Libertarianism through Thick and Thin
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Ron Manners on his unusual path to libertarianism, writing publications, & fighting bureaucracy – Video

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Ron Manners on his unusual path to libertarianism, writing publications, fighting bureaucracy
after school "When I was I think about sixteen, after high-school, I was working in my father #39;s engineering business and I was unpacking some big crates tha...

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Definitions of Libertarianism – The Advocates for Self …

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What Is Libertarianism?

There are many ways of saying the same thing, and libertarians often have unique ways of answering the question What is libertarianism? Weve asked many libertarians that question, and below are some of our favorite definitions.

Libertarianism is, as the name implies, the belief in liberty. Libertarians believe that each person owns his own life and property and has the right to make his own choices as to how he lives his life and uses his property as long as he simply respects the equal right of others to do the same. Sharon Harris, President, Advocates for Self-Government

The CATO Insistutes David Boaz

Libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each persons right to life, liberty, and property rights that people possess naturally, before governments are created. In the libertarian view, all human relationships should voluntary; the only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have themselves used force actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and fraud. David Boaz, Executive Vice President, Cato Institute

Libertarianism is a philosophy. The basic premise of libertarianism is that each individual should be free to do as he or she pleases so long as he or she does not harm others. In the libertarian view, societies and governments infringe on individual liberties whenever they tax wealth, create penalties for victimless crimes, or otherwise attempt to control or regulate individual conduct which harms or benefits no one except the individual who engages in it. definition written by theU.S. Internal Revenue Service, during the process of granting theAdvocates for Self-Governmentstatus as a nonprofit educational organization

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Libertarians true identity revealed: Rich conservatives OK with gay people, basically

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The New York Times Magazine recentlywondered at lengthif the long-prophecied Libertarian Moment had finally arrived. Why, just look at the prevailing attitudes in America: openness to same-sex marriage and liberalization of drug laws, aversion to long-term overseas military deployments (wars), and um Obama is unpopular so people hate government regulation now, maybe? Sure. Well, no. As we wrote, libertarianism as a package is going to be a hard sell to the public as long as it dismisses concerns over economic insecurity and insists upon dismantling the regulatory state and large social insurance programs. But hey, its great that libertarians and liberals have common ground on and are making headway in social and criminal justice policy.

Who would be the foot soldiers in this Libertarian Moment thats not really arriving? The usual, well-funded thinkers that have given the movement a disproportionately large voice within debates in Washington, D.C., for decades Reason magazine, the Cato Institute along with a few MTV VJs from the 90s. Also: Rand Paul! Rand Paul is the son of a libertarian and is sort of a libertarian himself and is going to be the next president, after all. And then America will finally be the sexy free-market rock n roll paradise of libertarians imagination. There is a plan, folks.

But any political movement is going to need more than just a few magazines and think tanks and a scion whose political future depends on the extent to which hes willing to water down his libertarianism. Meaning: Libertarianism needs a lot more libertarians. If libertarianism is going to be the wave of the future, a significant portion of the American populace should a) know what libertarianism is and then b) subscribe to it.

Right now that portion is 11 percent not nothing, but also 11 percent. Thats the figure according to Pew of Americans who both say they are libertarian and know the definition of the term.

Youd expect, then, that those who know what libertarianism is and call themselves libertarians would be broadly in favor of the whole ideological package: social liberalism, for lack of a better term, anti-police state, anti-interventionist, and hella anti-economic regulation and so forth small government, all around.

Thats not necessarily the case among those 11 percent, Pew finds. The 11 percent are, indeed, more likely than the public overall to say government aid to the poor does more harm than good by making people too dependent on government assistance, and somewhat more likely than the public overall to say government regulation of business does more harm than good.Theyre also more likely than the public overall to support legalizing marijuana.

But on cops and foreign policy? Self-identified libertarians-who-generally-know-what-libertarianism-is are a little more supportive than the public overall of letting police do whatever the hell they want and bombing everyone all the time (although the foreign policy question is spectacularly vague):

And they are about as likely as others to favor allowing the police to stop and search anyone who fits the general description of a crime suspect (42% of libertarians, 41% of the public).

Similarly, self-described libertarians do not differ a great deal from the public in opinions about foreign policy. Libertarianism is generally associated with a less activist foreign policy, yet a greater share of self-described libertarians (43%) than the public (35%) think it is best for the future of our country to be active in world affairs.

Pew ran another math-y thing to figure out which cluster, or political type, these self-identified libertarians are most closely aligned with. Youll never guess which cluster came out on top! It rhymes with Schmusiness Schmonservatives.

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The Eternal Problem Silicon Valley Can't Solve

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The death by a thousand cuts applies to aging. So I am working to kill aging with a thousand cuts.

During the dotcom boom, Dave Asprey made $6 million in one swoop. At the age of 26, in the rush of power and possibility that came with that sudden windfall of cash, he felt like nothing was beyond his reach, not even death. I decided that I was just not going to die, he tells me, with a smile. That would be my next challenge.

And, so, Asprey joined the age-old fight to conquer death.

Over the last 15 years, Asprey has been tinkering with technologies in the hopes of slowing the aging process in his own body. He describes this as bio-hacking, using the hacker mentality to turbocharge his own biochemistry. And to hear Asprey tell it, that's working: With a couple of scientific hacks, hes lost hundreds of pounds, increased his IQ, and improved the quality of his sleep. All these things, he says, are also prolonging his life-span. Hes now sharing these techniques with others through Bulletproof Executive, the company he founded that creates coffee and other products to spike bodily performance, and as the chairman of the board of the Silicon Valley Health Institute, a group that meets monthly to discuss the latest developments in the study of longevity.

The building that houses the SVHI, located just down the street from Googles campus, is a microcosm of a growing Silicon Valley trend. There, Asprey and others are trying to stop individual bodies from aging--starting with their own--and investment is pouring into a growing number of companies whose stated goal is to increase human longevity and, in some cases, even cure death. Asprey freely admits that these are grandiose, quixotic endeavors. But in a place where geeks have changed the world with previously unthinkable breakthroughs in science, nothing seems impossible. When youre young and youve just created something amazing that makes you a ton of a money, you do egotistical things, Asprey says. And Im not saying thats a bad thing: I want to swing for the fences. What is all of this cool technology were creating compared to getting an extra hundred years of life?

He's far from the only one dreaming of a home run. Last year Google launched Calico Labs, a medical company whose goal is to tackle aging and illness. While so far Calico is remaining fairly secretive about its projects (my requests for an interview were politely declined), experts believe its objective is to go beyond solving individual diseases the way most medical researchers have done until now. Instead, it will work on technologies that extend life through previously untapped means, like gene therapies and cryogenics. Earlier this year, Calico hired Cynthia Kenyon, an acclaimed geneticist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has been experimenting with tweaking genes in animals to slow aging. By disabling a gene called daf-2, she has doubled the life-span of roundworms, fruit flies, and mice. In her new role as VP of aging research at Calico, she will ostensibly be attempting to re-create these results in humans.

This year, another company, Human Longevity, joined the anti-aging quest. Founded by J. Craig Venter, another millionaire entrepreneur, its central goal involves understanding DNA. Felix Frueh, the chief scientific officer of Human Longevity, explains that in some ways, the goals of Human Longevity are in line with what medicine has been trying to do all along: cure illness, improve life quality, and extend the human life-span. The difference is that his company applies big-data tools to process vast quantities of information we now have about the human body. The organization will sequence 2 million human genomes in five years, gathering unparalleled insights into the causes of disease. Rather than tackling problems incrementally, he says it is possible to work on a bigger scale, yielding more dramatic results. One of them could be cheating death.

When I spoke to other members of the medical community--doctors and surgeons--they were largely skeptical about the anti-aging movement. Dr. Mark Shrime, a surgeon who serves as a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, says that radical life extension and curing death hardly ever comes up in hospitals or medical classes. He tells me that theories of longevity have been circulating for decades without any tangible results but outcomes seen in lab animals are rarely replicated on human bodies. The question is, are these things feasible in high-level organisms, like primates, he says. Shrime points out that there is already an immortal jellyfish. The steps to making humans immortal would be astronomical, he says.

Dr. Raghu Athre at Memorial Hermann Northwest Hospital in Texas says that in working with patients, it becomes immediately apparent that human bodies are complicated and often react in ways that we could never expect. Patients are not the same as test tubes and lab rats, he says. There are so many variables that are out of our control. Athre argues that tech entrepreneurs are used to creating things they can control and work with data that makes sense; doctors, on the other hand, realize that human beings often defy logic. While neck cancer is associated with smoking, there are also 29-year-old non-smokers who get neck cancer and die within six months, he says.

This is not to say that doctors believe life extension will never happen. We will probably get to a point where we know enough about aging to increase life-spans," Shrime says, "but if we are seeing breakthroughs in worms and jellyfish, this is still miles and miles away from anything tangible we can offer to patients.

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Transhumanism’s Extropy Institute – Transhumanism for a …

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Extropy Institute continues to support critical research and development of sciences and technologies of human enhancement. For further information on our 2004 Vital Progress Summit please follow this link: About the VP Summit

In late 2006, Extropy Institute closed. ExI's Strategic Plan explains the details of this decision and the potential for the future of ideas that were generated during ExI's lifetime.

The philosophy of Extropy continues on into the future.

This website is the "Library of Transhumanism, Extropy and the Future". The Extropy e-mail list continues to be very active and is the main venue for transhumanists and one of the best places on the Internet to meet transhumanists for challenging and creative discussions about the future. ____________________________________

Welcome to website of Extropy Institute, the original force behind the philosophy and global cultural movement of transhumanism. We welcome you to join our efforts in promoting The Proactionary Principle.

The world needs critical thinkers now! What is Extropy Institute? Extropy Institute is a think tank ideas market for the future of social change brought about by consequential technologies.Our Board of Directors, Advisors and Proactive Supporters bring together diverse ideas about the future.Our approach is proactive, our focus critical, and our ideas are principled in addressing social concerns and questions that will make or break the future of humanity. Extropy Institute has been pioneering critical and creative thinking about the future for the past 17 years.

The Mission of ExI has been to serve its members by ensuring a reputable, open environment for discussing the impacts of emerging technologies and for collaborating with diversely-skilled experts in exploring the future of humanity.

As a philosophical and cultural organization, our goals include being an international resource for strategic thinking about the future. Specific outcomes of our vision over the years have been recognized through publications, conferences, virtual summits, university courses, extropy-chat email list, and members' projects; working toward designing our future. The outcomes are located on our resources page. _______________________________________________________________]

Support the ideas vital to our future by participating in the globalcommunity and become proactive and support the Proactionary Principle.

The current project: ExI Project No. 1 - PROACTIONARY PRINCIPLE As human lives and the global environment become ever more interconnected with technology, we become increasingly responsible for making wise decisions about how to use it. We need a balanced opinion on how to apply technology to human needs. We should not reject the products of applied science; neither should we implement powerful new technologies without foresight and proactive preparation. Above all, we must not tackle the decisions of the future with the cognitive habits of the past. We need new, smarter ways to evaluate the opportunities and dangers issuing from nanotechnology, genetics, machine intelligence, climate engineering, or neurological modification. The Proactionary Principle (ProP) is designed explicitly for this purpose.

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DARPAs tiny implants will hook directly into your nervous system, treat diseases and depression without medication

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DARPA, on the back of the US governments BRAIN program, has begun the development of tiny electronic implants that interface directly with your nervous system and can directly control and regulate many differentdiseases and chronic conditions, such as arthritis, PTSD, inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohns disease), and depression. The program, called ElectRx (pronounced electrics), ultimately aims to replace medication with closed-loop neural implants, which constantly assess the state of your health, and then provide the necessary nervestimulation to keep your various organs and biological systems functioning properly. The work is primarily being carried out with US soldiers andveterans in mind, but the technology will certainly percolate down to civilians as well.

The ElectRx program will focus on a fairly newarea of medical therapies called neuromodulation. As the name implies, neuromodulation is all about modulating your nervous system, to improve or fix an underlying problem. Notable examples of neuromodulation are cochlear implants, which restore hearing by directly modulating your brains auditory nerve system, and deep brain stimulation (DBS), which appears to be capable of curing/regulating various conditions (depression, Parkinsons)byoverriding erroneous neural spikes with regulated, healthystimulation.

A state-of-the-art retinal implant and its controller/battery. Current implants are not particularly small things.

So far, these implants have been fairly big things about the size of a deck of cards which makes their implantation fairly invasive (and thus quite risky). Most state-of-the-art implants also lack precision the stimulating electrodes are usually placed in roughly the right area, but its currently very hard to target a specific nerve fiber (a bundle of nerves). With ElectRx, DARPA wants to miniaturize these neuromodulation implants so that theyre the same size as a nerve fiber. This way they can be implanted with a minimally invasive procedure (through a needle) and attached to specific nerve fibers, for very precise stimulation.

Read our featured story:Brown University creates first wireless, implanted brain-computer interface

While these implants cantregulate every condition orreplace every medication at least not yet they could be very effective at mitigatinga large number of conditions. Basically, a large number of conditions are caused by your nervous system misfiring most notably inflammatory diseases, but also potentially brain and mental health disorders. Currently, a variety of drugs are used to try and cajolethese awry neurons and nerves back in-line by manipulating various neurotransmitters but the same effect could be created with an electronic implant that catches themisfire, cleans up the signal, and then retransmits it.

DARPAs ElectRx program

The technology DARPA plans to develop through the ElectRx program could fundamentally change the manner in which doctors diagnose, monitor and treat injury and illness, says DARPAs Doug Weber.Instead of relying only on medication we envision a closed-loop system that would work in concept like a tiny, intelligent pacemaker. It would continually assess conditions and provide stimulus patterns tailored to help maintain healthy organ function, helping patients get healthy and stay healthy using their bodys own systems. [Read:Brave transhumanist pioneer self-implants a computer into his arm.]

Despite requiring a lot of novel technological breakthroughs, DARPA is planning to perform human trials of ElectRx inabout five years. The initial goal will be improving the quality of life for US soldiers and veterans though theres no word on which condition DARPA will focus on. Something simple like arthritis is most likely, but Im sure theres a lot of interest in curing/regulating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well. Earlier in the year, DARPA announced a similar program to develop a brain implant that can restore lost memories and experiences.

While DARPAs ElectRx announcement is purely focused on the medical applications of miniatureneural implants, there are of course a variety of other uses that might arise from elective implantation both for soldiers, but also for civilians. With a few well-placed implants on your spine, you could flip a switch and ignore any pain reported by your limbs, allowing you to push your body harder and faster. With precision-placed implants around the right nerve fibers, youcould gain manual control of your organs you could slow down or speed up your heart, turbo-charge your liver, or tweak just about any other function of your body. Transhumanism here we come.

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The Warsaw Indies

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Crunching Koalas

"We were thinking of a name for the studio," says Tomaszewski. He's sitting in the middle of the small but sparse room Crunching Koalas uses for its office. It's the size of a large bedroom with bookshelves along one wall and a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows along the other.

When the Koalas moved into the space it was barren. Concrete walls painted battleship grey, bare floor, no bookshelves. It could resemble something out of a post-apocalypse scenario, which, in a way it is. The decaying building had been passed from hand to hand after the fall of communism, and eventually became a sort of low-rent, all-purpose space, used almost exclusively by small, young companies like Crunching Koalas. Warsaw is littered with these buildings most are scheduled for destruction and being squeezed for every possible last use before the wrecking ball swings.

Tomaszewski and his co-founders Lukasz Juszczyk and and Kris Lesiecki put in a particle board floor, built the shelves and painted the walls. Then they installed a set of lime green shades in front of the windows, which, on sunny days like this one, diffuse the room in a kind of acid trip green. The effect is at once alarming and mildly exotic.

Tomaszewski is one of a new generation of Polish game developers, raised after the fall of Communism in a country where the idea that you could grow up to do whatever you wanted had suddenly become somewhat normal. Tomaszewski learned to make games at the local technical university in an elite program for game development run by fellow indie game developers and the founders of Thing Trunk, Filip Starzynski and Konstanty Kalicki. After graduating, Tomaszewski entered a business plan competition in which the top four companies would get funding. He placed fifth.

"So I didn't get anything," he says. "We were sure we were going to get it. We already rented a flat, which was bigger. It was supposed to be our studio. When the results came and I was fifth, it was like, oh my God. How are we gonna do this?"

A few weeks later, he got a second chance. He applied again for the funding, and his business plan came in first. Now all he needed was a name.

"I know we wanted a sweet animal, a sweet creature in the name and the logo, because we're making games that are partly casual," Tomaszewski says. "We wanted to appeal to people who like sweet animals."

"Capybaras was taken. There was no studio with koalas, so we took the koalas. We didn't just want to be koalas, though. We needed something more. ... The guys who funded our studio came up with the idea to name it the Crunching Koalas."

Tomaszewski and his partners were "crunching" on games for other studios, putting in long hours and basically working themselves into exhaustion. To the company's investors, this seemed cute. The team members were not just koalas; they were "crunching" Koalas.

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The Warsaw Indies

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Category Archives: Transhuman News

What Is Libertarianism What Does the Libertarian Party Stand For Ron Paul YouTube clip2 – Video

What Is Libertarianism What Does the Libertarian Party Stand For Ron Paul YouTube clip3 – Video

Libertarianism through Thick and Thin – Video

Ron Manners on his unusual path to libertarianism, writing publications, & fighting bureaucracy – Video

Definitions of Libertarianism – The Advocates for Self …

Libertarians true identity revealed: Rich conservatives OK with gay people, basically

The Eternal Problem Silicon Valley Can't Solve

Transhumanism’s Extropy Institute – Transhumanism for a …

DARPAs tiny implants will hook directly into your nervous system, treat diseases and depression without medication

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