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Daily Archives: November 27, 2022
Stock Market | FinancialContent Business Page
Posted: November 27, 2022 at 1:38 pm
The transhumanist tradition is marked by an insistence that its project is supposed to elevate the human, to take him beyond his biological limitations. Transhumanism invites us to ignore all historic and socio-political context which causes the suffering of mankind by only attempting to control the damage that has already been caused, not to address the root causes. Transhumanism is not a project for the betterment of humanity but is a silent war on it. As Max Horkheimer explains in his preface to the Eclipse of Reason (1947): Advance in technical facilities for enlightenment is accompanied by a process of dehumanization. Thus progress threatens to nullify the very goal it is supposed to realize - the idea of man.
Publicae.org and NWO STATE DAO, henceforth carries within its moral duty, to uphold the natural rights of man and to safeguard the sovereignty of our soul and our spirit. Yet, ironic as it may seem, this is not expected of us being a cryptocurrency project, let alone that NWO STATE should call others like minded to indirect action. Our aim henceforth, in this first instance, is to illuminate the matter at hand for the unaware masses and early retail crypto investors at large. Daniel Kuhn in his article The transhumanist case for crypto (2021), solidifies the transhumanist obsession with Thanatopolitics (politics of death) arguing that: But who would want to live forever? As a historical fact, it turns out, many early adopters of cryptocurrency, thats who! How fitting!
Indeed so it is, many early investors in crypto had, and still have, ties to the transhumanist movement and not by accident. Blockchain technology embodies an almost transcendental ephemeral view on economy. The very premise of crypto, is the potential for radical change and distribution of power away from governments and from central banks, a power and wealth transfer which according to transhumanists is just yet another enhancement of the current logic of all dynamic structures and systems. Enhancement and reset, of the current world order is for them nothing more than the dismantling of the nation state governance and corporate powers not controlled by the elites themselves, it means a logical increase in their own decision making capabilities as technocrats, and yields them the sole right as being market disruptors and social engineers. Their plan is obvious, an alienation of the regular mortal human being whos every movement, carnal and mental need will be mapped out, digitised, and his spirit and cognitive abilities fully commodified for a final Full spectrum Dominance.
As Jean-Francois Lyotard defined when he envisioned the current conditions, which now allow for these circumstances to progress, he stated that the postmodern condition is as a state of incredulity toward metanarratives. Hence, as a metanarrative, the term Transhumanism was coined by Aldous Huxleys brother, Julian, saying that I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence... It is thus no coincidence that Julian Huxley and the foundations of transhumanism were tightly entangled with the field of eugenics. Their aim is to improve the quality of human beings, one through genetic breeding wiping off the undesired traits of humanity en masse, and the other through technology doing just the same. Whilst in eugenics the ambition doesnt go beyond selection of genetic material, in transhumanism it does. With science as their crucial tool, the transhumanists claim theyll be able to free man from his biological limitations, an experience of humanity without any of the negative side effects: The result will be longer life spans, greater physical and mental capabilities, and perhaps, better self-control. The promise is beguiling: Utopia without hard work, a New World under our control. (Koch 2010)
For the unaware, it is vital to understand that the major flaw of transhumanism is that it relies on a naive understanding of the human mind and body, portrayed as being mechanical and unholistic in nature, whereas individual parts can easily be manipulated without causing imbalance to the whole system. This machine-like view is very much prevalent in evolutionary psychology where founding researchers in the field have argued that the mind functions pretty much like a machine with different modules which has evolved to perform particular information processing tasks. The transhumanist agenda therefore relies on an understanding of man as a machine with dysfunctional parts which can be replaced, thrown out, or improved without causing damage to the overall balance of vital force which sustains it, this they believe regardless of science not yet having a prudent understanding of what consciousness is, let alone of any metaphysical ramifications that any alterations to it that it may cause quantum mechanically speaking in regard to observational effects of reality.
Just like eugenics, Transhumanism also pretends not to have an ethical accountability at its base and simply hides its assumptions under the umbrella of simply being scientific. In order for a transhumanist to make the argument of human enhancement, they need to assume that they already know what traits are desirable, and what traits are undesirable in the human race. This kind of lacking ethical framework, of leaving it up to science, regarding questions of what exactly is to be considered desirable, and what is not in favour for humanity as a whole, is an ethical foundation which requires a blind belief in the kind of science that transhumanists promote which is ethically justified within the framework of Scientism.
Many representative figures of the transhumanist trend are popular in the mainstream, Sam Harris unsurprisingly thinks that science should be used to enhance the human through technology, but that science alone also can tell us what is morally right! This outrageous claim contradicts centuries of moral philosophy and argues that philosophy and ethics arent needed at all in answering ethical questions, and that the scientific method is more than enough to settle the debate. To anyone who is remotely familiar with moral philosophy and with the work of David Hume, know that it clearly states what is and ought to be, as a distinction on ethics. Hume argued that theres a gap between reality and our ethical frameworks, a gap which means that no set of facts about reality can inform us on what is and what isnt moral. Simply said, the ethical principle which states that slavery is wrong can not be found by observing the colour of the sky or by measuring the temperature of the water. Facts and scientific descriptions exist in a whole and separate domain from moral theory. Therefore, science, no matter how advanced, can in no shape or form ever be justified as being epistemically sufficient in providing us with normative claims. Whilst science can help us to implement technology in our biology, it cannot tell us whether thats the right thing to do or not as transhumanists like Sam Harris may claim nonetheless. Transhumanists regardless, maintain a view of science which sees it to be disconnected from its material and historical base. However, thinkers like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have shown, that science isnt some morally neutral practise operating in a vacuum, but is a specific system and magnifying glass through which reality is perceived and understood, and it is by all intent and purpose liable to the formation of paradigms which push research into very specific directions of social constructs and channels of conditioned attention.
In view of our human biology being incredibly complex, NWO STATE DAO upholds the conviction that our attempts to tamper with it can be catastrophic for future generations. Predominantly it is the increasing advance of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) which poses the greatest threat to freedom of thought and individual cognitive sovereignty.
Herein it is clear, that the likes of Elon Musk and his Neuralink endeavour portrays himself as a benefactor of humanity whilst removing the risks it entails long.term for the misuse of the technology by self contradicting his arguments to confuse the public saying at the MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Department's 2014 Centennial Symposium: "You know all those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and he's like... yeah, he's sure he can control the demon, [but] it doesn't work out."
Scientific advancements into these kinds of technologies fall securely under the banner of ageing and longevity research, here we find avid proponents of the transhumanist movement in the crypto space. Indeed, even the most famous name in cryptocurrency, Vitalik Buterin, founder of the Ethereum Blockchian, is utterly obsessed with life extension. Buterin himself has said that Ageing is an engineering problem, thus he is towards this aim heavily involved in Gitcoin.co, a platform dedicated to open-source software which works by incentivizing developers with payments and quadratic crowdfunded funding grants which are hailed as being resources allocated to democratic public goods. It should then come as no surprise, that Buterin is in official kahoot with quadratic voting and quadratic funding technology which is continually being developed by Glen Weyl, the Microsoft Office of CTO Political Economist & Social Technologist and founder of RadicalXChange which works globally to advance these blockchain frameworks, claiming they will benefit everyone as to remove scrutiny from regulatory authorities. Gitcoin grants round 12 featured more than 20 blockchain based longevity projects like Lifespan.io seeking funding from the public. What they all have in common is their argument that the work they do is for the betterment of mankind by providing the value of a longer and healthier lifespan, and in the out most case, also finally remove death completely from life as an analogy by replacing the Christian promise of eternal life from God as foretold in John 3:36. While Buterin and Weyl are prominent transhumanists, they are not alone in the Blockchain community to have such views. Aubrey De Grey, famous for his biomedical research states that: I have been gratified since the beginning of blockchain, to see the enormous fanbase that I and the longevity movement have in there. Hence, the link between crypto and transhumanism indeed stretches back to its technological genesis. Hal Finney (1956-2014), the first person to transact Bitcoin from Satoshi, was also part of the transhumanist movement evident from his participation in the Extropian online discussions of life extension, artificial intelligence and matters pertaining to the transfer of human consciousness from biological brains to alternative high-performance substrates''. Hence it shall hereafter be publicly known, that Publicae.org and NWO STATE DAO reject and are pragmatically and epistemically opposed to the ideals of Transhumanism!
Publicae.org, NWO STATE DAO and $STATE / brand, company name, websites, content, materials and information are provided by Publicae.org on an "as is" and "as available" basis. You expressly agree and acknowledge that your use of the Publicae.org websites, content, material and information is at your sole risk. Publicae.org shall not be liable to any incidental, indirect, special, punitive or consequential damages. Publicae.org will not be liable for any damages of any kind arising from the use of any Publicae.org websites, content, material or information. #StayHuman
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Negentropy – Wikipedia
Posted: at 1:36 pm
In information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality. The concept and phrase "negative entropy" was introduced by Erwin Schrdinger in his 1944 popular-science book What is Life?[1] Later, Lon Brillouin shortened the phrase to negentropy.[2][3] In 1974, Albert Szent-Gyrgyi proposed replacing the term negentropy with syntropy. That term may have originated in the 1940s with the Italian mathematician Luigi Fantappi, who tried to construct a unified theory of biology and physics. Buckminster Fuller tried to popularize this usage, but negentropy remains common.
In a note to What is Life? Schrdinger explained his use of this phrase.
... if I had been catering for them [physicists] alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead. It is the more familiar notion in this context. But this highly technical term seemed linguistically too near to energy for making the average reader alive to the contrast between the two things.
In information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality.[4][5][6] Out of all distributions with a given mean and variance, the normal or Gaussian distribution is the one with the highest entropy. Negentropy measures the difference in entropy between a given distribution and the Gaussian distribution with the same mean and variance. Thus, negentropy is always nonnegative, is invariant by any linear invertible change of coordinates, and vanishes if and only if the signal is Gaussian.
Negentropy is defined as
where S ( x ) {displaystyle S(varphi _{x})} is the differential entropy of the Gaussian density with the same mean and variance as p x {displaystyle p_{x}} and S ( p x ) {displaystyle S(p_{x})} is the differential entropy of p x {displaystyle p_{x}} :
Negentropy is used in statistics and signal processing. It is related to network entropy, which is used in independent component analysis.[7][8]
The negentropy of a distribution is equal to the KullbackLeibler divergence between p x {displaystyle p_{x}} and a Gaussian distribution with the same mean and variance as p x {displaystyle p_{x}} (see Differential entropy Maximization in the normal distribution for a proof). In particular, it is always nonnegative.
There is a physical quantity closely linked to free energy (free enthalpy), with a unit of entropy and isomorphic to negentropy known in statistics and information theory. In 1873, Willard Gibbs created a diagram illustrating the concept of free energy corresponding to free enthalpy. On the diagram one can see the quantity called capacity for entropy. This quantity is the amount of entropy that may be increased without changing an internal energy or increasing its volume.[9] In other words, it is a difference between maximum possible, under assumed conditions, entropy and its actual entropy. It corresponds exactly to the definition of negentropy adopted in statistics and information theory. A similar physical quantity was introduced in 1869 by Massieu for the isothermal process[10][11][12] (both quantities differs just with a figure sign) and then Planck for the isothermal-isobaric process.[13] More recently, the MassieuPlanck thermodynamic potential, known also as free entropy, has been shown to play a great role in the so-called entropic formulation of statistical mechanics,[14] applied among the others in molecular biology[15] and thermodynamic non-equilibrium processes.[16]
In particular, mathematically the negentropy (the negative entropy function, in physics interpreted as free entropy) is the convex conjugate of LogSumExp (in physics interpreted as the free energy).
In 1953, Lon Brillouin derived a general equation[17] stating that the changing of an information bit value requires at least k T ln 2 {displaystyle kTln 2} energy. This is the same energy as the work Le Szilrd's engine produces in the idealistic case. In his book,[18] he further explored this problem concluding that any cause of this bit value change (measurement, decision about a yes/no question, erasure, display, etc.) will require the same amount of energy.
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Entropy and life – Wikipedia
Posted: at 1:36 pm
Relationship between the thermodynamic concept of entropy and the evolution of living organisms
Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and the evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910, American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of thermodynamics and on the principle of entropy.[1][2]
The 1944 book What is Life? by Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrdinger stimulated further research in the field. In his book, Schrdinger originally stated that life feeds on negative entropy, or negentropy as it is sometimes called, but in a later edition corrected himself in response to complaints and stated that the true source is free energy. More recent work has restricted the discussion to Gibbs free energy because biological processes on Earth normally occur at a constant temperature and pressure, such as in the atmosphere or at the bottom of the ocean, but not across both over short periods of time for individual organisms.
Ideas about the relationship between entropy and living organisms have inspired hypotheses and speculations in many contexts, including psychology, information theory, the origin of life, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
In 1863, Rudolf Clausius published his noted memoir On the Concentration of Rays of Heat and Light, and on the Limits of Its Action, wherein he outlined a preliminary relationship, based on his own work and that of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), between living processes and his newly developed concept of entropy.[citation needed] Building on this, one of the first to speculate on a possible thermodynamic perspective of organic evolution was the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In 1875, building on the works of Clausius and Kelvin, Boltzmann reasoned:
The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials these, for organisms, are air, water and soil, all abundantly available nor for energy which exists in plenty in any body in the form of heat, but a struggle for [negative] entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.[3]
In 1876, American civil engineer Richard Sears McCulloh, in his Treatise on the Mechanical Theory of Heat and its Application to the Steam-Engine, which was an early thermodynamics textbook, states, after speaking about the laws of the physical world, that "there are none that are established on a firmer basis than the two general propositions of Joule and Carnot; which constitute the fundamental laws of our subject." McCulloh then goes on to show that these two laws may be combined in a single expression as follows:
where
McCulloh then declares that the applications of these two laws, i.e. what are currently known as the first law of thermodynamics and the second law of thermodynamics, are innumerable:
When we reflect how generally physical phenomena are connected with thermal changes and relations, it at once becomes obvious that there are few, if any, branches of natural science which are not more or less dependent upon the great truths under consideration. Nor should it, therefore, be a matter of surprise that already, in the short space of time, not yet one generation, elapsed since the mechanical theory of heat has been freely adopted, whole branches of physical science have been revolutionized by it.[4]:p. 267
McCulloh gives a few of what he calls the "more interesting examples" of the application of these laws in extent and utility. His first example is physiology, wherein he states that "the body of an animal, not less than a steamer, or a locomotive, is truly a heat engine, and the consumption of food in the one is precisely analogous to the burning of fuel in the other; in both, the chemical process is the same: that called combustion." He then incorporates a discussion of Antoine Lavoisier's theory of respiration with cycles of digestion, excretion, and perspiration, but then contradicts Lavoisier with recent findings, such as internal heat generated by friction, according to the new theory of heat, which, according to McCulloh, states that the "heat of the body generally and uniformly is diffused instead of being concentrated in the chest". McCulloh then gives an example of the second law, where he states that friction, especially in the smaller blood vessels, must develop heat. Undoubtedly, some fraction of the heat generated by animals is produced in this way. He then asks: "but whence the expenditure of energy causing that friction, and which must be itself accounted for?"
To answer this question he turns to the mechanical theory of heat and goes on to loosely outline how the heart is what he calls a "force-pump", which receives blood and sends it to every part of the body, as discovered by William Harvey, and which "acts like the piston of an engine and is dependent upon and consequently due to the cycle of nutrition and excretion which sustains physical or organic life". It is likely that McCulloh modeled parts of this argument on that of the famous Carnot cycle. In conclusion, he summarizes his first and second law argument as such:
Everything physical being subject to the law of conservation of energy, it follows that no physiological action can take place except with expenditure of energy derived from food; also, that an animal performing mechanical work must from the same quantity of food generate less heat than one abstaining from exertion, the difference being precisely the heat equivalent of that of work.[4]:p. 270
In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrdinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, theorized that life contrary to the general tendency dictated by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase decreases or keeps constant its entropy by feeding on negative entropy.[5] The problem of organization in living systems increasing despite the second law is known as the Schrdinger paradox.[6] In his note to Chapter 6 of What is Life?, however, Schrdinger remarks on his usage of the term negative entropy:
Let me say first, that if I had been catering for them [physicists] alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead. It is the more familiar notion in this context. But this highly technical term seemed linguistically too near to energy for making the average reader alive to the contrast between the two things.
This, Schrdinger argues, is what differentiates life from other forms of the organization of matter. In this direction, although life's dynamics may be argued to go against the tendency of the second law, life does not in any way conflict with or invalidate this law, because the principle that entropy can only increase or remain constant applies only to a closed system which is adiabatically isolated, meaning no heat can enter or leave, and the physical and chemical processes which make life possible do not occur in adiabatic isolation, i.e. living systems are open systems. Whenever a system can exchange either heat or matter with its environment, an entropy decrease of that system is entirely compatible with the second law.[7]
Schrdinger asked the question: "How does the living organism avoid decay?" The obvious answer is: "By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating." While energy from nutrients is necessary to sustain an organism's order, Schrdinger also presciently postulated the existence of other molecules equally necessary for creating the order observed in living organisms: "An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a stream of order on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos of drinking orderliness from a suitable environment seems to be connected with the presence of the aperiodic solids..." We now know that this "aperiodic" crystal is DNA, and that its irregular arrangement is a form of information. "The DNA in the cell nucleus contains the master copy of the software, in duplicate. This software seems to control by specifying an algorithm, or set of instructions, for creating and maintaining the entire organism containing the cell."[8]
DNA and other macromolecules determine an organism's life cycle: birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death. Nutrition is necessary but not sufficient to account for growth in size, as genetics is the governing factor. At some point, virtually all organisms normally decline and die even while remaining in environments that contain sufficient nutrients to sustain life. The controlling factor must be internal and not nutrients or sunlight acting as causal exogenous variables. Organisms inherit the ability to create unique and complex biological structures; it is unlikely for those capabilities to be reinvented or to be taught to each generation. Therefore, DNA must be operative as the prime cause in this characteristic as well. Applying Boltzmann's perspective of the second law, the change of state from a more probable, less ordered, and higher entropy arrangement to one of less probability, more order, and lower entropy (as is seen in biological ordering) calls for a function like that known of DNA. DNA's apparent information-processing function provides a resolution of the Schrdinger paradox posed by life and the entropy requirement of the second law.[9]
In recent years, the thermodynamic interpretation of evolution in relation to entropy has begun to utilize the concept of the Gibbs free energy, rather than entropy.[10][11] This is because biological processes on Earth take place at roughly constant temperature and pressure, a situation in which the Gibbs free energy is an especially useful way to express the second law of thermodynamics. The Gibbs free energy is given by:
where
The minimization of the Gibbs free energy is a form of the principle of minimum energy, which follows from the entropy maximization principle for closed systems. Moreover, the Gibbs free energy equation, in modified form, can be utilized for open systems when chemical potential terms are included in the energy balance equation. In a popular 1982 textbook, Principles of Biochemistry, noted American biochemist Albert Lehninger argued that the order produced within cells as they grow and divide is more than compensated for by the disorder they create in their surroundings in the course of growth and division. In short, according to Lehninger, "Living organisms preserve their internal order by taking from their surroundings free energy, in the form of nutrients or sunlight, and returning to their surroundings an equal amount of energy as heat and entropy."[12]
Similarly, according to the chemist John Avery, from his 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution, we find a presentation in which the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its basis in the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. The (apparent) paradox between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems, according to Avery, has its resolution "in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources."[13] Assuming evolution drives organisms towards higher information content, it is postulated by Gregory Chaitin that life has properties of high mutual information,[14] and by Tamvakis that life can be quantified using mutual information density metrics, a generalisation of the concept of Biodiversity.[15]
In a study titled "Natural selection for least action" published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A., Ville Kaila and Arto Annila of the University of Helsinki describe how the process of natural selection responsible for such local increase in order may be mathematically derived directly from the expression of the second law equation for connected non-equilibrium open systems. The second law of thermodynamics can be written as an equation of motion to describe evolution, showing how natural selection and the principle of least action can be connected by expressing natural selection in terms of chemical thermodynamics. In this view, evolution explores possible paths to level differences in energy densities and so increase entropy most rapidly. Thus, an organism serves as an energy transfer mechanism, and beneficial mutations allow successive organisms to transfer more energy within their environment.[16][17]
The second law of thermodynamics applied to the origin of life is a far more complicated issue than the further development of life, since there is no "standard model" of how the first biological lifeforms emerged, only a number of competing hypotheses. The problem is discussed within the context of abiogenesis, implying gradual pre-Darwinian chemical evolution. In 1924, Alexander Oparin suggested that sufficient energy for generating early lifeforms from non-living molecules was provided in a "primordial soup". The Belgian scientist Ilya Prigogine was awarded with a Nobel Prize in 1977 for an analysis in this area, and one of his main contributions was the concept of dissipative system, which describes the thermodynamics of open systems in non-equilibrium states. A related topic is the probability that life would emerge, which has been discussed in several studies, for example by Russell Doolittle.[18]
The evolution of order, manifested as biological complexity, in living systems and the generation of order in certain non-living systems was proposed to obey a common fundamental principal called "the Darwinian dynamic".[19] The Darwinian dynamic was formulated by first considering how microscopic order is generated in relatively simple non-biological systems that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium (e.g. tornadoes, hurricanes). Consideration was then extended to short, replicating RNA molecules assumed to be similar to the earliest forms of life in the RNA world. It was shown that the underlying order-generating processes in the non-biological systems and in replicating RNA are basically similar. This approach helps clarify the relationship of thermodynamics to evolution as well as the empirical content of Darwin's theory.
In 2009, physicist Karo Michaelian published a thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life[20][21] in which the fundamental molecules of life; nucleic acids, amino acids, carbohydrates (sugars), and lipids are considered to have been originally produced as microscopic dissipative structures (through Prigogine's dissipative structuring[22]) as pigments at the ocean surface to absorb and dissipate into heat the UVC flux of solar light arriving at Earth's surface during the Archean, just as do organic pigments in the visible region today. These UVC pigments were formed through photochemical dissipative structuring from more common and simpler precursor molecules like HCN and H2O under the UVC flux of solar light.[20][21][23] The thermodynamic function of the original pigments (fundamental molecules of life) was to increase the entropy production of the incipient biosphere under the solar photon flux and this, in fact, remains as the most important thermodynamic function of the biosphere today, but now mainly in the visible region where photon intensities are higher and biosynthetic pathways are more complex, allowing pigments to be synthesized from lower energy visible light instead of UVC light which no longer reaches Earth's surface.
Jeremy England developed a hypothesis of the physics of the origins of life, that he calls 'dissipation-driven adaptation'.[24][25] The hypothesis holds that random groups of molecules can self-organize to more efficiently absorb and dissipate heat from the environment. His hypothesis states that such self-organizing systems are an inherent part of the physical world.[26]
Like a thermodynamic system, an information system has an analogous concept to entropy called information entropy. Here, entropy is a measure of the increase or decrease in the novelty of information. Path flows of novel information show a familiar pattern. They tend to increase or decrease the number of possible outcomes in the same way that measures of thermodynamic entropy increase or decrease the state space. Like thermodynamic entropy, information entropy uses a logarithmic scale: P(x) log P(x), where P is the probability of some outcome x.[27] Reductions in information entropy are associated with a smaller number of possible outcomes in the information system.
In 1984, Brooks and Wiley introduced the concept of species entropy as a measure of the sum of entropy reduction within species populations in relation to free energy in the environment.[28] Brooks-Wiley entropy looks at three categories of entropy changes: information, cohesion and metabolism. Information entropy here measures the efficiency of the genetic information in recording all the potential combinations of heredity which are present. Cohesion entropy looks at the sexual linkages within a population. Metabolic entropy is the familiar chemical entropy used to compare the population to its ecosystem. The sum of these three is a measure of nonequilibrium entropy that drives evolution at the population level.
A 2022 article by Helman in Acta Biotheoretica suggests identifying a divergence measure of these three types of entropies: thermodynamic entropy, information entropy and species entropy.[29] Where these three are overdetermined, there will be a formal freedom that arises similar to how chirality arises from a minimum number of dimensions. Once there are at least four points for atoms, for example, in a molecule that has a central atom, left and right enantiomers are possible. By analogy, once a threshold of overdetermination in entropy is reached in living systems, there will be an internal state space that allows for ordering of systems operations. That internal ordering process is a threshold for distinguishing living from nonliving systems.
In 1964, James Lovelock was among a group of scientists requested by NASA to make a theoretical life-detection system to look for life on Mars during the upcoming space mission. When thinking about this problem, Lovelock wondered "how can we be sure that Martian life, if any, will reveal itself to tests based on Earth's lifestyle?"[30] To Lovelock, the basic question was "What is life, and how should it be recognized?" When speaking about this issue with some of his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was asked what he would do to look for life on Mars. To this, Lovelock replied "I'd look for an entropy reduction, since this must be a general characteristic of life."[30]
In 2013, Azua-Bustos and Vega argued that, disregarding the types of lifeforms that might be envisioned both on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, all should share in common the attribute of decreasing their internal entropy at the expense of free energy obtained from their surroundings. As entropy allows the quantification of the degree of disorder in a system, any envisioned lifeform must have a higher degree of order than its immediate supporting environment. These authors showed that by using fractal mathematics analysis alone, they could readily quantify the degree of structural complexity difference (and thus entropy) of living processes as distinct entities separate from their similar abiotic surroundings. This approach may allow the future detection of unknown forms of life both in the Solar System and on recently discovered exoplanets based on nothing more than entropy differentials of complementary datasets (morphology, coloration, temperature, pH, isotopic composition, etc.).[31]
The notion of entropy as disorder has been transferred from thermodynamics to psychology by Polish psychiatrist Antoni Kpiski, who admitted being inspired by Erwin Schrdinger.[32] In his theoretical framework devised to explain mental disorders (the information metabolism theory), the difference between living organisms and other systems was explained as the ability to maintain order. Contrary to inanimate matter, organisms maintain the particular order of their bodily structures and inner worlds which they impose onto their surroundings and forward to new generations. The life of an organism or the species ceases as soon as it loses that ability.[33] Maintenance of that order requires continual exchange of information between the organism and its surroundings. In higher organisms, information is acquired mainly through sensory receptors and metabolised in the nervous system. The result is action some form of motion, for example locomotion, speech, internal motion of organs, secretion of hormones, etc. The reactions of one organism become an informational signal to other organisms. Information metabolism, which allows living systems to maintain the order, is possible only if a hierarchy of value exists, as the signals coming to the organism must be structured. In humans that hierarchy has three levels, i.e. biological, emotional, and sociocultural.[34] Kpiski explained how various mental disorders are caused by distortions of that hierarchy, and that the return to mental health is possible through its restoration.[35]
The idea was continued by Struzik, who proposed that Kpiski's information metabolism theory may be seen as an extension of Lon Brillouin's negentropy principle of information.[36] In 2011, the notion of "psychological entropy" was reintroduced to psychologists by Hirsh et al.[37] Similarly to Kpiski, these authors noted that uncertainty management is a critical ability for any organism. Uncertainty, arising due to the conflict between competing perceptual and behavioral affordances, is experienced subjectively as anxiety. Hirsh and his collaborators proposed that both the perceptual and behavioral domains may be conceptualized as probability distributions and that the amount of uncertainty associated with a given perceptual or behavioral experience can be quantified in terms of Claude Shannon's entropy formula.
Entropy is well defined for equilibrium systems, so objections to the extension of the second law and of entropy to biological systems, especially as it pertains to its use to support or discredit the theory of evolution, have been stated.[38][39] Living systems and indeed many other systems and processes in the universe operate far from equilibrium.
However, entropy is well defined much more broadly based on the probabilities of a system's states, whether or not the system is a dynamic one (for which equilibrium could be relevant). Even in those physical systems where equilibrium could be relevant, (1) living systems cannot persist in isolation, and (2) the second principle of thermodynamics does not require that free energy be transformed into entropy along the shortest path: living organisms absorb energy from sunlight or from energy-rich chemical compounds and finally return part of such energy to the environment as entropy (generally in the form of heat and low free-energy compounds such as water and carbon dioxide).
A contribution to this line of study, and an attempt to solve those conceptual limits, has been given by Ilya Prigogine throughout all his research, that lead him also to win the Nobel prize in 1977. One of his major contributions was the concept of dissipative system.
Vol. 2 Pages 1266-1269 IEEE
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The Satanic Bible – Wikipedia
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Religious text of LaVeyan Satanism
The Satanic Bible is a collection of essays, observations, and rituals published by Anton LaVey in 1969. It is the central religious text of LaVeyan Satanism, and is considered the foundation of its philosophy and dogma. It has been described as the most important document to influence contemporary Satanism. Though The Satanic Bible is not considered to be sacred scripture in the way that the Christian Bible is to Christianity, LaVeyan Satanists regard it as an authoritative text as it is a contemporary text that has attained for them scriptural status. It extols the virtues of exploring one's own nature and instincts. Believers have been described as "atheistic Satanists" because they believe that God and Satan are not external entities, but rather projections of an individual's own personalitybenevolent and stabilizing forces in their life. There have been thirty printings of The Satanic Bible, selling over a million copies.
The Satanic Bible is composed of four books: The Book of Satan, The Book of Lucifer, The Book of Belial, and The Book of Leviathan. The Book of Satan challenges the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, and promotes Epicureanism. The Book of Lucifer holds most of the philosophy in The Satanic Bible, with twelve chapters discussing topics such as indulgence, love, hate, and sex. LaVey also uses the book to dispel rumors surrounding the religion. In The Book of Belial, LaVey details rituals and magic. He discusses the required mindset and focus for performing a ritual, and provides instructions for three rituals: those for sex, compassion, or destruction. The Book of Leviathan provides four invocations for Satan, lust, compassion, and destruction. It also lists the nineteen Enochian Keys (adapted from John Dee's Enochian keys), provided both in Enochian and in English translation.
There have been both positive and negative reactions to The Satanic Bible. It has been described as "razor-sharp" and "influential". Criticism of The Satanic Bible stems both from qualms over LaVey's writing and disapproval of the content itself. LaVey has been criticized for plagiarizing sections, and accusations have been made that his philosophies are largely borrowed. Attempts have been made to ban the book in schools, public libraries, and prisons, though these attempts are somewhat rare.
There are multiple stories of the birth of The Satanic Bible. In the introduction to the 2005present edition, High Priest Peter H. Gilmore describes LaVey as having compiled The Satanic Bible on his own from monographs he had written about the Church of Satan and its rituals. Gilmore lists a number of people who influenced LaVey's writings: Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, H. L. Mencken, the members of the carnival with whom LaVey had supposedly worked in his youth, P. T. Barnum, Mark Twain, John Milton, and Lord Byron.
LaVey's estranged daughter Zeena Schreck, in an expos about both her father's religion and past, attributes the birth of The Satanic Bible to a suggestion by Peter Mayer, a publisher for Avon. According to Schreck, Mayer proposed that LaVey author a Satanic Bible to draw from the popularity of the 1968 horror film Rosemary's Baby, which had caused a recent rise in public interest in both Satanism and other occult practices.[a] Schreck states that, aided by Diane Hegarty, LaVey compiled a number of writings he had already been distributing: an introduction to Satanism, a number of short essays, a guide to ritual magic, and articles he had previously published in The Cloven Hoof, a Church of Satan newsletter.
Either to meet length requirements set by the publisher or out of agreement with the ideas, LaVey and Hegarty borrowed heavily from writings by other authors. These included a social Darwinist book published in 1890 entitled Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard, as well as Dee's Enochian keys from Aleister Crowley's The Equinox, modified to replace references to Christianity with those to Satan. Some accuse LaVey of paraphrasing the Nine Satanic Statements from Rand's Atlas Shrugged without acknowledgement, though others maintain that LaVey was simply drawing inspiration from the novel. LaVey later affirmed the connection with Rand's ideas by stating that LaVeyan Satanism was "just Ayn Rand's philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added".
Originally published in paperback by Avon in 1969, The Satanic Bible has had thirty printings and has never gone out of print. A hardcover edition was published by University Books that same year but has now been out of print for decades.[29] In 2015, William Morrow published a new hardcover edition of the book combined in a single volume with its companion work, The Satanic Rituals, and marketed under a special arrangement by Rabid Crow Arts and Graphics.[30] The main content has not changed throughout the editions, although the dedication was removed after several printings and the introduction has changed several times. The Sigil of Baphomet has been printed on the cover since the original publication. The Satanic Bible has sold over one million copies since its initial release. It has also been translated into Danish, Swedish, German, Spanish, Finnish and Turkish.
Though it is no longer included in current printings of The Satanic Bible, early printings included an extensive dedication to various people whom LaVey recognized as influences. LaVey's primary dedication was to Bernardino Nogara (misprinted as "Logara"), Karl Haushofer, Grigori Rasputin, Basil Zaharoff, Alessandro Cagliostro, Barnabas Saul (John Dee's first scryer), Ragnar Redbeard, William Mortensen, Hans Brick, Max Reinhardt, Orrin Klapp, Fritz Lang, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. C. Fields, P. T. Barnum, Hans Poelzig, Reginald Marsh, Wilhelm Reich, and Mark Twain. The secondary dedication named Howard Hughes, James Moody, Marcello Truzzi, AdrianClaude Frazier, Marilyn Monroe, Wesley Mather, William Lindsay Gresham, Hugo Zacchini, Jayne Mansfield, Frederick Goerner, C. Huntley, Nathanael West, Horatio Alger Jr., Robert E. Howard, George Orwell, H. P. Lovecraft, Tuesday Weld, H. G. Wells, Sister Marie Koven, Harry Houdini, Togare (LaVey's pet lion), and the Nine Unknown Men from The Nine Unknown.
Throughout the various printings of The Satanic Bible, it has included introductions by various authors. The first edition (in print from 1969 to 1972) included an excerpt from an article by Burton H. Wolfe, an investigative journalist and biographer of LaVey, entitled "The Church that Worships Satan". Wolfe provides an extensive biography of LaVey and a history of the Church of Satan. He mentions Rosemary's Baby as contributing to the popularity of Satanism, though he does not claim LaVeyan Satanism to have directly influenced its creation. From 1972 until 1976, the introduction to The Satanic Bible was a piece by Michael A. Aquino, who later went on to found the Temple of Set with a number of members of the Church of Satan. He gives a detailed analysis of the Satanic philosophies, and dispels myths about LaVeyan Satanism. He explains that it is not "devil worship", and that LaVeyan Satanists in fact reject the worship of external gods completely. He too provides a brief background on LaVey, explaining how LaVey brought some of the knowledge he had acquired while working with the circus to his religion. Wolfe again wrote the introduction for the 1976 to 2005 editions of The Satanic Bible. It included some of the same content as the 1969 version, with an expanded biography of LaVey and more information on the various conflicts between other religions and LaVeyan Satanism. Since 2005, The Satanic Bible has contained an introduction written by Gilmore, High Priest of the Church of Satan. In this introduction, he discusses his discovery of LaVeyan Satanism and his relationship with LaVey. He then goes on to provide a detailed biography of LaVey and addresses allegations that LaVey falsified much of the story of his own past. The introduction also provides a history of The Satanic Bible itself, as well as that of two other books by LaVey: The Satanic Witch and The Satanic Rituals.
LaVey explains his reasons for writing The Satanic Bible in a short preface. He speaks skeptically about volumes written by other authors on the subject of magic, dismissing them as "nothing more than sanctimonious fraud" and "volumes of hoary misinformation and false prophecy". He complains that other authors do no more than confuse the subject. He mocks those who spend large amounts of money on attempts to follow rituals and learn about the magic shared in other occult books. He also notes that many of the existing writings on Satanic magic and ideology were created by "right-hand path" authors. He tells that The Satanic Bible contains both truth and fantasy, and declares, "What you see may not always please you, but you will see!"
The prologue to The Satanic Bible begins by discussing the concept of gods, good and evil, and human nature. It includes the Nine Satanic Statements:
The Nine Satanic Statements outline the basic ideology of LaVeyan Satanism, and have become some of the guiding principles of LaVeyan Satanism. They also served as a template for later publications by LaVey, such as his 1987 "Nine Satanic Sins". Ayn Rand's influence on LaVeyan Satanism is apparent in the Nine Satanic Statements, leading some, namely Nikolas Schreck, to assert that the Statements are simply unacknowledged paraphrase of Rand's thoughts. These accusations have been disproved, however.
Much of the first book of The Satanic Bible is taken from parts of Redbeard's Might Is Right, edited to remove racism, antisemitism, and misogyny. It challenges both the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, advocating instead a tooth-for-tooth philosophy. LaVey, through Redbeard, strongly advocates social Darwinism, saying, "Death to the weakling, wealth to the strong!" Humans are identified as instinctually predatory, and "lust and carnal desire" are singled out as part of humans' intrinsic nature. The Book of Satan suggests a hedonistic outlook, saying, "I break away from all conventions that do not lead to my earthly happiness." Indulgence is endorsed, and readers are encouraged to make the most of their lives. It criticizes both law and religious principles, instead suggesting doing only what makes one happy and successful. LaVey continues to denounce other religions, and he rails against what he considers to be arbitrary definitions of "good" and "evil". Religion is criticized as a man-made construct, and the reader is urged to question everything and destroy any lies that he or she uncovers. Long-standing lies that are believed to be irrefutable truths are identified as the most dangerous. The last part of The Book of Satan is an adaptation of the Christian Beatitudes, changed to reflect the principles of LaVeyan Satanism.
The Book of Lucifer contains the majority of the philosophy of The Satanic Bible. It details how Christianity has taught that God is good and Satan is evil, and presents an alternate view. It describes that the concept of Satan, used synonymously with "God", is different for each LaVeyan Satanist, but that to all it represents a good and steadying force in their life. Believers have been called "atheistic Satanists" because of this lack of belief in external gods, but others identify as antitheistic. Satan is seen to LaVeyan Satanists not as "an anthropomorphic being with cloven hooves, a barbed tail, and horns", but as a force of nature that has only been described as evil by other religions. Satan is viewed as a metaphor or a symbol, not as a being to be worshipped.
LaVey rejects the idea of prayer, instead urging Satanists to take action to fix a situation instead of asking for a solution. The seven deadly sins are advocated, on the basis that they all lead to personal pleasure. He says that Satanism is a form of "controlled selfishness", in the sense that doing something to help another will, in turn, make one happy. The Golden Rule is again mentioned, and LaVey suggests altering it from "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" to "Do unto others as they do unto you" so that if someone is treated poorly, he or she can respond viciously. The Book of Lucifer also contains a list of "The Four Crown Princes of Hell" (Satan, Lucifer, Belial, and Leviathan) and of seventy-seven "Infernal Names", representations of Satan from various cultures and religions. They are the names that, according to LaVey, are most useful in Satanic rituals.
The Book of Lucifer contains a long chapter titled "Satanic Sex", discussing Satanism's view on sexual activity as well as misconceptions surrounding these views. He denies the belief that sex is the most important element in LaVeyan Satanism, and that participation in orgies or other promiscuous behavior is forced. He explains that sexual freedom is encouraged, but only in the sense that believers should be free to explore their own sexualities as they please, without harming others. Along with the rumors regarding Satanic views on sex, LaVey also addresses those about animal and human sacrifice. He explains that the only time a LaVeyan Satanist would perform a human sacrifice would be to accomplish two goals: to "release the magician's wrath" as he or she performed a curse, and to kill someone who deserved to die. He considers the action of hurting another person a request to be destroyed and explains that the Satanist is morally required to grant this request in the form of a curse. LaVey also says that a Satanist would never sacrifice a baby or an animal, as they are pure carnal beings and considered to be sacred. In The Book of Lucifer, LaVey outlines LaVeyan Satanism's views on death. He explains that one who has lived a full life will dread death and that this is the way it should be. He also does not agree with the idea of reincarnation. He encourages a strong will to live, comparing it to animals' instincts to fight viciously for their lives. Suicide is discouraged except in cases of euthanasia, where it would end extreme suffering. Because the Satanist is considered their own god, birthdays are celebrated as the most important holidays. Following one's birthday in importance are Walpurgisnacht and Halloween. Solstices and equinoxes are also celebrated.
The third book of The Satanic Bible describes rituals and magic. According to Joshua Gunn, these are adapted from books of ritual magic such as Crowley's Magick: Elementary Theory. The Satanic Rituals, published by LaVey in 1972, outlines the rituals more precisely, and contains the entire text of the Black Mass. LaVey begins The Book of Belial by defining magic as "The change in situations or events in accordance with one's will, which would, using normally accepted methods, be unchangeable." He explains that some of the rituals are simply applied psychology or science, but that some contain parts with no scientific basis.
LaVey explains that, in order to control a person, one must first attract their attention. He gives three qualities that can be employed for this purpose: sex appeal, sentiment (cuteness or innocence), and wonder. He also advocates the use of odor. In the Book of Belial, he discusses three types of rituals: those for sex, compassion, and destruction. Sex rituals work to entice another person; compassion rituals work to improve health, intelligence, success, and so on; destruction rituals work to destroy another person. LaVey advocates finding others with whom to practice Satanic rituals in order to reaffirm one's faith and avoid antisocial behavior. He particularly advocates group participation for destruction rituals, as compassion and sex rituals are more private in nature. LaVey goes on to list the key components to successful ritual: desire, timing, imagery, direction, and "The Balance Factor" (awareness of one's own limitations). Details for the various Satanic rituals are explained in The Book of Belial, and lists of necessary objects (such as clothing, altars, and the symbol of Baphomet) are given.
The final book of The Satanic Bible emphasizes the importance of spoken word and emotion to effective magic. An "Invocation to Satan" as well as three invocations for the three types of ritual are given. The "Invocation to Satan" commands the dark forces to grant power to the summoner, and lists the Infernal names for use in the invocation. The "Invocation employed towards the conjuration of lust" is used for attracting the attentions of another. Both male and female versions of the invocation are provided. The "Invocation employed towards the conjuration of destruction" commands the dark forces to destroy the subject of the invocation. The "Invocation employed towards the conjuration of compassion" requests protection, health, strength, and the destruction of anything ailing the subject of the invocation. The rest of The Book of Leviathan is composed of the Enochian Keys, which LaVey adapted from Dee's original work. They are given in Enochian and also translated into English. LaVey provides a brief introduction that credits Dee and explains some of the history behind the Enochian Keys and language. He maintains that the translations provided are an "unvarnishing" of the translations performed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1800s, but others accuse LaVey of simply changing references to Christianity with those to Satan.
The Satanic Bible often uses the terms "God" and "Satan" interchangeably, except when referring to the concepts of these as viewed by other religions. LaVey also occasionally uses the term "God" to refer to other religions' views of God, and "Satan" or synonyms to refer to the idea of god as interpreted by LaVeyan Satanism, as when he writes, "When all religious faith in lies has waned, it is because man has become closer to himself and farther from 'God'; closer to the 'Devil.'" Throughout The Satanic Bible, the LaVeyan Satanist's view of god is described as the Satanist's true "self"a projection of their own personalitynot an external deity. Satan is used as a representation of personal liberty and individualism. Satan is also used as a metaphor for the ideas connected with the early Christian view of Satan or the serpent: wise, defiant, questioning, and free-thinking. LaVey discusses this extensively in The Book of Lucifer, explaining that the gods worshipped by other religions are also projections of man's true self. He argues that man's unwillingness to accept his own ego has caused him to externalize these gods so as to avoid the feeling of narcissism that would accompany self-worship.
If man insists on externalizing his true self in the form of "God," then why fear his true self, in fearing "God,"why praise his true self in praising "God,"why remain externalized from "God" in order to engage in ritual and religious ceremony in his name?Man needs ritual and dogma, but no law states that an externalized god is necessary in order to engage in ritual and ceremony performed in a god's name! Could it be that when he closes the gap between himself and his "God" he sees the demon of pride creeping forththat very embodiment of Lucifer appearing in his midst?
Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible, pp. 4445
Though at some points LaVey refers to Satan as a physical being, this is intended to encourage the Satanist's "rational self-interest."
Many of the ideas in The Satanic Bible suggest a secular, scientific view of the world. However, some of these ideas continue beyond present-day secularism by implying that various occult forces are not supernatural, but rather thus far undiscovered by science. These forces are said to be manipulable by the practitioner of LaVeyan Satanism, a trait of the religion that has been compared with Christian Science and Scientology.
James Lewis argues that scientific themes are so prevalent in The Satanic Bible because LaVey was appealing to the authority of science to legitimize Satanism as a religion.
Social Darwinism and the concept of "human nature" are ideas that are prevalent throughout The Satanic Bible. LaVey describes Satanism as "a religion based on the universal traits of man," and humans are described throughout as inherently carnal and animalistic. Each of the seven deadly sins is described as part of human's natural instinct, and are thus advocated. Social Darwinism is particularly noticeable in The Book of Satan, where LaVey plagiarizes portions of Redbeard's Might Is Right, though it also appears throughout in references to man's inherent strength and instinct for self-preservation. LaVeyan Satanism has been described as "institutionalism of Machiavellian self-interest" because of many of these themes.
The Satanic Bible is recognized as one of the key texts of modern Satanism. The Church of Satan requires that people accept "LaVey's principles" before becoming members of the church. Many other Satanist groups and individual Satanists who are not part of the Church of Satan also recognize LaVey's work as influential. Many Satanists attribute their conversions or discoveries of Satanism to The Satanic Bible, with 20% of respondents to a survey by James Lewis mentioning The Satanic Bible directly as influencing their conversion.In Gilmore's introduction, he lists a number of novels and films supposedly influenced by The Satanic Bible and LaVeyan Satanism. These include the novels Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin and Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber, as well as films such as Rosemary's Baby, The Devil's Rain, The Car, and Dr. Dracula. Others have lauded The Satanic Bible as heavily influential on metal and rock bands, such as Black Sabbath, Venom, Slayer,[90] King Diamond, and Marilyn Manson.
Richard Metzger describes The Satanic Bible as "a razor-sharp, no-bullshit primer in natural and supernatural law." David G. Bromley calls it "iconoclastic" and "the best-known and most influential statement of Satanic theology." Eugene V. Gallagher says that Satanists use LaVey's writings "as lenses through which they view themselves, their group, and the cosmos." He also states: "With a clear-eyed appreciation of true human nature, a love of ritual and pageantry, and a flair for mockery, LaVey's Satanic Bible promulgated a gospel of self-indulgence that, he argued, anyone who dispassionately considered the facts would embrace." The philosophy it presents has been described as "strident libertarianism" and "an obvious distillation of ideas common among members of the United States counter-culture in the 1960s." Joshua Gunn argues that the significance of The Satanic Bible as an occult item owes to its status as a "totem or a fetishized object in popular culture", not the philosophy contained within. He argues that many erroneously categorize the content of The Satanic Bible as evil and depraved from the minimalist, dark cover design (composed of a purple Sigil of Baphomet and white text on the front, and a photo of LaVey superimposed over the Sigil of Baphomet on the back), the verbose, overblown style of the text, and the presence of the word "Satan" in the title. Contrary to this belief, he says, the philosophy presented by LaVey is "neither offensive nor surprising."
Zeena Schreck has criticized The Satanic Bible as a financial endeavor suggested by Avon publisher, Mayer. She maintains that it contains large amounts of falsified information about LaVey's past, and that much of the book is plagiarized from Redbeard's Might Is Right, Dee's Enochian Keys, and Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Chris Mathews, in Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Radical Subculture, describes The Satanic Bible as "hastily prepared" and cynical. Both Mathews and a 1971 article in Newsweek compare the ideologies presented in The Satanic Bible to Nazism: containing "unremitting focus on social elitism, appeals to force, and scorn for egalitarian principles". Israel Regardie criticized LaVey's alteration of the Enochian Keys in The Book of Leviathan as stupid and of lower quality than the original Keys.
The Satanic Bible has also received a large amount of criticism from people and organizations who find its content to be dangerous. Much of this criticism came during the period of "Satanic panic," when Satanic ritual abuse was feared to be epidemic. Much of this media coverage, however, has been denounced as "uncritical and sensationalized." Tom Harpur condemns the book as "blasphemous" and "socially seditious," and blames it for causing an increase in gruesome violence, ritual abuse, and other obscene acts. Critics have also accused The Satanic Bible of encouraging violence and murder, particularly in young people considered to be impressionable. Dawn Perlmutter criticizes it for providing adolescents with bad messages and messages that can be easily misinterpreted. Possession of The Satanic Bible has been used by some studies to identify adolescents who are antisocial, and some warn that possession of the book is a warning sign of emotional issues. The Council on Mind Abuse took a very negative view of The Satanic Bible. Former Executive Director Rob Tucker warned parents to look for The Satanic Bible in their children's bedrooms, saying, "You have to help the child fight this obsession like any other addiction" and "It's like giving drugs to a kid who is already on the edge." Attempts to ban the book from schools and public libraries have been made in various places around the world, and bans or limitations on the book in prisons have been repeatedly challenged in court. However, opposition to The Satanic Bible has rarely led to its removal; these bans are rare. The book was banned in South Africa from 1973 to 1993.[107]
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BSE : Securities and Exchange Board of India (Issue of Capital and Disclosure Requirements) (Fourth Amendment) Regulations, 2022 – Marketscreener.com
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Celestron Travel Scope 70DX is an ideal beginner’s telescope for just …
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With several major celestial events left in 2022, now's a good time to up your skywatching game.
Whether you're looking for your first telescope or are looking to add to your arsenal of skywatching tools, we've got you covered with a great deal on a perfect beginner telescope package that's also well-suited for traveling or camping. This package will get you peering throughout the solar system in no time.
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The package includes two eyepieces (20mm and 10mm) to offer both high- and low-power views of space and even comes with a 2x Barlow lens for even more magnification, a moon filter for gazing at Earth's natural satellite, and a smartphone adapter for taking pictures of celestial objects. There's even an included Bluetooth remote for taking pictures so you don't have to disturb the telescope whenever you finally have a good picture lined up.
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The future of space tourism: op-ed | Space
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Dylan Taylor is a global entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who acts as the Chairman and CEO of Voyager Space Holdings and the founder of Space for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that seeks to democratize space exploration. He has also served as an active advocate and philanthropist in the space manufacturing industry and a strategic advisor for the Archmission and the Human Spaceflight Program while also acting as the co-founding patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Opinions and Insights.
It's true that 2020 spawned a collective feeling of retreat coupled with a FOMO (fear of missing out) that inspires us to escape a chaotic world. For now, we have the silence of nature or an eventual trip abroad, but the future can provide a more adventurous escape: one to the stars.
The NewSpace industry has its sights set on space tourism, a growing market expected to be worth at least $3 billion by 2030. As companies like SpaceX test reusable rocket technology to make spaceflight more affordable and accessible for humans, other private firms, including Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, are investing in suborbital space tourism to take Earthlings into the very edge of space and back. While only uber-wealthy passengers and private researchers will have access to space tourism in the immediate future, the long term holds promises for ordinary citizens.
The evolution of technology plays a vital role in sending more tourists to space and a few influential trends will determine the future of space tourism, along with the progress we make both on and off our home planet.
Related: Space tourists will face big risks, as private companies gear up for paid suborbital flights
Suborbital travel will likely be the space tourism subsector to materialize first, but it may also be the most short-lived. However, Blue Origin, backed by Jeff Bezos, is testing its New Shepard system that will launch customers to the edge of space in a capsule which separates from a small rocket and retreats back to Earth under parachutes. Richard Branson's company Virgin Galactic relies on a space plane, dropped from a carrier aircraft, with a rocket motor that speeds up and takes passengers high into the atmosphere.
Both companies' shuttle systems are designed to fly passengers over 50 miles above Earth's atmosphere, allowing customers to experience the feeling of weightlessness for a few minutes. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo will launch its next human spaceflight test on Dec. 11 as Blue Origin eyes early 2021.
These brief spaceflights hold opportunities for tourism and scientific research and present unique experiences for space observation at varying trajectories and regulatory requirements. However, Axios reports concerns over declined public interest in suborbital tourism as a passing interest due to high costs and a short-lived ride. This may deflate the market as passengers await new developments in the field.
But there's some hope. Some experts look to commercial suborbital trips to take the place of long-distance air travel that can eventually cater to everyday citizens. SpaceX plans to use its Starship rocket to fly 100 people around the world in mere minutes. The company stated that a 15-hour flight to Shanghai from New York would be capable of flying in 39 minutes. According to UBS, if even only 5% of the average 150 million passengers that travel on 10 hour or longer flights pay $2,500 per trip, then returns could skyrocket to $20 billion per year in today's value.
A recent UBS report mentions, "Space tourism could be the stepping stone for the development of long-haul travel on earth serviced by space."
Related: Virgin Galactic wants to send people on superfast trips across Earth
Orbital tourism, which entails remaining in space for at least one full orbit, is another major focus of governmental agencies and private space companies, all of which have the long-term goal to inhabit the moon and Mars. Projects from Boeing, SpaceX and Axiom Space plan to start launching tourists to the International Space Station on commercial spacecraft beginning as early as this year. SpaceX is also partnering with Space Adventures to send four tourists to low Earth orbit for a few days in late 2021 or early 2022.
As more companies consider in-space tourism, orbital vacations are set to become a popular trend. Orbital vacationing infrastructure, including orbital and lunar-based hotels, is positioned to become lucrative as space infrastructure companies already hauled in a combined $3.6 billion so far this year.
Much of this infrastructure remains in preliminary stages, but the first approach may be to establish low-orbit hotels. One hotel design expects to send guests in a hydrogen-filled balloon with a pressurized capsule, utilizing Earth's gravity. Other options include designing or renovating an existing space station to accommodate guests. NASA, for instance, is opening up the International Space Station for commercial tourism. The Aurora Station, a planned luxury hotel that will host six guests for a $9.5 million, 12-day stay in low Earth orbit, will charge $9.5 million for the trip. It's pricey, but experts predict prices will fall like they did in the tech industry for computers and mobile phones.
A proposal for expandable space habitats may also serve as orbital hotels. Made of unique materials and easily stored at home, they are launched to space where they're inflated to true size. Bigelow Space invented the B330, a space habitat that enlarges to form a hotel or living area for humans in space. As demand increases, they are interconnected to other inflatable habitats to increase their size. Bigelow also plans to develop an attached inflated module to the International Space Station as one of the first hotels in space. In-space vacations will eventually be the gateway for moon and Mars habitation.
Private space companies are devotedly investing across space tourism and firms like UBS consider access to space an enabler to broader opportunities for investment.
More next-generation engineers will enter the space tourism sector for the scope of opportunities and innovation, eventually decreasing the barriers to entry that will increase competition, lower costs, and ultimately democratize space travel for everyday citizens.
Of course, there are crucial safety, comfort and health factors to consider. Training, medical screenings and liability waivers will need to be examined before tourists head to space.
Space tourism will be a small subsector of the industry, but it will bolster the entire NewSpace industry. Once space tourism does become mainstream, it will also positively impact many socioeconomic factors on Earth: creating jobs, educating citizens about space and fostering a new solar-based energy infrastructure. The sweet escape to the stars can eventually awaken us to the awe-inspiring potential of space exploration while also giving us a better appreciation of home.
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Oceania Healthcare (NZSE:OCA) Is Paying Out Less In Dividends Than Last Year – Simply Wall St
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Oceania Healthcare (NZSE:OCA) Is Paying Out Less In Dividends Than Last Year  Simply Wall St
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Posthumanism: A Philosophy for the 21st Century? – TheCollector
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Untitled by Michelle Han, 2017, via ArtStation, with Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1817, via Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg
The impossible has long ago become possible. We can fly. We can communicate across great distances. We can cure many illnesses and have long ago started dabbling with the creation of life itself. The digital revolution is changing how we live, experience our identity, and understand reality. As technology is transforming our lives, we seem to have caught a serious case of vertigo. Are we turning into gods or are we in the process of making ourselves redundant? Posthumanism is a philosophical framework that asks the deeper question of what we mean when we say we. Could posthumanism be the philosophy for the 21st century?
Is posthumanism a philosophical theory, a method of analysis or merely a way of describing the condition of our current (and future) world? Posthumanism is difficult to define.
Broadly speaking, posthumanism is a philosophical framework that questions the primacy of the human and the necessity of the human as a category. While humanism appeals to our shared humanity as a basis for creating community, posthumanism criticizes this way of thinking as being limited and full of implicit biases. Some posthuman philosophers even claim that humanism is not only false, but downright destructive.
This may seem counterintuitive at first: the terms humanism and shared humanity remind us of things like progress, equality and human rights. Why should we let go of this way of thinking? Lets look at some of the arguments. Posthuman philosophy criticises the idea of the human on multiple counts. Here are the most important arguments.
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Posthuman thinkers believe that the concept of the human is in fact intertwined with things like colonialism, sexism, and racism. While an appeal to our shared humanity may be beautiful in theory, a brief look at history shows a different story. The idea of the human has historically been used to oppress whoever (and whatever) was considered nonhuman. The philosopher Rosi Braidotti makes the point that our understanding of the human is based on the concept of Da Vincis Vitruvian Man, 1490. She argues that slaves, native populations, and women were historically excluded from the category of what she calls fully human. Consequently, they were barred from enjoying equal rights with the white male. Humanism is therefore far from innocent: It comes with the baggage of Western supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
Da Vincis Vitruvian Man is a well-known symbol of humanism. Postcolonial and feminist philosophers have criticised this view and artists like Harmonia Rosales are subverting this in their artwork. Check out our articles on Women in Performance Art and Unknown Female Artists to find out more about women in the art world.
While it is a commonly accepted fact that humans are essentially animals, we continue to place ourselves in opposition to animals and other life-forms. Posthumanism suggests that we should stop thinking of ourselves as superior to the rest of the planet and accept that we are part of nature. After all, science has long ago proven that we share over 90% percent of DNA with apes. Recent discoveries have shown that we have a lot more in common with plants and mushrooms than we may think.
Sounds crazy? In fact, this idea isnt new at all
Long before Darwin, in 1748 the materialist thinker Julien Offray de La Mettrie published the highly entertaining essay Machine Man. While the essay (in which he likens humans to animals, machines, and plants) was highly controversial at the time, later scientific discoveries have proven many of his claims to be right.
But the idea that we are nothing more than a walking plant (De La Mettrie) goes back even further: The brotherhood of humans, animals, plants (and everything else) is deeply rooted in the cosmologies of many aboriginal tribes and natural religions:
Posthumanism asks us to remember our true place in the world: we are an integral part of nature.
It can be argued that humanism is the ideological basis for the exploitation of our planet: if we see ourselves as separate from (and superior to) the natural world, we dont have to feel so bad about exploiting and mistreating other lifeforms. But the natural world isnt the only victim of this mindset a worldview that separates us from the rest of the world also causes damage to our own psychological well-being. Seeing ourselves as outside nature contributes to the feeling of fragmentation and alienation that pervades the postmodern condition.
Embracing posthumanism could heal the perceived gap between the human and non-human. It could therefore help us connect more deeply to ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
But there is a price to pay: if we want to heal our relationship with the natural world, we have to let go of the idea that we are different or special. The posthuman decentralisation of the human requires us to release our sense of self-importance and embrace the interconnectivity and interdependence of everything. This shift in perspective may inspire us to finally take serious action in slowing down the extinction of animals and the destruction of ecosystems. A more inclusive posthuman perspective could therefore help us in facing complex global problems like the climate crisis.
New times require new ways of thinking. While humanism may have been an appropriate philosophy for the Renaissance, the challenges of the 21st century confront us with new questions and dilemmas. Can a posthuman philosophy help us navigate this brave new world?
We live in an age of AI, algorithms, robotics, and genetic manipulation. Wars are no longer fought by human agents alone. Technologies such as bomb disposal robots and drones help to save and destroy human lives. But what are the ethical implications of taking the human soldier out of the war zone? Will replacing human soldiers with robot soldiers decrease or increase the havoc of war?
While an army of robots sounds like a science-fiction nightmare, some theorists argue that killer-robots may in fact behave more humanely than human soldiers. A robot army is unlikely to pillage and rape unless they are programmed to do so. On the other hand, they are also less likely to show human compassion. Or could we program machines to be more compassionate than humans? The ethics of programming is only one of the many challenges we have to face in the 21st century
The past century has shown the vastness of the damage technologies can inflict: the scale of destruction and amount of suffering of the two world wars is still part of our collective trauma. More recently, the Syrian war has shown us the cruelty of humans and the devastation caused by remotely controlled drone strikes.
Taking a posthuman perspective, we may start by asking a deeper question: why do we continue to associate the word humane with lack of cruelty? After all, no animal is as cruel and destructive as the human animal. We need to take a good look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether the human should really be used as an ethical standard.
Likewise, we must face the even more difficult ethical question of whether the preservation of the human should always be put above all else. Does the saving of human lives justify the destruction of our planet and the killing of other animals?
While war is a big driver of technological innovation, it isnt the only area that is being revolutionized by new technology. The advances of the past century have also enabled us to improve, prolong and save the lives of millions of people.
Whether we like where our world is going or not, it is impossible to halt the clock of technological progress. We have already surpassed the question of whether technology is good or bad. Instead, we urgently need ethical frameworks that help us deal with the more complex question of how.
How should technology be programmed, who should do the programming, how can it be regulated and what happens if there is a bug in the system?
A posthuman ethics could give us vantage points for dealing with such questions.
And this is only the beginning of it. How do we deal with the ethics surrounding human enhancement, cloning and DNA manipulation?
Advanced technologies and virtual realities are an integral part of our lives. Digital devices have already merged with our bodies in multiple ways: phones and computers are increasingly replacing (and upgrading) the functions of our eyes, ears, mouths and brains. They allow us to outsource our memories, communicate with others and see into faraway places and times. Technology allows us to transcend our human limitations. Smartphones have long ago become part of our extended self. We are finding ourselves increasingly dependent on the technologies we own.
To the philosopher Donna Haraway this is hardly surprising:
The separation between humans and machines has disintegrated. Old definitions of human no longer apply. Humanism, so the posthuman argument goes, is an outdated concept that is useless for making sense of our posthuman condition.
And it looks that the boundary between the human and machine will only continue to dissolve.
The posthuman thinker Yuval Noah Harari predicts that we will upgrade [ourselves] step by step, merging with robots and computers in the process, (2015, Homo Deus). According to Harari, we have long ago replaced the belief in God with a belief in human progress and the sanctity of human life.
Does that sound like science fiction? In 2013, Google publicly announced that they aim to solve death. In Hararis view, our quest for immortality is simply a logical consequence of our ever-growing powers. If we combine this with the belief that man is the measure of all things (a sentence attributed to the Greek philosopher Protagoras), we have given ourselves the go ahead for an upgrade into divinity.
While we have not achieved immortality yet, and the COVID-19 crisis has reminded us of our all too human vulnerability, our growing power confronts us with new ethical dilemmas: 2018 saw the birth of the first gene-edited babies. The responsible scientist was given a prison sentence for his Frankensteinian transgression, but the babies remain part of our posthuman reality. The knowledge enabling us to play God is already out there. Whether we like it or not, we cannot stop these advances. It is impossible to put the genie back in the box. The boundary between the human and the non-human has already disappeared and it looks like it will only continue to dissolve.
Human enhancement brings up difficult ethical and philosophical questions. Will these changes turn us into Gods, or will they turn us into monsters? If we manage to solve the last secrets of life and death, will our immortality amount to our own annihilation?
The critique of humanism suggests that we already live in a posthuman reality. But why is it so difficult to truly integrate this way of thinking into our worldview?
Our human identity is a key part of our sense of self, and humanism the ideological ground of a capitalist Western-dominated world. Letting humanism go requires us to let go of our ego. It requires us to let go of our sense of self-importance. It would also force us to face some uncomfortable truths about the way we have treated each other and the planet.
The posthuman condition is a paradoxical one. We have created the conditions of our own undoing. As we acquire greater powers through scientific discovery and technology we also fall into ever-greater danger of making ourselves disappear. The reality we are creating also creates us. There is no us and the outside world, no subject-object dichotomy. We are the creators and the creatures of the posthuman condition. We are Frankenstein and the monster.
Embracing posthumanism means to step off our self-made pedestal. But letting go of the human also requires us to step up: great power comes with great responsibility. While a posthuman perspective requires humility, it also urges us to step up to the challenges we have created for ourselves. It is a stepping up and a stepping down.
Does accepting our status as animals and eradicating our pretensions of being outside nature empower or disempower us? If we were to upgrade ourselves into immortal beings, would these beings still be considered human? Or would genetic enhancement make us lose our humanity? All this boils down to the following question: What are we really trying to hold on to when we hold on to the human in us?
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Smallpox in Canada | The Canadian Encyclopedia
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A woman with smallpox in Prince Edward Island, c. 1909.
Smallpox is an infectious disease most commonly caused by the variola major virus. Its symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting, mouth sores and an extensive skin rash. The rash blistersand scabs, leaving pitted scars or pocks. Smallpox can cause pneumonia, blindness, and infection in joints and bones. There is also a less virulent form of smallpox called alastrim, caused by the variola minor virus.
Smallpox spreads in saliva droplets and through contact with the infectious rash. It can be passed between people and from contaminated objects to people. The rate of death from variola major is 30 per cent but from variola minor it is 1 per cent or less.
Smallpox crossed the Atlantic Ocean when European empires began to expand in the 16th century. The disease had long decimated populations and caused terror. It was first reported in New France in 1616 near Tadoussac, the colonys first fur-trading post. The budding fur trade repeatedlyexposed nearbyInnu and Algonquin communities to the disease. Many fell ill and died due to their lackof immunity. The disease spread into the Maritime,James Bay and Great Lakes regions.
Between 1634 and 1640, Jesuit priests introduced smallpox into Wendake (Huronia),west of Lake Simcoe and south of Georgian Bay. Priests insisted on baptizing sick and dyingHuron-Wendat.However,the priests presence contributed to the spread of the disease. Due to smallpox and other infectious diseases, the Huron-Wendat population declined by roughly 60 per cent by 1640.
Smallpox played a large role in the struggles between the French, British and Americans to control the St. Lawrence region. In 173233, a smallpox epidemic swept through Louisbourg, a French settlement in what is now Nova Scotia. It killed at least 150 people, including people the French had enslaved and brought to the colony. Another epidemic hit Louisbourg in 1755. This was the worst epidemic in New France. It was part of a larger epidemic that swept acrossNorth America between 1755 and 1782. During the Seven Years War, an outbreak forced de Vaudreuil,the French commander, to delay his invasion of Fort Oswego in what is now New York State. In 1763, the British under Jeffrey Amherst used blankets exposedto smallpox as germ warfare in an attempt to subdue the First Nations resistance led byObwandiyag (Pontiac). In 1775, during theAmerican Revolution,American troops besiegingQuebec City were stricken with smallpox.
As European fur-trading posts moved west, so did the virus. From 1779 to 1783, smallpox spread to areas that now form parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Some communities of Plains Indigenous peoples lost 75 per centor more of their members. It is estimated that more than half of First Nations people living along the Saskatchewan River(territory of the Nehiyawak, Saulteaux, Assiniboine and Niitsitapi) died of smallpox orepidemic-related starvation.
In 1838, a second smallpox epidemic struck the Prairies. The epidemic began with an infected person aboard an American Fur Company steamship on the Missouri River. The captain refusedto halt or quarantine the ship. The virus eventually reached Forts Union and McKenzie, in what is now North Dakota and Montana. Traders representing various nations, including the Assiniboine and Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), frequented the affected American trading posts.
Hudsons Bay Company employees started giving inoculations and teaching the technique to others after the two Prairie epidemics. Smallpox changed power structures andalliances, as well as land use and occupancy. Some distinct cultural groups disappeared as almost all of their members died. Survivors sometimes joined other ethnic groups.
Mtis communities in what is now central Alberta experienced a smallpox outbreak in 1870. St. Alberts Mtis populationdeclined by roughly 37 per cent that year.
Smallpox first reached the Pacific Northwest in the late 18th century. In the late 1770s, the disease killed many members of Tlingit, Haida,Kwakwakawakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Salish and Ktunaxacommunities. In 1782, roughly two-thirds of the St:l population died after contracting smallpox.
In 1862, a person infected with smallpox arrived in Victoria aboard a steamship travelling from San Francisco. The disease spread to an encampment north of the city, where tradersfrom many First Nations stayed. The few efforts colonists made to control the disease were disorganized. Some demanded the eviction of Indigenous people from colonial communities to protect themselves from the disease. When the residents of the north encampment left for their homelands, the disease spread across the colonies of Vancouver Islandand British Columbia. The disease had devastating impacts on many peoples, including the nations of Kwakwakawakw, Tlingit, Heiltsuk, Haida, Tsimshianand Tilhqotin, as well as some Coast Salish and Interior Salish nations. On the coast alone, some 14,000 Indigenous people died, representing a loss of roughly half of the regions population.
The1862 epidemic left mass gravesites, empty settlements and grieving survivors. It also impacted governance in some nations. Stories, knowledge and skills were lost with those who carried them. The massive population decline paved the way for coloniststo move further into Indigenous lands without establishing treaty relations. Fear ofsmallpox was one cause of the Chilcotin War of 1864 (see Tilhqotin).
Beginning in 1768, arm-to-arm variolation, an inoculation using the live smallpox virus, became more widely practised in North America and helped limit the spread of the disease. Reverend John Clinch introduced a safer vaccine in North America in 1798.After Confederation, the provinces made it mandatory to vaccinate schoolchildren. They also passed laws allowing municipalities and townships to carry out general vaccinationwhen an epidemic threatened. However, many people opposed mandatory vaccination. Anti-vaccinationists were critical of the unclean administration of vaccines and viewed vaccines asa way for public health units to avoid more costly sanitary measures. Some believed that vaccines would cause illness and suffering. Anti-vaccinationists also viewed mandatoryvaccination as a breach of individual rights. Many French Canadians in Montreal opposed vaccination during a major smallpox outbreak in 1885.Riots broke out in the city, in part as a response to officials attempts to enforce control measures.
Modern smallpox vaccine production began in Canada in 1916. Nevertheless, a notable outbreak occurred in Windsor, Ontarioin 1924. Sixty-seven unvaccinated people contracted the disease and thirty-two died. Smallpox persisted in Canada until 1946, when vaccination campaigns eliminated it. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it globally eradicated in 1979 aftera 10-year campaign in South America, Africa and Asia. Smallpox is the first major disease to have been wiped out by public health measures.
Canadian scientists played a key role in the eradication. Connaught Laboratories, based in Palmerston, Ontario, consulted on vaccine production across the Americas.Between 1980 and 2001, Connaught and its successors kept smallpox samples in a deep-freeze in case the vaccine was needed in the future. After 9/11, in the context of new fearsof bioterrorism, pharmaceutical company Aventis Pasteur retrieved the stocks to create a new stockpile of the vaccine.
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