Blogger now insists that we type something into this "title" field but HEY OLD MAN THESE ARE YOUR RULES NOT MINE

Once upon a chronology -- whole eons ago, vast dizzying gulfs of time before last Thursday -- there was a single Amon Düül, and a single Life Extension movement, and I used to wind them up. The Life Extension members, that is. That was before the advent of the Interlattice, and if you wanted to troll people then you had to do it the old-fashioned way with cuneiform clay tablets smoke signals typed letters THE WAY NATURE INTENDED.

[drains pint; hiccups; slams glass down on table].

For instance, one popular idea among the Life Extension crowd in those days was the Caloric Restriction approach to postponing mortality. The idea is that a rigorous regime of semi-starvation will force your body to slow its metabolism as it ekes out its scanty rations of energy, meaning less production of free radicals, which are a Bad Thing; apparently Evolution did not know what it was doing (and was probably drunk) when it set our metabolic rates to its default high level. I am not describing this very well but at the time they were explaining the theory I was not listening so much as trying to escape.

Apple + parsnip for dinner? DO NOT WANT.

Subsequent decades saw Amon Düül split into Amon Düül I and Amon Düül II, much as the Life Extension crowd diverged into the Alcor Life Extension Foundation (who freeze heads and bodies as a thoughtful gift of nutritional / gustatory supplies for future generations) and the Life Extension Foundation. The latter peddles dietary supplements, and lobbies for libertarian causes like disbanding the FDA (which is currently holding back progress and distorting the snake-oil market with its unreasonable expectation of "proof of efficacity"). After 35 years the Caloric Restriction diet is known not to work for primates but it is still promoted on the LEF website... if nothing else it enlarges the market for dietary supplements.

Totally not an early Krautrock collector

Is it possible that the Movement has been co-opted by glibertarians and grifters? [but I repeat myself]. Now distinguished from the pedlars of colloidal silver and 'activated iodine' only by their preference for panaceic selenium as a more reputable form of alchemy?

"Sell-any-um" joke goes here

Fortunately a reliable test exists. A quick Goofle search for "Life Extension Movement" + "Climate Change" brings up the following information, suggestive of magical thinking and reality denial:

1. Climate change is not happening, and the so-called “consensus” across climatologists is merely evidence that consensus in science is a mirage.
2. Climate change may be happening but there is no evidence that it is anthropogenic.
3. Climate change may be anthropogenic but there is nothing we can do to stop it.
4. It would be wrong to stop anthropogenic climate change because a warmer planet would bring economic benefits to those of us who plan ahead and buy land in high, cold places.

Imagine my sadness to see wrongness failery being monetarised like this. I remember when people went all weirdness delusional FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME rather than for personal profit. Perhaps it is time for the two factions to re-unite, recruit the drummer from Van der Graaf Generator, and call themselves Life Extension UK Amon Duul UK.

[signals to monkey butler to chase kids off lawn].