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Category Archives: Transhuman

Former GOP candidates push baseless QAnon conspiracy theory that Hurricane Ian was created to punish DeSantis – The Independent

Posted: October 2, 2022 at 4:11 pm

While Florida residents and emergency crews survey the devastation from Hurricane Ian, which continues to barrel along the East Coast, two former far-right congressional candidates floated a baseless conspiracy theory that the federal government created the storm to punish and target Republicans.

Lauren Witzke, a QAnon-supporting conspiracy theorist who was the GOP candidate for US Senate seat in Delaware in 2020, said she has no doubt that technology exists to manipulate weather that could be used to target Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

We know the technology does exist, she told former GOP congressional candidate Deanna Lorraine on her far-right conspiracy theory streaming channel, above a caption reading Biden Builds Transhuman Cyborg Army Using Immigrants.

Of course they would be willing to do something like this to target red states. I have no doubt. The technology exists to manipulate weather, Ms Witzke added in a clip captured by watchdog group Right Wing Watch. I know Florida is prone to hurricanes, however this developed to [a category 5 or category 5 storm] overnight, and it does seem to be hitting the conservative areas.

She said she is not putting it past the elites to target something like this towards Florida as punishment for eliminating Covid-19 vaccine requirements and getting rid of child grooming, referencing the states law prohibiting classroom discussion of LGBT+ people and issues by smearing its critics as groomers.

These huge hurricanes always seem to target red states, red districts, and always at a convenient time, typically right before elections or, you know, because possibly Ron DeSantis has been stepping out of line a lot and fighting the deep state, said Ms Lorraine, who received less than 2 per cent of the vote in a race against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2020.

Their claims echo similarly unhinged-from-reality statements central to the QAnon movement in the wake of Hurricane Ida in 2021, which devastated coastal Louisiana with impacts felt throughout the south and East Coast.

QAnons big tent conspiracy theorist movement includes references to deep state-controlled weather manipulation events but fail to address the climate crisis, political figures who deny it, increasingly powerful storms fuelled by climate change, and a lack of critical infrastructure investments to combat them.

Nearly two million people in Florida remain without power after Ian made landfall on Tuesday.

The states death toll also continues to rise as emergency responders survey the damage. Officials have reported at least one confirmed death and 20 unconfirmed deaths in three counties.

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Is the body key to understanding consciousness? – The Guardian

Posted: at 4:11 pm

In 2018, billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman paid a startup called Nectome $10,000 to preserve his brain after he dies and, when the technology to do so becomes available, to upload his memories and consciousness to the cloud.

This prospect, which was recently popularised in Amazon Primes sci-fi comedy series Upload, has long been entertained by transhumanists. Although theoretically possible, it is rooted in the flawed idea that the brain is separate from the body, and can function without it.

The idea that the mind and brain are separate from each other is usually attributed to the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Ren Descartes, who believed that the body is made of matter, and the mind of some other, non-physical substance.

Modern brain research rejects the distinction between the physical and the mental. Most neuroscientists agree that what we call the mind is made of matter. The mind is hard to define, but the consensus now is that it emerges from the complex networks of cells in the brain.

But most people still view the mind and brain as being distinct from the body. In 2016, four prominent brain researchers published an article summarising what we know about consciousness. It begins: Being conscious means that one is having an experience to see an image, hear a sound, think a thought or feel an emotion.

It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that the mind/brain and body are intimately linked, and that the body influences our thoughts and emotions. Being conscious does not just mean having awareness of the outside world. It means being aware of ones self within ones surroundings. The way we experience our body is central to how we perceive our self.

Phantom limbs are a striking demonstration of the importance of the body for self-consciousness. They were described in the mid-16th century by the barber-surgeon Ambroise Par, who reportedly amputated several hundred limbs a day during the Italian war of 1542-46.

Verily it is a thing wondrous, strange and prodigious, he wrote. The patients who have many months after the cutting away of the leg grievously complained that they yet felt exceeding great pain of that leg cut off. At that time, however, few survived the operation, so the phenomenon was seen only rarely, and dismissed as a delusion.

Advances in medicine and military technology changed this. The invention of a bullet called the Mini ball with its greater accuracy, range, and muzzle velocity, increased the number of amputations, while the introduction of anaesthetics and antiseptics improved the survival rates of soldiers who went under the knife.

And so it was that the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, who amputated countless arms and legs on the battlefields of the American civil war, came to see that phantom limbs are the rule rather than an exception, experienced by the vast majority of amputees.

The medical community was still sceptical of the phenomenon, however, so Mitchell initially described his observations as a short story, The Case of George Dedlow, published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1866. The fictional titular character was a composite of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were maimed and mutilated during the conflict. He lost all four limbs, one by one, to become a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape, reduced to [a] fraction of a man.

Mitchells story was so vivid that readers took it as factual, and believed that he was a real patient being treated at Philadelphias South Street Stump hospital. Many wrote him letters of support, some tried to visit him, and some even raised money for his care. But the story played a large part in bringing the phenomenon into the realms of medical science, and Mitchell went on to become the first elected president of the American Neurological Association.

Mitchell recognised phantom limbs as a disturbance of bodily self-consciousness, in which the amputee retains awareness of the missing limb, and feels as if it is still attached to their body. In some amputees, the phantom disappears within weeks or months of amputation. In others, it persists for decades.

Phantoms do not appear only in the form of missing limbs. Women may experience phantom breasts after mastectomy; men can experience phantom erections after amputation of a cancerous penis; and there are reports of phantom eyes, noses, teeth, and even phantom haemorrhoids, bowel movements and gas after surgical removal of the rectum.

Phantom sensations occur because the brain creates a dynamic model of the body by integrating tactile and visual information with limb position signals from the muscles and tendons. This model, variously called the body schema or body image, is crucial for both the perception and control of the body. But when a limb or other body part is removed, the schema is not properly updated, and so it retains an imprint of the missing part. As a result, the individual remains conscious of the missing part often, even more so than of their existing body parts.

Most of us could imagine few things worse than having a limb amputated. But some people want nothing more.

Take Australian Robert Vickers. Before I was 10 years old I knew my left leg somehow didnt belong, Vickers told ABC Radio National in 2009, and that my body would not be as I felt it should be until I had the leg amputated precisely halfway up the thigh.

Vickers harboured this strange desire, and suffered in silence, for more than 30 years. It made him severely depressed, and he received psychotherapy. He was prescribed antidepressants, tranquillisers, and antipsychotics, and received electroconvulsive therapy, but to no avail. He tried, without success, to damage his leg in various ways, in order to force an amputation.

Then, at 41, he submerged the unwanted limb in dry ice until the pain became unbearable. His wife drove him to hospital, where he received the amputation he had wanted for so long. I left hospital two weeks later with my desired stump, and life changed for the better from that day. In the 24 years since, I only regret not doing it sooner.

Vickers is perhaps the best documented case of body integrity identity disorder (BIID), an extremely rare condition, of which fewer than 500 other cases have been reported to date. For most of his life, Vickers believed his experience to be unique, but others suffering from the condition describe it in similar terms.

All report a fascination with amputees, and a desire to amputate, from an early age. The desire usually becomes obsessive, to the extent that they will try self-amputation. Use of dry ice appears to be the most common method, and some have used homemade guillotines or shotguns. In another well-documented case, a 79-year-old New Yorker travelled to Mexico and paid an unqualified doctor $10,000 to amputate his leg. He died of gangrene a week later.

BIID first appeared in medical literature in a 1977 study published in the Journal of Sex Research. The authors of this study including Greg Furth, himself a wannabe amputee described the condition as a paraphilia, or an abnormal sexual behaviour, in which the stump is fetishised because it resembles a phallus, and named it apotemnophilia, meaning amputation love.

Some BIID sufferers do indeed report a sexual aspect to their desire to amputate. But they invariably describe their experience in terms of self-identity. One participant in Melody Gilberts 2003 documentary Whole says that he finally became a person late in life after blowing his own leg off with a shotgun. Another participant told the film-makers that by taking the leg away, Im actually more of a person than I was before Ive corrected the body that was wrong. Vickers has stated that he felt incomplete with his left leg, and that he only became whole after its removal.

The condition was renamed body integrity identity disorder to reflect this. BIID is a disturbance of bodily self-consciousness with a neurological basis, as are phantom limbs. There is evidence to suggest that it occurs because the affected limb is not incorporated into the body schema as it develops in early childhood. Amputation is not offered as a treatment for BIID sufferers, but it could be argued that making it available to them would minimise their risk of self-harm.

Research into bodily awareness is leading us to rethink the nature of consciousness. Our understanding of how the brain works will progress only when we stop observing the brain in isolation, and start thinking of it as one part of a system that includes the body and its environment.

An understanding of how brain and body interact is critical for understanding the phenomena of phantom limbs and BIID. Such interactions also play a key role in mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, and in eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa. All of these conditions cause symptoms in the body that may be accompanied by disturbances in how the brain interprets those symptoms.

Yet the links between the brain and body are still under-appreciated. Only by taking the body into consideration will we gain a better understanding of these conditions and, it is to be hoped, develop effective treatments for them.

The new understanding of bodily self-consciousness leads us to some surprising conclusions. If bodily awareness is the basis of self-consciousness, then it follows that bumblebees, and even robots, may possess basic consciousness.

A study published in 2020 by researchers in Germany showed that bees can accurately judge gaps between obstacles relative to their wingspan, and reorient their bodies accordingly to avoid inflight collisions. Researchers at Columbia Universitys Creative Machines Lab have developed a starfish-shaped robot with an in-built body schema, which can adjust its gait after having a limb removed. The latest version of this robot creates its own body schema from experience.

If self-consciousness is based in bodily awareness, then it is unlikely that a lab-grown mini-brain could ever become conscious, as some ethicists have claimed. By the same token, transhumanists claim that we will one day gain immortality by uploading our brains to supercomputers will probably always be science fiction.

Body Am I: The New Science of Self-Consciousness by Moheb Costandi is published by MIT Press (22.50). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Cyborg Sapiens Book Opening Window on Future Presented in Athens – The National Herald

Posted: September 22, 2022 at 12:13 pm

ATHENS The recently-released book Cyborg Sapiens, written by Dimitris Orfanidis and published by Elkistis, covers very serious topics Artificial Intelligence, the Upgrading () even the transformation, of the human species via technological implants and genetic alteration, etc. Precisely because they address realities that may be coming but cannot yet be grasped, attention has been drawn to this publication precisely because it is a book of poetry, not non-fiction poets and artists being historically the presenters of states of being that are not visible or here yet.

The book presentation September 19 at the War Museum in Athens featured a learned panel moderated by journalist Fanis Papathanasiou. The participants were Orfanidis, Theofanis Tasis, professor of Contemporary Practical Philosophy at the Alpen Adria Universitt, who also teaches at College Year in Athens, Sonia Tourkolia, president of Educational and Cultural Society of Kyparissias, Sophia Lignou, President of Greeces Court of Appeals, and actor Vassilis Paleologos.

The event was organized by the society Literary Circle of Greek Judges( ) and indeed the Amphitheater was filled with judges, lawyers, and artists. Lignou is the Societys current president, Orfanidis, a judge of the Court of Appeals, is its Past President and current General Secretary.

A lively Q & A followed and Xenia Dimitriou, past Prosecutor with the Supreme Court of Greece, noted Orfanidis succeeded with his small volume of poems in eloquently encapsulating writing on the topic to date.

The value of the event, however, was the dramatization of such matters material that seems far off and abstract to us when encountered in books and articles through readings by Paleologos and others of the poems, many of which are in the voices of individuals of the future who are already living the realities being addressed. The poetry shows that while we cannot predict facts, one can explore the implications, legal, ethical, spiritual, of current developments.

Orfanidis fourth published poetry collection was inspired by a life experience. He was shaken by the power of technology to seize our souls. While he was enjoying a beautiful vista on the seashore, he noticed someone nearby captivated by a similar view on his cell phone. That prompted him to devour existing writing on these topics, books like Homo Deus and works by Professor Tasis.

Tasis and Orfanidis and later the Q&A participants touched on notions practical and philosophical: How and where are lines to be drawn? Who draws the lines and makes the decisions? Who gets the new goodies and how? What are the points of no return we must look out for and will we be able to see and act upon them in time?

The ideas that emerged during the event and the reception that followed in the Museums Foyer were pessimistic but fear is a good engine for driving people to learn and prepare to act, and that motivates the efforts of both Orfanidis and Tasis.

The discussions showed there are many slippery slopes here, as well as lines that are seemingly strongly drawn but in reality are too easily smeared.

Much has already happened, as some participants noted. We interact with AIs on the phone without realizing it. Will they gain consciousness and become our rivals or will they develop into less threatening things, not artificial persons but just cognitive functions that will add their (considerable) power to the invisible hand of the free market that already makes so many of our individual and collective decisions?

Almost everyone agrees implants would be a blessing for healing people with hearing, seeing, or even cognitive disabilities but once the hardware and software in mastered, the leap from maintaining health to granting super powers is small.

And to what degree can individuals or societies just say no to things like brain enhancements, for adults and for their children, when companies and schools might merely just suggest it but those who dont go alongare cast aside or left behind?

The poems also ask at what point do humans with implants and other enhancements become Cyborgs? Would they constitute a new species? Are we here we enter the realm or science fiction (or are we already there) who remain human going to be subjugated or eliminated by the transhuman? Again, how do you apply the brakes? Who applies the breaks?

The discussion also addressed the rise of political or religious movements that might try to advance the process perhaps erasing or replacing God or thwarting it.

With titles like Artificial Salvation, Not a (Big) New Deal, Artificial Intelligence Service, Fake Babies, Dolce Vita, and of course, Brave New World, Cyborg Sapiens is a lesson on the power of poems and a sermon on taking greater responsibility for the future.

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America embraces the fourth industrial revolution – The Post – UnHerd

Posted: at 12:13 pm

Spotted

07:30

by Mary Harrington

Do you trust this man? Credit: Getty

Biotech is entering a new era, with massive US government support: last week the US Government signed an executive order that assigned $2 billion in government funding for high risk, high reward biotech projects such as CRISPR gene editing, artificial meat and further development of the mRNA technology behind the Covid vaccine.

With this shift, as I noted last week, a new paradigm of health is emerging, not as a default state where doctors are on hand to help get us back to normal when something goes wrong. In the new, transhumanist vision, humans are a kind of meaty machine whose basic functioning can be engineered toward a vision of health thats something more than the default, via biomedical interventions. And doctors are engineers we depend on in perpetuity to keep supplying new and better upgrades.

Last weeks executive order gave another signal that this dream of engineers with limitless power to upgrade nature is increasingly dominant within the worlds only superpower:

- U.S. Government

In the paragraphs that follow theres plenty of throat-clearing about protecting against accidental or deliberate harm, and safeguarding United States principles and values and international best practices. But anyone who feels reassured as a result should glance again at the third sentence in the passage Ive quoted, which makes it clear that this path of limitless upgrades will be open from the word go to commercial exploitation.

For we already have a well-worked example of how easily harm can be redefined, as values come under pressure from commercial imperatives: child gender transition. Consider, for example, the different perverse incentives in publicly and privately-funded healthcare systems where this protocol is concerned. In recent years, European nations with publicly funded healthcare systems have rowed back on paediatric gender medicine, for example citing severe side effects and lack of evidence. America, though, has an insurance-based healthcare system, where the incentive is for more and more advanced and expensive interventions and here, perhaps coincidentally, senior public medical officials call the protocol essential, life-saving and evidence-based.

And while the NHS is closing its only child gender clinic, calling it inadequate, in the US gender care for children is an explosive growth area. The first such US clinic opened in 2007, and there are now (according to the HRC) 50 such institutions, though the real number is probably as high as 300 clinics providing biomedical upgrade services to children.

Of course its not just about following the money; its also about values. America has long valorised those who overcome odds or disregard limits to realise a seemingly impossible dream. So when new technologies promise to overcome our physiological limits, extending that American Dream to human nature itself, no wonder many are enthused. And from this perspective, the harm and violation of values consists in submitting to unchosen biophysical norms. Here, radical interventions are defended as a means of protecting children from the trauma of undergoing the wrong puberty.

We are plunging blindly into the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, guided by an ascendant paradigm that views harm as a refusal to intervene in whats normal and health as structurally reliant on ongoing biomedical intervention. The reality, though, often falls short of this hubristic dream. Theres already no shortage of testimony from children who regret having interrupted their normal maturation and irreversibly surgically re-sculpted their bodies in accordance with the transhumanist paradigm of freedom-through-upgrades.

And when we extrapolate the now US Government-backed drive to accelerate biotech innovation, we can reasonably expect these children to be merely the first bow-wave of living collateral damage. If we continue on this path without any framework for defending our normal human organisms as right in themselves, without upgrades, there will be plenty more.

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You need to watch 2022’s best video game adaptation ASAP – Inverse

Posted: at 12:13 pm

Video game adaptions have a checkered history, but anime consistently seems to be the best medium for alternative content based on video games. Following in the footsteps of shows like Castlevania and Arcane, Netflixs new Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a phenomenal adaption of the source material that fully makes use of the series key themes about transhumanism in a cyberized world. In fact, it delivers a more compelling story than anything found in Cyberpunk 2077.

The events of Edgerunners take place one year before the start of Cyberpunk 2077, and the Night City of the anime will look quite similar to anyone thats played the game. The show uses locations from the game, and there are even a few familiar characters that pop up along the way. Edgerunners follows David Martinez, a street kid struggling to survive while his mother scrounges every penny she can to send him to Arasaka Academy. Like most stories in the cyberpunk genre, tragedy hits Davids life and continues to strike throughout the series.

Before long, David has a life-changing meeting with an Edgerunner named Lucy and joins up with a group to start pulling off jobs. In the games universe, an Edgerunner refers to someone who lives on the edge and generally works jobs outside of the law, outfitting their bodies with cyberware and other technical enhancements. Lucy is instantly one of the most memorable anime characters in recent memory. Shes a stylish and aloof netrunner with a traumatic past that informs so much of her identity, and the way the show peels back her layers is a wonder to behold.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners does a great job of integrating the UI of the game into animation.Netflix

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is filled with plenty of action, explosions, and cursing, but whats most impressive about the show is the surprisingly thoughtful and emotional relationship at the heart of everything.

Underneath all the neon glamour Edgerunners is really a story about two people struggling to find their place in a hostile world while protecting each other. They each have their own development arc across the 10-episode series, but their evolving relationship is the most compelling part of whats going on.

Theres also a strong ensemble cast to back up the core duo. The foul-mouthed and diminutive Rebecca stands out as a hilariously unhinged highlight, while the unscrupulous villain Faraday makes a good foil to David.

Impeccable pacing in a meaningful overarching narrative full of memorable characters is the recipe for good TV, and Edgerunners has it all. Each episode has at least some kind of action, and it becomes unabashedly violent and/or gory at some points.

Studio Trigger was the absolutely perfect choice to bring Cyberpunk to anime, as the studios trademark eclectic style works wonders here. The bright neon colors of Night City really pop, and the animation really has a sense of impact with bullets exploding heads and massive blows from mechanical arms making horrific bone-crunching noises.

Characters like Rebbecca stand out as some of the best the Cyberpunk series has to offer.Netflix

Action scenes consistently make use of dynamic camera angles, and there are some neat tricks the animation does to represent characters moving at high speeds. All of this is highlighted by a bumping soundtrack that sports a few original songs on top of plenty of ones from Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners really feels like it makes a blueprint for how CD Projekt Red should approach this franchise moving forward. Sure the show has all the Choombas and other slang the game does, but theres a genuineness that the anime has that the game simply lacks. Although there are certainly some strong narratives in the game, much of Cyberpunk 2077s storytelling feels like it's specifically trying to be hard and edgy.

While Edgerunners has a lot of those same elements, its more concerned with making characters that feel like real people. Because of that, the seasons climax feels memorable and important. So much of Edgerunners story isnt happy, but it definitely winds up feeling immensely cathartic.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY.

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Top 10 Magic Churches Through Which To Work Out My Real World Feelings About Religion – Hipsters of the Coast – Hipsters of the Coast

Posted: at 12:13 pm

Cover image: Abiding Grace by Jenn Ravenna Tran

As a professor of theology and religious ethics, I believe that there is value in understanding what religions teach and how those teachings impact peoples lives and cultures. As a religious person, Im also deeply invested in reckoning with how my religious tradition and those I encounter affect me personally and the folks I loveand its hard to turn this off. For some folks, Magic: The Gathering is a needed escape from these heavy questions; but for me, Magic and especially its lore are a playground in which these issues can be played with and poked in a way that is insulated, at least some small amount, from the higher stakes of critique of a real religious tradition.

Where do I see this happening most fruitfully? So glad you asked. Here are my rankings for the top 10 religious institutions in Magics multiverse that I think have the most to say about contemporary issues in (western) religion and spirituality:

Due Respect by James Ryman

This universalist evangelical movement ostensibly welcomes mana of all colors, as long as the white mana is in charge. The Machine Orthodoxy just wants to purify and compleat you, and if it has to do that by colonizing other worlds and forcing you to comply with groupthink, then thats what it will do. Really, its no trouble.

The Machine Orthodoxy is an obvious and monstrous evil reminiscent of Star Treks Borg. The terrifying Giger-esque New Phyrexians are our projection of fascistic terror, with all its promised disintegration of individuality. The villainous eugenic aim of Yawgmoth and his worshippers has been brought forward and twisted into the dream of even greater multiversal domination.

Part of this twist is the relentlessly literal and materialist mind of the New Phyrexians, who have only recently begun to understand what a soul. There is something fascinating about how Phyrexians receive and understand informationlike anyone, according to the structures of possibility within their own worldview. As the medieval dictum goes, what is received is received in the mode of the receiver. Nevertheless, the alien nature of the New Phyrexians is distancing enough that Im more interested in the Old Phyrexia.

Phyrexian Scriptures by Joseph Meehan

Thats right, GIve me that old time religion. On Old Phyrexia, Yawgmoth came to have the power of a god, and that included having followers! If you like H.R. Giger-esque body horror (I do not) and eugenics, and/or listening to Fear Factory, this might be the place for you.

The design of Phyrexia and its scriptures is inspired by the Christian mythology surrounding Hell, where Yawgmoth is considered the great creator and the spheres of Phyrexia are patterned after the layers of Dantes Inferno. The scriptures, which appear on the eponymous card and in the flavor text of six cards, read the way one may expect a religious text to read. The flavor text on Dark Ritual is represented below, in Josephs Meehans rendering:

From void evolved Phyrexia. Great Yawgmoth, Father of Machines, saw its perfection. Thus the Grand Evolution began.

Evil cults are often meant to be readily understood as villains, and we arent meant to think too much about them, but theres something here about the notion of transhumanism and our faith in science and medicine to solve our problems and carry us forward that might be worth teasing out.

Find more about Phyrexia at: The Grail Legend in Magic Lore

Preacher by Quinton Hoover

Do you want a mishmash of everything Jesper Myrfors wants to critique about Christianity? This Church is for youits got everything: Inquisition, a Fire and Brimstone Preacher, and likely references to antisemitic violence. Whatever it may have once been before the Brothers War, The Church of Tal became a devoted witch-hunting institution in the centuries after the Sylex blast, adopting the credo Suffer not a magician to live almost verbatim from the planeswalker King Jamess Bible.

Given the Churchs history of reacting against the immense violence of artificers and wizards, theres probably something interesting to say here about the danger of the oppressed becoming the oppressor, but the Dark wasnt yet ready to say it.

Read more about Magic & Witch Hunting at Religion & Horror in the Season of the Witch

Have you ever gotten so upset over religious complacency that you founded your own massively popular breakaway sect of zealots and doomsayers which elevated you to such prestige that you were able to convince an eternally young woman to have an affair with you, only to have her leave you for a Sarpadian dwarf, so you decided to tell everyone she was the reincarnated high priest of the evil dark lord of a different religion, and sent your former concubine to go and kill her, not realizing that your intended victims brother had godlike magical powers and could incinerate you? Well thats what it feels like to drive the new Ford F-150.

The Farrelites were a charismatic cult of personality, preaching the end times, demonizing their enemies, and waging a culture war within Icatia, all while the cult leader manipulated women within his sphere of influence. Can someone go check on whether they ended up making Icatia great againits gone? Oh. hm.

Revival by Paul Canavan

Ravnica is what you get when you think to yourself, wow, what if every church in Prague was actually the architectural style for the whole world. The Orzhov Syndicate is what you get when you reduce 16th century Catholicism to the doctrines of purgatory and indulgences and the material excesses of clergy and make it an entire churchs personality. The resulting institution functions something like a mob or a crime family, which the wealthy extorting the weak and less powerful, and binding them to contracts that they will likely never repay.

Like Innistrads Church of Avacyn, what started out as a two-dimensional portrait of a Church run like a shady bank later becomes an idea for at least a faint consideration of deeper issues. When Kaya kills the Obzedat and assumes leadership of the guild, the notion of debt, penance, and reparation are briefly raised, and the confluence of the spiritual and the economic set the stage for some potentially worthwhile reflection on how money and faith interact. The story during the WAR era didnt quite get there, but perhaps next time.

Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose by Lie Setiawan

Another take on 16th Century Catholicism. If doing a what if with indulgences and purgatory wasnt enough, the Legion of Dusk on Ixalan seemingly compares the Spanish Catholic conquistadors to bloodthirsty vampires. But wait, they arent really conquistadors

I mean, sure, theyre pale and they dress in clothing and armor styled after the 16th century. They have Spanish names, and sail galleons across the seas from their homelandand admittedly, they do have hostile encounters with the natives. But they arent really colonizing anything. Adanto is just a temporary thing while they look for the Immortal Sun. We promise! We also promise they arent Catholics. Yes, they apparently have a supreme pontiff, and they build cathedrals and practice a kind of baptism and the consumption of a sacrament in honor of their founder. But look, its not like they said that Catholics are bloodthirsty, colonizing fanatics.

Caricatures aside, the stories of the Apostle Mavren Feins epiphany upon finding Elenda, about how the purpose of their faith has been twisted and misunderstood in her absence, and about VItos resistance to this news, has resonances with the experience of many young religious people who begin to see the world and their old faith with new eyes (or those who refuse to) after leaving home for the first time. Whether we explore this further in the coming years Ixalan set is yet to be soon, but I hope we do!

Read more at: The Thorn in Our Side: Vito & the Legacy of the Spanish Conquest

Basri, Devoted Paladin by Jason Rainville

Have you ever spent your life training to be worthy of special service to your gods so you could pass the test and go to the afterlife, but in reality your gods had been dominated generations ago by an immensely powerful dragon wizard from another world in an elaborate plot to create an unstoppable army of undead super soldiers so he could invade a different world and reclaim his lost immortality? Well thats that it feels like to drive the new Ford F-150.

Amonkhets population is the victim of a different sort of pyramid scheme, a sham religion replacing their original, indigenous faith. Using their old gods, who seemed to be genuinely concerned about the ideals and concepts they represent and embody, Nicol Bolas twisted the Amonkhetis understanding of spirituality to funnel power to himself, manipulating the beliefs of the Amonkheti for his own dark purpose.

This story is common enough in American culture: a strong personality tweaks Christianity just enough to walk away with the riches of their congregation while still maintaining all of the appearance of being a religious expression concerned with the spiritual well-being of its members and even still perhaps possessing ministers who are serving from genuine and benevolent conviction.

While we havent gotten to see him in action in the story, yet, Basri Ket is a fascinating example of someone healing from the spiritual loss that is felt when a religious community is rocked by scandal and the revelation that so much of what they believed was a distorted fabrication. What Basri Ket does in the wake of this knowledge is to separate enduring truth from its abuse by demogogues. Taking up Oketras ideal of solidarity, Basri begins a new faith that aims at something transcendent without reliance upon the falsified cosmology of the Amonkheti religiona tremendously fascinating approach in an era where more and more people in developed nations are disaffiliating from organized religion while remaining as spiritual as they ever were.

Idyllic Tutor by Jaime Jones

If the poems, dialogues, and philosophy we have from Ancient Greece is any indication, the Greek Gods were, for layfolk, almost never gods of exclusive devotion (henotheism) until very late (4th to 2nd centuries BCE). However, being in any sense devoted to Heliod, as a pilgrim, champion, or priest would certainly cause consternation. In the wake of rumblings about Heliods actions regarding Elspeth, and with whispers mounting that gods are the patterns that we perceive, given sentience, there are few places in the multiverse that are likely to have more lively conversations about philosophy of religion.

What is the power of collective belief? Can collective belief become so strong that it develops something of its own will and life? Is that (all) what religion is? Is that the truth of religious doctrine? If thats the case, then what is apotheosis (ascending to godhood), really? Is it giving oneself over so fully to the collective belief that ones name becomes symbolic of, even synonymous with some primal force? Like Fred Rogers, and kindness? The way the world of Theros provokes theological questions like these is why Ive ranked it at number 3.

Read more at:Reflections on the Return of Idyllic Tutor

Abiding Grace by Jenn Ravenna Tran

If, for your mental health one day, you need to daydream about a religion that is everything it says it is, an institution dedicated to the teachings of its legitimately benevolent founder, that sets out to protect the weak and help those in need, then the Church of Serra might be for you. This Churchs floating towers are a little piece of heaver, Serras Realm on Dominaria.

The Serran Church preserves a lot of the aesthetics that we expect in Christianity-inspired fantasy churches, like glorious stained glass, takes it to the next level, and sets it within an institutional structure wherein the strongest authority figures all take the form of strong, flying women. If the current Church is keeping the old traditions of Serras Realm alive, then it also has hymns and liturgy! High Church Anglicans rejoice!

Idealistic depictions of institutions like this one help us to imagine whats possible, to put our hopes and aspirations into a form where we can examine and improve them, and learn from our own narratives about our motivations and our goals. While having too rosy an idea of any institution can blind us to inequities and other moral failures, not pausing to imagine a better world can tempt us toward an unhelpful nihilism. The goodness of the contemporary Church of Serra is a gleaming respite from the often depressing examples of religious institutions elsewhere.

Read More at The Church of Serra

Arlinn, the Packs Hope by Eric Deschamps

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Karl Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, 1844

What if we made Marxs words about religion the entire plot of a Magic: The Gathering set?

Seriously though, while the initial premise of Innistrads main institutional religion could seem like it leans into a thin literalization of Marxs critique, recent visits to Innistrad hint at the possibility for deeper reflection about how to hold on to faith and rebuild after the institution is rocked by corruption and scandal, or after your relationship to yourself puts you at odds with the beliefs of many in the Church (cf. Odric, Thalia, and Arlinn).

Now that the Church is rebuilding and many folks are turning to Sigarda, and folk religions are returning in the absence of the Avacynian Churchs persecutions, the religious landscape on Innistrad is poised to become one of the most interesting places in the multiverse to ponder issues analogous to contemporary real-world religious issueswhich is why Ive given it the top spot!

Read More at As Hallowtide Approaches: Negotiating Faith and Festival

I hope youve enjoyed this tour of different religious expressions in the multiverse. There are so many more religious or quasi-religious institutions we might have examined, and in more detail, that Ive omitted for a lack of lore, or because they land in an area that is far enough outside of my expertise that I didnt think I could fairly articulate the issues they raise. If these 10 provoked any deeper thinking, then Ive done my job, and I am happy to leave the rest to you for now.

Until next time.

Jacob Torbeckis a researcher and instructor of theology and ethics. He hails from Chicago, IL, and loves playing Commander and pre-modern cubes.

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Dr. Carrie Madej Out of Georgia | American Media Periscope

Posted: September 11, 2022 at 1:41 pm

June 28, 2022

By James Grundvig, American Media Periscope

On the first summer Sunday, Dr. Carrie Madej and her partner, Billy, crashed in a single-engine plane in Woodbury, Georgia. The bucolic town, located 70 miles south of Atlanta, became the second leg of their journey after returning from a trip to Florida.

Why is this last point critical? Because it almost rules out sabotage to the engine and aircraft. Had someone tampered with it, the plane should have crashed on the first leg flying back from Florida, not at the Roosevelt Memorial Airport in Woodbury.

This observation came from a major airline and small aircraft pilot. Still, a source within the FAA will notify me if evidence is found to the contrary. Another airline pilot texted me, stating: This is why I only fly in twin-engine planes in case of a stall on a single-engine aircraft.

With broken legs, successful surgery, and a massive outpouring of best wishes, prayers, and speedy recovery, Dr. Madej moved from critical to stable condition yesterday. As of this writing, many of her close contacts believe she will be released from the Atlanta metro area hospital today.

From the Washington Standard:

It happened around 2:15 p.m. The FAA said they were flying a single-engine Piper PA-24.

According to Michael Watson, the chairman for the Meriwether County Airport Authority, the flight was on the way from St. Petersburg, Florida, near Tampa, to Newnan-Coweta County Airport when it experienced an engine issue as the plane started its descent. The flight was diverted south to Warm Springs, but crashed. Flight tracking website Flight Aware shows the path of the flight before the crash.

The FAA is working with the National Transportation Safety Board to determine a cause for the crash. Neither agency would provide specifics of the investigation.

Dr. Carrie Madej Spear of Truth

For those unfamiliar with Dr. Carrie Madej and her work, or who havent seen her interviews on my show Unrestricted Truths, Episodes 75 and 32, or on AMP Breaking News segments here, here, and here, or at the June 2021 Tampa Freedom Conference, her story is unique.

Before COVID-19, I knew hundreds of doctors, scientists, journalists, and researchers uncovering the hidden dangers of the U.S. immunization program. Today, I know thousands and more and more experts have come out to defend freedom, liberty, truth, and the power of the individual to choose by informed consent. All of that has been absent since the pandemic started in early 2020.

Before Covid, I didnt hear or know Dr. Carrie Madejs name. But when the CDC, FDA, and NIH began fabricating the virus data, creating the casedemic fraud via the bogus PCR tests to push the Covid vaccine agenda, her name rose quickly to the top.

We in the truth movement learned that Carrie Madej had been in the same fight as us, but on a different parallel track dating back to a 2013 techno-transhuman conference she attended in Atlanta. Chilled by what she learned and how scientists had sold out to the devil Dr. Madej became known as the transhumanism whistleblower. She saw where the Covid vaccineswith the quantum dot technology, Luciferase Bluetooth neural link, graphene oxide, and mRNA technologyled to a very dark place and future for humanity.

She exposed the dark plan and bleak future at countless conferences, as guests on shows, expert witness, and podcasts, by shining a light on the transhumanist Covax agenda.

Over the past year, Dr. Madej became known as one of the 5 Docs alongside Drs. Lee Merritt, Christiane Northrup, Sherri Tenpenny, and Larry Palevsky on their hit Bitchute channel show, Critically Thinking with the 5 Docs.

If you dont know her brave work, risking her life every day, to tell the truth, lay out the facts, and break it down in plain English for her viewers and audience, you can find more about her on the Dr. Carrie Madej website.

Yes, a plane crash after takeoff typically ends in death and tragedy. However, in her case, and that of Billy, as many have stated since the accident, that they are alive and out of ICU so quickly was a miracle.

In this fight of good vs. evil, light against darkness, truth over lies, Dr. Carrie Madej will have time this summer to reflect on what she has accomplished over the past 30 months of Covid fraud. During her rehab and recovery, she will also have time to look at the big picture signals of how the global medical tyranny plan will come to an end this fall.

And end it will.

Soon without the ability to print money, corrupt governments worldwide will collapse, and along with it, their three-year, concocted pandemic plan and lockdown, along with their instruments of destruction in the Covid clot shot.

Heres to a speedy recovery, Dr. Carrie Madej!

Best wishes, love, and faith to you.

Our prayers are with you.

James Grundvig, Editor-in-Chief

John Michael Chambers, Founder and CEO

Dawn Martin, Executive Producer

Kris Edlekamp, COO

And the rest of the AMP Media team.

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Not Applicable Website for Not Applicable label and artists …

Posted: at 1:41 pm

Berliners! Check out Der Dritte Stands 5 day programme at Au Topsi Pohl starting Tuesday:

5 DAYS AT AU TOPSI POHL Berlin

12.7.2021ALCHIMIA ORGANICA Matthias Bauer & Maria LuccheseDER DRITTE STAND

13.7.2021DUO Matthias Bauer & Anna KaluzaDER DRITTE STAND

14.7.2021XENOFOX Rudi Fischerlehner &Olaf RuppDER DRITTE STAND

15.7.2021ZSOLT SORESsoloDER DRITTE STAND

16.7.2021FOILS Matthias Mller &FrankPaul SchubertDER DRITTE STAND

With an art exhibition byMaria Lucchese

Concerts start at 20:30Au TopsiPohl, Pohlstrae 64, Berlin

Shanzhai Acid takes its inspiration in equal parts from the Chinese culture of imitation electronic products that often surpass that which they imitate through punk customisation, and the psychedelic consciousness that Mark Fisher, Jeremy Deller and Florian Hecker, amongst others, have inferred from the social and philosophical catalyst of Acid musics.

Manifested via a kind of knock-off orchestra of mutant modules and bastardised synths conducted by DIY machine learning algorithms, its a construct designed to explore what kind of auditory trip this combination of opinionated, chaotic sound generators and ML can hallucinate into the world of electronic music minstrelry.

Throw the switch on this frankensteinian analogue computer and vortices of covariance, fractal geometries and nonlinear attractors are born, evolve and die as sonified complex systems in the hands of an omnivalent machine savant. Hundreds of parameters and routing assignments are invoked from hundreds of thousands of training data points, exploding the labyrinth of analogue circuitry into myriad trajectories, sometimes improvising constellations and galaxies of sound that dance and weave before collapsing in on themselves like blackholes.

As these nucleic worlds evolve and collide, the rigours of musical analysis spontaneously combust, leaving only a kind of amorphous ectoplasmic string theory of sound. In this effervescent, primordial flux, noiseforms evolve and run amok, speaking in tongues, self-organising and conjuring for their listeners spontaneous creation paradoxes.

Retrain in Cyber they said. QED.

Der Dritte Strand is a new trio featuring Matthias Mller (trombone), Matthias Bauer (double bass) and Rudi Fischerlehner (drums and percussion). Have a listen to the awesome Umstand from their forthcoming album, releasing on March 11th 2022.

Great to see Martin, Leonie and Laura taking their Still/Moving light sculpture to COP26 follow them and its progress over here: https://stillmoving.org/

Transhuman Haromlodics takes inspiration from a diverse network of actors and phenomena, allowing them to shape and influence the nature and form of the music in an attempt to imagine a fluid, expressive symbiosis; a small contribution to forging a more engaged and emancipated understanding of how thinking more openly about our culture of music might help us think more openly about other aspects of our reality.

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Review: BBC PROMS AND THE ENO at Printworks London – Broadway World

Posted: September 7, 2022 at 5:38 pm

The Proms, Printworks, and multimedia mayhem. Created and co-produced by award winning counter tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, Philip Glass's meditative Minimalism and Handel's Baroque elegance crash together in a cacophony of artistic media.

It certainly wants to be more than just a musical conversation between two composers. But its ambition is often its own worst enemy.

Performed at Printworks, which usually houses DJ sets and raves, it's an artistic free-for-all with everything thrown at the wall. The Handel and Glass combinations are taken from Roth's Grammy award winning album ARC. Karen Kamensek conducts the English National Opera Orchestra alongside a variety of films projected overhead, artist Glenn Brown produces live painting, there are dancers darting around, and Jason Singh's "nature beatboxing."

Everything clamours for attention; moments of coherence are few and far between. When the different media do fuse its the psycology of Glass's brooding repetition leading the charge in carving the fraught emotional landscape. The visuals add colour afterwards. The Prom sees first performances of extracts from Songs from Liquid Days, Monsters of Grace, and The Fall of the House of Usher, alongside a world premiere of 'No more, you petty spirits' from Cymbeline.

It's the opposite with the Handel whose music is sadly relegated secondary to the visuals. His 'Vivi, tiranno' from Rodelinda is juxtaposed with a loud satirical collage of videos from Toiletpaper Magazine's Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari; brash and surreal inversions of adverts and dadaesque visual puns are projected onto the venue's walls.

The films are vaguely linked by a theme of evolution. Starting with Handel's Rinaldo, medieval knights wander green and pleasant lands. It then morphs into a clunky 90's video game before it mutates into a futuristic cityscape with humanoid robots wandering around contemplating their trans-human existence. The narrative, as ambiguous as it is, chimes with Glass' undecorated and precise emotional language, but the overstuffed visuals become too bombastic and too distracting alongside the rich complexity of Handel's music.

Naturally some of it does veer into pretentiousness. Costanzo strides through the crowd guided by assistants brandishing blinding lights to split them as if he is the messiah descending from Heaven. It's a little bit silly, but it is undeniably exhilarating to be so close to Costanzo's blisteringly melancholic performance as lights, colours, and sounds swirl around above.

The experience is only possible because of Printworks. The space is entirely democratic. There is no hierarchy as in other venues; there is no best seat in the house. The audience can and do move around the space engendering a sense of conceptual freedom to engage in the artistic anarchy unravelling around them. But there are some trade-offs: the orchestra rely on microphones giving their timbre a distinctly metallic quality. Whilst fitting for the industrial ambiance, Printworks is an old printing plant clad in concrete and metal, it leaves the orchestra feeling cold.

But maybe it is something that is best enjoyed without overthinking. Picking one thing and focusing on one's own narrative is the way to engage in this, not letting everything battle for attention. It's a bit like an art gallery in that sense: you can't give every painting the time it deserves so best to pick out a handful to savour.

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The fruit of the transhumanist project will not be a better human being – TVP World

Posted: September 2, 2022 at 2:39 am

For the time being, it seems that far more dangerous than artificial intelligence itself are the people who manage it and are already using it, for example, to invigilate society or to control peoples moods, preferences, even opinions, says Father Dr Micha Zikowski MI.

TVP WEEKLY: Ilya Samoylenko, one of the commanders of the Azov battalion, is called a Cyborg by the Ukrainian media. In 2015, he lost his left arm, which was replaced with a titanium prosthesis, and his right eye in the fight against the Russians, so he uses an artificial one. Can we consider this as an example of transhumanism?

FR. DR MICHA ZIKOWSKI: In order to judge whether a particular intervention in the biological structure of the human being is transhumanist, it must be assessed against the overall perspective of this ideology. Transhumanists write a lot about the cyborgisation of the human being, but it should be remembered that in transhumanism the whole sphere of science is subordinated to a certain neo-Gnostic, techno-spiritualist vision. Transhumanism in its futuristic projects ultimately wants to free the human mind (consciousness) from the body. The body is therefore an obstacle to divinity, which transhumanists identify with the abiological post-human stage. This is why transhumanism nurtures one might say a deep hatred of the body.

So the aim of transhumanism is not to help human beings on the basis of therapeutic intervention?

No. Endo or exoprosthesis (cyborgisation) is not in itself transhumanist, unless the person undergoing it wishes to no longer be human and has done so for that very purpose. The nature of transhumanism is a disagreement with remaining in a biological body. We can call the enhancement of the body by various kinds of technology transhumanism if it is strictly subordinated to the expectation of the arrival of such technology that will make it possible to leave the corporeal dimension, e.g. by transferring the mind to cyberspace.

Is transhumanism characterised by an extreme instrumentalisation of human existence?

Of course. It is not difficult to see in it a technological substitute for an anti-Christian religious system. Such conceptual creations found in transhumanism as technotranscendence, techno-gnosis, the technological singularity, super-intelligence or the post-human are in fact parareligious concepts, merely dressed up in a technological robe. Transhumanism is judged by the representatives of this movement themselves to be a neo-Gnostic system. History shows that the doctrine of Gnostic sects has been fought against by Christian intellectuals, if only because of the glorification of the figure of Satan by some Gnostics. We can also find similar examples in transhumanism, e.g. in one text by leading transhumanist Max More we find a manifesto entitled In Praise of the Devil.

Click here to read the full article.

By Tomasz Plaskota

Translated by jz

source:WEEKLY.TVP.PL

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