In his writings, noted futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has said that he believes human technology will one day reach a point where the human life expectancy will be radically extended, resulting in near immortality. In a 2009 interview with Computerworld, Kurzweil put the date at which immortality could be achieved somewhere around 2040 or 2050 thanks to the ever-quickening pace of technological development and the rise of nanotechnology that will repair or even replace parts of the human body. Kurzweil may have overshot that date by a few decades, as today’s human achievement is the invention of nanospiders that can crawl along human DNA and change it.
DNA nanospiders, created by Columbia University scientists, are small robots (about 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair) made of DNA molecules. As ScienceNews reports:
The “arachnoid nanobots” have three to four legs and walk across expansive landscapes of exquisitely folded DNA. Some of these molecular machines can take 50 steps all by themselves. Others sport wiggly arms that can pick up and carry around nanoparticles.
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The Obama administration is now working with state attorney generals to rip off pension funds to bail out mortgage borrowers who don’t even need help. Pension funds that millions of Americans rely on for their retirement will suffer. Bank shareholders will also suffer. I explain how and why in a commentary at The Washington Examiner website. The government is trying to get mortgage servicers to write off portions of loans that are owned by other people or institutions — like the pension funds that millions depend on. That undermines property rights. Last fall, intellectuals with ties to the Obama administration proposed a much larger, but conceptually similar, bailout that could cost taxpayers a trillion dollars, the idea being to temporarily increase consumer spending through the next election.
Bi-partisan pressure mounts for the Obama administration to move on long-pending free trade agreements (FTAs). At Senate Finance Committee hearings yesterday on the trade agenda, both Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Ranking Member Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) gave the Obama administration a hard time on not moving on pending trade pacts as U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk testified before the full committee.
Sen. Hatch took a particularly tough line in his questioning. He noted that while the Obama administration is prepared to submit the U.S.-Korea FTA, he questioned why it has dragged its feet on setting any definite timetable for considering the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama. Both trade pacts have been negotiated and re-negotiated for several years now, and yet the administration still claims there are still some outstanding issues that need to be resolved, mainly relating to labor unions.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) also expressed concern about the pace with which these agreements are being submitted to Congress. According to USTR Kirk, the U.S.-Korea FTA is ready for technical drafting and submission to Congress, but the Colombia and Panama FTAs don’t have clear timetables for congressional consideration. Sen. Thune asked what further changes the president wants in the agreements and questioned whether U.S. credibility about future agreements will be hurt if more revisions are required after the FTAs have been negotiated and signed. He said, “A deal with the U.S. ought to be a deal.”
In response, Kirk said that “a vast majority of people in the U.S. don’t believe in the wisdom of our trade policy” and we have to “keep faith with American workers.” He noted that the Korea trade pact is ready, and Congress should move on that, while the other two agreements are moving forward and should be ready this year.
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Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty is a work of great depth. It’s one of those books that one doesn’t read, so much as study. But the extra effort brings ample intellectual rewards. Still, it isn’t the most approachable book. For one, its length requires a commitment that many readers aren’t willing to make. For another, Hayek’s verbose prose style does not make for easy reading.
Fortunately, the good folks at IEA have just released Eugene Miller’s summary of all the arguments Hayek makes in The Constitution of Liberty. You can download it for free here. Besides being a good companion to read alongside the original, it looks easier for more casual readers to digest.
IEA has given similar treatments to some of Hayek’s other works. Take a look if you’re new to Hayek, or would like a refresher course on works you’ve already read.
People complain that the level of political discourse in America is lower than ever. That isn’t actually true if you look at the historical record. But ratio of heat to light is still far too high.
Over at the Daily Caller, I share a bit of wisdom from the economist Joseph Schumpeter about how people can have a more constructive dialogue about the direction of the country.
I have long been fascinated by both aberrational and irrational human behavior, at least since I documented a mass outbreak of hysteria regarding the so-called “heterosexual AIDS explosion” that wasn’t GOING to take place but allegedly already had.
More recently, I documented that the whole Toyota flap was mass sociogenic hysteria in the same category of the missing children and Satanic abuse in the day care centers hysteria. This notwithstanding that I’ve been unable to find a single publication that’s willing to print what I show is clearly obvious. Editors don’t think anybody is interested that this is America’s greatest mass hysteria in many years, and that such mass hysterias usually cause tremendous and lasting damage. And maybe they’re right.
Mind, “irrational” and “aberrational” are by no means synonymous. Often enough, irrationality rules the day and it’s rationality that is aberrational.
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Tech:
Facebook a top cause of relationship trouble, say US lawyers:
“When Facebook gets involved, relationships can quickly fall apart – as Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi have discovered. But dictatorships are not the only ties being dissolved by social networking sites: now Facebook is increasingly being blamed for undermining American marriages.”
LimeWire Settles Copyright Infringement Case:
“The music publishers, which include Sony and Warner Music Group, sued LimeWire for copyright infringement last June. However, today all claims brought against LimeWire LLC and Chief Executive Mark Gorton were dismissed following a filing in a New York federal court.”
Google releases stable version of Chrome 10:
“Google has released version 10 of its browser. The update brings hundreds of bug fixes as well as many features that have been available on the Chrome beta and dev channels to users interested in using Chrome’s latest builds. Chrome 10 also addresses 23 security vulnerabilities in the WebKit-based browser (easily more than Google has ever fixed before): 15 rated as High, three rated as Medium, and five rated as Low.”
Researchers unmasking anonymous email senders:
“Just because you send an email anonymously doesn’t mean people can’t figure out who you are anymore.”
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This year’s budget battle is especially heated. Democrats want the federal budget to be $3.7 trillion. Republicans want it to be $3.6 trillion. Both sides are willing to shut down the federal government rather than give in.
That’s where cowboy poetry, of all things, comes in. This traditional American art form, which I’d never heard of until today, has suddenly become the latest front in the epic struggle over the size and scope of government.
It is currently official federal policy to financially support cowboy poetry. But the GOP wants to cut $61 billion, or 1.6 percent, out of President Obama’s proposed budget. And cowboy poetry funding is on the chopping block.
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