Daily Archives: June 16, 2016

The Secrets of Personal Empowerment

Posted: June 16, 2016 at 5:44 pm

When someone engages in a behavior thats a problem, the reason they do it is irrelevant. If we try too hard to understand the behavior, before long well find ourselves excusing it and eventually enabling it.

Ive recently completed a series of articles on the types of behavior frequently displayed by persons with disturbed characters. Those behaviors interfere with the process of healthy socialization and also frequently serve as mechanisms to manipulate and impression-manage others. (See Understanding the Dysfunctional Tactics of Disturbed Characters.)

In a new series of articles, well be discussing the keys to empowering oneself not only in relationships with disturbed characters, but in all social interactions. The principal secrets of personal empowerment are twofold:

Once the main principals are grasped, there are specific methods or tools a person can employ to keep from being taken advantage of in relationships with unscrupulous characters. Several articles to come will take a look at each of these tools of empowerment and how to apply them in everyday situations.

In previous articles, Ive mentioned how one of the most problematic legacies of traditional psychology is the notion that peoples behavior is motivated most of the time by their fears and insecurities and that they are not often consciously aware of their emotional issues. Most of us are familiar with the tenets of traditional psychology. So, when somebody does something unnerving we almost always try to understand it by asking ourselves what need, fear, or insecurity underlies it. Worst of all, often the leap is made from understanding the behavior to inadvertently excusing it or enabling it.

The single most important empowerment tool is to accept no excuses for hurtful, harmful, or inappropriate behavior. Once a person stops trying to explain or understand a behavior and simply sets a limit to no no longer accept it, everything begins to change. Learning to correctly identify and label the various problem behaviors that disturbed characters frequently display as well as learning how to respond to those behaviors is equally empowering.

So, we begin the process of empowerment by accepting no excuses. When someone engages in a behavior thats a problem, the reason they do it is irrelevant. If we try too hard to understand the behavior, before long well find ourselves excusing it and eventually enabling it. If a behavior is wrong, it needs to be corrected, purely and simply. And we need to hold one another accountable. Its the only way to stem the stunningly rising tide of character disturbance in our culture. We complete the process of empowerment by learning how to conduct ourselves in a wide variety of situations in which persons of deficient or disturbed characters may throw a host of problem behaviors at us. By recognizing their tactics, labeling them correctly, responding to them effectively, and holding the disturbed character accountable for change, anyone can learn the secrets of not being taken advantage of or exploited.

Accepting no excuses is the first and cardinal rule, but there are many others. Well explore them all in upcoming posts.

Would you like to join the discussion on The Secrets of Personal Empowerment?

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The Secrets of Personal Empowerment

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What is Posthumanism? | The Curator

Posted: at 5:44 pm

Perhaps you have had a nightmare in which you fell through the bottom of your known universe into a vortex of mutated children, talking animals, mental illness, freakish art, and clamoring gibberish. There, you were subjected to the gaze of creatures of indeterminate nature and questionable intelligence. Your position as the subject of your own dream was called into question while voices outside your sight commented upon your tenuous identity. When you woke, you were relieved to find that it was only a dream-version of the book you were reading when you fell asleep. Maybe that book was Alice in Wonderland; maybe it was What is Posthumanism?

Now, it is not quite fair to compare Cary Wolfes sober, thoughtful scholarship with either a nightmare or a work of (childrens?) fantasy. It is a profound, thoroughly researched study with far-reaching consequences for public policy, bioethics, education, and the arts. However, it does present a rather odd dramatis personae, including a glow-in-the-dark rabbit, a woman who feels most at ease in a cattle chute, an artist of Jewish descent who implants an ID-chip in his own leg, researchers who count the words in a dogs vocabulary, and horses who exhibit more intelligence than the average human toddler. The settings, too, are often wildly different from those you might expect in an academic work: a manufactured cloud hovering over a lake in Switzerland, a tree park in Canada where landscape and architecture blend and redefine one another, recording studios, photographic laboratories, slaughterhouses, and (most of all) the putative minds of animals and the deconstructed minds of the very humans whose ontological existence it seeks to problematize.

But that is another exaggeration. Wolfes goal is not to undermine the existence or value of human beings. Rather, it is to call into question the universal ethics, assumed rationality, and species-specific self-determination of humanism. That is a mouthful.

Indeed, Wolfes book is a mouthful, and a headful. It is in fact a book by a specialist, for specialists. While Wolfe is an English professor (at Rice University) and identifies himself with literary and cultural studies (p. 100), this is first of all a work of philosophy. Its ideal audience is very small, consisting of English and Philosophy professors who came of age in the 70s, earned their Ph.D.s during the hey-day of Derridean Deconstruction, and have spent the intervening decades keeping up with trends in systems theory, cultural studies, science, bioethics, and information technology. It is rigorous and demanding, especially in its first five chapters, which lay the conceptual groundwork for the specific analyses of the second section.

In these first five chapters, Wolfe describes his perspective and purpose by interaction with many other great minds and influential texts, primarily those of Jacques Derrida. Here, the fundamental meaning and purpose of Posthumanism becomes clear. Wolfe wants his readers to rethink their relationship to animals (what he calls nonhuman animals). His goal is a new and more inclusive form of ethical pluralism (137). That sound innocuous enough, but he is not talking about racial, religious, or other human pluralisms. He is postulating a pluralism that transcends species. In other words, he is promoting the ethical treatment of animals based on a fundamental re-evaluation of what it means to be human, to be able to speak, and even to think. He does this by discussing studies that reveal the language capacities of animals (a dog apparently has about a 200-word vocabulary and can learn new words as quickly as a human three-year-old; pp. 32-33), by recounting the story of a woman whose Aspergers syndrome enables her to empathize with cows and sense the world the way they do (chapter five), and by pointing out the ways in which we value disabled people who do not possess the standard traits that (supposedly) make us human.

But Wolfe goes further than a simple suggestion that we should be nice to animals (and the unspoken plug for universal veganism). He is proposing a radical disruption of liberal humanism and a rigorous interrogation of what he sees as an arrogant complacency about our species. He respects any variety of philosophy that challenges anthropocentrism and speciesism (62)anthropocentrism, of course, means viewing the world as if homo sapiens is the center (or, more accurately, viewing the world from the position of occupying that center) and specisism is the term he uses to replace racism. We used to feel and enact prejudice against people of different ethnic backgrounds, he suggests, but we now know that is morally wrong. The time has come, then, to realize that we are feeling and enacting prejudice against people of different species.

Although Wolfe suggests many epistemological and empirical reasons for rethinking the personhood of animals, he comes to the conclusion that our relationship with them is based on our shared embodiment. Humans and animals have a shared finitude (139); we can both feel pain, suffer, and die. On the basis of our mutual mortality, then, we should have an emphasis on compassion (77). He is not out to denigrate his own species far from it. Indeed, he goes out of his way to spend time discussing infants (who have not yet developed rationality and language), people with disabilities (especially those that prevent them from participating in fully rational thought and/or communication), and the elderly (who may lose some of those rational capacities, especially if racked by such ailments as Alzheimers). Indeed, he claims: It is not by denying the special status of human being[s] but by intensifying it that we can come to think of nonhuman animalsasfellow creatures (77).

This joint focus on the special status of all human beings along with the other living creatures roaming (or swimming, flying, crawling, slithering) the globe has far-reaching consequences for public policy, especially bioethics. Wolfe says that, currently, bioethics is riddled with prejudices: Of these prejudices, none is more symptomatic of the current state of bioethics than prejudice based on species difference, and an incapacity to address the ethical issues raised by dramatic changes over the past thirty years in our knowledge about the lives, communication, emotions, and consciousnesses of a number of nonhuman species (56). One of the goals of his book, then, is to reiterate that knowledge and promote awareness of those issues that he sees as ethical.

If you read Wolfes book, or even parts of it, you will suddenly see posthumanism everywhere. You can trace its influence in the enormously fast-growing pet industry. From the blog Pawsible Marketing: As in recent and past years, there is no doubt that pets continue to become more and more a part of the family, even to the extent of becoming, in some cases, humanized.

You will see it in bring-your-pet-to-work or bring-your-pet-to-school days. You might think it is responsible for the recent introduction of a piece of legislation called H.R. 3501, The Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years, know as the HAPPY Act, which proposes a tax deduction for pet owners. You will find it in childrens books about talking animals. You will see it on Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, and a PBS series entitled Inside the Animal Mind. You will find it in films, such as the brand-new documentary The Cove, which records the brutal slaughter of dolphins for food. And you will see it in works of art.

Following this reasoning, section two of Wolfes book (chapters six through eleven) veers off from the strictly philosophical approach into the more traditional terrain of cultural studies: he examines specific works of art in light of the philosophical basis that is now firmly in place. Interestingly, he does not choose all works of art that depict animals, nor those that displace humans. He begins with works that depict animals (Sue Coes paintings of slaughterhouses) and that use animals (Eduardo Kacs creation of genetically engineered animals that glow in the dark), but then moves on to discuss film, architecture, poetry, and music. In each of these examinations, he works to destabilize traditional binaries such as nature/culture, landscape/architecture, viewer/viewed, presence/absence, organic/inorganic, natural/artificial, and, really, human/nonhuman. This second section, then, is a subtle application of the theory of posthumanism itself to the arts, [our] environment, and [our] identity.

What is perhaps most important about What is Posthumanism remains latent in the text. This is its current and (especially) future prevalence. By tracing the history of posthumanism back through systems theory into deconstruction, Wolfe implies a future trajectory, too. I would venture to suggest that he believes posthumanism is the worldview that will soon come to dominate Western thought. And this is important for academics specifically and thinkers in general to realize.

Whether you agree with Cary Wolfe or not, it would be wise to understand posthumanism. It appears that your only choice will be either to align yourself with this perspective or to fight against it. If you agree, you should know with what. If you fight, you should know against what.

What, then, is the central thesis of posthumanism? Wolfes entire project might be summed up in his bold claim that, thanks to his own work and that of the theorists and artists he discusses, the human occupies a new place in the universe, a universe now populated by what I am prepared to call nonhuman subjects (47)such subjects as talking rabbits, six-inch people, and mythical monsters?

Well, maybe not the mythical monsters.

Excerpt from:

What is Posthumanism? | The Curator

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ThinkBeyond.us | What Is Transhumanism?

Posted: at 5:43 pm

transhumanism, n.

trans hu man ism

an international intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

Wikipedia

That's the definition of "transhumanism" the Web offers up. It's true in a sort of reductionist sense, but I'm not sure it's a terribly useful definition.

If I were to define transhumanism, I'd say that it's an idea whose premise is that human nature is not some fixed quantity, forever unalterable; it's something that is a consequence of our biology and our environment, and it can be changed. Furthermore, advances in technology and in our understanding of biology, chemistry, and physics, give us the power to change it as we wish--to take evolution from a blind, undirected process to a process that we can make choices about. It's predicated on the idea that we can, if we so desire, choose what it means to be human.

A great deal of conventional thought has always held on to the idea that "human nature" is something that's a fundamental part of who we are, forever unalterable. Certain aspects of the human condition, from mortality to aggression, from disease to territoriality, have always been thought of as fixtures of the human condition; no matter how our society changes, no matter what we learn, these things have been assumed to be an immutable part of us.

Transhumanist thought holds that this isn't so. We are physical entities, whose nature comes from an extraordinarily complex dance of biochemical processes happening in our bodies. The way we respond to stress, the way we behave, the way our bodies suffer gradually increasing debility, all these things are the consequence of the physical processes happening inside our bodies and brains.

And they can change. Improved diet has made us qualitatively different from our neolithic ancestors--taller, longer-lived. Thousands of generations living in large numbers have made us more able to function in complex social environments; we have, in a sense, domesticated ourselves.

Right now, advances in biotechnology offer to revolutionize our view of who we are. What if aging and death were no longer inevitable? What if we could invent ways to repair genetic disorders? What if the human brain, which is a physical organ, could be modeled inside a computer? What if we could develop techniques to make our brains operate more efficiently? These sound like science fiction to a lot of people, but every single one of them is the subject of active research in labs around the world right now.

Transhumanism is a highly rationalist idea. It rejects the notion that human beings are corrupt, doomed to suffer and die as a result of a fall from grace. Rather, it postulates that the things that make us who we are are knowable and comprehensible; that the state of being human is a fit subject for scientific inquiry; and that as we learn more about ourselves, our ability to shape who we are increases.

The implications of these ideas are deeply profound. Transhumanist philosophy is built from the notion that things like indefinite lifespan, brain modeling, and improvement of human physical and intellectual capacity are both possible and desirable. Transhumanism, therefore, is profoundly optimistic.

It is not, however, Utopian. Like all new technologies, these things all have potential consequences whose outlines we can't see clearly yet. Therefore, transhumanism tends to be concerned not only with the possibility of biomedical technology but also its ethics; the study of transhumanism is, in large part, the study of bioethics. Who controls the direction of new, disruptive biomedical technology? What does it mean to be a "person;" is an artificial intelligence a person? How should new biomedical technology be introduced into society? How can it be made available democratically, to everyone who wishes it? What role is available to people who for whatever reason don't choose to benefit from new advances in medical understanding?

At its core, transhumanism is deeply pragmatic. Since it seems likely that biotechnology is going to improve over time whether we think about the implications of it or not, transhumanists think about things like bioethics, immortality, and the nature of consciousness in concrete, real-world terms, rather than as philosophical exercises. One of the things I most like about transhumanism is its drive to ask questions like "How can we maximize the benefit of what we are learning while maintaining human agency, dignity, and the right to choose?" Transhumanists are invited to be skeptical about everything, including the premises of transhumanism. It is quite likely that whatever views of the future we dream up will be flawed, as most prognostication tends to be. But by getting into the habit of examining these ideas now, and of considering the moral and ethical dimensions of our accelerating understanding of biology, we can at least train ourselves to get into the habit of asking the right questions as new breakthroughs come.

ThinkBeyond.us | What Is Transhumanism?

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Transhumanisme | Don Juan: Wozu bermenschlich, wenn du …

Posted: at 5:43 pm

This is what we should live for, Danlo: the heightening of our sensibilities, the rarefying of our desire, the deepening of our purpose, the vastening of our selves. The power to overcome ourselves. To be more. Or rather, to become more. Who hasn't dreamed of such becoming? - David Zindell: "The Broken God".

Lord Martin Rees, member of the Oxford Martin School Advisory Council, Fellow of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, giving the 10 year anniversary lecture for the Oxford Martin School.

Transhumanisme is mainstream geworden.

In den beginne had je het Extropy-Institute. Toen ik mij aansloot bij dit instituut, ca 1997/98, was het een gezelschap met een zeer hoogwaardige mailinglist. In Nederland was toen Transcedo in oprichting, transhumanisme met een Nederlandse couleur locale. Een klein groepje van zes leden, die eens per maand op het centraal station in Utrecht bij elkaar kwamen om te discussiren over zaken waarvan iedereen indertijd dacht dat het sciencefiction was, maar waarvan sommige inmiddels gerealiseerd zijn en de meeste andere zodanig binnen bereik liggen dat vrijwel niemand meer twijfelt aan de toekomstige mogelijkheid ervan.

Grootste wapenfeit van Transcedo: het organiseren in 1998 van de eerste Transvision: de bijeenkomst van Europese Transhumanisten, in Weesp. Een initiatief dat daarna jaarlijks herhaald werd in repectievelijk Stockholm (1999), Londen (2000) en Berlijn (2001), waarna in 2002 Nederland weer aan de beurt had moeten zijn. We kregen het in dat jaar echter niet meer voor elkaar. Waarom niet? Iedereen gaf inmiddels zijn eigen invulling aan het begrip transhumanisme en daarmee aan hoe zo'n symposium ingevuld zou moeten worden. Transcedo bestaat inmiddels eigenlijk alleen nog in naam; de leden die cryogene suspensie als de belangrijkste activiteit van Transcedo zagen, hebben een nieuwe vereniging opgericht, de DCO (Dutch Cryonics Organisation).

Inmiddels zijn er meerdere verenigingen en organisaties opgericht met een min of meer transhumanistische doelstelling en, door het veranderen van het karakter van het internet, vinden de meeste activiteiten plaats via Facebook en Google+, al zijn er natuurlijk nog steeds websites. Zoals bijvoorbeeld deze :-), al wordt hij dan ook onregelmatig bijgehouden 🙁 want, zoals gezegd, het meeste nieuws - als dat er al is - wordt gebracht via de social media.

Bij gebrek aan nieuws worden er dan wel eens stukjes geschreven (en gerecycled!) die misschien wat meer navelstaarderig zijn, zoals deze: "Transhumanism: there are [at least] ten different philosophical categories; which one(s) are you?" door Hank Pellissier op het forum van het Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Pellissier onderscheidt tien soorten transhumanisme en wel:

Extropianism

Singularitarianism

The Hedonistic Imperative

Democratic Transhumanism

Survivalist Transhumanism

Libertarian Transhumanism

Religious Transhumanism

Cosmopolitan Transhumanism

Cosmism

Anarcho-Transhumanism

Uiteraard wordt in het artikel uitgelegd welk label voor welk type transhumanist staat, maar om de zaak overzichtelijk te houden zijn er mengvormen. Pellissier daagt de lezer dan ook uit kleur te bekennen en op het forum aan te geven welk type transhumanist hij of zij is en, interessant dit te doen aan de hand van een Pie-Chart, die je hier kunt maken.

In 2004 heb ik mijn positie binnen het transhumanisme al eens bepaald; voor het grootste gedeelte gebaseerd op de toen al verouderde principes van het Extropy-Institute. Maar goed, ik heb ook zo'n pie-chart gemaakt en ik kwam er, niet geheel tot mijn verbazing achter, dat mijn ideen de laatste jaren wat zijn gaan verschuiven, je ontwikkelt je natuurlijk, en het zou zomaar kunnen dat deze chart over vijf jaar, vijf maanden of zelfs over vijf dagen al niet meer klopt.

Goed, op het gevaar af dat ik erop vastgepind ga worden, is hier mijn pie-chart.

Allemaal angst. Doom and Gloom. Zelf kan ik niet wachten....

Via Singularity Weblog.

Mooie film van Richard Mans.

In this breathtaking science fiction spectacle, a strange mechanical device lands on a desolate world and uses the planet to undergo a startling transformation, that has profound implications for an entire galaxy.

abiogenesisfilm.com facebook.com/abiogenesisfilm

Abiogenese is het ontstaan van leven uit niet-levende materie.

An Oxford philosophy professor who has studied existential threats ranging from nuclear war to superbugs says the biggest danger of all may be superintelligence.

Superintelligence is any intellect that outperforms human intellect in every field, and Nick Bostrom thinks its most likely form will be a machine -- artificial intelligence.

There are two ways artificial intelligence could go, Bostrom argues. It could greatly improve our lives and solve the world's problems, such as disease, hunger and even pain. Or, it could take over and possibly kill all or many humans. As it stands, the catastrophic scenario is more likely, according to Bostrom, who has a background in physics, computational neuroscience and mathematical logic.

"Superintelligence could become extremely powerful and be able to shape the future according to its preferences," Bostrom told me. "If humanity was sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figure out how to do so safely."

Bostrom, the founding director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, lays out his concerns in his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. His book makes a harrowing comparison between the fate of horses and humans:

Horses were initially complemented by carriages and ploughs, which greatly increased the horse's productivity. Later, horses were substituted for by automobiles and tractors. When horses became obsolete as a source of labor, many were sold off to meatpackers to be processed into dog food, bone meal, leather, and glue. In the United States, there were about 26 million horses in 1915. By the early 1950s, 2 million remained.

The same dark outcome, Bostrom said, could happen to humans once AI makes our labor and intelligence obsolete.

Lees meer.

Een nieuw boek over transhumanisme komt binnenkort uit: "Religion and Transhumanism. The Unknown Future of Human Enhancement". Een fraaie cover van een biddende post-human:

die gelijk ook een ernstige vraag opwerpt: religie en transhumanisme, is dat niet in tegenspraak met elkaar?

Sebastian Seung, schreef in 2013 het boek "Connectome: how the brains wiring makes us who we are". Zo'n beetje de Amerikaanse tegenhanger van Dick Swaab's "Wij zijn ons brein". In tegenstelling tot Swaab staat Seung niet helemaal afwijzend tegenover cryonics en bespreekt in hoofdstuk 14 van zijn boek de kansen voor het slagen van cryogene suspensie als zijn model van het brein klopt. Dat is de reden dat het boek door veel transhumanisten gelezen is. Het boek eindigt min of meer (er volgt nog een epiloog) met de volgende bijzondere uitspraak:

The bible said that God made man in his own image. The German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach said that man made God in his own image. The transhumanists say that humanity will make itself into God.

Zoals uit de tagline van deze website (een citaat uit "Don Juan und Faust" van Christian Dietrich Grabbe) blijkt, is dat ook hoe ik het transhumanisme interpreteer.

De uitgever rechtvaardigt het boek als volgt:

"Transhumanism" or "human enhancement" is an intellectual and cultural movement that advocates the use of emerging technologies to change human traits. Although they may sound like science fiction, the possibilities suggested by transhumanism are very real, and the questions they raise have no easy answers. If these enhancementsespecially major ones like the indefinite extension of healthy human lifebecome widely available, they would arguably have a more radical impact on humankind than any other development in history.

This book comprises essays that explore transhumanism and the issues that surround it, addressing numerous fascinating questions posed by scholars of religion from various traditions. How will "immortality" or extreme longevity change our religious beliefs and practices? How might phamaceuticals enhance spiritual experiences? Will "post-human" technologies be available to all persons, or will a superior "post-human race" arise to dominate the human species? The discussions are as intriguing as the future they suggest.

De redacteurs van "Religion and Transhumanism", Calvin Mercer, "professor of religion" en Tracy J. Trothen, "associate professor of ethics and theology" hebben duidelijk het accent gelegd op de ethische kant van het transhumanisme:

Gaap. Die discussies zijn inmiddels al heel vaak gevoerd en op zijn minst doet het boek ongeveer hetzelfde als het op deze website eerder besproken boek Human Being @ Risk van Mark Coeckelbergh, behalve dat "Religion and Transhumanism" door meerdere auteurs bij elkaar is geschreven, waaronder Anders Sandberg, dus mijn hoop is dat dit boek daar iets nieuws aan gaat toevoegen, mogelijk - maar het boek moet nog uitkomen, dus ik moet het nog lezen - in ieder geval meer een "dialogue" gaat opleveren. Het boek is ook iets aangenamer geprijsd: 46 voor 472 pagina's, en verschijnt in november 2014.

Via The British Institute of Posthuman Studies - A Critical Forum for Transhumanist Thought. Written by: Peter Brietbart and Marco Vega

We investigate three dominant areas of transhumanism: super longevity, super intelligence and super wellbeing, and briefly cover the ideas of thinkers Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil and David Pearce.

PostHuman: An Introduction to Transhumanism is the first of our planned video series on transhumanism, titled PostHuman.

Interessant artikel in Wired.co.uk in de afdeling Transhumanism: Sleep replacement and 3D-printed shapeshifting: a bodyhacker's wish list. Daaruit de volgende WishList:

2013 to 2014 Wireless file storage Subdermal navigation system Brain-only control of temperature of my house

Five to ten years Replacement of heart Sensors on remaining major organs Proximity sensors Internal alarms Enriched blood (enriched with oxygen)

10 to 20 years Replacement of most major organs Maths coprocessor (OMG I want this so bad) Replacement and entire brain system (audio cortex maybe?) Toxin filtration Replacement of hands B2C (brain to computer) wireless interface with internet Emotional "volume" B2B (brain to brain) wireless interface

20 to 40 years Majority of body replaced 50 percent plus of brain replaced Back up "brain" Levitation tech Self-repair No need for food or oxygen Temporal tuning (slow the perception of time)

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Transhumanisme | Don Juan: Wozu bermenschlich, wenn du ...

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Don’t Bank On The Supreme Court To Clarify The Second …

Posted: at 5:41 pm

If you think the Supreme Court is poised to expand or restrict gun rights sometime soon, don't hold your breath.

As handwringing continues over what might have prevented the Orlando massacre-- an old-time filibuster sparked by it even broke outin the Senate on Wednesday -- the justices are about to consider a state gun control law enacted in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

According to its docket, the court on Thursday will weigh whether to take up Shew v. Malloy, a case with all the elements that could make it emblematic for the battle over the Second Amendment's meaning.

It's a dispute between a host of gun rights groups, businesses and individual gun owners against Connecticut over the constitutionality of a sweeping regulatory regime that bans so-called "assault weapons" -- semiautomatic firearms and large-capacity magazines of the very sort used in Newtown and Orlando.

Back in October, an appeals court in Manhattan said the Connecticut law and a similarly restrictive law in New Yorkwere constitutional --and the plaintiffs vowed to take the battle to the Supreme Court.

Tom King, the head of New York's biggest gun rights group, even said he was "happy" to have lost the case because that meant his organization could now ask the highest court of the land to decide the issue once and for all.

Brendan McDermid / Reuters

But then Justice Antonin Scalia died. And suddenly,the gun lobby's calculations changed -- including King's, who told the New York Daily News weeks after Scalia's death that it was "just the wrong time" to continue the fight in the absence of a reliable conservative vote at the Supreme Court.

That might explain why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) glowingly pointed to the National Rifle Association's opposition to Merrick Garland, the president's high court nominee, to rationalize his own refusal to hold a vote and a hearing for Garland.

None of this matters, and yet it matters a great deal.

Because despite the pleas from gun rights advocates who still want the Supreme Court to take up the challenge to the weapons ban, the justices could wield all kinds of reasons not to touch the case with a 10-foot pole.

It's not that they aren't interested in clarifying the scope of the Second Amendment in the wake of Scalia's magnum opus in District of Columbia v. Heller, which for the first time recognized a fundamental right to gun ownership in the home. But to echo King, it's just not the right time -- not with a short-staffed Supreme Court, a volatile political environment, and a nomination fight that may very well continue after President Barack Obama's successor takes office.

As things stand now, all signs point to an extremely quiet and uncontroversial Supreme Court term beginning next October -- a dry season that will stand in stark contrast to the current term's constitutional blockbusters on affirmative action, abortion and immigration, to name only a few.The court just isn't taking many new cases.

This paucity of potential big decisions aside, the courthassent some signals that the Second Amendment is safe, even as it has rejected dozens of cases challenging gun control measures across the country, leaving lower courts as the final decision-makers.

Over the protest of Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court refused in December to review an appeals court decision that effectively upheld an assault weapons ban in a small Illinois town. Thomas said that decision treated the Second Amendment as a second-class right.

But in March, a month after Scalia's death, the justices tipped their hand the other way, ruling that a Massachusetts ban on stun guns may violate the right to bear arms, quietly but forcefully endorsing the late justice's Heller decision.

The Second Amendment extends ... to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding," the court said in a very brief rulingthat no justice signed his or her name to.

But writing separately, Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito said they would have gone further, asserting that indeed, gun ownership for self-defense is a "fundamental right" while making clear that Americans' safety shouldn't be "left to the mercy of state authorities who may be more concerned about disarming the people than about keeping them safe."

Fighting words, as well as fodder for debate about where the court may go next on guns.

It is precisely this seeming tension within the Supreme Court -- plus the political fallout from Scalia's vacancy and all the work that other courts are doing to make some sense of the Second Amendment -- that indicates why the justices probably won't pull the trigger on the next big gun rights case soon.

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Don't Bank On The Supreme Court To Clarify The Second ...

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Cryptocurrency a Response to Financial Crisis, Says CEO

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President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday mourned the dead and comforted families and survivors in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Obama urged senators to "rise up and do the right thing" and pass new gun laws. Photo: AP

Scientists have gotten one step closer to answering one of biologys greatest mysteries with the first discovery of a chiral molecule in interstellar space. WSJ's Monika Auger reports. Photo: Brett A. McGuire

A Florida sheriff said the body of a 2-year-old boy has been found, after he was dragged into the water by an alligator Tuesday night at Walt Disney World. Photo: AP

CIA Director John Brennan said Thursday that a two-year campaign by the U.S. and coalition forces to defeat ISIS has seen gains on the battle field but it has failed to disrupt its capability to carry out terrorist attacks. He also said that Omar Mateen, the shooter in the Orlando attack, had no direct link to ISIS. Photo: AP

John and Tina Novogratz restored the Park Slope, Brooklyn home first owned by chewing gum mogul Thomas Adams, Jr. They live in the four-story building with their five children. Photo: Dorothy Hong for The Wall Street Journal

Virtual reality is drawing a huge amount of attention at the worlds largest video-game trade show, E3, which according to organizers has seen the number of VR exhibitors double compared with last year. Mark Kelly reports. Image: Zuma

Watch a film trailer for "Pete's Dragon," starring Oakes Fegley, Robert Redford and Bryce Dallas Howard. Photo: YouTube

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Cryptocurrency a Response to Financial Crisis, Says CEO

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Drug-Gene Testing – Mayo Clinic Research

Posted: at 5:40 pm

Drug-gene testing is also called pharmacogenomics, or pharmacogenetics. All terms characterize the study of how your genes affect your bodys response to medications. The word pharmacogenomics is combined from the words pharmacology (the study of the uses and effects of medications) and genomics (the study of genes and their functions).

Your body has thousands of genes that you inherited from your parents. Genes determine which characteristics you have, such as eye color and blood type. Some genes are responsible for how your body processes medications. Pharmacogenomic tests look for changes or variants in these genes that may determine whether a medication could be an effective treatment for you or whether you could have side effects to a specific medication.

Patient Information: Pharmacogenomics Finding the Right Medication for You

Pharmacogenomic testing is one tool that can help your health care provider determine the best medication for you. Your health care provider also considers other factors such as your age, lifestyle, other medications you are taking and your overall health when choosing the right treatment for you.

The purpose of pharmacogenomic testing is to find out if a medication is right for you. A small blood or saliva sample can help determine:

The laboratory looks for changes or variants in one or more genes that can affect your response to certain medications.

Each person would need to have the same specific pharmacogenomic test only once because your genetic makeup does not change over time. However, you may need other pharmacogenomics tests if you take another medication. Each medication is associated with a different pharmacogenomics test. Keep track of all your test results and share them with your health care providers.

The need for pharmacogenomics testing is determined on an individual basis. If your pharmacogenomic test results suggest you may not have a good response to a medication, your family members may have a similar response. Mayo Clinic recommends you share this information with your family members. Your health care provider can also provide recommendations for family members who may benefit from having testing.

Current limitations of pharmacogenomics testing include:

The cost of pharmacogenomics testing varies depending on which test is ordered and your health insurance coverage. To help you determine test costs and coverage:

A federal law called the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) generally makes it illegal for health insurance companies to discriminate against you based on your genetic information. This federal law does not protect you against genetic discrimination by life insurance, disability insurance or long-term care insurance companies. Some states have laws in this area.

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Drug-Gene Testing - Mayo Clinic Research

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Internet Censorship in China – The New York Times

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Stormwatch (comics) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted: at 5:39 pm

Stormwatch is a fictional superhero team appearing in American comic books published by WildStorm, which later became an imprint of DC Comics. Created by Jim Lee, the team first appeared in Stormwatch #1 (March 1993). After WildStorm became an imprint of DC Comics, the stories were set in the DC Universe, and the group was depicted as a secretive team of superheroes who tackle dangerous missions while remaining unknown to the larger superhero community.

Stormwatch (run by a fictional United Nations) is overseen from a satellite by its director, the Weatherman. The Weatherman was Henry Bendix, who had cybernetic implants connected to his brain to better monitor the world situation and his Stormwatch teams in action. His field commander was Jackson King (also known as Battalion), an African-American telekinetic. Other founding members include Hellstrike (an Irish police officer who is an energy being), Winter (an ex-Russian Spetznaz officer and an energy absorber), Fuji (a young Japanese man, an energy being trapped in a containment suit) and Diva (a young Italian woman with sonic powers).

Stormwatch began in the comic book Stormwatch, published by Image Comics and owned by Jim Lee. Early writers of Stormwatch included Jim Lee, Brandon Choi, H. K. Proger and Ron Marz; early artists included Scott Clark, Brett Booth, Matt Broome and Renato Arlem.

Marz, who had worked on Marvel Comics' Silver Surfer and developed Hal Jordan's Green Lantern replacement Kyle Rayner at DC Comics, took over the writing while James Robinson was writing WildC.A.T.s. Robinson and Marz, directed by Jim Lee, intertwined the books' storylines over several months.

Around this time, two two-issue miniseries were published: Stormwatch Team One (written by James Robinson) and WildC.A.T.s Team One (written by Steven Seagle). In the intertwined miniseries, the groundwork for both teams was laid in the mid-1960s by a core group consisting of Saul Baxter (Lord Emp), Zealot, Majestic, John Colt (the template for Spartan), Backlash, a young Henry Bendix and Jackson King's father Isaiah, all of whom would be members of (or figure prominently in) the later Stormwatch and WildC.A.T.s teams. In this series "WildStorm", the publishing imprint name, was a code word used by the United States Government: "Wild" was extraterrestrial life-forms, and "Storm" was invading forces.

Robinson's WildC.A.T.s and Marz's Stormwatch culminated in the Wildstorm Rising crossover, during which both teams were disrupted; Stormwatch incurred casualties, and the WildC.A.T.s were believed dead. After WildStorm Rising, Alan Moore took over the writing of WildC.A.T.s. After a second imprint-wide crossover, Warren Ellis took over writing Stormwatch with #37 (July 1996).

Ellis' version of Stormwatch injected sexual and horror elements, thinly-disguised political commentary and criticism of the United States government into the stories. The art was toned down from the more-exaggerated 1990s style which dominated the early Image Comics, allowing readers to take the book more seriously. During this period Ellis used Stormwatch to introduce the concept of the Bleed, a space between parallel universes which later featured in Planetary and other comics set in the Wildstorm Universe. By the end of volume one Ellis made Henry Bendix a manipulative villain, as Grant Morrison did with The Chief in DC's Doom Patrol.

Ellis continued to write the book into Stormwatch volume 2, until the August 1998 WildC.A.T.s/Aliens crossover (written by Ellis) saw the Stormwatch team decimated by xenomorphs (the creatures from the Alien film series). Most of the Stormwatch characters Ellis had not created were killed off in this story. A group of Stormwatch survivors became the main cast of Ellis' new series, The Authority, including his characters Jenny Sparks, Jack Hawksmoor, Apollo, the Midnighter, Swift (who debuted in Stormwatch vol. 1 #28, written by Jeff Mariotte) and two new characters who were successors of the Engineer and the Doctor from Ellis' Change or Die storyline. Stormwatch volume 2 ended with a story, set after WildC.A.T.s/Aliens, in which the United Nations disbanded Stormwatch. The last scene, a conversation between former members of Stormwatch Black, introduced The Authority and promoted its first issue. Other survivors from the original team (including Battalion, Christine Trelane, and Flint) appeared in The Authority, and King and Trelane became central characters of The Monarchy.

In the 11th issue of Planetary, another Ellis series in the same fictional universe, a secret agent (John Stone, modelled after the James Bond films and Jim Steranko's Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. comics) works for a 1960s precursor of Stormwatch: S.T.O.R.M., its command center known as S.T.O.R.M. Watch.

In September 2002, Stormwatch was revived as Stormwatch: Team Achilles, written by Micah Ian Wright. The series followed a human UN troubleshooting team dealing with superhuman-related problems. The planned final issue (#24) was never published, although its script is available for download online.[1]

Stormwatch was one of several comic books restarted after Wildstorm Comics' WorldStorm event. This version was launched in November 2006 with writer Christos Gage and penciller Doug Mahnke.[2][not in citation given] The series ended after issue #12,[3] but resumed in August 2008 as part of the Worlds End event with issue #13.[4] In the new series several dead characters (Hellstrike, Fuji, Winter and Fahrenheit) were resurrected and reformed as the new version of Stormwatch Prime (now sponsored by the United States), and a separate branch office Stormwatch: P.H.D. (Post-Human Division) was opened in New York.[5]

DC Comics announced in June 2011 that the team would be incorporated into the DC Universe in a new series, written by Paul Cornell and drawn by Miguel Sepulveda, as part of the September 2011 relaunch of its comics.[6]Peter Milligan took over the book in issue nine after leaving Justice League Dark with issue eight.[7]

This Stormwatch, an organization which has protected Earth from alien threats since the Dark Ages, is commanded by a group known as the Shadow Cabinet:[8] a four-member group of Shadow Lords[9] referred to as "the dead", and represented by an entity which can negate the group's powers and is aware of their secrets (except Harry's).[10] Rejecting the title "superheroes", Stormwatch Jack Hawksmoor, Apollo, Midnighter, Jenny Quantum, the Engineer, the Martian Manhunter (who left the team after wiping everyone's memory of him),[9] and three new characters: Adam One (an immortal born during the Big Bang,[11] who was later revealed to be Merlin),[12] Emma Rice,[13] the Projectionist (who controls the mass media) and Harry Tanner, the Eminence of Blades (the power to lie to anyone and be believed)[14] exist in secret and consider themselves professional soldiers. Their base is a hijacked Daemonite spaceship in Hyperspace,[15] later upgraded into the Carrier.[16]

Jim Starlin wrote Stormwatch with #19, erasing the team's history as a 1,000-year-old organization and restarting its history again. Apollo and Midnighter were returned to their original costumes as the core of a new Stormwatch team with the Engineer, Hellstrike, the Weird and new characters Jenny Soul, the Forecaster, and Force.[17] After Starlin's run ended with #29, Sterling Gates wrote the series' 30th and final issue which restored the previous version of the team.[18] The team then appeared in The New 52: Futures End weekly limited series.[19]

Ellis' run on Stormwatch was collected into five trade paperbacks:

Stormwatch: Team Achilles was collected into two trade paperbacks:

Stormwatch: Post-Human Divison was collected into four trade paperbacks:

The New 52 version of Stormwatch was collected into four trade paperbacks:

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Stormwatch (comics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Cryptocurrency a Response to Financial Crisis, Says CEO

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Internet Censorship in China – The New York Times

Stormwatch (comics) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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