Category Archives: Post Human

A medical student in Ethiopia has just earned a Guinness World Record for a truly jaw-dropping stunt: longest time to spray water from the mouth.

Kirubel Yilma, of Addis Ababa, cansquirt a continuous spray of water from his mouth for nearly a minute:56.36 seconds to be exact.

Yilma, 20, recently broke the previous record of46.86 seconds, set in 2012 byDickson Oppong, aka Waterman, of Ghana.

As can be seen on the video above, Yilma chugs a lot of liquid before he starts the waterworks.

Theres some science behind his spittle. Yilma said he used his medical studies to figure out the best way to regurgitate water.

I am a second-year medical student at Addis Ababa University, so I have the knowledge of how to use my muscles effectively so as to break the record, he told Guinness World Records.

Enjoy the video of this feat while it lasts, because Yilma said he plans to boost his spray stream to over a minute, at least.

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Human Fountain Can Spit Water For Nearly A Minute | The ... - Huffington Post

To the Maori, indigenous people who live along New Zealands Whanganui River, the water isnt only sacred its part of their being.

The communityhas a saying, Ko au te awa. Ko te awa ko au. In English, this means, I am the river. The river is me.

For years, the Maori peoples relationship with the waterway has been legally unrecognized despite their best efforts. But on Wednesday, theNew Zealand Parliament passed a bill granting the river the same legal rights as a human being, BBC reported.

I know the initial inclination of some people will say its pretty strange to give a natural resource a legal personality, New Zealands Treaty Negotiations Minister Chris Finlayson told the BBC.But its no stranger than family trusts, or companies or incorporated societies.

During the early 1900s, however, visitors to New Zealand would pile on paddle boats to cruise down the countrys third-longest river. As years passed, taking kayaks or jet-boats down the twisting waterwaybecame more fashionable, according to the Rough Guide to New Zealand. The movie River Queen, whichstarred Samantha Morton andKiefer Sutherland, was even filmed on its waters.

The tribes of Whanganui take their name, their spirit and their strength from the great river which flows from the mountains of the central North Island to the sea. For centuries the people have travelled the Whanganui River by canoe, caught eels in it, built villages on its banks, and fought over it, according to websiteTe Ara, managed by theManat Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage.

But as the touristscame, the pollution grew.

By 1970 the river was nearly dead, the New Zealand Heraldreported in 2011. One wastewater treatment plant operator, Phil Gilmore, said it suffered from 150 years of nonstop pollution.

The riverhad no true legal representation, until now.

The Parliaments decision on Wednesdaymeans the river can now be recognized in court. It will be will be represented by two people, one from the New Zealand government and one from the Maori community.

We have always believed that the Whanganui River is an indivisible and living whole which includes all its physical and spiritual elements from the mountains of the central North Island to the sea, Gerrard Albert, an Maori spokesman, told the Telegraph.

AsParliament member Adrian Rurawhe toldRadio New Zealand, the Maori view the rivers well-being as directly linked to their own, making the bill personal.

The Maori have fought for recognition of its relationship with the Whanganui River since the 1870s, Finlayson told the Sydney Morning Herald, adding that it was the longest running litigation in New Zealands history.

The bill also included $80 million in financial redress and a $30 million fund that will be used to improve the rivers health, the New Zealand Herald reported.

Attendees of the third reading of the billbroke into song.

It has been a long, hard battle, Albert told the Telegraph. While today we close the book on this part of our history, tomorrow we start writing a new one.

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This New Zealand river now has the same legal rights as a human being - Washington Post

By Sean D. Hamill / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

There are 391 people from thousands of years of human history who are honored in Heinz Chapels spectacularly colorful stained glass windows.

They include important figures from religion, philosophy, the arts, humanities, and the sciences, including William Harvey, an English physician who first mapped the human circulatory system, and Galen, the Greek physician who identified the importance of the arteries.

There is not a window honoring Thomas Starzl, the pioneering Pittsburgh transplant surgeon and researcher who died last week and was memorialized at a nearly two-hour service by more than 400 family, friends, colleagues and transplant recipients in the chapel Saturday, on what would have been his 91st birthday.

But many in attendance agreed: If the 84-year-old windows were being made today, Dr. Starzl would deserve a place in them.

Oh yeah, he deserves a window, Phil Schauer, a Cleveland Clinic surgeon who trained under Dr. Starzl, said just before the service. He deserves his own wing.

Eleven speakers during the service explained why.

Martine Rothblatt, a technologist and chairman of the United Therapeutics Corp., told the story of how she first met Dr. Starzl a decade ago at a meeting and told him her frustration that there must be a better way to create organs to alleviate the shortage that plagues the transplant world.

Ive been thinking about his issue for many years, Dr. Starzl replied, before laying out a plan to make it possible to one day have genetically modified organs from pigs that can be transplanted into humans in a nearly unlimited supply.

She said she has spent the last decade trying to follow that plan he laid out that day. She announced to the crowd that next year they project that the first human transplant from such an organ will occur all of it born from the seed of Thomas Starzl.

While all the speakers acknowledged his super human qualities, force of nature will and impact on history, they spoke, too, of the kind and generous man they knew personally, the man who made his own bed, who walked the family dogs, the man who acknowledged his faults and tried to make up for them.

Alex Dietrich, Dr. Starzls great-niece, said her grandmother used Dr. Starzl as an example for her, but not just for his success.

She held him up as an example of what it meant to be a good man, she said.

The world will miss your genius, she said, speaking to Dr. Starzls memory. We will miss Tom, the good man.

Bob Starzl, Dr. Starzls cousin, said the family understood that they share his loss with the world and another larger family.

We were lucky to have him in our family, said Bob Starzl, his cousin. But he had created a far bigger family, of medical professionals and patients and their families.

Mark Nordenberg, the University of Pittsburghs chancellor emeritus, said the first time he met Dr. Starzl in the early 1980s, Dr. Starzl explained what was happening with the transplant program at a time when anti-rejection drugs were not yet common, and the numbers he presented were not particularly encouraging.

But Mr. Nordenberg said all it took was a look in [Dr. Starzls] determined eyes, and I was convinced that this man was going to meet and defeat any challenges that came his way.

John Fung, Dr. Starzls protg and now director of the Transplantation Institute at the University of Chicago, expressed for many the anguish he felt at the passing of his friend, who seemed as bright as ever, even if his body was failing him in recent years.

His death was unimaginable. This could not happen. Not to our friend and mentor, Dr. Fung said. At first there were no words. Then there was a word: Awe.

Tim Starzl, his son, compared his father to a medieval stone mason, or architect who built a living cathedral.

You can go almost anywhere and see an edge of this cathedral, he said, noting the thousand doctors he trained, and then the thousands those doctors trained, and on and on. You will almost always see somebody who is touched by Dr. Starzl.

The architect is gone, he concluded. But the cathedral remains.

Dr. Starzls wife, Joy, who sat in the front pew during the service with their family golden retriever who famously used to go to the office with Dr. Starzl was the last speaker.

Through her tears, she told the mourners how hard it was in the early days when they arrived in 1981, but how they were still sure they made the right choice by coming to Pittsburgh.

And she concluded by telling the audience she had a request.

I know this is not traditional, but Id like you all to join me in singing Happy Birthday, she said, before the crowd rose and joined her in full voice.

Afterward, in an interview, Ms. Starzl said Saturday had been a tough day. But her spirits were lifted hearing all the memories and stories.

Some of the stories were new to her, she said,But they were all true; they were Tom.

Sean D. Hamill: shamill@post-gazette.comor 412-263-2579 or Twitter: @SeanDHamill

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Tom Starzl: 'super human' transplant pioneer and 'the good man ... - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Less than two months in, President Donald Trump is already shaping up as a disaster for human rights. From his immigration ban to his support for torture, Trump has jettisoned what has long been, in theory if not always in practice, a bipartisan American commitment: the promotion of democratic values and human rights abroad.

Worse is probably set to come. Trump has lavished praise on autocrats and expressed disdain for international institutions. He described Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as a fantastic guy and brushed off reports of repression by the likes of Russias Vladimir Putin, Syrias Bashar al-Assad, and Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

As Trump put it in his bitter inauguration address: It is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, has written that Trumps election has brought the world to the verge of darkness and threatens to reverse the accomplishments of the modern human rights movement.

But this threat is not new. In fact, the rise of Trump has only underlined the existential challenges already facing the global rights project. Over the past decade, the international order has seen a structural shift in the direction of assertive new powers, including Xi Jinpings China and Putins Russia, that have openly challenged rights norms while at the same time crushing dissent in contested territories like Chechnya and Tibet.

These rising powers have not only clamped down on dissent at home; they have also given cover to rights-abusing governments from Manila to Damascus. Dictators facing Western criticism can now turn to the likes of China for political backing and no-strings financial and diplomatic support.

This trend has been strengthened by the Western nationalist-populist revolt that has targeted rights institutions and the global economic system in which they are embedded. With populism sweeping the world and new superpowers in the ascendant, post-Westphalian visions of a shared global order are giving way to an era of resurgent sovereignty. Unchecked globalisation and liberal internationalism are giving way to a post-human rights world.

All this amounts to a challenge to the global human rights norms that have proliferated since the end of World War II. In that time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, has been supplemented by a raft of treaties and conventions guaranteeing civil and political rights, social and economic rights, and the rights of refugees, women and children. The collapse of the Soviet Union served to further entrench human rights within the international system.

Despite the worlds failure to prevent mass slaughter in places like Rwanda and Bosnia, the 1990s would see the emergence of a global human rights imperium: a cross-border, transnational realm anchored in global bodies like the UN and the European Union and supervised by international nongovernmental organisations and a new class of professional activists.

The professionalisation of human rights was paralleled by the advance of international criminal justice. The decade saw the creation of ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the signing in 1998 of the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court an achievement that then-UN secretary-general Kofi Annan hailed as a giant step forward in the march towards universal human rights and the rule of law. On paper, citizens in most countries now enjoy around 400 distinct rights.

Crucially, this legal and normative expansion was underpinned by an unprecedented period of growth and economic integration. Like the economic system in which it was embedded, the global human rights project attained a sheen of inevitability; it became, alongside democratic politics and free market capitalism, part of the triumphant neoliberal package that Francis Fukuyama identified in 1989 as the end point of mankinds ideological evolution.

In 2013, one of Americas foremost experts on international law, Peter J Spiro, predicted that legal advances and economic globalisation had brought on sovereigntisms twilight. Fatou Bensouda, the current chief prosecutor of the ICC, has argued similarly that the creation of the court inaugurated a new era of post-Westphalian politics in which rulers would now be held accountable for serious abuses committed against their own people. (So far, no sitting government leader has.)

But in 2017, at a time of increasing instability, in which the promised fruits of globalisation have failed for many to materialise, these old certainties have collapsed. In the current age of anger, as Pankaj Mishra has termed it, human rights have become both a direct target of surging right-wing populism and the collateral damage of its broader attack on globalisation, international institutions, and unaccountable global elites.

The outlines of this new world can be seen from Europe and the Middle East to Central Asia and the Pacific. Governments routinely ignore their obligations under global human rights treaties with little fear of meaningful sanction. For six years, grave atrocities in Syria have gone unanswered, despite the legal innovations of the responsibility to protect doctrine. Meanwhile, many European governments are reluctant to honour their legal obligations to offer asylum to the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing its brutal civil war.

To be sure, not all of these developments are new; international rights treaties have always represented an aspirational baseline to which many nations have fallen short. But the human rights age was one in which the world, for all its shortfalls, seemed to be trending in the direction of more adherence, rather than less. It was a time in which human rights advocates and supportive leaders spoke confidently of standing on the right side of history and even the worlds autocrats were forced to pay lip service to the idea of rights.

If the human rights age was one in which the contours of history were clear, today it is no longer obvious that history has any such grand design. According to the latest Freedom in the World report, released in January by Freedom House, 2016 marked the 11th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. It was also a year in which 67 countries suffered net declines in political freedoms and civil liberties.

Keystone international institutions are also under siege. In October, three African states South Africa, Burundi, and Gambia announced their withdrawal from the ICC, perhaps the crowning achievement of the human rights age. (Gambia has since reversed its decision, following the January resignation of autocratic president Yahya Jammeh.) Angry that the ICC unfairly targets African defendants, leaders on the continent are now mulling a collective withdrawal from the court.

African criticism reflects governments increasing confidence in rejecting human rights as Western values and painting any local organisation advocating these principles as a pawn of external forces. China and India have both introduced restrictive new laws that constrain the work of foreign NGOs and local groups that receive foreign funding, including organisations advocating human rights. In Russia, a foreign agent law passed in 2012 has been used to tightly restrict the operation of human rights NGOs and paint any criticism of government policies as disloyal, foreign-sponsored, and un-Russian.

In the West, too, support for human rights is wavering. In his successful campaign in favour of Brexit, Nigel Farage, then-leader of the UK Independence Party, attacked the European Convention on Human Rights, claiming that it had compromised British security by preventing London from barring the return of British Islamic State fighters from the Middle East.

During the US election campaign, Donald Trump demonised minorities, advocated torture, expressed admiration for dictators and still won the White House. Meanwhile, a recent report suggests that Western support for international legal institutions like the ICC is fickle, lasting only as long as it targets other problems in other countries.

In the post-human rights world, global rights norms and institutions will continue to exist but only in an increasingly ineffective form. This will be an era of renewed superpower competition, in what Robert Kaplan has described as a more crowded, nervous, anxious world. The post-human rights world will not be devoid of grassroots political struggles, however. On the contrary, these could well intensify as governments tighten the space for dissenting visions and opinions. Indeed, the wave of domestic opposition to Trumps policies is an early sign that political activism may be entering a period of renewed power and relevance.

What, then, is to be done? As many human rights activists have already acknowledged, fresh approaches are required. In December, RightsStart, a new human rights consultancy hub, launched itself by suggesting five strategies that international rights NGOs can use to adapt to the existential crisis of the current moment. (Full disclosure: I have previously worked with one of its founders.)

Among them was the need for these groups to communicate more effectively the importance of human rights and use international advocacy more often as a platform for local voices. Philip Alston, a human rights veteran and law professor at New York University, has argued that the human rights movement will also have to confront the fact that it has never offered a satisfactory solution to the key driver of the current populist surge: global economic inequality.

In a broader sense, the global human rights project will have to shed its pretensions of historical inevitability and get down to the business of making its case to ordinary people. With authoritarian politics on the rise, now is the time to re-engage in politics and to adopt more pragmatic and flexible tactics for the advancement of human betterment.

Global legal advocacy will continue to be important, but efforts should predominantly be directed downwards, to national courts and legislatures. It is here that right-wing populism has won its shattering victories. It is here, too, that the coming struggle against Trumpism and its avatars will ultimately be lost or won.

Foreign Policy

Sebastian Strangio, a former editor and reporter for The Phnom Penh Post, is a journalist and author focusing on Southeast Asia.

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The post-human rights world - The Phnom Penh Post

Posthumanists and perhaps especially transhumanists tend to downplay the value conflicts that are likely to emerge in the wake of a rapidly changing technoscientific landscape. What follows are six questions and scenarios that are designed to focus thinking by drawing together several tendencies that are not normally related to each other but which nevertheless provide the basis for future value conflicts.

Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science, Fuller is best known for his foundational work in the field of social epistemology, which is concerned with the normative grounds of organized inquiry. He has most recently authored (with Veronika Lipinska) The Proactionary Imperative: A Foundation for Transhumanism (2013).

Next entry: Andrew Ferguson on Predictive Policing

Previous entry: Will AI make us immortal?

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Value Conflicts surrounding the Meaning of Life in the Trans/Post/Human Future - Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

The Chinese government has released a report on human rights in the United States, just a week after the U.S. State Department released its own report on human rights around the world.

The report, titled The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2016, was released by the Information Office of the State Council on Thursday. The text of the main report has about 6,500 words in its English language translation, which doesn't include a lengthy chronology of U.S. human rights violations that accompanies the main report.

Concrete facts show that the United States saw continued deterioration in some key aspects of its existent human rights issues last year, theintroduction reads. With the gunshots lingering in people's ears behind the Statue of Liberty, worsening racial discrimination and the election farce dominated by money politics, the self-proclaimed human rights defender has exposed its human rights myth with its own deeds.

Anumber of flaws in the U.S. system are documented in the text, including gun violence, crime rates, incarceration rates, the influence of money in politics, voter turnout, the expense of the 2016 presidential election, media bias, social polarization, income gaps, a shrinking middle class, poverty, falling life expectancy, falling health standards, a flawed Social Security system, poor race relations, police killings of African Americans, racial disparity, prejudice against Muslims, the gender pay gap, sexual harassment, inadequate protection for children's rights and abuse of the elderly.

In addition to these domestic issues, U.S. foreign policy also comes under scrutiny, with the report noting the number of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and citing figures on civilian casualties compiled by Airwars, an independent project aimed at tracking the war against the Islamic State.

Despite allegations of media bias, Western sources are frequently cited in the report. In an accompanying chronology of U.S. human rights violationsin 2016,reporting by The Washington Post is referred to more than 60 times. Some information does appear to be misrepresented, however: The Chinese report appears to mix up 2016 figures on the economy from Gallup for the previous year's, for example.

The release of the report marks something of a tradition for Beijing: China has released a similar report on human rights in the U.S. shortly after the State Department's report is released every year since 2000. Reading the report, there can be no doubt that it is designed as a response to the U.S. report on human rights in other countries.

Wielding the baton of human rights, [the State Department] pointed fingers and cast blame on the human rights situation in many countries while paying no attention to its own terrible human rights problems, the Chinese report states. People cannot help asking about the actual human rights situation of the United States in 2016.

The State Department has released human rights reports on every country that receives U.S. foreign assistance or is a United Nations member state for the past 41 years.The intensely researched report includes a year's work by embassy staff around the world and requires almost 100 editors.

This year's State Department report said that freedom of expression was on the decline around the world. It singled out China for its severe repression of civil and political rights, noting that despite China's denials, there were tens of thousands of political prisoners in the country, and that torture and illegal detentions at black jails remained an issue.

However, despite the strong wording of the report, many human rights activists were dismayed that Rex Tillerson, the new secretary of state, had not appeared in person to present the report and had only offered limited written remarks about the report. Such a decision sends an unmistakable signal to human rights defenders that the United States may no longer have their back, a message that wont be lost on abusive governments, Rob Berschinski, a senior vice president at Human Rights First, told The Washington Post last week.

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Excerpt from:
US awash in 'terrible' human rights abuses, Chinese government report claims - Washington Post

Religion scholar Reza Aslan ate cooked human brain tissue with a group of cannibals in India during Sundays premiere of the new CNN show Believer, a documentary series about spirituality around the globe.

The outcry was immediate. Aslan, a Muslim who teaches creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, was accused of Hinduphobia and of mischaracterizing Hindus.

With multiple reports of hate-fuelled attacks against people of Indian origin from across the U.S., the show characterizes Hinduism as cannibalistic, which is a bizarre way of looking at the third largest religion in the world, lobbyist group U.S. India Political Action Committees said in a statement, according to the Times of India.

Aslan released a statement on his Facebook page Wednesday in response to the backlash.

In the episode, Aslan meets up with a sect of Indian religious nomads outside the of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The Aghori, as they are known, reject the Hindu caste system and the notion of untouchables, and espouse that the distinction between purity and pollution is essentially meaningless. In the Aghori view, nothing can taint the human body, Aslan said.

Kind of a profound thought. Also: A little bit gross, said Aslan, whose bestselling books on religion include Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Aghori convince Aslan to bathe in the Ganges, a river that Hindus considers sacred. An Aghori guru smears the ashes of cremated humans on his face. And, at the Aghoris invitation, Aslan drinks alcohol from a human skull and eats what was purported to be a bit of human brain.

Want to know what a dead guys brain tastes like? Charcoal, Aslan wrote on Facebook. It was burnt to a crisp!

At one point, the interview soured and one cannibal threatened Aslan: I will cut off your head if you keep talking so much. Aslan, in turn, said to his director that, I feel like this may have been a mistake.

And when the guru began to eat his own waste and hurl it at Aslan and his camera crew, the CNN host scurried away.

Pretty sure that was not the Aghori I was looking for, he said.

Aslan also interviewed several non-cannibal Aghori practitioners, including those who ran an orphanage and a group of volunteers who cared for people with leprosy. Still, some critics felt the focus on the flesh-eating Aghori inappropriate and done for the shock value.

It is unbelievably callous and reckless of CNN to be pushing sensational and grotesque images of bearded brown men and their morbid and deathly religion at a time when the United States is living through a period of unprecedented concern and fear, wrote Vamsee Juluri, a media studies professor at the University of San Francisco, in article at the Huffington Post.

(Cannibalism, while not formally outlawed in the United States, may lead to charges for desecration of corpses. Eating human brains has also been linked to prion disease.)

Some viewers turned to Twitter to express their anger at the program. One of the loudest voices on the social media platform belonged to wealthy Indian-American industrialist Shalabh Kumar, who made significant contributions to President Donald Trumps campaign and has angled to become a U.S. ambassador to India. Kumar seemed to perceive the episode as an attack on Hindu Americans who voted for the president.

Disgusting attack on Hindus for supporting @POTUS, Kumar tweeted. Invoking the Clinton News Network a label that Trump helped popularize Kumar wrote in a follow-up tweet that the network had no respect for members of the religion. He called for Hindus to boycott CNN.

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Reza Aslan, host of CNN's 'Believer,' under fire for eating human brain with cannibals in India - National Post

President Trump and many of his top aides have expressed skepticism about climate change, while others say human activity is to blame for global warming. So what's the administration's real position? (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

This story has been updated.

Scott Pruitt, the nations top environmental official, strongly rejected the established science of climate change on Thursday,outraging scientists, environmentalists, and even his immediate predecessor at the Environmental Protection Agency.

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and theres tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that its a primary contributor to the global warming that we see, Pruitt, the newly installed EPA administrator, said on the CNBC program Squawk Box.

But we dont know that yet, he continued. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.

His comments represented a startling statement for an official so high in the U.S. government,putting him at odds not only with other countriesaround the globebut also with the official scientific findings of the agency he now leads. President Trump in the past has called the notion of human-fueled climate change a hoax. And other cabinet members,including Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, havepreviously questioned the scientific basis for combating global warming.

[This climate lawsuit could change everything. No wonder the Trump administration doesnt want it going to trial]

But Pruitts attempt to sow scientific doubt where little exists alarmed environmental advocates, scientists and former EPA officials, who fear he plans to use such views to attack Obama-era regulations aimed at reining in pollution from the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.

The world of science is about empirical evidence, not beliefs, Gina McCarthy, the EPAs most recent administrator, said in a statement. When it comes to climate change, the evidence is robust and overwhelmingly clear that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high. Preventing the greatest consequences of climate change is imperative to the health and well-being of all of us who call Earth home.

She added, I cannot imagine what additional information the Administrator might want from scientists for him to understand that.

Pruitts climate change comments resulted in instant headlines on Thursday. As criticism mounted, White House press secretary Sean Spicer batted back a question about Pruitts comments from a reporter who cited Pruitts words and how they contradict the scientific consensus on climate change.

Thats a snippet of what Administrator Pruitt said, said Spicer. He went on and said I dont think we know conclusively, this is what we know. I would suggest that you touch base with the EPA on that. But he had a very lengthy response and that is just one snippet of what the Administrator said.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer downplayed EPA head Scott Pruitt's comments on March 9 that carbon dioxide isn't a primary contributor to global warming. (The Washington Post)

But Pruitt, whowas visiting the energy industry conference CERAWeek in Houston, also waded into related controversial topics during his CNBC interview. In particular,he questioned whether it was EPAs role to regulate carbon dioxide emissions something undertaken through the agencys Clean Power Plan, the Obama administrations most significant policy to combat climate change and challenged the Paris agreement on climate change.

Nowhere in the equation has Congress spoken, said Pruitt on whether hisagency is obligated to regulate carbon dioxide. The legislative branch has not addressed this issue at all. Its a very fundamental question to say, Are the tools in the toolbox available to the EPA to address this issue of CO2, as the court had recognized in 2007, with it being a pollutant?

(Pruitt was apparently referring to the 2007 Supreme Court decision inMassachusetts v. EPA,in which the court ruled that harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognizedand that the EPA had been arbitrary and capricious in failing to issue a determination on whether greenhouse gases endanger the health and welfare of the public.)

The remarks appeared to fundamentally call into question whether the EPA has a role in the regulation of greenhouse gases that drive global warming, including not only carbon dioxide but methane. Last week, Pruitts agency withdrew an agency request to oil and gas companies to report on their equipment and its methane emissions, which could have laid the groundwork for tighter regulations.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 25 in Oxon Hill, Md. (The Washington Post)

Pruitt also dismissed the international Paris climate agreement, which the Obama administration helpedto lead and which was joined by nearly 200 countries in late 2015, as a bad deal for the United States.

Its one thing to be talking about CO2 internationally, Pruitt said. But when you front-load your costs, as we endeavored to do in that agreement, and then China and India back-loaded their costs for 2030 and beyond, thats not good for America. Thats not an America first type of approach.

On the science of climate change, Pruitts statements fly in the face of aninternational scientific consensus, which has concluded that it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For that matter, they also contradict the very website of the agency that Pruitt heads.

The EPAs Climate Change website states the following:

Recent climate changes, however, cannot be explained by natural causes alone. Research indicates that natural causes do not explain most observed warming, especially warming since the mid-20thcentury. Rather, it is extremely likely that human activities have been the dominant cause of that warming.

For this conclusion, the EPA cites the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading global scientific consensus body that assesses the state of the science roughly every five years.

Pruitt spoke with CNBC amidst growing anticipation that the Trump administration will soon move to begin a formal rollback of President Obamas Clean Power Plan, an EPA policy capping emissions from electricity generating stations, such as coal-fired power plants.

Pruitt himself sued the EPA over the Clean Power Plan in his previous role as the attorney general of Oklahoma.

And thats just one of multiple lawsuits that he filed against the EPA others were over mercury and air pollution, the agencys attempts to regulate pollution of waterways, and methane emissions from oil and gas facilities, to name a few.

The EPA chief has made several statements in the past that are similar to the present one, perhaps, but not so strongly worded.

For instance, writing for National Review in 2016, he stated that Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. In his Senate confirmation hearing, meanwhile,he stated in a tense exchange with Senator Bernie Sanders that the climate is changing, and human activity contributes to that in some manner.

Another of Pruitts predecessors now in the business community also commented on the science of climate change in the context of his remarks.

The time for debate on climate change has passed, Lisa Jackson, President Obamas first EPA administrator and nowvice president ofEnvironment, Policy and Social Initiatives at Apple, told the Post.

Certainty is what business needs, said Jackson. And relying on science is something that we do every single day. So now if were going to question science, I think it has an impact on more than just some federal rules, or some law, it has a huge impact on human health, the environment, and our economy.

More from Energy and Environment:

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On climate change, Scott Pruitt causes an uproar and contradicts the EPA's own website - Washington Post

1:20 CNN host eats human brains, sparking outrage

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A group of nine people, including eight minors, were arrested on charges related to the assault and robbery of a man, which occurred in broad daylight. The victim reportedly didn't suffer any serious injuries, and 18-year-old Darrell Smith is the only member of the group facing charges as an adult.

Two kayakers got more than they expected when they encountered some whales off the coast of Argentina. As they approached one of the massive animals, the beast maneuvered itself underneath them and then rose up, carrying the boaters on its back for a short while.

Residents in Onoway, Canada, began reporting pink water coming from their taps on Monday. It eventually was discovered that a common water treatment chemical was responsible for the brightly colored water, and according to authorities, there was no risk to the public.

Scientists at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Boston University have built a robot that can read a human's thoughts, as long as that person is wearing the connected EEG. Right now, the bot can only determine very basic commands, and can be guided by thought while performing simple tasks.

After multiple incidents of having his cars keyed in London, Kay Hussain set up a camera to try to catch the perpetrator. When he checked the footage, he saw a man who appears to look just like Donald Trump seemingly vandalizing his car.

Original post:
CNN host eats human brains, sparking outrage - New York Post

Last week, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker published a satirical essay, in which he wondered whether the strange reality we live in could be some kind of computer game played by an advanced intelligence (us in the future or alien).

His point was that if it is, the "programmers" are messing up, given the absurdity of current events: the incredible faux-pas at the Oscars, where the wrong best picture was announced; Donald Trump, the most outsider president ever elected in U.S. history; the strange comeback by the New England Patriots at the Super Bowl. These events, claims Gopnik, are not just weird; they point to a glitch in the "Matrix," the program that runs us all.

For most people trying to make a living, pay bills or fighting an illness, to spend time considering that our reality is not the "real thing" but actually a highly-sophisticated simulation sounds ridiculous. Someone close to me said, "I wish smart people would focus on real world problems and not on this nonsense." I confess that despite being a scientist that uses simulations in my research, I tend to sympathize with this. To blame the current mess on powers beyond us sounds like a major cop out. It's like the older brother framing the younger one for the broken window. "He threw the ball!" Not our fault, not our responsibility, "they" are doing this to us.

Of course, philosophers consider such questions because they are interesting and raise points about the nature of reality and our perception of it. The Are We Living in a Simulation? question comes from a 2003 paper by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who reasoned, compellingly, that given our own proficiency with computers and virtual reality, one of the following propositions must be true:

In other words, either we disappear, or our successors do or don't run simulations, including the one we are part of today. Bostrom's point is that if our species moves on to a new, posthuman phase, our "new us" will have unimaginable computation powers, and running realistic simulations will be a given. If this is the case, we would be like characters in a super-advanced Sims game, believing we have autonomy when, in fact, we are puppets in the hands of the game-players.

This sounds like a very Calvinist kind of situation, with God substituted by super-advanced game players. Or maybe we can call them Super Advanced Gaming Entities (S.A.G.E.)? Our fates are in the hands of "posthuman" entities with powers beyond our control. The key difference between God and a simulation (at least in this narrow context) is that God is presumably infallible, while simulations have glitches, or can have glitches.

The one glitch in the simulation argument is that there is nothing to stop the simulation at one super-advanced posthuman (alien) species. It could very well be that our simulators are, for their part, simulated by even more advanced simulators, and those by even more advanced ones, ad infinitum. Who is the first simulator? This reminds me of the "turtles all the way down" concept of Anavastha in Indian philosophy, where the world rests on an elephant that rests on a turtle that rests on a turtle that... In the West, it may be interpreted as infinite regression or the problem of the First Cause. (For a history of the "turtles all the way down" concept and its many occurrences and variations see here.)

This offers at least some sort of comfort, given that we all seem to be enslaved in an endless nested web of simulators. Only the first simulator is truly free. Familiar?

For Bostrom's argument to work, the key assumption is that advanced intelligences will have an interest in simulating their ancestors (in this case, us). Why would they, exactly? Would they expect to gain some new information about their reality by looking at their evolutionary past?

It seems to me that being so advanced they would have collected enough knowledge about their past to have little interest in this kind of simulation. Forward-looking may be much more interesting to them. They may have virtual-reality museums, where they could go and experience the lives and tribulations of their ancestors. But a full-fledged, resource-consuming simulation of an entire universe? Sounds like a colossal waste of time.

The simulation argument messes with our self-esteem, since it assumes that we have no free will, that we are just deluded puppets thinking we are free to make choices. To believe this is to give up our sense of autonomy: after all, if it's all a big game that we can't control, why bother? This is the danger with this kind of philosophical argument, to actually make us into what it's claiming we are, so that we end up abdicating our right to fight for what we believe in.

Let us make sure that we don't confuse philosophical arguments with our very real socio-political reality, especially not now. We need all the autonomy that we can muster to protect our freedom of choice.

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is currently teaching a Massive Online Open Course titled Question Reality! that goes much deeper into these questions. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

Link:
Why Reality Is Not A Video Game And Why It Matters - NPR