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The Long View

The Long View 2008-01-30: ESB Anomaly; New Candidates; A.D. 2424; Mole Rats; Convergent Evolution

John J. Reilly had something of a horrified fascination with naked mole rats. He also brings up here his review of Simon Conway Morris’ Life’s Solution, which I still find an interesting idea, but one that is probably dismissed more than it should be just because it is looking

The Long View 2008-01-28: Iraq as Parable; The Grossraum Fallacy

I do find it interesting that John J. Reilly’s comment here on a primary function of government, the promotion of just order: The Iraq War might stand as a metaphor for the whole episode of Movement Conservativism in American history. It started well enough, and it got rid of

The Long View 2008-01-25: Texas Airship; The Parties Implode; Atheist Spirituality

As John J. Reilly says, you should be cautious if you see too many airships; it may mean your timeline has diverged from the main sequence. Texas Airship; The Parties Implode; Atheist Spirituality I have warned in this space, more than once, that airships are a Fortean technology that becomes

The Long View 2008-01-24: Ice Age; Democratic Fissure; Nominating Petraeus

There is an article quoted here by John J. Reilly the most effective way to to prevent the Republicans from nominating an attractive candidate for President like David Petraeus in 2012 was for the expected Democrat President to give him a job offer he couldn’t refuse. This is what

The Long View 2008-01-22: Don't Panic; Panic in 2016; Victory with Demobilization; Mahdi Watch

The James Fallows Atlantic piece “Countdown to a Meltdown” from 2005 is an absolutely fascinating bit of political prediction, let’s look at it in more detail, as it combines some of John’s obsessions with some of my own. Fallows wrote the article as advice to the incoming President

The Long View 2008-01-17: METI; Boltzmann; Benedict's Editors; Union of the West; NATO Slacks; A Defense of the Rotten Borough

Lots of items of interest in this blog post from John J. Reilly, but addressed very briefly. * The interaction between SETI and the transhumanism latent [well, latent in 2008] in libertarianism * Old man shakes fist at cloud, I mean John complains about the depth of a liberal education that cannot

The Long View: An Army of Davids

Self-assembling nanobots are vaporware, a concept without even a glimmer of actual technology behind it, so its is appropriate that they are used to advocate for libertarianism, a political philosophy without a constituency. Nonetheless, I could not help but reflect by the time I finished the book that, in some