The war and its financial consequences. Supreme Court rules states can’t ban conversion therapy. And cloning headless “bodyoids” for their parts & to cheat death.
The War and Its Financial Consequences
Last week the nervous stock market shot up on the mere possibility that President Trump’s speech on the Iran War would consist of the U.S. declaring victory and going home. But instead the speech heralded only the next phase of the war, which–if the Iranian government doesn’t sue for peace, and it won’t–means attacking civilian targets such as power plants.
I thought one reason we were fighting is to liberate the long-suffering Iranians from their tyrannical theocracy! Why are we going to wage war against them?
Anyway, the financial impact of the war on the U.S. is growing, and it’s not just the price of gasoline and the expense of the ordinance we are blowing up. The rest of the world is dumping U.S. treasury bonds, which finance our enormous national debt.
The reasons are not just a reaction against America’s erratic foreign policy or questions arising about how reliable is America’s “full faith and credit,” though those are no doubt factors. According to the Financial Times, countries are raising cash to deal with the high oil prices caused by the war by bolstering their currencies.
Sell-offs of Treasury bill have the effect of raising interest rates, since the government must pay more interest on the bonds in order to sell them. That, in turn, raises all interest rates, since banks and private bond-sellers must also raise their rates to compete against what the Treasury pays. This, in turn, increases inflation.
That foreign countries are dumping our bonds also demonstrates how dependent we are on those countries due to our profligate spending.
So where are those countries putting their money? According to the People’s Daily Online, China assets emerge as safe haven amid global bond sell-off.
Supreme Court Rules States Can’t Ban Conversion Therapy
Traditionally, same-sex attraction and the desire to have a different sex have been considered psychological disorders. The Gay Rights movement, seeking to normalize that condition, fought that classification. In 1987, the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used by psychiatrists and psychologists removed all references to same-sex attraction.
But some people with homosexual desires didn’t want to have them and sought psychological help and often Christian counseling to overcome them.
One therapy used in the 1950s and 1960s–when psychological behaviorism was at its peak–was aversion therapy. Patients were shown gay erotica and given electric shocks in an attempt to “de-condition” them. This method–which was in line with other brutal psychological treatments at the time such as “shock therapy” and lobotomies–has been discredited.
In the zeal to ban that approach, activists also sought to ban even “talk therapy,” the more normal type of psychological treatment and the approach used by Christian counselors.
Today, 27 states have banned all “conversion therapies” that seek to change a minor’s sexual orientation.
A Christian counselor named Kaley Chiles sued the state of Colorado for its law that keeps her from offering “talk therapy” to minors who want to reduce feelings of same-sex attraction or to feel more comfortable with their physical gender. She claimed the Colorado law violates her freedom of speech.
The case, Chiles vs. Salazar, made its way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Chiles’ favor in an 8-1 decision. That means, even the liberal judges–all but Ketanji Jackson–agreed that the laws preventing counselors from even talking to young people who struggle with sexual issues are unconstitutional.
Cloning Headless “Bodyoids” for Their Parts & to Cheat Death
We’ve had lots of big technological ideas lately–computers, internet, artificial intelligence. Here’s another one: generating “bodyoids.” That is, human bodies without minds. These would allow for painless medical research, provide spare parts for organ transplants, and even make it possible to overcome death.
A Boston biotechnology company called R3 BIO is attracting investors for its project of generating organs apart from entire bodies. The plan is eventually to generate a body without a brain or even a head. They are starting with monkeys. The larger goal is to do it with human beings.
An article on the subject quotes one of the investors:
“We think replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” said Boyang Wang. “If we can create a non-sentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
“We need . . .integrated, full-system human biology platforms. That means human cell-based models that incorporate vasculature, immune components, and endocrine signalling.”
“Models that can metabolize drugs, develop inflammation, and respond systemically, not just in one tissue, but across many.”
Without a brain, these “human biology platforms” wouldn’t presumably have a consciousness so they couldn’t feel pain or resent being mistreated. What could possibly be wrong with that?
Well, recent research suggests that consciousness does not simply reside in the brain, but seems to reside in the neural networks of the body as a whole. Or, Christians would suggest, an immortal soul. And since the brain regulates the workings of the other organs, it isn’t clear how organs could function without one. But these are practical issues that suggest that the scheme won’t work. What about the ethical issues? Aaron Kheriaty discusses those, concluding,
A bodyoid’s value for science and medicine lies precisely in what it would be, which is not a zombie, not a dead person, not a mannequin that mimics the human form. It would be a profoundly disabled human being, designed and created to be profoundly disabled—a vulnerable human being so totally defenseless and voiceless that it could be exploited with impunity.
But R3 BIO has a further agenda that it has tried to hide. The MIT Technology Review broke this story about R3 BIO’s plans last year in a sympathetic story called “Ethically Sourced ‘Spare’ Human Bodies Could Revolutionize Medicine.” “Ethically sourced”! Recently, though, the MIT Technology Review dug deeper and discovered something that shocked even the technophiles at MIT, publishing an article entitled Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones with the deck, “The ultimate plan to live forever is a brand new body.”
MIT Technology Review discovered that the stealth startup’s founder John Schloendorn also pitched a startling, medically graphic, and ethically charged vision for what he’s called “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies. . . .
Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver.
Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.
Regalado says that R3 BIO has been keeping these goals secret–in “stealth” mode, as they describe it–in order to prevent the public from being repelled by the research and wanting to put a stop to it.
Regalado goes on to describe the research, the efforts to keep it quiet, and how the company has discreetly spread the word among members of the longevity movement called “Vitalism,” who seek to find ways to medically eliminate death.
R3 BIO is proposing two tracks: “Body replacement,” in which you could get replacements of your body parts from a younger but non-sentient clone of yourself as your body ages. And “body transplant,” in which your brain–or head–would be transplanted into a younger body, thus giving you a new life.
Here is some of the research that R3 BIO is trying to carry out:
In order to make the body replacement process ethical, the clone’s brain needs to be stunted so it lacks consciousness. That is where the interest in birth defects comes in. Remarkable medical scans of kids with a rare condition, hydranencephaly, show a total absence of the cerebral hemispheres. Yet if they are cared for, they may be able to live into their 20s, even though they cannot speak or engage in purposeful movement. The technical question, then, is how to intentionally produce such a condition in a clone.
Regalado quotes biological researcher Jose Cibelli, a critic of these projects:
“There are so many barriers,” says Cibelli. It’s a long list: Human cloning is illegal in many countries, it’s unsafe, and few competent experts would want, or dare, to participate. And then there’s the inconvenient fact that for now, there’s no way to grow a brainless clone to birth, except in a woman’s body. Think about it, Cibelli says: “You’d have to convince a woman to carry a fetus that is going to be abnormal.”
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