Why is it that Kurzweil can focus so clearly and radically, acceptable as prophetic visionary, on the assumption of organized energy from the body into the machine, in other words the uploading of the self's architecture out of the short-lived corporeal into the mechanical and immortality that way, but it's laughable, ridiculous to insist that same process or something like it could take place from the body into say something like a 2000 year old tree? Could have been is taking place all along beside us around us through us in us.
Why is that absurd, but Kurzweil's vision of the uploaded self residing in an eternal mechanical housing is plain fascinating?
I'll tell you why.
Because the threat is there - in the tree, in the world, in organic life itself. The rejection of the failed and failing being, greedy grasping incapable, thwarted and petulant, etc and so on. Beauty and grace for all their benevolent lustre are implacable and uncompromising. Kurzweil's vision is a loser's alternative to what's been here from the beginning and won't accept that selfish uber alles mentality of spirit.
You can destroy the world but you don't have the skill or the grace to create it.
Or the humility to help bring it into being.

links from/to Shahidul Alam:

http://www.shahidulnews.com/2009/05/23/dreaming-of-tamil-eelam/

She, like so many others who have been oppressed, will forever yearn for freedom. Until another’s prosperity gives one joy; until another’s sorrow gives one pain; until the betterment of another becomes one’s concern; until one is liberated by another’s freedom; victory over another, will be a defeat for oneself.

http://www.shahidulnews.com/the-unfolding-crisis-in-pakistan/

Rahnuma Ahmed in a four part series, writes on the unfolding crisis in Pakistan

A largely defenseless people struggling to survive and hemmed in on a narrow strip of land, facing indiscriminate air strikes, assault from gun boats and cluster bombs by a well-equipped army...

Israel continues to supply Sri Lanka with arms and military training even after the United States and Britain cut off military supplies to Sri Lanka over the government’s human rights violations.

WMR/onlinejournal

Don't forget the blood of the lamb, honey!

On October 16, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Israel Lobby’s bill, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. This legislation requires the US Department of State to monitor anti-Semitism worldwide.

To monitor anti-Semitism, it has to be defined. What is the definition? Basically, as defined by the Israel Lobby and Abe Foxman, it boils down to any criticism of Israel or Jews.

Rahm Israel Emanuel hasn’t been mopping floors at the White House. As soon as he gets the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 passed, it will become a crime for any American to tell the truth about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and theft of their lands.

It will be a crime for Christians to acknowledge the New Testament’s account of Jews demanding the crucifixion of Jesus.

It will be a crime to report the extraordinary influence of the Israel Lobby on the White House and Congress, such as the AIPAC-written resolutions praising Israel for its war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza that were endorsed by 100 percent of the US Senate and 99 per cent of the House of Representatives, while the rest of the world condemned Israel for its barbarity.

Paul Craig Roberts

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Something much much more worrisome to me than Jewish control of US public discourse is the vectoring of "carbon footprint" worries with the increasing social and political dominance of Jewish power, as per Th. Friedman and Disney's "Earth".
A still unspoken but widely thought about aspect of the "too many people, not enough resources" thing is how much easier it would be to maintain consumption rates at present per capita levels but reduce the number of consumers, the number of capita per.
It solves the problem of resource scarcity at the same time it solves the uncomfortable problem of trying to get people to give up their toys and luxuries. Keep the toys and luxuries, get rid of the neighbors!
Keep in mind that the people now running the US and most of the rest of Western Civilization have as their central founding myth the "Passover" which is the biological removal of an enemy by the hand of God, operating through his angels. His exterminating angels. Who had to be specifically shown which houses not to infect when it came plague time. Divine power being somewhat myopic.
Thus the blood of the lamb reference.
Keep in mind that Christianity as presently iterated is pretty much just "Judaism for Dummies"
Crazy people who think their self-made deity uses disease to protect them.
Focusing exclusively on Israel - the crimes of mistreatment and subjugation visited on the Palestinians by gloating Israelis, the grotesque atrocities of Gaza, the glaringly obvious fact of Israeli/Jewish manipulation of the US government and public to accomplish the atrocity of Iraq - is no longer strategically accurate, true as it is, important as it is to keep the accusations loud and clear.
But Israel and the US are now part of the same geopolitical entity, as is England and possibly France. Israel is the head, the US is the body, sort of.
These are not sane men, they are not decent men, and they are not noble men. What they are is desperate and conscienceless men.
And just as with the Iraq debacle, it's vital that people get in front of them, not follow behind them cataloging their duplicities and crimes.
Reality isn't enough.
Predict what they'll do and make it plain and simple.
Sabotage their iniquity with truth. And quit worrying about hurting people's feelings.
They aren't.
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just wondering...

random notes on the fly:

Disney's Earth can be readily interpreted, the phrase not the television program, as a statement of territoriality and possession.
Which seems banal and adolescent until you set Thomas Friedman's eco-posturing next to it. And if like me and more than a few others you have this sense of a restrained hunger for eugenic cull fermenting at the edges of public discourse.
I'm not suggesting there's anything conscious or overt in that. Just one of those happy accidents brought about by the limits of language and the partiality of enlightened consciousness in the main players.
An automatic and obvious response to the excesses of humanity's carbon footprint isn't just the lessening of the carbon footprint itself - using less, using more green tech, etc - in fact built into the frame of the question as it's presented is that the foot itself could well be reduced, the size of the foot itself could be made smaller, and this would lower the carbon footprint as well as making available much that is scarce and growing scarcer now.
In fact it's suspicious that there's so little talk of eugenics at a time like this.
Suspicious to the edge of alarming, except that everything's pretty alarming anyway.
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The term "hyper-Semitic" could be introduced into the discourse now, it would help.