@Steven D Now where is my copy of Tchaikovsky's rendering of Dante's Inferno? It has to be here somewhere.

#2.1.1 where Satan is frozen in ice, then yes, you are correct.

@WaterLily @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Yesterday, Robert Reich, in the name of MoveOn said that we should pressure spineless Dems (i.e., almost the entire upper echelon) of course by mounting a campaign (please donate, please /s) to tell them to grow a spine. Bull. If the campaign doesn't involve primarying the bastards it will never work. If you wanna get better Dems, throw out the current lot. I don't think that will work but do support anyone willing to make the effort.

we're not facing a policy crisis, no matter how much it seems we are. We're facing a political crisis. I guess I'm going back to your first quotation: Power concedes nothing without a demand. For it to be a demand, rather than a request, there have to be some consequences if the answer is no.#2.1.1

#1 And thanks for the organized outline. You sense, as many of us do, the current difficulty in herding the cats into a coherent movement. Yours could be the rallying cry we all need.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

Which would also take them out of their purportedly-feared pitchfork-range. Why the heck don't they go to those 'emergency escape' places in New Zealand now, rather than polishing off the rest of civilization and any chance of planetary life surviving first? Why are they so intent on draining everyone else of every last cent they have, to the point of globally placing everyone's money exclusively in the hands of financial institutions, via a 'cashless society' scheme rendering everyone penniless, starving and helpless at any major power-outage/hack/'lost electronic records' claim by banks/the US-'legalized' bank robbery of their own depositors money if they ever run short by recklessly crashing or whatever, as they're soon expected to do?

How much, I wonder, does it cost to buy into the 'immortality tech' which various billionaires have been suckered into investing in for some time, and which the White House-integrated Google is working on?

Apparently a few of the very wealthiest and would-be very wealthiest do-anything-for-money types want to live forever in the hell-on-Earth they're creating in the process, substituting 'Virtual Reality' for the reality they anyway refuse to accept, and I'm seriously wondering how much this has to do with the current lunacy.

Googled: Billionaires invest immortality research - maybe try it and see what you get?

If possible, these are best read in full at source, should whatever device used be able to manage it.

Please note names and occupations involved and especially the emphasis on surrendering life in order to 'live forever' as a machine/computer program with their characteristics realistically reproduced, apparently under the notion that they themselves will not still die with their bodies, even though a recording of their personalities may continue to play while power lasts.

Obama has suggested that he's interested in joining other politicians from the Bush Admin and elsewhere as a hedge fund manager in Silicone Valley, because this matches his interest in genome research and (magical) science.

But this does nothing to improve human life-spans, rather it's eliminating life to be replaced with 'better-than-life' robots/computers. The ultimate meritocracy, in which life simply does not deserve to exist because robots/computers 'can do anything better than humans can'.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/20/the-immortality-financi...

The Immortality Financiers: The Billionaires Who Want to Live Forever

We all want to live forever, but some of us have the means to actually do something about it. Adam Gollner, author of The Book of Immortality, profiles five billionaires pouring money into longevity research.
Adam Leith Gollner
08.20.13 3:45 AM ET

... To this day, gerontology pitchmen assure us that we’re about to solve aging—an opportunity, they inevitably add, we should seriously consider from a business standpoint. This same narrative keeps repeating itself. ...

... Death isn’t easy to contend with. Imagining that we’ll live forever—whether physically or spiritually—is an elemental solace. No matter how wealthy we may be, we still can’t bribe our way out of dying. But that isn’t stopping the these five ultra-rich immortality financiers.

Larry Ellison

“Death makes me very angry,” admits Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation and the fifth-richest person in the world (his net worth is $43 billion, according to Forbes). ... With that in mind, Ellison has set up a foundation dedicated to ending mortality, or at least to “understanding lifespan development processes and age-related diseases and disabilities.” They spend real money, too: the Ellison Medical Foundation gives out more than $40 million a year. Ellison’s biographer Mark Wilson notes that Ellison sees death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.” It’s a Silicon Valley take on The Seventh Seal, with Ellison as the crusading knight and the grim reaper cast as a pasty, wan CEO at a rival software company.

Paul F. Glenn

Santa Barbara–based venture capitalist and investor Paul F. Glenn is the bank account behind a nine-figure endowment that supports laboratory research at institutions like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, and more. Alongside the five-year, $5 million grants the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research gives out to their consortium of labs, they also regularly award unsolicited $60,000 prizes to individual scientists doing peer-reviewed work that they believe deserve support. ... Alongside his donations to Ivy League institutions, he’s also made contributions to the Methuselah Foundation, whose cofounder Aubrey de Grey claims that “the first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today.”

Dmitry Itskov

Thirty-two-year-old Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov started the 2045 Initiative with the goal of helping humans achieve physical immortality within the next three decades. According to his manifesto (at www.2045.com), Itskov’s main aims are “to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality.” For us to evolve into neo-humans, he says we’ll need to give up on biological bodies and make a leap into artificial, machine bodies as soon as possible. Once our minds are backed up in cyberspace, we’ll just download ourselves into bionic avatars whenever we get a hankering for the thrills of materiality. How seriously does he want to become a cyborg? Itskov, a transhumanist, says he is “100 percent certain” that humans will attain immortality by the year 2045.

Peter Thiel

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” That’s the motto of Founder’s Fund, the hedge-fund managed by PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel. The future was supposed to be more tricked-out than this, and well-known libertarian “wackaloon” Thiel wants to use his $1.6 billion to do something about it. He’s throwing his fortune behind a number of obsessions, as The New Yorker reported in their 2011 profile of Thiel. First, he’s against higher education, and his 20 Under 20 fellowships are dedicated to keeping promising youngsters out of universities. Then there’s his support for seasteading communities, floating city-states in international waters, and hence not subject to governmental laws and regulations. Most important, Thiel has invested heavily in enterprises dedicated to physical immortality, such as the SENS Foundation. How successful have his efforts been thus far? After he sank millions into a Silicon Valley nanotechnology start-up called Halcyon Molecular, its founder, William Andregg, told TechCrunch.com he plans to live for “millions, billions, hundreds of billions of years.” Halcyon Molecular quietly went out of business last summer.

Sergey Brin

Of all the moneybags encouraging immortality research, there’s one in particular who has the strongest chance of lending legitimacy to the quest for eternal life: Google cofounder Sergey Brin. While his partner Larry Page has focused more on the business side of things, Brin’s role has been to explore technology opportunities he deems to be “on the cusp of viability.” This means backing everything from synthetic test-tube burgers to prototypes of Google Glass, robotic eyewear permanently synched to the Internet. Under Brin’s aegis, Google has provided hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Singularity University, where executives pay five figures for weeklong seminars about technology’s capacity to solve “humanity’s grand challenges” (including aging and death). Google recently hired the radical futurist Ray Kurzweil to be their director of engineering: he famously claims humans will merge with computers over the next few decades to become immortal superbeings. ...

Why would anyone want to outlive their bodies by nano-teching their brains, experimentally messing with what makes each of us human individuals? Sponsoring the Zombie Revolution for real?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-12/billionaires-scramble-immortali...

Billionaires Scramble For Immortality (Literally)
by Tyler Durden
Apr 12, 2015

Money can't buy me love... happiness... or class; but, as The Washington Post reports, the billionaire chase for the fountain of youth may just mean that money can buy immortality. For example, "death has never made any sense to me," stated Oracle founder Larry Ellison who has donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research and has proclaimed his wish to live forever. And doctors seem to be a step closer to performing the ultimate breakthrough surgery in anti-aging (nicknamed HEAVEN): transplanting a human head onto another body.

Peter Thiel and the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research. As The Washington Post reports, their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.

While most are rightly skeptical about achieving immortality; science and technology could help us live longer, to, say, 150 years?

The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding, regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.

“I believe that evolution is a true account of nature,” as Thiel put it. “But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.”

Oracle founder Larry Ellison has proclaimed his wish to live forever and donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research. “Death has never made any sense to me,” he told his biographer, Mike Wilson. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?”

And now, as RT reports, perhaps the ultimate 'fix' for an ailing body is about to come true...

Doctors seem to be a step closer to performing a breakthrough surgery: transplanting a human head onto another body. A Russian man with a rare genetic muscle-wasting disorder has volunteered to be the first to try the procedure.

“I’m very interested in technology, and anything progressive that might change people’s lives for the better,” Valery Spiridonov from the Russian city of Vladimir, told RT. ...

A major problem with their theories is that - as is typical in the branch of the petrochemical/GMO/nanotech industry we term Big Pharma - they prefer to ignore biology. I've heard what we think of as aging described as being the result of insults which the body has been unable to heal - and 'cost-cutting' industrial pollution, inadequate nutrition (such as that supplied by profitable factory-farmed/GMO/petrochemically affected foods, such as with pesticides which prevent the uptake/function of essential dietary minerals) are indeed major impediments to optimized cellular-and-up biological function, to say the least. But these are so profitable to the few - the only thing to do is to ignore reality and create more 'virtual reality' to substitute for real reality and science, the latter involving the study of the former and how it works in reality. What could possibly go wrong?

Another is that these life-despising personalities are to be programmed into theoretically immortal machines forming the Singularity - what could possibly go wrong there, either? I suppose that 1984 wasn't enough of a text for them...

http://www.newsweek.com/2015/03/13/silicon-valley-trying-make-humans-imm...

Tech & Science
Silicon Valley Is Trying to Make Humans Immortal—and Finding Some Success
By Betsy Isaacson

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, plans to live to be 120. Compared with some other tech billionaires, he doesn’t seem particularly ambitious. Dmitry Itskov, the “godfather” of the Russian Internet, says his goal is to live to 10,000; Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible,” and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, hopes to someday “cure death.”
These titans of tech aren’t being ridiculous, or even vainglorious; their quests are based on real, emerging science that could fundamentally change what we know about life and about death. It’s hard to believe, though, since the human quest for immortality is both ancient and littered with catastrophic failures. ...

...But historical precedent hasn’t dissuaded some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Thiel, for example, has given $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation. Aubrey de Grey, Methuselah's co-founder, says the nonprofit’s main research initiative, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), is devoted to finding drugs that cure seven types of age-related damage: “Loss of cells, excessive cell division, inadequate cell death, garbage inside the cell, garbage outside the cell, mutations in the mitochondria, and crosslinking of the extracellular matrix.… The idea is that the human body, being a machine, has a structure that determines all aspects of its function, including its chance of falling apart any time soon, so if we can restore that structure—at the molecular and cellular level—then we will restore function too, so we will have comprehensively rejuvenated the body.” ...

...Perhaps the fix is to replace bodies—these unreliable vessels, plagued with problems!—altogether. That's the goal of the most ambitious billionaire-backed immortality investment of them all, Itskov’s 2045 Initiative. Founded in early 2011, the initiative has already collected an impressive set of experts in specialties ranging from robotics and neural interfaces to artificial organ creation. Their goal: replace our current meaty cases with robotic or holographic avatars by (you guessed it) 2045.

But even if such robot avatars get cheaper and experience a sudden upswing in use, consciousness is still tied to our meaty, messy brains—and thus far, no one's yet made headway in transferring it to a more durable medium.

That's not to say no one's trying. Tech giant Intel is aiming to have an “exascale” computer—a computer that can operate at the same speed as the human brain—by 2018. And in August 2013, researchers from Japan and Germany used Japan's K supercomputer to simulate 1 percent of brain activity for one second. That may not sound like much to be excited about, but with exascale machines on the horizon, it’s surely a sign of what’s to come. Markus Diesmann, one of the scientists involved in the K supercomputer experiment, told The Daily Telegraph in 2014, “If petascale computers like the K computer are capable of representing 1 percent of the network of a human brain today, then we know that simulating the whole brain at the level of the individual nerve cell and its synapses will be possible with exascale computers—hopefully available within the next decade.” ...

...Perhaps the most worrying question that arises with the prospect of having millions (and even billions) of multi-centenarians running around on Earth is whether the planet can support this kind of growth. Current projections suggest that the world’s population will rise from 7 billion today to about 9 billion in 2050—at which point it will more or less level out. And abundant concerns have already been raised about what all these billions of people will do for work, not to mention where they will get safe drinking water and the food necessary to live healthily. But those forecasts don’t consider the possibility that we’ll stop dying. If we do, the next generation of innovative health-tech entrepreneurs will face perhaps an even greater challenge: redesigning the planet to accommodate its massive population of Humans 2.0.

...

Nah, that's not for the non-billionaire proles, or for those who love and do not fear life.

In this scenario, there will be nothing left on greed-destroyed Earth but a few programmed machines with the personality disorders of a few billionaires having the option of running endless virtual reality scenarios until the power runs out... and just maybe a few frantic trapped and disintegrating personalities in glitching nano-trapped artificial-brain-cages, possibly forever?

And I am seriously wondering if some form of nanotech experimentation may potentially have been responsible for Planned-President Hillary's glitching health issues, (with her daughter apparently having purchased an apartment in which she could recover, with a clinic inside the building?) after reading a reference to the new President Trump's claimed concern about ramps and stairs and his prompt vacation and Obama joining Bush Admin and other high public officials in Silicon Valley? Is the 'human' part of some high public officials now being 'nano-machined' out of existence? Since that's what Google's working on doing (having become so closely entwined with Obama's White House and all) and so many billionaire donors are pouring funds into?

The only thing I'm sure about is that this transfer of the actual consciousness, rather than a personality record and characteristics, of people into machine form to let them specifically live forever cannot actually work - precisely because biology and machinery are not the same, any more than corporations or machines can ever be human.

Unless, of course, it was really true that the existence of photographic images actually can steal people's souls, as was once thought by comparable earlier magical thinkers, who in this case would probably have figured out the 'transfer' scam after realizing that they still remained in their own bodies, however many copies of their image were made.

And within the world such profiteers are so eager to pollute and destroy for literally insane profits, quite possibly to buy a postulated immortality within their very own created hell.

Explains a lot, doesn't it, if they think they'll no longer need human things?

#2.1.1 Not that I wouldn't like some just punishment for these bastards, but really, at this point, all I want is for them to get out of my fucking way.

@sojourns No, I'm just saying that I, too, remember the older idea that the age of automation was going to provide a kind of eudaimonia for the human race, in which everybody gets to pursue their highest self, while all the dirty work gets done by the machines.

#3.2.1 I'm confused by what you are trying to say here?? Are you at all referring to the Luddites, who were really just in fear of losing their hard earned, polished craft and not necessarily anti-technology.

Elucidate! Please.