Are you suggesting that nobody dies from prostate cancer in america? And what about those who lack the ability to properly treat their prostate cancer, what is their five year survival rate?

Kudos to you on your excellent post. Its refreshing to see you didn't get defensive at the "Fucking Moron" thing. That said, I believe, although this may be an unwarranted assumption on my part, the GP meant to suggest that even though a person could be chromosomally male or female they could in fact be gendered in other ways. And this is before considering things like Turner Syndrome or other sex chromosome related syndromes. We would most likely all agree that a developmentally standard individual should be sexed according to their external genitalia, but what of androgen insensitive males who were raised as females (a practice that used to be common) or women with Turner Mosaicism wherein many of her cells would exhibit XO and others would exhibit XX. Aneuploidy is a heady subject with some interesting implications for our understanding of sex and gender. Course, I could be way wrong about the intention of the GP, he seems kind of like a dick.

" More than Iron, more than lead, more than gold,
        I need electricity,
        I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber,
        I need it for my dreams."

It's arithmetic and its not dangerous, it's illuminating. If those bacteria in the thought experiment were to somehow find 3 brand new jars to grow into guess how much more time they bought themselves... 2 minutes! by 12:02 they would have overgrown even the sudden and large influx of resources into their system. You disagree without any sort of reason to disagree. And your only refutation of my claims is a reliance on technology that is far enough away that we can consider magic. But even granting magic fusion fairies unless they can continue to produce exponentially more energy to meet the demands of a growing population, at some point fairly shortly into the future we will run out of resources to produce more energy. At some point growth has to stop. We can't make that go away. We can decide if we stop it now via a conscious act or if we stop it later through war, famine, nuclear holocaust or the like. All the way up until 11:59 a bacterium could be saying, "it's cool, we still haven't even used half of all of our resources and our best bacteria minds are working on the problem." But while he may be right in fact, he is wrong in principle.

Here here! It's tragic that our elected representatives think they're our leaders, or god forbid, our rulers... wait I take it back, it's tragic that we, the public, think our representatives are our leaders. I appreciate NORML and strongly support ending the drug-war across the nation, but I take huge exception to the idea that we need to pay to have less government involvement in our lives. Drug users shouldn't have to pretend that they want to be fine upstanding squares, they should demand that their rights be respected even if they aren't squares.

And a final note, it tears me apart when people talk about government granting rights. The declaration of independence, while not a policy document, clearly sets forth language regarding our INALIENABLE rights. Rights which cannot be separated from the individual. The role of the government with respect to our rights is not to grant them, not even to guarantee them, it is to protect them and a government that is not doing that is in dereliction of duty to its citizens. That got a little tangent to JCR's point but its all in the same vein.

Don't mod him up, the 1000 year figure is as much a myth as the various fears promoted about nuclear power. What no one in this thread is taking into consideration are the realities of exponential growth and where we are with our abilities to generate energy. I am going to use a wonderful thought experiment I heard on a video by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett (link below.)

Imagine you have a single bacterium that splits every one minute. You put it into a jar of sufficient size such that at the end of 60 such doublings, the entire volume of the jar is taken up by the bacteria. You start an experiment at 11:00am by 12:00pm the experiment is done. At what time was the jar half-filled? The answer: 11:59am! When was the jar about 1% filled? The answer: between 11:53am and 11:54am. At what point would a super intelligent bacterium be worried about the exhaustion of its resources? My guess would be by the time it was too late.

Anytime you have growth as a % of the "principal" you're in the world of exponential growth. If the world's average growth rate is 2%, in 35 years we'll have about 14billion people on the planet, the aggregation of those 14 billion people will consume more than the entire population of consumers in history. At what point will those people be consuming in excess of even a theoretical ability to produce and how long will the surpluses generated while we have excess capacity take to be depleted?

We shouldn't be demanding more power plants be put online, we should be demanding zero growth while we figure out a way to avoid running headlong into whichever Malthusian solution we're hell-bent on reaching. We should use other metrics to gauge the success of our economic system than growth. A tumor grows, most people don't get too excited about that.

As a final note, nuclear seems to be the best option with regard to our CURRENT energy needs. France has demonstrated how it can be done cleanly, ITER reactors show how it can be done efficiently. But the myth of the long future with nuclear power, or any power technology needs to be exploded.

For a good watch, start at one and go to eight:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6A1FD147A45EF50D

A short phrase to illustrate google's reluctance to open the idea choice to the public:

Marblecake also the game.

Man oh man I wish I got to this comment yesterday when I had mod points. In a similar vein, an argument was made that investing in teh arts via $10,000 grants has an insane ROI. For instance, give 10 grand to the right guy to make a screenplay, that gets bought for $150000 and made for 100,000,000 and finally earns 200,000,000. Think of the returns received in a simple $10,000 grant. Sure, most grants won't pay out this well, but if only a fraction of a percent do then its a numbers game at that point. Contrast that with the 10's of billions we're sinking into the black hole of corporate america and figure the ROI on that.

I totally agree. My favorite type of fantasy has always been the Lovecraft/Howard swords and sorcery kind of stuff. I love the gritty human characters and the sex and the violence. Stories like Den and Elfquest are cool to. I like that seventies stoned-out-of-your-head-here's-some-wild-shit-fantasy, next to that I always felt the holy trilogy was sterile and dull. Give me sexy necromancer queens , yoked out amoral swordsman, bizarre animals and a huge heapin' hunk of WTF and I'm in heaven.

What you did there was paint a fantasy setting with a scifi brush. One of the differences between fantasy and scifi are the themes. To illustrate Star Wars is fantasy, Star Trek is SciFi. The differences are Star wars: Strongly moralistic themes (light side, dark side) inherently mystical force, whole planets have the same culture, technology is not derived from currently known or postulated tech. Star Trek: Humanistic themes, no clear cut moral stance, presumably more explanation of the technology. If you have FTL travel why don't you have FTL sneaker-net? Why would a planetary system agree to have a "lord" as the government. The more "imaginative" you have to be, the more implausible the story becomes and the faster it turns into fantasy with lasers as opposed to SciFi.

I disagree with your characterization of mainstream science. Science uses what works as is evidenced by Kary Mullis being influenced by LSD and discovering PCR. Scientists have run the gamut from kabbalah studying rocket scientists (Jack Parsons), to swinging swiss wife-swapping physicists. The inspiration can come from anywhere, but the key to turning it in to science is reproducibility outside of the transcendental state. A lot of people take acid and talk about the interconnectedness of all things, very very very few take acid and can mathematically relate general relativity and quantum mechanics. Its not so much that science frowns on the use of drugs, its just that for the vast majority of people drugs don't offer the useful states of mind necessary to do science.

With regard to Terrence Mckenna, personally I resonate with some of his ideas. However, there is no rigor to his theories. Terms are ill-defined, his selection of historical points are arbitrary and don't clearly demonstrate an increase in complexity, or even a decrease in complexity. He could have just as easily talked about a flowering east indian culture as the fall of the roman empire because the only selection criteria is whatever supports the Timewave Zero hypothesis. His theory falls apart at the point of "Infinite Novelty" when he claims anything imaginable will happen, but what about mutually exclusive things? Or logically impossible things? And why the I Ching? The african geomancers created a system of binomial mathematics that influenced Leibniz and was a thousand years ahead of its time. What special reasoning led to the selection of the I Ching as a correct divinatory method and further, how did he come to interpret the date of 2012 when chinese I Ching practitioners did not? Terrence McKenna had some wild and great ideas that are worth reading about (I don't like the register of his voice.) but he is not the inspired genius that many people paint him to be. My 2 cents anyway

An electron to a nucleus is not like a planet to a star. An electron exists in a smeared out cloud around the nucleus of an atom, it doesn't spin about like a planet in orbit, in fact we can say where a planet in orbit is at any point in its orbit, we can give a probability for the electron. The seemingly coincidental nature of the universe is, with regard to this coincidence, just the over applied analogy of the Bohr model of the atom. It has no factual value to understanding the connection between the tiny and the vast. However, the appearance of transcendental numbers all over the place, and the eerie ability of math to describe literally everything... that's just pure magic right there.

Two things:
1. GP made no claim about being non-partisan. His post clearly was partisan.

2. Clinton in bosnia, Obama and Ayers or failing to pay taxes all have nothing to do with a volcano erupting. The political connection comes from Jindal specifically mentioning volcanoes and obliquely from New Orleans and hurricane katrina. This is a story about a natural disaster, not a lying politician.

bonus bonus bonus point point point!!

3. Even if the GP's central theme was lying politicians he doesn't have to keep quiet just because some politicians he may or may not share affiliations with also lied! A standard conservative tactic is "You to!" Which does nothing to address the criticism leveled at their leadership.

I agree with most of your post. Squealer up there has no problem reminding us how bad the farm was before now, and ample "facts and figures" to prove it. Orwell was right about the future, just wrong about under which philosophy it would be brought about.

By the way, home prices in Detroit are selling for $7500, maybe you could telecommute?

Most likely it will be tied to the rate at which natural resources can be extracted from the land. This can be mitigated to some degree by greater demand for natural resources causing new extraction businesses, but that will not in all cases completely counter a very large demand. Many industries like mining concerns, oil refineries, oil wells and chemical plants take many years to go through planning, permitting, construction, production. All of that prevents "the market" from responding to the increased demand by increasing supply.

In addition, at some point we will reach the limit at which we can no longer extract the natural resources we need for certain businesses. Whether that point is dozens or thousands of years from now depends on the resource, but it is a limiting concern ultimately.