Set Bemusement Level To “Stun”

A guy in California has actually patented a phaser that can stun from a distance. The UK defence forces are interested.

[Update at 2:57 PM PDT]

I should add, that I don’t think it will work. The ability to transmit a charge through such a “tunnel” has been demonstrated, but I think that it’s unlikely that it would reliably “stun” an individual. It would need a lot of power, which means a heavy battery pack, and even then, the effects on human physiology would be unpredictable. It might render him unconscious, it might kill him, it might make him mad. Life’s not like the movies…

Set Bemusement Level To “Stun”

A guy in California has actually patented a phaser that can stun from a distance. The UK defence forces are interested.

[Update at 2:57 PM PDT]

I should add, that I don’t think it will work. The ability to transmit a charge through such a “tunnel” has been demonstrated, but I think that it’s unlikely that it would reliably “stun” an individual. It would need a lot of power, which means a heavy battery pack, and even then, the effects on human physiology would be unpredictable. It might render him unconscious, it might kill him, it might make him mad. Life’s not like the movies…

Set Bemusement Level To “Stun”

A guy in California has actually patented a phaser that can stun from a distance. The UK defence forces are interested.

[Update at 2:57 PM PDT]

I should add, that I don’t think it will work. The ability to transmit a charge through such a “tunnel” has been demonstrated, but I think that it’s unlikely that it would reliably “stun” an individual. It would need a lot of power, which means a heavy battery pack, and even then, the effects on human physiology would be unpredictable. It might render him unconscious, it might kill him, it might make him mad. Life’s not like the movies…

Libertarian Slaveholders

Do debating tactics get any more confused, sleazy and odious than this?

A slave owner in the antebellum South thought that blacks were not human beings, and he resented like hell an abolitionist telling him that he had to treat a black like a human being, and it was his principled view that that wasn’t the case. And you had to fight a civil war and basically use the state to enforce the notion that all men are created equal, and that blacks were as fully human beings as whites were. So there are times that that libertarian model just doesn’t work very well.

So, Fukuyama claims that libertarianism, a belief in the sovereignty of the individual, would have defended slavery? Francis, get a clue. Slavery was a failure of statism–in which laws were passed that made it legal for one man to enslave another. This was as far from libertarianism as it’s possible to get.

Comments like this make it hard to take anything he says about ethics or morality, on the subject of cloning, or anything else, seriously.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!