Tue Nov 10, 2020 - 7:07 pm ESTFri Jun 18, 2021 - 5:25 pm EDT

November 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) The COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by the worlds elites as part of a plan to globally advance transhumanism literally, the fusion of human beings with technology in an attempt to alter human nature itself and create a superhuman being and an earthly paradise, according to a Peruvian academic and expert in technology.

This dystopian nightmare scenario is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but an integral part of the proposed post-pandemic Great Reset, Dr. Miklos Lukacs de Pereny said at a recent summit on COVID-19.

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Indeed, to the extent that implementing the transhumanist agenda is possible, it requires the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a global elite and the dependence of people on the state, said Lukacs.

Thats precisely the aim of the Great Reset, promoted by German economist Klaus Schwab, CEO and founder of World Economic Forum, along with billionaire philanthropists George Soros and Bill Gates and other owners, managers, and shareholders of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Finance who meet at the WEF retreats at Davos, Switzerland, contended Lukacs.

Transhumanism is far from a benign doctrine. Rather, it is at complete enmity with Christianity, Lukacs pointed out during the virtual in Truth Over Fear Summit organized by California-based Catholic writer and broadcaster Patrick Coffin.

Transhumanists take science as their religion and believe in a philosophy of absolute relativism that claims that individuals can change reality at will, and they seek to relativize the human being and turn it into a putty that can be modified or molded to our taste and our desire and by rejecting those limits nature or God have placed on us.

Transhumanism therefore requires the destruction of the Judeo-Christian morality, which is based on absolute principles and values.

Those raising alarm about the Great Reset often overlook the crucial role of technology in the plans of the meta-capitalists, contended Lukacs, who has Ph.D. in management from the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIoIR) from the University of Manchester.

The COVID-19 pandemic was just another social engineering project deliberately planned and implemented by predatory meta capitalism to achieve the ultimate end: redefining and reconfiguring the human nature and condition, he argued in a presentation in Spanish.

I have the firm conviction that this pandemic has been manufactured and its purpose is none other than to initiate, as they say, or implement the Great Reset, which will open the door to the advancement of the transhumanist agenda, he said.

Indeed, WEFs Schwab has been promoting the Great Reset as a way to harness the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a term he coined, which, he declared in January 2016, will affect the very essence of our human experience.

Schwab described the Fourth Industrial Revolution then as a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines among the physical, digital and biological spheres, Lukacs said.

Those technologies include genetic engineering such as CRISPR genetic editing, artificial intelligence (A.I.), robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and quantum computing.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is nothing other than the implementation of transhumanism on a global level, emphasized Lukacs.

Transhumanism as a political ideology and cultural movement was defined in 1998 by Swedish economist Nick Bostrom, then a professor at Oxford, and David Pearce, a British philosopher, who that year founded the World Transhumanist Association.

More recently, Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and author of Homo Deus, who is regarded as a great visionary, has been promoting transhumanism.

Transhumanists propose to use technology to alter human nature to produce human beings with super longevity, super intelligence, super well-being, Lukacs said.

They reject the Christian belief in absolute truth, and that God created human person in His image and likeness, and see absolute values as a brake for their pretensions of transhumanist and globalist progressivism.

Thats why the approval of abortion is key to understanding why we are entering fully into this transhumanist agenda of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Lukacs said.

When abortion was approved, the political, economic order and moral values on which Western civilization is based collapsed.

Abortion means nothing other than the transition of the human being from a subject of rights to an object of commercialization, to an object of experimentation, he said.

Life ceases to have an inherent value, an inherent dignity. It becomes an object of consumption, an object of production, and this aligns perfectly with the goal of transhumanists to experiment with the human being.

Transhumanism is a struggle against those propositions of absolute values, said Lukacs, and what it embodies in progressivism is absolute relativism.

Evidence that absolute relativism has caught hold in the Western world is the rapid and widespread rise in trangenderism.

Lukacs also noted cases of transspecisim, transageism, transableism, and transracism.

Examples of these attempts to reshape ones reality at will include the American known as Lizard Man, the Canadian man living as a six-year-old, the British woman who blinded herself because she wanted to be disabled, and the German woman who injected herself with melatonin to darken her skin to identify as black.

These are previous states of transhumanism, a kind of accustoming, especially of the new generations, to accept this diversity, Lukacs said.

While many transhumanist proposals are rooted in science fiction, Lukacs pointed out they now have the technology to attempt to realize their mad aspirations.

Transhumanists propose to increase longevity by using CRISPR genetic editing, which has been used to triple the lifespan of mice. Thus, using this technique on human beings, it is conceivable that people could live to the age of 200 or 300 years old, he said.

They propose to increase human intelligence by planting chips in people that have greater processing capacity than the human brain.

An example is Elon Musks NeuraLink, which is an interface that is applied to the cerebral cortex and which Musk says will help people with Alzheimers or epilepsy, but which Lukacs speculates could open the door to neuro-hackers.

There is also the post-humanist school of transhumanism, of which economist Bostrom is a proponent.

Bostrom proposes that at some point it will not even be necessary to have a physical body, but we will be a set of information, that we will be able to upload our thoughts to the Cloud, that we will be able to form a great collective intelligence with other human beings, Lukac said.

As for the promise of super wellbeing, philosopher Pearce said it was the hedonist imperative to genetically modify us to aspire to super well-being.

What Pearce is saying is that through genetic modification, were going to be virtuous human beings, and that we have to forget about pain and suffering, we have to get rid of those genes that make us aggressive, violent, jealous, that force us to fight and kill each other, said Lukacs.

When you put all these things into the balance, what you are realizing is what you are looking at is literally the destruction of human beings, of Homo sapiens, and their conversion to Homo deus.

But as with the Great Reset, the elites twist the language and disguise their transhumanist agenda behind vaguely benign phrases, so Schwabs Fourth Industrial Revolution is sold to us as an idea thats not necessarily going to affect us, or that it is progress that will benefit humanity, he said.

However, just as ordinary people will suffer in the Great Reset under the architecture of oppression, as Edward Snowden phrased it, so they will bear the brunt of the experimentation by transhumanists.

Its very worrying because for achieving that kind of dream, many, many mistakes will happen for sure. The burden will be carried by the people that get affected by this in their health, in their lives, in their economic situation and in their psychological or mental state, said Lukacs.

Its a very, very costly experiment. And [the elites] are not going to bear any responsibility for this. Trust me, he told Coffin.

For them, its wonderful. For the rest, this is just dystopian.

Lukacs also contended that the global elites encountered an unexpected roadblock to their plans in U.S. president Donald Trump.

Actually, the structure of power is not that complicated, he told Coffin in an online Q&A session.

At the top are the meta-capitalists or capitalists that have so much financial muscle that they can play beyond the rules of capitalism; actually, they make the rules of capitalism or remake them, he said.

And you have those guys on Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, Big Construction, everything big, the big corporate transnational world. Those are the billionaires who through their philanthropies, their billion-dollar pledges and all this kind of stuff, they funnel money downwards to all the politicians, who are basically rented politicians, they rent them, they run the world for them, he said.

Its really the privatization of power through philanthropy, added Lukacs.

And then, of course, you will have a layer of middle ground or middle level institutions, NGOs, universities, foundations, and then youll go down to grassroots local government. Its a pyramidal structure.

But Trump is one key public figure who could evidently not be rented.

It is so obvious that in the States right now for the past, what, four, five months, a state coup has been in the making. As simple as that. I have no problem in saying it openly, Lukacs told Coffin.

Thats the situation. They have tried to oust a president that was democratically elected because they are desperate. China is still progressing. And their partners in the West, theyre just not catching up. So, they are a little bit desperate. China is not going to wait.

For more information on Truth Over Fear Summit, go here. Premium passes are still available.

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Read Chairman Stolyarovs 60-page essay, The United States Transhumanist Party and the Politics of Abundance, published as Chapter 5 ofThe Transhumanism Handbook, a major compilation of transhumanist thought edited by Newton Lee.

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In his speech at the XIV World Congress of Families (WCF) [full text in video here in Spanish], Cardinal Gerhard Mller sharply criticized transhumanism as an offspring of anthropological nihilism that leads to destruction and death:

Friedrich Nietzsche is the prophet of nihilism. After the death of God he proclaimed the superman who is his own God and creator for himself. All the gods are dead. Now we long for the superman to live. In our days, the historian Yuval Harari offers us a new edition of this program of self-perfection of man as the creator of a superior biotechnical hybrid. In his book Homo Deus, man is his own god. Why does Harari or Friedrich Nietzsche succeed? Why do thinking adults willingly have their bodies dissected or inflate their egos so much that they threaten to explode even as they become cynical gods? The theological answer is simple: anthropological nihilism has its home in the pride of the creature who wants to become like God and establish for himself the difference between good and evil, true and false.

This ideology is reflected in culture and zeitgeist in many ways: on the one hand, there is gender ideology, which combines identity and cultural-political aspects. Abortion also follows logically from the self-deification of man. The utilitarian euthanasia, the so-called mercy killing, also goes along with it. Selective abortion and euthanasia resemble the Nazi era in Germany because human life loses value. All ideological currents of this kind are fruits of anthropological nihilism.

The fiction of a free choice of sex is a denial of Gods will for the human person. God created us as male or female. And that is a good thing. Every human being exists in his or her bodily nature, whether male or female. Gender ideology, which certainly comes under the heading of anthropological nihilism, deprives both men and women of their own possibilities.

The change of sex is an inspiration of the devil. This is the first principle of Christian anthropology. We cannot imagine man as a creature who defines himself. Only modern nihilism can and does, Cardinal Mller added.

The culture of anthropological nihilism will end in the collective suicide of humanity. Atheism is always nihilism, an antihumanism. The fruit of the culture of death is death. Christ overcomes the culture of death, a death that is against the life of children, against marriage and against love. Faith in God opens us to a culture of life in the love of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Why are we freed from the slavery of the perishable to the freedom and glory of the sons and daughters of God? This is the Christian faith, the Cardinal ended to sustained applause.

See the original post here:

Cardinal Mller: Transhumanism is the offspring of nihilismit is an antihumanism - International Family News

Being able to live for ever sounds like a concept that belongs on the pages of a science-fiction novel, one as implausible as time travel or becoming invisible.

However, that could all be about to change, according to a guest at the Dubai Future Forum.

Futurist Dr Jose Cordeiro said anyone who is still alive by the year 2030 has a good chance of living for ever.

Dr Cordeiro told the forum that the key to immortality was finding a way to reverse the ageing process.

We are very close to figuring it out. Ageing is a technical problem that we understand and can probably reverse, he said, speaking to The National on the sidelines of the forum.

Its a likelihood that people will soon be able to live for ever, rather than a possibility.

I personally dont plan to die.

While his remarks might sound like pie in the sky, humans are gradually living longer.

According to James C Riley, professor and author of several books on the global history of health, between 1800 and 2000 life expectancy rose from about 30 years to a global average of 67 years, and more than 75 years in some countries.

This dramatic change was called a health transition, characterised by a change both in how long people expected to live, and how they expected to die.

The increase in life expectancy, with people now living an average of more than 70 years, is often attributed to medical advancements, improved diets and better awareness of harmful habits.

Dr Cordeiro was adamant that immortality is simply the next logical step in the human journey and that stopping the ageing process is a matter of simple engineering.

We never used to be able to fly but now weve even been able to go to the Moon, he said.

One critical event that needs to happen in the race for immortality is reaching what is known as "longevity escape velocity".

This refers to a situation where life expectancy is improving at a rate faster than people are ageing.

That point could be reached as soon as 2029, according to Dr Cordeiro, meaning everyone alive afterwards could theoretically live for ever.

'Turritopsis dohrnii' is a species of biologically immortal jellyfish found worldwide in temperate to tropic waters. Getty

The solution to finding a way to live for ever could lie in our oceans, he said.

Last month, researchers at Spains University of Oviedo sequenced the genome of the Turritopsis dohrnii, more commonly referred to as the immortal jellyfish.

The moniker is no coincidence as the creature, which is smaller than the nail on the smallest human finger, is able to reverse its lifespan.

It does this by shrinking in on itself when physically damaged or experiencing stresses such as starvation, reabsorbing its tentacles and losing the ability to swim, according to the UKs National History Museum.

It then settles on the ocean floor in a blob-like cyst before re-emerging in a new body within 36 hours.

We are studying why there are certain life forms that do not age. Now that we are able to study the immortal jellyfish, we will be discovering things very quickly, Dr Cordeiro said.

One of the major issues will be humanity coming to terms with the possibility of living for ever, after millennia of living with the knowledge that death was an inevitability.

There are mental issues that need to be resolved as we have become accustomed to the fact we will all die, since the beginning of humanity. But it does not need to be that way any more, he said.

He pointed to the work being carried by high-profile tech-billionaires into anti-ageing as another example of how immortality could be around the corner.

Last year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos invested in Altos Labs, a start-up with the goal of extending human life.

In 2016, Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a $3 billion plan to erase all diseases by 2100, while in the same year Microsoft said it was using computer science to solve cancer within a decade.

Earlier in the week, a UAE medical group unveiled plans to help the population reach a life expectancy of 101.

Pure Health chief executive Farhan Malik announced a scheme to make Abu Dhabi a centre of research when it came to longevity.

At an event in Louvre in Abu Dhabi he said that when we talk about longevity, we don't just mean increasing lifespan but making people healthier for longer.

Over the past decade, billions of dollars have been invested in anti-ageing research, with Google's Calico, the American National Institute on Ageing and Saudi Arabia's Hevolution Foundation being some of the names in the industry.

Updated: October 13, 2022, 1:27 PM

Link:

Ageing is a technical problem that can be reversed, Dubai Future Forum told - The National

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John Fetterman is a trust fund kid. He took money from his parents deep into middle age when he decided finally what he would like to do with the rest of his life, which is to be the U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. The problem is fate intervened and he can now no longer speak. He had a bad stroke and we feel bad about that. Everyone does, but because of that stroke, Fetterman now needs electronic assistance in order to communicate with other people.

He can't talk on his own. It's not a right-wing conspiracy theory. It's not QAnon. It's real. In fact, it's so real, his campaign concedes that it's real. That is true. Fetterman uses a software program to understand the words of those around him and to formulate his responses to those words. In other words, to talk. Now, to be perfectly clear, this software is not a hearing aid. Fetterman doesn't need a hearing aid because he isn't deaf. He's not hearing impaired. Instead, this program takes words and then rearranges them into language that John Fetterman can understand because his brain can no longer do that for him.

That's sad. For transhumanists, though, it is thrilling. This is an amazing moment. This is Neil Armstrong on the moon. Here you have one of the most famous politicians in the country merging with a computer. This is the future they imagine. They're thrilled by it, but for everyone else, for the voters of Pennsylvania, for example, it does raise some obvious questions. For example, where exactly does the software end and John Fetterman consciousness begin?

We don't know. We can't know, but it's obvious that Pennsylvania could very well be sending a computer program to the U.S. Senate where inevitably it will be hacked. Yesterday, MSNBC sat down with John Fetterman and his thinking machine to assess where the man ends and the machine begins and the initial impressions were not at all encouraging.

FETTERMAN SAYS STROKE NOT 'GOING TO HAVE AN IMPACT' ON DUTIES IF ELECTED, INSISTS CAMPAIGN 'VERY TRANSPARENT'

REPORTER DASHA BURNS: We had a monitor set up so that he could read my questions because he still has lingering auditory processing issues as a result of the stroke, which means he has a hard time understanding what he's hearing. Now once he reads the question, he's able to understand. You'll hear he also still has some problems, some challenges with speech, and I'll say, Katie, that just in some of the small talk prior to the interview, before the closed captioning was up and running, it did seem that he had a hard time understanding our conversations.

John Fetterman, lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and Democratic senate candidate, speaks during a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US, on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. Photographer: Nate Smallwood/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Nate Smallwood/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Well, good for her for admitting that. That's a rival channel. Don't watch a lot of MSNBC, but she should tell viewers that, and she did. What she just told you is that before the machine was turned on, John Fetterman could not understand human language, not even small talk. But once the machine was plugged in, he sounded or the machine sounded nearly human, but don't worry. Everything is going to be fine in the Senate as long as there's not a power outage. It's not like the electricity ever goes down in this country. We definitely have enough renewables to keep John Fetterman voting the right way for the next six years. Better build some more wind farms. That's the plan.

But once again, to the credit of the MSNBC.com reporter, she did ask a follow-up. How do we know your thinking machine isn't going to break, John Fetterman? Can we see a doctor's report on this? Here's how that exchange went:

REPORTER DASHA BURNS: Can voters trust that you will be able to do this job on day one?

JOHN FETTERMAN: Yeah, of course.

BURNS: So, you say you're on the road to full recovery, but right now, voters really have to take your word for it. We've asked for your medical records. We've asked to have a conversation with someone from your medical team to interview your physician. You've declined those requests. Why?

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FETTERMAN: Well, I feel like we have been very transparent in a lot of different ways when our doctor has already given a letter saying that I'm able to serve and to be running.

BURNS: I mean, respectfully, that letter from your physician, that was six months ago. Don't voters deserve to know your status now?

FETTERMAN: Being on, in front of thousands and thousands of people and having interviews and getting around all across Pennsylvania, that gives everybody and the voters decide, you know, if they think that it's really the issue.

He's reading that off a screen and by the way, we're taking him at his word that there's not a staffer backstage typing out the answers because he himself can't formulate them. Now, again, you can feel deeply sympathetic to John Fetterman. That's sad to watch, but this is a guy who wants to run the federal government in a body of 100, the most powerful legislative body in the world, and he wants to be a member of it.

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Over at CBS, reporter Ed O'Keefe asked the obvious question, "Will Pennsylvanians be comfortable with someone representing them who had to conduct a TV interview this way?" Now, that's a mild way to put it, but it's certainly a fair observation. The guy's reading his answers off a screen with the reporter three feet away. That's the definition of impairment and again, this is a very serious job.

But others in the media scoffed at the idea that was a problem at all. In fact, far from being a problem, it was an asset because if the equity agenda means anything, it means that incompetent people ought to be in charge. That's equity.

As New York City Councilwoman Rita Joseph put it, questions about Fetterman's profound brain damage are, "incredibly ableist." Ableist? "We desperately need more diversity in elected office, and that includes people with speech impediments." Well, we desperately need that. That is absolutely right, but actually we're not talking about a speech impediment. She's telling us he's got a stutter just like Joe Biden. Remember they told you that Joe Biden's dementia was just a stutter? But of course, a speech impediment would not prevent Fetterman or Biden from understanding other people's speech. Huh?

Investigative reporter Hunter Walker, who writes for Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, answered that question with a question of his own "Would they treat a deaf person like this for needing assistance?" Oh. So, if you have questions about John Fetterman, you hate the deaf. You're a hearingist, bigot. We're going to close down your bank account of JPMorgan, ablest. But again, it's not really relevant to the Senate race in Pennsylvania because once again, John Fetterman doesn't have hearing problems. He's not deaf. This isn't deafness. This is brain damage.

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The Independent's Eric Michael Garcia tried to tie up that loose end, and he used an analogy to do it. That's howreally smart people talk. "How is this any different," he wrote "from Tammy Duckworth or Madison Cawthorn needing a wheelchair?"

So,John Fetterman, being unable to talk without reading it off a screen, either from the software orfrom one of his staffers backstage is exactly the same as being wounded in defense of your own country. It's a war injury.

And then John Fettermans wife, who came into this country as an illegal alien by the way, wondered the same thing and we're quoting "Truly appalling. Have these journalists never heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act? Really curious to learn how they feel about wheelchairs and glasses."

Really? So, your questions about John Fetterman's mental health, the acuity of his brain, his ability to talk and listen and reason, use his higher faculties, those questions are banned by the Americans with Disabilities Act because he's not just an incompetent guy trying to take over the country. No, he's disabled.

Over at Vox, Ian Millhiser said he knows exactly how Fetterman's bigoted critics view people with eyeglasses. "Is it the position of NBC News that a senator with glasses cannot be trusted in office because they use assistive technology to accommodate their disability?"

It's unbelievable. Not only can you not ask questions about the guy you're supposed to vote for and whether he can actually represent you in the United States Senate, you're not allowed. He's fine and by the way, the fact he's not fine is the reason to vote for him. So, they're hitting you for both sides. Vote for him because he's so profoundly disabled. We don't have enough for those in the Senate. But if you note he is profoundly disabled, you're a bigot. They got you coming and going.

Have you heard this before? Does it sound kind of familiar where they take someone with an obvious impairment and then they use him to accrue more power for themselves? It's not really about the disabled person. It's about them and then if you ask questions about it, shut up bigot!

PENNSYLVANIA PARENT RIPS SCHOOL DISTRICT FOR CANCELING HALLOWEEN PARADES OVER INCLUSIVITY CONCERNS

Climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks at a the "Fridays For Future" climate rally during COP26 on November 5, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Does the name Greta Thunberg come to mind? That's the girl who is always lecturing you about global warming and how you are evil. Greta Thunberg is someone who needed help and concern from adults. At the age of 11, she lost 22 pounds because, according to her parents, she was so depressed about global warming that she couldn't eat and then she was diagnosed with a whole suite of very serious problems: OCD, mutism, Asperger's, very, very sad, actually.

But the people around Greta Thunberg and the people who used Greta Thunberg didn't see this as sad at all. They saw it as an advantage for them because Greta Thunberg could be used to accrue more power to them and you weren't allowed to say anything about it because she was disabled, which, by the way, you weren't allowed to notice. Here's Greta Thunberg:

GRETA THUNBERG: You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

So you look at that and on one level you think, why is this person lecturing me, someone who's never had a job before is in charge of, like, our energy policy? That's crazy.

And then the other level, the more deep level, the more important level, you realize what a tragedy you just saw. Here is someone who is profoundly troubled, who needs real help and care and empathy and love from the adults in her life, but she's not getting any of that. Instead, she's being carted out like a sideshow freak for the profit of others. They're using that child in exactly the way they're using Joe Biden and John Fetterman and by the way, Kamala Harris, the dimmest person ever to work in American politics. None of them have any idea what's going on. And they're being used by people for the benefit of those people, but you can't say anything because you would be against people with disabilities and the ADA prohibits you from doing that. Right?

You're supposed to accommodate Greta Thunberg's disability, pretend her words are profound, just like the fake poet at Biden's inauguration. Oh, she was so great. We dare you to say she wasn't. She was ridiculous, but you did not because it's so profound.

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In Greta Thunberg's case, of course, the media loved it because they could use her too. They could use Greta Thunberg, didn't care anything about it. She could die and they wouldn't care. They would find someone else to use as a marionette for their own political ambitions. Watch them:

ANDREA MITCHELL, MSNBC: Perhaps the most impressive and impassioned remarks have come not from a president or prime minister, but 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg

CNN ANCHOR: She is the teenager on strike for the planet. Time's Person of the Year. Greta Thunberg is leading a generation of climate kids.

LAURA COATES, CNN: Greta, first of all, I got to reassess my life choices. That is a force to be reckoned with.

BILL WEIR, CNN: Greta Thunberg, the Swedish girl who inspired so much, she said she was in a deep depression when she understood the warnings of science, but turned that depression into action. I see the result here today.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MSNBC:Greta's passion does reflect what really is happening and we're still arguing whether or not it exists?

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Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks during a climate strike demonstration of Fridays for Future in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 22, 2021. - Sweden OUT (Photo by Erik SIMANDER / TT News Agency / AFP) / Sweden OUT (Photo by ERIK SIMANDER/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images) (Photo by ERIK SIMANDER/TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images)

She turned that depression into action. Well, no, she didn't, actually. She's living in hell. Like most emotionally unbalanced children, she's suffering, but you don't care because you can use her. You did nothing to support her, to love her, to cure for serious mental illness.

No, you used her to take more power and if anyone says anything about it, if you think children shouldn't go on television to talk about climate policy and energy, then you're a bigot. You hate children. You hate Greta Thunberg; And by the way, as you sit and watch the results of the lunatic policy that she's espousing without even understanding Europe's energy grid collapsing, then you're a bad person.

As Vox reported, "Attacks on Greta Thunberg expose the stigma autistic girls face." No, they expose the callousness and cynicism of her parents and MSNBC anchors and everybody else who used her suffering to their own benefit. The Washington Post complained "Autistic young people deserve serious respect and attention, not dismissal as the pawns of others." Really? Whose pawn is Greta Thunberg? Yours. Researchers at the University of Albany even published a study on "Analysis of ageism, sexism and ableism in user comments and YouTube videos about climate activist Greta Thunberg."

So again, you need to listen to her because she's not well, but if you note that she's not well, you're a bigot. It's the same, exactly the same dynamic you're watching what the president of the United States, Joe Biden, who is not well and everybody knows it. Joe Biden mourned the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski publicly. Then a few weeks later, he asked, totally befuddled, why isn't she here at the event? But if you notice it, that happened, you're the ageist.

DEM SUPER PAC TARGETS OZ WITH ATTACK ADS BASED ON 'PUPPY KILLER' CLAIMS

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: You know, my gosh, come on. You can't go after him for, you know, not giving aid to Florida or not tackling the infrastructure and he's giving aid to Ukraine. So, you can't go after him for that, but you can go after him for forgetting that someone has passed. I mean, and she passed last month, not like 100 years ago.

SUNNY HOSTIN:I think what it really shows is that this country is so ageist. This country has a problem with age and I think they need to stop weaponizing his age. I hate that about this country.

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This country has a problem with age so if you don't like the fact the commander-in-chief, the guy who commands our nuclear arsenal, is deranged because of age, which he is, then you're the bigot. But underneath all of this is this single most cynical political move in the history of this country, and that is elevating Joe Biden precisely because he is fading away, because he is demented. That's why they chose him.

They had an option, actually. His name was Bernie Sanders. We're hardly endorsing Bernie Sanders' program, but Bernie Sanders could think clearly. And the people who run the Democratic Party just hated what he had to say. So, they picked a guy who had nothing going on upstairs, was flatlining mentally, so they couldn't control him. That's exactly what they're doing with Fetterman.

Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channels (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.

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TUCKER CARLSON: Liberals are elevating Fetterman for the same reasons they elevated Biden - Fox News

The student in my doctoral seminar almost snorted when someone referred to Amazons Alexa as an Artificial Intelligence, or AI.

Its nothing but a voice activated database query system. Theres no intelligence involved at all, she scoffed.

She had a point and missed the point. Finding more user-friendly ways to access data has always been important and, over the years, technological upgrades have included a leap from specialized languages (secret codes that only the computers and their overlords understood) to natural language interfaces (Alexa, turn on the lights.) While impressive, these advances are not artificial intelligence.

But this misses the real issue. The biggest leap forward is not how well computers think, but how we think about computers. What is changing is our consciousness of what it means to be human. By giving an interface a name, a distinctive voice, and the appearance of a personality, Alexa isnt teaching us to use a natural language database interface, shes teaching us to regard a computer program as one of us. These days Amazon even sends you notes suggesting that you need to keep up with Alexa and what shes doing, just as you might a long-forgotten friend.

The ubiquity of Alexa and Siri, now found in just about every cellphone, automobile and sprinkled through businesses and households, continues a long pattern of anthropomorphizing computers. Star Wars creator George Lucas created robot characters, C3PO and R2D2, that expressed emotions toward both humans and one another. These, in turn, elicited such strong emotional attachment that having human characters risk their lives to save them didnt seem ridiculous.

In the first generation of Star Trek we also learned to allow non-humans into the realm of human emotions and loyalties. It is hardly surprising that the second generation of Star Trek would carry on exploring the humanization of artificial intelligences. In the TV series Star Trek Generations, an AI (Data) stands trial, claiming what are essentially human rights. In the film Star Trek: First Contact, we find the temptation of that same AI to join the Borg queen and take on the sins of the flesh.

It doesnt really matter that AI hasnt yet lived up to the claim of being intelligent in the sense of being sentient. What matters is the growing cultural acceptance that devices created by humans and made of silicone, plastic and metal are living beings whom we treat as peers.

That acceptance also slowly changes the way we think of ourselves. Much attention has been given to whether and when so-called AI will actually become intelligent. Aside from fiction, such as Neil Stephensons Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, not nearly enough consideration has been given to how we begin to think of ourselves as AIs.

Perhaps the most obvious change is the steady relocation of human personhood into the mind, and thus the brain. In the early part of the 20th century human death was marked by the cessation of breath and heartbeat. Since the late 1960s, it has been identified by a lack of certain meaningful electrical signals in the brain. To be dead is to be brain dead, even if the rest of the body functions. And to be living is to be brain alive even if sustaining the brains life is entirely through artificial means. We measure the presence of a mind and soul by what happens in the brain.

As Jeffrey Bishop notes in Anticipatory Corpse, with the advent of increasingly sophisticated transplant surgery the body (and not necessarily a human body; we also use pig, cow, and artificial parts) has become a repository of interchangeable parts necessary to sustain the brain and central nervous system. I personally have two artificial lenses, and a cows heart valve in a silicone structure. Artificial hips, knees and elbows are ubiquitous. Were all really just Six Million Dollar Men and Robocops in waiting.

Small wonder transhumanism (which made the cover of TIME in 2011) has become popular among those who have the wealth and hubris to imagine themselves as potential transhumans; their essential consciousness transposed into a computer program.

One such is Elon Musk, who in a 2018 interview with Axios on HBO said humans must merge with artificial intelligence, creating a symbiosis that leads to a democratization of intelligence. Indeed, as our cultural sense of what it means to be human changes, we may well divide into three types of humans: those who can afford to become transhuman, those who will simply die, and those whose religion promises they live eternally in some other form. Religion will become the poor-persons transhumanism.

The transition that moves the center of being human to the mind, now defined as a complex of electrical impulses supported by mechanisms that maintain it (the body), represents as profound a transition in our understanding of what it means to be human as those affected by great religious teachings and the advent of modernity and the secular age. And like those religious teachings and the rise of modernity, it poses profound questions of how we will understand ourselves and others.

When does a living body lose its human rights? When does it begin to have them? Should AIs, when they emerge into sentience, have human rights? And when they reproduce themselves, a major goal of AI research, who will control their reproductive rights? Most of all, what makes a human a human? Is there something more to us than observable patterns of electrical interactions in the brain?

Traditionally the intellectual center for exploring human self-understanding has been the humanities. Yet universities have been consistently downgrading the study of the humanities in favor of STEM subjects related to increased economic productivity. And in any case scholars in the humanities need to refocus on emerging cultures and their understanding of what it means to be human. STEM researchers, who study what we are, dont have the tools to study who we are and how we express our self-understanding. So those of us who focus specifically on what it means to be human must address future humanity as well as the past.

Religion, too, addresses our understanding of what it means to be human. Yet the changes even now taking place with the advent of AI seem to have scarcely gained the notice of religious leaders still battling with modernity. Weve grasped that there may be virtual churches, but have we considered that some of their members (and even preachers and musicians) may be intelligent machines represented by avatars? What happens to our humanity when it isnt merely disembodied, but re-embodied in a different form? What do terms like body, soul, spirit, and flesh, mean in virtual worlds?

Because we are on the cusp of an axial shift in human self-understanding we need a renewed focus on these questions. And that focus must bring into view not just the exploration of the past, but the human of the future, even now emerging in literature, television and film, history, politics and the fine arts.

Robert Hunt is the director of global theological education at Perkins School of Theology on the SMU Dallas campus. He wrote this for The Dallas Morning News.

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The more we think of AI as human, the more we think of ourselves as machines - The Dallas Morning News