This is JK Rowling's comments on independence. As Mike Haseler pointed out the original was formatted to make it difficult to read, which is a shame because it is about as serious and sensible as anything anybody has said on the subject:

Before you read the following, please be warned that it’s probably of interest only to people who live in Scotland or the UK (and not all of them!)  If you read on regardless, you need to know that there is going to be a referendum on 18th September on whether or not Scotland should leave the United Kingdom.  If you’re only vaguely interested, or pressed for time, there’s a mention of Death Eaters in paragraph 5.

I came to the question of independence with an open mind and an awareness of the seriousness of what we are being asked to decide.  This is not a general election, after which we can curse the result, bide our time and hope to get a better result in four years.  Whatever Scotland decides, we will probably find ourselves justifying our choice to our grandchildren.  I wanted to write this because I always prefer to explain in my own words why I am supporting a cause and it will be made public shortly that I’ve made a substantial donation to the Better Together Campaign, which advocates keeping Scotland part of the United Kingdom.

As everyone living in Scotland will know, we are currently being bombarded with contradictory figures and forecasts/warnings of catastrophe/promises of Utopia as the referendum approaches and I expect we will shortly be enjoying (for want of a better word) wall-to-wall coverage.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I am friendly with individuals involved with both the Better Together Campaign and the Yes Campaign, so I know that there are intelligent, thoughtful people on both sides of this question.  Indeed, I believe that intelligent, thoughtful people predominate.

However, I also know that there is a fringe of nationalists who like to demonise anyone who is not blindly and unquestionably pro-independence and I suspect, notwithstanding the fact that I’ve lived in Scotland for twenty-one years and plan to remain here for the rest of my life, that they might judge me ‘insufficiently Scottish’ to have a valid view.  It is true that I was born in the West Country and grew up on the Welsh border and while I have Scottish blood on my mother’s side, I also have English, French and Flemish ancestry.  However, when people try to make this debate about the purity of your lineage, things start getting a little Death Eaterish for my taste.  By residence, marriage, and out of gratitude for what this country has given me, my allegiance is wholly to Scotland and it is in that spirit that I have been listening to the months of arguments and counter-arguments.

On the one hand, the Yes campaign promises a fairer, greener, richer and more equal society if Scotland leaves the UK, and that sounds highly appealing.  I’m no fan of the current Westminster government and I couldn’t be happier that devolution has protected us from what is being done to health and education south of the border.  I’m also frequently irritated by a London-centric media that can be careless and dismissive in its treatment of Scotland.  On the other hand, I’m mindful of the fact that when RBS needed to be bailed out, membership of the union saved us from economic catastrophe and I worry about whether North Sea oil can, as we are told by the ‘Yes’ campaign, sustain and even improve Scotland’s standard of living.

Some of the most pro-independence people I know think that Scotland need not be afraid of going it alone, because it will excel no matter what.  This romantic outlook strikes a chord with me, because I happen to think that this country is exceptional, too.  Scotland has punched above its weight in just about every field of endeavour you care to mention, pouring out world-class scientists, statesmen, economists, philanthropists, sportsmen, writers, musicians and indeed Westminster Prime Ministers in quantities you would expect from a far larger country.

My hesitance at embracing independence has nothing to do with lack of belief in Scotland’s remarkable people or its achievements.  The simple truth is that Scotland is subject to the same twenty-first century pressures as the rest of the world.  It must compete in the same global markets, defend itself from the same threats and navigate what still feels like a fragile economic recovery.

  The more I listen to the Yes campaign, the more I worry about its minimisation and even denial of risks.  Whenever the big issues are raised – our heavy reliance on oil revenue if we become independent, what currency we’ll use, whether we’ll get back into the EU – reasonable questions are drowned out by accusations of ‘scaremongering.’  Meanwhile, dramatically differing figures and predictions are being slapped in front of us by both campaigns, so that it becomes difficult to know what to believe.

I doubt I’m alone in trying to find as much impartial and non-partisan information as I can, especially regarding the economy.  Of course, some will say that worrying about our economic prospects is poor-spirited, because those people take the view ‘I’ll be skint if I want to and Westminster can’t tell me otherwise’.  I’m afraid that’s a form of ‘patriotism’ that I will never understand.  It places higher importance on ‘sticking it’ to David Cameron, who will be long gone before the full consequences of independence are felt, than to looking after your own.  It prefers the grand ‘up yours’ gesture to considering what you might be doing to the prospects of future generations.

The more I have read from a variety of independent and unbiased sources, the more I have come to the conclusion that while independence might give us opportunities – any change brings opportunities – it also carries serious risks.  The Institute for Fiscal Studies concludes that Alex Salmond has underestimated the long-term impact of our ageing population and the fact that oil and gas reserves are being depleted.  This view is also taken by the independent study ‘Scotland’s Choices: The Referendum and What Happens Afterwards’ by Iain McLean, Jim Gallagher and Guy Lodge, which says that ‘it would be a foolish Scottish government that planned future public expenditure on the basis of current tax receipts from North Sea oil and gas’.

My fears about the economy extend into an area in which I have a very personal interest: Scottish medical research.  Having put a large amount of money into Multiple Sclerosis research here, I was worried to see an open letter from all five of Scotland’s medical schools expressing ‘grave concerns’ that independence could jeopardise what is currently Scotland’s world-class performance in this area.  Fourteen professors put their names to this letter, which says that Alex Salmond’s plans for a common research funding area are ‘fraught with difficulty’ and ‘unlikely to come to fruition’.

According to the professors who signed the letter, ‘it is highly unlikely that the remaining UK would tolerate a situation in which an independent “competitor” country won more money than it contributed.’  In this area, as in many others, I worry that Alex Salmond’s ambition is outstripping his reach.

I’ve heard it said that ‘we’ve got to leave, because they’ll punish us if we don’t’, but my guess is that if we vote to stay, we will be in the heady position of the spouse who looked like walking out, but decided to give things one last go.  All the major political parties are currently wooing us with offers of extra powers, keen to keep Scotland happy so that it does not hold an independence referendum every ten years and cause uncertainty and turmoil all over again.  I doubt whether we will ever have been more popular, or in a better position to dictate terms, than if we vote to stay.

If we leave, though, there will be no going back.  This separation will not be quick and clean: it will take microsurgery to disentangle three centuries of close interdependence, after which we will have to deal with three bitter neighbours.  I doubt that an independent Scotland will be able to bank on its ex-partners’ fond memories of the old relationship once we’ve left.  The rest of the UK will have had no say in the biggest change to the Union in centuries, but will suffer the economic consequences. 

When Alex Salmond tells us that we can keep whatever we’re particularly attached to – be it EU membership, the pound or the Queen, or insists that his preferred arrangements for monetary union or defence will be rubber-stamped by our ex-partners – he is talking about issues that Scotland will need, in every case, to negotiate.  In the words of ‘Scotland’s Choices’ ‘Scotland will be very much the smaller partner seeking arrangements from the UK to meet its own needs, and may not be in a very powerful negotiating position.’

If the majority of people in Scotland want independence I truly hope that it is a resounding success. While a few of our fiercer nationalists might like to drive me forcibly over the border after reading this, I’d prefer to stay and contribute to a country that has given me more than I can easily express.  It is because I love this country that I want it to thrive.  Whatever the outcome of the referendum on 18^th September, it will be a historic moment for Scotland.  I just hope with all my heart that we never have cause to look back and feel that we made a historically bad mistake.

British spaceport in 5 years (coastal region possibly in Scotland) I privately understand Lossiemouth is the Scottish option. Campbelltown airport is actually pretty advanced but the flightpath from the US to Glasgow airports crosses it.
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Scottish secession will result in between 20,000 and 40,000 jobs moving to England, providing "huge boost" to City of London, says Centre for Economics and Business Research
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Balloon windmills -  I'm not convinced but they have at least the possibility of working which is more than current windmills do.
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Jerry Pournelle - As of course I always have. Interplanetary colonization is not easy. When NASA studied self-replicating systems in Space in 1980 it was concluded that technology was not up to closing the loop: we could not build real self-replicating systems with the current technology. When the report was presented to the Administrator, I pointed out that we did have the technology to build one kind of self-replicating system: a Moon Colony. It would have a replication time of about 18 years. The Administrator asked “Why would anyone want to live on the Moon”, which sparked the L-5 Society study on lunar colonists that demonstrated there was no shortage of well educated adventurous couples who would undertake to go live on the Moon. But that was back in the days of great space enthusiasm.

The good thing about the Moon as a place to study problems of space colonization is that is is only a few days away for physical transportation, and only a few seconds away for communications. We don’t need great theorists on the Moon: we need craftsmen. The best heart surgeon in the world is available by high definition television; a skillful surgeon can do her work under the direction of the best.

Before we start trying to build self replicating colonies elsewhere we should learn to build them on the Moon – and they might well be both physically and economically successful.
As to getting to Mars, it has been decades since I ran the Human Factors Lab at Boeing and did serious professional study of such matters, but I have kept in touch, and I don’t believe we know how to get humans to Mars alive, much less maintain them there. I do know that if we have a Lunar Colony first, we’ll have a lot more confidence in Mars operations.
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From Steve Sailer, I've not seen it reported elsewhere - The Dutch leftist legal professional who murdered in cold blood Pym Fortuyn, the candidate for prime minister on an immigration restriction platform, is out of prison after only 12 years. The assassin is usually identified as an "animal rights activist" to imply he was some kind of fringe wacko, but his testimony at his trial put him squarely in the mainstream of elite opinion on immigration in seeing Fortuyn's desire to stop Muslim immigration as beyond the pale. Indeed, the initial response of European Establishment figures in May 2002 was largely that Fortuyn had it coming.
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Typical - Despite clear evidence that the pro-Kiev radicals set Odessa’s House of Trade Unions ablaze on Friday killing dozens, the mainstream media is being ambiguous about the causes of the tragedy.
On Friday, Ukraine’s eastern town of Odessa saw brutal street battles between pro-autonomy activists and nationalist radicals which left 46 people dead. The majority of the victims died in the Trade Unions House that was set on fire by pro-Kiev radicals.

Very carefully worded commentary on the tragedy in Odessa came from the mainstream Western media, as if they were trying to avoid assigning the blame to those who actually set the building on fire. Their coverage of the event was heavily reliant on statements from Kiev that blamed the violence on pro-autonomy activists, as well as witness accounts given by the nationalist Right Sector members.
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Spiked on why the propaganda war on UKIP failed - basically because it was OTT and obviously lies (however I cannot say it entirely failed - there are some people who actually believe that if the entire state owned media, state regulated broadcasters and state funded by advertising newspapers make smoke they can't be entirely lying about a fire.)
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Mike Haseler's list of Scottish blogs
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"Age Reversal is no longer science fiction" by blood replacement. Not sure they have the full answer but they do have something.
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DIY cruise missile
 

    A few days ago I was, as one is, involved in a pub discussion over Proportional Representation V the First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system.

So this is a list of the arguments for PR, most of which I never thought of at the time:

1 - Its democratic. We get the results we actually voted for.

2 - PR is far more stable than FPTP since a small change in % voting doesn't mean an utterly opposed party gets a majority.

3 - In economics one of the few things almost all economists agree on is that free competition is better than monopoly for customers and in particular for encouraging innovation. And in turn that maintaining a monopoly requires barriers to entry to the industry. FPTP is a very high barrier
 since, at least in theory UKIP, to take 1 example, could get 25% of the national vote and 0% of representatives (ie 0 MPs).

4 - FPTP artificially enhances differences between different geographical regions. In Scotland FPTP gives us an overwhelming Labour majority on under 40% of the vote. In the south of England there is an overwhelming Tory majority, again on about 42% of the vote. In fact neither are remotely as "leftist" or "rightist" with the majority voting against the ruling "consensus". This has led Scots to actually believe the guff we are told of how we have different political values - leading to the current referendum.

5 - Where a particularist party (ie one which deliberately appeals to an ethnic group or "working class") gets a hold and its supporters live together (thus no feminist party can use this) it will get representation far greater than similar non-particularist parties. Particularism means people not caring for society as a whole which is a bad very thing for society.

6 - MPs in marginal constituencies get changed but those in safe seats have a job for life. In safe ones the only electorate the MP need fear is the tiny number of people in their constituency selection committee.

7 - Where there are several parties, as now, the majority of people in the large majority of constituencies are going to be represented by somebody they didn't want. How "represented" that makes them feel must be questionable.

8 - Thus under FPTP people, correctly, feel their own vote doesn't count.

9 - Indeed parties' political analysts often say the election turns on about 50,000 floating voters in marginal constituencies.

10 - In some areas you get 1 entirely immovable party that has held complete power for generations, which encourages corruption and contempt for the electors (yes I do mean Glasgow Labour).

11 - The US civil war is an example of the breakdown of trust that FPTP can produce. The South's secession was as brought about by Lincoln winning an overwhelming majority of electoral places on 39.7% of the vote. Had there been a run off he would probably have lost.

12 - Because FPTP tends to dragoon politics into a 2 party system it means the nuances of dissent aren't shown.

13 - Theoretically FPTP should produce a 1 party system because a party that gets 60% of vthe vote in every constituency will get 100% of MPs. Normally this doesn't happen because ruling parties turn out uniformly to be so bad that opposition coalesces into an 2nd party - hence 2 party system. The only exception to this is Singapore where 1 party has won since independence, but Singapore has actually had remarkable competent government.

14 - Gerrymandering (setting constituency boundaries in such a way as to ensure voters for those in charge are spread evenly enough for them to win a small majority in some areas while all opposition voters are in one constituency where they get only 1 member) is a constant problem, sometimes more blatantly than others.

15 - Feedback. The great advantage of democracy, or any sort of parliamentary government, over other systems is that when something isn't working society sends a sign. This is known as negative feedback and is a requirement in any complex machinery (the centrifugal governor made the steam age).  The glandular system does the same for the body. I believe such feedback is equally vital to governmental systems. FPTP does allow some feedback but it takes much greater effort and usually limits the signal that can be sent to the official opposition party's.

16 - Because power is in the hands of big parties, the individual MP's fate is very much in the hands of whoever is party leader. When MPs stand in their own name they are almost always squeezed out. Compare this with both Margo MacDonald and Dennis Canavan both of whom refused to accept being fired by their parties.

For PR

1 - It maintains the constituency link - everybody can find out who their representative as (though as #7 shows) the odds are they will not represent their views.

2 - It provides united government able to take action. Thus when Mussolini took power he introduced an FPTP rule applying to the total Parliament - that the largest single party must automatically get 60% of the seats. This system is in some ways better than our sort of PR in that the barrier to entry is only at the government level not at the getting into Parliament level so parties with new ideas are not so wholly excluded. Decisive united government is a bonus, if you are sure it will be decisive in the right direction.

   Isaac Asimov wrote this in 1964. I did a look at a similar 1900 article once before.
My comments in italics:

By ISAAC ASIMOV

    The New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place, the future will not be worth discussing. So let the missiles slumber eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the nonatomized world of the future.

 What is to come, through the fair's eyes at least, is wonderful. The direction in which man is traveling is viewed with buoyant hope, nowhere more so than at the General Electric pavilion. There the audience whirls through four scenes, each populated by cheerful, lifelike dummies that move and talk with a facility that, inside of a minute and a half, convinces you they are alive.  The scenes, set in or about 1900, 1920, 1940 and 1960, show the advances of electrical appliances and the changes they are bringing to living. I enjoyed it hugely and only regretted that they had not carried the scenes into the future. What will life be like, say, in 2014 A.D., 50 years from now? What will the World's Fair of 2014 be like?  I don't know, but I can guess.  One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.  Windows need be no more than an archaic touch, and even when present will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight. The degree of opacity of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with the intensity of the light falling upon it. OK on this he's wrong but the Good Doctor had a phobia that is clearly being reflected
There is an underground house at the fair which is a sign of the future. if its windows are not polarized, they can nevertheless alter the "scenery" by changes in lighting. Suburban houses underground, with easily controlled temperature, free from the vicissitudes of weather, with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common. At the New York World's Fair of 2014, General Motors' "Futurama" may well display vistas of underground cities complete with light- forced vegetable gardens. The surface, G.M. will argue, will be given over to large-scale agriculture, grazing and parklands, with less space wasted on actual human occupancy. ditto Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare "automeals," heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be "ordered" the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming. looking at any supermarket you will see how much of our earing is prepared meals, most of which only need a microwave (or futuristic microwave oven as it would have been called. Yet we still have kitchens, some of which look to posh to use.

Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.) There are a number of robotic machines (ie not looking like robots, that can do vacuuming. We are, perhaps surprisingly in view of Moore's Law, a few behind in this.

 General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D movies of its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its cleaning appliances built in and performing all tasks briskly. (There will be a three-hour wait in line to see the film, for some things never change.)  saw Tom Cruise in 3d last week. Not much queue. 6 sales booths.


The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotope batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer. Highlighted because the very idea of vacuum cleaners powered by nuclear "waste" is beyond the pale. As indeed is supplying over half our power by nuclear. But it shows what was expected and indeed what is technically feasible (not automatically desirable because longer electric cords is much easier) but feasible. Well demonstrates how backward we have been made by false Luddite scares.


And experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014. (Even today, a small but genuine fusion explosion is demonstrated at frequent intervals in the G.E. exhibit at the 1964 fair.) Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan. In the more crowded, but cloudy and smoggy areas, solar power will be less practical. An exhibit at the 2014 fair will show models of power stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth. We don't have fusion but it is still promised for ---- years. The cost of solar power cells is dropping fast and is headed to be competitive (though not competitive to the cheap nuclear power we could have,

The world of 50 years hence will have shrunk further. At the 1964 fair, the G.M. exhibit depicts, among other things, "road-building factories" in the tropics and, closer to home, crowded highways along which long buses move on special central lanes. There is every likelihood that highways at least in the more advanced sections of the world*will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air*a foot or two off the ground. Visitors to the 1964 fair can travel there in an "aquafoil," which lifts itself on four stilts and skims over the water with a minimum of friction. This is surely a stop-gap. By 2014 the four stilts will have been replaced by four jets of compressed air so that the vehicle will make no contact with either liquid or solid surfaces. Hovercraft have proven less cost effective than conventional vehicles. The cost of road building is now overwhelmingly that of the political/bureaucratic costs of being allowed to do it. This gives little incentive for innovation

Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems. Smooth earth or level lawns will do as well as pavements. Bridges will also be of less importance, since cars will be capable of crossing water on their jets, though local ordinances will discourage the practice.  Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with "Robot-brains"*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. I suspect one of the major attractions of the 2014 fair will be rides on small roboticized cars which will maneuver in crowds at the two-foot level, neatly and automatically avoiding each other. A few years early but only a few. Automated driving systems are being made and how long it takes for them to be available to all depends largely on politics

For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side, standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown sections. They will be raised above the traffic. Traffic will continue (on several levels in some places) only because all parking will be off-street and because at least 80 per cent of truck deliveries will be to certain fixed centers at the city's rim. Feasible but not done 

Compressed air tubes will carry goods and materials over local stretches, and the switching devices that will place specific shipments in specific destinations will be one of the city's marvels. Feasible but would require political organisation

Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica (shown in chill splendor as part of the '64 General Motors exhibit) All available. For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies, concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles (in model form) with large soft tires*intended to negotiate the uneven terrain that may exist on our natural satellite. No Moon colonies, entirely because it has been prevented.

Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014. Engineers have long solved that one. Conversations with the moon will be a trifle uncomfortable, but the way, in that 2.5 seconds must elapse between statement and answer (it takes light that long to make the round trip). Similar conversations with Mars will experience a 3.5-minute delay even when Mars is at its closest.  However, by 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony. As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. In fact, one popular exhibit at the 2014 World's Fair will be such a 3-D TV, built life-size, in which ballet performances will be seen. The cube will slowly revolve for viewing from all angles. We have the TVs, we have the occasional robot on Mars, we even have the robots sending TV pictures from Mars.

One can go on indefinitely in this happy extrapolation, but all is not rosy. As I stood in line waiting to get into the General Electric exhibit at the 1964 fair, I found myself staring at Equitable Life's grim sign blinking out the population of the United States, with the number (over 191,000,000) increasing by 1 every 11 seconds. During the interval which I spent inside the G.E. pavilion, the American population had increased by nearly 300 and the world's population by 6,000.  In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000. US pop about 310 million

Population pressure will force increasing penetration of desert and polar areas. Most surprising and, in some ways, heartening, 2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves. Underwater housing will have its attractions to those who like water sports, and will undoubtedly encourage the more efficient exploitation of ocean resources, both food and mineral. General Motors shows, in its 1964 exhibit, the model of an underwater hotel of what might be called mouth-watering luxury. The 2014 World's Fair will have exhibits showing cities in the deep sea with bathyscaphe liners carrying men and supplies across and into the abyss. Population pressure has not been such a problem because the green revolution means we are producing more food using less land. In turn no underwater living - not even any seateading beyond the experimental level - though that is coming - when the politics is squared

Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be "farms" turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The 2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which "mock-turkey" and "pseudosteak" will be served. It won't be bad at all (if you can dig up those premium prices), but there will be considerable psychological resistance to such an innovation.  Although technology will still keep up with population through 2014, it will be only through a supreme effort and with but partial success. Not all the world's population will enjoy the gadgety world of the future to the full. A larger portion than today will be deprived and although they may be better off, materially, than today, they will be further behind when compared with the advanced portions of the world. They will have moved backward, relatively. Nope, everywhere except maybe North Korea is much better off (& for NK it is because of politics)

 Nor can technology continue to match population growth if that remains unchecked. Consider Manhattan of 1964, which has a population density of 80,000 per square mile at night and of over 100,000 per square mile during the working day. If the whole earth, including the Sahara, the Himalayan Mountain peaks, Greenland, Antarctica and every square mile of the ocean bottom, to the deepest abyss, were as packed as Manhattan at noon, surely you would agree that no way to support such a population (let alone make it comfortable) was conceivable. In fact, support would fail long before the World-Manhattan was reached.  Well, the earth's population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling every 40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a World-Manhattan is coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!  There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death rate; (2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of AD. 2014 will have agreed on the latter method. Indeed, the increasing use of mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair stiffening arteries and breaking nerves will have cut the death rate still further and have lifted the life expectancy in some parts of the world to age 85. Fortunately we didn't have to agree on lowering the birth rate. People did it voluntarily and individually. Anywhere women get the choice birth rates are falling.

There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently.  One of the more serious exhibits at the 2014 World's Fair, accordingly, will be a series of lectures, movies and documentary material at the World Population Control Center (adults only; special showings for teen-agers).  The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of automation. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. Part of the General Electric exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process. It is not only the techniques of teaching that will advance, however, but also the subject matter that will change. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary "Fortran" (from "formula translation"). Automation has gone further than that and computing much easier.

Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.
Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! No it hasn't. Though there is disagreement between those who think the government should be providing more jobs and those who think government should be cutting benefits to those who refuse jobs. Surprisingly the number of hours worked hasn't greatly diminished overall - indeed because more wives are working (in jobs less strenuous than housework  once was) the workforce is far larger.
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   It looks like the bad things generally haven't happened, the technical and even social problems foreseen have been far less than foreseen. And that government telling us what we can't do is a greater problem - indeed the main barrier on human progress.

   The very estimable Matt Ridley (of whose articles more later) has this on the improbability of our Moon and its influence on making Earth more suitable for life:

David Waltham, of Royal Holloway, University of London, is the author of the very readable Lucky Planet, which argues that the Earth is probably rare, perhaps even unique, as planets go. He is also a self-confessed “moon bore” who has made important discoveries about how the Moon formed.

Ever since Copernicus, the “mediocrity principle” has been scientific orthodoxy: that our planet is not the centre of the Universe; it’s just one of (as we now estimate) a thousand billion billion spherical objects of similar size orbiting fiery suns just like ours.

But in that case, as the nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, where is everybody? Why no faint radio messages from our distant neighbours in space? There should be enormous numbers of planets that have been around for longer than us, long enough surely to get to the point of transmitting some interstellar Muzak. Yet not a peep.

Dr Waltham points out that planets where life fails to survive cannot give rise to sentient life forms, so we are bound to find ourselves on one that has managed to be just right. Precisely because we are afflicted with this severe case of observational bias, the mediocrity principle need not follow. We can be misled by what we can see around us into thinking our case is typical, when actually it might be almost impossibly rare. We might be neither special nor commonplace, just lucky.

And indeed, there does seem to be a long string of coincidences behind our existence. The pressure of anti-gravity in our universe happens to be very, very small — not quite big enough to blow the Universe apart before stars could form. Phew. The relative strength of nuclear and electrical forces is just right to allow carbon to be one of the commonest elements, and carbon’s capacity to form lots of bonds is crucial to life. Cheers. The strength of molecular bonds is just right to allow chemistry to happen at our distance from the Sun. Hooray.

Then there’s the climate. Although there were probably at least four times when the Earth came close to freezing altogether or overheating irreversibly, it somehow recovered each time, unlike on Venus or Mars, and for the last half billion years the weather has been astonishingly benign. Periodic catastrophes, caused by volcanoes or meteorites, have set the evolution of life back, but not often enough to prevent intelligence emerging eventually: another stroke of luck.

Spookily, the slow waxing of our Sun’s strength over four billion years should have produced a ten-degree rise in average temperature, but it has not because it has been almost precisely matched by a slow decline in our greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide became progressively scarcer. This has kept the temperature in a small range for a very long time — long enough once again to allow the emergence of intelligent life. (The recent uptick in carbon dioxide levels as a result of fossil fuel burning is still small in comparison.)

Waltham posits three possible explanations for these great strokes of good fortune: God, Gaia and Goldilocks. God does not show His workings; Gaia says living things themselves somehow unwittingly control the thermostat; and Goldilocks says it’s just an almighty fluke that we’ve managed to keep things neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

.... the Moon stabilised the rate and angle of our spinning such that we got a fairly long day and regular seasons to keep warming the poles and preventing the irreversible growth of ice. What Waltham has discovered, however, is that this was an even bigger lucky strike than we used to think.

Had the Earth’s day been a few minutes longer just after the collision, or the Moon’s diameter a few miles greater, then the Earth would have had an unstable spin and life would have been repeatedly wiped out by chaotic climate change. If the day had been shorter or the Moon smaller, then we would have had more and longer ice ages, because too little heat would have reached the poles through air currents.

Very few planets indeed could have collided with an object the right size to produce such a moon and even fewer of them would have ended up with a Goldilocks moon that was just the right size. Since life cannot control the Moon’s orbit, Gaia cannot explain this piece of luck. The Moon therefore shows decisively just how hard it will be to find another planet of sufficiently stable climate to spawn life that could last long enough to develop intelligence.

Waltham has persuaded me that we are “perhaps the luckiest planet in the visible universe”, the only one among billions of billions to have thrown six after six whenever the dice were rolled. Whichever planet achieved this would have thinking beings on it who would think they were special, whereas really they were just lucky. And they would be alone, or very nearly so.

###############################

   This is a fascinating subject, and important for anybody who thinks life the universe and everything are important. I have written before on why we appear to be alone in the universe and come up with another explanation other than God, Gaia or Goldilocks - "the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse theory in which every single unpredictable possibility of every quantum movement of each atom in the universe creates a new universe every instant. Even though the overwhelming majority then reunite with the next quantum movement, it does produce a number of possible universes for which the word infinite is inadequate. However it does mean that it is inevitable that there will be a universe where we evolved and obviously that it is going to have the unusual conditions allowing us to evolve. This is what we see.

Indeed for the more mystically inclined one can combine this multiverse with its meta-infinity of uninhabited universes with Schroedinger (and his cat’s) view that a quantum event only achieves actuality when it is observed by assuming that our universe became real (whatever that means) when we evolved to be aware of it and that the uninhabited ones are merely quantum fluctuations.

Either option is possible; it’s the traditional random mechanistic universe that is unbelievable. "
Also on Panspermia - theory that life started elsewhere but only developed beyond the microbes(propagated across the universe by light pressure) on this planet & possibly others, because it is hospitable.

Life first appeared on Earth almost as soon as the surface cooled which suggests either that the actual formation, rather than getting complex, is comparatively easy or that it came from elsewhere.

In 2009 I referred to this as the Craig Paradox (ripping off the term Fermi Paradox).

A much more recent benefit (one which would only have shortened our development by thousands rather than billions of years, so not important except to those primarily concerned about human timescales) is that the regularity of the phases of the Moon brought a mathematical order to early Man's universe which was certainly vital to developing mathematics (see the Antikythera Device) and possibly to the entire concept of a rational universe.

  The Moon looks a pretty good explanation for our uniqueness. Apart from the stabilisation of our orbit, the high and varying tides give a very good mechanism for evolution to put life on land. Tides vary because of the mixture of force from the Sun and Moon which sometimes work together to create high tides and sometimes counteract. This means that there is consistent evolutionary pressure for life to be able to survive on the shore for periods varying up to 2 weeks waiting for the tide to rescue them. Life that can live on land for 2 weeks is close to being able to live there forever.

   Another possibility is that it is lunar tidal pull that has kept the Earth's magma mobile and molten. If so this produces 2 gains - (1) continental drift which means we have many small continents with more equitable weather and with nutrients being replaced (2) volcanic outgassing produces excess CO2. On several occasions the planet has come close to being covered by ice (in one case probably more than close). It is assumed that this was reversed by outgassed CO2 increasing, with no plant life to consume it, till it increased global temperature enough to melt the ice. Without that an iceball Earth would have been stable. If, without a Moon, we would have had no liquid core we have no volcanoes.

   So without this big a Moon no advanced life. Nobody really has a good explanation of how the Moon came about - best is that it was hit by a Mars sized comet and bits knocked into orbit, but that doesn't fit well either. So whatever the explanation for our Moon it must be incredibly unlikely.

  Therefore we are incredibly unlikely. Fortunately we live in an Everett infinite multiverse where everything, no matter how unlikely, has happened. But perhaps only once per Universe.

    Brian Monteith has put this up on ThinkScotland and also, with the speech edited as it uses a shorter format, on the Free Society blog Please put any comments there.


WHEN I AND THE WORLD were much younger than now and both of us thought we were more “leftist” than today I read a book, set on the Moon, about a revolution where the very lowest in society rise up and overthrow the corrupt imperialist running dogs of the ruling class. By throwing rocks at them.

With a fair bit of liberated sex thrown in, which played to one of my interests at the time, and an awful lot of slang dialogue, which was not such an interest, it definitely established itself as hip countercultural stuff.

The book is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein (whose picture on the cover astonishingly showed him with a military style crew cut.) It took me some time to realise that the absolute free market regime this underclass live under was not “left wing”. It exists only because the oppressors, an EU style world state, are too lazy to run society and the lack of any popular democracy means people cannot oppress each other in the name of democracy as we do today.

As is normal with Heinlein the social engineering is as well thought out as the traditional sort of engineering. Only years later did I find out that the mentor character, Professor Bernardo de la Paz was closely based on the real life anarchist philosopher Robert LeFevre. There is no shortage of the action needed for an exciting story full of ideas from an intelligent computer to a remarkably simple and genuinely effective ultimate weapon - enough to satisfy anybody looking for such. Also, there are as many ideas per paragraph most writers give per book, but then that applies to most of the Heinlen’s  books.

The philosophical heart of the book is this speech from the professor made to the Lunar Constitutional Convention: 

“Like fire & fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom - if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant. Move slowly, be hesitant, puzzle out the consequences of every word. I would not be unhappy if this convention sat for ten years before reporting - but I would be frightened if you took less than a year.

Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional ...for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments. For example, I note in one draft report a proposal for setting up a commission to divide Luna into congressional districts and to reapportion them from time to time according to population.

This is the traditional way; therefore it should be suspect, considered guilty until proven innocent. Perhaps you feel that this is the _only_ way. May I suggest others? Surely where a man lives is the least important thing about him. Constituencies might be formed by dividing people by occupation ... or by age ... or even alphabetically. Or they might not be divided, every member elected at large - and do not object that this would make it impossible for any man not widely known throughout Luna to be elected; that might be the best possible thing for Luna.

You might even consider installing the candidate who got the least number of votes; unpopular men may be just the sort to save you from a new tyranny. Don't reject the idea merely because it seems preposterous - think about it! In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes worse than overt tyrannies.

But if representative government turns out to be your intention there still may be ways to achieve it better than the territorial district. For example you each represent about 10,000 human beings, perhaps 7,000 of voting age - and some of you were elected by slim majorities  Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by 4,000 citizens. He would then represent these 4,000 affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would be a minority in a territorial constituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them. All would then be represented by men of their choice. Or a man with 8,000 supporters might have 2 votes in this body. Difficulties, objections, practical points to be worked out - many of them! But you could work them out ... and thereby avoid the chronic sickness of representative government; the disgruntled minority which feels - correctly - that it has been disenfranchised.

But whatever you do not let the past be a straitjacket!

I note 1 proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent - the more impediment to legislation the better. But instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a 2/3rds majority ... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere 1/3rd minority. Preposterous? think about it.

If a bill is so poor that it cannot command 2/3rds of your consents is it not likely to make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as 1/3rd is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
But in writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative. Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies ... no interference, however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation ... no involuntary taxation. Comrades if you were to spend five years in a study of history while thinking of more and more things that your government should promise never to do and then let your constitution be nothing but those negatives, I would not fear the outcome.

What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government power to do something that appears to need doing. Please remember always that the Lunar Authority was created for the noblest of purposes by just such sober and well-intentioned men, all popularly elected. And with that thought I leave you to your labours."

As a Scot, with our SNP government having made some comments about how, come the day, they will provide us with a constitution that will enshrine all sorts of rights (the second ‘draft’ is now available), not for us to restrain the state but giving the state a duty to restrain us in the name of the "environment", education or what have you, I wish any of them had as much understanding as the Professor's audience.

I don’t want to upset any fans of Ayn Rand, who is a libertarian icon (rather a contradiction in terms) but she isn’t a fraction as good as Heinlein. Possibly her leaden prose and hammering the ideas home makes her better guru material. More likely the fact that Heinlein plays with all sorts of social ideas in different books; bureaucracy Star Beast; military rule Starship Troopers; absolute monarchy Glory Road; constitutional monarchy Double Star; by secret conspiracy Friday; dictatorship Time Enough For Love; theocracy Stranger in a Strange Land and this made him too big and unpredictable to be buttonholed as anybody’s guru.

On the other hand his successful societies have at least as much freedom as we have seen in our lifetimes. What more should you ask for?

“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbours than the other sort.”
Robert A. Heinlen 1907-1988

Neil Craig is proprietor of Scotland's largest independent science fiction bookshop http://futureshockbks.blogspot.co.uk/

Brian also found the "Lone Wolf" picture which is rather cool of him

      Jerry Pournelle recently published a comment from me. He had previously been discussing Russian population decline and said that Putin's aim in Crimea/Ukraine is a desperate search, not for territory but for more Russians. That is a reasonable position but I considered that there is a better way to get people.
---------------------------------------------------

  

Putin Needs Russians 

Presumably he doesn’t really understand how free enterprise works much better than Obama. He has plenty of money. all he has to do is put lots of it into child support, probably only of children who have at least 2 ethnic Russian grandparents though that would get a lot of western fingerwagging. 

If you tax something you will get less of it. if you subsidize it, enough, you will get more. 

That would be cheaper than wars. 

One of the lessons of wars since the industrial revolution is that a nation no longer gets powerful by grabbing the territory of unfriendly neighbors if you have to keep their recalcitrant population too. Britain learned this in Ireland and India & learned the opposite lesson about the strength of friends in Australia and Canada (& despite a little carelessness in 1776 in the US too). 

I once calculated that by 2050, at present rates of population growth <http://www.geographyiq.com/ranking/ranking_Population_growth_Rate_dall.htm> [my article http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/demographic-population-growth-war.html ] Yemen will have a larger population and a more aggressive population than Russia (more aggressive because poorer, more crowded and large families make young men more expendable). Not problems I wish on either.  

Best Wishes
Neil Craig

I am quite certain that Mr. Putin understands family incentives and tax breaks. And not wanting recalcitrant minorities is likely to look very high in his calculations. In the case of the Crimea the benefits of annexation outweigh the costs.  In the cast of the ‘stans’, it is better to lure the Russians to Russia; the land is not really wanted. With the Ukraine itself things get complicated.  I suspect Russians are quite capable of rational analysis on these issues.
--------------------------------

      I like his gentle chiding of the possibility that Obama and his circle might have not an infinitely worse understanding of free markets than the ex-KGB colonel Putin has. Having read some speeches from both I have to accept he is probably right. Ditto on a whole range of other subjects.

      Jerry's site is one that should be read by anybody who is philosophically interested in politics rather than simply as a way of using tribalism to fleece the voters and by anybody who supports human progress. I am proud to say that his site and earlier writings are probably my primary political influence so you know who to blame.

    A couple of comments I have made elsewhere regarding the Ukrainian mess:

   Roger Helmer said "Both Russia and the EU benefit enormously from the trade in Russian gas.  Russia supplies around 30% of Europe’s gas demand, with some half of that coming through Ukraine.  The UK gets little Russian gas directly, but any loss of gas to the EU as a whole would clearly impact on our supplies from elsewhere.

Fortunately we’ve had a warmish winter, and it’s nearly Spring, so immediate pressure on supplies is not too severe.  Several European countries (though not the UK) have built new gas storage, in large part to anticipate supply problems and reduce the immediacy of their dependence on Russia.
If the situation deteriorates, and a shooting war commences, the impact could be very serious indeed, both for prices and for security of supply.  In the UK, we have created a situation where over the next decade or so, gas is the only generating capacity we can build in the time-scale to keep the lights on.

 We’re locked-in, at a time when one of Europe’s major gas suppliers seems to be on the brink of war."

& I commented


and in reply to this article on Stratfor

 

         I find this apparent finding of Scots ancestry for the Kalesh people near the Khyber pass inexplicable.

The Kalash people of Pakistan were found to have chunks of DNA from an ancient European population. Statistical analysis suggests a mixing event before 210 B.C., possibly from the army of Alexander the Great

This could reflect the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. The Kalash claim to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers, as do several other groups in the region.

   Did Alexander the Great have a Scottish regiment?  Perhaps that explains why he was so successful.

    "Sir, it was an ambush there were 2 of them" - traditional.

     Not entirely impossible - it is known that after 1066 much of the Byzantine Empire's Varangian Guard, nominally Vikings, was made up of English warriors driven out by the Norman Conquest, but at that stage the Norse had established trade routes across Russia (the Russ were Norse conquerors)  so there was the contact.

     This is part of the newly produced Genetic Atlas of Human Diversity. The amount of information available in each of our DNA is incredible (I am told that unlinking 1 DNA coil it could be stretched to the Moon) and we have barely started being able to read them.

  Primark politically correct bastards.

   Went shipping last Friday and Primark put our stuff in one of their paper bags. It was raining and the thing came apart before I got home. Why can't they use the traditional, lightweight, waterproof plastic bags that cost so much less of the world's resources (as measured by money) than the soggy clothes dumpers?


    Another example of "environmentalism" being nothing to do with protecting the environment (almost always the cheapest option is the one that uses least resources, that's why its cheapest) and purely about enforcing Luddism.

    Not knocking Primark for their goods - clearly they are paying 12 year old Bangladeshi's sufficiently little to keep it cheap - though at the same time paying them far more than complainers do or ever would & infinitely more than always wrong Green guru Paul Ehrlich, who gets hundreds of thousands of $ from American foundations, for lying, ever would. 

China is fairly enthusiastic about Bitcoin. Previously I wrote that Bitcoin was a very good investment so long as the world's governments didn't gang up against it. With China supportive that now seems unlikely.
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China is not planning to be a low wage economy in the future - they are pouring $80 bn into automation and robots.
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This links to James Delingpole's articles at the Spectator http://www.spectator.co.uk/author/james-delingpole/
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Confirmation of Labour's dishonesty and contempt for its own supporters

"Labour sent out ‘search parties’ for immigrants to get them to come to the UK, Lord Mandelson has admitted.

In a stunning confirmation that the Blair and Brown governments deliberately engineered mass immigration, the former Cabinet Minister and spin doctor said New Labour sought out foreign workers.

He also conceded that the influx of arrivals meant the party’s traditional supporters are now unable to find work.

By contrast, Labour leader Ed Miliband has said his party got it wrong on immigration but has refused to admit it was too high under Labour."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2324112/Lord-Mandelson-Immigrants-We-sent-search-parties-hard-Britons-work.html#ixzz2lfarBGO0
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Planning rules governing the extraction of shale gas and onshore oil in Scotland will be made tougher, the Scottish government has said. http://www.thegwpf.org/scotlands-climate-minister-puts-hurdles-shale-development/
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"Over here in the Czech Republic they've got some EU money to throw at innovation. Mixed industry and academic sorta stuff and we've a couple of projects that fit into their desired categories well enough. So I had a pint with someone who knows how to apply for these funds: heck, if there's free money out there why not? The first deadline for applying is 22 of this month. The actual cash would be available, assuming we passed all the hurdles and tests, in May 2015.

Yes, 2015: and no, this is not how innovation or start ups work. 18 months is in fact the entire lifecycle of an innovative start up these days: Instagram was bought for a billion dollars in about half that time from starting to purchase."

I commented in support of the one way government can successfully promote innovation
"The only way for the state to promote innovation is through X-Prizes - the money then goes to the inventors not the politically connected not those who spend time formfilling.
Technically it would not prevent agreement to offer the prize being reached only too late, because the invention had been made but if so (A) somebody would notice & (B) the prize would not then be awarded and the money wold be available for a new prize."
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/a-visit-to-the-happy-world-of-will-hutton
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Mid Staffordshire Hospital - 1400 dead, nobody to blame. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24204177
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We are the SNP, we don't need to stick to no steekin' law:


Lady Clark of Calton last month said she was not satisfied ministers complied with their obligations under European nature legislation.

A spokeswoman for the Scottish government said ministers did not agree that the application was incompetent.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-24381406
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John Brignall article on why government much prefers large useless projects to small useless, or indeed useful ones:
 

    In a country ruled by the Sir Humphreys and amiable nincompoops like Cameron Hacker, with the unelected EU bureaucracy presiding over all this poem seems much more current than when it was then.

Rudyard Kipling

The Servant When He Reigneth

"For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear. For a servant when he reigneth, and a fool when he is filled with meat; for an odious woman when she is married, and an handmaid that is heir to her mistress." -- PROV. XXX. 21-22-23.

Three things make earth unquiet
And four she cannot brook
The godly Agur counted them
And put them in a book --
Those Four Tremendous Curses
With which mankind is cursed;
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Old Agur entered first.
An Handmaid that is Mistress
We need not call upon.
A Fool when he is full of Meat
Will fall asleep anon.
An Odious Woman Married
May bear a babe and mend;
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Is Confusion to the end.

His feet are swift to tumult,
His hands are slow to toil,
His ears are deaf to reason,
His lips are loud in broil.
He knows no use for power
Except to show his might.
He gives no heed to judgment
Unless it prove him right.

Because he served a master
Before his Kingship came,
And hid in all disaster
Behind his master's name,
So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary hells,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on some one else.

His vows are lightly spoken,
His faith is hard to bind,
His trust is easy broken,
He fears his fellow-kind.
The nearest mob will move him
To break the pledge he gave --
Oh, a Servant when he Reigneth
Is more than ever slave!

       Was there a real Jesus? 

       I do not doubt that there was a real Moses because his name is Egyptian and who would invent a national founder of a different nationality? The same applies to the name Heracles who, in all the stories, was tormented by Hera. Jesus was so common a name if you threw a rock in any Judean street you were likely to hit a Jesus or Mary.

        The Dead Sea Scrolls also refer to a Messiah who had lived a few generations back, despite them being contemporary with or predating the biblical Jesus.

        On the other hand the Beatitudes rhyme in Aramaic, but not in the Greek it was written in, which means they were said by an Aramaic speaking teacher.

         Wikipedia's article on the Historicity of Jesus  says almost all the biblical scholars agree he did, but then they have an incentive to don't they.

        But they have another Christ Myth article, which lists opponents and their views and in fact most of them are willing to accept there was a guy it is just that most of the stories are accretions, which I am comfortable with.

        However I ran across this list on Listverse, of 8 reasons he existed.



2 Modern Religion


        Of them I find #8 convincing. Paul's Epistles are accepted as historical letters and Paul refers not just to meeting and not getting on with St James but of him being Jesus' brother. Since James was the leader of a rival faction (more committed to having a primarily Jewish cult) there is no way he would have acknowledged the link if he could disputed it. 

        One writer who started doubting his reality came round to accepting Jesus as the author of what is called the Q document - something which is a common source of the 4 gospels. The common source seems difficult to doubt but the fact that no trace of such a document exists has always been  a problem.

        However if  it was not a written record but an oral one of the actual words of Jesus then there is no problem. Remember this is an era before mass literacy when Homer was passed on orally for most of a millennium.

       These are the bits of the bible generally attributed to the Q document:

The Beatitudes Love your enemies Golden Rule[42][43] Judge not, lest ye be judged The Test of a Good Person The Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders The Parable of the Lost Sheep

The Parable of the Wedding Feast The Parable of the Talents The Parable of the Leaven The Parable of the blind leading the blind The Lord's Prayer Expounding of the Law The Birds of Heaven and The Lilies in the Field

   A couple of Heinleinisms on 2 entirely separate themes - Art and settling the solar system.

Art

“Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/129814-art-is-the-process-of-evoking-pity-and-terror-which


   Which makes Kick Ass certainly and Grand Theft Auto probably art (which I mentioned on the Newsnight ART debate) and Tracy Eminem's bed definitely not.

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      Settling the Solar System

  In his book, Expanded Universe (not available outside the US & Canada) starting on page 368. is an article about the time needed to get to Mars or Pluto at various accelerations.

Mars
at 1 G 4.59 days ; at 0.1 G 14.5 days ; at 1/100th G 45.9 days; at 1/1000th G 145 days

Pluto (50 times further away and the furthest planet (actually no longer classed as planet)  
at 1 G 4.59 weeks; at 0.1 G 14.5 weeks; at 1/100th G 45.9 weeks; at 1/1000th G 145 weeks

   As he points out there are, or rather were in 1950 when he wrote it, ways to achieve 1/1000th G including very simple nuclear rockets or solar sails. I assume we could do 1/10th of a G now with nuclear rockets.

   But we don't have to. He compares those last timescales with those of the Age of Exploration. Note that this was written in 1950, 63 years ago and what was possible but difficult now is, in engineering of not political terms, easy now:

"It took the Pilgrim Fathers 9 weeks and 3 days to cross the Atlantic
Two years and nine months - that was the a normal commercial voyage for a China clipper sailing out of Boston last century..











England, Holland, Spain, and Poerugal all created worldwide empires with ships that took as long to get anywhere and back as would a 1/1000-gee spaceship
...even the tiniest constant boost turns sailing the Solar System into a money making commercial venture."







 

   This is from Futurepundit:

"Natural Selection To Boost Fertility In Developed Countries
Jason Collins and Oliver Richards expect a resurgence on fertility in developed countries.

We propose that the recent rise in the fertility rate in developed countries is the beginning of a broad-based increase in fertility towards above-replacement levels. Environmental shocks that reduced fertility over the past 200 years changed the composition of fertility-related traits in the population and temporarily raised fertility heritability. As those with higher fertility are selected for, the “high-fertility” genotypes are expected to come to dominate the population, causing the fertility rate to return to its pre-shock level.

This is not really new news. Delayed child-bearing and other attributes are being selected against. Natural selection sped up reproduction among French Canadians.
Africa is a continent whose demographic trends already do not fit the Panglossian projections of some commentators about how we've supposedly licked the overpopulation problem. In the next 90 years Africa's population will go up by more than a factor of 4. Quadrupling. Good bye many species of plants and wildlife.

The new statistics, based on in-depth survey data from sub-Saharan Africa, tell the story of a world poised to change drastically over the next several decades.
Take a look at Tanzania, which is today one of the poorest countries in the world. As of 2000, it had 34 million people; California’s population was the same that year. Today, Tanzania has about 45 million people. By 2100, its population is projected to be 276 million – almost the size of the entire United States today, and by then one of the largest countries in the world.

The whole world is on course for a huge resurgence in fertility. Natural selection assures this outcome. The only way I can see to prevent it: government-mandated genetic engineering of offspring to reduce the next generation's desire to have kids. But I doubt that will happen.

One of the reasons I am not optimistic about the future is natural selection. Selective pressures are more powerful than our conscious minds. The part of our minds that thinks it controls the speech center is deceived into thinking it is in charge. Our conscious minds do far more rationalizing and far less rational reasoning than we think we do. I give us poor odds of getting in control of our instincts and curbing their most damaging manifestations."

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     This does seem a problem to which there is no humane solution. And one where exponential growth controls so that it only gets worse with time.

    On the other hand so long as baseline economic growth is greater than population growth (which rarely tops 1%) it is not a Malthusian problem. Nobody is going to starve, at least not without the actions of warlords.

    Even in the very long term I think population can expand enormously. I have written previously of how we could build many millions of  O'Neill colonies which would mean we could support a population thousands of times Earth's current one. 700 years at 1% annual growth would not be enough to achieve that.

    Where there is a problem is with differential demographic growth. Differential growth means some communities will be swamped, as the Serbs, who had lived in Kosovo for at least 1,000 years (as place names and 1,000 year old churches prove) were swamped by Albanian (not all local demographic growth but even where it was immigration part of the driver for that was high population growth in Albania). The other driver of immigration was people in poor countries wanting to move to rich ones, in the same way that water runs downhill.

    This, plus the fact that poor peoples tend to have more kids, means that population growth brings down competence.

   It means that failing cultures outbreed successful ones.

   It means, if IQ testing around the world is of any use in finding IQ, that the future belongs to low IQ sub-Saharan Africans, rather than Parsees, Jews, Japanese or Chinese who all score above average on IQ.

    Cultures which deny population controls (Amish, Catholics) or deny women the right to choose (Islam) will gain through differential growth, assuming they are able to prevent people quitting.

    "Here's a gloomy idea. No population in which there is substantial equality between men and women is maintaining its numbers at the present level of technology. Only the populations in which women are substantially oppressed are growing. As more and more equality of the sexes is achieved, the birth rate of a country declines."   --- John McCarthy

    I would not like such cultures to supplant what we call western civilisation but the universe will not, without us doing something, arrange things as we wish.
  
    On the other hand:

"Malthus was right. It's hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 10^28 people or the universe more than 10^50. - John McCarthy 1987

   So on a 1% annual growth rate we will be ok for 2,100 years or if we conquer the universe, 28,000 years.

  So nothing we should consider now.
  Right?