Monthly Archives: June 2017

Papal Teaching

No one can fail to see the dramatic and distressing consequences of this pragmatism that conceives of truth and justice as malleable qualities that human beings themselves can shape. One relevant example among others is man's attempt to control the sources of life through experiments in human cloning. Here, we can see for ourselves the theme the Meeting [for Friendship Among Peoples] refers to: the violence with which people seek to appropriate the true and the just, reducing them to values which can arbitrarily be disposed of without recognizing any kind of limit, apart from those fixed and continuously surpassed by their technological operability.

...Christ taught another way: it is that of respect for human beings; the priority of every method of research must be to know the truth about human beings, in order to serve them and not to manipulate them according to a project sometimes arrogantly seen as better even than the plan of the Creator.

Pope John Paul II, Message for the 25th Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples (August 2004), nos. 2, 3

I am speaking of a tragic spiral of death which includes murder, suicide, abortion, euthanasia.... To this list we must add irresponsible practices of genetic engineering, such as the cloning and use of human embryos for research, which are justified by an illegitimate appeal to freedom, to cultural progress, to the advancement of mankind. When the weakest and most vulnerable members of society are subjected to such atrocities, the very idea of the human family, built on the value of the person, on trust, respect and mutual support, is dangerously eroded. A civilization based on love and peace must oppose these experiments, which are unworthy of man.

Pope John Paul II, Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace (2001), no. 19

In any event, methods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided. I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view to obtaining organs for transplants: these techniques, insofar as they involve the manipulation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when their proposed goal is good in itself. Science itself points to other forms of therapeutic intervention which would not involve cloning or the use of embryonic cells, but rather would make use of stem cells taken from adults. This is the direction that research must follow if it wishes to respect the dignity of each and every human being, even at the embryonic stage.

Pope John Paul II, Address to the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society (2000), no. 8

[T]he distinction that is sometimes drawn between reproductive and therapeutic cloning seems specious. Both involve the same technical cloning process and differ only in goal. Both forms of cloning involve disrespect for the dignity of the human being. In fact, from an ethical and anthropological standpoint, so-called therapeutic cloning, creating human embryos with the intention of destroying them, even if undertaken with the goal of possibly helping sick patients in the future, seems very clearly incompatible with respect for the dignity of the human being, making one human life nothing more than the instrument of another. Further, given the fact that cloned embryos would be indistinguishable from embryos created by in vitro fertilization and could readily be implanted into wombs and brought to birth, we believe it would be practically impossible to enforce an instrument that allowed one type of cloning while banning the other.

Archbihop Celestino Migliore to the United Nations on the International Convention Against the Cloning of Human Beings (October 21, 2004)

Mr. Chairman, the science may be complex, but the issue for us is simple and straightforward. The matter of human cloning that involves the creation of human embryos is the story of the beginning of human life.... If reproductive cloning of human beings contravenes the law of nature a principle with which all delegations appear to agree so does the cloning of the same human embryo that is slated for research purposes. A cloned embryo, which is not destined for implantation into a womb but is created for the sole purpose of extraction of stem cells and other materials, is destined for pre-programmed destruction...

If the United Nations were to ban reproductive cloning without banning cloning for research, this would, for the first time, involve this body in legitimizing something extraordinary: the creation of human beings for the express purpose of destroying them. If human rights are to mean anything, at any time, anywhere in the world, then surely no one can have the right to do such a thing. Human rights flow from the recognition that human beings have an intrinsic dignity that is based on the fact that they are human. Human embryos are human, even if they are cloned. If the rest of us are to have the rights that flow from the recognition of this dignity, then we must act to ban cloning in all its forms.

Archbishop Celestino Migliore to the United Nations on the International Convention Against the Cloning of Human Beings (2003)

The Holy See looks upon the distinction between "reproductive" and so-called "therapeutic" (or "experimental") cloning to be unacceptable. This distinction masks the reality of the creation of a human being for the purpose of destroying him or her to produce embryonic stem cell lines or to conduct other experimentation. Human embryonic cloning must be prohibited in all cases regardless of the aims that are pursued. The Holy See supports research on stem cells of post-natal origin since this approach - as has been demonstrated by the most recent scientific studies - is a sound, promising, and ethical way to achieve tissue transplantation and cell therapy that could benefit humanity....

Cloning a human embryo, while intentionally planning its demise, would institutionalize the deliberate, systemic destruction of nascent human life in the name of unknown "good" of potential therapy or scientific discovery.... Since embryonic cloning generates a new human life geared not for a future of human flourishing but for a future destined to servitude and certain destruction, it is a process that cannot be justified on the grounds that it may be able to assist other human beings.

Intervention by the Holy See Delegation to the United Nations, at the Special Committee of the 57th General Assembly on Human Embryonic Cloning (2002)

The act of cloning is a predetermined act which forces the image and likeness of the donor and is actually a form of imposing dominion over another human being which denies the human dignity of the child and makes him or her a slave to the will of others. The child would be seen as an object and a product of one's fancy rather than as a unique human being, equal in dignity to those who "created" him or her. The practice of cloning would usurp the role of creator and would thus be seen as an offence before God....

There remains, however the fact that reproductive cloning is only part of the overall issue. Therapeutic cloning, the production of human embryos as suppliers of specialized stem cells, embryos to be used in the treatment of certain illnesses and then destroyed, must be addressed and prohibited. This exploitation of human beings, sought by certain scientific and industrial circles, and pushed forward by underlying economic interests, retains all its ethical repugnance as an even more serious offence against human dignity and the right to life, since it involves human beings (embryos) who are created in order to be destroyed.

Archbishop Renato Martino to the United Nations, on an International Convention Against the Reproductive Cloning of Human Beings (2001)

Since 1988, two great global divides have grown deeper: the first is the ever more tragic phenomenon of poverty and social discrimination ..., and the other, more recent and less widely condemned, concerns the unborn child ... as the subject of experimentation and technological intervention (through techniques of artificial procreation, the use of "superfluous embryos," so-called therapeutic cloning, etc.). Here there is a risk of a new form of racism, for the development of these techniques could lead to the creation of a "sub-category of human beings," destined basically for the convenience of certain others. This would be a new and terrible form of slavery. Regrettably, it cannot be denied that the temptation of eugenics is still latent, especially if powerful commercial interests exploit it. Governments and the scientific community must be very vigilant in this domain.

Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Contribution to the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa (2001), no. 21

In the cloning process the basic relationships of the human person are perverted: filiation, consanguinity, kinship, parenthood.... In vitro fertilization has already led to the confusion of parentage, but cloning will mean the radical rupture of these bonds....

The "human cloning" project represents the terrible aberration to which value-free science is driven and is a sign of the profound malaise of our civilization, which looks to science, technology and the "quality of life" as surrogates for the meaning of life and its salvation....

Halting the human cloning project is a moral duty which must also be translated into cultural, social and legislative terms.

Pontifical Academy for Life, "Reflections on Cloning" (1997), no. 3

[A]ttempts or hypotheses for obtaining a human being without any connection with sexuality through "twin fission," cloning or parthenogenesis are to be considered contrary to the moral law, since they are in opposition to the dignity both of human procreation and of the conjugal union.

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation (Donum vitae) (1987), I

Revising the name given to the killing reduces its perceived gravity. This is the ecology of law, moral reasoning and language in action. Bad law and defective moral reasoning produce the evasive language to justify evil.... The same sanitized marketing is now deployed on behalf of...fetal experimentation and human cloning. Each reduces the human person to a problem or an object. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, "Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics" (1998), II, 11

Human cloning does not treat any disease but turns human reproduction into a manufacturing process, by which human beings are mass-produced to preset specifications. The cloning procedure is so dehumanizing that some scientists want to treat the resulting human beings as subhuman, creating them solely so they can destroy them for their cells and tissues....

While cloning may never produce any clinical benefit, its attack on human dignity has already begun.

Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on reports that a biotechnology firm has cloned human embryos (2001)

More here:

Selected Quotes from Church Documents: On Human Cloning

A 27-year-old Romanian with a crime record trailing through Europe and the Middle East was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday for his role in a credit card cloning scam in Denver.

A jury convicted Laurentiu Urziceanu on Jan. 19 of 22 felony counts including possession of a fraud device, bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. He was acquitted of one count of bulk cash smuggling.

Urziceanu and an accomplice cloned credit cards of customers at two Denver banks using sophisticated electronic devices, cameras and computers, said Tim Neff, a prosecutor inthe U.S. Attorneys Office in Denver.

Initially afraid that he would be returned to Romania upon his arrest in Chicago, Urziceanu sought political asylum by claiming that he was a gypsy who was the target of persecution in his homeland. His temporary stay in the U.S. will be behind bars.

Urziceanus arrest happened because of an observant Denver Greyhound bus teller, Neff said at Urziceanus sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Denver. The teller apparently believed Urziceanu might be a terrorist.

On Jan. 25, 2016, when Urziceanu tried to send fraud devices in a package through Greyhound, the teller noticed he seemed unusually hurried and his claim that the package contained a toy and sweaters was dubious. A bomb squad was calledand when they examined the contents of the box, they discovered seven pin-hole cameras and credit card skimming devices that wereplaced inside ATMs to steal credit card numbers.

Special Agent David Lauber of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security resealed the package and sent it to Chicago. When Urziceanu, using the alias Brazovics Balazs Peter, of Italy, retrieved the package, federal agents arrested him following a chase through the crowded streets of downtown Chicago, Neff said. At the time, had a forged Hungarian drivers license in his possession.

The tiny pin cameras were used to record bank pin numbers from more than 100 bank customers.

Urziceanu and his accomplice had allegedly stolen credit card information from 19 Wells Fargo Bank customers, court records indicate. They cloned credit cards and used them to withdraw $6,600 from bank accounts. The pair was in Denver only three days before going to Chicago, Neff said.

At one point, Urziceanu went to a Boulder post office on Jan. 25, 2016, and mailed a box of money to his girlfriends mother, Domnica Iovan, in Chieti, Italy.

While in Chicago, he had sent another box containing $22,000 in cash hidden in a speaker box to a family member named Ionescu Ecaterina in Rome, Italy.

Urziceanu entered the country on foot illegally near Rio Grande City, Texas, on Jan. 7, 2015, court records indicate. Neff said the international griftercame to America with larceny in his heart. Urziceanu was arrested in Texas on an immigration hold, but paid a $15,000 bond and fled the state, court records say.

The Rome Crime Squad arrested Urziceanu on April 28, 2011, outside the S. Paolo IMI Bank in Rome after he wascaught installing equipment that taped transmissions in an ATM. That July he was sentenced to from one to six months in prison.

Neff said Urziceanu was later arrested in Israel in a similar case but was not convicted of that crime.

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International grifter gets 5 years in prison for Denver credit card cloning scam - The Denver Post

Whether it be cyber attack or a good old crash, having a backup of your crucial systems and files in hugely important.

If there's an upside to data devouring malware like WannaCry, it's the way it concentrates our minds on back up strategies.

Predictably, after a few hundred thousand computers were held to ransom by hackers last month, attention has turned to safety nets, and rock solid back up is an essential element of a solution.

Cloud-based file storage services like Dropbox and OneDrive are great for protecting data files, not just because they keep a copy in cyberspace but also because they allow you to replicate data on multiple machines.

Our own data lives in Dropbox, with copies synchronised on a USB hard drive directly attached to our office desktop, and a networked Drobo file server in the same building, and an external drive at home that's only powered up once a day. That's deliberate.

Any data visible to the internet is at some risk, so we like to have an offline copy.

But there's more to tech life than data files, as a recent hard drive failure on our iMac reminded us. Faced with a defunct machine, you just want it to work again. That's where drive cloning software is a godsend.

Broadly, there are two approaches to recovering from a hashed up hard drive. Some solutions back up to a special kind of file that isn't itself a duplicate of the drive, but can be used to generate one.

That's a standard back up and restore approach, and most products that work like that also let you peer into the back up file and fish out copies of individual files and folders. But they don't get your machine back on the road in a hurry. For that, you need a cloner.

On a Mac, our cloner of choice is Carbon Copy. We love the clean, intuitive interface that presents a list of all the drives that are within sight, letting you choose what gets backed up to where and how.

Of course, back up tasks can be automated, so you could decide to run an update every day and make an entire fresh copy once a week, as hard drive space allows.

A full Carbon Copy clone of a two terabyte hard drive might take a few hours, but updates after that rarely require more thanminutes as the software intelligently identifies the files that have changed and only copies those.

One trap for cloning software is that it risks overwriting good data with bad. If a file on the source drive is damaged, it will be replicated in its defective state to the back up drive. Carbon Copy insures against that with a Safety Net feature, a kind of trash can that holds old versions rather than deleting them.

Best of all, the program can turn most external USB drives into a bootable replacement for your main hard drive. It starts up and runs more slowly than an internal drive, but if you absolutely, definitely need to have your Mac running right away, it's ideal.

Windows users have plenty of choices for cloning, but we've never strayed from Casper, an inexpensive offering that has displayed bulletproof reliability for nearly fifteen years.

Casper's name is a play on Norton Ghost, once the big name in desktop backup solutions. It's the friendly Ghost, get it?

Well, like Carbon Copy on the Mac, Casper is delightfully approachable. Many cloners share a common failing. They are unclear about which drive holds all your data and which is blank. It's nerve wracking to be less than certain that you're not about to overwrite good data with empty space.

Casper's friendly interface makes it crystal clear which way the data needs to flow.

Casper doesn't only clone. It can also create disk images that update incrementally, allowing drive restoration to a selected point in time. But again, we mainly rely on it to ensure that a bootable replacement hard drive is on hand at all times.

One advantage of cloning is that you can easily test your safety net. As good as disk images can be, almost nobody carries out trial restores to check that they actually work. But regularly we set our Mac to boot up from a Carbon Copy external drive and we spend a few minutes running applications to get comfort that we aren't just imagining we're insured against drive failure or data corruption.

It's nice to know that the safety net will hold.

Peter Moon is a technology lawyer with Cooper Mills.peter.moon@coopermills.com.au

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Backups and cloning remove the risks of cyber attacks and computer crashes - The Australian Financial Review

(AllHipHop News)In early 2016, B.o.B became one of the most prominent faces of the so-called Flat Earth movement when the southern rapper used his Twitter feed to question the idea our world is round.

His support for the flat Earth concept even led to a back-and-forth with famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Bobby Ray recently spoke with HotNewHipHop about other conspiracy theories such as Snapchat secretly gathering peoples facial scans, human cloning, UFOs,geoengineering, chemtrails, fluoride, the Illuminati, and 9/11.

I feel like [9/11] is an inside job. The evidence that has surfaced over the years I feel like there wasan insurance policy taken out on the building for terrorist attacks, ironically, said B.o.B. Its just a lot of differentthings that dont add up, so I definitely feel like its an inside job.

It was some of the conspiratorial reactions to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that first introduced a teenage Bobby to theories about false flag operations and secret societies.

Besides being a vocal contrarian, B.o.B is also the creator of music projects such asThe Adventures of Bobby Ray,Strange Clouds,Underground Luxury, Psycadelik Thoughtz,andEther.

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B.o.B Talks Conspiracy Theories About 9/11, Snapchat, Cloning, Chemtrails, The Illuminati & More (VIDEO) - AllHipHop (blog)