Historian Claims the Wealthy Will Transform Into “God-Like Cyborgs” Within 200 Years

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Photo Credit: Daily Mail By Ellie Zolfagharifard. The rich are set to become God-like cyborgs in what could be the ‘biggest evolution in biology’ since life emerged.

This is according to Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who believes the radical shift will take place in the next 200 years.

Using biotechnology and genetic engineering, Professor Harari claims the wealthy will transform into a new type of divine, immortal human with complete power over life and death.

He argues that humans are unable to resist the temptation to ‘upgrade’ themselves, according to a report by Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph . . .

‘I think it is likely in the next 200 years or so homo sapiens will upgrade themselves into some idea of a divine being, either through biological manipulation or genetic engineering of by the creation of cyborgs, part organic part non-organic. (Read more from “Historian Claims the Wealthy Will Transform Into a New Type of Human Within 200 Years” HERE)
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Weatlhy Americans “Feel Cornered and Threatened,” Building Safe Rooms for Security

By Matt Chaban. While serving as president of the New School, Bob Kerrey, the former United States senator, needed a residence befitting his station. The university moved him into a red brick Neo-Grec townhouse on West Fourth Street in Manhattan, which was previously owned by the actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

The $20,000-a-month rental had many grand spaces for entertaining, including Mr. Kerrey’s favorite, a rooftop terrace. Yet, its most unexpected amenity was quite private and secretive: a safe room.

“It looked like any old walk-in closet,” Mr. Kerrey said of the 8-feet-by-12-feet bulletproof space inside the third-floor master bedroom (a space the former Navy SEAL said he had little use for). “There was nothing about it that gave it away as anything but a place to hang your clothes.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Does Harvard Have a Secret History as a Major Force for Evil?

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Photo Credit: NY Post “Verita$” was a best seller in Korea, author Shin Eun-jung’s native country, because she asks the question that’s hardly ever asked: Why Harvard?

Eun-jung says the third word a Korean baby learns, after mom and dad, is “Harvard.” She argues that this is a tragedy, because Harvard isn’t the global intellectual powerhouse of reputation.

Now, there are plenty of criticisms of Harvard, though rarely the one Eun-jung levels: that Harvard swanned its way to dominance by maintaining a false front of liberalism when it is, in fact, an arm of the governing right.

“Verita$” recites a litany of bad acts: the Salem witch trials, eugenics, a so-called “collaboration” with Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, architects of financial collapse such as Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, McCarthyism, racism, sexism, tyrannical labor practices and “a poison called elitism” . . .

The institutional corruption stems from Harvard’s hungry endowment, Eun-jung says. The Harvard Corporation invests wisely if not well, for instance backing Enron then mysteriously cashing out before it tanked the energy markets. This black box of university finance, she says, shows Harvard is an undemocratic pawn of international corporate overlords. (Read more from “Does Harvard Have a Secret History as a Major Force for Evil?” HERE)

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Meth Addict Gouged out Eyes and Ate Them

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An ice addict in [an Australian] hospital emergency department gouged out his own eyeballs and ate them, a Federal Liberal MP has revealed.

The horrific story was revealed yesterday at an Ice Summit on the Central Coast organized by the Express Advocate to address the epidemic in the region.

Dobell Federal Liberal MP Karen McNamara relayed the story as she opened the summit before a packed auditorium this morning.

“There is nothing at all recreational about this drug,” Ms McNamara said . . .

A spokeswoman for Ms McNamara later said the incident occurred at John Hunter Hospital at Newcastle [Australia] and that she was in the room when the story was related to Ms McNamara by a frontline emergency services officer who wished to remain anonymous. (Read more from “Meth Addict Gouged out Eyes and Ate Them” HERE)

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11-Year-Old Graduating With 3 Degrees From U.S. College

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Photo Credit: Twitter An 11-year-old boy receiving three degrees became the youngest graduate at American River College this year, by far.

Tanishq Abraham graduated from high school at age 10, and now has his sights set on a medical degree. He told KCRA he wasn’t intimidated by taking classes with students twice his age.

“Even on the first time I came to a college class, I wasn’t really nervous, so, this isn’t much of a big thing to me,” Abraham said.

Abraham graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA, which didn’t come as a surprise to his mother.

“Even in kindergarten he was pretty ahead, two years ahead, and just went from there,” she said. (Read more from “11-Year-Old Graduating With 3 Degrees From American River College” HERE)

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Woman Found Pushing Dead Son in Swing at Park

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Photo Credit: WUSA9 A Maryland mother was found pushing her dead three-year-old child in a swing at a park Friday morning, according to the Charles County Sheriff’s Office.

Officers responded to Wills Memorial Park located at 500 St. Mary’s Avenue around 6:55 a.m. for the report of a woman who had been pushing a child in a swing for an unusually long period of time.

The 24-year-old mother and her son may have been at the park since the day before, officials said. When officers got to the park, they found the woman pushing the three-year-old in a swing at the playground. Officers noticed right away that the boy was dead. (Read more from “Woman Found Pushing Dead Son in Swing at Park” HERE)

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World’s Oldest Person to Turn 116

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The woman declared by gerontology experts to be the oldest person in the world is turning 116 Saturday.

Jeralean Talley was born in Montrose, Ga., on May 23, 1899. She’s been in Michigan since 1935. Relatives say she remains active and aware of what’s going on around her.

Talley was named world’s oldest person in April after the death of Gertrude Weaver,who passed away at the age of 116. Weaver died just five days after 117-year-old Misao Okawa died in Japan . . .

Talley has been consistent in her answer as to what she’s lived so long.

“It’s all in the good Lord’s hands,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about it.” (Read more from “World’s Oldest Person to Turn 116” HERE)

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MMA Fighter Captures, Hog-Ties Bank Robber [+video]

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Photo Credit: PCSOA bank robber in Pinellas County learned the hard way that crime never pays, when his attempted robbery was foiled by a local MMA instructor and business owner.

Eric Haritakis, nicknamed the ‘Ginja Ninja’ by friends for his red hair and swift moves, was at the Grow Financial Federal Credit Union on Friday to make a deposit for his health food delivery company, Zen Body Foods, when a man robbed one of the tellers. . .

Surveillance video from a neighboring UPS Store showed Haritakis sprinting after the suspect. Haritakis chased the man, later identified as 31-year-old Michael Jon Neubecker, around the side of the building.

FOX 13 News

“I don’t really know what I was thinking at that time. I just kind of went for it. I figured if he had a weapon, he probably would have pulled it out at that point,” Haritakis continued. . .

“I see the guy bringing a guy back with his hands behind his back and almost carrying him,” said Kristin Drexler, an employee at UPS. “I was just amazed at how down-to-earth [Haritakis] was. He was just so nonchalant about the fact that he just chased down a bank robber.” (Read more from “MMA Fighter Captures, Hog-Ties Bank Robber” HERE)

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Study: Video Games Increase Risk of Mental Illness

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Photo Credit: The Telegraph Millions of boys could be at increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other mental illnesses in later life through playing action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, according to new research.

Scientists say players navigate the screen using a key area of the brain called the caudate nucleus, which leads to loss of grey matter in the hippocampus.

Previous studies have shown reduced volume in the hippocampus, which controls memory, learning and emotion, is associated with neurological and psychological disorders including dementia and depression.

The Canadian team said if action gamers have less grey matter, as people who rely on the caudate nucleus normally do, then they may be more prone to mental illness.

In the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they tested 26 players and 33 non players who wore skull caps recording their brainwaves and eye movements as they negotiated a virtual maze decorated with trees and mountains from which they had to retrieve objects. (Read more from “Study: Video Games Increase Risk of Mental Illness” HERE)

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Creepy Ads Use Litterbugs’ DNA to Shame Them Publicly

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Photo Credit: Wired Next time you’re about to toss a cigarette butt on the ground, consider this freaky fact: It takes less than a nanogram (or less than one billionth of the mass of a penny) of your dried saliva for scientists to construct a digital portrait that bears an uncanny resemblance to your very own face. For proof look to Hong Kong, where a recent ad campaign takes advantage of phenotyping, the prediction of physical appearance based on bits of DNA, to publicly shame people who have littered.

If you walk around the city, you’ll notice portraits of people who look both scarily realistic and yet totally fake. These techno-futuristic most-wanted signs are the work of ad agency Ogilvy for nonprofit Hong Kong Cleanup, which is attempting to curb Hong Kong’s trash problem with the threat of high-tech scarlet lettering. It’s an awful lot like the Stranger Visions project from artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who used a similar technique a couple years back to construct sculptural faces as a way to provoke conversation around what we should be using these biological tools for.

In the case of Hong Kong’s Face Of Litter campaign, the creative team teamed up with Parabon Nanolabs, a company out of Virginia that has developed a method to construct digital portraits from small traces of DNA. Parabon began developing this technology more than five years ago in tandem with the Department of Defense, mostly to use as a tool in criminal investigations.

Parabon’s technique draws on the growing wealth of information we have about the human genome. By analyzing saliva or blood, the company is able to make an educated prediction of what you might look like. Most forensic work uses DNA to create a fingerprint, or a series of data points that will give a two-dimensional look at an individual that can be matched to pre-existing DNA samples. “We’re interested in using DNA as a blueprint,” explains Steven Armentrout, founder of Parabon. “We read the genetic code.” (Read more from “Creepy Ads Use Litterbugs’ DNA to Shame Them Publicly” HERE)

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Arms Control Advocates Rally to Prevent Development of Killer Robots

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6wOS4.AuSt.91The British aircraft manufacturer BAE Systems promotes its Taranis drone with a video that focuses on the dramatic: images of the swept-wing stealth aircraft flitting through the clouds, dramatic background music and thunder, men in chemical suits amid futuristic control rooms.

Its mission is multifaceted, the website claims: conducting sustained surveillance, marking targets, gathering intelligence, deterring adversaries and carrying out strikes in hostile territory.

And, the manufacturer notes, in large type: “Controlled by a human operator.” With a photo of the man who was at the controls as the stealth drone made its inaugural test flight.

In the world of high-tech robotics, the idea that a human operator would be considered a selling point seems anachronistic. But a growing movement of diplomats, arms control campaigners and international humanitarian law experts have begun pressing the United Nations to move now to ban what they fear is the next step in mankind’s pursuit of ways to destroy his fellow man: killer robots that can be programmed in advance to recognize a target, then pull the trigger on their own without any human intervention.

It wouldn’t take much, said Thomas Nash, director of the London-based advocacy group Article 36, to turn the next generation of Taranis aircraft into autonomous killers with the addition of some software. (Read more from “Arms Control Advocates Rally to Prevent Development of Killer Robots” HERE)

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