Time for cryonicists to learn Castilian?

I've just now heard of this, and I don't know what to make of it:

New association wants to build facility to store 500 frozen human bodies in the Madrid Sierra

A cryonics association wants to build a new facility in the Sierra of Madrid with the capacity to maintain 500 cryogenically frozen human bodies until such a time as advances in science will allow them to be brought back to life.

It’s understood that the association has already been in contact with the Mayor of El Escorial, Antonio Vicente, who told El Mundo newspaper that he doesn’t see it as a ‘crazy idea’, but warned that there could be restrictions given the town’s location within the Guadarrama National Park.

Vicente said he is prepared to study the proposal once there is more concrete information and documentation.

The recently created Ibero-American Cryopreservation Association has chosen the Madrid Sierra because of its central location, the low risk of earthquake and the cool temperatures. The association’s president, Francisco Roldán, said the facility, which would include a research laboratory, would provide individual capsules with liquid nitrogen at 196 degrees below zero.

Bodies could be maintained almost indefinitely, he said.

The facility would provide between 250 and 300 direct and indirect jobs, and would need investment of up to 50 million €.

Cryopreservation of human bodies is not however currently permitted under Spanish legislation.

Francisco Roldán's webpage (in Spanish).

Eh, reading this page with the Spanish I remember from junior high, the guy sounds like a public relations hack.

A future history idea

A sudden collapse of American military power leaves American forces in Afghanistan and surrounding regions stranded. They can't fight their way to a friendly country and seek passage home, like in Xenophon's Anabasis, so they seize control of their regions and create what future scholars will call the Americo-Bactrian state.

So, what does that imply about a character descended from those Americans, several generations removed, who manages to get to an advanced science-fictional civilization (I would guess predominantly Chinese) and have adventures in Future World?

My take on the Coffee Invitation in the Hotel Elevator incident

Atheists should not necessarily dismiss religious teachings about women just because religions spread weird claims about things which we can't observe, like the gods, the afterlife, alleged miracles and so forth.

Men have had the ability to observe women all along, by contrast, and the doctrines they've formulated about women and attached to religious traditions just might incorporate some defensible but politically incorrect facts about female behavior.

In other words, atheists in the human nature realist camp don't necessarily have to defend feminism if the facts support traditional views of women's behavior instead of feminist exercises in Opposite Day thinking.

I have Skype on my iPad 2.

Search for the Skype user name "advancedatheist," email address holyspiritdenier@gmail.com .

In case you think I exaggerate.

Stupid Hal Lindsey's world view has poisoned many people's lives. Some of his victims have posted reviews of his most famous book on Amazon:

Soul Destroying...

Obviously, none of this came to pass. But I'm still here. I was brought up, steeped in this stuff, honestly believing that the world was going to end in 1977 / 1982 / 1986 / etc. I grew up with no sense of mortality, expecting to be raptured up into the air at any moment -- I would never die, we were the last generation. But I'm still here, and now I'm dying. My body was not tranformed, it has just worn down. How do you reconcile this? If "they" were wrong about this, then what else were they wrong about?

One Star - But Only Because Negative Numbers aren't a Choice

I read this book when I was a kid (I'm 45 now). It scared the bejeebers out of me which I now realize was the whole point. (Fear is a POWERFUL way to manipulate people - ESPECIALLY CHILDREN!) Because there was no one around I could turn to who would explain to me about sensationalism and greed, I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. I put off planning college and a career for a number of years because I couldn't see the point - after all, who wastes their time rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? When I think of the years I wasted because of this book, I get really, really angry! This book was NOT an isolated incident - the religious perspective it grows out of systematically reinforces the same ideas.

It'd be funny if it weren't for all the destroyed lives...

In 100 years, Hal Lindsey will be remembered in footnotes of history books that equate him with past failed prophets like William Miller (the Adventist who predicted the coming of Christ in 1843), Ann Lee (the Shaker founder who declared the start of the new Millennium in the 1840s), Joachim of Italy (the world would end in 1260), Jan Matthys (a Reformation-era doomsayer who caused a Branch-Davidian style slaughter), and Montanus (the original false prophet of doom, who said Jesus would return in Asia Minor in the 2nd century). Like them, Lindsey felt behind him a trail of disappointed, dispirited people who took him seriously. Lindsey predicted that the world would end by 1988 - and guess what, we're still here! A lot of people altered their entire approach to life; they put off college, put off marriage, and did NOTHING to make the world a better place - after all, why help care for the poor, fight the persecution of Christians overseas, or work to stem the moral decline of America when IT'S ALL ABOUT TO GET BLOWN UP ANYWAY. In fact, the rise in abortions, environmental destruction, starvation, disease, etc. is A GOOD THING, because it confirms our FAITH that the RAPTURE is about to happen!

Lindsey got away with this nonsense in the 1970's and 1980's because the U.S. lacked an organized and self-conscious culture of religion-skeptics which could find one another and act as "consumer watchdogs" to warn people against falling for these hoaxes and delusions. The internet has changed the rules of the game, so now we can put these grifters, charlatans and cranks like Lindsey on notice that we won't let them spread their doomsaying without our publishing criticism in response.

Do the right thing, Mr. Lindsey: Issue that public apology.

Cryonauts as religious security risks

Just pure speculation on my part: What if the people in Future World would feel reluctant to revive cryonauts because they fear that at least some of us could inadvertently reintroduce religious beliefs that they consider undesirable or even dangerous?

How could this occur? People with fringe religious beliefs now generally don't pose much threat to our society unless they act upon them in ways which harm others, like radical Muslims, christian parents who let their children die from treatable diseases because they believe in faith healing, or Mormon polygynist men who "marry" 12-year-old girls. Religious obsessives like these examples generally haven't shown interest in cryonics.

Well, suppose that the people in Future World have a technology like the Krell Machine, but unlike the Krell in the movie Forbidden Planet, they've constructed a firewall to protect society from anyone using it to create something harmful, even unconsciously. (The movie uses Freud's psychoanalytic term "the Id" [das Es] to describe the refractory, unconscious part of the mind.) Their Krell Machine doesn't necessarily have to produce stuff; it could also generate software constructs as directed by the minds of the people in Future World.

The society in Future World might also have taken measures to control antisocial tendencies in the minds of its inhabitants based on a deep understanding of cognitive science, including measures to suppress the destructive aspects of religiosity. (If the worst manifestations of religiosity don't demonstrate "monsters from the Id," I don't know what does.) So they might not worry so much about the prospect that we would restore forms of religious belief and practice which have long since died out, because their minds would not suffer from that kind of susceptibility.

What could they worry about instead? Introduce into that society revived cryonauts who come from the era of "feral" human minds, and our monsters from the Id might find ways to breach the Krell Machine's firewall to create the religious equivalent of, say, the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Of course, our resuscitators could revive us and put us in quarantine as well, with no access to the Krell Machine. If the Krell Machine becomes as necessary to making a living in Future World as the internet shows signs of becoming in our world, then we could find ourselves seriously disadvantaged, indeed, at least until Future World can find better ways to accommodate us, or we can find those ways ourselves. If we revive with radical life extension, we'll certainly have the time to work on this "interesting" problem.

Time for a Hal Lindsey Apology Project?

I've played around with this partly-baked idea: Start a letter-writing campaign to Hal Lindsey to demand that he issues a public apology to all the people whose lives he has poisoned with his "end times" nonsense since 1970.

You can find his website here. He apparently lives in California, but his support staff operates out of Tulsa (which doesn't surprise me):

Address:

P.O. Box 470470
Tulsa, OK 74147-0470
United States

Telephone:

1-888-RAPTURE
1-888-727-8873

E-mail: questions@hallindsey.com

If you have had a bad experience because of Hal Lindsey's doomsday teachings, feel free to post them here. Or you can communicate with me privately: holyspiritdenier@gmail.com

Heading into "David Mabus" territory?

Rick Potvin has posted an incoherent word salad about gatekeepers, "ice age truth" and "Judaics":

MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2011

Cryonics has gatekeepers, guards and guardhouse that will instill pause.

Nice looking innocuous guardhouse occupied with hidden but potentially threatening and unreasoning guards.

I've been forced to pause to consider the association of certain names in cryonics with the rejection of the coming ice age and with Judaics. The tactics being used by what I've confirmed are cryonics gatekeepers on the internet are outside the bounds of what I prefer to deal with-- which is the search for truth. Instead of wrestling with issues, cryonics gatekeepers attack the purveyor of ice age truth personally, by making false associations and delivering what might be interpreted as veiled threats. Even this post could be construed by the guards as potentially "damaging to cryonics" and I would likely recieve an anonymous vieled threat before too long. On the other hand, it may be innocuous enough to not attract that kind of response. I've heard from insiders that it's actually a good thing that outsiders understand that cryonics has teeth to defend itself. So this post could actually be interpreted as "good publicity", ironically.

Homework Question: To any anonymous cryonicist, is this okay to post or am I going to be slandered and attacked again? Thanks for your civilized consideration at this point. Thank you. [Discussion Outline]

Tulsa's baby steps towards rationality

I've watched most of the videos posted on on the Thinking Atheist's YouTube channel from Tulsa's recent atheist conference, the first of its kind in Oklahoma as far as I know. Compared with videos I've seen from higher status conferences, the talks at this one seem kind of mediocre. It featured three atheist activists whom I would consider third tier - Seth, the Thinking Atheist; AronRa; and Matt Dillahunty - along with a couple of local people in Oklahoma whom I hadn't heard of previously.

Though in context, Tulsa's atheists have to start somewhere. This conference drew over 300 people and apparently left the participants with a sense of accomplishment. It will take awhile before someone like P.Z. Myers, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris would consider it worthwhile to travel to Tulsa and talk to an audience there about the advantages of critical thinking. Give it time, though.

Some observations: AronRa seems intelligent and knowledgeable about science, but I had trouble watching his video because he looks like a villain from a Chick tract, or some guy I'd see in a biker bar in Arizona. Why does he dress that way?

Seth's talk and the talk by the former ORU professor-turned-agnostic sounded too introductory-level to me, though perhaps they felt the need to spoon feed some basic ideas and information because of the relative newness of organized atheism in Tulsa.

I could especially relate to the part in Seth's talk where he recounts his christian upbringing and how his church used end times propaganda, specifically a film which shows the beheading of christian converts during the "tribulation." as part of its process to break down adolescents and make them "accept Jesus." The message: If you accept Jesus now, then you'll have a spot reserved for you when Jesus evacuates his followers at the rapture; otherwise, if you convert later, the bad guys will chop off your head. Yeah, benign child rearing practices at work there.

I didn't see that particular film, but in 1972 or '73 I read stupid Hal Lindsey's book, The Late, Great Planet Earth, which had inexplicably become a best seller in the 1970's and which started the current round of rapture nonsense plaguing American culture over the past 40 years. That book messed with my mind for several months until I read books by more rational people like Isaac Asimov and Robert Ettinger and started to see the problems with the theistic world view. Unfortunately I lived in Tulsa's "rapture ready" religious environment for many more years and had to put up with the beliefs of fundamentalists and evangelicals. I find it encouraging to see that a few hundred relatively sane people (so far!) in Tulsa have decided to band together and create a social space of rationality for themselves.

Ark of fetishism

I don't understand why the existence of physical artifacts with some vague connection to religious myths and legends substantiates these stories' woo-woo claims. Anthropologists have a name for this belief: Fetishism.

For example, Muslims pray five times a day to a probable meteorite housed in a temple in the Saudi Arabian city of Mecca. The existence of this rock doesn't mean that it supports the validity of Islam.

Similarly, the existence of the ruins of the Temple of Delphi doesn't mean that the Greek god Apollo exists and at one time sent cryptic messages to female mediums there, even though famous historical people in antiquity like the philosopher Socrates consulted these "oracles" for advice.

Yet today we see stupid shows on cable TV, like the SyFy Channel's Legend Quest, based on the premise of finding alleged artifacts connected with biblical stories, like Moses' staff, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Lance and the Holy Grail, with the implication that these artifacts might have woo-woo powers which challenge the current naturalistic world view of educated people. Assuming for the sake of argument that pieces of stuff like these things exist in the here-and-now, and that you could handle them, so what? Muslims who go on their pilgrimages to Mecca can press their lips to their cult's magic rock, but Westerners generally consider that an exercise in fetishism, and not a point in favor of Islam's truth claims.

I could say the same thing about the idea of building fetishes based on descriptions of them in ancient religious texts. Creationist Ken Ham, for example, who according to what I've read sounds like a crank of the highest order, wants to build a full-scale replica of Noah's Ark at his creationism theme-park in Kentucky based on the description and measurements found in the book of Genesis. Ham reasons thusly:

To rebuild the Ark, to full-scale biblical dimensions, as a sign to the world that God’s Word is true and its message of salvation must be heeded (Romans 3:4, 5:12).

Just as the Ark in Noah’s day was a sign of salvation, as well as judgment, an Ark rebuilt today can be a sign to point to Jesus Christ, the Ark of our salvation, and to coming judgment (II Peter 3:5-13, John 10:9).

I don't see how these claims follow from their premises. The ability to build things based on descriptions in stories doesn't mean that these things must have existed for real at one time, much less acquire mystical powers in the process. Peter Jackson's set builders and prop makers built things for Jackson's LOTR movies based on Tolkien's descriptions of them in his novels, including the One Ring; but no rational individual believes that Tolkien's novels portray historical events, and nobody believes that the prop Ring used in the movie gives its wearer supernatural powers in real life.

I get the impression that christians' anxiety about their doomsday cult's future drives both creationism and end times beliefs, especially because many christians combine both interpretations of their scriptures. These christians know that their world view doesn't make sense in light of modern scientific knowledge, especially given the vistas of space and time science has revealed to us; so they want to center the universe around humanity and compress its time scale down to something which makes humans seem cosmically important. It seems more likely to me that if humanity survives, christianity will disappear eventually without an apocalypse to signal its ending.

The need for a "Wal-Mars"

When I walk through a Walmart (admittedly one of my favorite places to shop), I like to fantasize about how many things that company sells which would come in handy on an interstellar expedition: Food, tools, clothing (apart from space suits, of course), firearms & ammunition, flashlights & batteries, first aid kits, cameras, PC's, etc.

Apparently David Brin and Bud Sparhawk have had similar thoughts:

Water and Wrenches, Belts and Suspenders

Someday, Earth civilization will send emissaries to Mars. Over the long run, the task of exploration cannot be left only to robots. If we are ever to know Mars from a human perspective we must have eyes on the ground, feet in the soil. People offer unbeatable advantages of intelligence and adaptability. But getting to Mars and other deepspace destinations with crews of living men and women won't be easy.

Among the many obstacles we must overcome are the immense cost of such an expedition and the need to ensure a much higher, almost-guaranteed probability of success. Mission designers must overcome major technical issues along with barriers both physiological and mental. A detailed plan will include procedures for orbital transfer, landing, performing science and returning to Earth. These problems will take years - likely decades - to resolve.

And yet, it turns out that some fundamentals are still the same as they were when Shackleton and Amundsen probed the Antarctic, or Hillary and Tenzig took on Everest. All of them fretted about one thing, above all. Supplies, supplies, supplies.

Ninety percent of the time, energy and expense of those exploration treks went into laying down caches of necessities. Doing so properly ensured survival when it finally came time for the blitz to the summit or pole. Failure to get it right helped doom the ill-fated Scott Antarctic Expedition. When we send human crews to Mars, we would do well to remember this and provide what they need, without scrimping, well in advance. In fact, prudence suggests that we not even launch the human components of a Mars expedition until at least twice as many consumables are already there on site, both orbiting the planet and on the surface, as they would need, even if accidents happen. (The Apollo moon landings did not fit into this pattern, because they were essentially sprints toward a much closer objective. More like Lindbergh than Amundsen.)

As it turns out, this kind of advance-provisioning needn't delay matters at all. It will take many years, or decades, to design, critique, and build the manned components. Meanwhile, the greater bulk of material needed by any expedition will be almost completely design independent: water, food, wrenches, shovels, microscopes, sampling bags and other basic tools, and supplementary maneuvering fuels like hydrazine will be needed, whether the explorers travel by rocket or railroad. Moreover, these "general" supplies make up a great part of the mass of any expedition.

Many science fiction writers have shown an awareness of the need for simple tools and supplies when it comes to the conjectural colonizing of other planets. You might use some super-advanced space ship or other technology to get you to a habitable exoplanet, but then you'll need tools as simple as knives to start to build wealth there and make the planet support you. Robert Heinlein shows a fictional example of this in his "juvenile" novel, Tunnel In the Sky, which reads like a cross between Stargate and Lord of the Flies. In the novel Heinlein postulates that a technology based on Earth can send people through temporary "tunnels" in space-time to Earthlike exoplanets. Earth's government wants to get people off the planet for Malthusian reasons, but to improve the emigrants' odds of success it has institutionalized survival ordeals for late teenage and college-aged people for a fixed number of days on uninhabited exoplanets. Only in the novel's case, an astronomical event cuts off the youngsters from returning to Earth, so they assume that they can't go back and start to recreate their understanding of adult society on the exoplanet. The characters' threshold of adulthood and the abundance of young women keep the young men from turning feral like in William Golding's novel.

The youngsters manage to hang on despite their underpreparedness. And Heinlein writes that each colonist carried a knife:

It was the all-purpose tool, for cutting leather, preparing food, eating, whittling, basketmaking, and as a make-do for a thousand other tools; their wealth came from knives, arrows were now used to hunt - but knives shaped the bows and arrows.

So of course Mars explorers and eventually colonists will also need knives, perhaps of the hard-wearing "tactical" sort favored by American warriors in places like Afghanistan, shipped well in advance with other supplies according to Brin's and Sparhawk's reasoning.

Max More nearly leaves the 21st Century.

Max More, CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, recently avoided cryostasis. From the 3rd Quarter 2011 issue of Cryonics magazine:

I just survived my second car wreck.
Having returned from giving a cryonics
talk in Southern California, I was driv-
ing home from the Phoenix airport when I
got into a situation that caused me to swerve
to avoid a collision. At freeway speed, that
swerve was hard enough to send my car out
of control. It spun around and ran head first
into the high concrete divider wall of the 51
freeway. I remember thinking, “This is it.”

My car was totaled. To my astonish-
ment, I stepped out of the car and found
myself almost completely uninjured.

Praise be to seat belts and airbags. My
old car had no side air bag, so it was fortu-
nate that I slammed into the wall head on.

When this sort of thing happens to most humanists/atheists/skeptics/etc., they usually say something to the effect that their brush with death gives their lives so much meaning; then they go back into terror management and try not think about death until the next episode of mortality salience.

Max, by contrast, arguably displays sterner stuff, and I can well imagine his redoubled efforts to make cryonics work. Please stick around, Max. We need you in this century, though knowing you I think you would do just fine in centuries to come, when the necessity arises.

Another perspective on christianity's Long Now problem

Scholars alive 10,000 years from now who study ancient religions would know a lot more about a successful religion - call it Religion X - which starts 8,000 years from now than they would know about christianity, mainly because they would have fresher and probably more abundant historical information about Religion X's origins and development.

In other words, from their vantage point Religion X originated 2,000 years ago, but christianity originated in the much deeper and more obscure past of 12,000 years ago. Does any christian believe that christianity can survive for another 10,000 years, or even another 1,000 years, given its unfulfilled prophecies about the "end times"?

Excellent talk by a former christian who deprogrammed himself

I can't help but think that the christian who becomes an atheist in the current context in effect puts his mind into a time machine, and travels 100+ years into the future:

Christians love eternity, but not time.

I get the impression that many christians, especially the ones susceptible to biblical literalism and creationism, find the scientific view of our historical position in the universe unsettling, to say the least.

One, they tend not to like the idea that humanity has a long history before christianity, especially a prehistory going back hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture and civilization. That interpretation of the past raises awkward questions about human origins, the fate of all those billions of people who died without hearing the gospel, and why christianity came along so late in the game.

And two, they tend not to like the idea that humanity might have a long secular future ahead of it.

Why do they seem to feel this way about our unprivileged position in the history of the universe? Setting aside the whole creationism clusterfuck, first of all, christianity can't get away from the fact that it started out as a doomsday cult which predicted that Jesus would return "quickly" and wrap up the business of the human species. That hasn't happened after 2,000 years, even though every generation or so we see kooks like Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye and Harold Camping who preach or publish their warnings about the christian end times. This embarrassment keeps recurring because the cult's own scriptures present the idea of an imminent apocalypse, clearly and in multiple places, even from Jesus himself. The polling data show that this belief persists in the christian mainstream, at least in the U.S. Considering that Americans generally don't read the bible, where do they pick up this notion, if not from preachers and popular novels like the Left Behind series? The fact that the apocalypse never happens throws doubt on Jesus' identity, integrity and authority.

Secondly, the prospect of a Long Now, to coin a phrase, lying ahead of humanity also raises the possibility that christianity could disappear in the passage of centuries. Assuming that humanity maintains a continuity of literate civilization for the next 10,000 years, would the people living 100 centuries from now even know about christianity, apart from a few scholars who study ancient religions?

This discomfort with our orientation in the history of the universe probably contributes to many christians' desire to hasten the arrival of the "end times." They want the supernatural dénouement to happen in their lifetimes, not only to validate what they believe, but also to make sure that it happens before the christian religion itself disappears. What does the rapture delusion really indicate, if not a fear or expectation of the literal disappearance of all the "true christians" from the planet? Christianity's contingent emergence, duration and likely disappearance in history means that it doesn't have any more "metaphysical" significance in the scheme of things than any other arbitrary world view humans have developed.

The short answer: No.

Rick Potvin, in the context of his obsession with the circumstances of Robert Ettinger's recent cryonic suspension, asks:

By the way, what are people doing dying at 92 anyway? I thought the idea around here was to EXTEND lifepan? Where are the cryonicists who are 140 years old? Doesn't Life Extension Mix work? WTF? ---Rick Potvin

No, of course Life Extension Mix doesn't "work," except as a money-making scam for certain cryonicists. (I don't know if Robert Ettinger ever used it, BTW.) And more cryonicists interested in the integrity of the movement should point out the obvious, just as I've tried to draw attention to the pseudoscience of postulating that "nanotechnology" will work like macroscopic mechanical engineering, and provide us with a revival mechanism which could restore at least some people from cryonic suspension as early as 2050(!). For some reason the alpha cryonicists who have a say in running things in 2011 seem to resist the idea of organizing cryonics as a multi-century project.

BTW, Mike Darwin has started to post about the current inadequate state of "life extension" interventions. I've read about this stuff since the late 1970's, and I notice that the people who conduct these experiments on themselves still seem to die pretty much on schedule.

A critical review of FM-2030's last book

One of my correspondents even calls FM "a caricature of a transhumanist." I disagree with the reviewer's contention that wanting to re-engineer the human body to make it less vulnerable to organ failure and death derives from a religious impulse; we call that goal "medicine" instead of "religion" for a reason.

Source of this review:

(Amagansett, NY: Amagansett Press, 2011)

I don't mean to be uncharitable but the author of Countdown to Immortality, who was born as Fereidoun M. Esfandiary and the author of such well regarded novels as Identity Card, changed his name to FM 2030 and began preaching that human immortality, based on prosthetic body parts, DNA revitalization and plastic surgery, was just around the corner, seems to have gone off the deep end. I say that because, in explaining his hopes, he spends precious little time on scientific achievements that might increase longevity before launching into his dreams of a world of levitating bodies; rebuilt, super-strong limbs, and intergalactic colonization. To put this in a more positive way, as a work of science fiction, the book is not half bad, but if you take it seriously, you're in trouble.

For one thing, he follows the route, so common in world religions, of saying the mind (or soul) is everything; the body nothing. He writes, "How absurd that such a promising phenomenon as human life with all our potential for infinite growth should still be at the mercy of a liver or a heart – a blob of flesh. "He expounds further – this is all bold in the original but I'll skip that – "Why do we need bones and joints? Why blood and veins and arteries? Why do we need any vital organs? How vital are they?"Or, to sum up his thought, "The human body is overbureaucratized - full of superfluities and obsolescences."

Add to that hatred of the flesh an ethnocentrism that knows no bounds. Take as example, one particularly offensive to me as my wife's family died in the Vietnam war, how, discussing the injuries in wars, he touts the mortality rate of wounded soldiers in Vietnam as only 1.7 percent. He adds, "In the 1970s healthcare administrators began to realize that a critically wounded soldier on a battlefield had a better chance of recovery than a city-dweller injured in an accident."

His statistics of mortality is obviously that of only U.S. GI's, but the vast majority of the deaths were on the other, winning side. The U.S. had about 58,000 deaths while the North Vietnamese lost 1,100,000. The Communists didn't have the luxury of medivac helicopters, plasma and trained doctors and so couldn't have achieved the life-saving statistic over which he gloats. That is to say, he ignores the real toll of the war. As this and other passages in his book make clear, his program for saving "humanity"defines that category rather narrowly as consisting exclusively of the Western elite.

Let me change tack now by saying, if the book is taken as light science fiction, it is worth a read. The author does have a rich (if narrow) imagination and vivid style. Take when he describes how once all of "humanity"is flying around with its jet-packs, we still need "highways." "When individual freeflys become popular we could begin to transform our freeways into flyways. (Just as at one time we converted our stage coach trails into auto routes.) We can cover these flyways with some cushioning substance such as foam or rubber or some other resilient material and require people to fly over them. In case your vertical lift craft or jet-pack malfunctions and your emergency parachute does not deploy, your fall will be cushioned."

I've already mentioned his disdain for internal bodily organs. Here he explains how we can get rid of the digestive system! (Again, I will not bold the whole passage as he does.) "Isn't it time we outgrew the crude process of stuffing grub in our mouths to sustain ourselves?... Why fritter away time and resources producing – distributing – consuming food stuff?"Quoting another futurist, FM continues, that we have to "close the nutrient-waste cycle within the body such that no material would enter or leave. The gaseous, liquid, and solid wastes of the body would be reconverted to oxygen and fuel while other wastes would be reconverted into needed structural materials... [all powered by] a compact fuel cell or miniaturized fusion power device."

Now, with a lot of these cumbersome organs gone, who needs a skeleton? "Our bodies will evolve into sleek, ultralight structures. In time to come the body weight of an average six-foot transhuman may be around 80 pounds. Such an ultralight body will not need much of a skeletal framework." And flesh will also change. "The new skins may be transparent ... for quick access to the body's microcircuitries."

I won't spoil the book by revealing other surprising and often outlandish predictions, but if that's to your taste, get this book. If you want serious reflections on life extension, however, you are going to have to keep searching.

Ferdinand Lundberg nearly describes today's America.

From The Rich and the Super-Rich (1968), Chapter Seventeen:

If they prove nothing else the widespread American riots, increasing and spreading from the 1940's and 1950's into the 1960's, prove that the American ruling class, given the political instrumentalities of its rule through low-grade stooges, is unable to rule at home. The general cry goes out for law and order, yet there is steadily less and less law and order, more and more crime and insurrection as Lyndon B. Johnson calls for national days of prayer. For prayer rather than science or reason is the tool of the political medicine men. What is happening as the average citizen looks on in disbelief is that an outworn, patched politico-economic system is cracking, while no serious steps are taken to ascertain the causes and remedies. The causes of American insufficiency, at home and abroad, are political, not economic, or at least political before they are economic. Better put, they are cultural. Serious problems cannot be solved on the basis of a consensus of value-disoriented dolts.

"For prayer rather than science or reason is the tool of the political medicine men." The white men's Ghost Dance which Texas governor Rick Perry led in Houston yesterday reminded me of this passage.

And again I ask: Why do we put up with this doomsday cult based on a ghost story about a guy who allegedly "rose from the dead"?

So much for paleolithic nutrition.

We'll have to go back to austerity diets we can afford to save precious money, based on gruel, polenta, grits, oatmeal, rice, potatoes, etc.

And now we know why our elders told us so much about life during the Great Depression.

"Christianity scares Captain Picard."

And I don't blame him for feeling that way about the prospect that a rational society will "get religion" again:

Christian ghost stories

I grew up as an east Tulsa kid. In the 1970's my family lived near 26th & Garnett, just a few minutes' walk from the branch library which opened up at that intersection in 1975, and years before Spanish-speaking newcomers started to colonize the neighborhood, as you can see from what that library offers now.

My maternal grandparents and my mother's two sisters lived in west Tulsa, however. Visiting them required about a half hour drive across town and over the bridge spanning the Arkansas River.

In 1972 my mother let me go with one of my aunts to a youth outing at this aunt's church. We went to a wooded park in west Tulsa (I couldn't point out the location after so many years), which had electrical power so that the church people could set up a screen and show a Dracula movie late at night - one of those Hammer Horror jobs starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (both of whom years later had parts in the Star Wars films, BTW). During an intermission, the adults served me and a bunch of junior high school-aged kids I didn't know some hot chocolate (not very good, as I remember it), then the preacher or a youth pastor gathered us around and asked us what we would do if Jesus "returned" that very night and caught us unprepared to meet him - with the implication that Jesus would wreak something horrific on us adolescents if we admitted to inadequacy in our preparations, like not having "given our hearts to the lord" or whatever.

This incident resembled the telling of a ghost story, but it seemed scarier than a ghost story in context because our elders had taught us to believe that this dangerous and powerful woo-woo named Jesus really exists and has plans to show up at any moment to "judge" us - or else he'll just wait until we die unshriven, and then he'll have his way with us in the afterlife.

Thinking about this now, I have to wonder how much of the appeal of christianity has depended on its use of the equivalent of ghost stories to manipulate people through irrational fear. The Harold Camping fiasco amounted to one big ghost story which some people actually believed, but I suspect the practice goes back to christianity's earliest days. I can just imagine how the firebrands in this doomsday cult's first few generations would catch low-status people in the Roman world during their off hours, mainly children, servile women, slaves, peasants and the ancient equivalent of blue collar guys, and tell them ghost stories about this recently revealed god named Jesus and how he would do mean things to them some day unless they renounce their traditional gods and accept him as their new alpha deity. Just to show that puny mortals couldn't fuck with this new god, he demonstrated his power by rising from the dead! (They knew better than to deploy this conversion strategy at first on educated, higher status pagans who had studied philosophy and rhetoric and probably had acquired some habits of critical thinking.)

We see the modern versions of that now, and not just in backwards countries where missionaries tell their ghost stories about Jesus to the villagers around the camp fire and hope these tales can frighten them into converting. Sunday school teachers in churches across the country confine children with their parents' consent every week and tell them ghost stories about Jesus, whether the children want to hear these stories or not; many of them would probably prefer to read or hear about Harry Potter instead, just as I could have enjoyed the vampire movie without the spooky sermon.

Fortunately we have a game changer which makes this process harder now for christian zealots: the internet. I suspect that the christian cult programmers who try their ghost stories on adolescents in the U.S. encounter more skepticism and resistance now from the kids who have looked up adverse information about christianity and theism online. Josh McDowell, the famous christian apologist, has even complained about the internet recently:

“The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not,” said McDowell, who is author of two books on Christian apologetics, More than a Carpenter and New Evidence that Demands Verdict.

Well, tough shit, Josh. If it makes your job harder when young people have access to information and points of view unfavorable to your side, what does that say about the credibility of your ghost stories about Jesus in the first place?

Paratime Wars?

What would Verkan Vall and the Paratime civilization do if the civilization on another timeline entered a technological singularity and independently discovered temporal transposition?

Got this in my email yesterday.

Wow! An atheist conference in Tulsa, with over 300 in attendance! The old redneck town might have some potential to become cognitively livable after all, in case I ever want to move back there:

[ACTOK] ACT August Newsletter

Whew. July was an exciting month! In case you were living under a rock, a freethought convention was hosted by yourAtheist Community of Tulsa and held right here in Tulsa.

The response was incredible.

In its inaugural year, FreeOK doubled Skepticon's and theTexas Freethought Convention's debut attendance...combined!

318 atheists and freethinkers from Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota gathered at All Souls Unitarian Church for a nine hour state...er,(correction)...regional convention.

Speakers were Dr. William G. Morgan, Abbie Smith, The Thinking Atheist, AronRa, and Matt Dillahunty.

If you missed it, videos will be uploaded weekly to The Thinking Atheist's channel found here and shirts will be available soon.

In addition to that exciting news, we acquired our 500th member on July 7th. We are now the 40th largest out of the 561 atheist Meetup groups worldwide and are arguably one of the most active and fastest growing.

August is a new month, however, and we are not even going to take enough time off to enjoy our accomplishments!

We have a lot going on this month, however due to the heavy workload for FreeOK, the calendar isn't entirely filled up and complete. However, we will have the regulars (Social dinner, Drinking With Atheists, Official Meeting, Post-Meeting Dinner, Secular Family Day, secular humanist volunteerism, Bible Study, et al.) and include a sermon on racism, a response toThe Response, and more. For the current news on this month's activities, please visit our calendar. More dates and events will be added as we go along so please check back.

This month, we will begin seeking legal counsel to learn more about and (maybe) eventually become a 501c3 tax-exempt (non-profit) organization. We shall also begin the prelimary stages of drafting bylaws and establishing a heirarchy of members and officers.

As always, any and all participation is welcome and we would love to have you out for one of our many fun, exciting, and inspiring events for the month of August.

Something that is not in the news yet, but may be soon is that the Sand Springs city council meetings are invoking sectarian prayer. Expect ACT to substantiate its acronym by responding in an effective yet non-confrontational way.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me. I read every email that I receive and respond to almost every one.

Are you tired of religion? The closet? Isolation?
Remain passive no more. ACT!

William Poire
President
Organizer
Atheist Community of Tulsa
www.actok.org

--
This message was sent by William Poire (president@actok.org) from Atheist Community of Tulsa.
To learn more about William Poire, visit his/her member profile

Paleo-future ad in "Life Extension" magazine

From the September 2011 issue:

I don't care for that magazine in general. One, it sells pills which don't work. Two, it uses a fear-based approach to try to get you to buy those pills. And three, apparently the editors still have a paleo-futurist outlook instead of paying attention to current events, if this ad says anything.