Meat And Money

The Ray Kurzweil free newsletter to which I’ve subscribed for many years has two items this week of strong interest to science fiction fans. One deals with an early success in growing meat in a lab – no living animals required. The second addresses the likely future of retailing. Both illustrate that the pace of change in industrialized societies continues unabated, and that one of Kurzweil’s major predictions, that the pace itself is speeding up, is coming true.

Factory grown meat is an old SF future projection standby. I’ve used it myself. Natural selection made us homo saps omnivores (check your teeth), and meat is a part of our nature-developed diet. But we humans are no longer as tightly bound to nature and heredity’s dictates as are almost all other animals; we have far more free choice. A large and steadily growing number of us have chosen to stop eating animal flesh. But that can be a very unhealthy choice, since certain vital nutrients are normally available only in animal tissue. (And our inherited taste buds just plain like! many varieties of meat.) Lab-grown meat, which could presumably be textured, flavored, supplemented by the addition of specific needed amino acids, etc.), can be an attractive alternative. And, moral questions aside, factory-grown meat would eliminate the extremely inefficient present system of raising untold millions of animals each year for slaughter. Most of the immense amounts of grain and other animal fodder saved could be fed directly to people. 

This would, of course, put thousands if not millions of people now engaged in raising, slaughtering, and butchering animals out of business. But some can be trained for jobs in the new meat factories, and the others, hopefully, will find better and less bloody jobs. 

Economic experts call the USA a consumer-driven society. If we all stopped buying anything other than what we need to survive – food, shelter, transportation, health care – the economy would collapse. Probably half or more of us wouldn’t have jobs. Most of us want more than the basic necessities, and the economy supplies us with the money to purchase lots of nice ‘extras’. All that spending adds up to what is commonly called a ‘standard of living’ – in our case a good one, but no longer among the world’s tops We get all those goodies through a system of production and distribution called retail trade. Ray Kurzweil predicts some major changes coming up, where we will be buying many of the gadgets –er, life-enhancing added values -- he talks about here. (For those of you not familiar with Kurzweil’s work, he’s said most of this before, in other forums. Ray is now working as a VP at Google, incidentally, in their creative future thinking department. He should be right at home there.)’ 

Here’s the full original article.

New Story: A Killing In Kind

This week I have a new story up in the third issue of “Fiction Vale”, a very promising new ezine which may have what it takes to last in a crowded and competitive field. The magazine is not free; costs four dollars per issue. It can be downloaded to a Kindle, or most other ‘smart’ devices, including probably your cell phone. You can also read the magazine on your computer, though you first may have to do what I did, visit Amazon and download their free Kindle application. (I have a Kindle, but prefer the much larger computer screen.) I encourage all you devoted Joseph Green fans to buy this issue, not only to read my story but all the others. And help a relatively new worthwhile ezine that is just getting its sealegs. 

On arrival you can learn a great deal about "FictionVale" before  deciding whether or not to buy. Scroll down past the intro material to the list of contributors, and you will see my devilishly handso -- smiling face. In addition to a short bio, each entry has a link to another site or individual blog where the writer can promote himself. Following the list of contributors, they provide a lot of information on the magazine and future plans. It looks to be an interesting venture, and I hope it succeeds.

Two other items of strong interest caught my attention this week. One was on the belated credit being given to Henry Miller, an important but neglected figure in American literature (in my not-too-humble opinion). At first dismissed as just another pornographer, his novels were not allowed into the USA until after Bennett Cerf led the eventually successful fight to get James Joyce’s Ulysses  past the censors (in its thousand-plus pages this great novel included a single appearance of the word ‘fuck’. ) The movie “Henry and June”, which I remember as being quite popular, probably did more to revive Henry Miller’s reputation than any number of book reviews.

The second item I found interesting on Huffpost (and if you are of the liberal/progressive persuasion and don’t subscribe to the free Huffpost, you are missing a lot. Arianna Huffington is one of the few celebrities of whom I know who began her public life as a conservative, then  had the intelligence and moral conscience to morph into a progressive). This one covers a study that seems to establish as fact what I perhaps already dimly sensed – that someone who gets up in the morning with some purpose in mind, the desire to accomplish something he or she deems worthwhile, betters his chances of staying alive. Something to think about, especially if you are retired and have allowed your life to become aimless and without purpose. 

Until next week, and more useless (but I hope interesting) meanderings.