MP3: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 (Approx. 118 minutes)
First, the discussion focuses on the conflict between corporate profits and both substantial wages and benefits and strong environmental protection policy. This conflict results in an element of cognitive dissonance on the part of most people (who must work for a living.) In order to maximize profit, discomfort must be correspondingly maximized as well.
Human behavior is dictated largely by two principles that psychologists call the pleasure principle and the reality principle. In a nutshell: people do what makes them feel good. When they feel bad, they must alter their environment in such a way as to remove the discomfort. They can either change their external environment or their internal environment. Political action, labor and environmental organizing would certainly bring change that would relieve social and environmental distress. That is not as profitable as holding down wages and profits. Profits can be maximized if people can be made to alter their internal environment in such a way as to endure or even enjoy discomfort (what Mr. Emory refers to as learning “to enjoy sitting on a tack.”)
There are a variety of ways of getting people to attempt this. If they are inebriated on drugs or alcohol, their pain will be attenuated (at least temporarily) and their will to resist blunted. In this context, opium would be “the religion of the people.” The real thing might be even better.
The analysis centers on a society in which people would be made into “true believers,” through a combination of totalitarian political control and technologically-reinforced fundamentalist religion. Denominational affiliation of subject nations and individuals may well remain diverse, but the foundation and source of political power would be tremendously powerful, technologically sophisticated military weapons of mass destruction. Most importantly, the very existence of these weapons would be unknown to the vast majority of people. An administrative elite would exercise political power. This elite would be religious, political and military in nature — Mr. Emory characterizes them as “priest-spies.” They would have at least limited knowledge of the prevailing military technology, as well as advanced tactical knowledge of its application.
Their “parishioners,” on the other hand, would see (and would be encouraged and obligated to see) the devastating application of the destructive technology as “miracles.” Groups or individuals who deviated from the prescribed path would be punished with the technology and this, again, would be seen by a naive populace as retribution by some supernatural entity. (It should be noted that New Age religions are by no means immune to this kind of exploitation and seduction by fascist elements.)
Weapons technology that might be involved would include genetically-engineered micro-organisms (“the plagues of Egypt”), Tesla technology to cause earthquakes or alter the weather (“God’s punishment on the wicked”), long distance mind-control techniques involving electromagnetic radiation (“the Voice of the Lord”). (Note: this lecture was given before information about Project HAARP became public.) In L‑1 evidence is presented that so-called “flying saucers” are real and do not come from outer space. They are advanced aeronautical devices, whose development began with prototypes flown by the Germans during the closing stages of World War II. They were further developed by the Western Allies in the years after the war. There is also substantial evidence of attempts by elements of the intelligence community to create belief in space aliens. With this in mind, Mr. Emory discusses the possible uses of “UFOs” and “aliens” in the fascist techno-theocracy described above. (Recorded in January of 1995 in Santa Monica.)
Interestingly, Nick Redfern notes in his book “In Pursuit of the Saucer Spies,” the fact that the earliest alien “contactees” — who reported that the extraterrestrials were Nordic looking and came in peace — had been associates of American fascist William Dudley Pelley during the ’30s. Mr Redfern infers nothing from this odd factoid, but I’d say it points to a propaganda campaign in the ’50s to disguise the true origin of certain UFOs.
The re-release of this article is very pertinent at this time. Channel 7 ABC News in Southfield, MI just announced a new street-light system called “Intelli-Lights”, by a local engineer and manufacturer. The street light system does what street lights are expected to do with a few exceptions. These lights contain powerful software that allows the capacity to respond to questions by pedestrians, give warnings and alerts via the government or law enforcement, video record with greater precision images within its path. In fact, Detroit and it’s suburban areas, have a sincere interest in improving its overall image has been adopting several other high-tech means of helping law enforcement. It reads good but it truly reduces a law-abiding citizens privacy.
Also, I hear time and again, after an earthquake, Sunami, or any devastating environmental disaster, Christians saying the “Lord is trying to tell people something. They’d better wake up!”
“J K II”:
There IS NO GOD. I think the crap state of our world is abundant evidence that there’s obviously no all-powerful, benevolent Supernatural Force.
Newly created glowing bunnies!
http://natmonitor.com/2013/08/16/scientists-create-glow-in-the-dark-bunnies/
Rest assured, they are terrestrial from very earthly technology.
Not the Thiel and Draper involvement:
excerpting...
...To be clear, Cambrian isn’t printing designer babies or dinosaurs — yet. Still, its rhetoric alarms critics. Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a bioethics watchdog group in Berkeley, sums up Heinz’s belief that “every problem can be solved by engineering” as as a kind of “techno-libertarianism.”
“We have to take seriously people like Austen Heinz who say they want to modify future generations of human beings and upgrade the human species,” she said. “I think that technical project is far more complicated than they acknowledge. Nonetheless, their story about what we should be striving for as human beings, as a society, I think is very troubling.”
...This facility, he envisions, could be run by another company, not necessarily the government. Because Cambrian wants to keep government interference to an absolute minimum, its CEO insists that behaving well is in the company’s best interest. “It’s pretty obvious why we wouldn’t want to do something bad,” said Heinz on a recent afternoon in his South of Market office. “We wouldn’t want the industry to be regulated. So, ‘How do we democratize creation without killing everyone?’ is basically the question.”
Controversial DNA startup wants to let customers create creatures
In Austen Heinz’s vision of the future, customers tinker with the genetic codes of plants and animals and even design new creatures on a computer. Then his startup, Cambrian Genomics, prints that DNA quickly, accurately and cheaply.
“Anyone in the world that has a few dollars can make a creature, and that changes the game,” Heinz said. “And that creates a whole new world.”
The 31-year-old CEO has a deadpan demeanor that can be hard to read, but he is not kidding. In a makeshift laboratory in San Francisco, his synthetic biology company uses lasers to create custom DNA for major pharmaceutical companies. Its mission, to “democratize creation” with minimal to no regulation, frightens bioethicists as deeply as it thrills Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
With the latest technology and generous funding, a growing number of startups are taking science and medicine to the edge of science fiction. In the works or on the market are color-changing flowers, cow-free milk, animal-free meat, tests that detect diseases from one drop of blood and pills that tell doctors whether you have taken your medicine.
‘Totally new organisms’
But few founders are pushing the technical and ethical boundaries of science as far as Heinz, who told the Wall Street Journal, “I can’t believe that after 10 or 20 years people will not design their children digitally.” At a recent conference in Vienna, he said, “We want to make totally new organisms that have never existed.”
His 11-person team has raised $10 million from more than 120 investors, including Peter Thiel’s venture firm Founders Fund. “It’s a fundamentally new technology that can open up a whole new industry,” said partner Scott Nolan.
Venture capitalist Timothy Draper, another investor, praises Heinz as an “exceptional leader with a unique passion for his business.”
“I love Cambrian,” he wrote in an e‑mail. “The company is literally printing life. Can’t wait to see all the great things that come of it.”
To be clear, Cambrian isn’t printing designer babies or dinosaurs — yet. Still, its rhetoric alarms critics. Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a bioethics watchdog group in Berkeley, sums up Heinz’s belief that “every problem can be solved by engineering” as as a kind of “techno-libertarianism.”
“We have to take seriously people like Austen Heinz who say they want to modify future generations of human beings and upgrade the human species,” she said. “I think that technical project is far more complicated than they acknowledge. Nonetheless, their story about what we should be striving for as human beings, as a society, I think is very troubling.”
‘Powerful technology’
Scientists modify the DNA of living organisms for many reasons: to make plants resistant to herbicides and pests, for example, or to make research animals mimic human conditions and diseases.
Editing DNA has become significantly less costly over the last decade, and Cambrian has modified or built machines that make the process even cheaper and faster. Traditionally, Heinz said, machines create DNA strands one at a time and many of them contain errors. His method makes millions of strands at once, errors and all, to also generate a few correct ones.
“It is the most powerful technology humans have ever created,” Heinz said. “Hydrogen bombs can destroy whole planets, but this is a technology that can create planets. This is the greatest human achievement of all time — the ability to read and write life, because that’s who we are.”
DNA is made up of four chemicals represented by the letters A, C, T and G. When Cambrian receives an order for specific genes, it adds DNA chemicals millions of times onto tiny beads that are then layered onto a glass slide. A machine assigns a color to each DNA chemical. The next step is the key one: A laser programmed to analyze the color combinations ignores the erroneous strands and “prints” the correct ones by pushing them apart from the rest. The final product arrives on a small plastic plate as a powder that customers put inside the cells of an organism.
Right now, employees check each order to make sure that a customer isn’t printing, say, base pairs of Ebola. But staff won’t have time to do that if, as Heinz predicts, orders dramatically increase in the next two years. In that case, he said, Cambrian might first ship the plates to an independent facility where experts would put the DNA inside cells, film and analyze it, and make sure that it is safe before releasing it.
This facility, he envisions, could be run by another company, not necessarily the government. Because Cambrian wants to keep government interference to an absolute minimum, its CEO insists that behaving well is in the company’s best interest.
“It’s pretty obvious why we wouldn’t want to do something bad,” said Heinz on a recent afternoon in his South of Market office. “We wouldn’t want the industry to be regulated. So, ‘How do we democratize creation without killing everyone?’ is basically the question.”
The federal government already regulates forms of genetic modification. The Food and Drug Administration oversees gene therapies for humans, and another agency has indicated it will not approve proposals to change parents’ sperm and eggs with the goal of passing genetic changes to their offspring. But Darnovsky, the bioethicist, said that it’s less clear what rules would apply to Heinz, who isn’t proposing to design modified humans himself, but to someday provide the DNA to a third-party designer.
“There does need to be a public discussion, and public policy about when and who and under what circumstances and how new life forms can be created,” she said.
Heinz and other scientists have years of technical hurdles to clear before they can create living, breathing humans from a plate of printed DNA. Such an act is not possible right now. But he doesn’t hide his enthusiasm about the possibility.
Is he essentially enabling eugenics? He rejects that term, which to him means government interference with reproductive rights. He insists that it differs from his approach, which he describes as allowing individuals to eliminate future suffering in a more humane way than abortion, “which is pretty barbaric.” “A decent percentage of people have really nasty mutations that cause really bad, horrible things,” like Down syndrome and cystic fibrosis, he said. “These are basically like hell on Earth, and I think it’s smart to be able to avoid those things.”
DNA printer
The technology could also be used for more superficial means, like printing desired eye and hair colors, and Heinz has no problem with that. “People are already trying to make those decisions by deciding who they’re going to breed with.”
Then there is the potential matter of creating living things that are now the stuff of science fiction. “If you could take a chicken and make it the size of my building,” Heinz mused, “you would probably learn a lot about genetics, which could be useful for human applications.”
Wouldn’t that be dangerous? “If the chicken’s carnivorous, then yeah.”
Heinz became interested in genetics as a student at Duke University in North Carolina, his home state. In 2008, he moved to South Korea for a doctoral program in electrical engineering and computer science, where he built the DNA laser printer used today. In 2011, after giving a talk about the technology at Stanford University, he dropped out of school and returned to the United States to incorporate Cambrian.
Cambrian currently prints DNA for Roche, GlaxoSmithKline and Thermo Fisher Scientific at 5 to 6 cents per DNA letter, Heinz said. Next year, the company wants to open a pilot version of the service to academics at a steep discount: $50 for 20 distinct 500-letter strands of DNA.
To succeed, Cambrian is investing in and working with companies that share its vision. It made an early investment in Glowing Plant, which raised more than $480,000 on Kickstarter to create genetically modified glow-in-the-dark plants. In response, the crowdfunding platform banned projects involving genetically engineered organisms. Glowing Plant plans to use Cambrian’s technology as it makes more plants.
Improved aroma
Cambrian will also share its technology with startups in which it holds a 10 percent equity stake. One is Petomics, which is making a probiotic for cats and dogs that makes their feces smell like bananas. Another is SweetPeach, which hopes to take samples of users’ vaginal microorganisms and send back personalized probiotics to promote vaginal health. (Contrary to Heinz’s description of SweetPeach at a recent conference, the products will not make vaginas smell like peaches.)
Heinz seeks to help create “thousands” more startups in this vein. On top of that, he wants to replace lost limbs, fight viruses and develop alternatives to antibiotics. Maybe someday, he said, scientists will even print DNA on Mars. “It’s going to be an amazing next few hundred years.”