Colorless Green Ideas

She sits outside, waiting for me to comb her out. I keep a lighter ready. Whenever a flea is caught in the comb, I quickly light the small bit of undercoat caught in the teeth and the flea stops moving. All you really have to do is burn their legs off and seal their mouth. Some days it seems as if they know what I’m doing. They feel better after I comb them. I wish I could just put a spot on them but it no longer works. Evolution. The day is hot, and long — and lonely. I struggle to deal with how it started — how my wife refused again to go to dialysis. The screaming that woke up my son. The memory of her locking me out of the house last night as I, covered in gas, hiked my way home from a car that had cut its fuel line, and she, blaming me for being late and refusing to let me inside. I remember how tired I was walking around through the gate in the stone wall to the workshop in the back, filling up a backpack with tools and walking back to the car, fixing it with a piece of old...

Venus currently sports a 0.9g gravity field and an atmospheric column 90 times that of Earth. Here is an economical and realistic long timescale terraform. 0. Deflect an asteroid into orbit around Venus. (cost: the rocket pack and computer controller) 1. Deflect a comet to strike the planet's surface, on a timescale that will coincide with the end of the bioterraform. (see cost, 0) 2. Genetically engineer a blue-green algae that is hydrosulfuophyllic by basing it on vent life out of the deep pacific. modify the bloom color to white. 3. Seed the upper atomsphere with that algae. 4. Using Material from the Asteroid, 3D Print and Install a solar sail at a stationary point between venus and the sun, in synchronous orbit. Shield should allow for at min. a 10 percent shielding. 5. Farm an ice moon from the far outer system and deflect it into collision with Venus. Once the cooling cycle begins, CO2 will be easier to sequester. The key to continuing the terraform is to th...

The 20th century is over. All of the big leftist projects of the 20th century failed. Most of the countries where communists are still in power like China, Vietnam – appear to be the most efficient managers of a very wildly productive capitalism. American neo-Keynesian leftists, Krugman, Stiglitz - Keynesian welfare state model is passé. In the conditions of today’s global economy it no longer works. For the welfare state to work you need a strong nation state which can impose a certain fiscal politics and in a global market it doesn’t work. And the third point which is most problematic - the idea of critically rejecting alienated representative democracy and arguing for local grass root democracy where it’s not - you just delegate to the others. Your representatives to act for you, but people immediately engage in locally managing their affairs and dark money rises. In this model we were fighting for less racism, women’s rights, gay rights, economic and social jusice. But if there i...