Animal Rights

I'm almost certainly preaching to the choir here, but if you support animal rights*, you should avoid PETA like the plague.

Here's a not entirely unbiased, but very fact laden account of the pet-dumping trial, which reveals that not only were PETA employees following SOP when they killed and dumped 31 animals, but that they'd dumped many more there, AND among the dead were a number of animals that were adoptable. Indeed that were given to PETA for the purpose of adoption, with said PETA employees assuring the former owners that the animals would find good homes.

It's a sad but very interesting read, and the worst bit is that the two killers, part of an organization that maintains that to kill an animal is equal to murdering a human, and that eating meat is comparable to being a prison guard during the holocaust, got away with their "murders" scott free, despite all the evidence to the contrary.



*I should probably say animal welfare, given how the two terms are used these days. But I don't know. I think animals should have rights. Not the kind of crazed "free from all human touch" rights that PETA wants to give them, but they should have the right to be free from pain, to avoid abuse. The be killed humanely and for a purpose if they are killed. They don't have rights in the way that humans have rights, but they do have rights all the same, or they should.

Singularity

An idle musing, as I read about the collapsing Greenland ice sheet while up late with insomnia.

Will we reach the Singularity first, or will we ruin the planet past all saving first? Given humankind's inability to put their long term best interest ahead of their short term comfort, I suspect that the changes that will come with reaching the Singularity may be the only thing that can save us. If climate change makes itself felt before it's too late to stop it, causes real, immediate, short term consequences while it's still possible to stave off the long term disaster, we may make it, but if the Greenland situation is anything to go by, the real crunch won't hit until it's too late to halt any of it.

Not that I'm saying we should count on the Singularity rescuing the human race, and not bother to try and fix things before hand. That's just as silly as counting on the Second Coming. We should do what we can here and now. But it may well be a futile effort unless the Singularity (or the Second Coming!) comes in time.

Which, while I'm idly musing, leads to another thought I've had recently, given my religious leanings. Which is that the Second Coming may well immediately follow the Singularity. That when we break through into the place where knowledge approaches infinity, we'll finally be ready to meet God.

If anybody doesn't understand the above, I will be happy to try and explain further. I am sleep deprived and in a rather odd mental state just now. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!