Laocoön and his Sons

https://www.corbettreport.com/ngo/

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In a strange analysis of a recent exchange between former assistant attorney general Barbara Babcock and a 33-year-old female lawyer during a forum on women in the law at the New York City Bar Association, Casey Chalk, a student at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Theology at Christendom College, covers religion for TAC — and makes a mess of it.

He tells us how Nietzsche’s will to power has led us astray:

Alternatively, the unquenchable thirst for power makes us less men and more beasts, casting us into unending competition that exhausts our bodies and progressively warps our minds and intellects back onto ourselves. We stack up awards, trophies, and accolades in a cult of self-worship that barely outlasts our existence on this planet. If we pursue families and children as an extension of this cult of vanity, they too will disappoint; when we then choose to ignore or leave them, the damage inflicted will ripple throughout kin and society.

If instead we interpret our careers not as sociological experiments for personal actualization, but as gifts and the means to grow in virtue, we create something that blesses our families and communities. We make our professions, like our families, opportunities for self-gift, where we willingly offer up a part of ourselves in service to something greater. Similarly, when we seek spouses and children “to love and to serve,” rather than to use for our own purposes, we contribute to a good that transcends us and brings us deeper contentment.

Furthermore, defining life as gift and self-gift rather than the appropriation of power allows us to perceive many social and political issues through a different lens. 

From Thomas Pfau

....

A philosophy whose claims remain strictly interior to the finitude of warranted assertability and procedural reason inevitably forecloses on the "incommunicable" (or non-transferable) reality of the individual person. For such enquiry is a fortiori only prepared to recognize and engage notions and propositions of its own devising, such that the personhood is construed in strictly formalterms - as the bearer of economic, political and human rights.

And yet, for these formal criteria even to be recognized as rationally meaningful and ethically binding, some antecedent, teleologically ordered view of the human person has to be presupposed. For to introduce an ensemble of "rights" or a deontological "ought" as the sole criterion of human personhood only furnishes us with a definition but not, alas, with a warrant such as would compel us to honour that definition in thought and practice.

Put differently, the very intelligibility and efficacy of sociological, political or legal definitions of the individual as a self-possessed, rights-bearing and happiness-seeking agent rests on an underlying normative view, an oblique consensus that this is indeed how personhood ought to be understood.

But again, as Spaemann notes, "with persons, esse is not the same as percipi," and "the recognition that a person is 'someone' is not reached by analogy" with object perception. For even "to acknowledge personal status is already to express respect" and, hence, to grasp in practice (rather than as a formal-logical syllogism) that "persons are beings that other persons speak to," rather than "things merely spoken of."

......

The so-called failure of personhood is not a failure at all - but, rather, a case of sin. Eliot's clerk sins against the imago dei not only of the typist but, just as plainly, also against his own. Read against the backdrop of Eliot's carefully embedded allusions to the rape of Philomela, the impersonal and dispiriting encounter here unfolded proves if anything more ghastly yet. For in modern urban, secular, and casually hedonistic culture, the violation of love and, thus, of the human person whose reality and flourishing essentially arise from it, has become the new normal.

This is what makes the scenes closing lines so particularly disturbing. With seismographic sensitivity, Eliot's writing registers the slightest tremors of spiritual anguish in the typist's "half-formed thought ... 'Well now that's done'." Even more poignant are the distracted and mechanical movements ("She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone") with which the nameless woman defends against the encroaching awareness of her person's violation and self-abasement.

At its strongest, this is what modern literature does: to capture the human person's grounding in the dynamics of recognition and love, if only ex negative by showing how the failure of achieving personhood is ultimately one of will, not nature. Needless to say, it is a proposition wholly at odds with modern Liberalism's essentially Pelagian understanding of self-legislating and self-contained human existence.

Thomas Pfau is Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English at Duke University, with secondary appointments in Germanic Language and Literatures and the Duke Divinity School. He is the author of Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge and Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/personhood-community-and-love/10287536

Gus:

Quite amazing, despite this quality of (it appears quite religious — "A number of modern philosophical developments - each of them notably diffident or outright hostile to theological reflection - have dramatically impoverished our conception of the human person." ) thinkers in the USA we end up with Donald DumbDumb leading the world and with Hillary-the-Warrior as a second fiddle...

To say the least, if you don't scratch your butt or throw yourself from a bridge after having read this essay, probably like me, you've not understood it...  Don't worry. It's better that way. Read from top. Gus is a fierce atheist who is "not shy about being strongly outright hostile to theological reflection".

What most modern philosophical developments, including sciences (that are environmentally observation-based, unlike economics, theology and politics) do is to actually understand the human condition from an animalistic viewpoint where reactivities become affected by stylistic inventions, including habits such as those of the theological reflection, which is not exclusive nor infintus.

And the "new normal" is never static and is multipli varied. Our persona evolves and devolves —while, by becoming omnibulated by the theological hubris, we often end up losing sight of our personal and global relationship with this little planet. Using the"new normal" expression here was glib and designed to be degrading to those who not participate in the theological hubris of the author — and this destroyed the entire (quite obscure) argument of the essay.

(published yesterday 23/9/18 — updated 24/9/18)

Scientists win historic Nobel chemistry prize for 'genetic scissors'

By Paul Rincon

Science editor, BBC News website

Two scientists have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA.

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are the first two women to share the prize, which honours their work on the technology of genome editing.

Their discovery, known as Crispr-Cas9 "genetic scissors", is a way of making specific and precise changes to the DNA contained in living cells.

They will split the prize money of 10 million krona (£861,200; $1,110,400).

Biological chemist Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, commented: "The ability to cut DNA where you want has revolutionised the life sciences."

Not only has the women's technology been transformative for basic research, it could also be used to treat inherited illnesses.

Prof Charpentier, from the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, said it was an emotional moment when she learned about the award.

"When it happens, you're very surprised, and you think it's not real. But obviously it's real," she said.

On being one of the first two women to share the prize, Prof Charpentier said: "I wish that this will provide a positive message specifically for young girls who would like to follow the path of science... and to show them that women in science can also have an impact with the research they are performing."

She continued: "This is not just for women, but we see a clear lack of interest in following a scientific path, which is very worrying."

During Prof Charpentier's studies of the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes, she discovered a previously unknown molecule called tracrRNA. Her work showed that tracrRNA is part of the organism's system of immune defence.

This system, known as Crispr-Cas, disarms viruses by cleaving their DNA - like genetic scissors.

In 2011, the same year she published this work, Prof Charpentier began a collaboration with Prof Doudna, from the University of California, Berkeley.

The two had been introduced by a colleague of Doudna's at a cafe in Puerto Rico, where the scientists were attending a conference. 

And it was on the following day, during a walk through the streets of the island's capital, San Juan, that Prof Charpentier proposed the idea of joining forces.

Together, they recreated the bacterium's genetic scissors in a test tube. They also simplified the scissors' molecular components so they were easier to use.

In their natural form, the bacterial scissors recognise DNA from viruses. But Charpentier and Doudna showed that they could be reprogrammed to cut any DNA molecule at a predetermined site, publishing their findings in a landmark 2012 paper. 

The breakthrough DNA snipping technology allowed the "code of life" to be rewritten. 

• UK approves embryo 'gene editing'
• First gene-editing in human body attempt

Since the two scientists discovered the Crispr-Cas9 genetic scissors, their use has exploded. The tool has contributed to many important discoveries in basic research; and, in medicine, clinical trials of new cancer therapies are underway. 

The technology also holds the promise of being able to treat or even cure inherited diseases. It is currently being investigated for its potential to treat sickle cell anaemia, a blood disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. 

But without regulation, some fear Crispr could equally be used to create "designer babies", opening up an ethical minefield. If genome-edited children grow up and have children, any alterations to their genomes could be passed down through the generations - introducing lasting changes to the human population.

Last year, Chinese scientist He Jiankui was jailed for three years after creating the world's first gene-edited human babies. He was convicted of violating a government ban by carrying out his own experiments on human embryos, to try to give them protection against HIV.

It had been thought a Nobel for this revolutionary science would not be awarded for many years because the technique is also the subject of a long-running patent battle in the US.

The dispute involves Charpentier and Doudna's group at the University of California, Berkeley, and a team at MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

The disagreement centres on the use of the Crispr technique in eukaryotic cells - those cells that bundle their DNA in a nucleus. It is in such cells, which are found in higher animals, that the most profitable future applications will exist.

The competing institutions claim their scientists made the crucial, most relevant advances.

Emmanuelle Charpentier was born in 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge, France. She obtained her PhD while at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and subsequently worked at scientific institutes in the US, Austria, Sweden and Germany - in addition to her native France.

Jennifer Doudna was born in 1964 in Washington DC but spent much of her childhood in Hilo, Hawaii. She was awarded her PhD by Harvard Medical School.

This year is the first time any of the science prizes has been awarded to two women without a male collaborator also listed on the award.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54432589

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A misunderstanding by Auguste Meyrat

Among the many other things that Covid-19 has brought out of people, none has been so widespread as the fear of sickness and death. When news of the virus broke out, whole populations immediately went into full lockdown, staying in their homes and stopping all work. Even after multiple vaccines and treatments have come out, a great number of people in the developed world are still cautious to the point of paralysis.

This hysteria continues, revealing a serious blind spot. Even though previous eras contended with much deadlier plagues, tyrannical governments, and periodic famines and wars, they did not exhibit such a strong aversion to death—to the point of society collectively shutting down. They lived their lives and took on risks, finding a way to accept and understand the inevitability of life’s end.

As others have already observed, so much of the change in attitude is tied to a loss of meaning. So many people today live lives utterly devoid of purpose outside of consuming goods and gaining social status. Even the solace of work and productivity is denied to them as more and more jobs are made redundant, inessential (as the lockdowns established), and disconnected from physical reality. All that is left to do is to play on the screen, watch the shadows on the cave wall, and aggressively ignore one’s own humanity.

Ironically, the novelists who tried to capture this emptiness didn’t do half so well as the novelist who found a way to somehow redeem the emptiness. Writers like Albert Camus and Franz Kafka told stories of dehumanized protagonists living out meaningless lives and meeting their deaths like dumb animals, but their novels more often seem like a copout from the human condition rather than realistic treatments. By contrast, in his novella The Death of Ivan Illych, Leo Tolstoy tells the story of a protagonist who tries to avoid the search for meaning only to be forcefully confronted with it as he dies a slow, painful death. It is far more realistic, and it illustrates deeper truths about the nature of humanity and its need for meaning.

The novella starts with Ilych’s funeral, as his ostensible friends and family appear to mourn his death. In reality, his wife laments the loss of income, his friends look forward to possible promotions resulting from his death, and even his children seem more confused than anything else. Few of the guests have memories of Ilych, and their sadness is contrived. Of Ilych’s friends, the narrator says, “Each one thought or felt, ‘Well, he’s dead but I’m alive!’”

...

A century and a half later, the greater part of society finds itself in this same existential predicament as Ilych. Today’s lifestyles deliver a pleasant life that somehow disconnects a person from the things that truly matter, alienating people from themselves and others. And, as Tolstoy warns, at some point every person will go through some kind of crisis that exposes this spiritual chasm and requires a response, regardless of how one feels about it.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an M.A. in humanities and an M.Ed. in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for the Federalist, the American Thinker, Crisis magazine, The American Conservative, and the Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/disease-and-purpose-in-ivan-ilyich/

Although Meyrat avoids mentioning god and religion in this article, one can smell the illusion of the almighty around the corner... The Everyman is a covert religious website...

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This is bullshit... To name just a few... Say Niels Bohr and many other SCIENTISTS were atheist and existentialist...

In their days "Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Brahe, Copernicus, Bacon, Ockham, Locke, Leibnitz, Aquinas, Augustine", did not have much choice "to show they believed" as RELIGIOUS BELIEFS EXCLUSIVELY CONTROLLED WHAT PEOPLE COULD DO. It was later discovered that Newton was a heretic... As far as Plato and Aristotle, my understanding is that they did not believe in a SINGULAR divinity, and other thinkers of their times did not believe in gods either... but this is not the point. 

The point is that sciences and religions are from different planet. 

"Today’s lifestyles deliver a pleasant life that somehow disconnects a person from the things that truly matter, alienating people from themselves and others."????

This would be universal bullshit. There are many people who manage life without being disconnected while enjoying the present lifestyles (whatever they are). Not all people are like Ivan Ilyich's family and friends. People like to share and are genuine in their friendships... They enjoy each other's company. Disease can place a dampener on such, but diseases and death are part of life.

So the beautiful friend we knew has died far too young. We went to her funeral a couple of weeks ago. The service was fully existential as she would have wished which we guessed she had organised — as she knew she was dying.... God did not get a look in, yet friends cried for never seeing her again... The meaning was our relative relationship and the moment we shared... as we remember and will remember her moments in our life. Cruel? 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!