LifeItself

Yesterday, my wife and I went to see "One night with Janis Joplin" at the Zach Theater in Austin.  Kacee Claton looks and sings eerily like Joplin.  Janis Joplin was a bright comet that lit up the skies decades ago and combusted in front of our eyes wide-shut.  Fifty years later, we continue to bask in Joplin's light and wipe off tears when she touches us with her raw emotions and makes love to all of us.  The timeless Janis Joplin, who tragically died when she was barely 27, is the essence of what a human can give to others, including her loneliness and drug addiction. For decades, Joplin's Cry Baby , has echoed in my head whenever I think about the wounds humans have been inflicting on this Earth of ours.  But why are we stumbling down a slippery path of environmental destruction that must lead to an inevitable collapse of modern civilization?  My explanation is that most people have a wrong frame of reference.  For example, what is the essence ...

In this blog and other blogs that will follow, I will show you how laws of nature limit human expectations borne from ignorance and arrogance.  First, I would like to remind those readers who might be scientifically-challenged that the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology are called "laws," because we, scientists, have found no exceptions to them in as many experiments as have been carried out for as long as these laws have been on the books.  I repeat: As opposed to legal laws, the laws of nature do not allow exceptions, do not listen to lobbyists, shrug off presidents, and dispatch ignorant scientists to the trash bin of history. Just like ignorance of the law cannot be a legal excuse, ignorance of the laws of nature is a crime, not an oops. But, because most societies do not care much about nature, this crime generally goes unpunished by human laws.  In the long run, however, trespassing against the laws of nature has only one outcome: We perish by one means or a...

My dear old friends from McKinsey & Company have come up with their view of the world's top technologies .  As a historical note, beginning in the mid 1980's and through the 1990's, McKinsey was instrumental in irreversibly damaging the U.S. oil and gas industry.  McKinsey was hired by the scared oil & gas managers to do a hatchet job on the researchers and operations staffs across the U.S. and - for a lot of money - did a awesomely devastating job. Suffices it to say that the oil and gas industry in the U.S. will never again have the same breadth and depth, ever.  This statement of fact has some interesting connotations when it comes to operating in the ultra-difficult, super-inhospitable environments, which seem to enter into our future.  In fairness to McKinsey and several other consulting outfits, they acted as expensive mercenaries used by management to execute (no pun intended) the already agreed upon plans, as in: "What do you want me to conclude, bo...

"Cowardice is the worst vice of men," Yeshua Ha-Nozri said softly to the fifth Procurator of Judea, the cruel knight Pontius Pilate, when they met at the Herod's palace on that fateful, unbearably hot 14th day of Nisan. If you do not believe me, please read the crown jewel of all literature, " The Master and Margarita ," written  some 80 years ago by a Russian doctor and writer, Mikhail Bulgakov. Yeshua is of course Jesus. But what does His quiet remark have to do with food, biofuels, poor health, hunger, and politics as usual by the rascals who have Jesus' name smeared all over their campaign slogans, even when they try to eat our souls?  We are cowards because we loath to resist the more powerful in our lives, even when we know they are wrong. As importantly, we are cowards because we are afraid to think for ourselves and draw our own conclusions.  Since we are cowards we are eager to accept half-truths, or blatant lies, if they sooth us and make us av...

So, we had the WSJ raving about applying good science to evaluate the undeniable benefits of GMOs, and we also had little shreds of evidence to the contrary. In India, for example, they found a couple of tiny, irrelevant problems with a GMO eggplant designed so marvelously  by Monsanto. Nonsense, I say!  But here is what those pesky Indians say. Oops! And Monsanto's Roundup, what a God send it has been for our hard working farmers and consumers! Or is it ?  Is it, really ?! I say, I am getting confused.  But my liver, and heart, and kidneys, and lungs, and hormones seem to know something.  And they all refuse to accept the GMO blessings.  They are wrong, I say! The science I don't like is junk science. And WSJ confirms.  What a relief...