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QUARK SOUP - A very good blog on environmental issues and sciences as its point of focus .
Impressed by this particular entry
First David Appell talks about (not entirely his views but a collage of links to) how nanotechnology and biotechnology (same as Prey) can be a serious threat beyond just sci-fi to actually finish off biological life on earth and get(a chilling prospect)taken over by exponentially replicating artificial life by as near as 2035 . . . whoa ! Day-dreaming ?
Its his analysis of a book by Bill McKibben - Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. The book calls for putting tabs on nano and biotech tinkering(aka research) or risk killing the human soul ! "A moratorium on these 'dangerous' technologies" - Luddite thoughts ??? That this is even not conceivable in this age of technology march with blinding pace, is surprising. But then isnt it thought provoking and even scary.
Appell then refutes these claims well . . . he couners the argument with the fact that we are constantly developing technologies to improve life, fight crippling diseases and up the standard of living and the process may have transformed us from Homo Sapiens to Homo Mutans or Homo Techno or whatever but that this argument cannot imply we are on self-destruct mode; since ages we have been evolving (unmistakably changing the world around us in the process) and the state we are in now is one we have arrived at, on this ongoing human journey. Its easy to frighten the public at large to sell books and movies and earn dollars but to find real solutions is much more difficult, and its for this precise reason, that the quest for innovation must go on.

Explore ::: wood s lot :::
From there :

America: The failed experiment
Paul Harris
yellow times

Most Americans seem to think that the United States has been a monumental success.
The United States is in decline; it is a society in an advanced state of decay.
America began with the genocide inflicted on native North Americans; it enslaved its own people and nearly tore itself apart in a cataclysmic war fought, in part, about that slavery. It has since spread its beneficence and its mayhem around the globe with casual disregard for all others. It remains a highly polarized society grouped together only by a collective fear of everyone else; within its own borders, groups of various sizes adhere only out of fear of other Americans.
The United States has relentlessly chased after the ability to annihilate its enemies with firepower beyond belief and convinced itself that it is right and just to do so. ...

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