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[personal profile] rfmcdonald
Never let it be said that we Livejournalers don't produce anything worthy of reading.


  • [livejournal.com profile] angel80 reports on the political nature of climate change in Australia, how emissions trading is seen as suspect and how controls on water use--saying, using precious water to grow rice for little net benefit--are politicized. Myself, I can say that similar things are this in this anti-antipodean dominion, one notable local variation being the idea that climate change would open up large areas of Canada to exploitation, even settlement. Note, please, that the Canadian Shield is pretty infertile, agricultural settlement is so passĂ©, and the wholesale collapse of the boreal and arctic ecologies isn't a good thing.

  • [livejournal.com profile] james_nicoll lets us know that some idiot decided to transmit the genetic code for RuBisCo, the molecule responsible for carbon fixation, to three nearby stars. Admittedly two of the stars are exceedingly dim red dwarfs, one so dim that it wasn't discovered at twelve light-years until recently, and the third is a bright star that would have been Sun-like but for its tendency to flood its system and hypothetical planets with stellar plasma, but still. Shouldn't we at least have some idea as to whether anyone's out there before we start transmitting "Hi we're here!" signals? At least, as James says, it isn't an obvious "lamp post error."i

  • [livejournal.com profile] mawombat, too long absent, comes up with a great two-part analysis (1, 2) of GĂ©ricault's famous 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa.

  • Finally, [livejournal.com profile] ptownnyc enunciates my anger about those people who talk about the "innocent victims of AIDS," in implicit contrast to the guilty victims (recipients?) of AIDS, like, say, queer men. He's not at all wrong when he talks about how many of the people, evangelical Christians but others, who fight against AIDS were absent from the fight against the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the developed world, which affected guess-who. I laughed cynically once when I read a passage wherein an evangelical's wife picked up a magazine in 2001, read an article about AIDS, and realized that people with AIDS suffered. Really?

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