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Category Archives: Transhumanism

Transfection to Transhumanism – Part 1 – rumble.com

Posted: November 24, 2022 at 12:46 am

Dr. Robert O. Young shares his research at the BioMed Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada on, "All of Humanity at Risk - Transfection of Graphene & Parasites Activated by 3, 4 & 5G Pulsating EMF!"

To All My Family and Friends Around the World,

"It is easier to fool people than it is to convince them they've been fooled." Mark Twain

Watch Part 2 and read the entire article at: https://www.drrobertyoung.com/post/humanity-at-risk-transfection-of-graphene-parasites-activated-by-3-4-5g-pulsating-emf

Robert O. Young MSc, DSc, PhD, Naturopathic Practitioner - http://www.drrobertyoung.com

Support the work, research and findings of Dr. Robert O. Young at: https://www.givesendgo.com/research

No donation is too small and will be appreciated and used for continuous research, publications and public education!

As a special thank you for your donation, I will answer one health or lifestyle related question.

After your donation, please email me at: phmiraclelife@gmail.com

Keep your question short and very specific. Please include your first and last name, phone number and email. Your question will be answered within 72 hours.

God bless YOU ALL!

Stay healthy and happy! http://www.givesendgo.com/researchwww.drrobertyoung.com/blog

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Fact check: False claim Biden’s executive order limits human rights

Posted: November 24, 2022 at 12:46 am

Biden blames Putin for war against Ukraine during UN speech

President Joe Biden called out President Vladimir Putin for the war against Ukraine as he pledged support for sovereign nations at United Nations.

Claire Hardwick, Associated Press

On Sept. 12, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to invest inbiotechnology and biomanufacturing innovation to advance health, climate and other matters.But some online claimthe order is linked to something more nefarious.

"The plan is no longer secret. Biden's Sept. 12, 2022 Executive Order declares that Americans must surrender all human rights that stand in the way of transhumanism," reads an Instagram post shared Sept. 18.

The post also claims that clinical trial safety standards and informed consent will be eradicated and thatthe executive order is implementing crimes against humanity"in order to achievethe societal goals of the new world order."

The post generated over 350likes in less than a week.

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But the claim is baseless.

Global health and human rights experts told USA TODAY the executive order does not eradicate human rights in any way or even relate to the transhumanism movement. The claim is tied to the baseless new world order conspiracy theory, which USA TODAY has previously debunked.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the claim for comment.

The claim is "totally off and not true," Samantha Reposa, a White House spokesperson, told USA TODAY in an email.

There is nothing in Biden'sexecutive order that weakens existing human rights protections in any way,Arthur Applbaum, a professor of democratic values at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, told USA TODAY in an email.

The second sentence of the order says, Central to this policy and its outcomes are principles of equity, ethics, safety, and security, and this is not mere happy talk, Applbaum said. The executive order attends to these considerations throughout.

The order also saysBiden's administration "must ensure that uses of biotechnology and biomanufacturing are ethical and responsible; are centered on a foundation of equity and public good…and are consistent with respect for human rights.

Fact check: Biden's executive order will evaluate concept of a digital currency, not launch it

Transhumanism, which the post invokes, refers to the idea of using permanently integratedtechnology to increase human perception, emotions or intelligence. Biden's order has nothing to do with this concept, Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told USA TODAY in an email. He noted the post's claims about human trials are also baseless participants still have a right to informed consent and there remain strong safety standards in clinical trials, Gostin said.

The new world order conspiracy theoryclaims that a cabal of elites are working to implement a government structure that would enslave the global populace and eliminate freedoms, according to the Middleburg Institute of International Studies. USA TODAY has debunked the conspiracy theorys claims before.

The post also ties this conspiracy theory to crimes against humanity, which is defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as a systematic attack directed against any civilian population, according to the United Nations.The order references nothing of the sort.

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that Bidens executive order declares that Americans must surrender human rights. The executive order says that central to its objectives are the principles of safety and equity, and thatBiden's administration must ensurethat uses of biotechnology are consistent with respecting human rights. As experts confirm, the order has nothing to do with limiting human rights related to transhumanism or anything else.

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Guerrero: I once fell for the fantasy of uploading ourselves. It’s a dangerous myth – Los Angeles Times

Posted: October 13, 2022 at 1:59 am

The fantasy began to consume me at the turn of the millennium.

Id always felt like a half-being, a cyborg of incompatible substances: gringa daughter of a Puerto Rican MD and a long-unemployed Mexican man with addiction issues. Native or alien. Nerd or rebel. I was white and not white but thought I had to choose.

No wonder, then, that the greatest ambition of my youth was to achieve digital immortality, or uploading my mind to the metaverse. Goodbye, flawed body. Hello, god-self.

Opinion Columnist

Jean Guerrero

Jean Guerrero is the author, most recently, of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.

A playful interaction with my father in the 1990s had primed me. He was showing me the Macintosh Plus, our first computer: a beige box with a rainbow apple logo. Papi guided my hands over the keyboard, causing me to poke one letter of my name at a time until there I was in the box: j-e-a-n. He clicked file, save, X, and my name disappeared. It frightened me. Papi turned off the computer, ignoring my protests. Watch, he said. He powered it back on and clicked through folders. Suddenly, there I was again, resurrected: j-e-a-n.

Inside the apple box, I could live forever.

The fantasys premise, which Id contemplate in later years, was that I was reducible to code: 0s and 1s. This view of life and data as interchangeable spread long before social media.

At USC in 1988, two philosophy students launched the journal Extropy. The opposite concept, entropy, is a law of physics: The universe tends toward chaos. Extropians saw this disorder as the supreme enemy. Their journal, whose contributors were overwhelmingly white and male, nurtured a cult of technology-worshiping immortality seekers.

They were early transhumanists, the pseudo-intellectual offspring of eugenicists, with their hubristic quest to breed a master race and all of its consequent horrors: from the Holocaust to the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people, mostly women of color and others labeled defective. Eugenicists thought there was such a thing as a perfect body; transhumanists went a step further to say perfection lay in select minds, which could transcend bodies altogether.

Transhumanists preach that a command of technology can liberate humans from the limits of mortal flesh. Human destiny is to leave our puny Earth and colonize the stars. Extropians argued that this agenda required rejecting morality, which could interfere with the rapid expansion of technologies that might, oops, destroy the Earth. (No biggie when the goal is infinity!)

In the early 90s, Wired magazine glamorized the Extropian cultists as hard-partying, psychonautic intellectuals. Slowly, transhumanism grew into a global movement now trending with some of the worlds most powerful people, including the richest, Elon Musk. Its twin cult is longtermism, which says we should prioritize positively impacting humanity in the faraway future: not just in the next few generations, but thousands or millions of generations from today. That philosophy also has Musks support and that of others such as Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, a top Biden donor.

Ultimately, this isnt about biological humans. The father of longtermism, Nick Bostrom, a transhumanist and Oxford philosophy professor, has been trying to push into the mainstream the idea that the futures hypothetical digital people matter more than the billions of humans alive today because there will be at least 1058 of them. Thats a 1 followed by 58 zeroes the number of human simulations he calculates we could run using the stars computing power.

The New York Times, the New Yorker and other media have given longtermism fawning coverage this year with little or no mention of its deranged core. The global fad and media frenzy are almost understandable at this moment in history. It truly is hard to watch: climate change, war, migration crises, economic instability, political regression into nativism, fascism and dictatorships. Its not science fiction but current events that inspire the quest for an escape path from planet Earth.

Longtermism is often framed as a way to protect Earth. But its architects care less about ecosystems than about making sure nothing stops humanity from reaching what Bostrom calls technological maturity. Thats a nice way of characterizing that moment when people turn into bits.

Last year, mile P. Torres, a philosopher who studies existential threats and has extensively investigated longtermism, warned that the traction longtermism is gaining makes it the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.

Leading longtermists have arrived at abhorrent conclusions, such as that philanthropy should focus on saving and improving wealthy peoples lives more than poor peoples because thats a more direct way to ensure the innovation needed to launch us into space.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, argues that the only way to reduce carbon emissions and salvage the Earth is to reduce consumption. Longtermism is a way for [tech giants] to justify not looking back at the devastation theyre leaving in their wake, he told me. Its a way for them to say it doesnt matter all the damage Im doing now because its for a future where humans will be in the galaxies.

Whether its Musks plan to colonize Mars or Mark Zuckerbergs promise of a Metaverse, these billionaires visions of escape via more industrial tools, more mass-produced technologies, can be seductive. At least Icarus hubris cost only his own life.

As a preteen, Id never heard of the transhumanists, the longtermists or the Extropians. But their early members were pumping propaganda into the culture, including the possibility of escaping our human forms, which they depicted as weak, vulnerable, stupid. This perspective infected me at a time when I was frightened of my body of its origins and its uncertain future.

The chaos and doom that Extropians and their heirs saw in the Earth and its mortal vessels, I sensed in myself. Years later, when I heard Musk talking on a podcast about human bodies as hideous sacks of meat that we must ditch for robot encasements, I remembered my teen self and the pain I harbored. The tech supremacists promised a clean escape. I wanted one.

I thought I couldnt possibly matter as much as what those men might make out of me.

::

In the early 2000s, I spent hundreds of hours trying to upload my mind to the web. Id sit at our computer in the evenings by this time a stylish blue iMac G3 and type every detail I could recall of the past 24 hours into a blog. I believed if I captured enough of my thoughts and experiences online, eventually some kindly engineer, long after my death, might revive me in the form of an algorithm. Id be immortal.

It was a teen girls techno-futurist fantasy, a twist on the Snow White fairy tale. I imagined nature as the poisoned fruit; the engineer was my savior. But the real poison was the fantasy.

For years, I was reckless with my body. I swallowed dangerous pills and pursued relationships with violent men. There were highs in all of that. Like the transhumanists, I came to believe that humans contain value only insofar as they experience pleasure, high intellect and other properties as defined by thinkers almost exclusively white and male.

For a time, I suspected Id inherited something from my father, who abandoned us amid a deluge of his own abnormal thoughts that my mother called schizophrenia. In studying neuroscience at USC, I caught a glimpse of myself in The Divided Self, a psychiatry classic. In it, R.D. Laing argues that the root of mental illness lies in mind-body dualism, which splits self from others. [The] body is felt as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied, inner, true self looks on at a divorce of self from body deprives the unembodied self from direct participation in any aspect of the life of the world.

I was watching myself as I maneuvered my body toward risks. I wasnt her. I was the mind.

Or so I thought. That escape from the self and the present is the false promise of longtermism. It was never true.

My journey to regain my sense of my body was long and circuitous. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in my 20s after a near-death experience in a drug cartel zone that I was touring for adrenaline. I developed an autoimmune condition in my 30s. My body, by revolting against my abuse, guided me back to it.

Other people, by caring about me in the depths of my self-destruction, taught me empathy for my embodied self: yes, I am a mind, but I am also belly, blood, wrinkled palms. Im as much a writer as I am the woman who dances on longboards. Im the books Ive written and Im my heritage of bad hombres. Native and alien. Nerd and rebel.

Human beings can maintain ambiguity over time, Rushkoff told me. They can hold onto contradiction. Machines cant do that. Machines resolve. Its this versus that. Whatever is uniquely human is in that in-between space they cant record.

The spark of human consciousness cant be uploaded in 0s and 1s. It can, however, be studied.

The Brain and Creativity Institute at USC is using brain scans and other tools to demonstrate that feelings sprout from the soil of our bodies and are central to consciousness.

Its really extraordinary that something that for so long was considered sort of peripheral to our lives feeling is in fact the very beginning, the foundation, the inaugural event of what becomes consciousness, said Antonio Damasio, an international leader in neuroscience who runs the institute with his wife, Hanna Damasio, an expert in brain imaging.

In his acclaimed book Descartes Error, he challenges French philosopher Ren Descartes famous saying, I think, therefore I am. Its more like I feel, therefore I am.

Our minds can conceptualize a self only because theyre receiving input from the rest of the body, through hormones, heartbeats, gurgling guts.

Thats why transhumanisms ideal of freeing the self from the body will never be achievable, and why longtermisms story of uploading future generations will remain just science fiction. Our minds are inseparable from the meat of us, with its unsolvable mysteries.

I sympathize with the desire to think otherwise. That siren song of immortality once lulled me into reckless risks, and I was lucky to survive. Now its spreading on a larger scale.

Mars and Metaverse are not the future. We must save the one planet that we have. Its the source of our miraculous bodies, which are far greater than any machine.

@jeanguerre

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Science and Religion | Science and Religion – Patheos

Posted: October 13, 2022 at 1:59 am

Ted Peters pursues Public Theology at the intersection of science, religion, ethics, and public policy. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. His book, God in Cosmic History, traces the rise of the Axial religions 2500 years ago. He previously authored Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom? (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002) as well as Science, Theology, and Ethics (Ashgate 2003). He is editor of AI and IA: Utopia or Extinction? (ATF 2019). Along with Arvin Gouw and Brian Patrick Green, he co-edited the new book, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics hot off the press (Roman and Littlefield/Lexington, 2022). Soon he will publish The Voice of Christian Public Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com. This fictional spy thriller, Cyrus Twelve, follows the twists and turns of a transhumanist plot. You can read more about the author here.

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Peek into Bible prophecy: Cryptic guide to end times – Monitor

Posted: October 13, 2022 at 1:59 am

Today we are here to tell you things that are going to shock you. began Joseph Kabuleta at the 2022 Watchers Conference held on September 17,; and shock he did; unravelling the tangle that is Bible prophecy providing irrefutable evidence of various end time Biblical prophecies coming to pass in our day.

One of the most recent fulfilled end time prophecy is the return to life of the Dead Sea. Known as the saltiest sea on the earth, the Dead Sea can neither support any marine life nor can any plant or animal life survive around it.

However, in Ezekiel 47, God told the prophet Ezekiel that the water would become fresh and living creatures would inhabit it. This prophecy came to pass in 2016, when freshwater ponds with fish were discovered on its shores.

Kabuleta also expounded on the major war prophesied in Revelation 9 and Ezekiel 38 along the River Euphrates that will happen in these last days.

The Bible reveals that the war will suck in countries along the river Euphrates; Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. Other countries will be involved as well including nations described as Gog and Magog (former Soviet Union, Russia and China); Rosh (Russia); Meshech (Moscow) Tubal (former Siberia in Russia), Persia (Iran), Libya, which includes all countries east of Egypt; Ethiopia, which includes all countries south of Egypt; Gomer and Togarmah, in southern Russia. It is said that they will combine to form a military force of 200 million soldiers and wage war against Israel.

Given its meagre population of only 20million, when overwhelmed by a force of 200 million, Kabuleta said, Israel will have no choice but to use nuclear weapons or risk being wiped off the map.

Zechariah 14:12 describes what will happen in this war and it is akin to the description of human flesh being vapourised by nuclear explosion.

To allow easy movement of the armies in this war, Revelation 16:12, foretells that River Euphrates will dry up. This prophecy came to pass in January 2021 when it was reported that the river was drying up. According to experts, it could be no more by 2040 if nothing is done.

Due to the never before experienced devastating effects of war, the world will be united in the search for a temporary peaceful resolution among the warring parties. This, Kabuleta deduces, will lead to the signing of the seven-year peace agreement spoken about in Daniel 9:27. The Bible says, at the end of those seven years, human government will end and Jesus will return.

As it was in the days of Noah

In Luke 17, Jesus prophesies that the time of His return will be similar to the days of Noah.

In Noahs time, fallen angels had sex with humans producing giant demonic-human race with superpowers never seen before. The story of giant race and a worldwide flood is recorded and retold in 500 cultures across the continent. It was only Noah and his family that still had the pure God given DNA that were saved to repopulate the earth.

In that time People became superhuman through interaction with spirits and now the same will happen through interaction with technology.

Transhumanism; a belief that claims that human beings have been evolving and the next stage of evolution of humans is to turn transhuman - human beings without limitations, the kind of humans we see in the plethora of superhero-themed films and series being released these days; such as X-men, Superman, The Flash, and Homelander.

Another scientific manoeuvre, among others, that is taking us back to the days of Noah is Project Immortality. It is a plan which seeks to create a system to ensure pseudo-immortality for mankind by transferring a persons consciousness to another persons body.

This concept was explored in the Netflix series Altered Carbon. Humans can now harvest consciousness and transfer it in an avatar that will never fall sick or die.

In June 2022, Marina Smith, a 87-year-old woman who passed away in the UK, was able to address the mourners at her own funeral thanks to this technology.

Just like in the time of Noah, humans will soon be able to achieve superhumaness and eternal life without God.

Our bodies will be like machines or robots where we can upgrade to whatever version we wish, through a chip placed in the forehead or right hand which will be the mark of the beast spoken of in Revelation 13.

The continued pursuit of immortality explains why Revelation 9:6-8 says in the last days men will seek death and will not find it; they will desire to die, and death will flee from them.

If this sounds strange, it is because we are living in strange times. We may not be able to pinpoint the exact day and time of Jesus return but the signs reveal that we are inching closer to the end of this age.

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Literature and Religion | Literature and Religion – Patheos

Posted: October 13, 2022 at 1:59 am

Leona Foxx Suspense ThrillersThe Wolves of Jack Londonwith Ted PetersLiterature and ReligionWhat is this wolf thinking?

The fieldcalled Literature and Religion or Literature and Theologyhas excited me since my graduate school days. When a student at the University of Chicago, I had the opportunity and honor to study with Nathan A. Scott, one of the progenitors of this field. Under Scotts tutelage, I could apply the theology-of-culture developed by theologians Paul Tillich and Langdon Gilkey to literary analysis. This method, theology-of-culture, provides lenses through which one can perceive the religious depth underlying otherwise secular discourse. I have employed this method when reading Americas most widely read author in the first quarter of the last century, Jack London.

Why might the theology-of-culture method work so well? Because, as Ralph C. Wood, a former Scott student and now a Baylor University professor, avers, The natural order is never autonomous but always and already graced. By digging into the depths, the literary critic can discover divine grace because its already there.

When I became a fiction author, however, I found the theology-of-culture method baffling. Its one thing to analyze. Its quite another to construct. Oh, I could handle the plot just fine. But, deliberately exploiting subtle connotations, undertones, and nuances seemed contrived, some how. This led me to surmise that great novelists most likely write intuitively, maybe even mystically.

In this master page on Literature and Theology, you will find my own espionage writings plus my analysis of the wolf troika of Jack London: The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea Wolf. In both writing and reading, the depth Im looking for is to be found not only in religion, but also in science. To be more precise, science itself can exude religious valence. Thats what the theology-of-culture uncovers and makes visible.

The fictional Leona Foxx leads a tense double life. She is unwillingly pulled back into being a CIA black op trained killer, while serving her new calling to God as a parish pastor on the South Side of Chicago. Haunted by a terrifying past, Leonas skills as a defender of America against threats both foreign and domestic conflict with her conscience, which is shaped by her faith and her compassion for both friends and enemies.

Leona uncovers a terrorist plot hatched by American mercenaries, who plan to blame Iran, thus threatening a war that will make them rich. She divests her clerical collar to pack her .45 Kimber Super Match II and rallies a counter-terrorist alliance of professional crime fighters and black gang members. The story climaxes with a drone helicopter attack on the 85th floor of the John Hancock Building, intended to assassinate the president.

Only Leona Foxx, her ragtag team of die-hards, her finely honed killer instincts, her arsenal of high-tech weapons, and her faith in God can avert the devastation that could result in the death of millions of innocents and manifest in hell on earth.

Discover and memorize Leonas Law of Evil: You know its the voice of Satan when you hear the call to shed innocent blood.

God. She started a prayer. Her thoughts drifted. As if in a theater seat, she watched her lifes past dramas. The faces of the three young men who put her life in peril at the Cheltenham station flashed on her mental stage. She relived the terrifying moment she saw the northbound train about to decapitate her. Then Orpah Tinnen walked into the scene. Leona thought of her son, Magnus, decapitated by the Iranian military. She remembered her moment in the church kitchen, her moment of remembrance of the blood-spattered chest of the executed prisoner.

God, she muttered. She paused. God, you have got such a fucked up world. Why did you put me here like a pin cushion to feel every prick of its pain? Yes, I want to love your world as much as you do. But, goddammit, its hard. Id like to ask the Holy Spirit for the wisdom and strength to trust in what I cannot see. But, goddammit, Im too pissed off to think its worthwhile. I hope your grace covers me. Amen.

Leona Foxx is a black op with a white collar, who worships at two altars, her country and her God. She fights with ferocity for both.

The woman pastor from Chicago, Leona Foxx, takes on renegade Transhumanists making themselves kingmakers by selling espionage technology. Leonas strategy is to turn superintelligence against itself in order to preserve global peace. Can a mere human prevail against the posthuman?

If you want to grasp the promises and risks of enhancing human intelligence given us by our transhumanist friends, readCyrus Twelve.

Blood sacrifice. Could there be anything more evil? What happens when the symbols of grace get turned upside down? Are we left without hope?

Set in the Adirondack Mountains, the clash between good and evil escapes its local confines to threaten the nation and even engulf the globe. The selling of souls to perdition fuels the fires of hell so that we on Earth cannot avoid the heat.

Discover and memorize Leonas Law of Evil: You know its the voice of Satan when you hear the call to shed innocent blood. On the shores and islands of Lake George, certain ears hear this call. Leona swims into action to stop the bloodshed.

Nature is blood red in tooth and claw. Although these are the words of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson in the dinosaur canto of his In Memoriam, Jack London (1876-1916) conveyed their truth with convulsive drama, vicious gore, and unspeakable cruelty.

In what I nickname Londons Wolf Troika, we read in The Call of the Wild how a San Francisco dog, Buck, goes to Alaska and becomes a wolf. In the next,White Fang,an Alaska wolf moves to San Francisco and becomes a dog. In the third of the troika, The Sea Wolf, a Norwegian ship captain named Wolf Larsen exhibits the traits of both civilized human and atavistic beast. Framed in terms of Darwinian evolution, Londons characters demonstrate that the primeval wolf lives on today in both our dogs and our dog owners.

Londons moral is this: never rest unawarely with peaceful civilization. At any moment civilization can erupt like a volcano and extravasate wolf-like fury, barbarity, and savagery. Our evolutionary past ever threatens to rise up with consuming cruelty, demolishing all that generations have patiently put together. Within the language of evolution, London describes original and inherited sin.

As an addendum, I add what may be the final short story London wrote, The Red One. When we to turn The Red One of 1916, it appears London was hoping for grace from heaven.

Now, London was a Darwinian naturalist. Not overtly religious. Yet, London intuitively recognized our desperate need for grace. On our own, our human species is unable to evolve fast enough or advance far enough to escape our wolf genes. Might visitors from heaven provide a celestial technology that couldby gracelead to our transformation? Might grace from heaven come in the form of a UFO from outer space? Four decades before the June 1947 sighting of flying saucers, Londons imaginative mind was soaring to extraterrestrial civilizations that could save us from ourselves on earth.

Because my method in Literature and Religion relies on a theology-of-culture, Im searching for different treasures than other London interpreters. Ive come to admire two generations of Jack London aficionados and scholars now who have fertilized and pruned this literary tradition. Ive benefitted greatly be meeting some of the Jack London Society sockdolagers such as Russ and Winnie Kingman, who produced A Pictorial Life of Jack London. Over the years Ive benefited greatly from devouring essays and books by Earle Labor, Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Clarice Stasz, Richard Rocco, Kenneth Brandt, and others. Ive begun reading the multi-volume behemoth intellectual biography of Jack London, Author Under Sail, by Jay Williams. There are more facts in Williams compilation that the Encyclopedia Britannica could dream of. And, of course, dont miss Jay Cravens new film, Jack Londons Martin Eden.

I am currently working on thisPatheosseries dealing with Jack Londons Wolf Troika. Here is what to expect.

Jack London 1: The Call of the Wild

Jack London 2: White Fang

Jack London 3: The Sea Wolf

Jack London 4: Lone Wolf Ethics

Jack London 5: Wolf Pack Ethics

Jack London 6: Wolf & Lamb Ethics

Jack London 7: The Red One

Literature and Religion: both writing and reading in search of divine grace.

Ted Peters pursues Public Theology at the intersection of science, religion, ethics, and public policy. Peters is an emeritus professor at the Graduate Theological Union, where he co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, on behalf of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California, USA. His book, God in Cosmic History, traces the rise of the Axial religions 2500 years ago. He previously authored Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom? (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002) as well as Science, Theology, and Ethics (Ashgate 2003). He is editor of AI and IA: Utopia or Extinction? (ATF 2019). Along with Arvin Gouw and Brian Patrick Green, he co-edited the new book, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics hot off the press (Roman and Littlefield/Lexington, 2022). Soon he will publish The Voice of Christian Public Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com. His fictional spy thriller, Cyrus Twelve, follows the twists and turns of a transhumanist plot.

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Robocop at 35: why the satirical action movie still holds up today – Digital Trends

Posted: October 4, 2022 at 1:47 am

Robocop begins with a lovely establishing shot of futuristic Old Detroit at twilight. The camera soars across a body of water (presumably the Detroit River) and pushes in towards the city. The buildings are clean-lined and elegant. The sky is a deep cerulean. This place seems pretty nice, we think.

Ah, but its an ironic joke one of many at the expense of the citys people who yearn for a livable urban environment amongst the industrial ruin because nothing else in the movie will be beautiful, at least not in conventional terms. Any beauty is seen through the eyes of rapacious men who can only appreciate the lethal curves and angles of militarized steel, the vertiginous skyscrapers of wealth and privilege, and the shimmering aura of money in all its forms. When a crime boss chews out a subordinate for accidentally scorching the cash from a robbery, he seems almost as aghast at the desecration of the pristine greenbacks as the fact that the gang wont be able to spend them.

Robocop is a movie about these evil men, the venal institutions over which they preside, and the flickers of human decency that keep them from enveloping what good is left of the human spirit. Among the many reasons why the movie remains so popular after 35 years (rousing sci-fi action, scathing wit, seamless world-building, first-rate filmmaking) is this insistence that the good among us can still rise from the (sometimes radioactive) muck that threatens to overwhelm us.

A lot of bad movies were made in the 1980s, and many of them were in traditionally disreputable genres like science fiction and horror. This was partially due to the massive popularity of the new home video market that was desperate for products to fill the shelves. Any old straight-to-video geek show would do as long as it contained some splatter gore and a little T&A and maybe had a sense of humor about itself.

Robocop has plenty of all of that, but the acclaimed Dutch director Paul Verhoeven who was making only his second film in America after Flesh + Blood signals that he is a serious filmmaker by employing bravura filmmaking early on. Even as the angry Black police sergeant yells scumbag repeatedly (could anything be more 80s?), Verhoeven establishes the station and the new recruit, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), with some complexly choreographed long takes and a moving camera. Its as though he wants to put the viewer on notice that, while Robocop may go on the video store shelf next to The Toxic Avenger, it will hardly be some tossed-off exploitation quickie.

A gnarly toxic avenger of sorts does appear late in the movie thanks to that ubiquitous 80s movie feature, a vat of acid, but the looming threat in that early scene is that the police officers might strike, thus leaving the populace unprotected. But like the lovely opening shot, its another bit of misdirection by Verhoeven. While labor unions were a public enemy for many in the conservative 80s, Robocop is radically, subversively leftist and firmly on the side of besieged workers. The institutions facilitating run-amok capitalism whether political, corporate, or military-industrial are the real threats to public safety and well-being in the movie.

Verhoeven and writers Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner waste no time in identifying the bad guys in the first of the movies famous satirical future news reports. The talking heads (Entertainment Tonights fizzy reporter Leeza Gibbons was an inspired casting choice) cheerfully recount the legacy of European colonialism in Africa, now in the threatening form of a French neutron bomb, along with the bumbling inadequacy of the US president, who floats around helplessly during his visit to the Star Wars Orbiting Peace Platform. The point is quickly made: Modern Western leadership is mired in the past, potentially deadly, and ineffectual. As the movie will soon dramatize, governments could never hope to match the ruthless efficiency and undiluted purpose of global corporations.

Sure enough, the first speech by the corporate Big Bad, Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), is about how the privatization of public endeavors such as hospitals, space exploration, and the military have enriched Omni Consumer Products (OCP). Their next goal is to privatize policing, a ripe target given its low level of public trust (thanks mostly to poor funding). Jones solution is to roll out robots/tanks designated ED-209s to keep the peace. But Verhoeven savagely lampoons the idea of a machine doing the delicate human work of policing in the now infamous sequence in which the ED-209 prototype shreds a junior executive into bloody hamburger without ever understanding what its doing (the machine keeps on pumping the corpse full of lead long after the man is beyond dead).

The fact that the robot (who is programmed for urban pacification) is rendered in quaint stop-motion animation is a sly joke about how out of touch it is. In another subtle jab, the name of the scientist who heads the program is Dr. McNamara, as in Robert McNamara, one of the architects of the Vietnam War and the warmongering scourge of Errol Morris Oscar-Winning documentary, The Fog of War. That the bloody corpse ends up flattened on top of the diorama of Delta City, OCPs gentrification model for Detroit, is less subtle, but the point is that none of the cold-hearted executives are in a position where they need to even pretend to care. Delta City could be an ocean of carnage and they would only see the next profit opportunity from their executive boardroom in the sky.

In a parallel jab, the criminals on the ground are equally aspirational, making small talk about capital investment and free enterprise between robberies and murders. These ground-level criminals are led by the psychopathic Clarence Boddicker, played with sneering bemusement by Kurtwood Smith. Ive written about this before, but it bears repeating: Smith and Cox play two of the all-time great movie bad guys here. Miguel Ferrer as an aggressively ambitious young executive also does slimily stellar work. The fact that theyre all here together is another reason why Robocop is considered a highlight of the genre.

Speaking of genre, the movie has also become considered a classic because it artfully fuses many classic sci-fi preoccupations: dystopian futurism, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the nature of human identity. These all coalesce around the character of Murphy, the neophyte officer who Boddickers gang violently dispatches, leaving just enough warm meat (and handsome chin) to refashion into the titanium-encased super cop.

But something stirs in the consciousness or soul or whatever metaphysical designation you want to give it, and that something is the essence of Murphy, who will struggle to understand and assert selfhood throughout the film. The cast and filmmakers do great work imbuing Murphy/Robocop with affecting pathos, especially since we dont really get to know him before his transformation and only see his family in flashback snippets. When his former partner, Officer Lewis (Nancy Allen), tells him that his family moved on after what they assumed was his death, we genuinely feel for the crestfallen tin can.

Of course, this is after we are already on his side, having witnessed his acts of reckless superheroism protecting the community. Another of the movies jokes is that Robocop is effective, but not very efficient. He tends to cause a great deal of collateral damage whenever he foils a crime or saves a victim (hes really no better than ED-209 in this regard). Nobody seems to care though, either because the city is already such a shambles that it doesnt matter or because people are so happy to see something working on their behalf that the destruction is worth it.

In terms of genre, Robocop is also one of the rare sci-fi films that predicted a real-world future that more or less came to pass. Like Blade Runner (starring Verhoevens frequent collaborator, Rutger Hauer) it features big cities that are simultaneously crumbling and gentrifying, a rising gap between rich and poor, an evisceration of social services, global corporations that control all the wealth and have monopolies on the best technology and research and development, and all of it teeters on the edge of environmental catastrophe.

Unlike Blade Runner, with its perpetual rainy night and empty streets, the urban environment depicted in Robocop still looks like the decaying industrialism in some big cities today. If you wandered around parts of the real Detroit, Im guessing you couldnt tell much of a difference.

Despite rooting around in dystopian sludge (at times literally), Robocop is not a nihilistic movie or even a cynical one. Though its primary form is scathing satire, it is profoundly humanist. Verhoeven was a child in the Netherlands during World War II and he witnessed the carnage and the chaos firsthand. While it probably seemed like the forces of darkness were extinguishing the light of civilization, that light survived amidst profound acts of courage and heroism. The movie dramatizes a similarly optimistic scenario with conviction.

Verhoeven has also said that, from a boys point of view, the war felt like a spectacle or adventure, which may account for both the fun and the briskness of the film (and some of his other films as well, such as Total Recall and the World War II action-drama Black Book). A good satire has to move, lest it gets bogged down in either depressiveness or preaching (one of the great satirists in the English language was named Jonathan Swift, after all). Verhoeven and the writersknow when to get in and out of the story, and indeed the movie sports one of the tidiest conclusions in all of cinema: the hero dispatches the villain and reclaims his human identity all in one stroke. Cut to black, cue the music.

Robocop is a Hollywood film made within the studio system by a foreign director during a blatantly commercial era of American moviemaking. It eviscerates capitalism and suggests that democracy is nothing more than a civics textbook fairy tale in a world run by authoritarian tycoons. This version of the world is pretty well accepted now that were all just a little bit wiser about the way things work (thanks Internet!).

But in 1987, when President Reagan, virtually nestled among amber waves of grain, was delivering speeches about American exceptionalism, such notions were little more than pinko hippie-speak. The fact that Verhoevens punk treatise was made at all in that environment is a miracle. That it has become one of the enduring indictments of its era while still being relevant to our contemporary moment and a helluva lot of fun makes it a special film indeed.

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Robocop at 35: why the satirical action movie still holds up today - Digital Trends

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OffGuardian because facts really should be sacred

Posted: September 16, 2022 at 2:43 am

Ryan Matters

In 1989, researchers from the Salk Institute in California published a paper detailing how theydeveloped an RNA transfection systemthat could directly introduce RNA into whole tissues and embryos.

The concept of using RNA as a drug is first described in this paper, making it the seminal work that formed the foundation for decades of further research in this area. The Discussion section of the paper states that:

The RNA/lipofectin method can be used to directly introduce RNA into whole tissues and embryos (R.W.M., C. Holt, and I.M.V., unpublished results), raising the possibility that liposome-mediated mRNA transfection might offer yet another option in the growing technology of eukaryotic gene delivery, one based on the concept of using RNA as a drug.

One of the Salk Institute researchers listed on the paper is Dr Robert W. Malone, a scientist who has recentlybeen censoredon social media for warning about the possible dangers of the covid-19 vaccines. It could be argued that theres no expert more qualified to warn us about the dangers of mRNA injections than the man who helped pioneer the technology, nevertheless, Big Tech decided he was expounding misinformation, because, well, they know better apparently.

Malones research, which resulted in a procedure that could be used to efficiently transfect RNA into human cells using a synthetic cationic lipid was supported by grants from the American Cancer Society and the National Institute of Health (who currently have a stake in the Moderna mRNA vaccine, showing their allegiance to the technology. More on this later).

While Malones contributions to the development of mRNA technology are well-known and well-documented, Wikipedia decided to remove all mention of him from their RNA Vaccine entry shortly after the scientist began speaking out about the dangers of the rushed-through covid vaccines. TheJune 14th versionof the article mentioned Malone by name 3 times and cited his work 6 times. The current version of the article mentions him 0 times and cites his work only 3 times.

However, this is unsurprising consideringWikipedias documented biastowards the pharmaceutical industry. Far more interesting is the institution that produced the research in the first place the Salk Institute.

The Salk Institute, named after Jonas Salk, the creator of the Salk polio vaccine, was constructed in 1962thanks to fundingfrom the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, today known as the March of the Dimes.

The March of the Dimes (MOD) was established in 1937 with the mission of eradicating polio and during a time when the Eugenics Establishment was already a prominent, but not yet popular, feature of the American health scene.The theory of Eugenicsis based on the idea that selective procreation can lead to the gradual improvement of the human race and that certain families are fit to lead society by virtue of their superior genes.

At the time, the nations key eugenics organizations included the American Eugenics Society (AES) and the American Society of human Eugenics (ASHE), funded by the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Harriman families, as well as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. It should be noted that the Rockefellerswere instrumentalin funding and promoting eugenics around the world. The Eugenics movement promoted selective mating, artificial insemination and compulsory sterilization and euthanasia as important means of weeding out so-called inferior human beings.

The first sterilization law in the US was passed in 1907, in the state of Indiana, and by 1931, many more states had followed suit by enacting similar laws.According to the Indiana Historical Bureau:

In 1907, Governor J. Frank Hanly approved first state eugenics law making sterilization mandatory for certain individuals in state custody.

Those sterilized under eugenics lawwere deemed undesirableon account of mental or physical impairments such as epilepsy, blindness and physical disabilities, as well as social inadequacies such as drug addiction or criminality. According to estimates, around 60,000 individuals were sterilized under such laws, deprived of their right to have children and forever branded as feebleminded.

In fact, the prominence of the American eugenics movementresulted in its adoption by the National Socialist Party of Germany, which sterilized more than 350,000 persons by the end of the second world war. After WW2, eugenics notions were dropped from public conversation, but the movement never dissipated, no, instead it was re-branded using more acceptable terminology such as population control and reproductive health, as we shall see later on.

The emergence of the MOD as a major player in the American Eugenics movement can be traced back to the organizations early association with the Rockefeller Institute from where it procured many of its key members and advisers, including professor Anton Julius Carlson, amember of the American Eugenics Society, recruited to serve on the MODs Medical and Research Committees and Professor Clair E. Turner, another AES member who served as assistant to then President, Basil OConnor.

Just before the establishment of the Salk Institute, the MOD announced it would bephasing out its polio programsand focusing its resources on birth defects.

In 1959, the MOD funded courses in medical genetics at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, a genetics institute founded in 1929 by Clarence Cook Little, who, at one time or another served as the president of the American Eugenics Society, the American Birth Control League and the American Euthanasia Society.

Jackson Laboratorys claimed mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in its shared quest to improve human health. Noteworthy is that the lab receivedincreased fundingin 2020, largely from the National Institute of Health (NIH), including a grant of $10.6 million to find treatments for rare genetic diseases by using gene-editing technologies. And at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the lab worked to developgenetically modified micefor use in vaccine studies and other research related to Sars-Cov-2.

Beginning in the 1960s, the MODfinancedseveral Birth Defects Prevention Centerslocated at medical institutions across the US. These new centers offered prenatal testing via amniocentesis to determine whether a baby would be born with defects and then gave the couple the opportunity to abort the affected child.

The MOD has alsomade direct donationsto Planned Parenthood, a clear contradiction of theirclaimed mission, which is to fight for the health of all moms and babies. Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization that provides reproductive health care in the US and abroad.

From 2019-2020 the organizationcommitted over 350,000 abortionsand has been criticized as steering resources away from womens health and toward abortion. Unsurprisingly, a look into the organizations history reveals that Planned Parenthood has its roots in Eugenics ideals.

Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, who, far from a birth control activist, as the mainstream would have you believe, was a racist eugenicist who sought to rid the world of unfit human stock. In her essay, A Plan for Peace, she describes the main objects of her proposed Population Congress which includes

a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

She also mentions the need to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.

As mentioned earlier, these Eugenics ideals inspired the Nazis who took many of Sangers ideas and ran with them, so to speak. In his book, The War Against the Weak, Edwin Black details how the Nazi sterilization law of 1933 as well as subsequent euthanasia laws were based on blueprints drawn up by Sanger and other American activists. In fact, associates of Sangerknew about these Nazi euthanasia programsand praised them.

Coming back to the Salk Institute, it should be noted that the mainstream account of the 20th-century polio outbreak, namely the notion that the disease is caused by a virus and that Dr Salks miracle vaccine was single-handedly responsible for ending the epidemic, is dubious and likely altogether false.

Paralytic polio appeared suddenly in the US in the early 1900s with continual, dramatic fluctuations in cases a pattern that continued until the end of the 1950s. The introduction of the Salk vaccine in 1954 seemed to coincide with the almost instantaneous decline in cases, which continued for more than two decades.

But prior to being called polio, conditions involving infirmity of the limbs were known by various other names including apoplexy, palsy and paralysis. Many historical writings refer to paralysis resulting from exposure to toxic substances and many of these accounts were documented by Dr Ralph Scobeyin his 1952 statementto the Select Committee to Investigate the Use of Chemicals in Food Products titledThe Poison Cause of Poliomyelitis and Obstructions to its Investigation.

Scobeys paper includes references to several investigations that seemed to indicate a link between polio outbreaks in the 20th century and the consumption of fresh fruit, providing a link between Polio and toxic pesticide exposure.

One crop pesticide in widespread use at the time was DDT, ahighly toxicorganochlorine that waswidely publicized as being good for you, but eventually banned in 1972. In 1953, Dr Morton Biskindpublished a paperin the American Journal of Digestive Diseases pointing out that:

McCormick (78), Scobey (100-101), and Goddard (57), in detailed studies, have all pointed out that factors other than infective agents are certainly involved in the etiology of polio, varying from nutritional defects to a variety of poisons which affect the nervous system.

The danger of toxic pesticides, including DDT, and their disastrous effects on the environment were illustrated by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book, Silent Spring.

In more recent times, researchers, Dan Olmstead, co-founder of the Age of Autism, and Mark Blaxil conducted twobrilliant investigations into the polio epidemics of the 20th century, reaching a similar conclusion to Scobey and Biskind, namely that the disease was caused by the widespread use of neurotoxic pesticides such as arsenite of soda and DDT.

Although Salks vaccine was hailed as a success, the vaccine itselfcaused many casesof injury and paralysis. And though there does appear to be a convincing correlation between the timing of the vaccine and the reduction in polio cases, as all good scientists know, causation doesnt equal correlation, especially considering the fact that DDT was phased out, at least in the US, over the same period.

Interestingly, Dr Salks polio researchwas fundedby the mother of Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon family banking fortune who idealized Margaret Sanger and later joined the board of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation.

Mays views on immigration were radical, to say the least, and according to some, she favoured compulsory sterilization as a means to limit birth rates in developing countries. May later joined the board of thePopulation Council, an organization founded by John D. Rockefeller III focused on population reduction.

In 1995, the Population Council collaborated with the WHO to createfertility regulating vaccines.

It would be a mistake to think that the polio epidemic was not related to the current age of vaccination we find ourselves in. On the contrary, claiming that polio was eradicated in the United States due to vaccination alone is a lie that garnered public favour for childhood vaccinations and helped to set the groundwork for the widespread belief in the safety and efficacy of all vaccines.

Diseases such as polio and smallpox (another lie that is beyond the scope of this article), and the subsequent pro-vaccine propaganda, primed much of the population to accept, without question, an experimental jab based on poorly understood technology.

In 1997, 8 years after the Salk Institute paper, the FDAapproved the first-ever trialof transfected RNA to develop immunity in cancer patients. The Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Health then voted to continue approval some months later, leading to the first-ever mRNA-based vaccine administered to humans.

Though mRNA is propagandized in the media as the next revolution in health, those with keen perception may be alarmed when reading excerpts such as this one, taken froman article on the history of mRNA, written by Damian Garde, a Biotech reporter for STATS:

The concept: By making precise tweaks to synthetic mRNA and injecting people with it, any cell in the body could be transformed into an on-demand drug factory.

Talk of cells being turned into on-demand drug factories is exactly the sort of meaningless techno-rhetoric meant to impress and entice an uninformed public. mRNA vaccines are based on the following concept: a piece of synthetic mRNA is shuttled into your cells, where it is used as a template to create the viral spike protein. Once this protein leaves the cell, the body producesantibodiesand learns how to fight future Sars-Cov-2 infections.

mRNA-based vaccines are often touted as a safer alternative to DNA-based vaccines, which,according to expertsmay trigger permanent and dangerous changes in the genetic information of treated people. However, do we know for sure that mRNA vaccines dont permanently change the genetic makeup of our cells?A 2001 papertitledRNA as a tumor vaccine: a review of the literaturestates that (emphasis added):

unlike DNA-based vaccines, there islittledanger of incorporation of RNA sequences into the host genome.

The use of the word little would seem to indicate that there may be at least some danger of genome integration, or more likely, researchers simply dont know.

In the 2004 expert opinion paper by Pascolo cited above, he outlines the link between mRNA vaccines and gene therapies, something which is continually denied and dismissed by the mainstream:

Although located in the cytosol and not in the nucleus, mature mRNAs belong to the biochemical family of nucleic acids. mRNA, similarly to DNA, may be considered a gene and, consequently, its use as a vaccine may be viewed as gene therapy.

Interestingly, it is purely due to a technicality of regulatory law that covid-19 gene therapies are allowed to be called vaccines.This is explainedin a paper titledThe European Regulatory Environment of RNA-Based Vaccines,which states that:

The definition of a gene therapy medicinal product as outlined in Annex 1 to Directive 2001/83/EC is as follows:

Gene therapy medicinal product means a biological medicinal product which has the following characteristics:

Gene therapy medicinal products shall not include vaccines against infectious diseases.

As is evident, the mere act of calling a gene therapy a vaccine against infectious disease negates its classification as a gene therapy, the approval process for which, at least in Europe, involvesgoing through the CATwhich is the EMAs (European Medicines Agency) Committee for Advanced Therapies.

Evidently, this play on language would seem to constitute a loophole of sorts, allowing easier approval for mRNA-based gene therapies planned for human use.

Approval is certainly a contentious topic when talked about in the context of the current covid-19 vaccines, none of which have been fully FDA approved, only authorized under emergency use (EUA), and labeled as investigational products, a fact that many people are unaware of. However, early in the year vaccine manufacturers already set their sights on full regulatory approval, after only 6 months of trial data.

On the 7th of May, Pfizer formally initiated their application to the FDA, with the aim of having the first-ever fully approved covid-19 vaccine. But with millions of vaccines already administered under EUA, whats the rush?

Furthermore, for the six first in disease vaccines approved by the FDA over the last 15 years, the median trial durationwas just shy of two years. A vaccine approved after 6 months of data would constitute one of the fastest ever.

Thephase three clinical trialsfor Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen are two years in duration, but the FDA has not clearly stated their position with regards to minimum follow-up prior to consideration for approval.

Longer, placebo-controlled trials are paramount to assessing vaccine safety. It is extremely alarming then that vaccine manufacturers, within weeks of receiving EUA, began tounblind trialsby offering those in the placebo group the chance to get vaccinated.

Moderna announcedthat as of April 13, all placebo participants have been offered the Moderna covid-19 vaccine and 98% of those have received the vaccine, meaning that their placebo group no longer exists and as such, they have no way to accurately measure long-term safety.

In anarticle for the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi quotes the FDA, on several occasions, saying that the maintenance of a placebo group would be critical to assessing both the safety and efficacy of covid-19 vaccines, which is obvious to anyone who understands the consequences of failing to adhere to scientific rigor when testing a new medical therapy.

In reality, there could be many reasons for manufacturers wanting FDA approval for their vaccines, but likely top of the list is the stamp of approval that comes with full licensure and the ability to use this as a way to convince those who remain skeptical regarding the safety and efficacy of the vaccines. Moreover, full FDA approval would pave the way for easier vaccine mandates, putting immense pressure on those of the awakened class who represent a thorn in the side of the Great Reset/Great Convergence agenda pushers.

More disturbing inconsistencies can be found in the FDAs process for assessing and approving these experimental vaccines. For example, the FDA recently cautioned against the use of antibody tests for evaluating immunity or protection from covid-19, especially after a person has received a vaccination, despite their EUA being originally granted, in part, due toantibody responses.

The implication for this reversal is that the EUA given for covid-19 vaccines should also be reversed, but whats the likelihood of that happening after millions have already been jabbed?

Moreover, the idea that antibodies provide protection from so-called viral infections represents a poor understanding of the body and the immune system. The fact that antibodies play little role in viral infections has been known by medical scientists since the 1950sbased on researchthat shows persons with the genetic inability to produce antibodies, called agammaglobulinemia, have normal reactions to typical viral infections and even appear to resist recurrences.

One of the covid-19 vaccine manufactures most talked about in the media is Moderna, a biotech company co-founded by Robert Langer, a researcher and inventor at MIT.

In 2013, the biotech startupreceived $25m in fundingfrom DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a research arm of the United States Department of Defense, and an organization well-known for ruthlessly pursuingdystopian, transhumanist technologies, such as implantable nanoparticles and bio-brain interfaces (more on this later).

Noteworthy is that the US government, through the National Institute of Health,appears to have a financial stakein the Moderna vaccine thanks to a contract signed by both parties, giving the NIH joint ownership over Modernas mRNA vaccine candidates. According to Axios:

The NIH mostly funds outside research, but it also often invents basic scientific technologies that are later licensed out and incorporated into drugs that are sold at massive profits.

This is more than alarming considering the NIH is responsible forprioritizing promising treatmentsfor covid-19 as well as improving clinical trial effectiveness, which, for Moderna, is impossible considering their trial no longer contains a control group.

NIHs vested interest in Modernas success may also provide a plausible explanation for why the biotech startup received EUA for their vaccinedespite failing, for over 10 years, to bring a single product to market.

In an interview for Economic Club, NIH director Francis Collins denied that covid-19 vaccines would be money-makers, saying that Nobody sees this as a way to make billions of dollars.

However, evidence points to the contrary as Modernas covid-19 vaccine sales reached $1.7 billion in the first quarter of 2021, making their CEO, Stephane Bancel, one of themany new pharma billionaires.

Operation Warp Speed, the name given to a partnership between several US Federal agencies aimed at accelerating the development of a covid-19 vaccine, was also wrought with conflicts of interest.

The Operation Warp Speed administration hired several consultants with ties to Big Pharma, including two former Pfizer executives. And in May 2020, it was reported that their chief adviser, Dr Monsef Slaoui, a former pharmaceutical executive himself,held $10m in GlaxoSmithKline stock, the same company that was later awarded a $2 billion contract to supply the US government with 100 million vials of covid-19 vaccine.

Dr Slaoui also held significant stock in Moderna, to whom the federal governmenthas awarded over $2.5b in funding.

Moderna co-founder, Robert Langer, whose net worth has alsoskyrocketed into the billions, is one of the worlds most cited researchers. A scientist at MIT, Langer holds over 1,400 patents and specializes in biotechnology, nanotechnology, tissue engineering and drug delivery.

Furthermore, Langer holds an administrative role at theMIT Media Lab, the same institute that was the focus of a scandal after it was revealed that the lab accepted funding from convicted sex-offender, Jefferey Epstein. Epstein also happened to have adisturbing fascination with transhumanism, a modern-day version of eugenics (transhumanism is discussed later in this article).

Then director of the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito,approved two donations from Epstein of $1.75m and allowed the prolific paedophile to direct funds to the lab from other wealthy benefactors, including a $2m donation from Bill Gates, who also has unsettling ties to Epstein, havingflown on his private jetand met with him on several occasions.

When the news broke out and Joi Ito resigned from his post at the lab, Langer was one of the first people tosign a letter calling for him to stay, and as an administrator for the labs Directors Office, its hard to believe he didnt know about the Epstein donations in advance.

Described as the common denominator in several coronavirus efforts, Robert Langer is certainly an interesting player in the transhumanist movement. In 2015, his company, Microchips Biotech, partnered with Israeli pharmaceutical giant, Teva Pharmaceutical, to commercialize its implantable drug delivery device.

Noteworthy is that Teva Pharmaceutical has receivedsignificant investment from Warren Buffett, who, in 2006, pledged to gradually donate his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an organization whom he served as a trustee up until very recently.

Langer also has ties to Charles Lieber, a Harvard nanotech scientistwho was arrestedin January on account of making false statements to federal authorities regarding his collaboration with Chinese researchers at the Wuhan University of Technology.

In 2012, Langer and Lieberworked togetherto create a material that merges nanoscale electronics with biological tissues. The material was described as a first step toward prosthetics that communicate directly with the nervous system.

Much of Langers research is backed by Bill Gates, who began funding mRNA technology in 2010 and has alsoinvested millionsinto Moderna.

In 2017, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundationsponsored a projectat Langers lab to create a microparticle vaccine delivery system that could generate a novel type of drug carrying particle, allowing multiple doses of a vaccine to be administered over an extended period of time with just one injection.

Then in 2019, Gates and Langerteamed up againto create an invisible ink tattoo that embeds immunization records into a childs skin. Disturbingly, the eventual goal of the project is to inject sensors that can be used to track other aspects of health.

Gates claims he needs the data for disease prevention, referring to his efforts to wipe out polio, measles and other infectious diseases from around the world. However, Gates various health-related initiatives in developing countries are not the work of a loving philanthropist, like the media would have us all believe. Instead, evidence would suggest that Gates involvement in public health represents the continuation of a long-standing eugenics agenda, hiding in plain sight.

Gates links to the eugenics movement start with his father, who praised the Rockefellers for their work in public health and evenmet with them in 2000to discuss matters relating to infectious disease, vaccines and the environment. During the meeting, Gates senior was quoted as saying:

Taking our lead and our inspiration from work already done by The Rockefeller Foundation, our foundation actually started GAVI by pledging $750 million to something called the Global Fund for Childrens Vaccines, an instrument of GAVI.

Interestingly, almost ten years after that meeting, Gates juniorco-hosted a meetingwith David Rockefeller to discuss population reduction.

Perhaps even more telling is the fact that in 2012 Bill and Melinda Gates hosted their London Summit on Family Planning, where they announced their commitment to population control in the third world, on the 100th anniversary of theFirst International Eugenics Congress, also held in London.

Gates is well-known for his obsession with vaccines, a curious pursuit considering that the 9,000,000 people who die every year from hunger would be better served by having clean water, food supplies and sanitary living environments.

In 2009,Gates Foundation funded observational studies in Indiafor acontroversial cervical cancer vaccinethat was given to thousands of young girls called Gardasil.

Within months, many girls began to get sick and within a year, five of them had died. During a similar study for a different brand of the HPV vaccine, many girls were hospitalized and a further two died. The Economic Times of India reported on this in 2014, with the shocking revelation that:

Consent for conducting these studies, in many cases, was taken from the hostel wardens, which was a flagrant violation of norms. In many other cases, thumbprint impressions of their poor and illiterate parents were duly affixed onto the consent form. The children also had no idea about the nature of the disease or the vaccine. The authorities concerned could not furnish requisite consent forms for the vaccinated children in a huge number of cases.

Gates has also heavily promoted the oral polio vaccine in India, after endeavouring to eradicate the disease. However, as discussed earlier in this article, toxic chemicals are involved in the etiology of polio and thus the disease cannot be eradicated by the use of vaccines. In fact, global health numbers indicate that more cases of polio are now beingcaused by the vaccines themselvesthan anything else.

In 2018, a group of brave Indian researcherspublished a paperin theInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Healthshowing a correlation between the oral polio vaccine drives and increased cases of acute flaccid paralysis, a condition described as clinically indistinguishable from polio.

Ironically, Gates has a$23m investmentin Monsanto, the company that markets roundup a glyphosate-containing pesticide that is known tocause adverse health effects, including neurological disorders and paralysis.

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OffGuardian because facts really should be sacred

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Mutate or Die: UNI and The Urchins Announce Debut Album ‘Simulator,’ out January 13th, 2023 on Chimera Music – Shore Fire Media

Posted: September 16, 2022 at 2:43 am

Cosmic art punks Jack James and Kemp Muhl, formerly known as Uni, resurrect as UNI and The Urchins

Kemp-directed video for genetically modified Doll Parts (Hole cover) out todayHERE

Uncomfortable and strangely beautiful blend of grunge, synth wave and punk macabre in the best way -PAPER MAGAZINE

On January 13th, 2023,UNI and The Urchinswill release their debut album,Simulator, onChimera Music. Formerly known as Uni, UNI and The Urchins are thepost-apocalyptic rock & roll cultled by vocalist and NYC nightlife fixtureJack James Busaand ex-GOASTT bassistCharlotte Kemp Muhl. Combining acrobatic post-punk with glittery glam rock,V Magazineonce described the bands sound as in their own league and therefore genre.Simulatorwas written (and mixed/mastered/engineered by Kemp) mostly in isolation in the woods of Upstate NY, but takes listeners on a cosmic journey through a"lobotomized disco"world of silicone sex doll factories, crucifix manufacturers and iPhone graveyards, in a Camus-esque dive into the ways technology has permanently changed our lives and, quite literally, us.

And in the same DIY vein as the making of the album,every song onSimulatorwill be turned into an epic music videodirected/edited/colorized (the whole bit) by Kemp herself. Self-taught in every respect - she left school for a modeling career after the sixth grade - Kemp has directed each pre-SimulatorUNI and The Urchins video to date, and her surrealist style has gained her additional gigs directing videos for bands such as The Smashing Pumpkins and The Killers' Mark Stoermer.

The first video to be released from the album, today, is an industrial-trippy cover of Holes Doll Parts. Magnified by the narcissism of social media, the visuals poke fun at the meaningless of beauty as we enter an almost-here age of transhumanism and body/genetic modifications, where bodies will just be an interchangeable design element.

Watch the video for Doll PartsHERE:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acHiln-9C-M&feature=youtu.be

Read atPAPER Magazineabout the "macabre in the best way" videoHERE:https://www.papermag.com/uni-and-the-urchins-doll-parts-2658210728.html?rebelltitem=17#rebelltitem17

Largely written alongside the pandemic-accelerated collapse of civilization - and societys resulting shift from a real world to a virtual world of humanoid avatars -Simulatorwas inspired by Kemp, Jack, and guitarist David Stranges love-hate relationship with the black magic of technology. After years of cynicism towards the modern world, its a trio of retro-rock-loving musicians determination toaccuratelyriff on the musical processes of their predecessors, which always looked forward, not behind. As Ziggy looked to the space race and moon landing as defining zeitgeists of his time, UNI and The Urchins look to the Singularity and the horizon of VR replacing all flesh.

Their motto for this new era? Mutate or Die

Check out an album trailerHERE:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkztKd0kuR0&feature=youtu.be

Watch this space for more news, music, and videos to come fromSimulator.

About Chimera Music

Chimera Music, formed in 2008 in the Manhattan kitchen of Sean Ono Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl, has released the pair's many projects as well as music by Yoko Ono, Moonlandingz, Black Lips, RZA, Iggy Pop, Ahohni, Tune-yards, John Zorn & others.

UNI and the Urchins (Credit: Ariel Sadok)

Frontman Jack James(Credit:Ariel Sadok)

About Frontman Jack James

Jack James is the androgynous alien front-man, starring in and co-creative directing UNI and The Urchins transmedia production house. He appears in television shows such as the FOX series Gotham, Rock Me, and the lead role in feature film, Mister Sister, a performance which earned him a Winter Film Awards nomination for Best Actor. From Blackbook magazine: Singer Jack Jamesghostly falsetto makes the proceedings all the more eerie and disconcerting an alarmingly tall man who resembles a cult character from horror movies vocal chops oozing charisma and star power. He can also appear at your Bar Mitzvah dressed as the lovechild of Kenneth Anger and Peewee Herman for the small fee of 13 Faberg eggs and your immortal soul.

Bassist Charlotte Kemp Muhl(Credit:Ariel Sadok)

About Bassist Charlotte Kemp Muhl

Shedding her Maybelline model image, bassist Charlotte Kemp Muhl has a background in psych rock from The GOASTT, her band with Sean Ono Lennon, their albumMidnight Sunhailed byRolling StoneandNPRas a best-of-the-year. She has since played bass on Jack White'sBoarding House Reach, acted as a zombie in Jim Jarmusch'sThe Dead Don't Die, and composed the score for an upcoming Crispin Glover film. She has directed all of UNI and The Urchins videos and mini-films, and engineered, mixed and mastered their new albumSimulatorherself. A workaholic and a diehard control freak, her biology is 70% composed of cup ramen and useless science factoids.

Guitarist David Strange(Credit:Nathan West)

For more information, contact Hannah Schwartz:hschwartz@shorefire.com

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Mutate or Die: UNI and The Urchins Announce Debut Album 'Simulator,' out January 13th, 2023 on Chimera Music - Shore Fire Media

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Eight best books on AI ethics and bias – INDIAai

Posted: September 16, 2022 at 2:43 am

Moral guidelines that help us distinguish between right and wrong are a part of ethics. AI ethics is a set of rules that advise how to make AI and what it should do. People have all kinds of cognitive biases, like recency and confirmation biases. These biases appear in our actions and, as a result, in our data.

Several books focus on ethics and bias in AI so people can learn more about them and understand AI better.

AI Ethics - Mark Coeckelbergh

Mark Coeckelbergh talks about important stories about AI, such as transhumanism and technological singularity. He looks at critical philosophical debates, such as questions about the fundamental differences between humans and machines and arguments about the moral status of AI. He talks about the different ways AI can be used and focuses on machine learning and data science. He gives an overview of critical ethical issues, such as privacy concerns, responsibility and the delegation of decision-making, transparency, and bias at all stages of the data science process. He also thinks about how work will change in an AI economy. Lastly, he looks at various policy ideas and discusses policymakers' problems. He argues for ethical practices that include a vision of the good life and the good society and builds values into the design process.

This book in the Essential Knowledge series from MIT Press summarises these issues. AI Ethics, written by a tech philosopher, goes beyond the usual hype and nightmare scenarios to answer fundamental questions.

Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximise Machines (2016) - John C Havens

The ideas in this book are economics, new technologies, and positive psychology. The book gives the first values-driven approach to algorithmic living. It is a definitive plan to help people live in the present and define their future in a good way. Each chapter starts with a made-up story to help readers imagine how they would react in different AI situations. The book shows a vivid picture of what our lives might be like in a dystopia where robots and corporations rule or in a utopia where people use technology to improve their natural skills and become a long-lived, super-smart, and kind species.

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence - Max Tegmark

The book starts by imagining a world where AI is so intelligent that it has surpassed human intelligence and is everywhere. Then, Tegmark talks about the different stages of human life from the beginning. He calls the biological origins of humans "Life 1.0," cultural changes "Life 2.0," and the technological age of humans "Life 3.0." The book is mostly about "Life 3.0" and new technologies like artificial general intelligence, which may be able to learn and change its hardware and internal structure in the future.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era - James Barrat

James Barrat weaves together explanations of AI ideas, the history of AI, and interviews with well-known AI researchers like Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ray Kurzweil. The book describes how artificial general intelligence could improve itself repeatedly to become an artificial superintelligence. Furthermore, Barrat uses a warning tone throughout the book, focusing on the dangers that artificial superintelligence poses to human life. Barrat stresses how hard it would be to control or even predict the actions of something that could become many times smarter than the most intelligent humans.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World - Meredith Broussard

This book helps us understand how technology works and what its limits are. It also explains why we shouldn't always assume that computers are suitable. The writer does a great job of bringing up the issues of algorithmic bias, accountability, and representation in a tech field where men are the majority. The book gives a detailed look at AI's social, legal, and cultural effects on the public, along with a call to design and use technologies that help everyone.

Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong - Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen

The book's authors argue that moral judgment must be programmed into robots to ensure our safety. The authors say that even though full moral agency for machines is still a ways off, it is already necessary to develop a functional morality in which artificial moral agents have some essential ethical sensitivity. They do this by taking a quick tour of philosophical ethics and AI. However, the conventional ethical theories appear insufficient, necessitating the development of more socially conscious and exciting robots. Finally, the authors demonstrate that efforts are underway to create machines that can distinguish between right and wrong.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom, a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford, wrote the 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, and Strategies. It says that if machine brains are more intelligent than human brains, this new superintelligence could replace humans as the most intelligent species on Earth. Moreover, smart machines could improve their abilities faster than human computer scientists, which could be a disaster for humans on a fundamental level.

Furthermore, no one knows if AI on par with humans will come in a few years, later this century, or not until the 21st or 22nd century. No matter how long it takes, once a machine has human-level intelligence, a "superintelligent" system in almost all domains of interest" would come along surprisingly quickly, if not immediately. A superintelligence like this would be hard to control or stop.

Ethical Machines: Your Concise Guide to Totally Unbiased, Transparent, and Respectful AI - Reid Blackman

Reid Blackman tells you everything you need to know about AI ethics as a risk management challenge in his book Ethical Machines. He will help you build, buy, and use AI ethically and safely for your company's reputation, legal standing, and compliance with rules. And he will help you do this at scale. Don't worry, though. The book's purpose is to help you get work done, not to make you think about deep, existential questions about ethics and technology. Blackman's writing is clear and easy to understand, which makes it easy to understand a complicated and often misunderstood idea like ethics.

Most importantly, Blackman makes ethics doable by addressing AI's three most significant ethical risksbias, explainability, and privacyand telling you what to do (and what not to do) to deal with them. Ethical Machines is the only book you need to ensure your AI helps your company reach its goals instead of hurting them. It shows you how to write a strong statement of AI ethics principles and build teams that can evaluate ethical risks well.

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Eight best books on AI ethics and bias - INDIAai

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