Rachel Kramer Bussel highlights eight new sex trends on the Internet. Here's her description of a new site called I Just Made Love:
With just shy of 60,000 entries, this site lets you record each of
your individual sexploits like a notch on a virtual bedpost. A map of
the earth on the homepage tracks where each entry is coming from so you
can see where, when, and how other people are getting off all over the
world. The map even has a filter option that allows you to view, say,
just lesbians, or couples who recently did it outdoors, providing a
fascinating, almost anthropological real-time survey of global sex
patterns. As of this writing, a gay male couple had just made love in
Greenland, the Spaniards were using condoms the most often, Portugal
was having the most sex per capita, and someone named Foi Otimo was
getting laid on a minuscule South Atlantic island called Edinburgh.
Matt Sigl sends George Lucas a cease-and-desist letter:
It has come to our attention that your actions over the past decade in the production of the films Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars Episode 3: Return of the Sith (hereafter referred to as "Star Bores") as well as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(hereafter referred to as "Grandpa Jones") infringes upon the rights of
millions of moviegoers to preserve their childhood memories unscathed.
This is a clear violation of your contract with the public to create
films worthy of the legacy that you, yourself, began in 1977. Your
recent actions have been grossly negligent, displaying a complete lack
of regard for taste and artistic merit. Star Bores and Grandpa Jones
represent a failure to satisfy the duty of care mandated for a
filmmaker of your status. A partial list of the infringing acts are enumerated herein:
View Sigl's list here. Trey and Matt's admonition of Lucas was a little less subtle:
I think there is a case to be made for Palin's take on the "hoarding" of Qs and Ks. Hoarding has more than one meaning and one of those is too keep as to
one's self. I think good Scrabble players know you don't just use those letters willy-nilly. You may be able to spell "quit" upon drawing a Q, but may not be able to place that word on a good scoring square, only giving you 13 points. If you drop "quit" on the right squares and rack up double or even triple word/letter bonuses, that can really turn the game around. You may even be able to place "quitter" on the board and get the 50 point bonus for using all your tiles. Pain me as this may, I tend to go with the Palin take on
this one.
And to anyone who suggests any sort of pun by using Scrabble letters to spell "quit" or "quitter" in regards to Palin, I loudly protest my innocence.
The St. Louis Fed has a good graph that shows the outstanding private
credit (consumer debt) since the end of World War II. I believe you are justified in your "two decades" comment although it
was actually about two and half decades ago that it really started to
explode after starting to ramp up in the 70's. Between about 1984 and
1990 it doubled from $400 billion to $800 billion. Then doubled again
in the '90's to $1.6 trillion by 2000. It appeared to be on pace to
double again this decade before this recession hit.
Now wait will Gitmo remains open through the middle of next year, finanical re-regulation gets gutted by Geithner, gays keep being fired from the military, unemployment plateaus at 12 percent, and more troops are sent to Afghanistan even as withdrawal from Iraq is postponed because they cannot even agree on an election date or terms despite months and months of negotiations.
Of course, there's a very very long way to go. And if health reform passes, unemployment begins to drop before next November, some movement occurs on Iran, and troops come home from Iraq in larger numbers ... anything can happen.
I think it's more aptly put that the new age of publishing has made it possible for small, opinionated news publications to have viable, market-based business models because they can cut the overhead that print requires. These publications have always existed in the print and web worlds, just with subsidies, witness: The Nation, The National Review, and any of the myriad of think tanks like the Cato Institute or the Center for American Progress.
Ultimately, Josh Marshall may be more like the William Buckley of his day but, ironically, with a market based business model rather than a subsidized one.
However, we should probably be careful before going too far with any of this. Marshall is funding his current expansion with investment funds provided by Marc Andreessen. The impressive thing is that Marshall was able to make his expansion pitch based on solid financials. We have yet to see whether the expanded vision he's headed toward is itself profitable.
In October 1937, Dominican President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina ordered the execution of the Haitian population living within the borderlands with Haiti. The violence resulted in the killing of 20,000 to 30,000 Haitian civilians over a span of approximately five days, which would later become known as the Parsley Massacre due to the shibboleth which Trujillo had his soldiers apply to determine whether or not those living on the border were native Dominicans who spoke Spanish fluently. Soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley, ask "What is this?", and assume that those who could not pronounce the Spanish word perejil (called pèsi in Haitian Creole, persil in French) were Haitian. Within the Dominican Republic itself, the massacre is known as El Corte ("the cutting").
The conventional wisdom is that we're living in the era of the death
of the book. This is, of course, ridiculous. We live at a time of
unprecedented literacy. People love to read. They read all the time.
You are, right now, in the middle of reading this.
But I have to say, after seeing the [above] "book trailer," I'm
starting to feel like the death of the publishing industry is long
overdue. If, for some reason, you can't watch this, it goes like this:
Andrew Halcro's final take-down of Going Rogue can be read in full here. Once again, it reveals the endless omissions of salient fact and concoctions of pure fantasy that mark this disgrace of an un-fact-checked, unedited celebrity-vehicle published solely for money and political insurance. Palin revels in the cowardice of a bully:
There is no personal growth in the entire book, from the beginning
where she blames the old boy network (Ruedrich, Allen, Stevens,
Murkowski) to the final chapter of blaming the new boy network
(Schmidt, Bitney, Wallace et al.) she exhibits no personal growth as a
person, a candidate or in her role as an elected official.
In
every capacity she is always the aggrieved party, even when she is in
charge and has the power to change the circumstances. But more
importantly, her tale of woe proves one thing; Sarah Palin is no
Barracuda, she's more like a spineless jelly fish...
Kottke highlights the following passage from Matt Zoller Seitz's "Feast":
Cooking, perhaps more than any activity, lets an actor exude absolute physical and intellectual mastery without seeming domineering or smug. Why is that? It's probably because, while cooking is a creative talent that has a certain egotistical component (what good cook isn't proud of his or her skills?), there's something inherently humbling about preparing food for other people. It doesn't matter whether you're a workaday gangster footsoldier giving lessons on how to cook for 20 guys, like Richard Castellano's Clemenza in The Godfather, or a hyper-articulate, super-fussy kitchen philosopher like Tony Shalhoub in Big Night, ("To eat good food is to be close to God..."), when you're cooking, it's ultimately not about you; it's about the people at the table. Their approval and pleasure is the end game.
Read the rest of the essay and watch more sumptuous scenes here.
You won't find the results or analysis in the MSM which is why we have Jim Fallows at the Atlantic. If you did not read his brilliant dismemberment of lazy MSM reporting during the Asian tour, you can reprise the best here, here, here, here, here and here. If you haven't come away from this series of posts without a deeper and much better understanding of what Obama moved forward on this trip, then by all means return to watching cable news. But let's just look at the more recent headlines: Item One:
The cellphone has become the ultimate arbiter of social class in Iran,
replacing the car. A majority of Iranians do not own a car, but a
majority of Iranians do own a personal cellphone, which makes the all
important pursuit of conspicuous consumption in the Islamic Republic
much easier than before. As much as Iranians complain about their
perceived backwardness, the entry of cheap East Asian cellphones into
the Iran market over the last few years has put them on the vanguard of
new forms of social communication -- one of which is probably not seen
too much in the West. I am referring here to the phenomenon of
Bluetooth "sexting." (If you are an easily offended diaspora Iranian
pining in nostalgia for the homeland, please click away now.)
When I compare the headlong rush to transform the U.S. health system
to the invasion of Iraq, my left-of-center friends react with horror.
Though I think of the Iraq invasion as a noble effort plagued by
profound conceptual problems, they tend to think of it as the product
of a deceptive conspiracy perpetrated by war profiteers and their
pseudo-intellectual henchmen.
Suffice it to say, I definitely
don't think that the health reform effort is a conspiracy cooked up by
health profiteers, though it's easy to see how private health insurers
and the pharmaceutical industry and other powerful incumbents benefit.
I think of the health reformers as very similar to me when I was at my
most fervently hawkish: sincere and mostly pragmatic idealists who are
letting their highest hopes become expectations.
I'm sure some of that is in play and Reihan is right to warn of potential mess. But unlike the Iraq war, health insurance reform was a signature issue in the previous campaign debates - both primary and general - and a clear Obama campaign pledge from the get-go. Unlike the Iraq war, the proposal's long term costs have been inspected closely by the CBO. I know no one who believes that the total final costs over ten years could go from $50 billion to, by some estimates, between $2 trillion and $3 trillion and counting. And I know of no one who thinks the end result will wreck America's international standing.
But yes, more debate and scrutiny. If you really think three decades of failures, a year of campaign debate and a year of legislative wrangling really hasn't aired the issues sufficiently.
The National Geographic clip on twins was fascinating, not least for the language it used. At eight weeks, the clip says, the brain of a fetus with a Y chromosome is bathed in testosterone. "Not enough, " it hypothesizes, and the brain isn't sexualized to be attracted to women. The clip doesn't say if a fetus without the Y would receives 'too much' testosterone or 'not enough' estrogen at eight weeks to develop a same-sex attraction.
Later, the clip speaks of switches in the brain causing disease, and it flashes back to the gay twins as it emphasizes the word 'disease,' visually implying the gay twin is diseased, the straight twin isn't, because of the way the switches in their genes were activated. In both instances, the underlying tone is a tone of "being gay is wrong, a genetic disease." This tone, it feels to me, forgoes any question of potential gain for same-sex attraction, re-enforcing negative social bias.
I also thought it amazing that the research suggests attraction to men is the norm, attraction to women must be activated with a testosterone bath. I would have assumed the opposite, that attraction to men must be activated. (I am a heterosexual woman.)
Describing natural phenomena that are not of the norm, without describing them as somehow defective or diseased, is difficult given our cultural inheritance. I don't think all of it can be called bigotry as such; most of it is simply driven by majoritarian default assumptions. Freud saw homosexuality as not normal. But he didn't draw any "disease" assumption from that and saw heterosexuality as equally worthy of explanation.
Over the past two days on the Dish we recorded the reflections of a military wife, David Brin gave thanks to the United States, Blake Hurst celebrated a bountiful corn harvest, Erik Stokstad showed us how much food we waste, Hank Hyena explained how we could soon dine on dinosaurs, and we learned how domestication dumbed down the turkey. And don't miss this Thanksgiving rap (though you can probably skip this performance).
In other coverage, we discovered more horrors perpetuated by the Catholic Church in Ireland, watched an exploration of the genetic origins of homosexuality, and tooknote of the latest lies of Sarah Palin. Andrew tackled the vacuous nature of Karl Rove and responded to a reader over Reagan and greed.
In Dish publishing news, we blew through the first 2,000 copies of our Window View book in about four days. But we ordered another thousand at the special $16.25 price, so go here to get one while they last.
"Everybody in the family played Scrabble and took great pride in hoarding Ks and Qs and slapping them down in long, fancy words on triple-letter scores." -- Going Rogue, p. 12.
Any good Scrabble player knows it's impossible to "hoard" Ks or Qs, as there is only one of each in a set of tiles. As a fellow Scrabble player said, "Perhaps she was thinking she was playing Poker, where hoarding Kings and Queens might be beneficial?"
Steven Simon writes at (pdf) the Council on Foreign Relations about what an Israeli strike against Iran might mean for US interests. His list of consequences:
First, regardless of perceptions of U.S. complicity in the attack, the United States would probably become embroiled militarily in any Iranian retaliation against Israel or other countries in the region. Given uncertainties about the future of Iraq and a deepening commitment to Afghanistan, hostilities with Iran would stretch U.S. military capabilities at a particularly difficult time while potentially derailing domestic priorities.
Second, an Israeli strike would cause oil prices to spike and heighten concerns that energy supplies through the Persian Gulf may become disrupted.
"The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is
now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a
tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that
society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even
as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries
in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle," - Alan Kaufman, Evergreen Review.
Frank Furedi hates that current "educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children":
The fetishisation of change is symptomatic of a mood of intellectual
malaise, where notions of truth, knowledge and meaning have acquired a
provisional character. Perversely, the transformation of change into a
metaphysical force haunting humanity actually desensitises society from
distinguishing between a passing novelty and qualitative change. That
is why lessons learned through the experience of the past are so
important for helping society face the future. When change is
objectified, it turns into spectacle that distracts society from
valuing the truths and insights it has acquired throughout the best
moments of human history. Yet these are truths that have emerged
through attempts to find answers to the deepest and most durable
questions facing us, and the more the world changes the more we need to
draw on our cultural and intellectual inheritance.
Erik Stokstad reports that a group of researchers has found that Americans waste about 40% of their food:
Food waste is usually estimated through consumer interviews or
garbage inspections. The former method is inaccurate, and the latter
isn't geographically comprehensive. [Kevin] Hall and his colleagues tried
another approach: modeling human metabolism. They analyzed average body
weight in the United States from 1974 to 2003 and figured out how much
food people were eating during this period. Hall and [Carson] Chow assumed that
levels of physical activity haven't changed; some researchers think
that activity has decreased, but Hall and Chow say their assumption is
conservative. Then they compared that amount with estimates of the food
available for U.S. consumers, as reported by the U.S. government to the
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The difference between calories available and calories consumed, they say, is food wasted.
"Major Lazer (feat. Nina Sky & Ricky Blaze) - “Keep It Goin’ Louder.” Directed by the incomparably batshit Eric Wareheim (i.e. not safe for work, grandmas)."
At a bar last night, I was talking to someone smart who made an excellent point: that a very quiet, revolutionary act in the history of publishing had just taken place. (This person compared this moment to Gutenberg, which might be a little bit far afield but not that far off!) That is that Joshua Micah Marshall is hiring a publisher for Talking Points Memo, the blog he started all on his own in 2000, a bit before all the warbloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds came onto the Internet, and four years before Michelle Malkin. (Oh yes, how soon we forget.) My friend’s point was: here is an editor, who built and owns his publication, who is now going to be the editor-owner, who will employ the publisher. For those of you who have worked at any sort of publication, the implications of this are staggering.
The Big Picturerounds up some entries from National Geographic's annual International Photography Contest. The photo above is by Richard Rush. Vote for your favorites here.
In your post there was a small but odd detail that
caught my eye. You write "until Christians start condemning the greed and
debt and consumerism of the past two decades as morally wrong, they have no
standing on other moral questions that are now in play."
Why two decades? Why not three, four, ten, or two hundred? Was it an offhand
choice of words, or do you actually think American "greed, debt, and
consumerism" somehow started about one year into the first Bush
administration? In particular, was your choice of "two decades" an attempt,
conscious or unconscious, to downplay the role of Reaganism in the care and
feeding of American greed? Or, was it that you didn't arrive in the USA until
roughly two decades ago and didn't see firsthand the greed, laziness, and
magical thinking underlying the Reagan revolution.
The latest review of Sarah Palin's work of magical realism by someone who knows the truth comes to the same conclusion as everyone else:
In Going Rogue,
Palin mentions none of Wooten's military record, but cites many charges
that were brought against Wooten that were subsequently dismissed. She
contends that there were "ten different" citizen complaints field
against Wooten--without acknowledging that all of them were
filed by members of her family or close friends. "They filed every
stinking one of the charges," Wooten contends. "But it's been more like
two dozen." ...
Wooten calls the version of events rendered in Going Rogue
an "outright lie." Either it "didn't happen [the way she alleges]," he
says, "or she exaggerated it all beyond recognition. I look forward to
telling my side of this story."
Wooten now joins an ever-growing array of figures from John McCain on down who have challenged the veracity of Palin's memoirs. The list also includes McCain senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, Palin's former legislative director John Bitney, her former political ally Andree McLeod, and former Alaska gubernatorial candidate Andrew Halcro. All Republicans. Wooten identifies himself as a "conservative" as well.
When you realize how vicious her vendetta was against Wooten, her brother-in-law, you wonder again why she has kept such kid gloves on with Levi Johnston.
You also wonder whether any fact-checking was done at HarperCollins. Well: you don't have to wonder. They had no fact-checkers at Harper Collins when they marketed my book (I had to hire two of my own). A random blog, I'd wager, has more factual reliability than a book published by Jonathan Burnham and edited by Adam Bellow. Yes: Adam Bellow. Editing Sarah Palin. What a stunning emblem that is of so much.
Jonah Lehrer reviews Stanislas Dehaene's new book:
One of the most intriguing findings of this new science of reading is
that the literate brain actually has two distinct pathways for reading.
One pathway is direct and efficient, and accounts for the vast majority
of reading comprehension -- we see a group of letters, convert those
letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word's meaning.
However, there's also a second pathway, which we use whenever we
encounter a rare and obscure word that isn't in our mental dictionary.
As a result, we're forced to decipher the sound of the word before we
can make a guess about its definition, which requires a second or two
of conscious effort.
I disagree completely with you and Packer. Yes, as a person-under-thirty I came of age politically under the nightmare of Bush and I campaigned vigorously and voted for Obama. Having graduated in June 2008 I had the luxury of being able to do so while in college; with November just a few months after, and his victory more or less a foregone conclusion at that point (barring a brief scare with Palin-mania), it was easy to be passionate about a host of issues and the man himself.
But I’ve only had five cumulative months of employment since, this in spite of a “practical” degree (economics) from a “good” school (East Coast whatever - if my situation is any indication, an Ivy degree doesn’t mean jackshit). Friends of mine with relatively less worldly degrees in many cases have not been able to find a job at all in over a year. And it is not that we’re just sitting on our asses, playing video games because we think we’re above a certain kind of work - this high-handed claptrap is perhaps the most irritating snobbery of so-called “experts”, of a piece with their stellar market analysis over the last decade. No, when we say we can’t get a job, we mean we can’t get any job.
I remember very vividly a heated argument with Karl Rove over eight years ago in which I worried about spending and deficits. "Deficits don't matter!" Rove kept repeating in that nasal world-weary tone he has. After a bit, I said, "What do you mean, deficits don't matter? Don't you remember the 1990s?" "No, no, no, no, Andrew," he replied. "What I mean is that people don't vote on deficits. That's why they don't matter."
I learned then that nothing beyond short term politics motivates Rove. Nothing. And I also learned: this fathomless cynicism is not just repulsive, it's invariably wrong. People sure did vote on deficits in 1992. And one small reason Obama won in 2008 is because many Independents and Republicans couldn't trust the GOP to stop spending and borrowing us into oblivion in an era of economic growth.
Now, Rove - whose shamelessness is only matched by his incompetence - is writing a deficit hawk column for the WSJ.
A formal investigation of Dublin’s Catholic Archdiocese concludes that there is “no doubt” that child sexual abuse was
covered up by Church authorities over four decades. Patsy McGarry has more:
One of the most fascinating discoveries in the Dublin Archdiocese
report was that of the concept of “mental reservation” which allows
clerics mislead people without believing they are lying. According
to the Commission of Investigation report, “mental reservation is a
concept developed and much discussed over the centuries, which permits
a church man knowingly to convey a misleading impression to another
person without being guilty of lying”.
[A] report in May sought to document the scale of abuse as well as the reasons why church and state authorities didn't stop it, whereas Thursday's 720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese – home to a quarter of Ireland's 4 million Catholics – did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995.
By then, the investigators found, successive archbishops and their senior deputies – among them qualified lawyers – already had compiled confidential files on more than 100 parish priests who had sexually abused children since 1940. Those files had remained locked in the Dublin archbishop's private vault.
The Window book got a little swallowed up by Palinpalooza these past two weeks, but the sales didn't slacken. We sold 2,000 at the low, crowdsourced price of $16.25 within a week, and we've now persuaded Blurb to publish another 1,000 at the same price. After this next thousand are snapped up, the price will return to the normal $29.95. So now's your chance.
They're a great Holiday gift, especially for a Dish reader you know, or anyone else who might be captivated by a world-tour through 200 separate windows in 200 separate Dish-reading abodes across the planet.
You can preview the book here with an interactive guide at Blurb.com, the print-on-demand company that is publishing it. And you can buy it for only $16.25 here. Remember it's a four color, high quality, coffee table book that would usually cost well over $30 from a regular publisher. But we're forfeiting a profit at the Dish, crowd-sourcing the price, and although Blurb will make a small margin, we're still able to bring it to you at close to half price.
The model has been so successful, in fact, that we hope to build on this in the weeks and months to come with a range of cheap user-generated books that are able to air topics - such as late term abortion or the cannabis closet - that tend to be euphemized or turned into ideology, but have managed to unfold on the Dish in realler, clearer form.
But few Dish books have as large a place in our hearts as the Window guide.
It's 200 pages of window views, selected from all the submissions sent in over the past three years, with the front image and the back one picked by you, the readers of the Dish. The book has views on every page - and their contrasts opposite one another add a whole new dimension to the Dish's most popular feature. And there's a foreword recalling the genesis of the whole idea (yes, at the very beginning, I tried to call the whole thing off, but you kept sending views and I kept posting them).
Since this is Thanksgiving, I'd like to thank everyone who sent in a window view - and all of you who still are sending them in (future collections will include many). This book can and will be an annual event and we hope to make it better and cheaper in the future with this new publishing model.
I'd also like to thank Patrick and especially Chris Bodenner who made this project possible and did almost all the work, Scott Havens and Justin Smith at the Atlantic who brought it across the finishing line, Leigh Haber who shepherded it throughout and Eileen Gittins who runs Blurb and saw the new model as something worth pioneering.
Gittins' own view about the new publishing model this book portends can be read here.
Buy them now while the last thousand at $16.25 last.
Julian Sanchez has a smart post on Palin-mania and the blogs aping the MSM:
We like to say new media is allowing us all to be journalists. But it’s
probably more accurate to say it lets us all be anchors. Sure, the
Internet also allows people with local knowledge or serious expertise
to speak directly and be picked up by a wider audience, but it doesn’t
fundamentally do a whole lot to increase the population of
those people. But it radically expands the population of potential
anchors chasing them—or, increasingly, chasing each other. And we don’t
even have the benefit of a script written by someone who at least got
briefed by someone who knows something. So while on the one hand
there’s a well-recognized trend toward media fragmentation into deep
niches, there’s countervailing pressure toward convergence on a handful
of big shallow water-cooler stories.
Phillip Carter, who ran the blog Intel Dump before joining the Obama administration as an official for detainee affairs, resigned last week. Greenwald speculates:
[W]hat is abundantly clear is that many of the Bush/Cheney policies which
Carter found most offensive are ones which the new administration has
explicitly adopted as its own. Equally clear is that, following Greg
Craig, this is now the second high-profile resignation of a relatively
devoted civil libertarian in a short period of time. Combine that with
the still-missing-and-unconfirmed Dawn Johnsen, and all of this leaves
those who are indifferent or hostile to civil liberties values --
people like John Brennan and Rahm Emanuel -- with even fewer
counter-weights than before.
Generally considered cranially vacant even for a bird—the turkey
wasn’t always such a buffoon. The wild turkey was historically
considered a rather shrewd critter, difficult to fool with standard
hunting ploys and surprisingly agile. Did you know, for example, that
wild turkeys can climb trees? And if you throw an apple to a group of
wild turkeys they’ll play with it like a football, according to Oregon
State University poultry scientist Tom Savage.
We’ve all heard that Ben Franklin was so enamored with the wild
turkey that he thought it should have been named the national bird
instead of the bald eagle. He reasoned that the turkey embodied the
resilience and street smarts of the new Americans (unlike the austere,
detached eagle that seems more French). Back then, the turkey had class
and enjoyed a level of respect rare among fowl.
But then we started domesticating them, and every bit of the turkey’s appealing attributes were drained out like so much broth.
If the movie “Food, Inc.” can be said to have a theme, it is that
corn is too cheap. Cheap corn has led to industrial uses, cheap fast
food, and, horror of horrors, corn fed to cows. This year's harvest is
bad news for documentary makers, because we're bringing in a tremendous
crop. Corn prices are at two-year lows. Author of Fast Food Nation
Eric Schlosser's pain is palpable, but a big harvest should be a cause
for celebration for everyone else. Farmers make the news when weather
causes low yields and high prices, but plentiful and reasonably priced
food is such a given that nobody but we farmers celebrates a great crop
like this one. The rest of America should celebrate, and be grateful
for the abundance that agriculture provides.
A very useful reminder of the long view, in these days of precipitous decline after the disastrous, bankrupting, morale-breaking over-reach of the Bush-Cheney years:
Even if America is exhausted, worn out and a shadow of her former self,
from having spent her way from world dominance into a chasm of debt,
the U.S. does have something to show for it the last six decades.
A
world saved. A majority of human beings lifted out of poverty. That
task, far more prodigious than defeating fascism and communism or going
to the moon, ought to be viewed with a little respect. And I suspect
it will be, by future generations.
This should be contemplated, soberly, as other nations start to consider their time ahead as one of potential triumph. As they start to contemplate the possibility of becoming the next great pax or "central kingdom."
If
that happens ... will they emulate
Marshall and Truman, by starting their bright era of world leadership
with acts of thoughtful and truly farsighted wisdom? Perhaps even a
little gratitude?
"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from
emotions -- racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of
war -- which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms,
and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to
have lost all power of action ... [H.G. Wells] was, and
still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious
bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he
himself would describe as sanity."
And we appease or ignore those forces at our peril.
Hank Hyena, writing for transhumanist magazine H+, imagines the consequences of lab grown meat:
In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just
domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even
rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want
to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be
able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts—obviously,
"DinoBurgers" will be served at every six-year-old boy's
birthday party.
Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism.
Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M.
Banks predicted in his short story, "The State of the Art" with
diners feasting on "Stewed Idi Amin." But I imagine passionate
lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their
co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to
bread-making machines.
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