The story of Back to the Future, rapped in less than five minutes:

“It’s staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty, fetishizes family while Jesus left his and urged his followers to abandon wives, husbands and children, champions politics while Jesus said his kingdom was emphatically not of this world, defends religious war where Jesus sought always peace, and backs torture, which is what the Romans did to Jesus.”
– Andrew Sullivan

* Using the law to promote bad science.

* Household budgeting made easy.

* The Senate concludes that yes, the Bush Administration let Bin Laden escape.

* Here’s an interesting symposium on the 50th Anniversary of Atlas Shrugged.

* Here’s a great article debunking several common claims of climate change skeptics.

* The Constitutional case against military tribunals.

* A map of food stamp usage in the United States. The program feeds 1 out of every 8 people and 1 out of every 4 children.

* This deadly algae bloom in a large lake in Guatamala is basically a preview of what the oceans will look like if current environmental trends continue.

Writing for Politico, John Harris complains that one of Barack Obama’s problems is that he’s just too darn rational.

But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.

Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.

The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.

First of all, I’m not entirely sure why being intellectual and logical in one’s approach to leadership is a bad thing. We tried eight years of governing by the gut with a President who “believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday” and it was an unmitigated disaster.

Do I agree with everything Obama’s been doing? Lord no. But complaining that the President is too rational is like complaining that your dinner tastes too good or that your wife is too beautiful. It doesn’t make any sense.

(link via DougJ)

Image Credit: Impact Lab

Daniel Larison has an excellent post on the futility of American “condemnation” of Iranian bad acts.

The demand that Obama “speak out” is ultimately a selfish one made by people who want to feel as if they and their government have some control over a situation that is beyond our control. If Obama issued ringing denunciations of Iranian abuses, it would give Western audiences some comfort, and it would offer some false hope to Iranian dissidents who would expect to see Obama shape his policy decisions accordingly, but it would primarily be for our own consumption and it would be a very easy way for Obama to score cheap political points with a political and pundit class steeped in our modern moralistic foreign policy traditions.

Read the whole thing.

J.C. Hutchins laments the loss of visual effects from the 1970s and 1980s in the age of CGI.

You’ll likely call me a nostalgic proto-curmudgeon, but bear with me. I’ll cite Star Wars. I’ll take the speeder bike chase in Return of the Jedi over the pod race in The Phantom Menace any day. Same goes for the stop-motion AT-AT snow walkers in The Empire Strikes Back over whatever the walking tanks were called in the prequel trilogy. Same goes for the hand puppet Yoda, versus the its frog-hopping pixel-powered prequel version.

Why? Because, as anachronistic as it sounds, this stuff looks more “real” to me than the newer stuff—and it’s that “reality” that cements my belief in those fantastical worlds. I believe this buy-in hinges largely on those old school limitations: the necessity of physicality; the demand that a thing be built before it could be filmed. The effects actually occupied real space, had literal dimension, and obeyed familiar (and completely unconscious) audience expectations of gravity and physics.

Read the whole thing. I agree with it wholeheartedly. CGI can be used to enhance visual effects (see, for example, Forrest Gump or Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies), but only because they’re enhancing something that’s already there.

Hank Hyena predicts that the development of in-vitro meat will cause radical changes in people’s lives. I’m not so sure. For example, Hank predicts:

When In-Vitro Meat (IVM) is cheaper than meat-on-the-hoof-or-claw, no one will buy the undercut opponent. Slow-grown red meat & poultry will vanish from the marketplace, similar to whale oil’s flame out when kerosene outshone it in the 1870’s. Predictors believe that IVM will sell for half the cost of its murdered rivals. This will grind the $2 trillion global live-meat industry to a halt (500 billion pounds of meat are gobbled annually; this is expected to double by 2050).

I think that this is completely off. Barring an outright ban of the selling of real meat, I think that there will always be a large market for it. Price isn’t an object here. There’s a reason why organic sells so well despite the higher prices. Will it be the dominant market? No–IVM will no doubt replace the real thing. But it will be a long process and there will always be people who insist on real meat for a variety of cultural and culinary reasons.

In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts — obviously, “DinoBurgers” will be served at every six-year-old boy’s birthday party.

I’m willing to bet that, barring some fantastic new flavors, this type of thing will remain a curiousity or novelty, and cultures will largely eat the IVM versions of the meats they always have. Taste has a strong cultural component that is very conservative.

Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we’ll just eat people we don’t like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, “The State of the Art” with diners feasting on “Stewed Idi Amin.” But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to bread-making machines. And of course, masturbatory gourmands will simply gobble their own meat.

Okay, this is just vastly underestimating the power of taboo. I’ll put a hundred dollars down right now that the production of human IVM never builds a market over $10 million dollars per annum and I’d be willing to bet an equal amount that the production of human IVM is banned within five years of first production.

The convenience of buying In-Vitro Meat fresh from the neighborhood factory will inspire urbanites to demand local vegetables and fruits.

IVM factories will almost certainly be zoned outside of residential areas and urbanites will almost certainly buy their meat in the grocery store the same way they do now.

his will be accomplished with “vertical farming” — building gigantic urban multi-level greenhouses that utilize hydroponics and interior grow-lights to create bug-free, dirt-free, quick-growing super veggies and fruit (from dwarf trees), delicious side dishes with IVM. No longer will old food arrive via long polluting transports from the hinterlands. Every metro dweller will purchase fresh meat and crispy plants within walking distance. The success of FarmScrapers will cripple rural agriculture and enhance urbanization.

This is a possibility, but not a probability, and zoning commissions will probably lag a good 10-15 years behind the curve in allowing this. I doubt that there will ever be enough room allowed in urban areas to grow in such a way that it overcomes rural, traditional methods of food production.

I’d encourage you to read the whole article, which is good in its own right, makes some excellent points (ie, the ones I didn’t criticize here), and provides some excellent resources for further reading. But Hyena makes the same mistake that a lot of people who live on the cultural bleeding edge do, which is to underestimate the power of cultural inertia in slowing down or outright stopping radical social change. I do think that IVM, when its developed, will be an amazing invention and will almost certainly become the dominant form of protein. But it will take a while and won’t be as groundbreaking as some people imagine.

“As president, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots in case they try anything.”
– President Barack Obama

A great cover of the Muse tune by my friend (and former Heretical Ideas contributor) Paul Muller.

“Today is Miley Cyrus’s birthday. She’s 17 going on Lindsay Lohan.”
– Michele Catalano