The Long View 2006-01-13: After Roe; Predators; Indigos; Pigs; Panspermia
Lots of fun little bits in this one. There are reasonable protections to extended to protect wilderness, and then there is the Wildlands Project, a scheme to return vast areas of the United States to howling wilderness. This goal isn't particularly hidden, but you can find references to it in the project materials linked in Wikipedia.
I like natural landscapes too, but this is all a little nutty.
There is also a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's creepy book Childhood's End. Many of the mid-twentieth century sci fi authors had really weird streaks, and Childhood's End displays Clarke's. Gnosticism is always lurking somewhere.
Also. Glowing pigs.
After Roe; Predators; Indigos; Pigs; Panspermia
Plausible deniability: this was all the Alito hearings were about. There was never much hope that the nomination could be stopped. The Democratic senators were chiefly concerned to ensure that the cultural left does not strike at them when Roe v. Wade is overturned. As I have remarked, the party will greatly benefit from that event, because the party will be able to field pro-life candidates, or at least candidates who do not have to take a pro-choice position. The opportunities in the Red States are for the future, however. In the near term, the senators had to placate the interest groups that made their election possible.
The hearings were yet more evidence that Roe would have to be repudiated even if it were about double parking. (I know I have said that before; it's a good line.) The cultural left has adopted the position that there is an invisible ham sandwich in the Liberty Clause of the Constitution. Since the existence of this sandwich cannot be demonstrated by text or history, constitutional jurisprudence has become the art of selecting those very special judges who can see it.
I cannot emphasize too strongly that it will not be enough for the Supreme Court to repudiate the holding in Roe (it might be possible to justify the holding in Griswald, the case that found a right to use contraceptives, but with far narrower reasoning). The Court has to repudiate the style of constitutional interpretation that made the decision possible. If the decision that overturns Roe simply declares that the Court, of its goodness, has determined to exercise its discretion in the opposite direction, then we will just be waiting for the next constitutional explosion.
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But foreign courts are worse, as we see in this outrage from Sweden:
A Swedish farmer sentenced to six months in prison for shooting a wolf on his farm in Dalsland, central Sweden, is appealing to the government for a pardon...The man was found not by the district court not to have broken the law, but he was convicted in the court of appeal. It was decided that although the man had reason to believe that the wolf would attack, as the wolf had attacked his neighbour's sheep an hour earlier, too much time has passed between the attack on the sheep and the farmer shooting the wolf.
I am at a loss to understand the fondness of the environmental lobby for dangerous predators. The reasons for keeping dangerous creatures away from farms and homes are primordial:
A South African anthropologist said Thursday his research into the death nearly 2 million years ago of an ape-man shows human ancestors were hunted by birds...[An] Ohio State study determined that eagles would swoop down, pierce monkey skulls with their thumb-like back talons, then hover while their prey died before returning to tear at the skull. Examination of thousands of monkey remains produced a pattern of damage done by birds, including holes and ragged cuts in the shallow bones behind the eye sockets...Berger went back to the [australopithecus child's] skull, and found traces of the ragged cuts behind the eye sockets.
The dangerous animals don't need to be extinct. Because developed countries are rapidly becoming reforested, there should be no lack of places for them to live. That's why they should be shot on sight when they enter inhabited areas.
Tough, but fair.
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Speaking of impending extinction, this lifestyle piece from the New York Times is extremely sinister:
The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived
More prosaically, "indigo children" seem to be intelligent tykes with attention deficit disorders whose mothers prefer to believe that their offspring are the next stage in human evolution than that these kids need either drugs or no-nonsense discipline. "Indigo" is supposed to describe the auras of these prodigies. The term "indigo" is sometimes used these days to mean a young, creative person. There are some links here
I knew from my studies of esoteric fascism that this notion of a mutant generation was the sort of thing that Madame Blavatsky used to go on on about. I quickly discovered that I was not the first to make the connection:
We are the last generation of the 5th root race. Our soul color is violet. Since about 1975 the first generation of the 6th root race has been coming in. Since the year 2000, 100% of the children being born are of the 6th root race. Their soul color is indigo. These are the "new and improved" spiritually evolved humans. Every Indigo Child has a " creative genius" within them waiting to be discovered and expressed. They have something new, something advanced, to bring to the world to evolve humanity, be it in the field of art, science, technology, philosophy, religion, and so on.
We went through all this in the 1960s, you know. Remember Consciousness III in The Greening of America? Now the question is whether sales of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End are picking up again.
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Indigo children may be imaginary, but fluorescent pigs are a fact, according to the BBC:
Scientists in Taiwan say they have bred three pigs that glow in the dark...They claim that while other researchers have bred partly fluorescent pigs, theirs are the only pigs in the world which are green through and through...The pigs are transgenic, created by adding genetic material from jellyfish into a normal pig embryo....In the dark, shine a blue light on them and they glow torch-light bright.
The scientists did not just do this on a bet: it's easier to work with genetic material if it fluoresces. If they begin to work on flying pigs, however, we will know they are not serious.
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The term panspermia does not appear in the NASA pages about the Stardust mission. Stardust is the space probe that collected dust from the comet Wild 2; Stardust is supposed to land in the Mojave Desert this weekend. "Panspermia," of course, is the notion that life spreads through space in the form of living or nearly living spores. If that is the case, then we are relieved of the embarrassment of figuring out how microorganisms appeared so quickly after the Earth formed.
Stardust was dispatched in part to answer questions about proto-biology, but I have not seen any speculation about whether the probe might bring back something living. When samples were brought back from the moon, both the samples and the astronauts were quarantined against the possibility that they might carry an infectious lunar organism. In connection with a comet, though, such precautions would make little sense. Cometary material is always raining into Earth's atmosphere: if Wild 2 carries spores from deep space, they would be here already.
Actually, I seem to recall that an Indian scientist proposed that novel infectious diseases do in fact drift down from space. Better not to think about it.
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Copyright © 2006 by John J. Reilly
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