As the Western media and governments continue poking fun and demonizing a very misunderstood country, there are a group of people who are taking it upon themselves in ignoring the propaganda and instead reaching out with compassion and understanding. These people are visiting and working in North Korea. They’re not North Koreans, but the love and connection they’ve gained with the North Korean people is real and deserve to have their stories told.

DMZ Northern Commander and former American commander, Michael Bassett, hug during the April 2013 Period of Brinksmanship. (Photo credit Joseph Ferris)

I’ve interviewed a few people of importance in gaining greater insight into the country, its people, its military, and its government. It is my goal in providing an open venue for them to speak out and hopefully gain enough attention for others to follow suit.

Here I’ve interviewed Michael Bassett and Felix Abt. Mr. Bassett is a decorated Army Veteran who holds a BA in International Communication from the American University in Washington DC, a graduate certificate in North Korean Affairs from Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, South Korea, and is currently working on his MA in Public Diplomacy from the American University.

Continue reading “Ruling the Rhetoric on North Korea: A Pedagogical Perspective” »

Containing more than 160 essays from over 40 contributors, this edited volume of essays on the science, philosophy and politics of longevity considers the project of ending aging and abolishing involuntary death-by-disease from a variety of viewpoints: scientific, technological, philosophical, pragmatic, artistic. In it you will find not only information on the ways in which science and medicine are bringing about the potential to reverse aging and defeat death within many of our own lifetimes, as well as the ways that you can increase your own longevity today in order to be there for tomorrow’s promise, but also a glimpse at the art, philosophy and politics of longevity as well – areas that will become increasingly important as we realize that advocacy, lobbying and activism can play as large a part in the hastening of progress in indefinite lifespans as science and technology can.

The collection is edited by Franco Cortese. Its contributing authors include William H. Andrews, Ph.D., Rachel Armstrong, Ph.D., Jonathan Betchtel, Yaniv Chen, Clyde DeSouza, Freija van Diujne, Ph.D., John Ellis, Ph.D., Linda Gamble, Roen Horn, the International Longevity Alliance (ILA), Zoltan Istvan, David Kekich (President & C.E.O of Maximum Life Foundation), Randal A. Koene, Ph.D., Maria Konovalenko, M.Sc. (Program Coordinator for the Science for Life Extension Foundation), Marios Kyriazis, MD, M.Sc MIBiol, CBiol (Founder of the ELPIs Foundation for Indefinite Lifespans and the medical advisor for the British Longevity Society), John R. Leonard (Director of Japan Longevity Alliance), Alex Lightman, Movement for Indefinite Life Extension (MILE), Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., Tom Mooney (Executive Director of the Coalition to Extend Life), Max More, Ph.D. , B.J. Murphy, Joern Pallensen, Dick Pelletier, Hank Pellissier (Founder of Brighter Brains Institute), Giulio Prisco, Marc Ransford, Jameson Rohrer, Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D., MBA, JD., Peter Rothman (editor-in-chief of H+ Magazine), Giovanni Santostasi, Ph.D (Director of Immortal Life Magazine, Eric Schulke, Jason Silva , R.U. Sirius, Ilia Stambler, Ph.D (activist at the International Longevity Alliance), G. Stolyarov II (editor-in-chief of The Rational Argumentator), Winslow Strong, Jason Sussberg, Violetta Karkucinska, David Westmorland, Peter Wicks, Ph.D, and Jason Xu (director of Longevity Party China and Longevity Party Taiwan).

Available on Amazon today!

Leadership at the next level

By Kenneth Mikkelsen, Mannaz

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National currencies

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The imposition of compositional structure within the craft of writing was recently pointed out to me. As students we are told repeatedly to open, elaborate and conclude a writing work. This carries on into so-called professional life. Indeed the questions that arise during the course of any given writing work are outside the scope of the work itself, the material of the work deals with facts and recommendations, which are based on our conclusions. To end a piece of professional or student work without conclusions and with questions would be seen as a lack of seriousness. We believe time invested into investigation is only worthy if we emerge with answers. And the answers we are to have begin with our original questions and are influenced by the way we approach the questions. And yet we approach the questions knowing they will need to be answered and so our opening approach is very limited. We not only formulate opening questions we feel we will have a good chance of answering, but our entire attention during the duration of looking at the question is focused on finding an answer. So where is the originality then in our thought? And where is the opportunity to explore the limitations of thought itself as it is applied to the complexity and urgency of matters in the world? If my opening point of inquiry is designed to be something I know I can find an answer for, then certainly I have no opportunity to go beyond what I know to address it, not really, and so there is nothing new. And if I begin a problem knowing I will be judged on finding an answer for that problem then I will necessarily limit or eliminate any point of fact or inquiry that takes me from that task. The generally accepted process and presentation of writing today is linear and monolithic in an academic and professional context. We talk about complexity and interrelatedness but we judge, evaluate and reward a written approach to that complexity and interrelatedness according to how well it fits into what we already know and according to the standards we have already found to be acceptable. Because we are bound to our knowledge and our processes of merit through training, repetition, various forms of aggrandizement and institutional awareness, however subtle or overt, we disregard or penalize information and modalities that fall outside our realm of knowing. Therein, the places we go to fulfill our knowing may expand (geographically or otherwise) but the way we approach and arrive at knowing remains the same. Although some may develop original technical innovations, those technical innovations will be used as tools to serve the knowledge system that is already established within any given realm of inquiry.

Our assumptions and biases about knowledge creation are interwoven with our experiences, our interpretations of those experiences, and our identification with the experiences and interpretations. Patterns emerge and we craft a self through the mosaic and soon that mosaic can stand in for our self. When that mosaic of experience and interpretation is cultivated through authority and the authority of our own experience and sense of self, we will extend our sense of authority into the realm of that which we already know. In this we are setting up a subtle preoccupation with what we know and with the familiar way we arrive at knowledge while simultaneously we derive a prejudice against what we do not know and also any unknown means to cultivate the known.

For example, pretend I am a teacher with a PhD, many people have applauded my research and I publish books, give famous lectures and have tenure at a prestigious school. I feel confident in my work and consider myself to be an authority in my field. A student comes along who does not know me and takes my class for the first time. She questions my logic and says my class is a bore. She tells me my exams do not test her knowledge of the subject but instead test her ability to repeat my version of the subject. She writes a paper calling into doubt the major premises of my field, to which I have contributed the most popularly followed lines of inquiry and she proposes an entirely new approach to the field and ends her paper with grand questions about the nature of intellectual thought. How do I approach this? In a typical situation I would question the student’s credibility as a student. I would consider her farfetched and someone who is incapable of understanding the subject matter. I would have trouble finding a way to give her a passing course score. She would be a problem to fix or to solve or to ignore. Never would I consider that perhaps she had a point. Why? I assumed the ascendency of my own knowledge based on my own sense of authority. Because the student operated outside my realm of knowledge and outside my sense of appropriateness in the acquisition of knowledge, I decided she was wrong. Invisible to me are my own assumptions of authority, including my assumption that authority has validity. Even though I have a wide set of experiences related to a branch of knowledge I am unable to see that those experiences are necessarily limited because I have only had a certain set of them, no matter how vaunted, and that knowledge itself is limited because it is always about what is already known. So I approach my student as if she is a problem instead of approaching her as a person with insight that may also be valid and should be explored. If we use something that is already known to approach what is new, how can we really approach it? The new will consistently be framed according to its relationship or lack of relationship with what has been established. And as has already been stated, what has been established is where authority has been placed, including our reverence for all the things we have already authorized.

Many of us operate in this field of inquiry, discovery and selfhood and it is apparent when we review our written forays into the realms of global problem solving discourse. So often we conclude. So often we have answers and set approaches to solving problems. So often we solicit recommendations for action. But rarely do we ponder over, except that which we have relegated to philosophy. In the realms of activity (politics, business, economics, education, health, environment, etc.) we theorize action, take action or meet to form a new activity. We say events and circumstances are too urgent to stop for too much thought, but in our haste, our actions themselves lead to further reasons to have to meet again to reorient ourselves. Our writing becomes a part of this process. We write in order to validate our next action and we guide that writing according to what we think that action should be. We rarely write to discover the appropriate terms upon which our action should be based. We rarely question the terms upon which our previous action has been based. We rarely inquire into our standards, we just try to find novel ways to meet them.

Continue reading “There Is No Need For An End” »

Immortal Life has complied an edited volume of essays, arguments, and debates about Immortalism titled Human Destiny is to Eliminate Death from many esteemed ImmortalLife.info Authors (a good number of whom are also Lifeboat Foundation Advisory Board members as well), such as Martine Rothblatt (Ph.D, MBA, J.D.), Marios Kyriazis (MD, MS.c, MI.Biol, C.Biol.), Maria Konovalenko (M.Sc.), Mike Perry (Ph.D), Dick Pelletier, Khannea Suntzu, David Kekich (Founder & CEO of MaxLife Foundation), Hank Pellissier (Founder of Immortal Life), Eric Schulke & Franco Cortese (the previous Managing Directors of Immortal Life), Gennady Stolyarov II, Jason Xu (Director of Longevity Party China and Longevity Party Taiwan), Teresa Belcher, Joern Pallensen and more. The anthology was edited by Immortal Life Founder & Senior Editor, Hank Pellissier.

This one-of-a-kind collection features ten debates that originated at ImmortalLife.info, plus 36 articles, essays and diatribes by many of IL’s contributors, on topics from nutrition to mind-filing, from teleomeres to “Deathism”, from libertarian life-extending suggestions to religion’s role in RLE to immortalism as a human rights issue.

The book is illustrated with famous paintings on the subject of aging and death, by artists such as Goya, Picasso, Cezanne, Dali, and numerous others.

The book was designed by Wendy Stolyarov; edited by Hank Pellissier; published by the Center for Transhumanity. This edited volume is the first in a series of quarterly anthologies planned by Immortal Life

Continue reading “Human Destiny is to Eliminate Death — Essays, Rants & Arguments on Immortalism (Edited Volume)” »

Just five years ago, anybody who spoke of technological unemployment was labeled a luddite, a techno-utopian, or just simply someone who doesn’t understand economics. Today things are very different – anybody from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman to CBS are jumping on the bandwagon.

We have come to believe that we are dependent on governments and corporations for everything, and now that technology is ever more pervasive, our dependence on them is even stronger. And of course we don’t question the cycle of labor-for-income, income-for-survival and the conspicuous consumption model that has become dominant in virtually every country – and that not only is ecologically unsustainable, but it also generates immense income inequality.

Well, I do. I challenge the assumption that we should live to work, and even that we should work to live, for that matter. In an age where we already produce more than enough food, energy, and drinkable water for 7 billion people with little to no human labour, while 780 million lack access to clean water and 860 million are suffering from chronic hunger, it follows that the system we have in place isn’t allocating resources efficiently. And rather than going back to outdated ideologies (i.e. socialism), we can try new forms of societal structure; starting with open source philosophy, shared knowledge, self-reliance, and sustainable communities.

There are many transitional steps that we can take – reduced workweek, reform patent and copyright laws, switch to distributed and renewable energies – and there will be bumps along the road, no doubt. But if we move in the right direction, if we are ready to abandon ideologies and stick to whatever works best, I think we will prevail – simply because we will realise that there is no war other than the one we are fighting with ourselves.

There is a real power in the act of physically moving. In so doing, each and every morning I can escape the cacophonous curse of the ubiquitous ESPN in the gym locker room. I toss my bag in my locker and immediately escape to the pure, perfect, custom designed peace of my iPod’s audio world. I also well remember the glorious day I moved away from the hopelessness of my roommate’s awful sub-human, sub-slum stench and into my own private apartment. The universe changed miraculously overnight. I think you can get my drift. The simple act of moving itself can be powerfully transformational. Sometimes, there is not enough bleach and not enough distance between the walls to have the desired effect. Physically moving is quite often the only answer.

As we consider transhumanist societies, such transitional power is certainly the result by many magnitudes. My team has been engaged in developing the first permanent human undersea settlement over the past few decades. In this process we have had the distinct advantage of planning profoundly transhumanist advances specifically because of the advantageous context of relative community isolation. Further we have the benefit of deriving change as a community necessity — as a psychological and cultural imperative for this degree of advanced cultural evolution. It is a real kind of powerfully driven societal punctuated equilibrium that can be realized in few other ways.

In moving into the oceans, the submarine environment itself immediately establishes the boundary between the new, evolving culture and the old. While the effect and actual meaning of this boundary is almost always overrated, it is nonetheless a real boundary layer that allows the new culture to flourish sans the interferences or contamination from the old. Trying to accomplish transhumanist goals while culturally embedded is far more difficult and far less persuasive to those who must undergo dramatic change and for the transformation to actually take hold and survive generationally. But in a new, rather isolated environment, the pressure to evolve and integrate permanent change is not only easier, it is rather expected as a part of the reasonable process of establishment.

Continue reading “The Power of the Move Outbound” »