freaktochic.com

Woody Allen Interviews Billy Graham

Good stuff, Allen was ahead of his time. Despite his personal eccentricity, he gets it. Insert Soon Yi joke here, but I promise you'll crack a smile.

Elton John On Christian Fundamentalists "Religion Promotes Hatred"

Here's a snippet frrom a conversation between The Scissor Sister's Jake Shears and Elton John, found on Huffpost, origianlly from The Guardian.

EJ: I think religion has always tried to turn hatred towards gay people. Religion promotes the hatred and spite against gays. But there are so many Christian people I know who are gay and love their religion ...

JS: My Mom's a Christian and she loves me; that whole side of my family is Christian and I have no problem with it. I just feel we need to stop worrying about pro-gay movements and start worrying about fundamentalist movements. It's not just about how gay people are treated - it's about how people are treated in general.

Read entire interview here.

technorati

here come the chimeras

Have you noticed lately how much the term consciousness comes up? Noted Futurist Watts Wacker told me in an interview that the brain, is to our generation, what the space program was to the 1960's. Sure enough brain books are selling like hotcakes. We're nutty over neurals, hallelujah to the hippocampus, it's time to dive into that grey matter.

In accordance with this new cerebral centric reality I present a disturbing new trend. Some deviant scientists down in Australia decided to see what would happen if they injected human brain cells into monkey fetuses.

In an article from News.com.au, Critics argue that if these fetuses are allowed to develop into self-aware subjects, science will be thrown into an ethical nightmare. An eminent committee of American scientists will call for restrictions into the research, saying the outcome of such studies cannot be predicted and may in fact produce subjects with a 'super-animal' intelligence.

The high-powered committee of animal behaviourists, lawyers, philosophers, bio-ethicists and neuro-scientists was established four years ago to examine the growing numbers of human/monkey experiments. 

These procedures, known as 'human-primate chimeras', involve the combination of human and monkey cells, tissue and DNA to observe any effect and examine the possibility that such combination could actually exist. Chimeras are mythical monsters from Greek literature, which combined various bodyparts from lions, goats and snakes.

This team will soon publish its conclusions in leading journal Science. In the report the committee will address such unsettling questions as whether introducing human cells into non-human primate brains could cause "significant physical or biochemical changes that make the brain more human-like" and how those changes could be detected.

The committee will also examine how detectable differences are in the monkey's brains, for example there may be emotional or behavioural changes, or if the monkeys developed 'self awareness', it could be measured - and dealt with.

Did you catch that? "AND DEALT WITH". Like it was a cold, or a pesky fungus. Oh that self awareness thing can be so annoying. I have a feeling CNN is going to start sounding a lot more like the Sci-Fi network in the next few years. In fact, just last month Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback, sponsored the “Human Chimera Prohibition Act of 2005” in the Senate. Stay tuned folks.