Category Archives: Transhuman News

PIERRE, S.D. (ChurchMilitant.com) - South Dakota becomes the fourth state to protect the right of adoption agencies to refuse placing children with same-sex couples.

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard on March 10,signed Senate Bill 149 which reads, "No child-placement agency may be required to provide any service that conflicts with or provide any service under circumstances that conflict with any sincerely-held religious belief or moral conviction of the child-placement agency."

The law grants a religious exemption to taxpayer-funded adoption and foster-care agencies, allowing them to avoid placing children with LGBT couples based on religious objections.

Adoption and foster care agencies that withhold services to gay couples out of concern for the child's spiritual welfare are now protected from adverse state actions including:

Loss of state funding

Loss of tax-exemptions

Imposition of fines

Revoked licenses

South Dakota becomes the fourth state to afford such legal protection to adoption agencies. Michigan, North Dakota and Virginia have already granted similar religious exemptions to child-care facilities. Other states in the process of enacting such laws are Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma.

Supporters of the law say the preemptive measure was necessary, to ensure such facilities acting on religious convictions, would not be forced to close their doors in the event that South Dakota followed several other states in banning discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Adoption agencies in Massachusetts, California, Illinois and Washington D.C. have voluntarily shut down services after their states passed laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The bill's sponsor, Sen. Alan Solano, said he wants to prevent the same thing from happening in South Dakota.

At the "Humanum" conference in 2014, Pope Francis stated, "Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child's development and emotional maturity."

Laura Durso, vice president of LGBT research and communications at the Center for American Progress, remarked thatthe law is "shamefully targeting LGBT parents and vulnerable kids."

James Esseks, director of the ACLU's LGBT Project, called the legislation "deeply troubling because it's "only one of many bills moving through state legislatures across the country that authorizes taxpayer-funded discrimination against LGBT Americans."

Jim Kinyon, executive director of South Dakota's Catholic Social Services, says the legislation prevents the state from discriminating against faith-based organizations, which act in accord with their "sincerely held" beliefs.

Religious agencies believe children do best with a mother and a father. A study conducted last year by the Catholic University of America (CUA) shows children raised by same-sex couples are twice as likely to suffer depression as adults compared to children who have a mother and father.

The study, "Invisible Victims: Delayed Onset Depression Among Adults with Same-Sex Parents," published in the journal Depression Research and Treatment, is the first study to monitor such children into adulthood.

The findings show that 18 percent of children raised by same-sex couples were depressed as adolescents, but by age 28 the number of those depressed surged to 51 percent. This was more than twice as high as those raised by heterosexual couples.

The study also reveals that 44 percent of children raised by gays have suicidal thoughts during adolescence. This was three times higher than in children raised by a mother and a father.

The research also showed that 93 percent of children raised by same-sex parents felt distant from their parents during adolescence, and 73 percent felt distant from them as adults.

The study was conducted by sociologist Paul Sullins of CUA, who has conducted previous studies that found children raised by same-sex couples suffer twice as many emotional problems as children raised by opposite-sex parents, and four times as many emotional problems as children raised by their joint-biological parents.

Another study by Sullins showed that ADHD is twice as common among children raised by same-sex couples than in children raised by male and female parents.

Prior to signing the bill, Gov. Dennis Daugaard saidhe was worried that private child-placement agencies, acting in the best interest of a child, might be sued if they denied placing someone in a "protected class," such as members of the LGBT community. His hope is that the recent measure will protect child-care agencies from such lawsuits.

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South Dakota Law Protects Adoption Agencies From LGBT Parenting - Church Militant

Cat Sparks meets Gavin from Lockheed Martin who is demonstrating the powers of an exoskeleton

Cat Sparks/Cosmos

Founded 30 years ago, South By is Austins pride and joy, an annual technology, media, movie, music and innovation conference-come-festival that runs from 10-19 March.

This year an estimated 70,000 plus registrants and artists are participating. Speakers include former vice president Joe Biden, CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna, pop star Kesha, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, music legends Nile Rogers and Mick Fleetwood, NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet, ocean conservationist Dr Fabien Cousteau (grandson of Jacques-Yves), Yoda master Frank Oz, and experts from the Pentagon, the CIA, Microsoft, NASA and a mixed bag of bleeding edge technologies big and small.

March in Austin is supposed to be hot. A surprise cold, wet snap resulted in a flurry of hastily overlaid plastic ponchos. Demographically, the crowd ranges from 20s through to 40-somethings, all dressed in casual clothes and sensible shoes. An eclectic blend of techno hipsters sporting backpacks, backwards baseball caps, occasional man buns -- and not as many beards as you'd expect -- each juggling multiple electronic devices, wires trailing out of ears and pockets. Young guys and gals talking incessant start-ups, successive apps, embedding, messaging, backend systems and workarounds, swapping schedules for party intel in the ubiquitous, never ending coffee queues. Every available wall socket is encrusted with barnacle-like charging devices.

Too many topics to cover here, plenty for the scientifically inclined: presentations on AI, AR, VR, impacts of machine learning, military drone swarms, genetically modified athletes, synthetic biology, pattern recognition, the power of geospatial context, drone journalism ethics, space exploration, democratised data access. Hearables, wearables, cleantech innovation, flexible substrates, optical interconnects, devices that charge themselves from light & waste heat.

Kristy Richards, from The Lab Insight and Strategy and I executed a presentation: Sci Fi Realities and Tomorrows Consumer, outlining some of the expectations for a device-free, augmented, AI enhanced and potentially transhuman future.

Meanwhile, transhumanism was taking tentative steps inside the Trade Hall, where Gavin from Lockheed Martin demonstrated passive load transfer via exoskeleton. I sampled cold brew coffee infused with nitrogen courtesy of the American Chemical Society as a Wi-Fi connected, electronic gesture-and-voice-controlled HD mirror analyzed my face, provided a skin index overview and advised me what to do about problem areas.

Beyond the high tech home brewing systems, premium hemp products for humans and pets, e-pulse pain relief, hand crafted acoustic guitars and digital mindfulness and stress resilience training, Animal Equality employed VR goggles to showcase the appalling conditions inside factory farms.

I was overtaken by a robot while passing the Christian Science Monitor stand, en route to the Exoplanet Travel Bureau where a girl handed out travel posters beside a large, steam emitting model of Enceledus.

Outside on the street, the deep, reverberating thrum of base and clash of cymbals drowned out traffic and snatches of breeze-born Japanese and Scandinavian. Skinny girls with blue hair cheered skatepunks doing tricks on boards rimmed with flashing led lights. Music seeped tentatively from corner bars and open windows.

Dropping in to the Google fibre lounge, I immersed myself in a VR headset to experience Skull Island as a helicopter passenger, flying between tall cliffs, only to be smashed out of the sky by bellowing King Kong. Next up, the Google Tilt Brush experience -- VR painting performed by waving hands with results displayed behind on a massive screen.

SXSW is convergence of smart, switched on, curious folk, a welcoming, friendly party atmosphere with more events and experiences on offer than it would be possible to absorb across a year. Whatever the future may bring, I hope it includes more festivals the caliber of this one.

Cat was until recently the Cosmos fiction editor. Her debut science fiction novel, Lotus Blue, was published by Skyhorse Press this month. It is reviewed in the next issue of Cosmos magazine out in April.

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Beaming in from SXSW - Cosmos

(Spoiler Alert: If you haven't watched the movie Logan and are planning to, you may want to read this essay only after you do.)

In generic heroic sagas, the hero leaves home to face numerous tribulations in a pilgrimage of the self.

The obstacles along the way are tests of the hero's strength, molding his/her character through pain and suffering. Glory, when achieved, is bittersweet, as it comes heavy with loss, usually of loved ones, family or companions. In tragic sagas, the hero pays with his/her life in the end so that others may be free.

The narrative line of the new blockbuster movie Logan, starring Hugh Jackman with story and direction by James Mangold, follows this structure to the core. It's a classic tragedy on steroids, with Tarantino-like graphic violence, the kind we don't usually associate with Marvel characters. It's the end of the X-Men as we know and love them. A dark, oppressive end, exploring, once again, the worse of humanity.

It brings to the fore the theme I explored in this space a few weeks back, the moral choices of those in power as they apply scientific knowledge. In the case of Logan, it's an evil corporation, no doubt a defense contractor, attempting to design the ultimate killing machine, mutant soldiers without the ability for empathy. The horror is that the corporation does this by genetically inserting mutant genes into the human genome, creating a gang of children they try to mold into heartless assassins, a sort of Neverland meets H.G. Wells Dr. Moreau.

The movie is so utterly sad it's painful to watch. Logan, the conflicted and beloved Wolverine, is old and broken, alone, drowning his sorrows in alcohol, driving a limo to survive in a harsh 2029 America. His sole job is to care for a nonagenarian half-demented Professor X, who suffers from seizures that threaten anyone near him. A "ticking time-bomb," "a weapon of mass destruction," is how his brain is now described. But good Professor X is still in there, and he feels the presence of a new mutant, the first in 25 years. X-Men character Magneto's worse fears are realized: Humans obliterated the mutants, the Final Solution working as well as it could. No redemption in this story, no Allies to defeat the evil dictators. Only death and loss to an entire kind.

Fortunately, the genetically-modified transhuman children the only redeeming aspect of the movie survived and escaped their torturing captors. One of them, Laura (played with beautiful intensity by Dafne Keen), carries Logan's genes and powers of regeneration. She even has his claws and metal core, although we don't quite know how this inner armor grows with her. But these are details. Much against his will, Logan is roped into rescuing his engineered daughter and taking her to Eden, the Neverland of mutant children, a meeting point near the Canadian border.

Mirroring the dark days we are experiencing in America, the mutant children must leave the country to become immigrants in search of a society that will embrace them.

Faithful to the tragic storyline, the heroes all perish. In the darkest scene of the movie, Laura must bury her own father, after a brief moment of much-needed tenderness as Logan finally understands what loving someone means. The other mutant children walk away, and Laura is alone by Logan's burial place. She picks up the cross that marks his grave and turns it sideways, making it into an X. The saga ends for our beloved X-Men. But the children do cross the border and mutants survive, hopefully to thrive again.

As in real life, the Final Solution will never work.

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A Mutant Holocaust In 'Logan' - WAMC