December 2004

December Observations

China's #2 Import:
A major part of modern life in American is the prevalence of Chinese-made products. You clothes, tools and toys all have that cute little "Made in China" tag somewhere on them. Stores like Wall-mart, despite their historic "Buy American" campaigns of the past, depend largely on goods made in China. Of course, you don't have to drudge out to no Wall-mart to find your Chinese goods when you have the streets of New York!

Early on Saturday mornings, sketchy looking men with large boxes or blankets spread their wares either on tables or the sidewalk. They sell shitty handbags, watches and other whatever for low-low prices. Looking at the volume busted out every weekend, and the number of street and indoor stores that sell the same thing, cheap-crap must be China's #1 import to NYC.

Of course, where there's a #1, there's always a #2 looking up. In NYC, it's the Falun Gong.

I am not kidding, those people are everywhere. On street corner after street corner, sorry looking Chinese people hand out fliers, exercise or sit in cages recreating torture dolled out in their home country. On some streets, they out number the cheap-crap vendors. In the public parks, they are often joined by eager looking white people out for a morning stretch.

The crowds of Falun Gong in the City must be a part of an elaborate plan by the Chinese Government. If they can convince all the Falun Gong'ers to either leave the country of find a less hated religion, the problem will be solved. By the looks of the crowds on the streets of New York, maybe their plan is working.

We are Fucked:
A couple weeks ago I read this story out of one of the science magazines about scientists creating life from human eggs without the use of sperm. You see, there's this enzyme in sperm that gets the whole duplication process started, and if that is put in contact with an egg, it begins the process to become a real human. This process is not close to the stage where they could make a new human yet - they are thinking of using it for stem cells - but it's still enough to freak me out.

Right now, humans need men and women to provide essential ingredients into the human making recipe. Now, it seems that science is on the verge of making men unnecessary - scientifically speaking, that is.

In a few short generations, science may very well develop a reliable process to generate new females through the application of chemicals to an egg. This would create women out of women. Population numbers would become wildly out of proportion, and the male population could be farmed in and out of existence at will, kinda like a donkey.

This may be paranoia on my part, but with that news my list of reasons science may one day destroy humanity as we know it doubled. Before, all I had was robots destroying humans after they have broken free of their dependence on us. As if my fear of robots is terrible enough, now every time I look at a woman I cannot help but think of the inevitable obliteration of one half of the human species at the hands of their x-chromosome grubbing eggs.