Free Republic

By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging. Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair. We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers. All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s. We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise...

After you heard President Obama's call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots? But just in case the question didn't occur to you, let me explain. On Tuesday, the day before Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, the restaurant chain Applebee's announced that it will install iPad-like tablets at every table. Chili's already made this move earlier this year. With these consoles customers will be able to order their meals and pay...

Published on Jun 5, 2013 If this doesn't wake you up, I don't know what will. Follow us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/StormCloudsGathering Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/collapseupdates Donate: http://StormCloudsGathering.com/donate Visit our website: http://StormCloudsGathering.com Get weekly email updates: http://tinyurl.com/naturalrightsnewsl... ------ Music is original sound track created by me. Composite animations are original. Links to get you started on your research: NDAA 2013 passes with indefinite detention still intact http://rt.com/usa/news/ndaa-indefinit... The Patriot Act http://thepage.time.com/2011/02/15/ho... http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/... Obama extends Patriot Act: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05... Widespread abuse of patriot act: http://www.aclu.org/national-security... Obama tries to hide information regarding rape and sexual abuse in Abu Ghraib: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world... Obama's kill list:...

One of the great parlor games of pundits, politicians, journalists, and just about everyone else is predicting the future. There’s a wonderful book, “The Experts Speak”, that is filled, page after page, with predictions and pronouncements by people of presumed wisdom and knowledge, all of which turned out to be often hilariously wrong. In 1913, regarding Einstein’s theory of relativity, Ernst Mach, a professor of physics at the University of Vienna, said, “I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.” I prefer optimists to pessimists and the...

The United States of America is in crisis. The economy is supposedly in recovery, but it is the slowest and most painful economic rebound since the Great Depression. Unemployment is high and millions have dropped out of the workforce entirely. Many American families have suffered a collapse in their net worth since 2009. During the current administration, America’s debt has increased from ten trillion to sixteen trillion dollars. American businesses face a regulatory burden of well over a trillion dollars per year. Investment in start-up businesses is thwarted and innovation is far short of what it should be. The government...

MANY American newspapers were doomed to decline from the moment the Internet arrived on personal computers. But The Washington Post, just sold off unexpectedly to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, was never really one of them. This is something the sentimental send-offs for the Graham family and its stewardship tended to ignore. As disruptive as the Internet has been for journalism, The Post was uniquely positioned to succeed amid the chaos. And it has struggled, in part, because the paper’s leaders failed to step into an online-era role that should have been theirs for the taking. The nature of that role is...

We may be in the era of Facebook and fracking. But 2013 is still beginning to look a lot like the cataclysmic century we just left behind.Victor Davis HansonVictor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB6p5QPVhPI

Abdallah Ben Mansour: "I chose to speak about this today because I've heard all the lectures. All the lecturers talked about dignity and preached to the Muslims: We should do this and that. We should be dignified. I am not telling you to be dignified – you are already dignified. You do not know this, but you should: You are dignified, noble, majestic, fabulous, lofty, strong, and grand." Applause Abdallah Ben Mansour: "This must not [just] be said. It must be believed, because it is the truth. It was not me who decreed this, it was Allah. All glory to...

6 Reasons Bernanke Is Wrong, And The Future Is Going To Be Bleak Rob Wile May 20, 2013, 10:10 AM Saturday morning, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told graduating Bard College students why he believes the future will be better. In theory, this is a pretty banal argument, especially in a graduation speech. But it looks a little different coming from an conscientious academic. Halfway through the speech, Bernanke presents the evidence of those who argue against this view — that actually, our best, most innovative days are way behind us. In a footnote, Bernanke discusses the folks he's really...

The Republican State Central Committee is meeting on April 13th to decide whether or not to oust Pat Brady as party chairman. Brady has been an absolute failure. He has divided the party. He has targeted conservative candidates for office. He has led the party off the cliff. He disrespects the party platform. In order for the GOP to have a future, he must go. Join us on April 13 at the Rally for the Future of the Illinois GOP.

In late June, Stockton became the nation's largest city to fail financially. At that time, all eyes were on the port city of 300,000 as experts warned the action could set off a string of similar filings among cash-strapped municipalities. Since then, a half-dozen cities have filed for Chapter 9 protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, including the city of San Bernardino.

Uploaded on Jul 5, 2011 Want an alternative to vehicular dependence on gas and oil? Forget about electric cars - how about wind-up cars, sail cars, and pogo cars! "Bruce McCall's Energy Free Transportation Future" envisions our roads and skies as environmentally fantastical places. click on the link

Or is it already one or the other? I don't know the answer, but the question is a basis for this article. I am not a student of religion and know little of Roman Catholic doctrine concerning Purgatory and Hell. Nor, as best I can remember, have I ever stayed at a Holiday Inn Express. However, my wife and I on several occasions back in 1997 and 1998 did enjoy our stays at Los Fraelis, a former (seventeenth century) monastery up in the mountains of the Venezuelan State of Merida that had been converted into a resort hotel. Los Fraelis...

Chavez is dead. Is Venezuela?h/t Devil's Excrement Daniel, one of my two favorite bloggers on things Venezuelan, published this article today. It summarizes what's wrong with Venezuela today and does not raise any false hopes for her immediate future. Her future is bleak. Here's the first paragraph. The wake is suspended, Chavez rests for the time being in a military museum, an old barrack to ensure past presidential safety at Miraflores, now unable to ensure safety in an area that has been overcome by slums. For a military that was never able to understand what the civilian world and democracy...

Celebrities are now upset about fracking, the injection of chemicals into the ground to crack rocks to release oil and gas. With everyone saying they want alternatives to foreign oil, I'd think celebrities would love fracking.I'd be wrong. Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono and their group, Artists Against Fracking, don't feel the love. Yoko sang, "Don't frack me!" on TV. Stopping fracking is the latest cause of the silly people. They succeeded in getting scientifically ignorant politicians to ban fracking in New York, Maryland and Vermont.Hollywood gave an Oscar to Gasland, a documentary that suggests fracking will shove gas into...

Bostrom: From Extinction to Transcendence by Paul Gilster on February 27, 2013 At the top of my list of people IÂ’d someday like to have a long conversation with is Nick Bostrom, a philosopher and director of OxfordÂ’s Future of Humanity Institute. As Centauri Dreams readers will likely know, Bostrom has been thinking about the issue of human extinction for a long time, his ideas playing interestingly against questions not only about our own past but about our future possibilities if we can leave the Solar System. And as Ross Andersen demonstrates in Omens, a superb feature on BostromÂ’s...

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

Hoping to take the commercialization of space to a higher level, a second company has jumped into what the founders hope will be a lucrative emerging market, prospecting for raw materials among near-Earth asteroids using fleets of low-cost robotic spacecraft, senior executives said Tuesday. The long-range goal is to develop an in situ manufacturing capability, harvesting raw materials and building components in space using high-tech mini foundries built around sophisticated 3D printers. "This is about the future. This is about making something happen," company chairman Rick Tumlinson told reporters during a news conference in Santa Monica, Calif. "Deep Space Industries...

The Next 10 Years Are Going To Be Mind-BlowingWe are living in an extremely exciting time in terms of science and technology. Things that have always been considered science fiction are becoming normal day-to-day components of our lives. And while we have been seeing invention after breakthrough over and over in the last couple of decades, this next ten years is going to blow everything else out of the water.The awesome thing about all these scientific discoveries it that they create technology that allows us to make more breakthroughs even faster. Our ability to innovate is increasing exponentially as the...