BLTC Research was founded in 1995 to promote paradise-engineering. We are dedicated to an ambitious global technology project. BLTC seek to abolish the biological substrates of suffering. Not just in humans, but in all sentient life.

Absurdly fanciful? No. The blueprint for a Post-Darwinian Transition is conceptually simple, technically feasible and morally urgent.

At present, life on earth is controlled by self-replicating DNA. Selfish genes ensure that cruelty, pain, malaise are endemic to the living world.

Yet all traditional religions, all social and economic ideologies, and all political parties, are alike in one respect. They ignore the biochemical roots of our ill-being. So the noisy trivia of party-politics distract us from what needs to be done.

Fortunately, the old Darwinian order, driven by blind natural selection acting on random genetic mutations, is destined to pass into evolutionary history.

For third-millennium bioscience allows us to:

• rewrite the vertebrate genome
  

• redesign the global ecosystem
  

• deliver genetically pre-programmed well-being

Biotechnology can make us smarter, happier – and nicer. Post-Darwinian superminds can abolish “physical” and “mental” pain altogether.

Get Your War on by David Rees, scheduled for November 2002 release as a book! Powell’s Books

Love Letters in Ancient Brick by George Herrimam:

The greatest comic strip of all-time. In a 1999 special issue, The Comics Journal named George Herriman’s Krazy Kat as “the greatest comic strip of the 20th Century.” In 2002, Fantagraphics embarked on a publishing plan to reintroduce the strip to a public that has largely never seen it: this volume is the second of a long-term plan to chronologically reprint strips from the prime of Herriman’s career, most of which have not seen print since originally running in newspapers 75 years ago. Each volume is edited by the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum’s Bill Blackbeard, the world’s foremost authority on early 20th Century American comic strips, and designed by Jimmy Corrigan author Chris Ware. In addition to the 104 full-page black-and-white Sunday strips from 1927 and 1928 (Herriman did not use color until 1935), the book includes an introduction by Blackbeard and reproductions of rare Herriman ephemera from Ware’s own extensive collection, as well as annotations and other notes by Ware and Blackbeard. Krazy Kat is a love story, focusing on the relationships of its three main characters. Krazy Kat adored Ignatz Mouse. Ignatz Mouse just tolerated Krazy Kat, except for recurrent onsets of targeting tumescence, which found expression in the fast delivery of bricks to Krazy’s cranium. Offisa Pup loved Krazy and sought to protect “her” (Herriman always maintained that Krazy was genderless) by throwing Ignatz in jail. Each of the characters was ignorant of the others’ true motivations, and this simple structure allowed Herriman to build entire worlds of meaning into the actions, building thematic depth and sweeping his readers up by the looping verbal rhythms of Krazy & Co.’s unique dialogue. As Lingua Franca once wrote, “Herriman was a rare artist who bridges the gap between high and low culture. His surrealistic strip was admired by popular entertainers like Walt Disney and Frank Capra yet also had a highbrow fan club that included E. E. Cummings, Willem de Kooning, and Umberto Eco”…

[…and me. — FmH] Powell’s Books

Declan McCullagh: “The danger of Congress being unusually profligate in discarding both money and Americans’ privacy is especially real right now. First, it’s an election year. Second, the war on terror has eliminated most of the usual obstacles to fiscal extravagance. Third, the Bush administration seems determined to reduce Americans’ protections against government snooping–all in the name of protecting America from terrorists.” C/Net