Category Archives: Transhumanist

This story is about something really creepy and disgusting. It is about routinely using people as batteries to power devices.

What comes to my mind is the prospect of an ironic ending to the famous depiction of evolution, the one where the neanderthal gradually turns into a straight-walking modern man, etc. It looks like if our self-appointed global managers with eugenicist tendencies get their way, the next phase of human evolution could be a battery!

A biological battery powering the digitized system of domination! Not a metaphorical battery where the masters get to syphon off peoples life energy and turn it into profits but a literal battery!

The concept of Human Battery puts the transhumanist slogan about the need to merge with machines or be left behind in the evolution of the human species in a sinister context. (Not that the slogan needed any additional context to sound like eugenics. Seriously who are you, Mr. Transhumanist, to consider yourself in charge of human evolution? Who appointed you?) But here is the context: What if being left behind means being turned into batteries?

Come, come, useless eater, stop being so useless! Put your body to work, useless eater, antivaxxer, grandma killer, planet killer! We have many useful machines to feed in our Fourth Industrial Revolution! Come, come, useless eater!

Now, an important philosophical distinction: My indignation is over the scope and the intention of their proposal. If this were merely about a neat little invention, a useful little emergency device that allows you to charge your phone from your body when you are stuck in the middle of nowhere, and your phone has just died fine, that can be reasonable!

If it were simply about the existence of an emergency device that we could use once in a blue moon, on our terms, when needed, it wouldnt be a problem. But in the realistic world we are living in, this is going the way of the Matrix! Human batteries are a very neat foray into the twisted world of human capital and impact investment, not to mention good ol energy harvesting! To quote my 2020 article about the Great Reset for Dummies:

Lets talk about human capital. In the new world, human capital is not just a metaphor for HR or labor. Microsoft, for example, has a patent for a method of transforming human behavior into cryptocurrency, which is done through an unspecified device coupled with a server that registers body activity and mines crypto.

Since under the New Normal, digital and crypto are supposed to become mainstream, this looks suspiciously like a tool that can be used both to tightly control the behavior of the poor who may depend on this for income and to literally mine the bodies of otherwise useless welfare dependents / UBI recipients for energy.

Furthermore, this patent could potentially be used to create a new financial instrument because, if mined for energy, these people become assets that could possibly be bunched together into virtual portfolios and virtually traded. See how neat?

Now, we are talking proper serfdom! And yes, this sounds very sci-fi but lets not forget how some billionaire visionaries think not like normal people, or else the workers at Amazon warehouses wouldnt be wearing diapers to skip bathroom breaks. Also lets not forget that today, there is trading of very theoretical items as well as betting on weather.

I mean, we shouldnt be surprised by the intention to abuse us, this is how our civilization has been functioning for a long time. But it doesnt make our pain today any less!

In their clever and prophetic 2015 article, the World Economic Forum repackages what sounds a bit like feudalism and makes it sound like a fun activity for the peasants. (Its easy to be prophetic when you hold the policy makers by the balls! Oops, I said the quiet part out loud, sorry.)

Via tricky language, the WEF narrative transforms our basic human existence and the things we do every day as happy, yokeless people, for our joy and on our own volition in other words as useless eaters into potentially useful energy-generating activities, that corporations, the bureaucrats, and the rich investors can exploit.

They subtly reframe the normal things that we do for ourselves in the manner of none of your Davos business as human energy powered activities, an economic area that they can then parasitically tap into (first, with their gentle pinkie, and then with their entire army of bulldozers). Heres from the horses mouth:

Human power used to be all the rage. 150 years ago [roughly around the time when slavery and serfdom were abolished in both of my homelands, America and Russia?], products that relied on human energy such as the bicycle, pedal-powered lathe or sewing machine could be found in most households [a great exaggeration about the availability of bicycles, but fine]. But as electro-mechanical motors developed, reliance on human-powered products gradually diminished.

Today, human power is not appropriately recognised for its potential as an alternative solution to our growing energy needs. Indeed, as we search for more renewable energy sources, is it possible to abandon using traditional electricity for certain tasks and return to human power? [yay, feudalism!]

The way that more and more products are becoming digital and even internet-connected makes this a challenge. But humans emit energy that can easily be harnessed from our everyday behaviour.

And here is a sweet incentive: Human-powered products also have the potential to encourage us to become more physically active Using human-powered products as a countermeasure to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles could create a credible new perspective towards exercise as an alternative energy source.

In some respects, human-power can be seen as the cleanest renewable energy source available, with great potential for helping people stay healthy and have fun. [Awwww, how about introducing a Ministry of Fun? A human-energy-powered Ministry of Fun? Just a thought.]

The article then talks about a concept, appropriately called, parasitic harvesting: Generating power from peoples normal activities such as walking is known as parasitic harvesting. One example of this in action is a handheld tube-shaped device that clips to your belt and backpack and generates electricity as you move around, using a magnet weight, spring, and inductive coil.

What a great idea! Given how subtle our cellular processes are, and how electromagnetic frequencies are such an important language for our bodies, it makes so much sense to walk around with a magnet and inductive coils on our body, while also bathing in the electromagnetic soup from the 5G towers and digital devices!

Sadly, it sounds like theyve lost their marbles. Either that or, like any literal or metaphorical slave owners, they only care about our well-being to the extent that our well-being impacts their profits.

Oh, and they say, we can power our wearables. Well, do we really need our wearables that badly? At that price? Maybe not? And it could be true that in rare occasions, people may need medical implants or wearables but are our aspiring masters counting on everyone being sick and needing a medical implant or wearable?

Are they planning to make everyone so sick that we will all need mothership-reporting medical wearables to keep us alive? Oh and sorry a grandma killer question what happened to our fun and healthy physical activity during the lockdown?

And here is a neat little video from 2021, accompanied by a touching, inspirational soundtrack:

The article, titled, New wearable device turns the body into a battery explains the invention further:

Researchers at CU Boulder have developed a new, low-cost wearable device that transforms the human body into a biological battery. The device, described today in the journal Science Advances, is stretchy enough that you can wear it like a ring, a bracelet or any other accessory that touches your skin. It also taps into a persons natural heat employing thermoelectric generators to convert the bodys internal temperature into electricity.

According to IEEE Digital Library, not only can wearable devices use vibration energy to charge their own batteries, but they could one day have a big impact on our communities.

Thats the conclusion reached by a group of international researchers experimenting with kinetic energy harvesting. The group comprised of researchers from the University of New South Wales and the University of Queensland sees potential to use the method as a valuable tool for things like urban planning and development by detecting peoples modes of transportation [emphasis mine].

Transportation mode detection [emphasis mine] is important to our communities, says Sara Khalifa, researcher from Data61|CSIRO, Australia.

It allows researchers to consistently and reliably collect information on individuals traveling behavior [emphasis mine] to inform urban design, real-time journey planning, human activity monitoring [emphasis mine], CO2 emissions, targeted advertising and more. In other words, well pay for our own surveillance and monitoring! Now, thats fun!

Speaking of paying, lets please revisit the Microsoft patent: Here is the summary:

Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user. Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user.

The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set by the cryptocurrency system, and award cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data is verified.

Heres more detail:

A virtual currency (also known as a digital currency) is a medium of exchange implemented through the Internet generally, not tied to a specific government-backed flat (printed) currency such as the U.S. dollar or the Euro, and typically designed to allow instantaneous transactions and borderless transfer of ownership.

One example of virtual currency is cryptocurrency, wherein cryptography is used to secure transactions and to control the creation of new units

A brain wave or body heat emitted from the user when the user performs the task provided by an information or service provider, such as viewing advertisement or using certain internet services, can be used in the mining process.

Instead of massive computation work required by some conventional cryptocurrency systems, data generated based on the body activity of the user can be a proof-of-work, and therefore, a user can solve the computationally difficult problem unconsciously. Accordingly, certain exemplary embodiments of the present disclosure may reduce computational energy for the mining process as well as make the mining process faster.

By the way, the word mining is very appropriate here. Isnt it the mechanism that turns vibrant land into wasteland? And will our master care when it happens to our bodies?

For living beings, electricity is a very important language that our bodies use for internal and external communications, and for many critical functions. Lots been said and written about it but perhaps The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenberg is an excellent starting point.

Modern scientists are babies when it comes to understanding the subtleties of our bodies and our interaction with the world. Why do they assume that the energy that our body emits is a waste? How do they know its a waste? How do they know that is serves no purpose? Is there such a thing in nature as waste?

Oh and how long until we are instructed to keep ourselves in shape to be efficient batteries for our feudal masters?

According to the WEF viewpoint, we are not just living our lives. We produce and spend energy. We dont just go about our day and do various things because we want to do them. We move around as power generators, as human machines, on a giant conveyor. We must be efficient.

They, the hungry messengers of the spirit of domination, are annoyed with every moment and every inch of our free and independent existence! And of course they have been annoyed with it for centuries and throughout the centuries, theyve being abusing different groups of people, with the same existential cruelty, trying to put people to use, without any respect for the spirit. Our independent existence is their lost profits! How dare we!

They dont want to leave any room for our unmonetized, unmonitored freedom. These people are mental. They are pathetic, anxious, greedy, sorry, mechanical zombies. At the root of it, they are not even scary, just pathetic (although they are capable of creating great carnage, and thats the scary part about their spiritual illness).

I am not angry, anger is not productive. But I am surely appalled! Their plight is in defiance of how we as human beings are intended to live, in harmony with the spirit, with nature, and with each other. They have really lost their marbles somewhere down the road! They are out of their minds, these messengers of the ghost of domination!

The task that we are looking at is challenging and humbling. I think that they are existentially allowed to temporarily mess with us so that we remember that the system of domination was never right. It was not right a thousand years ago, it was not right five hundred years ago, and it is not right today. Today, we feel it with our own souls and our own flesh really badly and it was never right.

And its time to remember that we are the children of spirit and Earth, just like many who came before us and faced the Machine. I, for one, am disgusted with the psychopaths but I am not afraid because we are love, and where there is love, there are no human batteries and no fear.

To find more of Tessa Lenas work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

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Meet the Human Battery, a New Source of "Green" Energy - Verve Times

The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale de Venezia is making a splash upon its long-awaited return. After a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual art exhibition is back on the scene with pieces representing artists and countries from around the world.

Consisting of a total of 200 artists from 58 countries, the Biennale was curated by Cecelia Alemani and is itself entitled The Milk of Dreams. The title draws its inspiration from the title of a book by surrealist artist Leona Carrington, which Alemani describes as being an exploration of a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of imagination.

Upon exploring the exhibitions many poignant offerings, its easy to see why the imaginative curator landed on the theme. An eclectic mix of eye-openers and statement-making pieces, the often surreal and exploratory pieces of the Biennale speak to its global sensibility and penchant for pushing the envelope (and in some cases, dropping jaws with in-your-face, dreamlike artwork).

Below are some of the most standout pieces on display this year, running the gamut from fantastically nightmarish metamorphic mashups to stark depictions of reality that speak to the horrors of war and the power of resilience:

Occupying the entire Danish Pavilion, Isolottos piece is emblematic of this years Biennale and its surrealist namesake. Depicting a human/horse hybrid lying prone in the center of a stark, messy interior, the piece evokes the dramas of a transhuman world afflicted by the same cycles of life and death, hope and despair, that connect us all.

Larger than life and less fantastical than many of its counterparts, German artist Katharina Fritsch opted for size, grandeur, realism, and attention to detail on this piece. But that doesnt make it any less impactful. Fritsch is also a co-recipient of the Biennales Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement this year.

Story continues

Stunning, silver, and described as a sprawling body of entanglements by its creator, this standout in the Korean pavilion is pseudo-realistic a tangled up knot of fantastic proportions that doesnt rely on animate objects and their relationship to the world, yet somehow evokes a feeling of movement with its twisty form.

Formerly located in NYCs High Line in 2019, U.S. artist Simone Leighs Brick House is a majestic bronze sculpture depicting an imposing figure thats part Black woman, part house, registering as a vessel, a dwelling, a space of comfort, and as a site of sanctuarya Black womans body as a site of multiplicity, says Madeline Weisburg. Leigh has also won a Golden Lion for her monumental and momentous sculpture.

Vogels contribution was a jaw-dropper for sure a perfect example of the German artists experimental repertoire, which often raises eyebrows with its metaphoric, sometimes metaphysical statements. Here, Vogel went for the shock factor, depicting a large, cartoonish model of a penis being pulled by a fleet of white giraffes, complete with explanatory plates describing various diseases and conditions like erectile dysfunction. Cartoonish? Yes. Shocking? Definitely.

In referring to the Venice Biennale this year, Wallpaper recently said, Stark reminders of a raging war were never far from sight or mind, and this is most evident in the centerpiece of the Ukrainian pavilion. A piece created by the pavilions curators, this stirring sculpture contains a multitude of stacked sandbags to represent the countrys efforts to protect their art from war damage a reminder thats both stirring and symbolic. Other notable Ukrainian offerings include The Fountain of Exhaustion by artist Pavlo Makov, which only arrived at the exhibition due to the perilous efforts of curator Maria Lanko to transport the piece beginning on the same day Russia began its attack.

Statements and reactions to the war in Ukraine were not limited to the countrys own pavilion. French artist JR presented a large photograph of a young Ukrainian refugee in this statement-maker that puts a human face on the tragedies of war. Its also been featured on the cover of Time and is part of the ongoing exhibition This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom.

A curvy, faceless hybrid thats equal parts sensual and unrecognizably recognizable, Invitation is another potent representation thats visceral and colorful, perfectly in keeping with exhibitions central surrealist theme. Located in the Austrian pavilion, the sculpture is perched above the viewer on a plinth, presented as a figure to be worshipped and admired.

The Venice Biennale 2022 runs from April 23rd through November 22nd, 2022 at the Giardini and the Arsenale.

The post This Years Venice Biennale is Full of Surrealism and Stark Reminders first appeared on Dornob.

Excerpt from:
This Years Venice Biennale is Full of Surrealism and Stark Reminders - Yahoo News

Heaven has different meanings for different people. For some transhumanists HEAVEN is an acronym for (HEad Anastomosis VENture), an attempt by an Italian and a Chinese surgeon to transplant a living head onto a living body. They have been working on this project for several years and claim to have had some success with animals.

This ambitious experiment by Sergio Canavero and Xiaoping Ren raises as many philosophical questions as it does neurological and surgical ones. The current issue of the Journal of Medicine & Philosophy examines some of the complications, assuming that it is even possible to remove a head from one body and transplant it onto another body.

One of the contributors, J. Clint Parker, of East Carolina University, asks whether the project contributes to human flourishing:

Dr. Canaveros initiative raises profound questions about what type of life is worth living, and importantly, what type of life is worth living forever. Even if there is something important about enduring, is it good for human beings to endure forever as they are now? The stakes seem to go up the longer one lives, and it seems likely that rather than giving human beings enhanced existence, head transplantation, at least for the foreseeable future, would likely lead to a diminished existence. Even if it worked perfectly, it seems widely improbable that simply anastomosing a new body onto a head would keep the brain perpetually young.

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Is it possible to transplant heads? - BioEdge

"RRR" asks the important question: what if two legendary revolutionaries who were active at the same time in colonial India actually met? Better yet, what if they were best friends? Better yet, what if one betrayed the other in a melodramatic twist of fate that ended in a climactic musical showdown that basically ends in them becoming god-like superheroes? That's "RRR," the incredible, insane, maximalist Indian Telugu-language epic directed by S. S. Rajamouli.

"RRR" tells the (fictionalized) story of Alluri Sitarama Raju (Charan) and Komaram Bheem (Rama Rao), two real-life revolutionaries who, again, probably weren't best friends in real life. But "RRR" imagines that they were, in the most eye-popping, adrenaline-pumping, hyperstylized action flick of the year.

In "RRR," Raju is a police officer working for the British Raj who is tasked with finding and arresting the legendary Bheem, a sort of John Wick-ian figure (except with more tiger punching) who protects the peaceful Gond tribe, after the British governor forcibly takes one of the Gond tribes' young girls as a pet for his wife. But Raju and Bheem, disguising himself as a lowly Muslim mechanic, unknowingly meet for the first time while rescuing a young boy from a train crash and instantly become best friends by virtue of their equivalent manliness (and also through a musical montage straight out of a rom-com). All this time, Raju doesn't know that Bheem is the man he is hunting, and Bheem doesn't know that Raju is actually an undercover cop working to steal weapons away from the British government. It all climaxes in a fiery inferno of betrayal, more tiger punching, motorcycle-throwing, and a viral musical sequence where Raju and Bheem happily outdance a bunch of white people. Take that, imperialism. (Hoai-Tran Bui)

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The Best Movies Of 2022 So Far - /Film

Our core needs are the same, he says. We have to feed ourselves, we have to clothe ourselves, we have to house ourselves, we have to educate ourselves.

And if you think robots are going to do all those things for us in the near future, think again.

In contrast to what the vast majority of people believe, our jobs are not all going to technology, Misel says. What weve done is outsource the mundane and the routine to technology, because thats all that it can do at this stage.

Humans will still be needed. And here are some of the jobs Misel believes will be in highest demand.

Our bricklayers, our carpenters and our gardeners are going to be even more important over the next 5, 10 or 20 years, Misel says. We will want to have spare time in our lives, and many of us will have disposable income that we will be prepared to use to pay other people to do things for us.

Perhaps one day, you will be able to have a chip implanted that will enable you to speak French, fix the plumbing or dance the rumba. But not any time soon. Were going to need people who will teach us to do things, Misel says.

Educators are in high demand.Credit:iStock

I believe we will do most of our routine shopping online - for food, clothes and so on, Misel says. But we will still be humans with a herd mentality, who want to come together. Retailing may become showtailing - in other words, well go to experience rather than to buy - but it will still involve customer-facing jobs.

Ten years ago, someone who made coffee was just someone who made coffee. Now, theyre a barista. And a bartender is a mixologist. They have increased in status, Misel says. And they are likely to be in even higher demand in the years ahead, as people increasingly spend time and money on going out to eat and drink. The pandemic only exacerbated existing labour shortages, Misel says. You just cannot find enough hospitality workers.

People are going to live longer, and they are going to want to do so in good health. We will need a whole slew of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals to help us to achieve those goals, Misel says. And it will be a rapidly evolving field. We will see a whole set of new medical procedures and medical practitioners, both doctors and allied health.

Like doctors, lawyers may need to develop new skills in the years ahead, but they wont be out of a job, Misel says. Lawyers will be using smart contracts and performing in blockchain. But the notion of having an enforceable document and somebody who understands that enforceable document will still be required.

If youre not sure which of these jobs is right for you, dont worry. One thing set to become increasingly redundant is the idea of having one career.

People will work hard at a task, then go off to do something unrelated using the skills they have acquired, Misel says. Many people will have a portfolio income, making money from different bits and pieces.

Knowing exactly where youre going isnt necessary. Some people will find their calling, and stay with it for life, and thats wonderful. For others, its a matter of understanding what their skills are, what it is they enjoy doing, and starting out on a path that makes sense for them.

If youre thinking about making the move to a booming industry of the future, learn more about the roles currently available and get advice on making a change by visiting SEEK Career Advice.

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Future of work: the top careers of the next decade - The Age

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. & RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kriya Therapeutics, Inc., a fully integrated gene therapy company pioneering novel technologies and therapeutics, today announced a $270 Million Series C financing. The financing was led by Patient Square Capital, with participation from Bluebird Ventures, CAM Capital, Dexcel Pharma, Foresite Capital, JDRF T1D Fund, Lightswitch Capital, Narya Capital, QVT, Transhuman Capital, and other undisclosed investors. Proceeds from this financing will support the advancement of Kriyas pipeline and continued scaling of its engineering, manufacturing, and computational platforms.

Kriya has established an ecosystem for delivering best-in-class technologies and medicines in gene therapy, with core business units in technology, manufacturing, R&D, and therapeutics. By leveraging its proprietary computational platform, in-house manufacturing infrastructure, and rational design toolkit, the company is uniquely positioned to bring potentially transformative gene therapies to a broad range of diseases.

We believe gene therapy has the potential to redefine medicine over the next decade. However, the field has been constrained by technological and operational challenges that make it difficult and expensive to deliver new products, said Shankar Ramaswamy, M.D., Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kriya. Kriya was founded to address the primary problems limiting the field, and I am proud of the progress we have made to date. This financing will support our continued growth as we advance our diverse pipeline into the clinic and further scale our core platforms, to achieve our ultimate vision of expanding the reach and unlocking the full potential of gene therapy as a modality.

In recent months, Kriya has achieved several milestones across key parts of its business. The company significantly expanded its pipeline through its internal R&D efforts, as well as through acquisitions and partnerships with leading companies and academic institutions. In addition, Kriya operationalized its state-of-the-art, scalable GMP manufacturing infrastructure in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina to support in-house production from early through late phase development. This infrastructure also empowers the development and implementation of novel technologies and processes that enable consistent, large-scale manufacturing. Kriya has also scaled SIRVE, its machine learning-enabled technology and cloud computing architecture, to support the integration of large datasets generated by the companys high throughput screening, next generation sequencing, and algorithmic data mining platforms.

Kriya has made tremendous strides over the past few years, attracting world-class talent, expanding its pipeline, and scaling the infrastructure necessary to unlock the full potential of gene therapy, said Jim Momtazee, Managing Partner of Patient Square Capital and Kriya Board Member. We believe the company has the potential to be the clear leader in the evolving gene therapy field, consistent with Patient Square Capitals focus to build and support category leading companies in health care.

About Kriya

Kriya is a fully integrated gene therapy company on a mission to revolutionize how gene therapies are designed, developed, and manufactured with a goal of improving speed to market and reducing cost. The company leverages its proprietary computational engine, in-house manufacturing infrastructure, and integrated design platform to engineer products with the potential to transform the treatment of a broad range of diseases. Kriyas team includes scientific pioneers with decades of experience in product development, complex manufacturing, and computational engineering.

The company has established an ecosystem for delivering best-in-class technologies and medicines, with core business units in technology, manufacturing, R&D, and therapeutics. Kriyas product pipeline addresses diseases of high unmet need with therapeutic area divisions in ophthalmology, oncology, rare disease, and chronic disease, each led by industry veterans with a track record of advancing products from concept through commercialization. Built upon this foundation, Kriya achieves the scale needed to drive transformational improvements in the engineering, production, and translation of gene therapies. For more information, please visit http://www.kriyatx.com and follow on LinkedIn.

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Kriya Announces $270 Million Series C Financing to Advance Fully Integrated Gene Therapy Engine - Business Wire

[imagesource: Neon]

This years Cannes Film Festival has a few big names and sizeable studio efforts on show, like Elvis and Top Gun: Maverick.

But as usual, there are also some hidden gems worth excavating.

The Cannes lineup is particularly rich this year, due in part to a few festival regulars and also a number of rising stars.

Well be getting into a few of the more anticipated films, many of which dont even have an official trailer.

Brand spanking new and indie, just how we like it.

Lets dive in, with five films as listed by The Guardian:

Crimes of the Future

Cannes regularDavid Cronenbergreturns with his own long-gestating script, about a future world in which people have to adapt to transhumanism. Evolution accelerates, bodies sprout new organs and human identities are in a state of flux.

Sounds plausible:

The Natural History of Destruction

Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa returns to Cannes for a special screening of his new documentary, based on the book by WG Sebald about the horror of aerial bombardment during the second world war a subject with a special resonance today.

The festival website has more about this film.

Broker

Japanese auteurHirokazu Kore-edahas made his first Korean language film, with Korean star Song Kang-ho, an intense emotional drama, based on a real case, about the baby boxes in which people can leave unwanted newborns.

Thats particularly apt given whats happening across the pond in the US:

One Fine Morning

Transgressive passion is the foundation of this movie from Mia Hansen-Lve, withLa Seydouxas Sandra, a single mum with a young daughter, trying to find care for her elderly father, and embarking on an intense affair with an old friend.

You can find out more at IMDb.

Men

A frisson of League-of-Gentlemen unease in a creepy English country village where all the men (played by Rory Kinnear) have a weird resemblance to each other:Jessie Buckleystars in this scary movie from Alex Garland.

British and creepy is a potent combination:

The 2022 Cannes Film Festival starts today (May 17) and runs through to May 28.

[source:guardian]

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Five Standout Films Coming To Cannes This Year [Trailers] - 2oceansvibe News

Elvis

Baz Luhrmann brings his trademark truckload of spangly glamour and sugar-rush showbiz to the story of Elvis Presley with Austin Butler as the King and Tom Hanks as his manipulative manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

Ukrainian film-maker Sergei Loznitsa returns to Cannes for a special screening of his new documentary, based on the book by WG Sebald about the horror of aerial bombardment during the second world war a subject with a special resonance today.

Cannes regular David Cronenberg returns with his own long-gestating script, about a future world in which people have to adapt to transhumanism. Evolution accelerates, bodies sprout new organs and human identities are in a state of flux.

Michelle Williams is the regular leading player for film-maker Kelly Reichardt, and she returns as Lizzie, a sculptor whose life is about to be turned upside down by a new show. Other stars include Andr 3000, Judd Hirsch and Amanda Plummer.

European cinema icon Claire Denis brings a movie with a hint of Peter Weirs The Year of Living Dangerously and her own keynote theme of colonial agony: Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn star as a journalist and businessman in 1980s Nicaragua.

Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda has made his first Korean language film, with Korean star Song Kang-ho, an intense emotional drama, based on a real case, about the baby boxes in which people can leave unwanted newborns.

Transgressive passion is the foundation of this movie from Mia Hansen-Lve, with La Seydoux as Sandra, a single mum with a young daughter, trying to find care for her elderly father, and embarking on an intense affair with an old friend.

A frisson of League-of-Gentlemen unease in a creepy English country village where all the men (played by Rory Kinnear) have a weird resemblance to each other: Jessie Buckley stars in this scary movie from Alex Garland.

Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyska takes on the story of the British silent twins. Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance star as identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons who spoke to no one but each other, wrote outsider art novels and were eventually sent to Broadmoor for arson and theft.

Virginie Efira stars in Alice Winocours drama as a woman caught up in a terrorist attack in a Paris bistro. Some months later, stricken with PTSD and amnesia, and plagued with fragmented memories, she makes a determined attempt to reconstruct her past.

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Cannes 2022: 10 movies to watch out for in this years festival - The Guardian

The word Gnostic has long shadowed the careers of Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe, two renowned elders of American poetry who each published an important new work last year. Mackeys three-volume box set Double Trio, the latest installment of the two intertwined serial poems that he has been writing for nearly forty years, and Howes memoirManimal Woe, a poignant prose-poetic elegy for her father, invite a closer look at this strange spiritual affinity.

For almost two millennia the Gnostics have suffered the reputation of teaching a dreary and dualistic religious doctrine in comparison with the hopeful, world-affirming beliefs of the early Christians with whom they vied for disciples on the southeastern fringes of the Roman Empire. First- and second-century Gnostic heresiarchs like Simon Magus, Valentinus, and Basilides notoriously proclaimed that the material universe is inherently evil, the flawed creation not of God but of a lesser deity who through pride, malice, or ineptitude fashioned the world into a prison for the human spirit.

Our only hope for salvation came not through gracethe true God, they believed, is infinitely remote from and utterly indifferent to the worldbut through secret teachings and initiation into gnosis, an intuitive and self-actualizing knowledge which penetrates and dispels the oppressive illusions of the world, thus liberating human spirits from the inert heaviness of matter.

Although the Gnostic sects had largely disappeared by the 4th century, the 20th-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Hans Jonas argued that Gnostic strains endure in any number of modern philosophies, political ideologies, and works of art. Gnostic has since become a catchall for varying shades of existential suspicion and magical thinking. There is a recent trend among conservative Christian polemicists, for example, to attack as Gnostic everything they abhor about the modern worldfrom gender and critical race theories to Silicon Valley transhumanism. But even within the overwhelmingly secular and progressive milieu of contemporary American poetry, to be pegged a Gnostic is something of a liability.

We are living through a period of unquestionable political urgency, when poets increasingly dedicate their writing to collective projects of activism or allyship. Gnosticism, many suspect, is inherently individualistic, otherworldly, and apolitical, encouraging an apocalyptic detachment from the wars and commotions of history, in effect allegorizing them away as contingent symbols of a primordial flaw laced into the fabric of reality. Salvation, for the Gnostics, wasfromhistory, notinhistory. In stark contrast, most contemporary poets express their political agency in straightforwardly materialist terms, despite the hallowed precedent of the revolutionary William Blake, who availed the mythological imagination of the ancient sects, and the efforts of self-described New Gnostics, who seek to define a visionary and religiously attuned experimental poetry for our time.

Few readers familiar with either Nathaniel Mackey or Fanny Howe, however, would question their left-wing political bona fides. Longtime favorites of the indie poetry crowd, both Mackey, seventy-four, and Howe, eighty-one, have in recent years been recognized as among the most important authors of their generation, as evidenced by respectiveNew Yorkerprofiles and significant honors, including Mackeys National Book Award and Bollingen Prize, Howes Lenore Marshall and Griffin Prizes, and a Ruth Lilly Prize apiece.

Many new readers are therefore currently encountering inDouble TrioandManimal Woetwo distinct apotheoses of two vast catalogs (Mackey has published nearly twenty books and Howe close to fifty) of some of the most challenging and imaginative political poetry written since the 1970s, especially as it pertains to the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the material conditions of Black life in America, preoccupations Mackey, Black, and Howe, white, share. Where Mackey and Howe diverge from the received wisdom is in their refusal to see Gnostic ambivalence and political commitment as mutually opposed. Collective political action, their new books suggest, must be shaped, guided, and channeled with a healthy sense of cosmic irony.

*

Double Triopresents the latest, and thus far the longest, episode in what Nathaniel Mackey calls his long song: the cross-cultural epic, comprising the two serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu (each the others understudy, as Mackey once put it) that he has been publishing incrementally since his 1985 debut,Eroding Witness.

Double Triois a pun. The title refers literally to the fact that each of the tomes three volumesTej Bet,Sos Notice, andNerve Churchcontains twice as many installments as each of its three antecedents,Splay Anthem(2006),Nod House(2011), andBlue Fasa(2016). But double trio also pays homage to the avant-garde saxophonist Glenn Spearmans group of the early nineties, which paired two jazz trios in free improvisations meant to elicit sui generis collaborations between instruments and bold new interchanges of musical ideas. Individually exploratory and centrifugal, each of the players nevertheless contributes to a vision (or, really, anaudition) of genuine collectivity, however transitory, however only partially enacted.

To become a band like that, to reconstrue individual identity and agency through ensemblic doubling and self-parsing, to collectively improvise a we, is the dream of the Gnostic sojourners who travel through Mackeys long song (Anuncio and Anuncia, Huff, Sophia, Itamar, Brother B and Sister C, Mr. and Mrs. P, Netsanet and Eleanoir, to name only a few) by boat, car, bus, train, airplane, and spaceship, passing through mapped localities (Los Angeles, Troy, Addis Ababa, Costa Brava) as well as allegorically limned regions unique to the Mackey mythos (Lone Coast, Low Forest, Crater, Dread Lakes, Lake Pred), on their way to an outmost destination they never quite reach, never more than a would-be band.

What prevents the migrating they from becoming an arrived-at we is Nub Mackeys word for that which prototypically dislocates, uncouples, decapitates. Nub is a Gnostic principle of severance endemic to being, but one that reveals itself in contingent historical incarnations, most recently in the United Slave States of Nub, the reassertion over the past decade of Americas old and new nature of violent deracination and exclusion.

This passage appears in a poem that alludes to the police murder of Eric Garner in 2014. Other poems inDouble Trio, written between the summer of 2012 and the summer of 2018, reference the murders of Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, and Alton Sterling, the mass shootings in Charleston, Dallas, Sutherland Springs, and Parkland, as well as the background noise of the troubled second term of the Obama administration, the 2016 presidential campaign, and the ascendancy of Donald Trump. Mackey mockingly portrays Trump as a kind of chthonic monster or archonone of the malevolent rulers of the planetary spheres in Gnostic cosmologywho lives beneath a field of comb-over haystacks and whom, like Scylla and Charybdis, the would-be band of black Odysseans must perilously navigate.

As these events sequentially unfold, the mood among Mackeys would-be band becomes increasingly nonplussed, angry, desperate, defiant, determined, resigned, hopefulunresolvedly all of these at once.

There is something undeniably fatalistic about Mackeys treatment of white supremacy and Black suffering. The unique tragedy of Eric Garners murder is, if not diminished, then certainly put in perspective by the ineluctability of historical recurrence. Black subjugation is extrapolated into something like a metaphysical constant. This is perhaps surprising, given that Mackey has written ambivalently in the past about a similar instinct in the Vietnam War poetry of Robert Duncan, the most unapologetically Gnostic writer of the 20th century, to cosmologize the American war machine, to treat such violence as part of the hidden order of things, and thus avoid taking a decisive moral position. Duncans poetic stance of oracular detachment famously cost him his friendship with Denise Levertov (a Roman Catholic convert, interestingly) who believed that the poet had a public responsibility to pursue concrete political measures against the war and used her own writing of the period to bear witness to American atrocities against the Vietnamese.

For Mackey, however, the question for the poet is not primarily between taking a stand and standing back. His characters act, they blow, even when they cant breathe. But just as the pleading final words of Eric Garner were repurposed into a powerful rallying cry for a new generation of civil-rights activism, Mackey suggests that the inescapable and, in some real sense, eternalfact of the violent severance of Black breath must be somehow dialectically incorporated into the sound of its perseverance.

This core conviction has shaped the mythopoetic and formal design of Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu from their inception. Mackey has discussed at length the importance to his project of the cosmogonic mythoi of the Dogon people of Mali, specifically their belief that doubleness, not individuality, is the true estate of human being. The human tendency to be born singular indicates an ontological prematurity. The Dogon song of the Andoumboulou, which recounts the story of humanitys originary loss of twinness, echoes Gnostic teaching. In funeral rites, the song is sung in a rasping, abraded, torn voice that, in Mackeys view, timbrally conveys the sense that we are born torn asunder from ourselves. The individual, in other words, is intrinsically dividual. The I is always already Nubbed.

In this way, Mackey turns on its head the conventional privileging and universalization of white over Black experience. It is actually the psychic uprootedness innate to diasporic identities, and not the self-assured Cartesian ego, that best characterizes the human lot. Mackeys critical writings have long protested the pressure historically imposed on Black writers to adopt a transparently and accessibly declamatory style, which a white literary establishment patronizingly presumes is necessary and sufficient for Black writers to tell their stories or, in todays parlance, speak their truth. He calls our attention to the possible duplicity whereby a poet might speak of political dispossession, but within an epistemological framework or model of lyric subjectivity that falsely presupposes self-possession.

Identity, for Mackey, is honestly expressible only as an Insofar-I: an I more subjunctive than securely subjective, one that acknowledges that self-presence is an illusion and that cognitive dissonance is the norm for one natally torn in half. In true Gnostic fashion, however, Mackey suggests that by accepting the truth of this we take the first step toward liberation.

Here, Mackey riffs on the linguistic peculiarities of Rastafarian Dread Talk in order to reveal how the cosmological and historical severance of the I and I makes possible degrees of self-detachment, and thus both irony as well as ecstasy (literally displacement from ones proper place), that better enable us to see how we might recover the we. The I, for example, can imaginatively project its own double or whatsayer, who at once gainsays the I (so what?) and goads it on (what next?). The religious and political ramifications are what Mackey calls, after Duke Ellington, blutopic: a model of communal life that does not try to suppress the blue and bass notes, the nonsense and dissonance (or nonsonance in Mackeys idiolect) at the bottom of everything, but learns how to make of them the doubled instruments of ongoingness. Babble be our boon, Mackey writes, such were the dictates of seeming defeat, fugitivitys / rigor.

*

If Mackey has largely embraced his Gnostic reputation, Fanny Howe has sometimes demurred. A well-known convert to Roman Catholicism, Howe stated in a 2004 interview that although she had passed through a Gnostic stage, it soon felt evil to have that view of being. She objected to the way the Gnostics understood gnosis to be the privilege of an elect few, the rest of us pitiably wallowing in illusion. Her writing shows perhaps clearer fidelity to Franciscan incarnational theology and the preferential option for the poor. And yet, there is a seditious, heterodox streak to Howes Catholicism. Gnosticism continues to function in her writing as something of a check against the possible excesses of Christian eschatological hope.

The beatitudes famously promise heavenly restitution for the wretched of the earth, tempting many Christians throughout history to see worldly dispossession at most as a transitory injustice and even in some cases as an ordained stage in Gods plan. But Howe Gnostically refuses to justify the persistence of suffering as providence. Like Mackey, she is forced to interpret the historical recurrence of evil as cruelly fated; human beings are the unwitting playthings of what she calls, inManimal Woe, the mystery of repetition.

I wanted to know why, she explains in the books coda, when slavery formally ended, it went on, both internationally and especially in the American courts, as scapegoating. Racial segregation and voter suppression, hatred of the poor and red-baiting, warmongering and xenophobiaHowe sees the present-day reappearance of the malevolent forces that assailed and obsessed her youth, negatively shaping her dawning political conscience in the late 1950s, as evidence that

there is something built into our national system, self-destruction, that goes round and round; repetition without progress; evolution of disagreements. So it goes, stopping at the same stations, having the same scuffles with the same people, scratching down the same punishments and laws only to create a population of government-haters, money-makers, angry nationalists with power, and the rest wage-slaves.

She wonders whether this bad infinity is actually innate to law itself. Life is the enemy of the law, she writes. Law struggles to prevent something new from living.

This sentiment echoes the idiosyncratic Gnosticism of Marcion of Sinop, a 2nd-century Christian heretic about whom Howe wrote sympathetically in her remarkable 2003 essay collection, The Wedding Dress. Marcion saw an irreconcilable difference between the legalistic, jealous, and genocidal God depicted in the Old Testament and the transcendent God whom Jesus in the Gospels called Father. Marcion concluded, by way of an extreme interpretation of Saint Pauls theology, that Jesus came not to fulfill but overthrow the law. Christ was an emissary, he claimed, not of Yahweh, the Demiurge and taskmaster of this broken world, but of a God whom we have never known. The alien father of the Gnostics, Howe elaborates, may have left a little imprint here on earth, but he doesnt seem to care in the way the interfering God of the Torah did. Evil is powerful because it makes itself known very viscerally; it cares, the way the torturer cares. The true God, she reflects, would paradoxically express compassion through disinterestedness and absence, wanting us to know and bravely accept that we are abandoned in the world.

These same Marcionite instincts return inManimal Woewhen Howe attempts to come to terms with the life and legacy of her late father. Mark DeWolfe Howe was a blue-blooded descendent of Ancient Boston and mad slave-traders as well as a prominent Harvard legal scholar, civil-rights activist, and firm believer that US common law could be an effective instrument, in his own words, for advancing the personal freedoms and human dignities of the American people, even if he was fully conscious of its failure historically to live up to that promise.

Howe plumbs her fathers archives, excerpting his letters, legal opinions, and lectures, often at length, searching for wisdom that might avail us in our current political predicament, but also struggling with his core convictions. The 1967 Civil Rights Act takes on especial symbolic resonance in the book, having been passed in the same year that her father died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack. Howes disillusionment with the failures of this specific law to ensure lasting justice for Black Americans is wrapped up emotionally with her acknowledgment that her father represented precisely the kind of privileged white liberal whose time has now passed and whose death created the painful conditions of Howes maturation and emancipation, the freedom to forge her own path. The Law seems to limit our abilities, Howe writes. This is at once a profoundly Gnostic discovery and, in the context of memorializing her father, an expression of grief.

In one of the most moving sections of the book, Howe composes a series of hypothetical letters in reply to her father, filling him in on the most significant events of her life since his passing. She shows herself to be conscious of the ways that the mystery of repetition has been at work in her own experiences and travails. She discerns fateful significance, for example, in the fact that she met and married the Black civil-rights activist Carl Senna just a year after her fathers death. Howe had three children with Senna before their divorce in the mid-seventies. She raised her mixed-race family, alone and impoverished, in sharply segregated Boston and its environs, finding community among other nomadic single mothers.

This is a period of her life that Howe has frequently written about, repeatedly combing her memories for clues about the deeper structures that have determined her life. Motherhood and childhood, Howe wrote inThe Wedding Dress, are distinct but overlapping existential horizons both characterized by bewilderment. Bewilderment is the natural condition of those left behind in the heros journey; mothers and children shadow the heros courage, discipline, conquest, and fame by sustaining positions of weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude; their paths are digressive and recursive, spiral rather than ascensional. Bewilderment circumnavigates, she writes, believing that at the center of errant and circular movement is the empty but ultimate referent.

InManimal Woe, Howe intimates that the nil point of the turning world is the vacancy left by the Fathers abscondment; the death of Mark De Wolfe Howe and the desertion of Carl Senna represent a lapse in paternal authority writ large. The Father is over and will never be saved, Howe insists. The Father is over like the Sabbath and the swamis. They noticed that laws are fears, and fears fade away. That law stays, the law of change. Again, for Howe this is an ecstatic, emancipatory discovery tinged with sorrow. How can you tell hysterical laughter from sobbing? Howe asks in the next breath, adding, That which is over is everywhere.

She retraces walks through Mount Auburn Cemetery, recalls lunches shared at Howard Johnsons, and imaginatively revives old conversations with her father about the incompatibility between liberty and equality, not as nostalgic and delusional exercises meant to resurrect what is irrecoverable, but as a Gnostic discipline of intuition and attention, watchful for patterns and predispositions in her own biography, in preparation for the next go-around. Premonition is the only way out of the trap of quantum history, Howe writes. To sense the face of yourself coming and to change your course before it does! What is finished must be repeatedly and creatively worked through to release a future into the air.

If this is a private spiritual discovery, it is also a political one. Even as repetition without progress has dulled us into the manimals we are today, pushing, bitching, lying, insinuating, measuring, bullying, and demanding pay for the labors of others, Howe suggests that just such a creative recapitulation, centripetally motored by an absence where the axis used to be, is needed to counteract it.

Recapitulation is backward thinking, like the composition of a poem or song. You look across a finished thing in order to understand it. You have to go over it again, but include your presence this time. You are now part of the thing you are going over. You cant ever escape this problem of being where you are as a negative presence.

*

When Howe subjects, through endless recapitulations, her own memories to this negative presence and Mackey harangues his own utterances with whatsay, they demonstrate a distinctively Gnostic restlessness, which the Christian theologian David Bentley Hart has recently described as a nagging apprehension that what we take to be real life or the real world is really only a kind of machine, altogether empty of spiritual life, devised to hold us captive and separate us from the truth.

Although such suspicions can so easily slide into paranoia and total despair, Hart insists that the Gnostics unyielding refusal to grant the history of this world a determinative or probative ultimacy proves enduringly wise. Neither Mackeys nor Howes poetry ever stops dreaming up possible political futures, but their thrumming bass notes of Gnostic disquiet remind us that we are prey to idols and illusions if we believe that history is anything other than a nightmare.

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This essay was published in Issue 112 of Image under the title Gnostic Ironies: New Poetry by Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe

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On the Gnostic Ironies of Poets Nathaniel Mackey and Fanny Howe - Literary Hub

by Dr. Joseph Mercola, public domain

(Apr. 15, 2022) The notion of transhumanism is being actively researched and explored, while on some level its already here. Many people regard transhumanism as turning human beings into robots, but it actually describes a social and philosophical movement that involves the development of human-enhancement technologies.1

In episode 26 of Childrens Health Defense (CHD) Tea Time, I spoke with Polly Tommey, director of programming for CHD-TV, and colleagues about the transhumanist agenda and how its ultimate goal is to control the human population. The process has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and over the last two years, the global cabal has succeeded in influencing behavior, primarily through fear and the creation of narratives.

Most people dont appreciate that theyre being surveilled 24/7, and most of the surveillance you are allowing into your life, as you give up your privacy and consent to surveillance in exchange for convenience. Google is a primary culprit and the most egregious offender, and they have major control and influence since, worldwide, 93% of the searches done online use Google.2 Its the biggest monopoly in the history of the world.

In the future, its possible that transhumanism will use technologies that are physically embedded in the human body or brain to offer superhuman cognition or forms of mind control. However, at this time transhumanism is already occurring, not from an implantable device but through mass formation psychosis and the manipulation of information.

A key example is the term mass formation psychosis, which Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology,3 mentioned on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience December 31, 2021. The episode was viewed by more than 50 million people.4

January 2, 2022, mass formation psychosis reached a value of 100 on Google Trends,5 which means it had reached peak popularity, after previously being practically unheard of.

The technocrats quickly took action, manipulating search results and populating Google with propaganda to discredit Malone and the mass formation psychosis theory even though Mattias Desmet, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, who has 126 publications to his name,6 has been studying it for many years, and the phenomenon actually dates back over 100 years.

Those under the spell of mass formation psychosis obsessively focus on a failure of the normal world or a particular event or person in this case COVID-19 which becomes the focus of the attention and can effectively control the masses. The phenomenon leads to totalitarian thinking and, eventually, to totalitarian states and its clear that Google didnt want you to know about it.

Because of their monopoly, Google controls what you see by manipulating search results and censoring websites or labeling them misinformation. If you want to find out how to truly get healthy, for instance, the information exists on the internet its there but you wont be able to find it easily if you dont know where to look because of the way Google controls information.

By manipulating information, they can shape and alter reality about any topic from COVID-19 to Ukraine in order to fit their agenda. Its not only Googles search engine thats tracking what you do but also your browser. Google Chrome browser tracks everything you do online, while Gmail captures every character you type and saves it on its servers indefinitely.

If you use smart speakers in your home, like Alexa and Google Home smart speakers or the Google Assistant smartphone app, theres a chance people are listening to your requests, and even may be listening when you wouldnt expect. Even smart thermostats can have microphones in them.

Have you ever had a phone conversation with someone and then in the next hour or day started getting ads related to something you spoke about? This is a powerful example of the amount of data theyre collecting about you and how theyre using it to control and manipulate your behavior. They dont need a futuristic transhumanist device to go in and manipulate your brain theyre already doing it without it.

The beginning of CHDs video features transhumanist Yuval Noah Harari, professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a top adviser to Klaus Schwab, owner and chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Its important to be aware that Schwab, WEF and Harari speak openly about transhumanism as part of The Great Reset, and Harari admits data might enable human elites to do more than just build digital dictatorships.

By hacking organisms, Harari said, elites may gain the power to reengineer the future of life itself because once you can hack something, you can usually also engineer it.7 Soon, he says, some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. And, if they succeed in hacking life, he describes it as the greatest revolution in biology since the beginning of life 4 billion years ago. According to Harari:8

For 4 billion years, nothing fundamental changed. Science is replacing evolution by natural selection with evolution by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds, but our intelligent design, and the intelligent design of our clouds the IBM cloud, the Microsoft cloud these are the new driving forces of evolution.

Once human life is hacked, the hackers will maintain control over life itself a process that has been accelerated by the pandemic. After all, Harari said, Its often said that you should never let a good crisis go to waste.9

Surveillance is a key part of the plan for global totalitarian control, and Harari says that in 100 years, people will be able to look back and identify the COVID-19 pandemic as the moment when a new regime in surveillance took over especially surveillance under the skin.10

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Dismantling the Transhumanist Agenda - The Post & Email