Plurp: It's all about chickens

Bigger!

2002.12.29 : 2003.01.04

Saturday, January 4, 2003
Blab. A reader who is unaware of hyperlinks instead sends us a long text from somewhere. Or maybe our Treasured Reader wrote this itself, in which case everyone else is required to link to the following.
The scientist who announced the birth of the first human clone last week says a second infant will be born this weekend.
Brigitte Boisselier, the head of Clonaid which claims to have produced the baby, told the Belgian VTM-Nieuws broadcast that "the child that will be born is a girl, from a lesbian couple".
When asked whether it was in Europe she said it would happen "not very far from here".
An official at the Belgian branch of the Raelian sect, to which Clonaid is linked, said later the country concerned was the Netherlands.
Boisselier says the parents of the second baby want to remain anonymous.
Clonaid has refused to offer any proof that the child it says was born last week is a clone. But the company has promised DNA test results to confirm its claim.
Clonaid, which declines to say where its facilities are, was founded in the Bahamas in 1997 by the man who founded the Raelian religious sect. The man, Rael, says he learned about the origin of life on Earth from a visitor from outer space. He says he views cloning as a step toward reaching eternal life.
Clonaid retains philosophical but not economic ties to the Raelians, the company says.
It is quite a circus, is it not? We are torn between believing that it's all a very amateurish PR hoax, or a very amateurish announcement of human cloning. But, in either case, we do love the media feeding frenzy.

Blab. For reasons unknown to us, a reader gets serious.
Harry Griffin of Dolly-the-sheep fame seems to think that human cloning would result in a large number of serious deformaties.
I'm not sure I'm OK with letting people experiment with children like that. Bailey's 2% solution doesn't strike me as the best, but it's better than unrestricted child experimentation. And I'm sure an even better rule could be evolved with some work.
On a related thread, why do you suppose that libertarians must oppose ALL attempts to regulate?
And then ...
"Why do you suppose" is ambiguous. What I meant was "Why do you act as if..."
So ... two good thoughts there!
First, we think it is an interesting prospect that cloning might be restricted legitimately on the basis of negligence, the argument that some level of risk to the future child makes it a good thing to ban childbirth. We only wonder what the actual argument is. Does it extend to people with a family history of genetic problems? To mothers that have a disease likely to be passed to the child? To mothers that drink or smoke during pregnancy? Just what class of people should we forbid from having children?
Second, we don't believe (even if we act as if) libertarians must oppose all attempts to regulate. There are certainly folks who call themselves that and believe in various governmental regulations. What disturbs us is the glib argument that we may legitimately regulate the risky activities of others, especially without a way to fence off that pernicious line of argument.

Blab. That reader from yesterday provides context. Or ... some other reader goofs on us.
Wow! Must be Ellis Paul's brother. We'll try to keep an open mind, but we must admit to a natural suspicion of (Western) people with reversed names. What are they hiding? That's what we want to know. ..........Western as in I live in Southern England?
Let's see. Some cultural traditions (notably those of China and India) put family names first and personal names last. This is not true, to the best of our limited knowledge, in Western naming, which Ellis Paul presumably follows.
We have no opinion as to whether or not the UK is a Western country. Especially not Southern England.

Blab. A reader turns out to be a bumper sticker.
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!
Stop Plate Tectonics!

Blab. Continuing the reader obsession with food is this disturbing entry.
That lasagna is covered with melted cheese. Take it off. Take it ALL off.
We have the most perverse readers.

Yo. John Brockman, author of the Edge, asks difficult questions of smart people. At the moment, he asks folks to imagine that they are Dubya's Science Advisor (a tall task in itself) and asks them to answer the question, What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?
Some of the answers are clever, while others seem quite silly. But they are thought provoking.

Plurp. We watched The Siege tonight. Chilling. We recommend it as a virtual history lesson.

Plurp.
The blue dog
had a natural suspicion of things with
names

Friday, January 3, 2003
Blab. On the topic of the little cube in which we plot world domination, we learn this.
THE BLUE DOG FELT BAD
THAT HIS LITTLE CUBE WAS NOT
AS BIG AS THE CAT'S
"His"?

Blab. A knowledgeable reader submits this fascinating theory about why there is no chewing gum for sale in either DisneyWorld nor the Orlando airport.
Because everyone in Florida smokes all the time, there is no market for gum.
So you're saying that people from Florida can't smoke and chew gum at the same time? Hmm.

Blab. A reader obtains two fortune cookies.
We are educated but confusion is so much more fun.
The plan is to show that every plan is pointless.
With three you get egg roll.

Blab. A reader who needs context writes:
Western as in I live in Southern England?
We can only guess that this is a person from the UK reminding us that the UK does not think of itself as part of Western Europe. We remind the reader that England is not the UK.

Blab. A reader keeps us up on recent events in Wacko World.
"A company founded by members of a sect that believes mankind was created by extraterrestrials says what it calls the first human clone will not undergo testing to verify her genetic makeup....
"Such a test would prove or disprove the company's claim that Eve is a genetic duplicate of her mother."
Strike one.
"Rael said he made the decision after a 'judge in Florida signed a paper saying that the baby Eve should be taken from the family, from her mother.'
"However, no Florida judge has made such a ruling."
Strike two.
"At another point, he was asked if his group had simply gotten away with a great publicity stunt. Rael, speaking from Canada via satellite, said his earpiece was having technical difficulties.
"'I am so sorry, but the sound is so bad. I cannot hear anything,' he said."
Strike three!
Ya gotta go click on that last link. Ya do.
We love a circus.

Blab. Those alleged libertoonians at Reason magazine check in with a ...
[link]
... to a rather surprising point of view on cloning.
Should the federal government and other governments outlaw attempts at human reproductive cloning? Reproductive cloning is not intrinsically immoral, but attempting to clone a human being now can be thought of as behaving so negligently that one has a high likelihood of maiming a person. It is appropriate to protect people from extremely negligent behaviors. However, bans unfortunately have a way of becoming permanent. How about a ban limited to five years during which research on the cloning of other mammals proceeds?
This seems like a pretty slippery slope for yon libertoonians. Just how large must the probability of birth defects be before pre-emptive banning is the libertoonian thing to do?
A good benchmark for deciding to proceed with human reproductive cloning would be when researchers are reasonably sure that clones would suffer no more likelihood of birth defects (about 2 percent) than do children produced by sexual reproduction, either in vitro or by conventional means.
Oh dear, oh dear! What about parents whose genetic background gives them a greater than 2% chance of having children with birth defects? Or whose profession? Or where they live? Ban 'em, says alleged libertoonian Ronald Bailey. No children for them.
We don't think so. Sorry, Ronald.

Blab. A reader gets just downright nasty.
Now that he's retired from the U.S. Senate, Strom Thurmond intends on returning to his native South Carolina. To while away the days of his retirement, he will help re-enact the time he fired the first shot of the Civil War at Ft. Sumter.
Being nasty, of course, is our job. Nice slam, though.

Yo. Did you wonder what Bush has in mind for North Korea?
In February 2002 it was reported that the US military was updating OPLAN 5027 in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. This includes a military calculation of the force needed to remove North Korean leader Kim Jung Il.
In mid-2002 a top aide to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld briefed a concept of operations for striking North Korea's weapons of mass destruction. This case study in the application of the Bush administration's new doctrine of pre-emptive military action envisioned a swift attack, carried out without consulting South Korea, America's ally on the peninsula.
This revises a 1998 operational plan.
[T]he new military plan included preemptive attacks against North Korea's military bases, including long-range artillery and air forces bases, if intellitence detected a hard evidence that North Korea was preparing to wage war. US and South Korean military leaders included pre-emptive strikes in this revised war plan [...].
A senior US official was reported to have said: "When we're done, they will not be able to mount any military activity of any kind. We will kill them all." The goal of the revised plan was to "abolish North Korea as a functioning state, end the rule of its leader, Kim Jong Il, and reorganize the country under South Korean control."
No wonder Kim is unhappy.

Yo. If you haven't seen the satellite photo of the Korean peninsula at night, here it is. Amazing, isn't it?

Plurp. Found in a file where we keep miscellaneous notes.
Hello Jimmydeansausage. Your User ID number is 28637.
We wonder what it could mean.

Plurp. What do you learn about someone from examining what others search for on their Web site? Let's find out.

lasagna naked pitures

helen naked pitures

naked pictures of helen

chihuly

christian games

muffler men

sarcasm for dummies

thermobaric

angelina jolie

answering machine

There. Now, what did you learn?

Yow. A belated Midwinter present unveils the marvels of Sqyntz, which are really quite sour little candy discs. We are a real groupie of sour things, and have been disappointed again and again by recent crops of kids' candies that claim to be intensely sour and aren't. Sqyntz, on the other hand, really are sour. Zowie.

Plop. So let's see if we've got this straight. Five people of Middle Eastern origin (or maybe nineteen) crossed into the U.S. on fake passports, using fake names, and the pictures being shown around by the FBI are apparently of other people entirely.
But if we see any of these people, we should let the FBI know.
We'll get right on that.

Plurp.
The blue dog
searched everywhere for
thermobaric pitures of Angelina Jolie

Thursday, January 2, 2003
Blab. We seem to have started some kind of conversation thing on the topic of cloning.
I think some people may be confusing cloning -- making a genetically identical copy of an organism -- with genetic engineering -- modifying the genetic structure of an organism to produce desireable (presumably) results. One doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the other, although I can see where cloning may be a tool toward genetic engineering.
Of course, most people get their science education from 1950s sci-fi movies, too, so I can see why there might be some confusion.
L.
Hey - don't knock 1950s sci-fi movies! They are the firmament of our understanding of both the natural universe and world culture.
We wonder if there are people who think that cloning is bad and genetic engineering is good. Or vice versa.
We suppose that folks who freak at biological things not produced by nature (by some definition) might be OK with clones (assuming their genomes are exact copies of their parent) but not with more interesting genetic engineering. We can't think of a vice for the versa, though.
In any event, both groups of people better learned to suck it up. No matter what they think, genetic engineering is with us. And someone will extend it to humans in the near future. That's why we think it's funny that, for all the posturing of the Harvard tenured faculty and the various self-appointed bio-ethicists, a bunch of UFO wackos may have made the first human clone.
You just can't control what people do on their own. Ain't it great?

Blab. A reader may have yet another musical suggestion for us.
Yes, Eliis Paul is good!
Wow! Must be Ellis Paul's brother. We'll try to keep an open mind, but we must admit to a natural suspicion of (Western) people with reversed names. What are they hiding? That's what we want to know.

Blab. A reader notes a disturbing event.
01/02/03 04:05:06
(Usual caveats/apologies about U.S. date format, time zone, and 12-hour time format.)
We want to know two things.

What were you doing up at four in the morning? If it's something other than playing GNE, you're in big trouble, young man.

Did the universe end? We thought so.

Blab. Speaking of Harvard, here is ...
A Day of Croquet in the Yard
What a lovely and stereotypical photo montage. We recognize that the suits and formal dresses are likely to be self-parody. And perhaps the dialog as well. (Though we are curious about the educational standards of students who use the word musnt'.)
We wonder, however, if the authors recognize that the thirty half-megabyte JPEGs that constitute that single page also fit into the stereotype of profligate privilege. What's that you say? Ah, of course. They don't actually know anyone without broadband access.

Plurp. Here's an interesting fact about Disney World.
You cannot buy chewing gum anywhere in Walt Disney World.
The reason should be obvious. Now here's an even more interesting fact.
You cannot buy chewing gum anywhere in the Orlando airport.
Fascinating, eh?

Plop. You know you're getting old when ...
... you pay more attention to the Moroccan drum technique than you do to that of the belly dancer.

Plurp. The World Showcase in EPCOT, which has exhibits for a number of counties and cultures around the world, has some odd gaps.
There are, for instance, no South American countries represented at all, while Mexico, the USA and "Canada" are all there. Similarly, although there are several Western European nations, there are none from Eastern Europe. The only African nation is Morocco, which is like representing North America with only Tennessee. China is there with a big exhibit, but Russia is nowhere to be found. Perhaps weirdest of all, from the point of view of population and culture, is the absence of India.
We were also disappointed to see no representation from the Middle East. We suggest a temporary pavilion called Interactive Iraq, in which kids could play WMD Hide & Seek and Southern Radar Whack-a-Mole. Better hurry, though.
We wonder what criteria Disney uses to select the countries that are represented in the "World" Showcase. Readers are invited to speculate.

Plurp.
The blue dog
spent a day in
the Yard.

Wednesday, January 1, 2003
Blab. Recent ruminations about the Tomorrowland of the 60s and the Tomorrowland of today elicit a correction from this knowledgeable reader.
Sorry, the 60s was all about the Beatles.
Thank you, Helen.

Blab. Another reader has what appears to be a rare, serious answer to our question. Imagine that.

Here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, if you could represent "the promise of the future," what would it be?
A healthy, well-fed person, sleeping. With a smile on eir face. On a starship en route to, say, alpha centauri.
Let's consider the two parts that our reader submits. The first - healthy, well fed and sleeping - is a timeless goal. Well, maybe except for that sleeping part, that being a timeless goal of ours.
The second - that starship thing - is a bit more problematic for us. You see, we just don't see that happening. Not for a very, very long time. Maybe even never.
The problem is that alpha centauri (and pretty much every place else in the universe) is really, really far away. It's not like being Columbus, when the New World was months away on a little boat. The new New Worlds are centuries away, or millennia away. Or more. Space is a vast gulf, far larger and far more lonely than humanity has ever before encountered.
Sure, maybe some magical new technology will allow us to bend spacetime, develop warp drive, or create some other cute SF plot device that gets us there faster. But maybe not. Our guess is: Probably not. And, if not, then everything will remain really, really far away. And we will be stuck here, at the bottom of our single gravity well, or maybe a few local gravity wells.
Or are we just being cynical? Having given up on our childhood dream of traveling into space ourself, are we simply projecting onto the rest of the world the necessity to focus on the terrestrial?

Blab. A reader reminds us that Dave has, as usual, already visited the cloning issues and has already blogged the definitive answer as to ...
Why cloning is bad.
Also there's the whole issue of tentacles.
You should, of course, go read them all, but here's our favorite:
Cloning will reduce the culture's respect for life, just like antibiotics and prosthetic limbs did.

Blab. Another reader checks in on the whole cloning thing.
Designer people? Undesigner people haven't worked out all that well, so let's give it a shot.
Responsibility for outcomes scares the hell out of people, particularly those who subscribe to the big myths like an all-knowing something behind all of this. "Hey, we'd rather not know, okay!??" God has a plan, they think; I wonder why he hasn't filed it yet. Touchy to criticism, is my guess.
As long as the little Raelians (sp?...too lazy to look it up given its longterm significance to me) don't wind up believing all that space person crap, even if the space persons speak French.
Congresspersons, we are told, have problems with the ethics of people making people in non-traditional ways. I have problems with the ethics of congresspersons taking the money and getting cheap haircuts on my nickle, while feeding the mighty maw of their fat wallet contributors, paying farmers not to grow, aiding the jingoism of GB2, and having amnesia about the fact that there are real living and traditionally made children in Iraq who will die when we get annoyed with our not being able to find what perhaps ain't there. "There is too!" "Not." "Is too! BOOM!!"
Have a nice year.
Thanks! You, too.

Blab. But this reader balks.
Oh, yeah, like I am going to tell you why cloning bothers me. So you can sit back in your little cube of an office and laugh at me.
Don't worry. We'll sit back in our little cube of an office and laugh at you anyway.

Blab. A bolder reader writes this.
First cloning as duplicating (not that is that): the philosophies:
kill some vs.
more of the same
are pretty much evil-equivalent.
"Why not genetically tailor children to remove diseases, increase intelligence, improve physical performance, and edit out bad habits?"
Remove diseases? fine
Increase intelligence? Has someone got a final/operational definition of intelligence.
I think not.
"improve physical performance"
Does that mean, inspired by spam, one would want to clone in order to increase penis size.
Would you clone Jim Carry? and what about Marylin Manson? [we need some]
Should sex workers' clones be sex workers?
Of course we want best of breed.*
What if one clones a brilliant rocket scientist and she/he want to dance naked for living? [fine with me]
Of course we are bound to do stupid things, so I don't sweat.
Enjoy the journey.
[* this is said to make a point, all my respect to all sex workers, whether they enjoy their life or hope/struggle for a different one]
We plan on making this entry a special discussion topic in our little cube of an office.

Blab. That small army of spies that records everything we do writes:
Helen scored pretty well, too.
Hmm. This refers to Disney's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, in which both Helen and we participated earlier this week. We held first place among the audience for a brief time.
Helen did, indeed, end up in the Top 10. She beat us out by a good train of logic on the question, What is it called when a Brownie works on a Girl Scout badge? Yay, Helen!
Now please go back to your recording devices.

Blab. A Treasured Reader checks in with all sorts of helpful hints.
all y'all gotta listen to ellis paul. he even plays NYC occasionally.
your good buddy dave chess was complaining about using dial-up and it prompted me to pre-announce my lastest grand scheme. thought you might consider listing it among the "prior art" for your autonomic computing patents as the network is self-repairing, self-regulating and self-building:
as for the last mile and reliable broadband communications, i'm working on training ants to pass along bits. i figure that they can perform packet switching better than pigeons (ref: RFC 1149, Waitzman D. A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, April, 1990). Plus they have the potential to provide "last mile" transmission directly to your selected countertop. cheaper than laying fiber as they construct their own tunnels.
Dorian
We will indeed check out ellis paul. Does he play the tabla?
We figure both Dave and Ian will be interested in your fascinating new communications protocol, for different reasons. Do you have an RFC on it?

Blab. Another reader actually continues the conversation about our musical interests.
You should check out the band Rusted Root. Very percussive.
Thanks! We shall indeed. Percussion is good!

Blab. A reader regards us as the source of all possible information.
I was reading on your web site and saw that you mentioned taffy machines-do you know where one could be purchased??
Thanks,
marc s.
You know, we don't know. Perhaps our readers are smarter than we are.

Blab. We are called to task on our suggestion that years, being nonrenewable resources, ought to be reused, rather than starting with a new one each year, as we seem to keep on doing.
What year would you reuse?
We'd suggest 1985. A very lightly used year. Surely it can stand a little more wear and tear before it's retired?

Plurp. The New Year's Eve plan:
Dinner in the Moroccan restaurant in EPCOT at 6 PM. Live music. Belly dancing (though not by us). Then a sedate retreat to the hotel where, just before midnight, we'd go down to the little white beach, lie in a hammock with a little picnic, and watch the fireworks.
The New Year's Eve actuality:
It started raining around 7 PM. In buckets. Torrentially. Thunder. Lightning. And it didn't stop until some time this morning. Helen, having cleverly looked at the Doppler ahead of time, said, Let's just stay in tonight, so we did. Picnic and all.
At midnight, it was raining even harder. But Disney, not to be put off, set off all of their twelve zillion planned fireworks. In the rain. And we watched the distant sky light up through the window of our warm, dry room.
So, Happy New Year.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was bound to do
stupid things

Tuesday, December 31, 2002
Blab. A festive reader addresses us.
happy new year plurp!
Still, it worries us. The way we see it, years are a non-renewable resource. Shouldn't we be trying to reuse the old ones, rather than gallivanting off to new ones all the time?
Then again, we used 2002 pretty much to be point of wearing it out already. So maybe it's OK to start with a new year. Just this once.

Blab. A reader attempts to explain the inexplicable madness of crowds.
Mashing together the assignment for future predictions and the comments on cloning, I think a lot of people are freaked out by it when they see that cloning will lead toward gentically tailored children. You know, that whole Gatica thing.
But why not? We're in an age where we can direct our evolution, right? Why not genetically tailor children to remove diseases, increase intelligence, improve physical performance, and edit out bad habits?
- Felis Lynx
We think you're right about that. We also think people are terminally confused. If folks are worked up about knowing, and even helping to determine, the characteristics of their potential pablum spewers, we recommend random, blind adoption. Offspring of two known parents have way too many traits in common with their parents.
We suspect that most of the itchiness about cloning is religious in nature. Religious folks get all confused when The Divine Miracle of Birth becomes plain old gritty engineering. We're very sorry about that. Really we are. (We're still apologizing for that Copernican solar system thing. Oh, and evolution. Especially evolution.)
Helen tells us that we're going to upset a lot of people with our views on cloning. We honestly can't imagine why. But if you're upset by what we say, then by all means:

Get over it,

Buzz off, or

Tell us, so we can make fun of you.

Blab. Unwilling to let it alone, a reader goads us to confess.
Wonderful meal at the Animal Kingdom lodge, hm? A heaping of Timon with a side of Pumba?
- Felis Lynx
You know, we were hoping for giraffe steaks, or at least fresh monkey brains. But no such luck. On the other hand, the restaurant (Jiko) really is quite good. It's a lovely space, both cleanly modern and colorfully tribal. We had appetizers of duck spring rolls, cinnamon beef roll, lentil filled phyllo and maize tamales. For dinner, Helen had kamut, wheat berries, and seared tandoori tofu. We had steamed bass en papier.
The food was all terrific, but the highlight was our waiter, who was enthusiastic, very knowledgeable about the food, and intent on encouraging us to try new things. (We don't usually need much encouragement.)

Blab. A reader waddles in, plops down on a nearby bar stool and asks:
So Steve White...in a desperate attempt to start conversation, what kind of music do you enjoy listening to?
My, that is desperate.
We like percussion - the Kodo Drummers, tabla, and so forth. We enjoyed Tuvan throat singers once, but probably only because Feynman mentioned them. We're also a fan of Beethoven, Peter Gabriel and Sheryl Crow, among others.
Now, converse.

Plurp. We got the top score today at the IBM invention video game in EPCOT's Innoventions, and we were temporarily the high scorer in the Disney version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
Who's competitive?
Meanwhile, Sony's Aibo needs another couple of generations before it's more than a simulation of a slow, nearly brain dead dog. Here doggie. No - here. The ball is here. Over here. Sigh.
In other news, Disney has acquired a few of the Segway Überhype Scooters, which seem ideal for an environment that is extremely concerned with its tech image, infinitely wheelchair accessible, and not at all cost conscious. Buy yours today!

Plurp.
The blue dog
kept both eyes
on the ball

Monday, December 30, 2002
Blab. One of the small horde of government agents that records every moment of our existence steps over the line with this.
Hey, Dr. Plurp, tell the kids about the wonderful meal we had last night at the Animal Kingdom Lodge.
Helen
Look. It's one thing to destroy any hope for privacy we might once have had. It's something else entirely to masquerade as Helen. Knock it off.

Blab. A reader lobbies for the future of the goons.
The future will be a place where man and Play Doh will leave together in peace and harmony....
- Felis Lynx
That would be fine with us. Much better than the current state of affairs.

Blab. Thinking about Tomorrowland and what the future might be like, a reader writes:
In the 60's (and even up through most of the 80's), the population was optimistic about the future and scientific development. Relativity, quantum mechanics, the discovery of DNA structure, the advance of the computer -- everything was happening at an accelerating rate. It was deemed believable that, within 20 years, most of what we considered 'impossible' 'now' would be old hat. The cold war ended. Germany reunited. The UN was more powerful than it had ever been. GENI was gaining support.
Then the war with Iraq came around, and (as always happens during wars), hope paused. It resumes, and the whole internet and dot com boom happened. Even the bust didn't diminish the hopes and dreams of all -- more IPOs came out, although a bit more study and effort was put it and less money was forthcoming.
Now, another war. A few, actually. The war on Terrorism. The (new) war with Iraq. North Korea about ready to have a nervous breakdown.
When you look at history, 'progress' can generally be defined as the advances that occurred while the government was too busy to stop them (there's still hope for GENI).
Possibly. Though we may remember the 60s differently than you do. We remember Vietnam, the great maw that sunk its teeth into four million young Americans, chewed up almost one hundred and fifty thousand of those, and swallowed forever nearly forty thousand.
We remember the nuclear arms race, the duck-and-cover drills in fourth grade, and our knowledge - as a child - that entire cities could be turned into hot plasma in an instant. And, later, we realized that any serious nuclear exchange would likely mean the end of all life on the surface of the Earth.
Every generation has its terrors, it seems.
Meanwhile, scientific and technological advances have continued apace. Beyond reason, Moore's Law gives kids supercomputers on which to play games. The human genome is nearing classification. There is hope that a Grand Unified Theory of physics really is possible. It is an age of marvels still.
So tell us. Here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, if you could represent "the promise of the future," what would it be?

Plop. Here's something we didn't know, courtesy of the Washington Post.
The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.
Isn't that special? Now, they don't say explicitly in the article that the U.S. provided stuff from which Iraq made (or could have made) chemical and biological weapons. Well, not exactly.
But, when folks die from Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, it may be that you know who helped.

Plop. And that's not all! One of those clever Washington types (see above) thinks it'd be great if the U.S. reinstituted slavery.
"I'm going to introduce legislation to have universal military service to let everyone have an opportunity to defend the free world against the threats coming to us," [Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York) said ...]. "I'm talking about mandatory service."
We say, good idea! Let's draft Rangel first. When he gets killed horribly in some far-off battlefield, we'll move on to the rest of the U.S. Congress. Once they are blown apart or in the throws of death from some dread disease, we'll throw their families in. The Executive Branch comes next - there's plenty of them. Afterwards, the vast armies of bureaucrats in D.C. that make this wonderment possible.
By that point, we'll wager that the rest of us will have forgotten why they thought it was such a good idea to let everyone have an opportunity to defend the free world. At least, that kind of sweet, gun-to-your-head kind of opportunity.

Rant. So we're missing the whole point of the outcry over human cloning. The arguments tend to be along the line of, we don't know what the long-term effects are. But that sounds too much like the Atomic Monster Movies of the 1950s. We don't know everything that could be known about X, so X will create horrors!
More educated is the argument, Cloned children are likely to have a higher frequency of genetic abnormalities, so we shouldn't clone people.
But that still makes no sense. Some people are more likely to have kids with genetic defects anyway. Should they be banned from having kids? Or people that work in certain professions, or live near Chernobyl - should they be banned from having kids?
Cloning must be controlled and regulated, we've heard pundits say. We can't figure out why. Maybe they think that we should ban anything that they think might be bad.
But bad for whom? If whomever is doing the cloning is up front with the donors and parents about the risks and so forth, what's the big deal? It's their DNA, and it'll be their kid. If they can choose their own mate, and decide to have kids or not, and decide to do in vitro fertilization if they want, then (wait for it) there's absolutely nothing morally different about cloning.
So we have these simple words for all the pundits: Butt out! It's none of your business!
So there.

Plurp.
The blue dog
must be controlled
and regulated

Sunday, December 29, 2002
Blab. A reader contributes a late entry to our Perfect Foods non-contest.
Hi Captain Plurp,
Earlier this month I had the experience of eating a perfect food: amazing vanilla ice cream between two freshly made large chocolate chip cookies. Yum. I bought it at the bakery on Disneyworld's Main Street and highly recommend it as a cheerful way to start a day.
The battered and deep fried candy bars at the Minnesota State Fair rank second, only to the cheese curds---not just for breakfast anymore!
Happy New Year
From your Midwest Fan Club
Okay! We're willing to stipulate that really good vanilla ice cream all by itself is quite wonderful and, when lodged inextricably between two really good chocolate chip cookies, is one of the most complex and wonderful palatial treats ever.
Having attained this great height of culinary wisdom, our Treasured Reader does a triple half gainer into terminal arterial sclerosis.
Deep fried candy bars? Next you'll be extolling the dietary benefits of deep fried Twinkies.
We worry about you. We do.

Blab. A reader indulges in nostalgia.
*neighbours,,,everybody needs good neighbours*
As we said:
So, this guy in an aesthetically appalling house in a humdrum suburban development hates his neighbor. Can they resolve their differences? Of course not. Instead, he tells his version of the hate-hate relationship on the Web.
There's not much more we can say. If they were Middle Eastern political figures, they would be sending violent weaponry into each others' yards in the name of vengeance.
Ironic, isn't it?

Plurp. Wandering around Tomorrowland in DisneyWorld today, we are struck by the topics selected as futuristic. Now, sure, the current Tomorrowland is a strange mixture of Disney's original vision of the future (as typified by the dated Carousel of Progress, or the zoomy Space Mountain), and the recent "future that never happened" theme (e.g. Extro, the time traveler thingie).
The 60's view of the future was that of Heinlein and Bradbury. It was all about space travel, about gleaming utopian cities, about teleportation and time travel. It was all about the inevitability of technological progress.
But that's not how the future turned out. The galaxy turned out to be Really Big, not to mention the rest of the universe, and there is little hope that we will ever see another solar system up close and personal. Heck, we haven't even got the gumption to go back to the moon, and Mars is a distant, lifeless planet. There are not gleaming utopian cities. Real cities are loud, grimy and old. There is not teleportation, sorry.
But the glowing hopes of the 60's had great appeal - great enough to persist even now, some forty years later.
So we wonder about the tomorrow of today. What are the hopes and dreams that we have today that will turn into better days in the future? Is it the post-apocalyptic world of Gibson and Sterling? Is it the .com world of ubiquitous computing, or perhaps the Drexlerian nano-future?
Sure, we have our own speculations. But perhaps we should encourage our readers (if we still have readers - we can't actually tell) to suggest their own thoughts about what the future looks like and (for bonus points) how Tomorrowland should be revamped to portray it.

Plop. Now we have to worry about polio again? Can't you goons keep anything safe?
Criminey! And we have trust you guys with guns and stuff?

Plurp.
The blue dog
wished the goons would
stick with Play-Doh

Top

Earlier entries Later entries