Lileks confronts reality:

[N]ature ripped out the bunnies from their soft home and drank their blood, and you want me to help it? With money?

Lileks himself isn’t a milquetoast, but he had a couple interrupt his morning’s work.

His Majesty: “There is unappreciated value in such things as bull fights and bear baiting. Civilized man needs to see a good mauling now and then, to keep him aware of what the alternative is.”

His Majesty is not a member of PETA.

Robert Zubrin approaches problems like an engineer. He tries to solve them. The engineering approach to problems is problematic when the problems are unsolvable–like the problem of human nature, for instance. But when it comes to fuel, actually trying to solve our fuel problems is an idea whose time has come. Zubrin’s flex-fuel plan allows vehicles to use methanol, which can be economically derived from coal, natural gas, and wood and organic byproducts. It’s a great plan. (more…)

I have Avatar, as I should. But a discussion recently made me think that it’s unconsciously not as anti-technology as it appears on the surface. In fact, its real message is not only that technology and and environmentalism are compatible, but that they are necessarily compatible.

Consider. The ideal world of the Navi is enterable only through the high-technology construct of the Avatar. In other words, as John Reilly claims, the function of technology is to recreate the enchanted and organic world of the fairy tale.

Anti-technological environmentalism is a dead end. Technologism that doesn’t help us fulfill the human aspirations that are at the root of environmentalism is also a dead end.

The movie is still drek, though.

All things denote there is a God. The brutality and suffering and waste and beauty and peace and dynamic order of Nature are all signposts to God’s being. (more…)

They kin regulate my breathing when they pry my lungs from my cold, daid mouth.  Not ‘fore then.  (more…)

Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps of devotion to science from the drivers of public hysteria on nuclear waste? (more…)

I know smart people who are convinced that we could create tons of new jobs and new prosperity if only we forced industry to go green. Green jobs, man. Green technology, man. Yes, we can! (more…)