An invaluable round-up from Hitchens:
Just look at the gang that strove to prevent the United Nations from enforcing its library of resolutions on Saddam Hussein. Where are they now? Gerhard Schroeder, ex-chancellor of Germany, has gone straight to work for a Russian oil-and-gas consortium. Vladimir Putin, master of such consortia and their manipulation, is undisguised in his thirst to re-establish a one-party state. Jacques Chirac, who only avoided prosecution for corruption by getting himself immunized by re-election (and who had Saddam's sons as his personal guests while in office, and built Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor while knowing what he wanted it for), is now undergoing some unpleasant interviews with the Paris police. So is his cynical understudy Dominique de Villepin, once the glamour-boy of the "European" school of diplomacy without force. What a crew! Galloway is the most sordid of this group because he managed to be a pimp for, as well as a prostitute of, one of the foulest dictatorships of modern times. But the taint of collusion and corruption extends much further than his pathetic figure, and one day, slowly but surely, we shall find out the whole disgusting thing.
Michael Anissimov argues that much 'Singularity' discussion is already fuzzing out into meaninglessness. The evident tendency of many commentators to get side-tracked by tedious neo-humanist fantasies (typically mixing immortalism with virtual-sex scenarios) certainly supports his case.
Rigorously conceived Singularity is Intelligence Catastrophe: the punctual emergence of explosively self-regenerating post-human cognitive amplification on the curve of accelerating technology -- aka Planetary Meltdown, the Immanent Limit of Capitalism, or the Wall Across the Future (where human imagination terminates).
Isn't it?
Nothing much to recommend 'Axenism' (that's a-xenism), except that the logical case for it seems close to overwhelming.