Sign Kid Various Up For The Super Soldier Serum, Please...

Kid Various is always puzzled by those who fear the coming great changes in our phisiology spurred by new technologies. The surge in sophistication of GRIN technologies (genetics, robotics, information systems & nanotechnology) is going to push us to the frontier of what we understand to be human. Sure there will always be downsides, the integration of any new technology always brings negative effects. But the upsides will so much more profound, up to and including virtual immortality!

Who would want to live in any other time or place than America in the 21st century? The Kid does not get all these people who think that there was some "golden age" when primitive people lived "in harmony" with nature. Let us make one thing perfectly clear. Being a neanderthal, an african tribesman or a Native American SUCKED ASS.

Life was a daily struggle for existence and you died early and painfully from disease, carnivorous animals or enemy tribes. Life was filthy, disgusting and either too hot or too cold.

It was, in the Hobbesian sense "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short."

So when it's noted, in this review of Joel Garreau's Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means to Be Human, that

The big question is, Is there going to be an arms race among people who will have to compete with enhanced people like that? Among the "enhanced" and the "naturals" [who think enhancements are creepy] and a third group—people who, for reasons of geography or money, don't have access to these enhancement technologies, and they envy and despise those who do.

For the record, Kid Various will be leading the "enhanced" category. As for the 3rd category, we, as a nation, should make every effort to grant access to these new technologies to every level of society so as not to start an "immortality gap."

However, for all you "naturals" out there? So long suckers!

Have fun decomposing into dust while Kid Various leans back and sips a Pina Colada while his brain is downloaded into the computer!

All types of enhancements are on the near horizon, including creating super soldiers!

At a Pentagon R-and-D facility in Virginia, program managers aim to create the ultimate warriors—soldiers that can fight without sleeping, tell their bodies to stop bleeding, and regrow lost hands and limbs.

Sweet. In 20 years we may actually be sending Captain America to dust-pits around the world!

Yes, this is The Idiom. Everything eventually relates back to Star Wars, Star Trek or comic books.

Which brings us to pehaps one of the greatest works of comic art in the whole history of the genre.

From The Ultimates, after beating the snot out of a Nazi alien who previously demanded his surrender, Cap replies:

Surrender?! Do you think this letter on
my head stands for FRANCE?!

Ho ho ho. Nice little chuckle.

Of course it does reflect a deeper problem facing the world in general, the general European tendency to stick their heads in the sand when it comes to certain unpleasant realities of the world. Nicely pointed out in an article written by one of those rare birds, a European that understands that attempting to address the "root causes" of islamist terror is both pointless and dangerous...

...Appeasement similarly crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Bosnia and Kosovo. Indeed, even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass murder there, we Europeans debated and debated - and then debated still more. We were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, to do our work for us.

Europe still hasn't learned its lesson. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word "equidistance," often seems to countenance suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Similarly, it generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore the nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam Hussein's torture and murder machinery, and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, to accuse U.S. President George W. Bush of being a warmonger.

This hypocrisy continues even as it is discovered that some of the loudest critics of American action in Iraq made illicit billions - indeed, tens of billions - of dollars in the corrupt UN "oil-for-food" program.

Today we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland, Britain and elsewhere in Europe? By suggesting - wait for it - that the proper response to such barbarism is to initiate a "Muslim holiday" in Germany.

I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of Germany's government - and, if polls are to be believed, the German people - actually believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists. One cannot help but recall Britain's Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, waving that laughable treaty signed by Adolf Hitler, and declaring the advent of "peace in our time."

What atrocity must occur before the European public and its political leadership understands what is really happening in the world? There is a sort of crusade underway - an especially perfidious campaign consisting of systematic attacks by Islamists, focused on civilians, that is directed against our free, open Western societies, and that is intent upon their utter destruction.

What atrocity indeed? Until the Europeans wake up and understand that the Islamists are not pursuing rational policy goals, but rather, are seeking to have thei value system dominate and triumph over our own, they will continue to be targets of Islamist terror attacks. Sadly, Kid Various thinks that it won't be until France or Germany is hit, and hit hard, by Islamists striking out at the soft targets of the infidels, that Europe will begin to mobilize for the effort ahead.