Rush Holt

Wow, what would it be like to have someone like Rush Holt as one of our Senators from Texas?  We've had nothing but regressive neanderthals for the past countless years.

Rush was a prime mover in trying to get the country to go back to paper ballots, or at the least insist on verifiable paper trails for voting, but that has been stalled in Congress, like just about everything else.  So we still cannot FULLY TRUST our elections.

Now, he's running for the Senate in New Jersey, and he's pushing to save Social Security.  It's actually really, really easy to do.  Well, easy to do if you don't mind pissing off the rich, which most in Congress seem loath to do.

weed is safe!!

Yet another study, this one by the feds, reveals that medical marijuana is safe and effective!

President Obama!!  Are you listening?!

New Federally Funded Study Proves Marijuana is Safe and Effective as Medicine

The federal government, in its attempt to keep marijuana illegal and misunderstood, recently sponsored a study which was conducted by the University of California Center for Medical Cannabis. The goal of the study was to disprove the many other studies that show cannabis to be safe and effective in treating symptoms, side-effects and diseases. Guess what? The CMCR came to the same conclusion as those other studies: marijuana is medically useful and effective. Oops. That’s rather inconvenient, isn’t it?

As published in the Open Neurology Journal, this new study showed that cannabis treats many conditions including chronic pain, peripheral neuropathy and the side-effects of chemo therapy, among other things. The study also showed that other delivery systems besides smoking – vaporizing, tincture, ingestion – work almost as well as lighting up. But smoking is the best way to take cannabis. Good thing another recent study showed that marijuana does not cause lung cancer.

In its conclusion, the study recommends that marijuana be re-classified by the DEA:

The classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug as well as the continuing controversy as to whether or not cannabis is of medical value are obstacles to medical progress in this area. Based on evidence currently available the Schedule I classification is not tenable; it is not accurate that cannabis has no medical value, or that information on safety is lacking. It is true cannabis has some abuse potential, but its profile more closely resembles drugs in Schedule III (where codeine and dronabinol are listed). The continuing conflict between scientific evidence and political ideology will hopefully be reconciled in a judicious manner.

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The Mythical Show

A very entertaining weekly series from Rhett and Link.

Rhett and Link is the comedy, filmmaking, musical and advertising duo of Rhett James McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln "Link" Neal. They are known for making viral videos and writing comedy songs as well as for filming low-budget commercials for local businesses across the United States on the Independent Film Channel series Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings. They upload their videos on two YouTube channels, one of which, the main channel, has over 200 million views and over 1 million subscribers. On the 25th of April 2013, they began their weekly 30 minute program "The Mythical Show" on their second channel RhettandLink2 which airs Thursdays at 5pm EST.

Nick Hanauer

This 6-minute-long TED talk by Nick Hanauer was removed from the TED website.  Was it because Nick, a billionaire, attacked the myth that the rich are the all-important "job creators?"  

We've known the claim was bunk for a long while now, and it's refreshing to see the myth demolished like this.  Unfortunately, many of our politicians still use it to justify breaks for the wealthiest among us.  

This TED talk isn’t posted on the TED website. Why not? Apparently they feel it’s too politically controversial. What that boils down to, essentially, is that the conservative strategy of bold lies to suck in the sheep has worked, and now if the truth doesn’t favor Republicans or isn’t neutral, it’s considered politically controversial. How can proven information be politically controversial?

As you can see, the video isn’t even partisan. Both Democrats and Republicans operate under the assumption that the rich are job creators, and that’s because, as mentioned in another talk, this time by Lawrence Lessig, politicians on the national level have to go through two electoral processes to get into office. Yes, they are voted on by the people. However, before that, they also have to win funding, and that means the rich pick which politicians run for major offices. Until we change campaign finance laws that isn’t going to change. In fact, the myopic vision of Congress is going to get worse, because the rich demand their attention.

And it isn’t a partisan problem. Even a third party, at a congressional level, would be controlled by the same wealthy influences, because without the money to campaign, they wouldn’t get the notoriety necessary to get the votes. The funders vote before the voters do, meaning that, by definition, well-known candidates are heavily influenced by wealthy interests. Once again, we can’t change that without reforming campaign finance laws.

The rich aren’t job creators. Even if we didn’t have people speaking out with evidence, we should be able to look at the last 20 years of income history and see for ourselves — the wealthiest Americans have reached previously unimaginable levels of prosperity, and if the job-creator logic held, we’d have evidence of it by now. It’s time for change.

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selective corporeality

Say, "Hmm?"

Hey, as long as my robocock still works, right?

Will People Alive Today Have the Opportunity to Upload Their Consciousness to a New Robotic Body?

A Russian mogul wants to make sure the answer is yes, and soon.

By Clay Dillow

Bottled Consciousness? Gaetan Lee via Wikimedia

When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn’t really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person’s consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal--human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host--within 30 years time.

Pushing aside all the extremely difficult technological challenges for a moment, there are a couple of important to considerations tied up in Itskov’s vision. First, while the later phases of his project are so far out as to seem ridiculous, phase one is totally feasible (in fact it’s already being done). From there, the leap to phase two--human brainpower transplanted into a mechanical robot--is a quite a leap. But if we are willing to allow that it might be possible even within the next 30 years, then we have to consider a further possibility: that many people alive today--like the twenty-something author of this piece--could be confronted with this kind of technology in their lifetimes.

Which is terrifying and amazing and disconcerting all at the same time.

We’ve already started down the road toward shedding our corporeality.But is it even within the realm of possibility? Phase one--creating a robot controlled by a human brain--is already well within reach. In fact, DARPA is already working on it via a program called “Avatar” (which, incidentally, is also the name of Itskov’s project) through which the Pentagon hopes to create a brain-machine interface that will allow soldiers to control bipedal human surrogate machines remotely with their minds.

And of course there are all the ongoing medical prosthesis projects (DARPA is involved in a few of these as well) that have shown that the human nervous system can interface with prosthetic enhancements, manipulating them via thought. Itskov draws a clear arc from what we have now to the consciousness-containing holograms that he envisions. All we have to do is attack the technological obstacles in between, one at a time, until we get there.

If only it were that easy. But Itskov also makes a valid point. In the past decade alone we’ve witnessed brain-machine interfaces emerge from the realm of nascent, futuristic ideas to mechanisms firmly rooted in reality. There’s still so much we don’t know about the brain, but better technology (and an abundance of funding in this field spurred by the horrific neurological and extremity injuries inflicted on American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan) is expanding the envelope of possibility every year.

What Itskov is really saying--though in a very ambitious way--is that we’ve already started down the road toward shedding our corporeality via prostheses that interface with our nervous centers. If you can interface a brain with a hand, and then a brain with an entire arm, why not a brain with two arms? With two legs? With everything else? The question now is figuring out where the limitations lay--just how far down that road we can go.

And what a hypothetical road it is. Theoretically, as long as one could keep his or her gray matter from decaying, he or she could continue to “live” indefinitely (at least if you buy into the idea that our consciousness lives in the wiring of our neurons). Phase three of Itskov’s plan--dispensing with the physical brain and uploading consciousness directly to a computer or robot--does away with the organic matter entirely, making your consciousness as permanent as that CD-ROM version of Myst that still lingers in the bottom of one of your desk drawers. People as programs--paging Kevin Flynn.

Of course, there are myriad reasons why uploading human consciousness to some kind of computer won’t work, not least of which being the fact that every attempt we’ve made at creating a computer that functions just like the brain has come up far short. And creating a hologram that also contains that consciousness? We’re not seeing it--not in thirty years, not in this century. Still, progress is being made in neural networks, microchips modeled on living brains, and entire computers set up to mimic the brain’s functionality. We’ve built synthetic analogs for all kinds of organs. The brain is the most complex of all, but following a certain line of reasoning--the line Itskov seems to be following--it’s only a matter of time and determination before we deliver a neurological analog as well.

All that is to say that Itskov’s vision, while overly-ambitious (and we like overly ambitious here), is not as completely far out as it sounds--at least not the earlier phases. People that are today firmly connected to their living bodies, consciousness all bound up in their craniums, may within their lifetimes be presented with a choice. Call it selective corporeality. In the future, questions about mechanical immortality--do we really want to live beyond our bodies as “conscious” machines? Is a robot or computer driven by a living brain a person, with all the rights and privileges inherent therein? Can i get jets implanted in my robo-hands and robo-feet so that I can fly like Iron Man?--could become, to some degree, actual questions that we have to consider, this time non-hypothetically.

It’s more than my non-mechanically enhanced consciousness can even start to think about.

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