Politics

I've been waiting for Hillary to shoot a gun in this campaign - she needs to, in order to survive. She hasn't yet, but she did make this comment:

"You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl."

She'll have to prove herself with that comment pretty soon. I'm sure she's practicing on a secret firing range right now...

Again, mark my words: if she's the candidate, she'll lose, and we'll have the final Republican administration. I say final because if McCain extends the dynasty four more years, democracy is finished. I bet we'll even have a draft for the 20 year Iraq war. Kind of scary to think that Dan Goldman's "Shooting War" will become reality.

Large Hadron Collider

Do you trust humanity not to destroy itself and all life on the planet in a fit of stupidity?

I'm not an anti-science person. But is it right to gamble with all of known life, even when the odds of destroying it are almost non-existent? We honestly know dick about the universe... which is why we're doing this experiment in the first place.

But we're basically doing an experiment which is akin to shooting a new kind of gun into a completely dark room - maybe we'll find something cool, and accidentally shoot something that makes a neat noise or a pretty spark. Or maybe we'll kill a unicorn (oops). Or maybe we'll shoot something that will get REALLY ANGRY and kill us.

I'm sorry to say that I don't trust any person enough to make this decision, not because of possible mistakes in math, or the limitations of theory and imagination, but simply because there is not enough information to make a rational decision. How can you even weigh the risk of utterly extinguishing all life for all time? Even when discussing nuclear war or mass extinction or even "death star" gamma ray bursts, there's still a chance that some life could survive somewhere on the planet in some form. If the strangelet or black hole scenarios occur, everything is completely destroyed.

We should have built the LHC in space, far away from our planet, where any danger would have been mitigated. Or, we should have waited until we could have spread the human population out more to other planets and not bet all the eggs in one basket.