, say Kirschvink and his collaborators, is to reduce substantially the total pressure of the atmosphere itself, by removing massive amounts of molecular nitrogen, the largely nonreactive gas that makes up about 78 percent of the atmosphere. This would regulate the surface temperatures and allow carbon dioxide to remain in the atmosphere, to support life, and could tack an additional 1.3 billion years onto Earth's expected human habitability lifespan.

All the world's politico's quibbling over carbon taxes won't even make a dent in the needed offset to the Sun's increased output. Scientists are going to have to figure out how to engineer a much more robust thermostat for our planet, if we want that 65 million generations of human to get that opportunity to be born on our home world.

Labels: Memes, Next

6/15/2009
Understanding the Cosmic master blaster - the gamma-ray bursts Since a gamma-ray burst has the power to destroy all life on our planet down to dozens of meters below the surface, we need to find out all we can about what makes these Cosmic master blasters happen. A new effect that may oppose the formation of black holes could explain the mysteriously immense energy of gamma-ray bursts.

Labels: Memes

6/09/2009
Getting a handle on what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan
David Kilcullen is a contemporary practitioner and theorist of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. A former Australian Army officer, he left that army as a lieutenant colonel in 2005, and now works as a counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency adviser to NATO, the United States, British and Australian governments. During 2007 he served in Iraq as Senior Counterinsurgency Adviser on the personal staff of U.S. Army General David Howell Petraeus, responsible for planning and executing the 2007-8 Joint Campaign Plan. To really get a handle on the mistakes that were made in Iraq and Afghanistan and the efforts to fix them, watch this Google talk.

Labels: Memes, Next

6/03/2009
What to make of the endless singularitarian debates I am often asked about some new raging debate among the members of the church of the singularity -- which will come first, the AI chicken or the diamondoid egg. Most singularitarians that I have met, seem to have adopted a messianic view of technology. Their hope is that a smart machine will awaken from non-existance one day soon, to save us all from our own evil natures. This concept appears to be patterned after one of the oldest and most delusional metaphors in humanity's long sad history of philosophical misdirection.

All that matters about how technological advances will unfold in the years ahead is that we endeavor to make them unfold and figure out how to best apply them as quickly as possible.

We live in a Cosmos, which by nature will cause our extinction if we don't move outward to inhabit other stellar systems quickly enough. HUMODS tend to be less interested in debating and more interested in making the technologies we are going to need to insure the survival of our kind, happen as quickly as possible.

Watch Bruce Sterlings thoughts on the singularity.

Labels: Memes

5/29/2009
Isaac Asimov on building a better belief system
From Isaac Asimov's The Roving Mind (1997), page 43:

"Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? - in ancient astronauts? - in the Bermuda triangle? - in life after death?"

No, I reply. No, no, no, and again no.

One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out 'Don't you believe in anything?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

The first step towards creating a better civilization 2.0, which can let us escape the ignorance, war, persecution, deprivation, disease and suffering of our current civilization, is to adopt a better belief system.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/27/2009
Americans have experience massive climate change before, including a 15 foot rise in sea level
From 6,000 to 600 years ago, a 15 foot sea level rise due to receding glaciation flooded America's coasts and intensified hurricanes. But not having stupidly built lots of immovable infrastructure right on those coast, like we have done, the civilization of the ancient Caribbeans was resilient enough to adapt and thrive despite the radically altered climatic reality.

The 5 meter (15 foot) sea level rise was also "marked by large variation in annual rainfall and periodic intensification of hurricane activity," explains Dr Jago Cooper, of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester. Yet the civilization of the ancient Caribbeans was resilient enough to cope with all those radical changes and continue to thrive.

With ice cores and sediment studies clearly showing that massive climate shifts have happened many times in our planet's past, routinely melting all the summer ice on the planet and raising coastal sea levels to levels that will flood all the world's coastal cities, why are we still building most of our most vital infrastructure in coastal zones where eventual destruction is assured?

We need to adopt a far more resilient, science-savvy and adaptable civilization model or one day an event is certain to come along that will cause the old order's aging, rigid, and obsolete model to fail catastrophically, sweeping our civilization into the dust bin of history and potentially even our species into extinction.

Labels: Memes

5/27/2009
Seasteading Institute announces winners of this year's design contest The old order's nation states seem a terribly flawed system. They seem to be forever spying on and infringing the rights of their citizens. They engage in costly and unnecessary conflicts and spend fortunes on things like research into bioweapons with the power to cause the extinction of our species. The services nation states deliver to citizens are routinely of inferior quality. And their efficiency is so abysmal that they turn their citizens into virtual slaves of the state by forcing them to pay taxes much higher than the 33% of their crops feudal lords took from their serfs. Moreover, instead of serving the common good, legislation and regulations often seem more targeted at serving the needs of a political connected elite, at the expense of most citizens.


Some, like the Seasteading Institure, think the best way to create a civilization 2.0 that treats humans with respect, is to avoiding the nation state model entirely by homesteading outside their jurisdiction either in outer space or on the high seas.


The images shown are from the more interesting of the winners of this year's Seasteading Institute annual design competition. The concept was created by a 22 years-old architecture student named Anthony Ling. And it illustrates an extremely interesting idea for maximizing human freedom by injecting real competition into the administration of our cities. Numerous proprietary communities of containerized living pods could be set up at sea. Community operators would be forced to provide highly efficient administration and real value for the fees paid by inhabitants, because if they failed to do so, inhabitants could just have their pods detached and moved to another better operated community.

The potential effectiveness of making governance truly competitive can be seen in the fierce competition between RV communities in places like Arizona and Florida. The highly mobile living pod inhabitants that are their customers must be given real value for their money. Imposition of the high fees or ridiculous and oppressive regulations, found in many communities with more captive populations, is made impossible by the mobility of the inhabitants.

Labels: Memes, Pods

5/26/2009
The engines of extinction - massive bot armies really are on the way
The US military's use of bots to turn the tide in Iraq's urban warfare theater has opened eyes all around the world to the possibilities of military bots. Now with Japan about to drop its restrictions on arms exports, an army of some of the best bot engineers on the planet is gearing up to cover the world with low-cost bot warriors. Companies in China and Korea are also moving to take advantage of the massive opportunity for profit that converting the world's militaries over from human to bot warriors represents. As American military research makes bot warriors ever more autonomous and formidable, Asian manufacturers will flood the world with low-cost warrior bots that improve on those cutting-edge but overly expensive designs. The burning question is can we organize a sufficiently resilient cloud-based Civilization 2.0, before the nation states and other engines of extinction of the old order bring about the demise of our species?

Labels: Bots, Memes, Next

5/23/2009
Climate activists talk about keeping human hands off, but really seek scientifically controlled climate
Many climate activists seem to think that if human influences could just be eliminated from the Earth's climate, it would naturally remain as moderate as the 20th century's climate. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

From studies of ice core samples and sediments, climate scientists and geologists know that during most of the last billion years (see chart), the Earth was far warmer than it is today. So warmer that often no permanent ice existed anywhere on the planet.

Only during four unusually cool periods, labeled ice ages, has summer ice existed at our planet's polls. Ice ages have occurred between about 800 and 600 million years ago, between about 460 and 430 million years ago, between about 350 and 250 million years ago, and from 4 million years ago right up until today.

We are currently living in an ice age that has had at least 60 glacial advances and retreats during the last 2 million years. While the glaciers are currently in retreat, scientists say we are still living in an ice age period with temperatures that are well below the average for the last billion years.

Earth's natural climate swings between much warmer periods when all the polar ice melts, which will flood all our coastal cities. And ice age periods when glaciers expand and retreat, which will bury interior cities like Chicago, Berlin and Moscow, under thousands of feet of ice. The climate we think of as normal, is actually a rare state that has only been in place for a tiny percentage of the last billion years. And unless we develop sufficient scientific understanding to effectively regulate our planet's climate, it won't stay that way.


The picture above is of an ice sheet in Antarctica that shows how Chicago, Berlin and Moscow will one day look, unless humans develop the tools necessary to actively regulate our climate.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/21/2009
What America's founding fathers feared about organized religions
Fans of organized religion are inclined to falsely claim that America's founding fathers patterned our system of government after the principals of the Christian church. Beyond being silly on its face, since democracy was invented in Greece long before Christ was born, reading the letters that America's founding fathers wrote to each other while they were designing our nation's government gives lie to that claim. Those letters makes it crystal clear that America's founders saw organized religions as one of the greatest potential threats to human liberty and freedom. Remember, many of America's early settlers came here from Europe to escape oppressive state religions in their home country. And that is why most of America's founders tended to have a personal faith, but saw great risk in the tendency of religions to organize into large and powerful institutions that could manipulate the powers of the state to mire civilization's progress in dogmatic stagnation.

Human progress comes from constant systematic, open minded inquiry, along with a willingness to develop and try out new ideas. War, stagnation and misery result from making up your mind that all truth is contained in some ancient religious screed, and then using dogmas, perception avoidance and intellectual laziness to avoid ever seeing anything that contradicts your beliefs.

Labels: Memes

5/19/2009
Prepare to survive hyperinflation
There are two schools of economics, Austrian, which is scientifically based, and Keynesian, which is pseudo-science with a single purpose -- justifying the existence of large and powerful nation states. Needless to say, nearly every one of our politicos, regardless party affiliation, has a Keynesian economic adviser. This is why our politicos are about to try to inflate us out of the current economic mess. No frugality is in the offing, indeed, even with the huge revenue drain of the downturn, the cost of two wars, the enormous cost of the bailout and the baby boomer retirement. Congress is working on a new health care plan that independent economist say will add $2 to $3 trillion more to the deficit over the next ten years. There is simply no way this much debt can be managed, other than by inflating it away, and that is what their Keynesian advisers are recommending.

This will hit you as a hidden tax that will steal the value of everything you own through hyper-inflation. Prepare for it now, because the difference between projected government income and outflow over the next ten years is simply too large for our politicos to handle by any other means. To learn more read: Will The Dollar Standard Collapse? by John Carney and Brace For Hyper-Inflation by Henry Blodget.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/19/2009
Take a magnificent glimpse at the future of our kind The Milky Way galaxy is out there for our kind to inhabit. Trillions in easy to mine minerals in the asteroid belt can give our civilization wealth enough to spread beyond our planetary system. We must accomplish this. Because the only alternative is species extinction. Our Cosmos functions as an intelligence creation engine, with many mechanisms for destroying any species that fails to develop sufficient intelligence to spread across multiple star systems.



Watch the magnificence of the Milky Way's galactic core as it rolls across the night sky in this amazing HD time-lapse clip, and afterward, you will have no doubt where we must go. We will move outward to inhabit that majestic vision. We will not fail the millions of generations of our progeny that will be deprived of existence, if we do not quickly enough claim our place in the Cosmos.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/19/2009
Cloud-based consultations can reduce doctor referrals to specialists by 20% An experiment that gave 46 general practitioners easy cloud access to specialists regarding patients with skin conditions reduced referrals to dermatologists by 20.7 percent. Using the cloud in every possible way in the medical field is the only way to make our health care system affordable again, while simultaneously offering improved patient care.

Labels: Memes, Mesh, Next

5/18/2009
The requirements for a better life The first thing you do when starting a new software development project is define the requirements -- the list of what a new piece of software is supposed to be able to do. Requirements don't tell a designer or programmer how to meet the need, they just describe the goal. Here is a software development engineer's effort to define the requirements for breaking free of his cubicle to find a more satisfying way of life. Maintaining a list of requirements for designing a happier and more satisfying life is a great way to focus your mind on clearing the clutter from your current reality and making a better one happen.

Labels: Memes

5/14/2009
The king has no clothes recognition avoidance mechanism Politicos and government economists love the concept of fiat money. It gives them more power. But fiat money is only the latest in a long line of currency debasement scheme sovereigns have practiced since money was invented. All such schemes have ended badly and so will the fiat money/credit bubble expansion economic model of today. Fiat money prosperity is just an illusion of prosperity. Only money with a stable intrinsic value can foster a healthy enough savings rate for the formation of a resilient prosperity. So when will the piper have to be paid?

The dollar is unique in that normally a king's enemies can win by the collapse of a king's currency debasement scheme. But with the dollar, a collapse would see no winners anywhere in the world, since all nations have followed the dollar into the fiat currency model. When the dollar does, their fiat money goes too, creating a financial catastrophe unprecedented in its scope. The magnitude of the catastrophe and the universality of the risk creates a unique economic support mechanism like the one between courtiers and king in the children's tale.

The king has no clothes recognition aversion factor creates in all who have their livelihoods staked on the continuation of a particular system. An extremely powerful psychological aversion blocking their ability to perceive that the system on which they are so utterly dependent is fundamentally and fatally flawed.

A corollary to the king has no clothes recognition aversion factor is that when reality finally forces an end to the collective delusion, the collapse will be unprecedented in its magnitude.

Any financial instrument denominated in any fiat currency is likely to become worthless as markets seize up and fail to settle worldwide. Real estate not usable for affordable housing or agriculture is also likely to have negligible value. Only items like food that people have an immediate need for can be relied on to hold their value in trading power.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/13/2009
Answering those who think humods tech is "unnatural" Most people who think it would be "unnatural" to cure aging so that people can live for centuries probably do not think brushing their teeth is "unnatural", but fundamentally it's the same thing. In both cases, one is using tools created by human intelligence to prevent damage which would otherwise slowly degrade one's health.

Labels: Memes, Mods

5/11/2009
Washington ups ante in their find-the-dollar-collapse-point game of chicken
The White House just announced that they will need to borrow fully half of what the government spends this year, $1.8 trillion. According to the AP, this is about four times the previous record deficit.

The king's pockets aren't just empty, he isn't wearing any clothes, and the world's economic system is completely dependent on the collective ability of investors to continue to ignore that fact. Else, the dollar begins a death-spiral into a collapse in buying power that will leave any financial asset denominated in dollars essentially worthless.

Industries heavily dependent on government like health care, universities, legal, road builders and military contractors will be utterly decimated by a dollar collapse. If you work in one of these industries, it is time to think about moving into another industry that is less government dependent. It is time to start putting together the supplies and skills you will need to survive the initial chaos after a dollar collapse.

Lately, the Chinese have been shunning long-term American debt, forcing the Fed to buy it up with printed money, and taking other steps to put the Yuan in a position to become the world's new reserve currency after a dollar collapse. They are hoping to take advantage of the dollar's fall to pull of the greatest shift in economic and political power ever achieved without firing a single shot.

But they may also fail, because the collapse of the dollar is likely to precipitate a global loss of confidence in all of the world's fiat, including the Yuan.

The failure of the fiat money system may leave no winners.

Risking our civilization on a wild experiment to see if prosperity can be sustained by instituting a fiat money/credit expansion economic system, which relies on the frugality of politicos for its sustainability, was the second stupidest socioeconomic experiment of the 20th century, nearly equal in insanity with the communist experiment. We are now seeing the failure of this experiment.

When money has no intrinsic value, saving becomes an irrational act. And without sufficient savings, it is impossible to sustain a prosperous and resilient socioeconomic system.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/10/2009
Is the singularity drawing nigh?
Some skeptics dismiss the technological singularity concept as rapture for geeks.

While I'd bet in favor of a smartbot passing the Turing test by 2030. I have serious doubts about the claims of some singularitarians that trillions of nanobots will be able to fab things so cheaply by then, that prices will fall to zero and create an end to scarcity.

While it does appear that nano/bio/cloud (NBC) technologies each may feature their own version of Moore's Law, everything being free by 2030 will, I think, prove to be wildly optimistic.

Consider that prior to the mechanization of agriculture, it took 95 farmers working dawn to dusk to generate enough surplus food to allow just 5 people to do something other than framing. While today, a single farmer can feed 100. Yet even with this enormous improvement in agricultural productivity, on the scale of what NBC tech might do, the cost of food is nowhere near free.

Also consider that back in 1980, Robotics Age Magazine: The Intelligent Machines Journal asked top experts in artificial intelligence and robotics: "How long until there are reasonably priced robots that can be quickly programmed verbally to do any factory assembly line job a human can do?"

The average expert answer back in 1980 was 11 years and the experts were nearly as optimistic about home bots. Here we are 29 years later with nothing like such versatile assembly line bot in sight and the only bots in our homes the very simple minded little Roombas.

So don't plan your life around getting a vast outpouring of freebies from a singularitarian horn of plenty. Because all that is likely to pour from that horn any time soon are lots of debates about the exact nature of our singularity savior and the exact moment that it will come down to us from above.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/08/2009
Why all the world's financial experts get it so wrong This morning I watched on YouTube, Peter Schiff speaking at Google about his new book .... WATCH

Schiff correctly perceives the reality of the situation up to a point, but misses two vital factors that are absolutely essential to surviving the years ahead.

Please watch Schiff's talk before reading the balance of this post.

The two factors that Schiff misses are these:
1. Because it is the world's reserve currency and the linchpin of the global monetary system under which all the world's nations agreed to switch over from monies with intrinsic value to fiat monies backed only by the promises of politicos and nothing else. A collapse of the dollar is very likely to trigger a failure of confidence in most of the world's other fiat currencies. Making all of the world's currencies likely to fail together and spreading the problems Schiff correctly points out America is likely to suffer in the years ahead, to the rest of the planet.
2. As their currencies fail, most if not all of the world's governments will confiscate privately owned gold. There is precedent for this in the last major financial upheaval - the Great Depression - and since gold will be the only money left standing after a dollar collapse, politicos will have to seize it in order to avoid losing all of their power and legitimacy.

The world's financial experts can't let themselves see what is unfolding for the same reason that religious fundamentalists can't let themselves see the logic and evidence for evolution. Because it would collapse the worldview they have relied upon to make all their life's choices.

The entire world of investing is predicated upon the worldview that you can hedge against risk. But there is no investment hedge vehicle that can protect against a systemic collapse of all the world's fiat currencies, followed by the confiscation of gold by the world's governments. This represents a total, systemic failure of the basic premise of every investor. Their god would be proven dead, and that is why they won't be able to see this, until unfolding circumstances force them to do so.

When a situation exists where a tribe's worldview fails so utterly that they are forced to perceive that failure, that tribe's civilization inevitably disintegrates into chaos. And that is what will happen to the world's investment community, after a dollar collapse.

Investing in a political fiat money/credit expansion economy is purely about faith. Faith that politicos won't debase the money to an extent that collapses the value of all the assets denominated in it. Putting savings into any investment denominated in a fiat currency is the kind of gambling where, perhaps by counting the cards, you can get a little bit of an edge and add to your pile of chips, but where at any moment the casino could fail, making all your chips completely worthless. The only way to safely store wealth in a political fiat money/credit expansion economy is by using it to obtain a skill or objects that you can both use and will always be able to trade for something else that you may need.

The only permanent way out of this mess is to build a civilization 2.0, based on a more resilient worldview.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/06/2009
At last one politician is not being fooled by unscientific pseudo-economics

We have to come to the realization that there is a sea change in what's happening. This is an end of an era and that we can't re-inflate the bubble, just as we devised a new system of Bretton Woods in '44 which was doomed to fail. It failed in '71 and then we came up with the dollar reserve standard which was a paper standard; it was doomed to fail and we have to recognize that it has failed. And if we think we can re-inflate the bubble by artificially creating credit out of thin air and calling it capital; believe me, we don't have a prayer of solving these problems.... WATCH

The idea that the credit collapse is a failure of "free markets" is government propaganda. How can credit be regarded as a "free market" when the basic interest rates have for years been set by the Federal Reserve at a rate far below historical norms. The artificially low rates have caused a collapse in the savings rate and inflated asset bubble after bubble. We won't have a truly healthy economy again until money with an actual intrinsic value is restored and saving/loan interest rates are truly allowed to be set by the free market once again, instead of being set by a committee of politicos at the Fed.

Labels: Memes, Next

5/05/2009
Public education tries to brain wash us into trusting government But so much centralized power always corrupts, making the nation state the most dangerous and destructive institution ever conceived:

Operation Northwoods, or Northwoods, was a false-flag conspiracy plan, proposed within the United States government in 1962. The plan called for CIA or other operatives to commit apparent acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Castro-led Cuba. One plan was to "develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington". The plan stated:

The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.

Operation Northwoods was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed by then-Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer, and sent to the Secretary of Defense.... READ

The cloud can be used to create a Civilization 2.0 that diffuses power broadly enough to avoid the formation of dangerous and destructive clumps like nation states.

Labels: Memes

5/05/2009
The FDA has killed millions and will likely one day kill you When forceful, powerful government intrudes into any field of human endeavor, the end results are much the same: ruination. The only questions relate to how long it takes to get there and the small details of how that ruin unfolds. The incentives of bureaucrats are almost exactly in opposition to the direction of progress, and the existence of a powerful regulator distorts all surrounding endeavors.

Regulatory bodies like the FDA have every incentive to stop the release of new medicine: the government employees involved suffer far more from bad press for an approved medical technology than they do from the largely unexamined consequences of heavy regulation. These consequences go far beyond the obvious and announced disapproval of specific medical technologies: the far greater cost lies in all the research, innovation and development that was never undertaken because regulatory burdens ensure there would be no profit for the developer. Personal gain for the regulator is thus to destroy the gains of people they will never meet, the exact opposite of what occurs in an open marketplace.... READ

Labels: Memes

5/04/2009
The threat matrix has changed but our institutions have not It continues to amazing me how inept all our governmental institutions appear to have become at dealing with the rapidly evolving threat matrix facing our civilization.

On the one hand, you have the people at Treasury and the Fed trying to fix our broken economy by inflating yet another bubble, using the same old monetary expansion and easy credit policies that got us into this mess in the first place. It should be obvious to any thoughtful person by now, that the fiat money/credit expansion economic model is fatally flawed and will not produce sustainable economic growth. Only individual savings encouraged through the use of money that has intrinsic value can do that.

Similarly, those charged with protecting America from pandemics still seem to be living in a past age before the giant leap forward in genetic engineering.

With it now so easy for a microbiologist to tweak a virus to be much worse than its natural form. We need to approach any outbreak with far more caution and suspicion than in the past. We need to go into the situation knowing that we could be under attack. It used to be safe to tell the public that animal viruses don't pass through meat to humans, so even during a swine flu outbreak, feel free to pig out. But now we know viruses can be tweaked to spread through an animal's meat, and we need to safeguard against this in any outbreak, until we are sure it isn't there.

Failure to do so could cause a doomsday scenario for America. A designer virus set loose in pig or chicken farms in Mexico, engineered to be transmitted both by the animal's meat and human-to-human. Our now globalized agriculture system would quickly transport the death from Mexican farms to store shelves in every city in America. Careful, proper cooking would kill the virus in many homes, but enough Americans don't take sufficient care in food preparation, that the virus would soon be in enough people that the human-to-human spread designed into it could be catastrophic.

Better genetic engineering has forever changed the threat matrix. Today, at any hint some new virus might spreading, a "don't eat this type meat until further notice" announcement should be routine. Otherwise, we leave ourselves wide open to an attack that the government's own experts have estimated could kill over 100 million Americans. Unfortunately, fear of costing agri-biz a few bucks is keeping America vulnerable to a devastating attack.

Civilizations often could survive having ossified protection institutions in the past, but in the era of designer viruses, they won't.

Labels: Memes, Next

4/29/2009
Experiments using ecosystems of enzymatic RNA molecules vividly demonstrates Darwinian evolution in action Sarah Voytek, Ph.D. has used ecosystems of enzymatic RNA molecules to demonstrate the classic principles of Darwinian evolution. The research shows that when different species directly compete for the same finite resource, only the fittest will survive. The work also demonstrates how, when given a variety of resources, the different species will evolve to become increasingly specialized, each filling different niches within their common ecosystem. By putting a trillion RNA molecules replicating every few minutes in a test tube, "we can study things very quickly," says Scripps Research Professor Gerald Joyce, M.D., Ph.D. This allows the forces of evolution to be observed to work over the course of just a few days.... READ

Labels: Memes

4/29/2009
Hundreds of roaming rogue black holes ripping planets from their stars
It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, destroying stellar systems. But it is probably fact, not fiction. New calculations by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics suggest that hundreds of massive black holes are wandering the Milky Way.

These rogue black holes would have originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way.

Each time two proto-galaxies with central black holes collided, their black holes merged to form a single, "relic" black hole. During the merger, directional emission of gravitational radiation would cause the black hole to recoil. A typical kick would send the black hole speeding outward fast enough to escape its host dwarf galaxy, but not fast enough to leave the galactic neighborhood completely. As a result, such black holes would still be around today in the outer reaches of the Milky Way halo.

Hundreds of rogue black holes should be traveling the Milky Way's outskirts, each containing the mass of 1,000 to 100,000 suns.... READ

Labels: Memes

4/28/2009
Accumulate real wealth not evaporative wealth Evaporative wealth is wealth that is dependent on some outside factor, which can change in ways that would vaporize the wealth associated with it.

Examples of evaporative wealth include things like large houses in the more remote urban suburbs. If the economy is healthy and vehicle fuel is cheap, such a house can have considerable value. However, in a faltering economy with high vehicle fuel prices, the value of such a house can quickly evaporate. See Extreme home makeover -- depression edition.

Avoid investing in evaporative wealth. Having to much wealth keyed to the same exernal factor can not only bankrupt an individual, it can bankrupt a nation or even an entire civilization.

America is the king of evaporative wealth with far too much of its wealth keyed to the same external factor -- the price of vehicle fuel. Houses in the suburbs, factory farms, food distributors, aviation firms, fertilizer makers, the vacation industry, retailers, restaurants -- the percentage of the American economy tied to the price of oil is immense.

And when nations switch from money backed by something that has intrinsic wealth, like gold or silver, to fiat money that is backed only by the promises of politicos. Then all the assets associated with that country's currency, are converted to evaporative wealth, even the ones that would otherwise be more solid.

Labels: Memes, Next

4/28/2009
Women can extend their lives by pairing with conscientious and neurotic males "Highly conscientious people are more organized and responsible and tend to follow through with their obligations, to be more impulse controlled and to follow rules," said University of Illinois psychology professor Brent Roberts, who led the study. Highly neurotic people tend to be more moody and anxious, and to worry, he said. This first large-scale analysis of what the authors call the "compensatory conscientiousness effect," in adults over age 50, found that women, but not men, get an added health benefit when paired with someone who is both conscientious and neurotic. Such males presumably both worry about their mates and take steps to care for them.... READ
(At last I understand why some women are attracted to me. -- Editor)

Labels: Memes, Mods

4/27/2009
The end of history Back in the 1990's, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay and book called "The End of History?" Suggesting that with western capitalistic democracy having soundly beaten its only rival, communism. There would be only good news and smooth sailing ahead. The only remaining superpower would enforce a Pax American of peace and prosperity worldwide.

Now, as we approach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, we can see that the old order is in fact fatally flawed. Its power is anything but super. Its failed ideas have bogged us down in not one but two land wars in Asia. The terrorist responsible for the only large scale attack on the American homeland has never been punished, because America's centralized power systems have become too decrepit to catch him. The America economy seems to be folding up like the "house of cards" President Bush once called it. The old American political system can stay afloat, only by borrowing trillions from foreign nations. And with a pandemic possibly spreading towards us, we recall in horror the systemic failure of Katrina.

All the old order's rigid, arthritic and over centralized institutions seem completely unable to cope with the fast pace world of the new millennium. Allowing our financial system to become overly centralized and complex, allowed a small group of financial shysters to loot it of trillions, leaving the world banks stuck with an enormous pile of toxic assets. While the over centralization of our food distribution system, moving away from local farms towards giant centralized food processors, makes it easy for any foreign power or even a single gene-hacking miscreant, to kill tens of millions of Americans with a bio-engineered pathogen.

The old order has so highly centralized everything, that pulling out one piece of the puzzle from one system can bring down all their highly centralized systems, leaving us ripe for catastrophic failure. Were, for example, the long fuel deliver line from the volatile middle east ever to fail, not only would our cars grind to a halt, but so also would the trucks needed to deliver the necessities of life from far off factories, and so too would the tractors necessary to grow that food.

Unless enough of us start living by and spreading the more resilient, decentralized, multi-nucleated and cloud-coordinated paradigm of the Humods Memes to build Civilization 2.0 as fast as we can. We could well experience an 'end of history.' Not due to the Fukuyama dream of an idyllic superpower-ruled centralized world, but due to a systemic failure so extreme, that there is no one left alive to record any history after that failure.... READ

Labels: Memes, Next

4/24/2009
An eye opening look at institutionalized religion The things William Lobdell saw while covering religion for the L.A. Times caused him to lose his faith. His recent talk about this at Google is something anyone who regards institutionalized religion as a positive or benign force should see.

Lobdell's experiences vividly illustrate that the problem is not just bad individuals within institutionalized religions, but the institutionalization of faith as a concept or meme. While a personal belief in a Creator can be a benign or even beneficial experience for an individual. The suspension of critical thinking and group think that appears to inevitably arise as a consequence of the institutionalization of this type of belief, represent an exceedingly dangerous phenomena. Something that America's founding fathers often worried about in their letters to each other while creating our nation. Most of them appear to have regarded institutionalized religion as one of the greatest potential threats to our nation and our freedoms.

Over and over, as this video shows, institutionalized religion has had the effect of causing both superiors and congregations of profoundly evil priests and preachers, doing horrible things to innocent victims, to attack and shun those victims, while continuing to honor and follow pedophiles and other reprehensible scum bags. Anything with this much power to suspend a normally sane person's powers of critical thinking is a potentially exceedingly dangerous and malevolent entity.... WATCH

Labels: Memes

4/23/2009
Government ultimatum sealed Merrill deal and critically weaken BoA Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paulson threatened to oust the Bank of America CEO if he pulled out of BoA acquisition of Merrill or revealed to the public the magnitude of Merrill's losses. Yes America, your leaders are now behaving like Mafia dons and lying to you wholesale to cover up their ineptitude that caused the destruction of America's economy. Forcing good banks to buy bad ones, only insures that there are only bad banks.... READ

Labels: Memes

4/23/2009
Bots are already revolutionizing the battlefield and altering the course of history
When U.S. forces landed in Iraq and Afghanistan, not a single bot went in with the troops. Now however, an estimated 12,000 ground-based bots and 7,000 unmanned aerial bots are being used to maintain control over these restive populations. Bots are being given much of the credit by a number of military experts for allowing America to have avoided an ignominious defeat in Iraq.... READ

Bots are already reshaping history by drastically lowering human casualty counts among occupying troops. This will allow a country to invade and occupy another country at far less cost than ever before. Bots could make world empire possible for the first time in human history.

Probably a combination of smart spy-bots and armed military-bots could allow a corrupt and inept elite to maintain their control over their nation's angry urban populations indefinitely. Normally, after an elite does something especially stupid, like running their nation's economy into the ground, the people rise up and oust them, but bots can provide inept elites the perfect tools for preventing this. With just a little bad luck, we should get to see the first test of this possibility very soon.

Labels: Bots, Memes

4/23/2009
Centralization of the net has made it highly vulnerable to attack The original DARPA research that lead to the creation of the Internet wanted to design a multi-nucleated communication system that was so resilient, it could continue to function even after a nuclear attack wiped out most of America's cities. Nodes on the net would operate independently, so any number of nodes could be taken out without destroying the system's ability to forward messages. But having been taken over by phone and cable companies in recent years, this ability has been lost, leaving the net vulnerable to attacks like the recent one in Morgan Hill, where several fiber optic cables were cut.... READ .... READ

If every WiFi router had code inside it to make it function as a node of a mesh network, the original resilience of the net's design could exist into every home. If fiber optic cables were cut to a section of a city, the net would continue to function by using the mesh net of WiFi routers to passed along packets one to the next until they reached an area that was still connected to fiber.

Mesh networks eliminate all the choke points, making the net impervious to vandalism and terrorism and making it harder for a local cable monopoly to overcharge you for net access.

Labels: Memes, Mesh

4/23/2009
Learning how to do effectively geo-engineering is a necessity Politicos are always looking for ways to frighten and manipulate the public into giving them more power. One gang of politicos might use terrorism, another might use global warming to instill fear. Always be skeptical about proposals from politicos, since science will rarely matter as much to one of them as political expediency. Already we have seen fear of global warming manipulated into the ridiculously wasteful corn ethanol program, design to buy votes from farmers in key states, while providing no real scientific benefit.
Having said that, research clearly shows us that the climate on our planet has radically shifted in the past through periods when it was both much colder and much warmer than today. Sufficently so to put much of the world's land mass under miles of ice and alter sea levels by 100 meters, higher and lower than today.
We must either learn how to predict and control this using, geo-engineering or find a way to make our civilization flexible enough to withstand events like this, perhaps by making our cities portable. Because research shows that ice ages in the past may have wipped out 90% of the world's human population, and that will happen again, unless we gain the knowledge to necessary to prevent it.... READ

Labels: Memes, Next

4/23/2009
A magic fix for our broken economy the "king has no clothes perception deception" Is the theory that a sustainable prosperity can be built on a fiat money/credit expansion paradigm humanity's second most colossal economic mistake after communism? Of course it is, every sane person knows that, but how do we get out of the mess adoption of this system has created.

There is only one thing that has the power to save us from the looming disaster of the pseudo-economic system imposed on us by our politicos, the king has no clothes perception deception.

The first step is making sure that everyone realize that there will only be losers when the dollar collapses. Thus, every single one of us must never allow ourselves to notice that our sovereign's fancy robes and huge pockets full of money are in fact only a consensual delusion. Even the slightest perception of this truth will destroy us all.

You are probably screaming at your computer right now, "what is this fool on about, doesn't he realize that our politicos' pockets aren't just empty -- THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE ANY POCKETS, THEY'VE ALL BEEN WALKING AROUND ECONOMICALLY STARK NAKED FOR YEARS -- just like the king in the old fairy tale!

Believe me, I understand your frustration, but just calm down, take a few deep breaths, and you'll see why maintaining the perception deception is our only way out of this mess.

There is no way to hedge against the disaster that will befall us if any one of us blows the whistle on our naked king!

Even if you sold out of all the markets before the collapse such a realization woudl bring, turned it all into gold and buried it in your back yard. When the dollar goes down, you'll still be screwed, right along with the rest of us.

Your favorite restaurants will all close. Your favorite shops will all close. Your favorite golf course will close. You favorite sports team will go out of business. The army will seize all the food distribution centers, causing your favorite supermarkets to have empty shelves. There will be no dollars to buy oil, no fuel for farm tractors, no way to drive anywhere, no way to make a living. Your freeze dried food will run out one day. Then you will be hiking out of the suburbs down into the central city to cue up in the bread lines right along with the rest of us.

What about all that gold in your backyard that Rush Limbaugh told you to buy? No help at all, I'm afraid!

Understand that if the cat gets out the bag that the king has no clothes, a dollar collapse is sure to follow, and this will pull down most of the other fiat monies around the world. Creating a worldwide crisis so extreme that the world's governments will make private gold ownership illegal and begin seizing private gold for "the public good." They did that back in the last depression in the 1930's, so there is already precedent, making them sure to do it again.

Just try to trade a single Gold Eagle for some decent food on the black market, and the next thing you will know. You'll be getting water-boarded by some very fit, very intense, well fed and exercised young men and women with short haircuts. Until you give up the location of the rest of your gold stash. Then you'll have a nice televised show trial followed by a public execution for the crime against the people of "hording and speculating."

You plan to fight them off with your AR, AK and 5,000 rounds of ammo? Then the public gets to enjoy an even better televised spectacle, as one of those thousands of sophisticate hunter-killer bots that the military used to turn the tide in Iraq, rolls up to your house and blows you and your family away. Nothing better for taking the peoples' minds off an economic collapse than seeing a shinny military droid take out another bunch of hoarders and speculators.

Beginning to see the full picture now? Good! So let's sum up.

EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE, including YOU will be so totally shafted by a dollar collapse, that we simply have no choice but to use the power of the "king has no clothes perception deception" to kick the ball down the road to our kids. Sorry kids, but dad and mom had no choice.

When ever reality intrudes, just repeat this mantra:

"Don't the king's robes look especially nice today! Gee, and look at all the money in the king's bulging pockets! Good time to buy some more of the king's Treasury Notes. All the king's horse and all the king's men..." -- wait, strike that last bit, wrong fairy tale.

Labels: Memes, Next

4/18/2009
Complex systems like civilizations collapse if they lack scale invariance Scale invariance means that across all scaling factors (large, medium, small, tiny, etc.), the properties that define the whole are conserved (intelligence, mobility, form, productivity, etc.). Resilient communities that are able to operate autonomously for extended periods of time, regardless of external goods/services availability, are essential for the avoidance of societal collapse.... READ

Labels: Memes

4/14/2009
The inevitability of Humods technologies Dr. Gregory Stock (author of Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future) extraordinary talk to TED from several years ago is a must see. It puts the inevitability of the humods-driven future in perfect perspective.... WATCH

Labels: Memes, Mods

4/09/2009
A Declaration on the Independence of Cyberspace

"We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence of conformity. In our world, whatever human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. We will create a civilization of the Mind in cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."
-- John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The EFF is a powerful force against the cloud being turned to evil by elites seeking to hold back the arrival of Civilization 2.0 -- support them.

Labels: Memes

4/09/2009
The wisdom of Bucky Fuller "Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time. Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time. Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time. It’s time we gave this some thought." -- Bucky Fuller.
Working over the cloud from a smart living pod is where we are going as the old order collapses and Civilization 2.0 arrives. The sooner you get there, the better you will do in Civilization 2.0.

The central question Bucky Fuller devoted his life to solving was: "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?"

We have learned since Fuller's death that it simply can't be done without moving off world, so the question for us is: "Can humanity survive lastingly and successfully in our cosmos, and if so, how?"

Labels: Memes, Mesh

4/07/2009
The dark side of Dubai Not sure if the excesses of a feudalistic form of government tells us anything about a globalized world, as the author of this article maintains, but it certainly shows us the advantage of open cloud-democratic rule over centralized control, when it comes to creating a civilization that works. Wherever transparency is lacking trouble is brewing.

"The thing you have to understand about Dubai is - nothing is what it seems," Karen says at last. "Nothing. This isn't a city, it's a con-job. They lure you in telling you it's one thing - a modern kind of place - but beneath the surface it's a medieval dictatorship." .... READ

Labels: Memes

4/07/2009
Obama rubber stamps Bush's shredding of our Bill of Rights The Obama administration formally adopted the Bush administration's position that the courts cannot judge the legality of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) warrantless wiretapping program, filing a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA late Friday.... READ

Labels: Memes

4/06/2009
Long term study proves that more exercise = life extension PARTICIPANTS: 2205 men aged 50 in 1970-3 who were re-examined at ages 60, 70, 77, and 82 years.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Total (all cause) mortality.
RESULTS: The absolute mortality rate was 27.1, 23.6, and 18.4 per 1000 person years in the groups with low, medium, and high physical activity, respectively.... READ

Labels: Memes

4/06/2009
Analysis finds that life must be common throughout our universe
A new thermodynamic analysis suggests that 10 of life's 20 amino acids must be common throughout the cosmos.... READ

Labels: Memes

4/06/2009
American bankers get to value loans on the honor system, huge actual loses to magically become bogus profits People that become accountants tend toward honesty, so they wanted bankers to mark their severely depreciated toxic waste assets down to their actual market value. Since otherwise, pointed out the accountants, investors and depositors would be fooled by banks that actually had large loses, showing bogus profits.

But America's bankers don't have an accountant's tendency towards honesty.

To the contrary, our bankers know they have been Madoffing their investors and depositors for years, so in case they get caught, they have been putting the wives, sons and daughters of numerous politicos into cushy, high paying jobs. They have been funding the re-election campaigns and trips to golf resorts of politicos in order to have enough politicos in their otherwise empty pockets to threaten and intimidate the accountants into letting America's banks continue their multi-trillion dollar heist.

So a bad $1,000,000 mortgage that today is worth only $300,000, gets to stay on the bank's books at something close to the full $1 million, allowing the bank to avoid $700,000 in losses and post an equal amount of bogus profits with the full blessing of America's now fully corrupted political gang.

The regulators that once tried to protect depositors or investors are now part of the criminal conspiracy to defraud them. Spray painting the dead crops green and telling the public that despite the drought we're having a record harvest this year has become the new American way life.... READ

Labels: Memes, Next

4/03/2009
Giving our systems and structures the intelligent resilience of lifeforms The number one design criteria of the Humods Era design ethic is to give our systems and structures the intelligent resilience of lifeforms. The old order liked to apply rigid design rules to their systems and structures. Cities had ridged zoning rules requiring the separation into districts of habitat, retail, office and industrial. In their monumental hubris and stupidity, urban planners gave no consideration to what would happen to their system if the petroleum that fueled the vehicles necessary to move people from one district to the next, were to stop arriving over its long and risky supply line from a troubled part of the world. Their stupidity is perhaps only exceeded by the bankers and regulators that designed our international finance system.

In the Humods Era, designs that lack the resilience, robustness and adaptability of lifeforms will be seen for the primitive and dangerous follies they are. Never a single community fire station and firetruck, but a thousand living pod maintenance bots with emergency code that allows them to swarm in and handle a fire or any other emergency that might arise, with wireless Cloud coordination of a highly efficient response. All our systems and structures should feature intelligent resilience that allows them to resist shocks to the extent they can do so without serious breakage, then have the flexibility to snap back and automatically self repair quickly afterward.... READ

Labels: Memes, Next

3/31/2009
Miffed over Russian space commercialization innovation, NASA goes potty
Ever since Russia adopted the smart Civilization 2.0 innovation of charging tourists for rides to subsidize their space launches, a petulant NASA has been driven potty. Now they are taking potty to the max, by making America's zero gravity toilet and exercise bike on the International Space Station off limits to Russians.... READ

It would be nice if this BBC story were merely an early April Fool's Joke, but sadly, knowing how petulantly peeved NASA's bureaucrats have been since the Russian figured out how to cover most of the costs of their launches with space tourism, it is probably true. With NASA's ridiculously expensive, overly complex and outright dangerous shuttle project floundering. And their efforts at creating a reliable new system, one more like the one the Russians now use, falling ever farther behind schedule and exploding in price. NASA bureaucracy has been acting pretty petulance of late. People of Russia, the American people apologize for NASA's petty potty petulance and encourage you to keep up the good work of actually finding ways of commercializing space.

America once knew how to do this well. By offering airmail subsidies and staying out of their way, NASA's anti-bureaucratic forerunner, helped America's innovators move us from the Wright's kite to commercial jet airlines flying Boeing 707's across the oceans, in less time than NASA has been flailing around trying to move humankind off this planet and out into space. What a thing to have to say, but it could well be that today's NASA bureaucracy is the single greatest impediment to space colonization.

America has moved on from practical innovation stimulation, to building fatally flawed and highly complex bureaucratic systems that are too-big-to-fail. There are however, a few bright spots, even within our bloated government.

Just compare NASA's recent progress with DARPA's Grand Challenge success in producing a bot-driven vehicle. First year, vehicles went nowhere, the best performing bot made it only 7 miles along the course before failing. But the very next year, in 2nd challenge, five bots successfully completed the course and bot-driven vehicles became a reality.

If we dumped NASA and put DARPA in charge of fostering humanity's move into space, in twenty years there might be viable human colonies spread all across the solar system with bots out mining the trillions in minerals from the asteroid belt. But if NASA remains in charge, we are likely to have very little, if anything more, than we have today.

Labels: Memes, Next

3/30/2009
Science is more than a body of knowledge "Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness." -- Carl Sagan in The Demon Haunted World, 1997

Labels: Memes

3/30/2009
Can stitching together too-big-to-fail banks into even larger Bankensteins really fix our financial system? Hmm? It can fix it alright.

What few realize is the seeds of our current financial woes go back to the decision of world government to switch from a system where money had the intrinsic value of precious-metal backing, to a system where its value was subject to constant political debasement.

As small boys, I, my father and my father's father, all paid 5 cents at the little neighborhood convenience store for a Hershey bar. But in the 40 years since the world's politicos began imposing their inflation tax, that price has skyrocketed from 5 cents to 89 cents, along with the prices of most everything else we regularly buy.

This inflation tax forces us all into becoming speculators to simply maintain the value of our money. The real rate of inflation on things we actually buy increases more each year than interest we can earn on our money, forcing us all into either taking speculative risks in search of a higher return or watching as the buying power of our stored wealth wither away year after year.

Another brilliant idea of our politicos was to insure bank deposits against loss to give the system more stability. But this only set in motion the systemic destabilization that we see today, by causing money to flow to the banks paying the highest interest rates, and inevitably taking the largest risks in order to be able to pay those higher rates.

Once their deposits were insured by the government, no one cared anymore how much risk their banker was taking. Both my dad and granddad studied a bank's financial statement carefully before depositing their hard earned money there. Thanks to deposit insurance, today no one does that anymore. You money is fully insured by the government, so there is no need to worry about the intelligence or frugality or honesty of your banker. Frugal bankers were made obsolete by this government action, their returns just weren't high enough anymore, they just weren't wreckless enough risk takers for the new financial system our politicos had created. When the government is causing inflation and assuming the risk of loss on deposits, bankers have no choice but to become speculators, just like the rest of us.

Nearly every financial regulatory law our politicos have passed over the last 50 years has encouraged the concentration of financial resources into fewer and larger economic units, run by those willing to take the most extreme risks.

Every as Hershey bar munching kids, my father and grandfather knew better than to design a system biased towards putting ever more eggs into ever fewer baskets.

But instead of exercising the wisdom of their parents and grandparents, our politicos and regulators have labored to create a reverse-Darwinian state in our financial industry, which forces the most resources to flow into the hands of the most wreckless risk-taking bankers.

Then when the inevitable inflation-driven real estate speculation such a system is certain to produce, caused the inevitable bubble to form and burst. Instead of breaking up our monstrously large banks, to prevent the stupidity of their policies from becoming known, regulators began stitching rotten big banks into even larger and more rotten Bankensteins. It was the only way to avoid recognizing that all their past policies have caused an enormous systemic failure.

Then they pressured accountants to postpone marking the value of bank assets to market. Because if true bank loses were known, regulatory malfeasance would become known, and the villagers would be coming after them with torches and pitch forks for having created these Bankensteins.

While regulators are stitching, our politicos are busy trying to cover up their own complicity, by making sure the regulators that started the fire are given even more power to run the fire brigade.

We need to scrap the old financial system and establish a more rational Civilization 2.0 system using the same multi-nucleated redundancy and robustness that keeps the Internet running despite power outages, cable cuts, server failures and even vicious coordinated attacks.

Only when our money has intrinsic value and our banking system is systemically designed to automatically avoid excessive risk and the formation of any units within it that are too-big-to-fail, can the buying power of your home, your 401K and the money in your wallet stabilize and hold their values.

Neighborhood Convenience Store Hershey Bar prices:

[1921] 5 cents
[1924] 5 cents
[1930] 5 cents
[1933] 5 cents
[1937] 5 cents
[1941] 5 cents
[1946] 5 cents
[1954] 5 cents
[1960] 5 cents
[1965] 5 cents
[1968] 5 cents
[1969] 10 cents (start of hidden fiat money inflation tax)
[1974] 15 cents
[1977] 20 cents
[1978] 25 cents
[1982] 30 cents
[1983] 35 cents
[1986] 40 cents
[1991] 45 cents
[2002] 59 cents
[2009] 89 cents

Labels: Memes, Next

3/30/2009
Taking into account black swans as you plan your life The future has always been crazier than we thought, Nassim Nicholas Taleb speaks to the Seminars About Long Term Thinking (SALT) conference about why all our systems need to be designed to withstand what he calls black swans and others call wild cards, the sudden arrival of events dismissed as being too unlikely to worry about.... LISTEN

Labels: Memes, Next

3/30/2009
Dogmas and dark ages Sam Harris gives the Long Now Foundation a talk about the true dogma of the Bible. If you adopt the real dogmas of the Old Testament's god, then the killing you are required to do will never end.

If your children talk back to you, kill them. If your neighbor works on the sabbath, kill him. If a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night, take her to the edge of town and stone her to death. If you come into a town and see someone praying to a foreign god, you must make he whole town pay for his sin, by killing him and everyone other man, woman and child in that town. During a meeting to discuss how to prevent members of God's favored tribe from marrying members of another tribe, such a mixed-tribe couple happened to walk by, a man ran out and brutally beat them both to death. God was pleased and rewarded the man by making him and his decedents priest in his temple. And there is more killing still, God commands you to kill wizards, homosexuals, fornicators, adulterers, oh, and have slaves is fine, so long as you free any slave that you beat so mercilessly that he loses an eye.

That is the real, vengeful, petty and brutal god as defined in the Bible, which you don't hear much from the pulpit about. And Christ never repudiates these commands in the New Testament. The Koran is equally violent and brutal. Don't just accept what someone else tells you about what these books say, read them for yourself. Then decide if their primitive and barbaric philosophy is for you.... LISTEN

Labels: Memes

3/27/2009
The race to debase
The dollar drops in buying power, next day the yen declines, day after that the euro erodes. It is a new arms race, with each nation pursuing policies designed to cut the valuable of their currency faster than other nations can. To lower the cost of their goods on world markets and artificially boost sagging employment back home. The crazy concept of fiat money, where currencies are backed only by the whims of a nation's politicos, instead of something of intrinsic value like gold or silver, appears to have degenerated into a race to debase. Where the final destination will be world financial destitution. When you rob a nation's currency of its intrinsic value, you convert all of that nation's prosperity into nothing more than an illusion that can disappear overnight.... LISTEN

Labels: Memes

3/27/2009
How to save the world from an asteroid impact To investigate the best way to deflect this and other asteroids onto a harmless path, a team led by David Dearborn of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has modelled the impact of a nuclear explosion on an object's trajectory. Thirty years before the asteroid was set to collide with Earth, a nuclear blast, equivalent to 100 kilotonnes of TNT, was set off 250 metres behind it. The nudge from the explosion increased its velocity by 6.5 millimetres per second, a slight change but enough for it to miss us.... WATCH .... READ

Labels: Memes

3/27/2009
Is our current economic model parasitic predation? Back in 1974, the long running connection between improvements in worker productivity and wage growth was severed. Median per capita wages for individuals have stagnated since then, replaced with measures of growth in house hold income (two workers instead of one) and growth derived from growing the labor pool (mostly illegal immigration). During this time, the money derived from productivity improvements was shunted to capital markets under the ideological assumption that these markets would make better investments in future prosperity than individuals. That assumption has been proven false. The money was gambled away or spent on lavish increases in the lifestyles of oligarchs and their underlings. (Editor's Note: Actually, much of this wealth was diverted to governments. A tiny amount went to the lower class with the rest about evenly split between upper class and political bureaucratic elites. The worst price has probably been paid by middle class kids, who have lost nearly half of their weekly quality time with their parents due to the increase hours on the job their parents must work to feed the vast appetites of America's political & economic elites.)

It would be bad enough if it ended there, but it doesn't. There is increasing evidence that this group of "oligarchs" has ideologically captured all forms of US governance in a situation similar to what we have seen in emerging markets like Russia and Argentian.... READ

Labels: Memes

3/25/2009
In Civilization 2.0 all markets, all data accessible in the cloud Regulators can't stop corruption, an offer of a $10 million per year job after they leave government is too enticing. Only the total transparency that can be achieved by moving all markets and economic data into the Cloud, freeing the Crowd do the do its own regulation has any real chance of stopping corruption.... MORE

Labels: Memes, Mesh

3/24/2009
Quite literally throwing the babies out with the bath water MADELINE Kara Neumann, age 11, died of diabetes because her parents prayed rather than taking her to doctors. Caleb Moorhead, age 6 months, died after his deeply religious vegan parents refused a simple vitamin injection to cure his malnutrition. Down through the ages the superstition and ignorance of their parents has cost the lives of millions of children. Now the superstitions among us seek to ban genetic cures for diseases that will can prevent millions of our children from suffering short, painful lives. By callously labeling children cured by genetic science of their maladies as 'designer babies' they are trying to hold back this breakthrough, like they held back blood transfusion for decades with claims that the human soul lived in our blood streams. This movement can best be quashed with memes that teach them in terms they can understand, that causing babies to suffer and die young is Devilry, not God work.... MORE

Labels: Memes, Mods

3/23/2009
Millions dead, infrastructure destroyed, from a solar storm? An extraordinary report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) says that such a monster solar flare could happen. Just one more of many reasons why we must spread our species off this planet as quickly as we possibly can.... MORE

Labels: Memes

3/18/2009
Civilization 2.0 or Dark Ages 2.0 - you get to decide
Around 1450, Gutenberg started using movable type to print documents, drastically reduced the cost of transmitting information to large numbers of people. Before Gutenberg, books had to be laboriously copied by hand and only a tiny elite ever got access to one. Most were doomed to the constant toil and ignorance of feudal serfs, with their only exposure to a book listening to a priest read from it in Latin, a language they did not understand.

The broad spread of knowledge Gutenberg's innovation set in motion spawned modern science, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and today's media. It has powered human forward progress for over 500. Without it Civilization 1.0, the first truly global civilization, could never have happened.

Now, a far more empowering knowledge dissemination innovation has arrived. It is called the Cloud and it is able to lower the cost of reproducing and disseminating another copy of any type of media or bot code to almost nothing. Suddenly, anyone and everyone can become a publisher or movie maker, a TV commentator or design a piece of code that will make each user's life better and get it to lots of people.

Of course, just as priests, emperors, kings, potentates and feudal lords fought hard to destroy or delay Gutenberg's innovation from creating Civilization 1.0. Today's corporate media chiefs are offering cushy jobs to the wives and kids of our politicos and pouring money into their re-election campaigns, seeking to bribe them into enacting laws that can delay or destroy the arrival of our brighter Civilization 2.0 future.

Like your ancestors fought for Civilization 1.0, you must now fight for Civilization 2.0. Because the alternative isn't do things get much better or merely stay the same. The alternative is do you get to live in Civilization 2.0 or will you be forced to live in Dark Ages 2.0.

You can either fight to insure a Civilization 2.0 future. Where an army of smart bots inhabit all your devices, reporting only to you, obeying only your commands, filtering the web to bring you only what you want. Or else, you will find yourself living in a Dark Ages 2.0. Where an army of smart bots are coded to monitor, manipulate, exploit and enslave you. Where corporate bots and Big Brother's multi-billion spy-bot army will make your life much more oppressive that George Orwell's worst nightmare.

For years after movable type presses were invented, in many places only those authorized by the king were allowed to own one and strict censorship had to be imposed on output, else your license was pulled. Essentially the same thing is happening today, holding back the rapid progress we could be enjoying, and helping to bring about instead economic stagnation and decline.

Most of today's governments only allow those with licenses to transmit data any significant distance over the airwaves, although it is entirely possible to give this ability to all. Smart bot transmitters/receivers can allow anyone to transmit as much data as they want, without ever stepping on any other transmissions. Smart radios can pair up automatically and by sensing which channels are in use already and avoiding those bands, rapidly move millions of people data streams with minimal conflicts, that error correcting bots could easily detect and remedy.

To give anyone exclusive use of a band of the airwaves today is exactly the same as saying only the kinds chosen can own a printing press.

But if you aren't willing to fight for a richer, smarter, brighter Civilization 2.0 future, you are going to get Dark Ages 2.0. Don't give your money to any corporation promoting Dark Ages 2.0. If your Cloud access provider is a corporation trying to cause Dark Ages 2.0, switch or go in with friends to share a single wi-fi connection among you to starve the monster of money.

And please, don't worry about print newspapers and magazines dying out. Cancel your subscriptions today. Because once they are all cloud based, they will be on our side, helping to promote Civilization 2.0 and working to subvert those that are seeking to move us closer to Dark Ages 2.0. Find out who they are and fight them until they become Civilization 2.0 friendly. It is your future that's at stake.... MORE

Labels: Memes

3/17/2009
Nice guys & gals finish first for their employers When it comes to leading a team tasked with developing new products and bringing them to market, new research from NC State University shows that project managers get much better performance from their teams when they treat team members with honesty, kindness and respect, creating a strong competitive advantage for the companies that employ them.... MORE

Labels: Memes

3/17/2009
When bureaucrats try to improve labor markets with regulations unemployment goes up
The more bureaucrats try to regulate a nation's labor market, the higher the levels of unemployment increases is the finding of a new study of 73 countries by the University of Bath in the U.K. One area of labor market regulation that appears to have particularly adverse effects on unemployment are stringent hiring and firing rules, the study finds..... MORE

Labels: Memes

3/16/2009
The 78 million strong boomer army begins its retirement assault on the Federal Treasury
The Chinese Premier is calling publicly on the American government to be more frugal. He is worried America could be forced into defaulting on the trillion plus balance on our Chinese credit card. Why would he be worried about a silly thing like that? Perhaps it is because 1946 + 62 = 2008, consider this:

Government employee pension obligations are exploding at all levels of government beyond the capacity of taxpayers to fund, even in good times.

Losses from CDS and other derivatives on bank and insurance company balance sheets are too big to bail out, so the Fed is helping companies find ways to cover them up, putting off the mark-to-market accountants say is the only way to make their balance sheets truthful.

Private pensions are suffering huge problems that the pension guarantee fund doesn't begin to have the funds to clean up. The auto companies alone seem about to bankrupt and sink that fund a couple of times over, setting up a huge additional Federal bailout.

Local governments, like California, are in growing financial trouble, even without consideration of their enormous employee pension problems.

Many big banks have lost all of their capital and a lot of their depositor's funds but can't be closed. Because the FDIC has too little money to close even a single bank the size of Citi or Bank of America, both of which probably need closing, along with a number of other large institutions.

Fannie and Freddie continue bleeding Uncle Sam of tens of billions, while hiding hundreds of billions more in loses by failing to mark-to-market, as accountants want them to do.

Most of the sub-prime's Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARM) gave 3 years before the rate jump went in to effect, that jump was the event that triggered the crash. But the far more numerous prime ARM loans made over the same period, usually gave 5 years before the rate jumped upward, so now the prime loan defaults are about to start hitting us and will run on for the next few years.

Our leaders have deployed nearly 200,000 troops across the middle east, sucking up huge quantities of money we don't have, but somehow after eight long, difficult years for our men and women in uniform, we've still not found the man responsible for bringing down the World Trade Center.

Employment is sinking at a rate of 6 to 7 million jobs annual as our economy tanks, both dropping tax collections and causing record increases in unemployment, welfare and food stamp outlays.

Credit card loses have jumped to 7.1%, nearly double normal levels and are still climbing.

But all those items are just the start of our financial troubles.

Born starting in 1946, the first wave of the 78 million strong boomer army begins its retirement assault on the Federal Treasury in earnest this year. Causing so much of an increase in spending, that it would have exploded the deficit even in the best of times.

But these are not the best of times, they are the worst of times. The boomers are about to hit us when the bust already has us falling to our knees.

Calling this alignment of dauntingly negative economic news a Perfect Storm, doesn't adequately capture the magnitude of the colossal train wreck we are now experiencing. The culmination of the grand post-World War II experiment to see if inflating fiat monies and rapidly expanding credit, can possibly create a sustainable prosperity for a civilization, is now unfolding. And the results of that experiment embarked upon by their grandfathers and expanded by their fathers, can only be adequately expressed with the elegant economy of language of the new generation. Forced to watch as their futures are consumed by a social experiment proving itself to be the most ruinously stupid, since the one called communism. All they do is shake their heads as they watch the news and utter one simple, elegant word that captures it all:

FAIL!

Labels: Memes, Next

3/15/2009
Let's hope President Obama is listening The Chinese leader has now publicly warned the new US Administration twice in public about the government spending too much and destabilize the US debt and dollar. Perhaps this old Chinese proverb explains Chinese concern: "It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than a man in a time of chaos."

Labels: Memes

3/15/2009
From Gutenburg to Youtenburg - everyone a publisher Shifting from Civilization 1.0's filter - publish model to Civilization 2.0's publish - filter model. The NY Times should be studying Digg.com, ... MORE

Labels: Memes, Mesh

3/13/2009
A commercial gene-tester wants to find genes that cause Parkinson By offering to perform its gene testing procedure on those with Parkinson for only $25, instead of the normal $399 price, Google backed gene-testing company 23andMe hopes to collect DNA from 10,000 people with Parkinson's disease so they can hunt down the common genes that cause that illness.... more

Incidentally, you might recall that California regulators tried to rip off consumers by insisting that patients must go through a hospital or doctor in order get any tests of their own DNA. Fortunately, public outrage over this latest regulatory effort to fleece them forced the regulators to back off. I'm sure those regulators won't have any trouble finding some other less visible way to pay those hospitals back for giving their wives and kids their really cushy jobs.

Labels: Memes, Mods

3/12/2009
Escape from the USA Here's my answer to an email asking if it is time to sell your house and move out of the USA to avoid the coming collapse of the dollar:

I don't think you are likely to go too far wrong marking your USA house to market and selling it. The Fed still seems to think that they can get the housing bubble to re-inflate, but at this point, having seen the ineptitude of their efforts so far, I lack any confidence in their ability to accomplish that goal.

As you point out, this could be Great Depression II, but we need to consider that it could be an even more fundamental event than that.

Given the enormous changes in technology that are afoot, we could be witnessing a truly fundamental realignment of historical imperatives. On the order of the replacement of feudalism with the nation state. We could be arriving at a major historical inflection point.

The post-WWII experiment to see if fiat monies, inflation, and massive credit expansion can be used to create permanent prosperity, certainly appears to be failing.

And doubtless, the collapse of faith in the debt and currency of the USA could well be an outcome of that failure.

However, if we do see a dollar collapse, it is almost certain to take all fiat currencies down with it.

Let me repeat that, a dollar collapse will almost certainly take all of the world's other fiat currencies down with it -- so there is no country to which you run to avoid the consequences of that event.

The problem isn't limited to the insolvency of America's banking system, the problem is a systemic failure of the fiat currency/credit expansion model that the western world adopted after World War II, as an experiment it was hoped would create a greater, sustainable prosperity.

Here are a few tips for surviving the collapse of the fiat currencies should it come:

The currently popular craze of decamping from America to places like Singapore, Panama, Dubai and the various other tax havens that the Escape from the USA thinks of as safe, could prove to be more dangerous, not less. A family selling a house in California and buying another one in Singapore, may not have improved their survivability potential one wit.

You need to be able to move quickly, so renting is the ticket, until the dust begins to clear and patterns become once again discernible.

Already there is serious talk in Europe of a coordinated lashing out at all of the tax havens. In a fiat money collapse, expect this to happen.

Consider Panama, no human being gets madder and more crazy than someone that just got used to having a little wealth, only to see it being snatched away. So people there will be angry, especial at Yanks. And Panama's use of the dollar as their national currency and reliance on shipping of goods from China to US and Euro zone, really makes it potentially the worst of all countries to be living in a worldwide collapse. Lots of potential for serious unrest there, and Yanks would certainly be the PRIME TARGETS of all the anger. Yet, developers in Panama are building numerous survival communities for Yanks, and apparently panicky Yanks are paying large premiums over other Panama property to join these little Yankee villages in a great sea of Panamanians.

I am afraid that getting out of dodge could be even worse than staying in Dodge for Americans. If the dollar pulls down all the other fiat monies, Americans are going to blamed for this fiasco and hated intensely for years. The people of Europe got so mad at the Jews for becoming money lenders and the tax collectors for the feudal lords of Europe a millennium ago, that their hate has survived into the present day. This could finally eliminate that hate, and make Americans the people to hate for the next millennium.

Yanks are sure to be demonized after a worldwide currency collapse -- especially in emerging economies like Panama. America's mortgage fraud that will forever be blamed for setting in motion the events that stole everyone's shinny future.

Expect many young democratic nation states and probably even some long stable democracies to slip into dictatorship after a fiat money collapse.

Be prepared for large cities everywhere to become about as hospitable to a middle class Yank family as moving into Sauder City in Iraq at the height of the insurgency would have been or building a mountain villa in Taliban controlled west Pakistan.

People are going to go completely ape if the fiat monies go down and all the jobs go away and the government checks all suddenly become worthless.

And there will be no one to protect you, expect cops and military units, no longer being paid enough to feed their families, to use the color of authority to loot.

During the great depression, lots of jobs went away, but governments, for the most part, were not badly indebted, as they are today. So they were up to the task of maintaining stability in most places. But even so, Great Depression I still ultimately lead to World War II.

So who knows where a potential much worse Great Depression II might wind up.

Stability could almost completely evaporate worldwide, if the fiat currencies start collapsing.

Instead of the 25% to 30% unemployment of Great Depression I, we could see 80% out of work in most major cities. How do you pay people when there is no currency with any value? How do you sell your good? How can there be many jobs? What are all those dependent upon the government for checks going to do when those checks become worthless?

It is a recipe for looting, crime and chaos on an unimaginable scale.

So, what is the safest place for an American citizen to ride out the chaos?

Probably a small, stable little farming community in rural America or Canada, far from any large city and surrounded by lots of natural resources. But even there, I would not buy a house, I'd rent one. To allow you to immediately head for wherever the recovery began picking up momentum the fastest.

There could rural and urban areas that fall backward for a time into a version of tribalism after a fiat money collapse.

If Asia can hold together, it will probably come back much quicker than America and Europe. But that is a really big IF. China's control of the press, might let them keep their currency from collapsing along with the other fiat monies. But even if they can do that, the Chinese economy has been spinning the wheel so fast to get their people into the now collapsing fiat/credit economic system, that their country could simply fly apart upon the failure of that system.

A complete disintegration of China is fairly likely in a fiat money collapse, and I mean complete, like throwing a bowling ball into a max-rpm jet engine. And if China explodes, anywhere in Asia would be the last place a Yank would want to. Being the foreign stranger in a strange land suddenly in total rebellion and chaos, no thanks. Especially if you are from the country that everyone will be blaming for their troubles.

The thing to do is just calmly become as flexible as possible.

Only rent don't own.

Cultivate neighbors for mutual defense in a crisis.

Always keep a full pantry.

Once the stores are gone, cheap gold rings will be tradeable for goods in informal markets everywhere, so fill up a safe deposit box with them.

Expect gold coins and bullion to be confiscated by most of the nations states, once their fiat moneys collapse. Confiscation happened in the USA during Great Depression I, so there is precedent for this action, but there is likely to be an exemption for jewelry.

A quality handgun, not an AK or AR, is going to offer the best protection after a currency collapse. With all the panic after a currency collapse, heading toward a store to score some food for your family carrying an AR, is apt to get shot on sight by the very nervous sniper hired by the merchant to protect is property from looters. A handgun stuck in you belt under your shirt offers good protection without causing others to perceive you as a shoot-on-sighting level threat.

Just try to keep clear of the chaos until pockets of stability return, and then go to one of those, but don't buy -- rent.

Labels: Memes, Next

3/12/2009
Will future historians blame environmentalists for the destruction of all coastal cities?
I continue to meet environmentalist that are deluding themselves with the belief that some giant conservative conspiracy, probably lead by Dick Chaney, is behind the renewed interest in nuclear power. Nope! It is guys like me that have noticed that their opposition to nukes has only caused the demand for power that nuke plants could have satisfied with no CO2 release, to get satisfied instead by CO2 belching coal-fired plants. Hundreds more of them than we would have had without their opposition to nuclear power. That is not a solution, it is a path to Armageddon.
Nuclear isn't the perfect energy solution but it is far less destructive to the planet than any of the other options for creating the necessary amount of energy at a price civilization is willing to pay.
The only option to nukes for saving our coastal cities that is practical, proven to work and affordable is active global warming control using Sunshade, but most environmentalists still mindlessly oppose this option as well. If all the world's coastal cities wind up underwater due to global warming in 2101, today's environmentalists will shoulder a lot of the blame .... more

Labels: Memes, Next

3/11/2009
Wanton cowardice in the face of humanity's greatest enemy - ignorance In the face of humanity's greatest enemy, ignorance, The Fertility Institutes caves to a little negative press.

EYE AND HAIR COLOR PROGRAM SUSPENSION
In response to feedback received related to our plans to introduce preimplantation genetic prediction of eye pigmentation, an internal, self regulatory decision has been made to proceed no further with this project. Though well intended, we remain sensitive to public perception and feel that any benefit the diagnostic studies may offer are far outweighed by the apparent negative societal impacts involved. For those patients with albinism or other ocular pigmentation disorders, we continue to offer preimplantation genetic diagnosis in general but will not be investigating the genetics of pigmentation of any body structures.

If we allow the ignorant of some to prevent us from engineering smarter, better, longer-lived versions of our kind, we will doom our species to a premature extinction. Contrast the cowardice of these doctors to the bravery of this woman.... more

Labels: Memes, Mods

3/11/2009
Simple technique can preserve the ability of your eyes to focus By constantly staring at a computer screen, a bit-pusher can actually cause a decline in the ability of their eyes to focus. Looking away from the screen for a moment to focus on walls various distances away or on something out a window every 10 or 15 minutes will preserve the focusing ability of your eyes.... more

Labels: Memes

3/10/2009
Young people who view old age negatively are much more likely to have heart disorders later on Researchers examined data on hundreds of men and women who have been studied for almost four decades as part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging were surprised to discover that there is a strong link between ageism early in life and poor heart health later on. "Our research suggests," the authors write, "that people are internalizing stereotypes of old age when they are still quite young - with far reaching [negative] consequences [to their own health].".... more

Labels: Memes

3/10/2009
Evidence that horse domestication caused the development of organized religion
You may have read recent reports from archaeologists that horse domestication seems to have begun in Kazakhstan about 5,500 years ago. Archeological evidence, like the thong bridle shown in the ancient horse image and changes in horse bones due to domestication for riding, appear to strongly support this date and place.... more

What makes this research especially interesting is that this archeological evidence supports the theories of anthropologists that both the concepts of feudalism and organized religion were invented to help defend against the development of horse-mounted village raids.

The theory is that hiking miles to the next village and lugging back the loot on foot was harder than just growing and weaving your own food and clothing. So up until someone figured out how to ride a horse, it only rarely happened and villages thrived. But after horse riding was invented, attacking and looting the neighboring villages became a lot easier than doing the work yourself, and begin to proliferate rapidly, putting the continued existence of villages in jeopardy.

To counter this new horse riding technology, in the years immediately following its invention. Archeology shows that the homes of village headmen began to grow into fortified feudal keeps that eventually became medieval castles. While, simultaneously, organized religious activity began as a means of persuading young village men to fight off attackers in an organized way.

Feudalism continue to thrive until another invention, the cannon, ended the protective value of keeps, castles and city walls and created the need for standing armies to repel invaders, causing the decline of feudalism in favor of the nation state political organization model.

Organized religion has proved to be a more robust meme than feudalism. Over 5,000 years after some clever person first discovered that promising a young person eternal life in paradise should they fall in battle doing their leader's bidding was a highly effective recruitment tool.

That process is still being used to manipulate youthful minds into serving as soldiers and suicide bombers by political leaders today, and leaders remain motivated to subsidize organized religion with grants and tax breaks, because of its political usefulness to them. The organized religion meme may well continue producing beneficial results for political leaders, at the expense of the young and gullible, for many more years to come.

Labels: Memes

3/09/2009
The long and deadly tragedy of the crusade against knowledge
How tragic that a politico, out to gain votes by catering to superstition, was able to retarded progress in one of the most promising medical breakthroughs of all time, regenerative medicine utilizing stem cells. Research labs were forced to do ridiculous things like buying a second multimillion dollar electron microscope with private funding. Because their existing and available microscope happened to have been purchased years earlier with a Federal grant. So putting even one stem cell into it would be grounds for withholding of all future government funding from every lab at that entire university. Could anything be more ridiculous?

And yet over the years, millions of lives have been prematurely snuffed out by exactly this sort of ignorant behavior. Even the use of blood transfusions remained banned for decades. Because the politicos of that time catered to the ignorant demands of priests and preachers claiming that a person's soul traveled around the body in their bloodstream, so a transfusion of blood might offend god by mixing immortal souls together, resulting in the damnation of the person who's life was saved by a transfusion. Were they not so deadly, how laughable such beliefs would be, but they are deadly, extremely deadly.

From witch burnings to bans on transfusions and stem cell research to suicide bombings, millions of innocent lives have been sacrificed on alters of ignorance, maintained by profoundly amoral and murderous men and women, who are able to gain political currency by masquerading as our society's moral guardians.... more

Labels: Memes, Mods

3/07/2009
Cloud bot lets you animate your own webmovie in just minutes
This animated webmovie, revealing for the first time the true nature of the future, was created in about 10 minutes using a cloud bot ... more

Labels: Bots, Memes, Mesh, Mods

3/06/2009
The human capacity for slavish adherence to religious or ideological dogma The human capacity for slavish adherence to a religious or ideological dogma, can abrogate reason, blind to the most egregious errors, cause unspeakable atrocities to be committed and condoned, and if allowed access to the super-empowering technologies in labs today, could become responsible for the extinction of our species.

Labels: Memes

3/05/2009
How much can you count on you government to keep you secure? Shortly after the 9/11 attack, America was hit again when key Democratic lawmakers along with some members of the press were sent letters containing deadly anthrax spores. A number of postal workers and one media person died. The FBI has now concluded that this attack came from a U.S. Army laboratory and was perpetrated by a U.S. Government scientist. The scientist the FBI blamed recently committed suicide and members of Congress briefed on the FBI's case, say that it is doubtful it would have stood up in court. And what has happened to the lab where the spores originated. It has profited handsomely out of the attack using their spores, with billions in additional tax payer dollars flowing into their coffers as a result of the fear the attack generated ... more

Labels: Memes

3/04/2009
Religious beliefs evolved and persist because they reduce anixety & stress For years a taboo subject for serious scientific research, a number of recent studies are providing clues as to why religious memes evolved and persist. One recent study found that while fundamentalist churches impose more behavior restrictions on members than mainstream churches. They actually compensate members for this imposition by providing them with much more real assistance in times of trouble. Thereby, making themselves a more rational choice for those living nearer the financial edge.
Now a new University of Toronto study has shown that compared to non-believers, religious participants experience significantly decreased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the portion of the brain that causes anxiety and stress from making a mistake. The stronger the religious zeal, the less their ACC fired in response to errors, and the fewer errors a subject made in a Stroop task -- a well-known test of cognitive control.

"We found that religious people or even people who simply believe in the existence of God show significantly less brain activity in relation to their own errors," said psychology professor Michael Inzlicht. "They're much less anxious and feel less stressed when they have made an error." ... more

Your atheist neighbors may never burned witches, launched Holy Wars or Crusades, or fly airliners into skyscrapers, but they are likely to experience more anxiety and be more stress out. We've all wondered why, so often, a strictly materialistic worldview appears not to be conducive to good mental health. Now we have research that shows us why this is true.
So how do we apply this new knowledge?
By experiencing our Universe as an incredibly majestic system that requires every species spawned within it to become intelligent enough to spread outward to other star systems or face an early extinction that leaves millions of generation of their offspring forever unborn. By taking on as a higher goal cooperating with like-minded individuals to push progress towards the preservation of our species. One may be able to live rationally, while still obtaining the benefits of reduced anxiety and stress that belief in mythological super beings apparently conveys.
There is great comfort in knowing that you have helped to push forward, even in a small way, the preservation of a cognitive line that will be lost if humans, humods and cognobots fail to develop the wisdom and technologies necessary to move outward across multiple star systems at a fast enough pace ... more

Labels: Memes

3/03/2009
Keeping all our eggs on one planet is a sure path to extinction
Discovered only on Feb. 28th, asteroid 2009 DD45 had a near miss with Earth on March 2nd at 13:44 universal time (8:44 a.m. ET). If 2009 DD45 had impacted with Earth, its 20 to 50 meter size and 20 kilometers per second speed would have allowed it to destroy everything with a circle about the distance from downtown New York City to downtown Philadelphia. An ocean impact would create an enormous wave capable of destroying multiple coastal cities ... more

Labels: Memes

3/03/2009
Towards a better democracy: "none of the above" How many times have you voted for someone as the lesser of two evils? A simple solution is to require a third choice always be included. We should have the option of voting "None of the Above" and if that choice receives more votes than any candidate, a new election should be held with a new slate of candidates ... more

Labels: Memes

2/25/2009
All drugs found to have serious side effect -- they drive politcos insane Imagine you are seated at a table with two bowls in front of you. One contains peanuts, the other tablets of the illegal recreational drug MDMA (ecstasy). A stranger joins you, and you have to decide whether to give them a peanut or a pill. Which is safest? You should give them ecstasy, of course. A much larger percentage of people suffer a fatal acute reaction to peanuts than to MDMA. This, of course, is only a thought experiment; nobody would consider doing it for real. But it puts the risks associated with ecstasy in context with others we take for granted. Sadly, perspective is something that is generally lacking in the long and tortuous political debate over illegal drugs ... more

Labels: Memes

2/25/2009
Never, ever feed a zombie bank An undead bank is an abomination. It will pretend good health but hide a rot. It will afflict you, over and over and over again, with harrowing near insolvencies (cf Citibank). Dead banks must be allowed to die ... more

Labels: Memes

2/24/2009
How to use COG (Cloud Organization Generation) to create a cloud crowd to solve any problem too big for you to solve alone
Here is a great talk architect Cameron Sinclair gave at the 2006 TED, where he explains how he successfully used COG (Cloud Organization Generation) to spawn an open cloud crowd organization of designers and architects covering 104 countries, dedicated to finding locally constructable and affordable habitat solutions for every part of our world. Nothing could illustrate the bankruptcy of our old institutions and the need for COG solutions any better than the story he tells of how it took the UN 20 years to add a flap to the standard tent they send to disaster areas to stop their tents from getting too hot to use inside. While the new cloud crowd that he triggered into existence was able to generate many far better tent designs, raise resources, manufacturer and started deploying a tent customized to the locality and circumstances in just a matter of days. Our old institutions are far worse than merely inept. Many have a fundamental flaw in their design that causes them to often generate immoral results. As when food relief is rushed in willie nillie after a famine, such that prices for local farmers' output collapses, they are unable to plant the next year, and the cycle of famine-rescue-famine-rescue gets forever perpetuated ... watch

Labels: Memes, Mesh

2/24/2009
Bernanke incentivizes banks to keep lying about their problem assets Bernanke told lawmakers at a Senate Banking Committee hearing today:

The Treasury will buy convertible preferred stock as needed in the 19 largest U.S. banks after stress tests to determine how much capital is needed to address losses in a worse case scenario. The shares will be converted to common only as the extraordinary losses happen, he said.

What this does is to incentivize banks to continue to cover up their problem assets. If banks reveal the true fall in value of their assets, they will be punished by having their equity diluted as the government takes common shares. However, if they can cover these loses up effectively, then the stock bank executives and others hold will continue to have some value.

So why is the Fed giving banks an incentive to lie rather than forcing them to come clean and actually fix their problems?

The only reason I can think of is that the magnitude of the bailout necessary to fix this mess must be so huge that the Fed and Treasury are afraid to undertake it for fear doing so might collapse investor confidence in US government debt and potentially even put the value of the dollar into a downward tailspin.

Labels: Memes

2/24/2009
Could a greater than human intelligence bring about a utopia? The Accelerating Future blog looks at the idea that AI cognobots or mind expanded humods might be a singularity capable of turning the Earth into a utopia.

According to Vinge's definition, the Singularity is the creation of greater than human intelligence. Vinge says this could happen in four ways: 1. The development of computers that are awake and superhumanly intelligent. (To date, most controversy in the area of AI relates to whether we can create human equivalence in a machine. But if the answer is yes, we can, then there is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed shortly thereafter.) 2. Large computer networks (and their associated users) may wake up as a superhumanly intelligent entity. 3. Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent. 4. Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural human intellect ... more

Just between us, I have a time machine and went forward to check and #3 happens long before the others. If you don't believe it, check out this link: Using light to activate brain circuits with nanoparticles. Your brain tied directly into all the cloud's data with some, good semi-smart data retrieval and evaluation bots (like where Google is becoming) working for you would be an incredibly formidable cognitive construct.

Labels: Bots, Memes, Mods

2/24/2009
Why increased regulation can't fix our broken financial system A basic economic principal dictates that setting up a government regulator board never works in favor of consumers. This is because the regulated industry will pour far more time and resources into influencing and taking control of their regulatory board than will consumers of the product or service consumed. So the regulated industry will eventually, inevitably, gain control of their regulatory board.
Take the example of state real estate boards. You only occasionally buy a house, so you as a consumer of this service, don't pay much attention to what your state real estate board does, but real estate brokers do. Rather than protecting consumers, all these boards in every state have been protecting brokers instead. They try to limit competition and drive up prices by making it ever harder to become a broker. Brokers once had to employ large clerical staffs to keep track of listings and type out long contracts one at a time on manual typewriters. Today the computer does all that for them, but have their prices come down. No, in fact, state real estate boards have consistently abused brokers that tried to lower prices, evening taking them to court and trying to lift their licenses to practice.
These boards, created to prevent a small number of cases each year where consumers were overcharged by realty agents, now run reality cartels for brokers that insure nearly every customer of this industry gets overcharged.
So should we be surprised that regulators failed to stop the abuses that collapsed the world's economy? No, it is the nature of regulation that this will always happen.
Whenever a problem like the current financial mess arises, increase regulation seems to many like the shinny, easy solution, but in the long run it will inevitably degenerate into a systemic consumer fleecing facilitator. The only real solution is the hard work of designing new more robust markets and systems that have enough built in mechanisms for promoting sufficient transparency to allow them to truly function in a free and open way.

Labels: Memes

2/23/2009
The big joint lie from the Treasury, FDIC, OCC, OTS and Federal Reserve A joint statement from the Treasury, FDIC, OCC, OTS and Federal Reserve issued this big lie: "Currently, the major U.S. banking institutions have capital in excess of the amounts required to be considered well capitalized." The reality is that America's banks are nothing like "well capitalize," they are essentially bankrupt.

To understand why, reduce the American banking system to one single small bank called, Rupt Bank. Rupt Bank holds exactly $1 million in assets all invested in a single house mortgage in California. The house appraised for $1.2 million when the loan was made, giving Rupt Bank a nice $200,000 cushion against a loan default. Rupt Bank got that $1 million to loan by selling $50,000 in stock to investors and then opening up an office in that strip mall near your house and getting $950,000 worth of deposits from you and your neighbors.

Unfortunately for us all, since the 1990's, both the FED under Alan Greenspan and Congress pursued policies that diverted enormous amounts of cheap capital from other investments into home ownership. This caused house prices, adjusted for inflation, which had remained fairly stable in America for over a century, to soar up to more than double the inflation adjusted norm.

When this credit bubble popped, Rupt Bank's $1,200,000 house in California fell in value to just $600,000. The owner cut out, leaving the bank to resell the house and take a loss on that sale of $400,000. With capital of only $50,000, this means that Rupt Bank lost $350,000 of their depositor's money right out of your and your neighbors' bank account.

This is exactly what has happened to thousands of banks all across America including all of America's largest banks like Citi and BOA. Each of them has lost ALL of their capital and quite a lot of their depositors' money as well.

Banks don't want you to know this and neither does the US Treasury, FDIC, OCC, OTS or Federal Reserve, and thus we are given lies. They are lying to us because in a situation of this kind a run on a bank could start at anytime and spread like wildfire to other banks, perhaps to all American banks, since nearly all are, in fact, insolvent. If a general bank run should begin, you will eventually get your dollars up to the $250,000 insured by the FDIC, but by the time you get them, they are likely to be worth much less than on the day before the bank run began.

A radical reboot of our civilization is going on, and wars for oil, a collapsing world economy, runs on banks, collapsing currencies and bankrupt governments are the sort of things you should be prepared to survive.

Labels: Memes, Next