....But the blood is still the life. Chart the DNA, or Draw the Knife. The blade is made of glass and steel, the Monitor reveals the Code that
Explodes the mythology or mere mortality. Helpless is not Knowing, Know the stain that strains fiction from truth. Henry_Allen
Give Me Immortality Or Give Me Death!
By RU Sirius
May 18th, 2007
Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death!
According to transhumanist Michael Anissimov, there’s an even chance that we’re
looking at immortality or existential destruction in the next 20-40 years.
Anissimov is only 23-years-old but he’s already become an important figure in
the transhumanist movement. While still in high school, he became founder and
director of the Immortality Institute. He’s been active with the World
Transhumanist Association (WTA), and he is currently Fundraising Director, North
America for the Lifeboat Foundation.
Lifeboat Foundation describe themselves as “a nonprofit organization dedicated
to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive
existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies,
including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI as we move toward
a technological singularity.”
Anissimov also blogs regularly at Accelerated Future.
I interviewed him for my NeoFiles Show. Jeff Diehl joined me.
RU SIRIUS: Let’s start off talking about immortality. And let’s talk about it
personally. Do you want to live forever?
MICHAEL ANISSIMOV: Oh, absolutely! For sure!
RU: Why?
MA: Because I have at least a thousand years of plans already. And in those
thousand years, I’ll probably make another thousand years of plans, and I don’t
see any end to that cycle.
RU: Do you see the quality of life improving for yourself and for most human
beings?
MA: Yes, I do.
RU: Because I don’t know if I want to live forever under Darwinian conditions.
It gets tiring.
MA: I agree. It does. We need to take control of our own evolution before this
would be a planet really worth living on. I don’t think that thousands of years
of war would be good for anyone. So things do need to improve.
RU: Yeah. Even having to pay… who can afford a thousand years?
MA: (Laughs) Well, you’ll work for a thousand years…
RU: It’s very expensive!
MA: Yeah, people are dying to retire. So it would help out if we had the robots
doing a little bit more of the work.
JEFF DIEHL: So what’s your itinerary for the next thousand years?
MA: I want to go spelunking in every major cave. I want to climb the highest
peak on every continent. I want to write, like maybe at least ten nonfiction
books and ten fiction books. Mmmm…
RU: Some people have done that in a lifetime.
MA: I know!
JD: Yeah, you’re not very ambitious, man — come on!
See also…
» Create an Alien, Win A-Prize
» Why Chicks Don’t Dig The Singularity
» Death? No, Thank You
» Prescription Ecstasy and Other Pipe Dreams
MA: (Laughs) Think of ten possible lives you could live, and then think that you
don’t necessarily need to choose between them. You could live them back to back.
RU: On the other hand, you could pop your consciousness into several bodies and
have them all living simultaneously for only a hundred years. Would that be the
equivalent of living a thousand years?
MA: I don’t think so. I think that would just be like having kids. Copying
yourself would give rise to multiple independent strains of consciousness.
RU: Maybe there could be some kind of central person who could be taking in all
of the experiences.
MA: There could be some information exchange, but…
RU: Aubrey de Grey, of course, is the hacker-biologist who has become very well
known for saying that this is quite plausible in the near future. Is there any
progress that he’s pointed to, or that you can point to, since he really
proclaimed the plausibility of immortality some time around the beginning of
this century?
MA: Yeah. Recently Peter Thiel, former CEO of Paypal, offered three million
dollars in matching funds for projects related to this. And they’ve started
coming up with ways to actually use over a million dollars, I believe. They have
the MitoSENS project and the LysoSENS projects.
RU: What are these projects about?
MA: Well, with LysoSENS — lysomal junk is this stuff that builds up between
cells. And our natural metabolism doesn’t currently have any way of breaking it
down. So researchers are trying to exploit the law of microbial infallibility —
the notion that no matter what organic material you’re talking about, you’re
going to be able to find a microbe that can eat it. So they’re searching for
microbes that are capable of breaking down this junk. And they’ve been looking
in places like… next to a Burger King, because people throw burgers on the
ground and stuff like that. So there are special bacteria there that learn how
to break down these organic compounds. And some of these researchers have even
gotten permission to get soil samples from the people that run graveyards
because that’s where you’d expect to find the bugs. Basically, they’re looking
for specialized microbes that can dissolve that lysomal junk.
RU: IBM recently announced a naotechnology breakthrough. They said that “the
breakthrough marks the first time chips have been made with a self-assembling
nano-technology using the same process that forms seashells or snowflakes.” This
sounds like a really big deal.
MA: Yeah, it is! It’s not the same thing though as molecular manufacturing,
where you basically have a molecular assembly line that places each atom, one by
one. It’s not quite as intelligently controlled or productive, but it is a large
breakthrough.
RU: Yeah, the word jumps out at me — “self-assembling.” That sounds… you’re not
too excited?
MA: (skeptically) Ehhh. I mean, it’s pretty exciting but people have been
playing around with this stuff for a while
RU: OK. Let’s move on to your current work — The Lifeboat Foundation This
foundation is focused on existential risk, which is a board game, I think: Camus
v. Sartre.
MA: (laughs) Not exactly!
RU: I don’t know how you win. It’s probably like Waiting for Godot: A
Tragicomedy in Two Acts — the board game never arrives.
Anyway, in the discourse currently going around among people who are part of the
transhumanist schemata and transhumanist world — there seems to be a turn from
optimism towards a dialogue that’s sort of apocalyptic. And the Lifeboat website
seems to reflect that. Do you think that’s true?
MA: I think it is true to a small extent. I think it’s actually reflective of
the maturing of the transhumanist movement. Because it’s easy to say…
RU: “It’s gonna be great!”
MA: Particularly when the dotcom boom was happening, everyone was, like, “Oh,
the future’s gonna be great. No problems.” You know… “We’re making shitloads of
cash. Everything’s going to go well.”
Now, we’ve had seven years of George Bush. We’ve been involved in two wars. We
understand that reality isn’t always peachy keen and we’re going to have to deal
with the consequences.
RU: So are people in the transhumanist world as worried as they sound, or is it
partly political – trying to be responsible and ease concerns among people who
are perhaps more paranoid than technophiles like yourself?
MA: No, it’s very genuine. The more you understand about powerful technologies,
the more you understand that they really do have the potential to hose us all,
in a way that nuclear war can’t.
RU: Give me your top two existential risks.
MA: Well, as Dr. Alan Goldstein pointed out on your show a couple of weeks ago,
Synthetic Life is a huge risk because life is inherently designed to replicate
in the wild. So life based on different chemical reactions could replicate much
more rapidly than what we’re accustomed to, like some sort of super-fungus. I
think that’s one of the primary risks. And the second risk would be artificial
intelligence — human-surpassing artificial intelligence.
RU: So you’re concerned about the “robot wars” scenario — artificial
intelligence that won’t care that much for us? Do you have any particular
scenarios that you’re following?
MA: Well, I’d like to caution people to be careful what they see in the movies.
Because this is one of those areas where people have been speculating about it
for quite a few decades, and so much fictional material has been built around
it…
RU: Actually, I believe everything in Terminator I.
MA: (Laughs) If you really look through those shows in a critical way, you see
that they’re full of blatant holes all over the place. Like, they can send a guy
through time, but they can’t send his clothes with him through time? (Laughs) In
reality, I think that artificial intelligence is potentially most dangerous
because it might not necessarily need to have a robotic body before it becomes a
threat. An artificial intelligence that’s made purely out of information could
manipulate a wide variety of things on the internet. So it would have more power
than we might guess.
RU: You’ve written a bit about the idea of Friendly AI. (We had Eliezer
Yudkowsky on the show quite a while back, talking about this.) Do you see steps
that can be taken to ensure that A.I. is friendly?
MA: Yeah! I’m totally in support of Eliezer and the Singularity Institute. I
think that they’re one of the few organizations that has a clue. And they’re
growing. I think that you’ve got to put a lot of mathematical eggheads working
together on the problem. You can’t just look at it from an intuitive point of
view. You can actually understand intelligence on a mathematical level. It’s a
lot to ask. I think that friendly A.I. will be a tremendous challenge because
there’s just a lot of complexity in what constitutes a good person. And there’s
a lot of complexity in what constitutes what we consider common sense.
RU: Do you think the breakthrough might come through reverse engineering the
human brain?
MA: It’s possible but probably not.
RU: Good, because I don’t think human beings are that friendly. I think the
friendly A.I. has to be friendlier than human beings.
MA: It definitely does. And one way we could do that is by creating an A.I. that
doesn’t have a self-centered goal system. All creatures built by Darwinian
evolution inherently have a self-centered goal system. I mean, before we became
altruistic, we were extremely selfish. A reptile has eggs, and then the eggs
hatch and he just walks off. He doesn’t care about his kids. So this altruism
thing is relatively recent in the history of evolution, and our psychology is
still fundamentally self-centered.
JD: Isn’t trying to plan for the nature of these future AI’s kind of absurd
because of the exponential superiority of their reasoning… if they even have
what we would call reasoning? Can we really plan for this? It seems like once
you hit a certain threshold, the Singularity, by definition is incomprehensible
to us.
MA: I initially had the same issue. It seems impossible. But ask yourself, if
you could choose, would you rather have an A.I. modeled after Hitler or would
you rather have an A.I. modeled after Mother Teresa?
Regardless of how intelligent the A.I. becomes, it starts off from a distinct
initial state. It starts off from a seed. So whatever it becomes will be the
consequence of that seed making iterative changes on itself.
JD: But maybe in the first nano-second, it completely expunges anything that
resembles human reasoning and logic because that’s just a problem to them that
doesn’t need to be solved any more. And then beyond that — we have no fucking
clue what they’re going to move onto.
MA: It’s true, but whatever it does will be based on the motivations it has.
JD: Maybe. But not if it re-wires itself completely…
MA: But if it rewired itself, then it would do so based on the motivations it
originally had. I mean, I’m not saying it’s going to stay the same, but I’m
saying there is some informational similarity — there’s some continuity. Even
though it could be a low-level continuity, there’s some continuity for an A.I.
Also, you could ask the same question of yourself. What happens if a human being
gains control over its own mind state.
RU: How we understand our motivations might be distinct from how we would
understand our motivations if we had a more advanced intelligence.
MA: That’s true.
RU: I’m going to move on to something that was on the Lifeboat web site that
confounded me. It’s labeled a News Flash. It says, “Robert A. Freitas Jr. has
found preliminary evidence that diamond mechanosynthesis may not be reliable
enough in ambient temperatures to sustain an existential risk from microscopic
ecophagic replicators.”
JD: (Joking) I had a feeling that was the case. (laughter)
RU: What the hell does that mean?!
MA: Robert’s a bit of a wordy guy, but maybe I can explain it. You have an STM
(Scanning Tunneling Microscope.) It’s like a little needle that’s able to scan a
surface by measuring the quantum difference between the two surfaces. Diamond
mechanosynthesis would just be the the ability to have a tiny needle-like
robotic arm that places a single or perhaps two carbon atoms onto a pre-
programmed place. So, in life, we are all based on proteins. Carbon isn’t
slotted in like in a covalent sense, which is the way that people that are
working on nanotechnology are thinking of working. They’re thinking of putting
together pieces of carbon, atom by atom, to make a covalently bonding carbon.
Robert’s saying that it might be that the ambient temperature of the environment
is too hot for that needle to work. So you’d need to have it in a vacuum or
super-cooled environment for it to work.
RU: You did a good job of explaining that. Moving on, there’s some talk on your
site of the idea of relinquishment, which is deciding not to develop
technologies. Is that even possible?
MA: Instead of relinquishment, I like to talk about selective development. You
can’t really relinquish technology too easily. But you can develop safeguards
before technologies reach their maturity. And you can develop regulations that
anticipate future consequences instead of always taking a knee-jerk reaction and
saying: “Oh, this disaster happened; therefore we will now regulate.”
RU: Of course, it’s not really possible to regulate what everybody everywhere on
the planet is doing.
MA: No, it’s not.
RU: Are you familiar with Max More’s Proactionary Principle?
MA: (skeptically) Mmmm I’m…
RU: Too obvious?
MA: No, I don’t fully agree with it. I do think that the Precautionary Principle
has a point.
RU: Maybe I should say what it is. Basically, the Precautionary Principle says
that with any technology we’re developing, we should look ahead and see what the
consequences are. And if the consequences look at all dire, then we should
relinquish the technology. And Max More argues that we should also look at the
possible consequences of not developing the technology. For instance, if we
don’t develop nanotechnology, everybody dies.
MA: Well, I don’t think that would happen.
RU: I mean, eventually… just as they have for millennia.
MA: Oh — everyone will age to death!
RU: Right
MA: No, I agree that the balanced view looks at both sides of the equation. The
Precautionary Principle’s kind of been tarnished because there are people that
are super-paranoid; and people who use it as an excuse to rule out things that
they find ethically objectionable like therapeutic cloning.
RU: Well, you could take anything as an example. Look at automobiles. If we had
looked ahead at automobiles — we could debate for hours whether they were a good
idea. There would probably be less humans on the planet and there would probably
be less distribution of medicine and food and all those things. On the other
hand, we might not be facing global warming. It might be nice that there are
less humans on the planet.
MA: Yeah, but in practice, if some invention is appealing and has large economic
returns, then people are going to develop it no matter what.
RU: On the Lifeboat site, you have a list of existential risks. And people can
sort of mark which existential risk they want to participate in or work on. I’d
like to get your comments on a few of the risks that are listed. But before I go
down a few of these things on the list, what do you think is up with the bees?
MA: The bees?
RU: The honeybees are dying off. Einstein said we wouldn’t survive if…
JD: … there’s some contention about whether he actually said that. I heard that
somebody tried to find that quote, and they weren’t able to find it.
MA: What does this have to do with the bees?
RU: Einstein said that if all the honeybees died off, we’d all be dead in four
years, or something like that.
JD: Yeah, because of the natural cycles that they support. Somebody else
debunked that.
RU: Well, he was no Einstein. You better look into the bees because that could
be an existential risk.
So here’s one of the risks – or the risk aversion possibilities — listed on the
site: Asteroid Shield.
MA: Well, someone once said that we’re in a cosmic shooting gallery and it’s
only a matter of time before we get nailed. I wouldn’t consider this to be a
high priority, but in the interest of comprehensiveness, it would be a good idea
if we had a way to deflect asteroids. Serious scientists have been looking at
this issue and they decided that knocking it out with a nuclear bomb wasn’t
really going to work so well. It’s too expensive and too unpredictable. So
they’re talking about attaching small rockets to slowly pull an asteroid off
course.
JD: I recently read one idea — collect a lot of space junk and create one big
object to alter the gravitational…
MA: Or you can put a little electro-magnetic rail gun on the surface and
progressively fire off chunks of the asteroid, which will also alter its course.
Even if you altered the trajectory of an incoming asteroid by a tiny amount, it
would probably miss because earth is just kind of like a tiny dot in space. But
right now, we don’t have the capability. So if an asteroid were coming next
year, we would be screwed.
RU: Right. And people have started talking about it. I mean, there has been sort
of an advance in the level of paranoia about asteroids that come anywhere near
us in recent years.
MA: One asteroid came about half of the way between us and the moon a while ago.
JD: Was it big enough to kill us?
MA: No. It was a hundred feet across, though — not bad.
RU: So how much chaos would that cause? I guess that would depend on where it
landed.
MA: Measured in megatons, I think it would be about one Hiroshima.
JD: Oh, okay. We can handle that… as long as it doesn’t land in San Francisco.
MA: (laughs) Exactly! So I don’t think the asteroids are an immediate concern.
But it helps people comprehend the notion of extinction risks.
RU: The former NASA astronaut Rusty Schweickart has become involved in fighting
off the asteroids. He used to be part of the L5 Society. I think Ronald Reagan
would say it’s a way of uniting all the people of earth to fight against an
enemy.
MA: Yeah!
RU: I think he talked about that in terms of aliens, not in terms of asteroids.
MA: Well, I think all existential risks, including the more plausible ones, do
serve a function in uniting humanity, and I think that’s a nice side effect.
RU: The particle accelerator shield — what’s that about?
MA: Some people think — as we engage in increasingly high-powered particle
accelerator experiments — something bad could happen. One standard idea is a
strangelet, which is similar to an atom but much more compact. If a strangelet
could absorb conventional matter into itself, and do so continuously, it could
absorb the entire planet.
RU: Sort of like a black hole.
MA: Yes, very much like a black hole. It’s another one of those situations where
we want to instill a sense of caution in the minds of scientists. We don’t want
them to just dismiss these possibilities out of hand because it potentially
threatens their funding. We want them to actually give it a little bit of
thought.
RU: OK, what about “seed preserver.”
MA: Oh, yeah! Well that’s actually being done right now! The Norwegian
government built a seed bank on some far north Arctic island. They’re shoving
some seeds in there, so I guess when the nanobots come, or the nuclear war comes
and 99% of humanity is all gone, then we’ll be able to go there, withdraw the
seeds, and create life anew.
RU: You seem to be a believer in the Singularity. For me – maybe yes, maybe no.
But I find it amusing that Vernor Vinge could give a talk titled “What if the
Singularity Doesn NOT Happen”, the implication being that the idea that it might
not happen is a real stretch. Do you ever feel like you’re in a cult — that
people who believe in this share a peculiar reality?
MA: The word Singularity has become a briefcase word. People kind of want to put
their pet ideas into it, so the actual idea has become kind of unclear in the
minds of many people. To me, the Singularity is just the notion of an
intelligence that’s smarter than us. So if you say that you don’t believe in the
Singularity, it means that you believe that human beings are the smartest
possible intelligence that this universe can hold.
RU: I guess what I don’t believe is that it necessarily becomes a complete
disjunction in history.
MA: But don’t you think that homo sapiens are a quite complete disjunction from,
say, homo erectus or chimps? We share 98% of the same DNA. So what if you
actually used technology to surpass the human mind? I think you’d have something
substantially more different from homo sapiens than homo sapiens was from their
predecessors.
RU: Do you think it’s more likely that we’ll develop machines that are more
intelligent than us and keep them exterior to us; or will we find some way of
incorporating them into us? It seems to me, if you look at the passion that
people have for being on the net, and being able to call up and get and link to
all the information and all the intelligence on the planet, people are going to
want this inside themselves. They’re going to want to be able to have as much
information and as much intelligence as everybody else. They’ll want to unite
with it.
MA: I think that would be a great thing, as long as people don’t go using their
intelligence for negative ends.
JD: Do you think this would happen gradually. Or do you think there would be
this point in time where lots of people make choices like whether or not to
merge? And then, maybe, the people who are afraid of that will want to stop
people from doing it, and conflict…
MA: I think it could actually be somewhat abrupt, because once you have a
superior intelligence, it can create better intelligence enhancement techniques
for itself. So it could be somewhat abrupt. But I think that these smart
entities could also find a way of keeping humanity on the same page and not
making it like: “Oh, you have to choose… If your brother or your sister is not
going into the great computer, then…”
RU: I think if it happens soon enough, it will be viewed as just another way of
going online. You know, to young people, it will be just… “Yeah, this is how
everybody’s going online now.”
MA: But if you had implants in your brain, it would be permanent.
RU: Do you think chaos is built into life? As the Artificial Life people have
been saying, life happens on the boundary between order and chaos. If chaos is
an element of life, can machines include chaos?
MA: Well, uh — hmm. I think that people overestimate the power of chaos.
RU: As a Patti Smith fan, I have to disagree.
MA: (Laughs) Well, it’s such an appealing idea — chaos. But if you take a look
at human blood and compare it to some random bit of muck you find in the ground,
you’ll see that it’s highly regulated, and there are huge complements of
homeostatic mechanisms in bodies that are constantly ordering things. Relative
to the entropy in the air array outside; inside my body is a very orderly place,
Life forms are very well organized pieces of matter.
RU: Right, but if you achieve complete homeostasis, then nothing happens.
MA: That’s true. Life does have to be on that boundary so it is challenging
RU: Here’s a quote from an interview with you: “The idea of the Singularity is
to transcend limitations by reengineering brains or creating new brains from
scratch, brains that think faster with more precision, greater capabilities,
better insights, ability to communicate and so on.” OK. That sounds good, but
what about pleasure, play, creativity, eroticism… and whatever it is you get
from magic mushrooms? Where does all that go?
MA (Laughs) I think all that’s very important. I think about all those things.
RU: So you think that can be built that into the singularity?
MA: Yeah. Oh, for sure…
RU: David Pierce is the one person who really sort of deals with those ideas.
MA: Well, it’s not really too PC to talk about it. But when you take a
psychedelic, you’ve changed your brain chemistry. With mushrooms, you flood your
brain with this one psilocybin chemical. With technologies that let you actively
change your own mind, it would be less of a shot in the dark. More precision
modifications would be possible. And you could turn it on and off like a light
switch, too. You could have much more control over it.
RU: Looking forward to it!
Friday, May 18, 2007
The Other "Immortality"
Thursday, May 10, 2007
A SAMPLE CHAPTER
The ideosyncratic early French Chapter Serial "Les Vampires" is the subject of an essay in process now I am working on. The youtube flic is Chapter II. Is it about crooks, cupernatural crooks, vampires, or sort of vamps? Stay tuned....Henry_Allen
From http://goatdog.com/moviePage.php?movieID=598 goatdog's movies
In Paris, in the depths of World War I, a vast criminal empire, the Vampires
(not the blood-sucking variety), holds the city in a death grip. Nobody knows
who might be a member, and nobody knows when they will strike next. Residents
are so terrified of the gang—it can't be fear of the war, which is never
mentioned—that they don't leave their homes. Into this terrifying situation goes
Philippe Guerande (Edouard Mathe), an intrepid reporter who vows to solve the
mystery of the Vampires. With the assistance of his somewhat faithful and mostly
hapless sidekick Mazamette (Marcel Levesque), he attempts to track down the gang
and their leaders, the Grand Vampire (Jean Ayme) and his consort, the beautiful,
mysterious, and dangerous Irma Vep (Musidora).
This grand and sprawling serial, produced in 1915 by auteur Louis Feuillade, is
one of the great masterpieces of the cinema. In its ten episodes, ranging in
length from 15 to 60 minutes, Feuillade and company use the entire city of Paris
as their set, and they create something unlike anything I've seen before. That
it manages to be gripping through almost all of its nearly seven hours of screen
time is an amazing feat. It combines slapstick comedy, edge-of-your-seat
suspense, pretty amazing outdoor shooting and stunt work, and dramatic pathos in
a thoroughly enjoyable mix. The film isn't like a lot of Hollywood serials: each
episode has its own story, but each one advances the plot a little more, and the
episodes don't all end in cliffhangers. It doesn't need them. Each episode is so
perfectly mounted that a cliffhanger at the end might have been a little too
much. It's enough to be left wondering what horrible things the Vampires would
be up to next; thankfully, since I rented it on DVD, I got to find out right
away.
Over the course of the episodes, Guerande and Mazamette come closer and closer
to defeating the Vampires. The film doesn't pull any punches: in the first
episode, the gang has beheaded a city official, and Feuillade and company
weren't afraid to have the head show up in a hatbox. For this, its glorification
of the criminal element, and its depiction of the Paris police as a bumbling
bunch of fools, several episodes of the film were banned from French screens.
Guerande and Mazamette do most of their sleuthing with guns blazing and by
themselves, with little assistance from the police, who tend to mess things up
anyway. Among their adventures, they solve the murder of a famous ballerina,
decode the Vampires' secret code book, capture the leader of a rival gang,
recover money stolen from a rich American businessman, and foil an elaborate
bank robbery. Captures and escapes abound, as does wanton murder and mayhem,
including the Vampires' free use of cannons to achieve their ends. Along the
way, the cast of the Vampires changes: the Grand Vampire gives way to Moreno,
the rival gang leader; Satanus, the true head of the Vampires; and Venomous, an
expert poisoner who ends up in charge. But Irma Vep is always present.
It's a travesty that Irma Vep and Musidora, the actress who played her, weren't
household names in the United States. She's one of the most magnetic characters
in film history. She's a strong female character, which is rare, and she's a lot
smarter than most of the men around her. Throughout the film, she reveals
herself as a dancer, an expert in disguise, an expert shot, an acrobat, and
surprisingly resilient woman. She often appears, to our pleasure, wearing the
uniform of the Vampires, a skintight black outfit that she fills most admirably.
She's a breath of fresh air to those of us who are sick of modern stick-figure
anorexic movie starlets. As the film progresses, the Vampires modify their
goals: instead of involving themselves in crime, they just want to kill off
Guerande and Mazamette. Through it all, both heroes find true love, which
ratchets up the stakes, as the Vampires target everyone and anyone involved in
their lives.
The DVD contains a beautiful restoration of the film. It includes the original
color tinting, which was used in silent films to indicate location or time of
day: blue for night, brown for indoors, yellow for outdoors, etc. The last
episode is a little washed out from age, and sometimes characters' faces appear
as white blobs, but overall it's very watchable. There's an orchestral score,
and while I don't know if it is based on the music that originally accompanied
the film, it works perfectly. There aren't a lot of extras, which is too bad,
because for once I would like to have read a little more about the film.
A lot of silent films, to be honest, are little more than historical artifacts,
and most viewers don't have the patience to sit through them. This is one
example of a relic from a bygone era that stands on its own as a great film with
both historical importance and relevance. The film's plotlines will be familiar
to just about everyone who has ever seen a mystery or an action film, but
they're presented here in a way that few of us have seen before. It's completely
accessible to modern audiences, and I hope that some of you go out and rent it.
It's worth the six-hour time investment.
Shock And Awe-We pay the price of Lies
1. We owe the Kurds,they like us. We should guarantee an Independent Kurdistan.
2. Otherwise, we are unwelcome, it was a lost and wrong cause - not responsive to Islamism, but an exacerbation of it.
3. Out now. Screw their sectarian war.Henry_Allen
consortiumnews.com
The Right's Parallel Universe
By Richard L. Fricker
May 9, 2007
To understand how the United States got itself into its current fix, it’s helpful to understand that the American Right and its powerful media apparatus have created a kind of parallel universe that has its own internal logic that sort of makes sense even if the “reality” isn’t exactly real.
So, on the Iraq War, everything is going pretty well except, as Fox News reminds its viewers, the “liberal media” keeps hiding all the positive developments from the American people. Plus, the only way to explain hostility toward George W. Bush is to postulate that his critics are consumed by irrational hatreds. The Right’s reality-divergent narrative exists on domestic policy, too.
For instance, Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and a medical doctor, explained in an April 23 speech at the Tulsa Press Club why a single-payer health insurance system like Canada’s is a sure failure and why the U.S. system of private insurance, often paid by employers, works so much better.
Coburn noted that the auto industry and many other old-line U.S. companies want a national health insurance program to get medical costs off the backs of employers and help them compete with foreign rivals that don’t pay for employee health insurance. But the senator offered anecdotes why that wouldn’t be a good idea.
“I talked to the head of General Mills,” the giant food manufacturer, Coburn said. “They have lots of employees in Canada. … I said what do you do when one of your Canadian employees gets really sick? They said they bring them to America because the Canadian system isn’t working well for acutely ill people.”
Commenting on the British medical system, the senator said, “When you look at England, the average length of time from the diagnosis of cancer to the onset of chemotherapy in England now is eight months. How many of you would be satisfied with that?”
However, like much of Fox’s happy talk about Iraq, Coburn’s scary comments about the health programs in Canada and the United Kingdom don’t square with the facts.
General Mills denies it has a program to send Canadians to the United States for treatment of serious illnesses and the U.K. cancer treatment program operates well within acceptable medical standards.
“It is true that, in certain circumstances, a General Mills employee in Canada could visit a doctor in the U.S.,” General Mills spokesman Tom Forsythe told me. “It would likely involve a U.S.-based employee on assignment in Canada. It does not happen often, and it could not be described as routine.
“However, there could be and have been cases where routine surgery, for example, (hernia, knee arthroscopy, some scans) could be done more quickly in the U.S., and an employee may visit a doctor in the U.S. for that procedure. I do not know the number, but it would be small.”
David Jensen of the government-run Health Canada said the health care budget for fiscal year 2005-06 was $37.9 billion, of which only $55.6 million was paid to U.S. doctors and healthcare facilities. That included care or treatment for Canadians vacationing in the U.S., students, and persons assigned to the U.S. by Canadian companies.
In short, there was no stream of Canadians surging into the United States for medical treatment as suggested by the senator from Oklahoma.
UK Care
When I sought comment from the Kings Fund, the health care oversight organization for the United Kingdom, I was directed to a 2006 study on cancer treatment.
According to the study, “Patients who visit their GP with symptoms that suggest cancer must be given urgent referral to secondary care under the two-week target established by the Cancer Plan. In June 2006, 98.9 percent of people with suspected cancer were seen by a specialist within the target time.”
The report continued, “The plan also set a target of a maximum one-month wait from diagnosis to first treatment for all cancers, which was meant to be achieved by the end of 2005. Some 99 percent of patients diagnosed with cancer start treatment within 31 days.”
Kings Fund senior associate Tony Harrison said Coburn’s information was “not correct, assuming that chemotherapy is the first line of treatment, which of course it may not be.” In reference to the 2006 study, Harrison said, “You will see that targets that have been set for referral to start of treatment are now largely met.”
As for Coburn’s claim about an eight-month wait for chemotherapy, Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy director of the American Cancer Society, said the point could be misleading since any treatment plan depends on a patient’s condition when the cancer is discovered.
“We do not have a single standard of care,” Lichtenfeld said. “We really don’t have good studies from diagnosis to cure.”
In other words, Coburn’s assertion about an eight-month window has no real point of reference in treatment plans since other strategies might be employed besides chemotherapy.
Still, Coburn’s horror stories about medical care in Canada and the U.K. have been part of the Republican mantra in the ongoing fight to prevent a universal health care system from being established in the United States.
Bizarre Myths
The Oklahoma senator has become notorious for making extreme statements that are later revealed as bizarre urban myths.
During his 2004 race for the Senate, for instance, Coburn was taped saying a campaign worker from Coalgate, Oklahoma, told him “lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom.”
The Coalgate superintendent of schools expressed outrage at the ludicrous claim, which was met with ridicule by many other Oklahomans. Nevertheless, Coburn was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Coburn also has argued that condoms promote sexually transmitted disease, that abstinence education prevents teenagers from having sex, and that silicone breast implants are good for women’s health. All these positions have been challenged by government studies and expert medical opinion.
Coburn, as a new member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, opined while pondering a bill restricting class-action suits, "You know I immediately thought about silicone breast implants and the legal wrangling and the class-action suits off that.
"And I thought I would just share with you what science says today about silicone breast implants. If you have them, you're healthier than if you don't. That is what the ultimate science shows. . . . In fact, there's no science that shows that silicone breast implants are detrimental and, in fact, they make you healthier."
At the time, Coburn made that statement silicone breast implants had been banned in the United States for more than a decade because of cases of implant leakage and other health complaints from women.
In 2006, the Food and Drug Administration did approve the implants return to the U.S. market, although a subsequent European study and many doctors have continued to raise questions about possible protein buildup around the implants and other safety issues.
Other medical experts, including the scientists cited by the FDA, argue that the preponderance of studies fail to show that silicone implants are detrimental to a woman’s health, but they don’t claim the implants make women healthier.
Richard L. Fricker is a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based freelance reporter/writer and two-time winner of the American Business Press Editors Award for Investigative Journalism. He writes regularly for the Swiss newsweekly Sonntags Blick and Consortiumnews.com. Fricker can be reached at rlfricker@hotmail.com .
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
MARS GLOBAL WARMING
Related? Unrelated? Good? Bad? The long hot Summer on the red planet. What if the ice melts? The Times of Londo says its getting hot; the BBC says there is ice enough for an ocean. Sail the Martian Sea? Henry_Allen
From The Sunday Times
April 29, 2007
Climate change hits Mars
Mars is being hit by rapid climate change and it is happening so fast that the red planet could lose its southern ice cap, writes Jonathan Leake.
Scientists from Nasa say that Mars has warmed by about 0.5C since the 1970s. This is similar to the warming experienced on Earth over approximately the same period.
Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.
The mechanism at work on Mars appears, however, to be different from that on Earth. One of the researchers, Lori Fenton, believes variations in radiation and temperature across the surface of the Red Planet are generating strong winds.
In a paper published in the journal Nature, she suggests that such winds can stir up giant dust storms, trapping heat and raising the planet’s temperature.
Fenton’s team unearthed heat maps of the Martian surface from Nasa’s Viking mission in the 1970s and compared them with maps gathered more than two decades later by Mars Global Surveyor. They found there had been widespread changes, with some areas becoming darker.
When a surface darkens it absorbs more heat, eventually radiating that heat back to warm the thin Martian atmosphere: lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. The temperature differences between the two are thought to be stirring up more winds, and dust, creating a cycle that is warming the planet.
| By Neil Bowdler BBC News |
The new method of scanning for water offers vastly more accurate readings than before, they say.
The data could prove vital for the Phoenix Mars Mission which launches this August and which will put a lander on the surface to dig for ice.
The new data shows wide variation as to how deep below the surface ice exists.
Seasonal changes
The deposits - far beyond the ice that is known to exist in the planet's North Pole - could be so large that were they to melt, they would deluge the planet in water forming an ocean.
Up until now, scientists had been able to search for water deposits using a spectrometer fixed to the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
It is a device that measures nuclear radiation coming from a planet to detect different materials.
However, only readings that are accurate to within several hundred kilometres can be obtained.
Now Dr Joshua Bandfield of Arizona State University has devised a new method for detecting ice.
By comparing seasonal changes in thermal infrared patterns, detected by the same Odyssey spacecraft, he says he can make readings accurate to within just hundreds of metres.
Dr Bandfield said water ice in terms of surface area would be "probably roughly a third to a half".
Though there is plenty of water ice, the new thermal imaging data also shows that there is considerable variation across the planet in terms of how far down ice can be found.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/6617851.stm
Published: 2007/05/02 22:17:13 GMT
© BBC MMVII
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
NEW CREDIBLE UFO
The bright yellow flat disc shapes, estimated to be twice the size of a Boeing 737, were spotted on Monday, 12 to 15 miles north east of the island.
Captain Ray Bowyer was flying an Aurigny plane from Southampton to Alderney when he saw the objects through binoculars.
Mr Bowyer said he was "pretty shook-up" by the sighting.
"This is not something you see every day of the week - it was pretty scary," he said.
At first he thought it was the sun reflecting from greenhouses in Guernsey. He said the objects were bright like the sun, but did not hurt his eyes when he looked at them.
The stationary objects were also observed by other aircraft and the passengers on the plane.
Disappearing pilot
John Spencer, deputy chairman of the British UFO Research Association, said: "These types of sightings have been reported by pilots - generally accepted to be reliable and sensible observers - since the 1940s and they have excited attention to this day.
"Such light effects are often popularly thought to represent alien visitors but many UFO researchers believe they more likely represent natural, atmospheric, phenomena not yet fully understood by science.
"However, a similar encounter in 1978 over the Bass Straits in Australia, where the pilot was in radio contact with the ground throughout, resulted in the pilot never being heard from again, so these phenomena are important to study."
| | This is the sort of sighting that is taken seriously and should be investigated thoroughly Nick Pope, former UFO investigator for the MOD |
Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFOs for the Ministry of Defence said: "While no witnesses are infallible, pilots are trained observers and less likely than most people to misidentify something mundane.
"The MoD's UFO case files contain several reports from civil and military pilots, some of which were correlated by radar. This is the sort of sighting that is taken seriously and should be investigated thoroughly.
"While most UFOs can be explained as misidentifications of aircraft, weather balloons, satellites and suchlike, a small percentage are more difficult to explain. This is one of the most intriguing sightings I've heard about in recent years."
A current spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence, said that while it does monitor air space for any unusual foreign objects which might pose a threat, they would not be carrying out an investigation in this instance.
Are you in the area? Did you witness these unidentified flying objects? Send us your experiences using the form below.
You can send your pictures and moving footage to yourpics@bbc.co.uk or text them to 07725 100 100
When taking photos or filming please do not endanger yourself or others, take unnecessary risks or infringe any laws.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/guernsey/6591365.stm
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Kurds and Armenian Genocide
Published on Jewcy.com (http://www.jewcy.com)
Daily Shvitz: Blogging with the heat turned up
Free Kurdistan
by August 21, 2006
Judging by Peter Galbraith's excellent The End of Iraq, the advent of Kurdistan as a distinct country has occurred in all but name. The language is different, the identity is different (most Kurds are Sunnis, but declare themselves Kurds first), and you won't find the flag of democratic Iraq flapping in Suleimania, Erbil or Dohuk. To drop "Sevres" into casual conversation in any of these three Iraqi governates would be like mentioning "Balfour" in 1945 Brooklyn. The spark of self-determination awaits the right wind to catch fire, if you'll pardon the hoary Orientalist metaphor. And if sectarian killing and anarchy in the rest of Iraq reaches the parliamentary level -- where, with a preeminent Kurd as president, it has yet to divide state with demands for secession -- then the Kurds are ready to put the official stamp of independence on the de facto variety they've been enjoying for over a decade. It is their constitutional right as Iraqis to do this, not to mention their moral right as victims of genocide and centuries-long persecution. With 30,000 million in diaspora, they're as much entitled to their own state as the are Palestinians, or as were the Jews or Ukrainians. The precedent for a unified "Iraq" isn't all that compelling. This is Michael Totten in Reason:
If Middle Easterners had drawn the borders themselves, Iraq wouldn’t even exist. Blame the British for shackling Kurds and Arabs together when they created the post-colonial, post-Ottoman map. The Kurds do. Like the English, they refer to a toilet as “a W.C.”—but they insist that stands for “Winston Churchill.”
History has suffered incalcuably by having valid arguments mouthed by the worst human beings. Tariq Aziz was fond of reiterating the Saddamist line during the first Gulf War that Kuwait "belonged" to Iraq because the latter territory was delineated by arrogant English cartographers after the World War I and was therefore subject to native reassessment. To accept this was to accept that Kuwaitis, too, had a legitimate grievance with their own boundaries and just as much of a claim to redraw them through conquest and annexation... Where does post-colonalism end? How far back do we have to go to "remake" the Middle East? With Kurdistan, the destination has already been reached by on-the-ground realities. No less important, so has justice.
Michael is an associate editor of Jewcy and a contributor to Slate. His blog is Snarksmith.
Source URL:
http://www.jewcy.com/daily_shvitz/free_kurdistan
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Why Bush will never pull out of Iraq
The old box trick has caught many a monkey. Let's not monkey around...Henry_Allen
House Passes Iraq Troop Pullout Bill
WASHINGTON, April 25, 2007(CBS/AP) A sharply divided House of Representatives brushed aside a veto threat and passed legislation that would order President George W. Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq by Oct. 1.
The 218-208 vote Wednesday came as the top U.S. commander in Iraq told lawmakers the country remained gripped by violence but was showing some signs of improvement.
Passage puts the bill on track to clear Congress by week's end and arrive on the president's desk in coming days as the first binding congressional challenge to Bush's handling of the conflict now in its fifth year.
“Our troops are mired in a civil war with no clear enemy and no clear strategy for success,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Democrat.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — the Democrat most credited with leading Congress into this head-to-head confrontation with President Bush — laid low on Wednesday, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. She skipped the meeting with Gen. David Petraeus, opting for a phone briefing instead.
Republicans promised to stand squarely behind the president in rejecting what they called a “surrender date” handed to the enemy.
“Al Qaeda will view this as the day the House of Representatives threw in the towel,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis, a Republican who is on the House Appropriations Committee.
The $124.2 billion bill would fund the war, among other things, but demand troop withdrawals begin on Oct. 1 or sooner if the Iraqi government does not meet certain standards. The bill sets a nonbinding goal of completing the troop pull out by April 1, 2008, allowing for forces conducting certain noncombat missions, such as attacking terrorist networks or training Iraqi forces, to remain.
House and Senate appropriators agreed to the legislation earlier this week. The Senate was expected to clear the measure Thursday, sending it to the president.
While Bush was confident the bill would ultimately fail because Democrats lacked the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto, he kept up pressure on lawmakers.
On the same day as the House vote, the president dispatched his Iraq commander, Petraeus, and other senior defense officials to Congress to make his case: Additional forces recently sent to Iraq are yielding mixed results and the strategy needs more time to work.
Petraeus told reporters sectarian killings in Baghdad were only a third of what they were in January, before Bush began sending in additional U.S. forces. He added that progress in the troubled western Anbar province was “breathtaking,” and that he thought Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was “doing his best” at leading the country.
But “the ability of al Qaeda to conduct horrific, sensational attacks obviously has represented a setback and is an area in which we're focusing considerable attention,” Petraeus said.
Petraeus said he would not touch on the “minefield of discussions about various legislative proposals,” but he noted that the new strategy in Iraq was just beginning. He said he planned to provide more details in early September.
Petraeus briefed his findings to lawmakers in a private room, where protesters outside chanted “Troops home now!” Republicans and Democrats alike emerged to say Petraeus had only confirmed their positions.
“This briefing reinforced our view that the solution in Iraq is a political solution,” Hoyer told reporters. Also confirmed, he said, was “our belief that we must hold the Iraqis accountable for achieving real progress.”
Rep. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, said Petraeus acknowledged there were challenges. “But considering where we are, I think the general feels good about the progress thus far,” Boehner said.
Bush said he stands firm on his latest strategy for winning the war and dismisses as counterproductive the Democratic call for withdrawal.
“That means our commanders in the middle of a combat zone would have to take fighting directions from legislators 6,000 miles away on Capitol Hill,” Bush said this week. “The result would be a marked advantage for our enemies and a greater danger for our troops.”
Petraeus' comments Wednesday put a finer point on when the much-awaited decision about the length of the U.S. troop buildup may come, saying he will make an assessment of the conditions in Iraq in early September, and report back to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other military leaders.
Gates has said he expects the assessment this summer, but this is the first time military leaders said it would not be until September.
© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.