Theater Shooting Indicative Of Systemic Deficiencies

Today a friend of mine who happens to be a member of the NRA commented on the Aurora, Colorado Batman shooter. He said; "A gun didn't kill those people; a criminal did. With sympathies for the families and swift justice for the shooter." I replied by telling him that I obviously agree with his statement, but unfortunately life isn't so simple as to be explained away with a cliched altruism. I reminded him that the tension in our social environment is highly palpable, there's a great deal of divisiveness in ideologies and younger people are sensitive to this hostile atmosphere. Most kids today haven't known a time when our country wasn't at war with some nebulous entity that's ready to strike from the blue with an act of terror. They are fully aware of the financial catastrophe that looms, and their entertainment reflects their angst with the failed system. They see rampant fraud pervading just about every aspect of their lives, from GMO's to muni-bond bid-rigging schemes of wall street that put communities and entire nations into debt simply to loot their resources.

Added to these stressors is the violence in the video games and movies. I'm not blaming these products, but the producers market them in a way that makes violent crime and war glamorous. - Much of what passes for music these days seems to be all about 'popin caps' in someone, drug-dealing or 'bitches'. - Kids shows are a fast-paced barrage of flashing images and loud noise. - The commercials foster envy of the other kids that have these great shiny toys. The companies behind the ads do a great job of hiding the fact that, to them, their young impressionable audience is a huge market that needs to constantly be 'harvested' (marketing term, I kid you not). All this combined fosters cynicism, aggression, resentment and creates heightened social tension so that when you mix someone who's already on the edge mentally, and weapons that are too easily obtained, we get this.

I haven't heard any reports of neighborhoods, cities or states doing battle with each other (yet), so what other reason to have multiple assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, gas canisters and masks? For hunting? I'd say the critters are outgunned as it is. The fact that these items were legally obtained, even over the course of a few months shows that there needs to be a mechanism that alerts authorities when an individual buys weapons, bullets, body-armor or anything else that seems like the purchaser likes to play navy-seal as a hobby. How did this get past anyone? I'm sure the merchants of death are of the attitude "I'm not concerned with what they do after they leave the store." What a sense of community, huh? Every time someone buys munitions their name should be put in a data-base and, like many credit card companies, trigger an alert when any unusual patterns emerge.

While all this is bubbling just below the surface of our culture, the "war on terror" industrial complex seems more concerned with feeling up granny at the airport than conceiving a realistic and effective way of deterring nuts like this. Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel is a good model of what counter-terrorism should look like here. They use simple but effective tactics including bomb-sniffing dogs and profiling, Not racial profiling, but common sense observation of behavior. I suspect the various homeland security contractors here in the U.S. are more interested in assembling a security apparatus that maximizes profits in a way that looks like they're really concerned with our safety. Who knows, maybe James Holmes was a Manchurian Candidate let loose so as to promote gun control policies, or maybe he was just an ordinary guy, crushed by enormous debt, that became severely unhinged. Whatever the case, someone shoulda been hip to this cat weeks ago.

Could Machine Life Be The Next Logical Evolutionary Step, And The Key To Immortality?

We often like to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution, with our brains that can behold ourselves and plan the future. But we may not be the ultimate manifestation of natural selection which, theoretically, could progress until the universe ends. It may be the machines that we build to serve us that one day rule the planet, our solar-system and maybe even the universe. Imagine a vast artificial intelligence that links entire galaxies with beams of Tachyons, arranging the electro-magnetism of stars into hyper-networks. Even more amazing,our minds could be the ghosts in those machines!

Believe it or not there are those who would make this concept a reality. Collectively they are known as Transhumanists, and their progenitor is Ray Kurzweil, inventor of text to speech software and predictor of cloud technology. He foresaw the fall of the Soviet Union due to emerging decentralized electronic communication (which Gorbachev confirmed to Ray years later). He also lays claim to a list of tech-patents a mile long.

Now, the idea of becoming one with machine may seem far-fetched, but then so did the idea of wirelessly communicating around the world at the speed of light. Now, cell phones are more ubiquitous than people! Given the rate of technological progression as expressed in Moore's law, Ray predicts we will merge with machines sometime before 2050. Actually, we already do to a degree. When you drive your car you are interfacing with the machine to the point where you can 'feel' the road and know exactly where your wheels are. But Ray's idea is a little more of the kind where we can augment our brains with computer chips. He envisions a time when we upload our memories and brain patterns into a computerized data-base where we can live in a virtual world of whatever we program it to be. Or we could download into a waiting clone after we die (See last post), The possibilities are endless. This idea has also been featured in the popular TV series Battlestar Galactica (The New One) where the cylons, built by humans, have a "Resurrection-Ship" built solely for the purpose of getting a new body after the old one has been rendered useless.

Climate-change, Caused by humans or not (and I believe it is a result of pollution; you just can't pump trillions of TONS of crap in the air and expect nothing!), is progressing so fast that eventually, and soon, most biological life as we know it will find it hard to survive. Nano-tech based self-replicating machines with chips of human consciousness however, will be much more durable and can design their own upgrades, enhancements, and ultimately expand out into the universe itself.

This good-looking blonde chap on the right was actually built by roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro and is the latest of the geminoid line of androids his team has produced to study human-robot interactions. Again, bearing in mind the rapid progress of technology, think of what we'll be doing with these advancements in just the next 10 years!

What our technology will bring remains to be seen, but it's certain that it is growing exponentially and will absolutely have some unexpected surprises. It may be saddening to think that perhaps we are just a precursor to the ultimate living beings, that our tireless efforts at developing technology is simply driven by evolution with artificial intelligence the goal. But, as some have said, it's the journey, not the destination, so enjoy your corporeal body while you can.


Next post; "The Twisted Philosophy Of Ayn Rand", don't miss it!

Turning Inwards, Or Science Fiction Becomes Reality

I'm nearing the end of "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton, a 988 page tour de force of a science fiction novel. In it, Hamilton portrays a future that I had imagined I would grow up in, where we have spread out into the cosmos and harvested the near infinite resources of space (asteroids, solar radiation, etc). In his novel, humanity has harnessed wormhole technology and used it to build a commonwealth of star-systems, and people use the holes almost as daily transportation; It's much quicker to ride into a wormhole station in New York and come out in Paris two minutes later. A ride to the nearest colonized star-system would take an hour or so.

In Hamilton's universe, we have learned how to upload our memories into data-bases so that when we grow old, or experience a catastrophic organic failure, the memories are then downloaded into a ready made clone that's been cryogenically frozen until such need arises. So with plenty of space to grow, and death all but eliminated, everyone can pursue very long-term goals and see them to fruition.

It was along these lines that, when I was around 9 and already reading hard sci-fi, I thought the world would look like when I grew up. Well, not quite as advanced, but I imagined that after the introduction of the space-shuttle when I was 10, it would be on to the stars from there.
So much for that.
Needless to say Iv'e become quite disillusioned, almost to the point of being misanathropic; how could my species let me down like this...let all of humanity down? Many esteemed scientists, including Stephan Hawking and Michio Kaku hold that the window of escape is closing, that if we can't establish a foothold elsewhere in the solar system within 50 or 100 yrs, then we will most likely become extinct from one man-made cause or another.

So instead of continuing to turn inward against each other in endless wars for resources and bickering about senseless ideologies, we should be reaching for the stars for a common cause... survival. We have the potential, it can be done but time is running out.

Jumping Ship

I frequently watch Max Keiser for the latest dirt on the world of finance. Max knows his economics, for one thing, he invented the "Virtual Specialist Technology", a software system used by the Hollywood Stock Exchange. He also hosts several shows on diverse networks around the world. Since graduating from New York University, He's been involved with markets and finance for 25 years. Now, this isn't supposed to be a biographical account of mr. Keiser, I just want to be clear that he's knows what he's talking about. His shows expose the massive fraud that's been unleashed on the world by, shall I use the term "Banksters"? Now I know that there has always been shysters and dirty deals in high places, but since the repeal of the Glass Steagall act under the Clinton administration, it seems that the floodgates of corruption have opened wide. I was surprised to find that it's repeal happened under Clinton, but i'm sure he was duped into thinking that this would be a good thing for this new economic world order he helped create under NAFTA by his advisors. Either that or he's just another corrupt politician too. So, My point is that since 1999, the fraud in the corporate finance world has skyrocketed, and it all appears to be aimed at wealth extraction. The toxic assets that were sold around the world to municipalities have done nothing but put them into financial dire straits and even bankruptcy, and increased the coffers of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and the rest of their ilk manifold. Max insists that a global collapse is coming and we are simply kicking the can, or trying to ignore it out of existence. Well if that's the case, and many other esteemed economists seem to concur, then maybe the oligarchs are grabbing what they can before the ship goes down to abyss. Not to sound like a conspiracy nut, but it certainly isn't outside the realm of possibility. Well, this has been my first serious post, any comments? please?

OK, so this my first post on my second blog. The first was a half-hearted attempt with bad spelling, but with this blog I will post all sorts of things of interest that have one thing in common; they are all part of this experience of our current reality called modernity. I will post my observations of current events, sometimes recall things in my past and show their relationship to the present.I also want to use this blog to help me develop as a writer. My next post will be longer and more interesting as i won't have spent hours setting it up!