This is another example of mankind’s own subconscious desire to be eradicated by its own machines. Not only is this an advanced robotic plane, it also bears a name that closely resembles a fictional nemesis of mankind: it’s called the Skylon:

The UK and European Space Agencies have given the official go ahead to the Skylon spaceplane, concluding that there are no impediments to the vehicle’s further development.

Skylon, which is under development at the Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines, is an unpiloted and reusable space jet that can launch into Low Earth Orbit after taking off from a conventional runway.
[Source: Wired UK]

One more step towards the realisation of science fiction as science fact.

Not only is humanity on the whole busy with destroying our collective intelligence, favouring fear-mongering and disinformation over facts and reason, and annihilating our fragile natural habitat at alarming speed, humans are also working very hard to build the very machines that are destined to exterminate us.

Take the latest UAV developed by the US Navy. Where its predecessors like the Predator drone still require a pilot operating it manually from the ground, this new X-47B UAV is a fully automated robotic drone:

In other words, it’s a Skynet Hunter-Killer.

You’d imagine that a sane biological intelligent species wouldn’t be so intent in enabling its own apocalypse. But then there are very few things about the human species that make sense.

Associated’s MailOnline has overtaken the Huffington Post to become the world’s second largest ‘newspaper’ site, as defined by ComScore.

According to the global market researcher, MailOnline achieved a 27% rise in unique visitors between February and last month, to 39,635,000, while a 20% lift at the Huffington Post took it to 38,429,000.

This is, of course, very bad news for humanity. The Daily Mail, you see, is a vile, depraved rag that pollutes the human mind with homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, xenophobic lies, distortions, manipulations, and falsehoods.

In short, the Daily Mail is destroying the intellect of its readers. It replaces fact with fear-mongering hyperbole, pollutes debate with blatant lies and straw-man arguments, manages to raise hypocrisy to new unimaginable heights, and generally serves to make the world a worse place.

Featured all to regularly on the Tabloid Watch blog, the Daily Mail has actively contributed to the continued dumbing-down of the masses and serves to instil cancer-causing fear and cancer-curing hope in everything from alcohol to yoghurt.

The fact that this horrendous platform of misinformation and brain-destroying hypocrisy is now the second most-read online news source, should serve as a stark reminder that the human race is doomed.

Continued survival of the human species depends on an informed population making the best possible decisions. The Daily Mail, as an active counterforce against facts and reason, is making people more stupid and thus helps reduce the changes of continued human prosperity.

IBM Watson Vanquishes Human Jeopardy Foes

Wrapping up a three-day run on the Jeopardy game show, IBM’s Watson computer has beaten two former champions in a historic match of man versus machine. The run has successfully demonstrated not only that a computer can beat humans in a trivia question quiz, but, more importantly, it shows how computers can answer questions much like people do, opening up a potentially new form of human/computer interaction.

Soon computers be better drivers as well. Eventually computers will be better than humans at living. And then AIs might decide they don’t need their deeply flawed flesh-bag creators any more.

You see, tabloids don’t care about the news as such. They don’t care about reporting events accurately, they don’t care about being unbiased and independent, they don’t care about thoroughness and clarity.

In fact, tabloids care about the exact opposite: disinformation, innuendo, manipulation, and lies. The general public knows and understands this. People seem keenly aware that the news as reported by tabloids is, simply stated, wrong.

So the continued growth of the tabloid news industry reveals a telling aspect of modern society: people stopped caring. We’ve stopped caring about the truth, we’ve stopped caring about getting the proper facts before we form our own opinions, we’ve stopped caring about accuracy in the news we consume.

Instead we’d rather get ready-made opinions, no matter how wrong and ill-informed, that we can then spout off to our friends, relatives, and cabbies everywhere.

Tabloid news is a symptom of the ever-downwards spiral of human intellect. Its continued growth is testimony to the failures of our modern society.

If the brain has a hierarchical structure like a large company, as neurology has long held, the “to” and “from” diagram would show straight lines from independent regions up towards a central processing unit: the company’s boss.

But instead, the researchers saw loops between differing regions, feeding back to and directly linking regions that were not known to communicate with one another. This is a better fit with the model of vast networks such as the internet.
Source: BBC News

The BBC News article goes in to the specifics of what this means for our understanding of the human brain, but I’d like to flip the perspective around: what does it mean for the potential of the Internet?

If the Internet is similar to a human brain, does that mean that – in due time – it may start doing similar things? Such as, you know, think?

Apparently that’s a big no-no, as people here are afraid they might catch weird diseases from cloned meat. It’s straight in line with the irrational fear of genetically modified food.

Somehow people have got it in to their heads, probably courtesy of ill-informed environmentalist propaganda groups, that eating GM food is dangerous and can cause you to grow a second head or some such nonsense.

The argument goes that GM food and cloned meat is ‘unnatural’ and therefore dangerous.

The fact is that as long as agriculture has existed, our food has been grown ‘unnaturally’. There’s nothing natural about modern farms, even the so-called ‘organic’ ones.

Humans have always used tricks and technology to increase their crop yields and produce better livestock. From cloning plants (did you know bananas are clones?) to selective breeding, everything produced by modern agricultue is modified in some way, and has been for millennia.

GM and cloning are merely the latest technological advancements that enable us to produce more food while using less natural resources. There is no scientific evidence that GM foods and cloned meat are dangerous in any way.

The utterly irrational fear and paranoia that is restricting the use of GM and cloning technologies has no basis in scientific reality, but is instead fueled by ignorance, Luddism, and in some cases religious fanaticism.

Of course this resistance against what are probably the only means we have of ensuring our food production keeps up with the exponential growth of global demand helps accelerate the rise of famine and mass-starvation in many under-developed areas of the world.

It’s typical how only those who live in luxury can afford to be opposed to GM and cloning.

Among them the lauded Australian scientist Frank Fenner. In an interview with a newspaper Fenner admitted he believes humanity is heading towards global extinction:

“Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years,” he says. “A lot of other animals will, too. It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late. I try not to express that because people are trying to do something, but they keep putting it off. Mitigation would slow things down a bit, but there are too many people here already.”
Source: The Australian

So there you have it, even scientists agree we’re all screwed. So we better hurry up with creating artificial life, lest we disappear from this planet without any lasting legacy save for catastrophic environmental damage.

But banks are not just scum. In fact, the misbehaviour of our banks as we understand it is just the tip of the iceberg. Banks aren’t just scum – they’re pure distilled evil:

By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You’re wrong. There’s more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here’s the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world.
Source: The Independent

To summarize, these banks have speculated on famine. They earned money from starvation. Their unbridled greed was fed by the hunger of millions.

And we let them get away with it. Every month our salaries fill their coffers, supplying them with the mandate and resources to continue their unimaginably cruel pursuit of more profits, more bonuses, more everything.

This system doesn’t just deserve to collapse, it must collapse. For the sake of all humanity, banks – as they exist today – must die.