Thinking about a post war society.

What if... 

...We stopped going to war.

Take that armed conflict!

During this time for the United States, war is fairly useless. We don't need more land and aren't likely to get it. The economy is shifting towards a borderless, free flowing market. One of the primary inhibitors of the international economy is the continued armed conflicts happening around the world.

So why do we still even consider going to war?

Jackson and Morelli's reason's for "bargaining failure":

"1. Asymmetric information about the potential costs and benefits of war.
2. A lack of ability to enforce a bargaining agreement and/or a lack of the ability to credibly commit to abide by an agreement.
3. Indivisibilities of resources that might change hands in a war, so that not all potentially mutually beneficial bargaining agreements are feasible.
4. Agency problems, where the incentives of leaders differ from those of the populations that they represent.
5. Multilateral interactions where every potential agreement is blocked by some coalition of states or constituencies who can derail it."

("The Reasons for Wars – an Updated Survey - Stanford University." Insert Name of Site in Italics. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Sept. 2013 <http://www.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/war-overview.pdf>.)


We don't NEED anything from any other country, especially those countries we are currently warring. Afghanistan doesn't have many resources, especially not enough to account for the cost of conflict. Iraq now produces about $75billion per year from oil, but, if you look at the cost of the Iraq war, then you'll see where that doesn't equal out.

Iraq War initially cost $757.8 billion. The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.

The Afganistan and Iraq wars have cost us roughly $100 billion every year. What happens if we were to spend that money elsewhere? That's not even touching the rest of the Defense budget.

Mmm... lunch...

Education

It would be hard to argue that cold, hard cash wouldn't do some good for our education system. Currently, the whole budget for the department of education is $19.4 billion. Doubling our education budget could do some great wonders. Many schools that need more teachers have been required to cut back after federal cutbacks. Double their budget though, and we would see schools higher more teachers to reduce class sizes and  more schools to reduce school populations. These steps would allow teachers and administrators to bring the student to teacher ratios to a manageable level. Currently, our teachers are overwhelmed and could use the support.

Research

Simultaneously, we could double the NIH budget. Responsible for 28% of all biomedical research funding, the NIH has a budget of $30.9 billion.

In 2000, a report from a Joint Economic Committee of Congress outlined the benefits of NIH research. It noted that some econometric studies had given its research, which was funded at $16 billion a year in 2000, a rate of return of 25 to 40 percent per year. It also found that of the 21 drugs with the highest therapeutic impact on society introduced between 1965 and 1992, public funding was "instrumental" for 15.

That's just a straight-up, good investment. It also goes along with improving education but on a graduate level. More NIH money means more NIH grants. More grants mean graduate school programs can take more graduate students. More graduate students mean more future scientists. More future scientists mean a larger work force to confront our most challenging problems and further developing our technology and medicine.

Don't those sound better than fighting all the time?

Captain?

Snoop Dogg?

Then we've all agreed! No more war!

Roast Beef Beer Stew

Start by having your grandmother coddle you. You should end up with a two large chuck roasts of about 4 pounds, a large bottle of Kiddoman soy sauce, and a real fuzzy feeling. If you don’t have this opportunity or time is short, go ahead and by a 4-pound chuck roast, some soy sauce, sugar (about 8oz), flour (2 tablespoons), carrots (3 large), celery (4 sticks from a stalk), green peppers (1), white sweet onions (1), a small basket thing of mushrooms, Garlic (3 cloves), black pepper (a pinch), salt (a bit more than a pinch), and a case of beer to ease the pain of not having as good of a grandmother as I do.

After you’ve collected everything, chop everything that seems like it should be chopped. But you want it in chunks ‘cause that’s gonna make your stew stew-y. Sear your roast in a hot pan using a bit of oil. Oh, You were suppose to get that. To be honest, I didn’t even get that or really sear it on both sides. I just seared the roast without oil because I was reading a few recipes and most everyone’s like, “oh yeah, definitely really sear it. Traps in flavors, ya know?” But then someone else was like, “No! We’ve had it all wrong! We’re actually losing flavor and ruining everything by searing both sides! We’ve got to stop what we’re doing and spread the word!” So I went ahead and seared it because my roasts had been frozen and it’d at least help finish thawing it. I seared it without oil. What are you gonna do? I don’t need your opinion about it, okay! If I wanted to be judged, I’d go back to that Wisconsin karaoke bar and sing some Britany Spears. I don’t even know why I bother trying to even share this recipe that I made up. Forget it. I’m done…









…Sorry, I shouldn’t have walked away like that. Where were we? Right. So sear your beef just a bit. Then toss all those chopped chunks and beef into a big ole pot. Oh, I should have mentioned that you should have pre-heated the oven to 350 degrees. I forgot to mention that. You should have done that at the beginning before chopping stuff. Now you’re going to have to wait a bit. I fucked that up. My bad. It’s the searing thing all over again.

In your pot toss in Worchester sauce… I forgot to tell you about the Worchester sauce. You didn’t get it did you. You should get that. It really helps with most beef dishes. I’ll wait.



You got it? Great. Pour in some of that - probably about 3 tablespoons. Then about a cup of soy sauce, cup of sugar, two table spoons of flour, and pinch of salt and pepper. Remember that 6-pack of beer you got? Pour a whole bottle in. I hope you didn’t drink it all. You should definitely only pour a stout or seriously tasty beer in there, but I was assuming that’s what you bought in the first place. If I told you get to cooking beer, you were probably going to do something stupid and end up pouring natty light in this pot. Good lord, I hope you aren’t doing that now. Not put enough water in the there that everything mostly covered – just a few veggies popping up. I made sure to put the meat on the bottle, but it probably doesn’t make a lick of difference.

Now it looks pretty decent already, right? Put that lid on the huge ass pot of deliciousness. Toss that motherfucker in the oven without abandon! Leave it for 1 hr.

Don’t actually leave. That’s dangerous. Just loiter around your kitchen. I watched a movie and played on my laptop. You should start feeling the growing roots of self-doubt. Did you read everything write? What if this recipe doesn’t work with my oven? I didn’t really get 4 pounds of beef. I hope that okay? You know… What if you just turned the temperature down. Just a little bit. Otherwise it might get dry, even though it is fully submerged in liquid. Just go and check on it. That will be okay. Take a fork and poke your meat. Pretty firm, right? I told ya. But just in case, turn the temperature down to 290 degrees. We will both feel better about it. Let that go for 2.5 hours.

Just in case, check the firmness of your beef every hour or so. You want the meat to be the definition of tender. When you serve the beef and someone asks for a knife, you want to be able to smirk back at them and say, “You don’t need one, silly goose.” Then they just pull apart with their fork their portion of your delicious, succulent, tender chuck roast. Everyone will be so proud of you, and you’ll finally get invited to your friends’ bingo night that you’ve always wanted to go to.

After the beef is tender enough to pull apart (did I mention how tender it should be?), take that pot out! I really hope you used oven mitts. It will be very hot. I don’t want to assume you knew that, so this is your warning.

Let it sit and cool for a bit and then serve!

You can thank me later.

Round up:
Ingredients –

4-pound Chuck Roast
1 beer
3 Tb of Worchester sauce
1 cup of soy sauce
1 cup of sugar
2 Tb of all purpose Flour
3 Large Carrots
4 Celery Stalks
1 Green Pepper
1 Sweet Onion
1 Pack of belle Mushrooms
3 Gloves of Garlic
1 Tb of Pepper
1Tb of Salt

Directions -
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
Wash veggies and meat.
Chop carrots, celery, green pepper, and onion into large chunks. Mince Garlic. Leave mushrooms.
Sear chuck roast to brown both sides.
Put beef, veggies, and rest of ingredients in a big pot.
Cover pot and place in oven.
Cook for an hour then turn the oven down to 290 degrees.
Cook for 2 hours and 30 minutes.
Let cool and enjoy.

Why did the chicken commit suicide?

A Theoretical exercise on Global warming.

The Context.

I got into a Wiki trap today. I was wondering whether there was an age of insects, where giant insects dominated the Earth. This led me to the geologic time scale. As I was reading through the history of the Earth, I took note of the carbon levels and heat of the Earth. Apparently, atmospheric carbon levels use to be 5 times the levels they are now.

But. But. What about global warming and carbon emissions?

That’s what I thought about too! Well, following the comets, various volcanic events, etc., the Earth went into some really serious cooling along with tectonic plate movement and shit. The dinosaurs died out because of the comet and shit, the insects froze, and the small mammals managed to survive. Infact! This was actually really great for mammals. Mammals got dat sick-nasty internal gestation period, warm blood, hair! We can fuckin’ dominate other creatures in the cold. And so began the mammalian dominance.

Right, mammals dominate the Earth. so what?

Well, during this whole time, we’ve been living in this strange cold period that had been much colder than other times in Earth’s history. Then the Earth was kinda like, “I’m done with this climate phase. I’m going back to being warm. I don’t even know why I did that. Maybe it was the comet + volcanic ash creating some dense cloud encasing me in a greenhouse effect, effectively blocking the sun. Or maybe I just wanted to fuck up some dinosaurs. I’m moody like that.” With enough expansion of your perspective of time and personification of inanimate objects, the Earth can seem like a volatile prick.

So the furry mammals had to deal with an Earth that is warming up. Then along come some advanced primates (this is believed to have happened somewhere between 6 days after the beginning of creation, a few million years ago, and ~10k years ago). They get together and say, “You know, Earth? We’re going to help you out. We’re going to really help you get back to your old carbon levels where there were only plants. Like pre-animals! That would be awesome, wouldn't it? Sure it will flood our cities because we built civilizations too close to bodies of water to handle our own Earth warming.”

Which is where we are heading towards now!

Anyway, here’s my plan.

The Plan.

So we are heating the earth, melting our ice caps, killing our polar bears, #yolo. Well this doesn’t have to be the end of the world (Literally!). If we just do modeling of where the oceans will grow into, canal that shit into the arid land, farm that newly revitalized land, ???, profit. We would also need to start making stuff flood proof, ‘cause there’s going to be a lot of water. And of course, we’d need to completely reconstruct all our cities to be Venice-esque... except not sink and fall into the ocean.

This plan is impossible. Mainly because we can’t really get any public works going these days. Also, we’d have to accept that a lot of animals would go extinct, a lot of landmarks would be destroyed, and a lot of ecosystems and habitats would completely changed. It would also take a lot of work. But long-term, it would probably allow for great human prosperity. Just sayin’.

One thing that’s pretty nice about the Earth is that the important stuff about it, like the existence of water, it’s size and gravity, it’s distance from the sun, and warm, iron core, are generally unaffected by humans. We could probably mess up a lot of shit, and the Earth would just respond, “Meh.”

DNA Data Storage, Having too much fun, and Some Music

DNA Data Storage

Researchers have released their findings on being able to store data within DNA and retrieving it with 100% accuracy. So we, of course, thought about how we could make organisms with artificial DNA containing computer code, an obvious movie idea. Furthermore, there's a great conspiracy theory here.

"What's that CKSW? What conspiracy? I like conspiracies."

I'm glad you asked. Allow me to elaborate. So if you studied biology intermittently the last 30 or so years, you might believe that nearly 98% of the human genome is non-coding DNA. If you are more up-to-date and not crazy, you probably can justify this running with current hypothesis and say that the ncDNA probably came from past viruses and helps us to fight disease, or probably has an unknown, biological, non-strange purpose. That would be well and good. You could probably sleep pretty soundly at night believe that. I know I will.

Or... The 98% non-coding DNA is data that was implanted in humans thousands of years ago by an advanced society. There is a computer program of sometime hidden in these unused DNA strands probably with plans on intergalactic travel or how to perfectly cook a grilled cheese without burning either side yet perfectly melting the cheese. It is right there! Wake up SHEEPLE!

So there's that.

Having Too Much Fun

So CK and I were wondering about this after a great evening and night among friends and generally good company, "Did I just run out of happy?"

Here's some context. We began the Friday evening with some Anti-jokes. We laughed a lot for a good 1-2 hours. We made really bad beat mixes and blasted them in the living with reckless abandon. We played with a soccer ball around the kitchen. My flatmate joined us among these things, adding to the good times and enjoyable company. We then went to a bar and ended up meeting some decent blokes. Totally cool science-career people. So we had good laughs and conversations about batmans movies and what the longest rivers in the world are and who can draw the best Africa (apparently, SW is the best. Ain't bragging if it is true). Then today (the next day) we hung out with more friends, getting delicious pizza and going to the Yazoo brewery.

Just so many hours of delight!

So around the time we start watching napping around the living room, watching Return of the King, it hits me. I'm out of happy. That was it. I'm tuckered out of fun.

Some Music  (sidenote: Everyone should have spotify)

Alt-J are an up-and-coming band. I have no idea how to describe them. Electronic? Rock? Somewhere in between? Here's my favorite of their album, An Awesome Wave.

I was just introduced to Lianna La Havas recently. She comes with full vocals but backed by an extremely capable band. Shit rocks. 

This wreck is all amiss interpreted; It was a vision fair and fortunate

Welcome back

So here at The Blog, we seek to use this as a creative outlet. I, Senator Wayne, will probably try incorporating music, social commentary, and conversations with Captain Kirk. This likely means a bunch of non-sense, and, quite frankly, I wouldn't be at all surprised if no one bothered reading any of it. I probably won't reread it. Those errors I made below? They're permanent, left to smolder. Like an infection you haven't taken the time to check out.

A Story about new beginnings.

Yesterday Captain Kirk called me. "Senator, you know how I started last semester rear ending someone on my first day of school? Well, you'll never guess what happened." He said, as if I knew nothing in the world and couldn't possibly guess the events of his life despite knowing him well. He continued in this demeaning manner, "I was rear ended coming home! Could you imagine that terrible luck?"

"No, but that isn't nearly as bad of luck! In fact, it might serve as a turn of fortunes!" I replied to no one because he had left a voicemail, leaving me speaking to an empty room.

Wait, you can't hear my replies to your voicemail?
No one can actually hear what I'm saying?
Oopsy daisy.

I then called him up, "Captain! I got your voicemail, but you are looking at this situation all topsy-turvy! You aren't the stumbling bimbo of last semester, following people closely and tarnishing their bumpers with utter disregard! You'd grown and superseded your peers, allowing you to be closely followed, dangling your bumper like a tasty bait!" He was generally unimpressed by this symbolic explanation of his favorable position. I do admit my role might closely resemble Decius Brutus to the Captain's Caesar.

Captain, there is absolutely nothing to worry about!

Have a good week, readers. We'll love you no matter what.

Text Conversations During Work.

Kirk: You think you could make a tube so long that you could siphon the oceans into space?
Wayne: Personally, no. Generally, yes.
Kirk: We should build one. Hold the world hostage.
Wayne: What do we need from the world? A bigger garden?
Kirk: Mo Money.
Wayne: Bah! Mo money, mo problems.
Kirk: How about this for a plot device. Alchemist discovers the stuff of life, and the solvent for it.
Wayne: Mmmmm. Now we are talking my language.
Kirk: Our heroes hear a rumor like these coming from traders to an out of the way city.
Wayne: The alchemist is the hero?
Kirk: Maybe. He and his colleagues must decide what to do with this new found power. But for all intents and purposes have acquired immortality.
Oh, our story takes place in the roaring 20s. Alchemy is only practiced by quacks except for a few who can see other shades of reality.
Wayne: Go on.
Kirk: Most people dismiss the claims as a hoax and bland rumor. Science has moved forward into the pre-atomic age. Our hero is a French alchemist gifted with this second sight.
He is known simply as monsieur le marc.
His colleagues include a James Beckworth, Bradford von Helmstead, Marie de la Bourbon, and their mysterious benefactor, Countess Anna Borisovana Chelya.
This second sight allows the see to glimpse into other shares of reality and with meditation and practice to grasp the true nature of a substance.
Wayne: Name of substance?
Kirk: It is known by many names. The philosopher's stone, grand panacea, the tree of life, phlogesten, midichlorians. Le Marc has named his discovery "the net."
Wayne: "The net"?
Kirk: It binds all life together. It is basis for it and as such is a net of sorts. Simply called "net" in usage.
Wayne: Are you making some sort of internet metaphor here?
Kirk: No. I'm looking through wiki for good alternative names. Help me out.
Wayne: Le Marc's Miracle whip!
Brings life to every recipe and death to your enemies!
Kirk: No, the anathema to life is know as azoth. The great colvent.
Wayne: That's not very science-y.
Kirk: It's alchemy. It's mystical!
There is no scientific formula for the miracle whip.
To try and creat eone would cause blindness at best and maddening at worst. Brain bits would trickle from your ears like stew from a kettle reading the thing. It is forbidden knowledge.
Wayne: Yet someone figured it out.
Kirk: He has the gift!
And who is to say that he isn't mad already?
Wayne: So there is a forumla, it isn't mystical, but you may have to go mad to figure it out.
Kirk: I should say that to tread the path to enlightenment risks one's sanity and life.

Econmist Begrudgingly Endorses Obama By Senator Wayne.

Link to the article.

A quote I take from Jay-Z is, "When the grass is cut, the snakes will show."

That seems to be the lesson of this election. We were able to watch one after another republican candidates drop, as if  blue shells were given to each contestant in this mazing game of political Mario Kart.

Here's the jist:
"Indeed, the extremism of his party is Mr Romney’s greatest handicap. The Democrats have their implacable fringe too: look at the teachers’ unions. But the Republicans have become a party of Torquemadas, forcing representatives to sign pledges never to raise taxes, to dump the chairman of the Federal Reserve and to embrace an ever more Southern-fried approach to social policy. Under President Romney, new conservative Supreme Court justices would try to overturn Roe v Wade, returning abortion policy to the states. The rights of immigrants (who have hardly had a good deal under Mr Obama) and gays (who have) would also come under threat. This newspaper yearns for the more tolerant conservatism of Ronald Reagan, where “small government” meant keeping the state out of people’s bedrooms as well as out of their businesses. Mr Romney shows no sign of wanting to revive it."