prepareforchange--2019-05-21--Bringing Compassion to Justice How Would Our World Look if there Was More Compassion and Less Punis

Bringing Compassion to Justice: How Would Our World Look if there Was More Compassion and Less Punishment?

I believe that true justice should have compassion in it. When someone does something harmful or destructive, the destruction is done not only to the person who is the victim, but it is also done to the person who has committed the destruction. We all know that every time we say something unskillful, that can damage our relationship to the other person, making him or her suffer, we know that we have also done harm to ourselves, and created suffering for ourselves. That comes from our lack of skillfulness, our lack of mindfulness, and our lack of compassion, and we suffer as the other person suffers. Maybe not right now, but a little bit later we will suffer. The real cause of the action is our ignorance; our lack of skillfulness.  In any kind of relationship there is always a willingness not to make the other person suffer: “Darling, I don’t want to make you suffer.” That is true, but because we are not mindful enough, we do not have the right perception of what things are, and because of the negative habit energy in us, we may do things that cause others to suffer. That is not out of my willingness, because I may have made a vow to make you happy, to make you suffer less. That is why we should try to look into the nature of interbeing to see that we ourselves may be the victims of a collective consciousness, of the transmission of negative seeds by our ancestors or by our parents. If we make others suffer, that is because we are also victims.  Doing harm to others does harm to ourselves, whether we realise it or not.  So if we know how to look at the so-called criminals, we will have compassion. Society has created them like that; they have not been lucky, they have been born into a situation where social conditions, and their parents and other influences, have created that kind of behavior, and that person is very much the victim of the situation. If we see that, we see the nature of interbeing in that kind of act, we will be able to be compassionate, and the punishment that we propose in that case will be lighter because we want justice. That’s not only understanding; that’s not only compassion — although there is understanding that has brought compassion — but that’s also justice.  Consider a sea pirate who rapes a young girl belonging to the boat people. If you have a gun you can kill him, but you cannot help him. He may have been born to a very poor fisherman along the coast, his father and his grandfather living a very hard life. In order to forget that kind of hardship, it may be that they used to drink in the evening, and they came home late at night. Perhaps the mother of the young man did not know how to read and to write and to give him a good education, and the young boy played with delinquents. When he reached the age of fourteen or fifteen he had to go to sea and help his father in the fishing business. Then when his father passed away he had to continue the business, and his life was very hard. And suddenly someone said, “You only have to make it once. The refugees might bring a little bit of gold with them, so if we stop just one refugee boat and take the gold and their valuables, then we can get out of this situation of chronic poverty. Just one!” The young fisherman agreed, and there on the high sea they caught the boat people, and he saw another person violating a lady. He looked around, and he didn’t see any policemen. So he just said, “I have never tried this. I want to try it once.” And then he became a molester, a rapist.  We are all products of our environments. Often we haven’t learned another way of acting. If you were on the boat and you had a gun, and you shot him in order to save the girl, you could kill him, but you could not help him. Of course, you would try to do anything in order to save the girl, but if you cannot, you will shoot him. You want the girl to be alive, not to be raped, and the sea pirate not to be shot, but if there is no other way, you might choose to kill him. But he was born into that life, and he has been a victim since he has come to life. Nobody has helped him. Educators, legislators, politicians, businessmen, humanitarians, humanists, no one has helped him, and that is why he is what he is there — he is a victim. If you kill him, you can call it justice, but I think that is less than justice because he has not been helped at all. We are a Product of Our Circumstances When I heard news of events such as this, I could not eat. It’s difficult to eat your breakfast when you hear this kind of news, and I had to do walking meditation in the woods in order to digest that kind of hardship. During sitting meditation one night, I saw that if I had been born like that pirate, in the coastal area of Thailand, and I had such a father, such a mother, I would now be a sea pirate. We are products of our society, of our environment, to a very large extent. That’s why looking deeply helps us to understand and to have compassion. With compassion, you can always offer a kind of justice that will contain more patience, understanding, and tolerance. Suppose someone has killed ten children. Why should he be allowed to live on? Ten people are dead; now you want another one, you want eleven. A person who has killed ten children is a sick person. Of course, we want to lock him up to prevent him from killing more, but that is a sick person, and we have to find ways to help that person. Killing him does not help him, and does not help us. There are others like him in society, and looking at him deeply we know that something is wrong with our society; our society has created people like that. Therefore, looking at him, we can see in the light of interbeing the other elements that have produced him. That is how your understanding arises in yourself, and then you see that that person is there for you to help, and not to punish. Of course, you have to lock him up for the safety of other children, but locking him up is not the only thing you can do. We can do other things to help him. Punishing is not the only thing, we can do much better. Some prisons offer meditation and this has had very positive effects. Recently Buddhist books on meditation, Buddhist magazines, and even Dharma talks have been offered in prisons, and many inmates have been practising accordingly. Several of them have gotten relief, and have been able to live peacefully in prison. I myself get a number of letters from prisoners, and many of them come from prisons in North America — who have read my books. One person said: Thay, when I stand above the staircase and look down, and see other inmates running up and down, I can see their suffering, their agitation. I hope they can do as I do, walking down and up the staircase in mindfulness, following my breathing. When I do that, I feel peace within myself, and when I feel peace within myself I can see very clearly the suffering of other inmates. That person has been able to create, to give rise to the compassion within him. You know, when we have compassion in our hearts, we don’t suffer too much. When compassion is there in our hearts, we are not the person who suffers the most. There is another prisoner who received a copy of Being Peace, a photocopy, and later on, he got the real book Being Peace, so he had two copies. He had stopped smoking, but he still kept some tobacco. One day, the fellow next to his cell banged on the wall and shouted to ask for some tobacco. Although he did not smoke anymore, he wanted to offer him this tobacco. And he took the first page of Being Peace, and he wrapped some tobacco in it, and sneaked it to the other side, with the hope that the other person might enjoy Being Peace. He himself had enjoyed Being Peace, and had started practicing sitting meditation in his cell. He just gave a small amount of that tobacco, and the next time he used page two, then page three…He was on death row. Finally, he had transferred the whole set of copied pages to the other prisoner. It was wonderful — the other prisoner began to practice in his cell and became very quiet. In the beginning, he had banged, and shouted, and cursed. But finally he became very subdued and very calm, and he was released. In order to thank the other person, he passed in front of the cell, and they looked at each other, and together they recited one sentence from the book, which they both knew by heart. That prisoner on death row was able to write a whole book on his practice, within his cell, and the book has been published by a publisher outside. Given the opportunity, everyone has the potential for change. So it is clear that punishment is not the only thing we can do. There is much more we can do in order to help. Transformation and healing are possible in these difficult situations. Another prisoner wrote to me, saying: Thay, I am very surprised to find that I can still retain my humanness in prison and that I have not gone mad. That is thanks to the practice. My only hope is that one day when I am released, and someone comes to see me and looks at my face, and says, ‘With the amount of suffering he endured in prison, yet he can look like that…’, that would be wonderful, the greatest reward that I could get. He said that the conditions in which he lived, the suffering he endured in jail, you could not imagine. But he has managed, in order to survive, to keep his humanness alive through all these difficulties. If we suffer less outside here and have a little bit of time, of course we can do something to help those inside. That is why killing that person only reveals our weakness. We surrender. We don’t know what to do anymore, and we give up. That is a cry of despair when you have to kill people. I hope that together we can practice looking deeply in order to find better means than to approve of capital punishment. My answer to the question is that not only can we reconcile justice and compassion, but we can also demonstrate that true justice must have compassion and understanding in it.


russiainsider--2019-02-23--Solzhenitsyns Prophetic 1978 Indictment of the West - Full Text Harvard Speech

Solzhenitsyn's Prophetic 1978 Indictment of the West - Full Text (Harvard Speech)

This is a truly remarkable speech, given by Solzhenitsyn to Harvard grads after living in the West for four years, three of them in the US.  Lionized in the West as a critic of the Soviet Union, he surprised everyone by giving America a stern scolding for being superficial, cowardly, obsessed with materialism, overly legalistic, confused by too much information, lacking in spirituality, and not the stuff of greatness, all things that have become even more true today then they were then, 40 years ago. He also explained that Americans did not understand Russia at all, which is still true today, because the media mostly lies about Russia.  He ends on an optimistic note, saying that the soul-deadening reality of the West, which dismayed him once he understood it, will end in the coming years, and man's spiritual life will take flight once again.  He said that if Russia ever managed to free itself from Communism, he would not recommend that she emulate the West, which he saw as a dead end. Fascinating to read or listen to 40 years after it was given, much of what he said then is coming true today as the West descends into a deep dishonesty and perversity.  Solzhenitsyn is a controversial figure in modern Russia, where most see him as having treasonously worked with Russia's enemies to destroy her, an intellectual Quisling. Nobody, likes traitors, especially Russians. He also has his fans, among them Mr. Putin.  What follows is most of the speech, except for a longish introduction. Very much recommended.  If I were today addressing an audience in my country, examining the overall pattern of the world's rifts, I would have concentrated on the East's calamities. But since my forced exile in the West has now lasted four years and since my audience is a Western one, I think it may be of greater interest to concentrate on certain aspects of the West, in our days, such as I see them.  This is recording of the speech with English audio dubbed over the Russian. Sadly, no version of the original Russian is available on internet, that we could find, although it used to be available in Russian as an audio cassette in the US. It is a very poetic and emotionally delivered in Russian.  A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.  Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists.  Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?  When the modern Western states were created, the principle was proclaimed that governments are meant to serve man and man lives to be free and to pursue happiness. See, for example, the American Declaration of Independence. Now, at last, during past decades technical and social progress has permitted the realization of such aspirations: the welfare state.  Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness -- in the morally inferior sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition fills all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development.  The individual's independence from many types of state pressure has been guaranteed. The majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about. It has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, leaving them to physical splendor, happiness, possession of material goods, money, and leisure, to an almost unlimited freedom of enjoyment. So who should now renounce all this? Why? And for what should one risk one's precious life in defense of common values and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one's nation must be defended in a distant country? Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.  Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes based, I would say, one the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in interpreting and manipulating law. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required. Nobody will mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk. It would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames.  I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.  In today's Western society the inequality has been revealed [in] freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly. There are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him; parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that each single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Actually, an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself. From the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. Thus, mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of restrictions imposed by democracy.  It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and in fact it has been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It's time, in the West -- It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.  Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.  And what shall we say criminality as such? Legal frames, especially in the United States, are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist's civil rights. There are many such cases.  Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature. The world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems, which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society.  The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media.) But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?  Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history -- or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may -- One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.  Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none -- and none of them will ever be rectified; they will stay on in the readers' memories. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press -- The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus, we may see terrorists described as heroes, or secret matters  pertaining to one's nation's defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "Everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era. People also have the right not to know and it's a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls [stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.] A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.  Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? In the communist East a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has granted Western journalists their power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives?  There is yet another surprise for someone coming from the East, where the press is rigorously unified. One gradually discovers a common trend of preferences within the Western press as a whole. It is a fashion; there are generally accepted patterns of judgment; there may be common corporate interests, the sum effect being not competition but unification. Enormous freedom exists for the press, but not for the readership because newspaper[s] mostly develop stress and emphasis to those opinions which do not too openly contradict their own and the general trend.  Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to flock together and shut off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era. There is, for instance, a self-deluding interpretation of the contemporary world situation. It works as a sort of a petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will only be broken by the pitiless crowbar of events.  I have mentioned a few traits of Western life which surprise and shock a new arrival to this world. The purpose and scope of this speech will not allow me to continue such a review, to look into the influence of these Western characteristics on important aspects of a nation's life, such as elementary education, advanced education in the humanities and art.  It is almost universally recognized that the West shows all the world a way to successful economic development, even though in the past years it has been strongly disturbed by chaotic inflation. However, many people living in the West are dissatisfied with their own society. They despise it or accuse it of not being up to the level of maturity attained by mankind. A number of such critics turn to socialism, which is a false and dangerous current.  I hope that no one present will suspect me of offering my personal criticism of the Western system to present socialism as an alternative. Having experienced -- Having experienced applied socialism in a country where the alternative has been realized, I certainly will not speak for it. The well-known Soviet mathematician Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliant book under the title Socialism; it is a profound analysis showing that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. Shafarevich's book was published in France -- Shafarevich's book was published in France almost two years ago and so far no one has been found to refute it. It will shortly be published in the United States.  But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.  A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being.  Therefore, if our society were to be transformed into yours, it would mean an improvement in certain aspects, but also a change for the worse on some particularly significant scores. It is true, no doubt, that a society cannot remain in an abyss of lawlessness, as is the case in our country. But it is also demeaning for it to elect such mechanical legalistic smoothness as you have. After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music.  There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. There are open and evident warnings, too. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.  But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their offensive; you can feel their pressure, and yet your screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses. What is the joy about?  Very well known representatives of your society, such as George Kennan, say: We cannot apply moral criteria to politics. Thus, we mix good and evil, right and wrong, and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world. On the contrary, only moral criteria can help the West against communism's well planned world strategy. There are no other criteria. Practical or occasional considerations of any kind will inevitably be swept away by strategy. After a certain level of the problem has been reached, legalistic thinking induces paralysis; it prevents one from seeing the size and meaning of events.  In spite of the abundance of information, or maybe because of it, the West has difficulties in understanding reality such as it is. There have been naive predictions by some American experts who believed that Angola would become the Soviet Union's Vietnam or that Cuban expeditions in Africa would best be stopped by special U.S. courtesy to Cuba. Kennan's advice to his own country -- to begin unilateral disarmament -- belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the Kremlin officials laugh at your political wizards. As to Fidel Castro, he frankly scorns the United States, sending his troops to distant adventures from his country right next to yours.  However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?  The American Intelligentsia lost its nerve and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?  I have had occasion already to say that in the 20th century Western democracy has not won any major war without help and protection from a powerful continental ally whose philosophy and ideology it did not question. In World War II against Hitler, instead of winning that war with its own forces, which would certainly have been sufficient, Western democracy grew and cultivated another enemy who would prove worse, as Hitler never had so many resources and so many people, nor did he offer any attractive ideas, or have a large number of supporters in the West as the Soviet Union. At present, some Western voices already have spoken of obtaining protection from a third power against aggression in the next world conflict, if there is one. In this case the shield would be China. But I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is again a doomed alliance with Evil; also, it would grant the United States a respite, but when at a later date China with its billion people would turn around armed with American weapons, America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the in Cambodia in our days.  And yet -- no weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal. Thus at the shameful Belgrade conference free Western diplomats in their weakness surrendered the line where enslaved members of Helsinki Watchgroups are sacrificing their lives.  Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. But one must be blind in order not to see that oceans no longer belong to the West, while land under its domination keeps shrinking. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.  Facing such a danger, with such splendid historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?  How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.  This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.  The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.  However, in early democracies, as in the American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were -- State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the 20th century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the 19th Century.  As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say that "communism is naturalized humanism."  This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorships; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. This is typical of the Enlightenment in the 18th Century and of Marxism. Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.  The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive, and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. And when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.  I am not examining here the case of a world war disaster and the changes which it would produce in society. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.  To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging everything on earth -- imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible -- The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.  If humanism were right in declaring that man is born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.  It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times. Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?  If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge: We shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.  This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward.


russiainsider--2019-03-13--How Jewish Elites Use Non-White Immigration to Undermine Western Nations VIDEO

How Jewish Elites Use Non-White Immigration to Undermine Western Nations (VIDEO)

Vertigo Politix is a YouTuber who makes short, detailed videos explaining aspects of the West's current problems. In the video below he summarizes how Jewish elites have deliberately undermined the culture and morals of whites in Europe and America, especially through changes in immigration policies.  Jewish elites, the true “deep state” behind the curtain and facade of “democracy“, are carrying out genocide primarily through mass non-White invasion (labeled as “migration”) but also through the promotion of feminism, miscegenation, abortion, homosexuality, gender dysphoria, etc.  In addition, to facilitate the effects of such dysgenic factors, these elites have subjected Whites to — over generations now — psychological warfare, through their control over the media, education, etc., to induce White guilt and self-hate.  The ultimate aim of these programs is to bring about a World Order ruling over former White countries, that will have been turned into multi-racial brown skinned, dysfunctional societies, no longer able to resist  tyranny.  Immigration is a form of demographic genocide, which either by design, or consequence, results in ethnic cleansing. In addition to this Western governments are effacing their European populations by promoting a variety of other schemes such as miscegenation, abortion, homosexuality, gender dysphoria, and White guilt.  But immigration has been, by far, the most successful approach towards complete replacement. And if this does not drastically change within the next two decades, Europeans will be the first race to become extinct.  So who within the political class is behind immigration policy? And how have they been able to coercively open the floodgates?  Whether the discussion begins with the Diaspora after the Bar Kokhba revolt, or seeks to understand the role played by fifth columns during the fall of the Visigothic Kingdom to Muslim forces, in 711 AD, there has been a continuous thread, over some 2,000 years, of a jewish influence within the lands inhabited by Europeans that has sought to undermine the integrity of cultural boundaries, and more crucially, the conception of borders.  Through traitorous invitation, political realignments, or financial legerdemain, these alien forces have often contrived the social conditions and historical circumstances where kingdoms and nations went to war, peoples fled their homelands, and for those caught in between, a life of brutal misery.  In such a frustrating and vicious cycle, a continuous pressure has been placed upon the European race! Never has a group of people being so crushed over such a length of time! Even the Asian and African kingdoms had centuries of relative peace here and there. But for simple Europeans, generally speaking a farming culture, which had natural ties to the land and each other, the past 2,000 years has been a nightmare!  In the grist mill of the present era, we have observable evidence of a Judeo-globalist conspiracy to open Western countries to the importation of countless non-White peoples, whose sheer numbers will out-produce the native European populations.  This current state of affairs can be traced back to the mid 1960s when, in just a few short years, every Western state changed — without any popular consent — the laws governing immigration policy. In every case jewish leadership was responsible for these changes. The resultant breakup of the dominant, homogeneous, traditional European culture, ensured that a small rank-and-file coterie maintained it’s grip over Western nations, by excluding any possibility of a larger racially European competitive group from rising to positions of influence..  Moreover, the social stability within many European nations gradually became compromised as the original ethno-fabric unwound, creating greater mechanisms of control against the native populations, which further reinforced the absolute dominance by this coterie, over state and culture.  The following is a short list of Western nations who adopted these democidal immigration policies after 1960, and the jewish ringleaders behind these efforts.  Senator Jacob Javits played a prominent role in the Senate hearings for the 1965 bill. Javits authored an article entitled “Let’s Open the Gates” in which a proposed immigration level of 500,000 people per year for 20 years was requested, with no restrictions on national origin. Congressman Emanuel Celler who had fought for unrestricted immigration since the 1920s in the House of Representatives, was the main writer of the legislation.  Leo Pfeffer who wrote many treatises and books that acted as softening propaganda for open immigration also co-conceived the legislated material.  Norman Podhoretz was a former communist, Comintern sympathizer, turned neocon who became a close associate of the upper mentioned men. He wrote numerous articles promoting open immigration. And jewish organizations, such as, the American jewish Congress, the jewish Federation, the ACLU, and B’nai B’rith, all filed briefs in support of open immigration before the senate sub-committee during the hearings prior to the Hart-Celler Act.  Walter Lippman played a crucial role in pressuring the Holt government to do away with racial profiling against non-White immigration. He was President of the Australian jewish Welfare Society, which among other services, offered financial support and housing to non-White immigrants to Australia.  John Malcolm Fraser was a cabinet member during the Holt government who went on to become the Prime Minister of Australia in 1975.  His mother’s maiden name was Wolff, born of a South African jew who emigrated to Australia. Despite being Minister of the war cabinet, his Liberal Party values did not stop him from advising on an easing of immigration restrictions. This sympathy no doubt gave him a leg up on his competitors when he campaigned for Prime Minister, a decade later.  The Labour Party, true to its Marxist roots, began a series of Nationality acts from 1948 onward, that established the rule of “jus soli”, whereby citizens of the British Commonwealth could now migrate to Britain.  Ralph Miliband was born in the jewish quarter of Warsaw. He emigrated to England in 1940.  After the war he joined the Labour Party, despite his hatred for English culture, and proceeded to become an intellectual proponent of the New Left. His writings and lectures proved influential in the reworking of several British Nationality Acts over the decades, as they became increasingly more open to non-White immigration.  Maurice Edelman was a lifelong member of British Parliament. He was a Francophile, an admirer of David Ben Gurion. His efforts over the years as a Labour Party MP included a number of published works, several of which sought to influence how Britons saw themselves. Like many of his ilk, he considered the peoples of Britain to be the ancestors of migrants.  Canada, Germany, Sweden, France, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and so many others, also had major overhauls to their national immigration policies during the same period.  The mainstream narrative explained this phenomenon as a development of lower birth rates among natural Europeans. Then there was a financial reasoning behind the influx, one which argued the fallacy that Western countries had a desperate shortage of low-skilled workers.  And now the latest explanation for mass emigration has been given, that Europeans need to become more diverse, despite the demonstrable fact that about 97% of all hair colors, and 96% of all eye colours attributed to human beings belong exclusively to the European haplogroup, the explanation that we are never given is simply this:  That an internationalist cartel, operating within Western nations, has designs on governing the planet at some point in the future. They have shared this common goal since the age of revolution, and this in part helps explain why their long-term plans always go unnoticed, because they think in terms of centuries, while Europeans can only see from one generation to the next.  And it matters not what one calls them, liberal, globalist, socialist, communist, cultural Marxist, or jewry! In toto, they are one in the same. They desire a one world cultural order, ruled by a centrally controlled government, with all of humanity under it’s thumb. And for them, European nationalism since 1848, has been a barrier to that goal. Therefore, Europeans must simply be replaced!  This philosophical point is essential to understanding their religion, or globalism. Much of the world already operates in some manner like it, but conditionally, on a micro level.  A subsistence version of it, a pseudo communism, if you will, due to poverty in Africa, culture in China, or caste systems in India.  However the individuality and free-spirited nature of Europeans, and their ability to organize and express these traits through cultural celebration, or nationalism, is a roadblock to world government. Even when given various forms of socialism to live by, many European cultures could just not adapt collectively, or metaphysically, to it.  And once it becomes understood that the purest form of this doctrine, communism, was simply a jewish designed belief system to persuade Gentiles to abandon the notion of property rights, relinquish their free will to an authority that ruled over them, and divorced themselves from the values of their culture, and kindred, in as much as they related to the state, then it makes perfect sense why the Europeans have stubbornly held their ground through dozens of the world’s greatest social cataclysms, of which the Bolshevik Revolution, and World Wars were only a part.  And now the final push looms large! An army of culturally alien, hostile peoples, have been brought into our midst! Many of whom are males of military age. They want to pair up and breed with native European women, which our elected governments offer up to them. They want their own laws and cultural norms to be dominant! They defile our religious and historical spaces, while waiting for the day when Western governments finally say to them:  And to think that it all began with just a few modest initiatives, some cosmetic changes to our immigration policy only a few short decades ago. When a man like Enoch Powell could deliver a speech that still meant something.  Yes! There will be rivers of blood!


slate--2019-10-17--Insurance Access Is Just a Fraction of Our Health Care Problem

I race down the hospital stairs, skipping the last one as I rush into the emergency department. The patient is a 10-year-old boy living in public housing in Harlem. As usual, I start by collecting the patient’s history, this time from his mother; she pulls her coat around her and responds to my questions in an almost rehearsed voice. It’s clear that she has been here many times before. This is the third time the patient has come into the ED for an acute asthma exacerbation over the last year. He is slightly small for his age, with a baggy Yankees shirt that drags over his knees.  I already know how this story is going to play out. Asthma impacts about 1 in 12 American children, but a child’s demographics go a long way in predicting disease severity, and even survival. I can predict, based on where my patient lives, that his asthma will not be well-controlled. I can predict, based on his socioeconomic status, that he’s going to have more ED visits and hospitalizations. I can predict, based on his race, that his likelihood of dying from asthma is much higher than it should be.  The United States is ranked No. 43 in life expectancy worldwide, one of the worst among developed countries (the infant mortality rate is even more abysmal, coming in at No. 55, below countries like Cuba and Poland). And yet, we spend more on health care than any other country in the world: We spend, on average, twice as much per person as other wealthy countries while still experiencing worse outcomes. The problem with our health care system, the reason why we spend so much and yet still have such bad outcomes, is that it’s unequal.  When many people hear “inequality,” they think about the millions of people who are uninsured. That’s certainly a critical issue, but it doesn’t explain the poor and unequal outcomes among children. Thanks to programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, 95 percent of children actually do have health insurance. So why is it possible for me to predict a child’s health trajectory based only on their race and socioeconomic status?  The first contributor is the intersection of social conditions and health. In addition to the high infant mortality rate, the U.S. also has one of the highest child poverty rates in the developed world. Poverty directly impacts health, especially for children. The asthma rate is much higher in poorer urban neighborhoods, partly due to substandard housing conditions: Mold and plumbing leaks, as well as cockroach and rodent feces, are major asthma antigens. In one rat-infested public housing structure in Boston with high asthma rates, housing officials started the Healthy Pest Free Initiative aimed at reducing the number of rodents and cockroaches in public housing. The asthma rate fell by almost 50 percent in a four-year period (in this instance, the decline was thought to be related to both decreased pests and decreased pesticide usage in the building). An improvement in housing conditions alone would decrease the rate of asthma and other childhood illnesses like respiratory infections. Furthermore, studies continue to show that health disparities early in life result in increased disease and shorter life expectancy into adulthood. Thus, low socioeconomic status and early childhood disparity impact an individual’s health throughout their entire life, beyond childhood.  Second, we must acknowledge that we have a two-tiered health care system. Even among the insured, the type of insurance that you have determines which clinics, medications, and sub-specialists you are able to access. Many children with asthma end up at clinics with fewer resources, leaving them overcrowded and underserved. Higher-resourced clinics, with pulmonologists, specialty asthma clinics, and auxiliary support (like nutritionists and social workers), tend to be congregated in wealthier areas, despite the fact that asthma rates are higher in poorer neighborhoods. In fact, children with public insurance have lower rates of controller medication usage, a key factor in controlling asthma, with one study showing that almost half of Medicaid-insured children with asthma reported no controller usage at all.  Race is also a major predictor of outcomes, with data from 2015 showing that African American children were four times more likely to be admitted for asthma and 10 times more likely to die from the disease as compared to white children. Our health care system, because it is dependent on who can pay what, is segregated by both income and race. This means a child’s access to health care differs widely by ZIP code. It has created an apartheid medical system that is inherently unequal.  Even among the insured, the type of insurance that you have determines which clinics, medications, and sub-specialists you are able to access.  Although the political debate focuses on access to insurance, if we really want to improve health outcomes in this country, the entire system needs to be restructured, and the inequality needs to be addressed. Insurance—and what kind of insurance you have—doesn’t just influence who gets coverage: It affects how the whole system is set up. It is no longer enough for politicians to only discuss access to coverage—they should be discussing improving the entire system. A “Medicare for All” system would allow for the restructuring of the entire health care system. Under “Medicare for All”, all Americans would have the same insurance, thus getting rid of private insurance and the two-tiered health care system that segregates individuals based on the type of insurance they have.  It would allow the government to change the payment structure so that doctors are incentivized to take on more lower income patients and improve outcomes. It would also allow for more preventive care and pediatric screening, key factors in identifying early childhood disparities and disease triggers. Versions of a “Medicare for All” plan also provide clinicians with health disparities training while increasing funding to recruit more minority physicians. It is much harder to see how a public option, which is essentially an expansion of Medicare that retains the private insurance model, would sufficiently restructure the system enough to address the inequality. The public option would provide more patients with coverage, but unless it is meant as a bridge towards a single-payer system, it would retain the currently unequal two-tier system.  As a pediatrician, one of the hardest aspects of my job is the fact that inequality often determines how a child will fare long before I meet them in the emergency department. I place the oxygen mask on my 10-year-old asthma patient, noticing his long Yankees shirt has a small hole in it. I wonder how many older brothers wore it before he did. I know very little about his past and his life, but I can still predict so much about his future.


sottnet--2019-10-13--Gene analysis reveals Bronze Age slavery

The finding, reported in the journal Science, provides fresh insight into ancient life in Europe, showing that complex slave-owning societies were well established long before those of classical Greece and Rome.The research, centred on genome-wide data gathered from 104 individuals buried in Germany's Lech Valley between about 2500 BCE and 1700 BCE, was conducted by researchers led by archaeo-geneticist Alissa Mittnik from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, in Jena, Germany.The scientists gathered nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from each individual and compared it to genetic databases covering ancient and modern humans. They also looked at how the graves were arranged and examined the relationship between the number and type of artefacts buried in each.The picture that emerged was of a surprisingly stable and enduring society that depended on the import of fertile women and menial underlings. The Lech Valley hosted a farming community, Mittnik and colleagues concluded, that persisted for about 700 years.The people of the valley were a mixture of Western Hunter-Gatherers, Anatolian Neolithic farmers and Steppe pastoralists, with the farmers' genetic heritage becoming more dominant as the centuries passed.Analysis of strontium and oxygen deposits in bone revealed that the men remained in the community across multiple generations - a condition known as patrilocality. The women, in contrast, were largely born outside the area - some, indeed, hailed from a region more than 350 kilometres away, on the other side of the Alps.The absence of women genetically related to the males strongly indicates that they left the community to join other groups.Mittnik and colleagues also looked at grave goods as signifiers of social importance."Certain types of grave goods, especially weapons - daggers, axes, chisels and arrow heads - in male graves and elaborate body adornments in female graves - large headdresses, massive leg rings - as well as pins in graves of both sexes are likely status-associated," they write.Among the cohort of corpses examined, they found examples of children and adolescents who were genetically related to adult males and who had been interred with significant artefacts. This suggests that social standing was inherited rather than earned.They also found examples of high-status women who had not contributed genetic material to downstream males, but who nevertheless appear to have lived with families.Some other individuals were genetically unrelated to either high status males or females, and were buried in graves with few if any grave goods. Mittnik and colleagues found that these low status people also lived in the same buildings - presumably as slaves.The Lech Valley, the researchers note, is likely to be representative of the social conditions that persisted across much of Germany during the early Bronze Age and will therefore prompt a rethink of how communities at that time functioned."Considering both grave furnishings and kinship, people of different status and biological relatedness likely lived together in the same household," they conclude, "which should therefore be seen as complex and socially stratified institutions.


drudgereport--2019-01-17--SCIENTISTS GROW PERFECT HUMAN BLOOD VESSELS

SCIENTISTS GROW 'PERFECT' HUMAN BLOOD VESSELS...

Scientists have managed to grow perfect human blood vessels as organoids in a petri dish for the first time.  The breakthrough engineering technology, outlined in a new study published today in Nature, dramatically advances research of vascular diseases like diabetes, identifying a key pathway to potentially prevent changes to blood vessels -- a major cause of death and morbidity among those with diabetes.  An organoid is a three-dimensional structure grown from stem cells that mimics an organ and can be used to study aspects of that organ in a petri dish.  "Being able to build human blood vessels as organoids from stem cells is a game changer," said the study's senior author Josef Penninger, the Canada 150 Research Chair in Functional Genetics, director of the Life Sciences Institute at UBC and founding director of the Institute for Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA).  "Every single organ in our body is linked with the circulatory system. This could potentially allow researchers to unravel the causes and treatments for a variety of vascular diseases, from Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular diseases, wound healing problems, stroke, cancer and, of course, diabetes."  Diabetes affects an estimated 420 million people worldwide. Many diabetic symptoms are the result of changes in blood vessels that result in impaired blood circulation and oxygen supply of tissues. Despite its prevalence, very little is known about the vascular changes arising from diabetes. This limitation has slowed the development of much-needed treatment.  To tackle this problem, Penninger and his colleagues developed a groundbreaking model: three-dimensional human blood vessel organoids grown in a petri dish. These so-called "vascular organoids" can be cultivated using stem cells in the lab, strikingly mimicking the structure and function of real human blood vessels.  When researchers transplanted the blood vessel organoids into mice, they found that they developed into perfectly functional human blood vessels including arteries and capillaries. The discovery illustrates that it is possible to not only engineer blood vessel organoids from human stem cells in a dish, but also to grow a functional human vascular system in another species.  "What is so exciting about our work is that we were successful in making real human blood vessels out of stem cells," said Reiner Wimmer, the study's first author and a postdoctoral research fellow at IMBA. "Our organoids resemble human capillaries to a great extent, even on a molecular level, and we can now use them to study blood vessel diseases directly on human tissue."  One feature of diabetes is that blood vessels show an abnormal thickening of the basement membrane. As a result, the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to cells and tissues is strongly impaired, causing a multitude of health problems, such as kidney failure, heart attacks, strokes, blindness and peripheral artery disease, leading to amputations.  The researchers then exposed the blood vessel organoids to a "diabetic" environment in a petri dish.  "Surprisingly, we could observe a massive expansion of the basement membrane in the vascular organoids," said Wimmer. "This typical thickening of the basement membrane is strikingly similar to the vascular damage seen in diabetic patients."  The researchers then searched for chemical compounds that could block thickening of the blood vessel walls. They found none of the current anti-diabetic medications had any positive effects on these blood vessel defects. However, they discovered that an inhibitor of ?-secretase, a type of enzyme in the body, prevented the thickening of the blood vessel walls, suggesting, at least in animal models, that blocking ?-secretase could be helpful in treating diabetes.  The researchers say the findings could allow them to identify underlying causes of vascular disease, and to potentially develop and test new treatments for patients with diabetes.


drudgereport--2019-11-20--Disease, defects and danger: The unhappy truth behind pet cloning...

Pet cloning has become more and more popular in recent years, with surging numbers of people paying thousands of pounds to have their adored cats and dogs cloned.  Celebrities have particularly widened the appeal of what was once considered an ethically-dubious science, with stars such as Barbara Streisand and fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg "recreating" their dogs.  But while it seems like the ideal solution to losing a pet, many experts are speaking out to warn unsuspecting animal-lovers of the perils of doing so.  One of the main problems with cloning pets is that they often turn out completely differently.  A number of owners who paid for the costly procedure have come forward in the last couple of years to reveal cloning has not lived up to what they thought it would be.  Huang Yu, from the city of Wenzhou, in China, paid $35,000 (£27,000) to have his cat Garlic cloned this year after being left utterly bereft when the feline passed away.  But when the new kitten – also named Garlic – was born in July to a surrogate mother in Beijing, Huang realised the two cats were completely different, not even sharing a physical resemblance.  Speaking about his experience to the New York Times, Huang admitted: “If I tell you I wasn’t disappointed, then I would be lying to you.”  Another case that bears striking similarities to this one is that of Ralph Fisher, who paid to have his tame bull Chance cloned.  And things seemed okay at first when the bull he decided to call Second Chance was born. For example, the clone ate the unusual way Ralph recognised from its predecessor – lifting his head and chewing rather than dipping his whole head in the feed bucket.  “I’ve never seen another animal do that,” Fisher said of this. “I thought it was the same animal. I would say we got him back."  But it wasn't long for the differences to begin emerging, including, most scarily, that Second Chance was not as tame as his parent clone and attacked Ralph twice.  Biotechnology expert Mark Westhusin, who was involved in the procedure that created Chance in 1999, explained: “People want to believe it is resurrection.  “It is in fact not resurrection. It’s just reproduction.”  And the problems don't just stop there.  A cloned animal may also come with a whole host of health issues that were not present in the 'original'.  The National Human Genome Research Institute, in Bethesda, US, has warned of the potential problems cloned creatures may have, including higher instances of disease.  "These include an increase in birth size and a variety of defects in vital organs, such as the liver, brain and heart,” it reported.  “Other consequences include premature ageing and problems with the immune system.”  Although proof of this is harder to find with pet cloning still a rarity, there is some anecdotal evidence, such as how Dolly the Sheep lived just six years – half the average lifespan of a sheep.  But this has not stopped companies promising they can provide a perfectly-cloned copy of heartbroken pet-owners' beloved companion.  One South Korean dog cloning service even boasts: “Let us be of aid to you and your family.  “With respect to the companions who have consoled our weary hearts and made the happy memories.  "How would it feel like to start again with your companion? It is now possible to make your dreams come true with biotechnology.”  Finally, there are the obvious very serious ethical concerns about cloning, such as how little this kind of cutting edge science can be properly overseen by governing bodies.  Medical ethicist Dr Ronald Munson previously went as far as to called cloning the "theatre of the absurd acted out by scientists".  One of the main concerns he raised was how of hand cloning could get, having first made these comments in the 1990's.  Cloning has certainly come along way since Dolly was born in 1996 – and it'll undoubtedly go a lot further.


foreignpolicy--2019-10-17--The True Story of the Genetically Modified Superfood That Almost Saved Millions

The True Story of the Genetically Modified Superfood That Almost Saved Millions  The cover of the July 31, 2000, edition of Time magazine pictured a serious-looking bearded man surrounded by a wall of greenery: the stems, leaves, and stalks of rice plants. The caption, in large block lettering, read, “This rice could save a million kids a year.”  The man in question was Ingo Potrykus, a professor of plant sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, where Albert Einstein had studied and taught. The rice plants around him, although the joint products of many minds and hands, had been largely inspired by him. Their kernels were not the usual plain white grains of rice. Instead, they had a distinct golden hue, the color of daffodils. When spread out on a black surface, they looked like nothing so much as tiny yellow gemstones.  This was Golden Rice, the fruit of nine years of research, experimentation, and development. The “gold” was in fact beta carotene, a substance that is converted into vitamin A in the human body. Conventional rice plants already contained beta carotene, but only in their leaves and stems, not in the kernels. Golden Rice also carries the substance in the part of the plant that people eat. This small change made Golden Rice into a miracle of nutrition: The rice could combat vitamin A deficiency in areas of the world where the condition is endemic and could, thereby, “save a million kids a year.”  Vitamin A deficiency is practically unknown in the Western world, where people take multivitamins or get sufficient micronutrients from ordinary foods, fortified cereals, and the like. But it is a life-and-death matter for people in developing countries. Lack of vitamin A is responsible for a million deaths annually, most of them children, plus an additional 500,000 cases of blindness. In Bangladesh, China, India, and elsewhere in Asia, many children subsist on a few bowls of rice a day and almost nothing else. For them, a daily supply of Golden Rice could bring the gift of life and sight.  The superfood thus seemed to have everything going for it: It would be the basis for a sea change in public health among the world’s poorest people. It would be cheap to grow and indefinitely sustainable, because low-income farmers could save the seeds from any given harvest and plant them the following season, without purchasing them anew.  But in the 20 years since it was created, Golden Rice has not been made available to those for whom it was intended. So what happened?  For one, Golden Rice is a genetically modified organism, and as such is weighed down with all the political, ideological, and emotional baggage that has come to be associated with GMOs—stultifying government overregulation, fear and hostility, and criticism (much of it unfounded) from environmentalist and other activist organizations and individuals. Greenpeace, for one, was especially vocal in its condemnation of genetically engineered foods, Golden Rice in particular.  To many, this protracted delay has been unconscionable, and it brought forth reactions as extreme as the hyperbolic claims made by GMO opponents. In 2016, for example, George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, said in an interview with the science publication Edge:  Golden Rice was a tough call strategically for Greenpeace and some of their associates. … A million lives are at stake every year due to vitamin A deficiency, and Golden Rice was basically ready for use in 2002, so it’s been thirteen years that it’s been ready. Every year that you delay it, that’s another million people dead. That’s mass murder on a high scale. In fact, as I understand it there is an effort to bring them to trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity. Maybe that’s justified, maybe it isn’t.  Much of the pro-Golden Rice backlash was overstatement, too. For one thing, it is doubtful that Golden Rice was “ready,” in any but the most technical sense, in 2002. Indeed, some critics would argue that as a proven, viable, agricultural commodity, it is not yet ready even today. Still, the fact is that the crop has been grown, and grown successfully, first in laboratories, then in greenhouses, and finally in open fields since it was invented. The rice has also been subjected to safety studies—toxicity and allergenicity studies—and studies on human consumption, including among American adults and Chinese children. These have found it to be more effective in providing vitamin A than spinach and almost as effective as pure beta carotene oil itself.  So what really happened? Extremist opposition, protests, rhetoric, and even vandalism did not, by themselves, have the power to stop Golden Rice in its tracks or even to substantially hamper the pace of its development. Indeed, the delay may come down to a variety of other, less obvious, factors.  The second cause was the fact that plants themselves are recalcitrant experimental subjects: They grow only so fast and no faster, and the cycle of germination, maturation, and seed production is a process that can’t really be sped up. However, this same process can easily be slowed down, or even terminated, by a variety of causes such as disease; insect attack; natural disasters and weather events including floods, frosts, heat waves, and droughts; vandalism; or simple human misjudgment or mishandling.  But it was something else altogether that had the greatest power to impede the development of Golden Rice, and that was government regulation. That power resided in a complex set of operational guidelines, restrictions, and requirements that created enormous obstacles for the Golden Rice scientists to overcome. Governments imposed these constraints in the name of safety; chiefly responsible for these restrictions is an international treaty known as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and its highly controversial Principle 15, otherwise known as the “precautionary principle.”  This principle states that if a product of modern biotechnology poses a possible risk to human health or the environment, then it is prudent to restrict or prevent the introduction or use of that product or technology, even if the magnitude or nature of the risk is uncertain, speculative, scientifically unproven, or even unknown. Although it may have been benign in its intent, the effect of the principle has been to slow the pace of biotechnology research and development—and in some cases even to halt it, at least temporarily, at multiple times during the research and development process.  In the case of Golden Rice, the combined result of these three factors—the scientific difficulty of the project, the slow and stately rate of plant growth and reproduction, and a body of stifling government regulations governing biotechnology research and development—was to prolong the incubation time of a food that, absent externally imposed government restrictions, could otherwise be saving the sight and lives of millions of people.  Yet despite all these roadblocks, Golden Rice has still emerged as the world’s first purposefully created biofortified crop. The project began in 1990, when Potrykus and his colleague Peter Beyer, of the University of Freiburg, started working to genetically engineer a metabolic pathway into a variety of Oryza sativa, the world’s most commonly consumed rice species, so that the plant’s edible kernels would contain beta carotene. It is an understatement to say that their task was daunting. There was no assurance when they started out that what they contemplated was even technologically possible, since it had never been done before. But the two men were highly motivated by the horrors of persistent vitamin A deficiency in developing countries, and they viewed their work as a calling—one from which they would not be deterred.  It took almost a decade of laboratory experimentation to invent Golden Rice, but by 1999, Potrykus, Beyer, and a group of colleagues finally succeeded. They inserted a set of genes into the rice genome so that the plant’s beta carotene accumulated not only in the plant’s leaves and stems, as it normally did, but also in the rice kernels themselves, just as if nature had intended things to work that way from the very beginning.  Once they accomplished that small but powerful technological trick, the inventors naively imagined that the hard part was now behind them. Little did they know that the most difficult tasks still lay ahead. Looking back on it all afterward, Potrykus reflected, “Had I known what this pursuit would entail, perhaps I would not have started.”  Once they had their initial proof-of-concept rice in hand, the inventors moved swiftly to develop Golden Rice further, first to improve the product and then to make it available, for free, to poor farmers in developing countries. In April 2000, they licensed their rice technology to the British agrochemical company Zeneca on a quid pro quo basis: The company retained the right to sell Golden Rice seeds commercially, perhaps as a health food, on the condition that the company financially supported the inventors’ future work on the rice and let them distribute the seeds at no cost to small-scale farmers. Zeneca later merged with the Swiss-based company Syngenta, but the terms of the original arrangement remained unchanged.  On Feb. 9, 2001, Greenpeace, which had a long record of opposition to all GMO foods and crops, issued a statement that an adult would have to eat 9 kilograms (about 20 pounds) of cooked Golden Rice daily to prevent persistent vitamin A deficiency, and that “a breast-feeding woman would have to eat at least 6.3 kilos in dry weight, which converts to nearly 18 kilos [40 pounds] of cooked rice per day.” Since the bioavailability of beta carotene in the rice was not then known, there was no factual basis for these claims, which in any case were later proved false. At about the same time, the Indian anti-GMO crusader Vandana Shiva called Golden Rice a “hoax.” It was the beginning of a propaganda war against the rice that has only intensified.  Around the same time, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety was making waves. The protocol had been adopted in the year 2000 by more than 100 nations, including members of the European Union (but neither the United States nor Canada). The written document, which came into force in 2003, governed the handling, packaging, identification, transfer, and use of “living modified organisms” among the parties to the agreement.  The agreement contained one version of the precautionary principle. Exactly what that principle, which focused on avoiding unknown risks, meant in practice was not immediately clear. It is more of an ideal, a standard of perfection to be aimed at, than a real-world guide to action or public policy. On the one hand, it sounds like a dressed-up variant of a number of innocuous platitudes such as “look before you leap” or “better safe than sorry.” On the other, it can equally well be interpreted as a doctrine of “guilty until proven innocent.”  In light of the Cartagena Protocol, every aspect of Golden Rice development—from lab work to field trials to screening for “regulatory clean events”—was entangled in a Byzantine web of rules, guidelines, requirements, restrictions, and prohibitions. The simple transfer of seeds from one country to another became a major logistical problem. It could take “more than two years to transfer, for example, breeding seed from the Philippines to Vietnam, and one year from USA to India, during which time 30 politically loaded questions were asked in the Indian parliament,” Potrykus said. “These Cartagena conditions are enforced, despite common sense suggesting that it is extremely difficult to construct a hypothetical risk from seed transfer between two breeding stations in different countries, especially for Golden Rice.”  Golden Rice was unique among genetically engineered foods, and the properties that made it different also made it immune to many of the conventional criticisms of GMOs. Golden Rice was not invented for profit, and after 2004, when Syngenta renounced all commercial interest in the rice, it would no longer be developed for profit. The rice would benefit the poor and disadvantaged, not modern, multinational corporations. It would be given free of charge to subsistence farmers who can save seeds and plant them from one harvest to the next, without restriction or payment of fees or royalties. The rice was not developed primarily for the benefit of farmers, as were most other GMOs that had been designed to be resistant to herbicides or pesticides. Instead, it was developed for the sole purpose of helping users: the malnourished poor suffering from vitamin A deficiency. And Golden Rice is not a crop upon which a major genetic engineering effort conferred a relatively minor advantage such as a longer shelf life or slightly improved taste, as was true, for example, of the long-since-abandoned Flavr Savr tomato. That’s why, for all the vitriol, the real villain of the story is regulation, rather than activism run amok.  Had Golden Rice not faced overly restrictive regulatory conditions, it could have been cultivated by rice farmers and distributed throughout some of the poorest regions of South and Southeast Asia. It would have already saved millions of lives and prevented millions of children from going blind.  Excerpted from Golden Rice. Used with permission of the publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press. Copyright © 2019.


foreignpolicy--2019-11-08--China’s Biotech Boom Could Transform Lives—or Destroy Them

When James Clapper, the U.S. director of national intelligence at the time, appeared before Congress in early January 2016 for an annual briefing of threats to the United States, he didn’t lack for material. Just a few weeks earlier, North Korea had tested a nuclear device, and Russia had begun deploying cruise missiles that appeared to violate a crucial arms-control agreement. But to the surprise of many experts, Clapper devoted a good chunk of his time to describing a much more exotic threat: biomedical research. Specifically, Clapper warned, “Research in genome editing conducted by countries with different regulatory or ethical standards than those of Western countries probably increases the risk of the creation of potentially harmful biological agents or products.”  Clapper’s statement didn’t explicitly mention China—but it didn’t need to. As his testimony went on to make clear, while in the 20th century the United States and Soviet Union held the keys to preventing planetary catastrophe, in the 21st the principal players are the United States and China. And while in a previous age keeping Pandora’s box closed meant preventing nuclear war, today it’s about preventing biotech dangers.  In just the past few years, the development of inexpensive gene-editing techniques has democratized biomedical research, producing a biotech bonanza in places such as China and creating a whole new category of security threats in the process, from the use of genetic information to persecute dissidents and minority groups to the development of sophisticated bioweapons.  When it comes to the United States, China, and technology, artificial intelligence tends to grab most of the attention. But policymakers need to come to grips with the even bigger threat of biotechnology—and soon. Fortunately, though, shared concerns about China’s role in biotechnology also provide a rare chance for meaningful and productive engagement in shaping the rules of a new world.  China’s starring role in preventing the 21st century’s biotech perils stems from its skyrocketing investment in biomedical research. Historically, Western countries, and especially the United States, have been the epicenter of research in the life sciences. The United States alone accounted for some 45 percent of biotech and medical patents filed in the 14-year period ending in 2013. But now, thanks to heavy state-backed investment, China is catching up. Economic plans instituted in 2015 call for the biotechnology sector to account for more than 4 percent of China’s total GDP by 2020, and estimates suggest that as of 2018, central, provincial, and local governments had already invested over $100 billion in the life sciences. Chinese venture capital and private equity investment in the life sciences, meanwhile, totaled some $45 billion just from 2015 to 2017.  China has also invested considerable effort in competing with countries like the United States for biotech talent. Of some 7,000 researchers recruited under the Thousand Talents Plan since 2008, more than 1,400 specialized in the life sciences. A leading American geneticist, Harris Lewin, has warned that the United States is “starting to fall behind … the Chinese, who have always been good collaborators, [are] now taking the lead.”  For the United States and other Western countries, China’s growing role in biomedical research is raising plenty of concern. Several Chinese researchers have shown a willingness to ignore ethical and regulatory constraints on genetic research. In 2018, He Jiankui became a poster child for scientific irresponsibility when he announced he had edited the genes of two twins in utero without following basic safety protocols. He reportedly dismissed them as guidelines, not laws.  Yet the reaction at home was not what He had hoped for. His research had been made possible by the relatively lax standards of Chinese universities, even as he had kept the true nature of it secret from many involved – while discussing it with a small group of Western bioethicists and scientists, who stressed their disapproval. It’s not uncommon in China to break the rules and be lauded for the results anyway, whatever the field. For He, though, the vast international attention that came after the story broke cost him his career and possibly his freedom. Chinese media rushed to stress official disapproval of the experiments. Even the overt purpose of the editing – to ensure that the babies, born to HIV+ mothers, enjoyed protection against the virus – turned out to be scientifically weak.  As China’s biotech sector grows, so too do fears that Chinese researchers like He will be more willing to push the limits of both science and ethics than those in the United States. Earlier this year, Chinese researchers recorded another mind-bending milestone when they implanted human genes linked to intelligence into monkey embryos—and then said that the monkeys performed better on memory tests.  The dominance of the party-state in China raises serious concerns around biotechnology, especially because it carries increasingly ethnonationalist tone. When in 2018 Chinese researchers created the world’s first primate clones, for example, they dubbed them Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, from the term zhonghua meaning “The Chinese Nation”—an oddly jingoistic moniker for a pair of monkeys. Chinese government policies often blur the line between eugenics and education, lumped together as improving the “quality” (suzhi) of the population, which received another stamp of official endorsement following the recent Fourth Plenum. These programs are carried out through the country’s huge so-called family planning bureaucracy—originally established to enforce the one-child policy.  Moreover, Beijing is increasingly extending its formidable social control apparatus into the realm of genetics. While there are considerable restrictions on private firms sharing biomedical data, largely because of an ugly history of popular discrimination against hepatitis carriers, the government has no such restrictions. A New York Times report earlier this year suggested, for example, that Chinese authorities had assembled a vast trove of genetic data on Chinese citizens without their consent, with the Uighur minority group having been specifically targeted.  Beijing’s brand of bio-nationalism also directly threatens the United States. U.S. officials have been warning universities and research institutions that the biotech sector is a focal point for Chinese industrial espionage activities in the United States. And this past August, a senior Defense Department official warned Congress that China’s growing role in pharmaceutical manufacturing could allow it to disrupt deliveries of critical battlefield medicines, or potentially even alter them to harm U.S. forces  Yet the biggest risks posed by biotech, for China, the United States, and other countries, pertain to nonstate actors. A critical feature of modern biotech, in contrast to technology like nuclear weapons, is that it’s cheap and easy to develop. A technique known as CRISPR, which the Chinese researcher He used in his illicit gene-editing work, makes it practical for just about anyone to manipulate the genomes of just about any organism they can lay their hands on. CRISPR makes it much simpler to skirt ethical restrictions and terrifyingly straightforward for terrorist groups to develop fearsome biological weapons.  Researchers have already shown it’s possible to reconstruct the smallpox virus, which was eradicated in the real world in the 1970s, for as little as $200,000 using DNA fragments you can order online. If a terrorist or rogue state were to successfully do so, virtually no one alive would have any resistance to the virus—and most stockpiles of the vaccine were destroyed long ago. There is an organization, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, that tries to screen suspicious orders for DNA fragments that might be used to build such bioweapons. And while most of the world’s major DNA synthesis firms belong to the consortium, membership is completely voluntary, and there’s also a thriving and entirely unregulated black market—much of it based in China.  All of this means that biosecurity standards in places like China matter more than ever. After all, if a major bioweapon were to be unleashed, it’s unlikely that any major, globally integrated country could escape unharmed. Fortunately, there are growing signs China is open to better regulation of its biotech sector. In February, the Chinese government announced that “high risk” biomedical research would be overseen by the State Council, China’s equivalent of the cabinet—a sign of the concern with which Beijing views incidents like the He Jiankui CRISPR scandal. In a further sign of this concern, in August, the Chinese Communist Party announced the creation of a new committee to advise top leaders on research ethics.  Government worry is matched by growing public concern within China. Opposition to genetically modified organisms is arguably stronger in China than in the West, and health concerns top the list of public issues. Rumors and panics largely center around health issues, especially after a series of vaccination scandals. That means that the government has to walk unusually carefully and offers plenty of scope to build ethical concerns into both law and practice.  There are plenty of issues for U.S.-China cooperation on biotechnology and biosecurity to address. Given China’s role in the He Jiankui scandal, meanwhile, it would make sense to partner with the United States and other countries as part of a new World Health Organization effort to set international guidelines for the use of CRISPR. Another promising area of U.S.-China cooperation, especially in the research community, relates to so-called gene drives, the process of editing genomes and then spreading them through an entire population in just a few generations. Using gene drives to prevent select mosquito species from reproducing, for example, might finally banish the world of debilitating, widespread diseases such as malaria and Zika, while endangered species might be engineered to survive climate change.  Microsoft founder Bill Gates once observed that “The world hasn’t had that many technologies that are both promising and dangerous. … We had nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.” But thanks in large part to the efforts of biomedical researchers in the United States and China, biotechnology is opening a similar Pandora’s box. And while the world has so far avoided nuclear war or conflict, it’s done so largely though efforts by governments, aided by the fact that nuclear technology is extremely difficult and expensive to master.  The new wave of synthetic biology is exactly the opposite: It’s cheap to use and employ. For that very reason, while the U.S., Chinese, and other governments will be critical to dealing with the threat of new technologies, the discussions can’t be limited to nation-states. They’ll also have to gather together individual researchers, institutions, companies, and organizations like the International Gene Synthesis Consortium. When it comes to the risks posed by emerging technologies, Beijing, like Washington, will have to face the limits of its ability to solve the problem on its own.