Like most people, I’ve been following the progress of the Syrian uprising. But over the last few days I have literally been losing so much sleep over it. Last night it made its way into my dreams and I’m so goddamn tired right now it’s not funny. I certainly cannot claim to be a real human rights activist, and it’s going to sound fucking ridiculous but this middle east anxiousness is mostly triggered from my childhood exposure to what was going on in Bosnia during the early 90’s during their war for independence when I was still a little girl living in Kuala Lumpur. I would pray to God every night before bed to protect the young girls being raped by soldiers in detention camps because it was somehow instilled into me that the deaths of over 100,000 and displacement of 2 million in the name of freedom were partly my fault as a 6 year old. Yay religion.

I suppose prayer got me through a lot when I was a child but thankfully somewhere along the way logic and reason rose from behind the bushes and punched me right in the face. Now, whenever I have a freak out, I turn to science and (I guess to an extent) philosophy to level me out. That said though, there’s still a lot that goes on inside my head that has staggered my mental growth so my psychological and biological age are so far apart I know what I should be doing, but almost…am not capable of really getting into that mind frame.

Anyway, Syria. I don’t know why Syria. Sure there have been much worse outcomes but for some reason this is the lucky one that messes my head up. Of all people, my dealer gave me a book a while back called The Age of Extremes, by that brilliant Marxist nutjob Eric Hobsbawn. In a nutshell it describes the 20th century as paramount violence and how all political systems suck. But here we are, now in the 21st century, the digital age, but there’s still heaps of fall out from our past. Fuck, it doesn’t matter what era you live in, everyone is going to claim that NOW is the time that really matters because we are at that crossroad of manifesting that incredible future that will blow our minds or completely destroy what’s left of our pathetic existence.


It’s this whole “too smart for our own good” argument. On a very basic scale, we have adapted to almost any environment and if not, have changed it to fit what we want. The industrial revolution was the beginning of what would propel us into this digital age where we are now creating living cells and curing the sick to the point of overpopulation. Instinctually (did I just create a new word, or is spell check being anti-Australian again?) we are curious beings, which have resulted in our abundance of knowledge, but we are also selfish – so do we use what we know to create a better world? Or feed our egos and benefit ourselves and let the next generation deal with the consequences?

Ok, so an example of that fine line between infinite possibility or complete disaster can be drawn from Craig Venter and his team creating the first self-replicating synthetic cell. So while he hasn’t actually made life from scratch per se, rather, created an organism with a synthesized natural genome, it is still enough for us to see our evolution from hunter gatherers to almost God-like. It seems like with this knowledge, Venter has begun research into synthesized algae fuel, as current natural methods will never yield the amount needed on a global scale. This could go two ways – the holy grail of renewable energy where algae fuel becomes a practical and common source of energy, or these cells are let loose to the outside world and catastrophically turns oceans into a sea of lipids.
 Ok, so the latter is grossly oversimplified but whatever.


Holy shit. How did I go from the Syrian unrest to a synthetic cell destroying the ocean? I don’t even know what point I’m trying to make anymore. I need to go for a walk.