Science/Technology

The rapid growth of knowledge
Cultural evolution depends on the non-genetic storage, transmission, diffusion and utilization of information. The development of human speech, the invention of writing, the development of paper and printing, and finally, in modern times, mass media, computers and the Internet: all these have been crucial steps in society’s explosive accumulation of information and knowledge. Human cultural evolution proceeds at a constantly-accelerating speed, so great in fact that it threatens to shake society to pieces.

Computers, unlike flesh-and-blood creatures, entirely lack the charms of spontaneity, playfulness, affection, sensuality, passionate attachment, and so forth.  Yet recent films, to my continued bafflement, offer bizarre scenarios of “intimate relatedness” between humans and synthetic sentients (for instance, “Her,” “Ex Machina”–and even more sickeningly, the human clones of “Never Let Me Go.”)  Two hundred years ago, the 19-year-old Mary Shelley showed more acute insight than today’s technophiles–by conjuring up a startlingly ironic contract between the coldly grandiose Dr.

In the early morning of March 23, Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner Lanakila Mangauil heard that construction of the world’s largest optical telescope had begun atop the Hawaiian sacred mountain Mauna Kea. He immediately spread the word to the community, who had been keeping vigilant watch, and ran up the summit to stop the desecration of this wahi pana, a place of cultural significance and practice. Others followed Lanakila’s lead, however, nobody expected that this would spark a global movement to protect one of our planet’s sacred sites.

Eager to cut, savage and wind back constructive projects in the realm of medicine, science and education, Australia’s government has made its latest head-shaking announcement on budgetary issues. The veteran climate change sceptic Bjørn Lomborg is going to become the recipient of $4 million in Australian tax payers’ money.

Dr Paul Offit, who is the multimillionaire darling of BigPharma’s vaccine industry (and who has profited hugely from his alliances with said vaccine industry) has been allowed to take the pulpit over and over again on NPR, MPR and WPR in recent months (also PBS). He is one of the well-paid professional voices of the CDC (major promoters of universal, even forced, vaccinations), the American Academy of Pediatrics and BigPharma’s vaccine industry that has hundreds of new vaccines in the pipeline, which will never be medico-legally liable if they kill or injure the vacinee.

Drought is like death by a thousand cuts. It steadily but slowly devastates the countryside long before people recognize an emergency at hand.
Excessive drought is but one symptom that climate change has turned vicious.
Worldwide drought conditions are more severe and much quicker to arise than in the past. Inasmuch as fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal emit ever more carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere with concomitant increasing levels of global warming, the outlook for escalating drought is clear and imminent.

When a Rockefeller decides to divest fossil fuel investments, heads turn. After all, America’s pioneer/father of oil production is John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) founder of America’s first great business trust, Standard Oil Company, dominating the oil industry for years.

The Mont Order Club’s first ever video conference in our society’s long existence was made in February, and saw spirited participation from our advisers. Foremost in importance were some of the wise judgments our advisers rendered on the ongoing crisis of the Westphalian nation-state. Namely, our advisers spoke of the challenges posed by the Internet and other new media to the archaic international system.

The Abstract for “Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate in the Anthropocene” (2014), by (Nobel prize-winner) Paul Crutzen and Stanisław Wacławek, begins this way:  “Humankind [’s] actions are exerting [an] increasing effect on the environment on all scales, in a lot of ways overcoming natural processes.”  The deep explanation for that “increasing effect,” I would argue,

For those of us who came of age sometime in the late 80s to early 90s the date October 21, 2015 has special significance in terms of both nostalgia and excitement. For those who don’t grasp the reference immediately this is the day that Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) travel to in the film Back to the Future 2. The purpose of the trip was to prevent Marty’s future son (also played by Fox) from taking part in an armed robbery that sends the McFly family on a downward spiral (Doc Brown having already taken the trip to the future and witnessed all this).