Civilianism News for July 15th

More Horrifying News Than Usual today

It's called the EATR Robot. Isn't that cute?

• Pentagon Developing Shape-Shifting ‘Transformers’ for Battlefield Real-life “Transformers” could soon be used by American soldiers on the battlefield.  The Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is well into the second phase of a project to develop “programmable matter” that could reshape itself to fit any situation, reports SIGNAL magazine.”
  Tell me how we can stop funding this crap. Do YOU want to pay for this?
• Robot land-steamers to consume all life on Earth as fuel – News has emerged of a milestone reached on the road towards a potentially world-changing piece of technology. We speak, of course, of US military plans to introduce roving steam-powered robots which would fuel themselves by harvesting everything alive and cramming it into their insatiable blazing furnaces.”

  It’s starting to appear that human beings as a species are irredeemable. If this is true, we deserve to go extinct. DARPA and the Pentagon again.  Didn’t anyone watch Battlestar Galactica?? Does Terminator ring a bell?  They even named it the EATR.  (See picture above).  We have some sick bastards in the military, the Pentagon, and running this country.

• US Military Trying to Create Robots That Will Feed on Dead Bodies While Killing Live Ones – Indicators are that it is not a hoax.
  Snopes.com has no entry for it as a hoax.
• The company’s press release is speculative, and looks legit.   RTI’s EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance military missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling.  The manufacturer, Cyclone Power Technologies, is listed on the pinks.As you know, we’re currently powering cars with biofuels, so this isn’t implausible, given that dead bodies are biomass. Won’t be long now before you can get Soylent Green at market.”    If this is true, God Help Us.  Yes that’s a figure of speech, but we are over as a civilization if anyone is truly planning this.

• AeroVironment shows off its robotic hummingbird – How is this for technology imitating nature? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been funding a project by California-based company AeroVironment to create tiny NAVs or Nano Aerial Vehicles.” Fun Little Robotic Spies that look like cute hummingbirds, so the government can see if you are buying weapons to fend off the flesh-eating robots they are developing. Is there a subset of Americans that thinks this is all cool?
• ‘The Matrix’ Fulfilled: EATR Military Robots to Use Biomatter as Fuel – The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research and development organization for the Department of Defense, aims to “maintain the technological superiority of the U.S military.”
  This is really going too far.   It’s stories like this that make people want to buy guns, bombs and more.

• Iran plane crash: 168 on board feared dead – Haaretz – Israel News – Iran has frequent plane crashes, which it blames on U.S. sanctions on the country that prevent it from getting spare parts for aging airplanes.” Sanctions are an act of war. Why? Because they kill people — usually innocent people.
• The ‘Cap And Tax’ Dead End – Scientists and engineers will have to prove that the possibility of a sudden, catastrophic carbon dioxide release from a storage site is exceedingly remote. I say “catastrophic” because carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and a ground-hugging cloud would suffocate anyone it enveloped. That is what happened in Cameroon in 1986, when naturally occurring carbon dioxide trapped at the bottom of Lake Nyos erupted and killed 1,746 people in nearby villages. Presumably, storage sites would not be located near population centers.” Carbon capture and storage is one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard of. It’s expensive and it won’t work and it could kill thousands of people. Why are we even talking about this?
• Why carbon offsets can’t work – Offsetting half our emissions (which means paying other countries to cut them on our behalf) makes a mockery of the government’s climate change programme.
• 100 Coal Plants Stopped (Reported by Rebecca Benson) – Intermountain Power’s coal plant in Utah became the 100th coal plant to be abandoned or prevented since the 2001 rush by industry to build more than 100 new coal plants, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign reported. In celebrating the milestone, they also noted that the move away from coal has brought new possibility—and new jobs—in the renewable energy sector, including wind, solar and geothermal.
• Climate Change: Halving Carbon Dioxide Emissions By 2050 Could Stabilize Global Warming – If carbon dioxide emissions are halved by 2050 compared to 1990, global warming can be stabilized below two degrees, according to a new study by German, Swiss and British researchers. Unfortunately, we don’t have any legislation on the horizon that will actually do this. We need some political leadership in this country.  On the other hand, if the above horrors are true, let climate change come and destroy us because we’ll deserve it.