Some new logos and a wonderful TED video

Some notes

By the time Obama leaves office (2016) a lot of conservative baby boomers will have died, and the US electorate will be more ethnically and culturally mixed. Unless the Obama administration screws up in some major way (e.g. the relations they form or fail to form with Russia, China and South America) it is hard to see how republicans could recover their previous dominance. Maybe the next turning point will be bioethics - at what point in the development of new biotechnologies do people decide that the liberal slope is getting too slippery; at what point do we start hearing unanimous calls to ban transhumanism; at what point does biotechnology become the new abortion/gay marriage? Maybe it never gets to that point, but i sure wonder what Obama's bioethics council will look like..

In other Obama related news: the roundtable on today's Democracy Now is soberingly critical of his foreign policy, particularly regarding Israel and Afghanistan.

Please check that the toilets are vacant before turning off the lights

 Big Ideas - January 24 2004: Zach Hall (60min) This is one of those very rare neuroethics lectures that doesn't stink. Maybe because Zach Hall is a neuroscientist. Good stuff. To be contrasted with  Leon Kass - The Dignity of Human Flourishing: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (1hr43min) which I post here only as a reference. I strongly advice you NOT to listen to this lecture - the experience is very very very painful. Leon Kass is a profoundly bioconservative, former member of the bioethics council of the American philosopher George W Bush. In case of accidental exposure, quickly watch the following debate and remind yourself repeatedly that Kass's amygdalae are hypersensitive to any mention of changing human nature and his Brocca is desperately trying to work out why.

A Christian bioethics podcast

One of the reasons biotechnology is so meaningful/important/salient/dopaminergic to me is that it catalyses thinking about the larger existential picture, in everyone. It puts us face to face with what life and human beings really are, what we think they are, and what we want them to be.

Like transhumanists, Christians are often seriously annoying. But say what you will, at least they take the existential challenge of biotechnology seriously. Like transhumanists, Christians have enough courage and imagination to strive for immortality and the transcendence of the human body. Unlike humanists and existentialists, they the have good sense to reject, violently, the assertion that this life, this absurd affair right here, is it.

No surprise then that one of the best the best bioethics podcast I've come across so far is from the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, a Christian think-tank.

One quote:

"One of the things I suggest is that these techno-sentimentalists don't address the real problem. They see the technology as evil and therefore they don't in any way try to take responsibility for the reactions that they have to these technologies. So I would suggest that while their criticisms and cautions are helpful, they can only take us so far, because most of us live in a world that's getting ever more immersed in technology, not less." - Michael Sleasman

The Bioethics Podcast

The painting is by Emin Sinanyan, and is called 'LABYRINTH: Maybe I'm Crazy'.