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    WHO SHALL LIVE

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      Is there a moral principle that speaks to ignoring the justice of a situation on the grounds that by doing so we maximize the survival of the fittest?     The attached article provides a realistic view of what doctors are up against, if there is a shortage of ventilators. I would hope that as part of the hospital administration assembled to handle these difficult decisions that in addition to doctors, there will be social workers, psychologists, and clergy to palliate and mitigate the shock families will experience upon knowing that their loved ones are being sacrificed for th..
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    Technology and Ethics

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    I just read Chapter 1: “Life and the Law in the Era of Data-Driven Agency,” Edited by Mireille Hildebrandt and Kieron O’Hara, which provides a fresh set of viewpoints to be consider in the current sweep of technology and its impact on, above all things, individual autonomy. https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788971997/9781788971997.xml?fbclid=IwAR32EbOIZAzoX8uydleHDHBrZ-s-dONe9qLxhBhfOz9ODny05EbyheLYqek..
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    DARPA wants to train military robots with your brain waves

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    Dr. James Giordano, one of our speakers scheduled for this April was to speak about neurobioethics, which touches on this technology. His appearance was postponed into fall 2020, due to COVID-19 pandemic). https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/brain-training-future-swarm-robot-armies/?fbclid=IwAR1A49pJqm99tI01D4muka4TgNmEN0zYtwxugsSco3uCUm5IHxMSeM4n0go..
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    Our Best Values Must Guide Our Most Powerful Technologies

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      We need to draw attention to the need for national and international policies to regulate initiatives that stand to alter the human genome. This doesn't necessarily mean banning or restricting science, especially medical science, but that activities touching especially germline alterations should be subjected to public discourse, before commercial interests run roughshod over the sanctity of what belongs to the collective "we," the anatomical integrity of the human species. http://churchandstate.org.uk/2020/02/our-best-values-must-guide-our-most-powerful-technologies/?fbclid=IwAR1Jugdf3..
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    SELF-ABSORPTION

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    Eight-hundred-thousand miles ago, hurled at sixty-seven-thousand miles per hour, twelve hours from now, my planet-spinning, perpetual twelve-thousand mile curve takes me into the next sunrise. But, Spaceship Earth has changed me more than my sidereal timekeeper or distance metric belies. Every second of every day, I head into a technological abyss at warp speed making it impossible to know where to steer what brought me here--what we call our humanity. We stand at the cusp of an evolutionary departure from the modern human, because of an onslaught of fossil fuel technology, artificial intellig..
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    AI TRANSLATION OF THOUGHTS- AN ENCODER–DECODER FRAMEWORK

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    The next generation, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), such as nano-sized robotic-motors will course through arteries for drug delivery, and eventually to provide a direct connection from the brain to the Internet. These devices will range in size from 10-9 meters (a few hundred atoms across) to 10-5 meters or the diameter of a white blood cell. The extent science and engineering realize this ambitious undertaking remains uncertain, especially the magnitude of improving computer-generated intelligence, i.e., information communicated to the brain, not intercepted by the human senses of sig..
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    Bizarre Ford Patent Lets You Filter Rideshare Cars by Smell

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    https://futurism.com/the-byte/bizarre-ford-patent-filter-rideshare-cars-smell?fbclid=IwAR0-ra8CbTrwQF8Eq4u-6vfaxZI_XbQDq2syP9uUBUGU44SjioCdvjGM-ps  ..
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    THE 47th STATE PANACEA OR PERVERSION

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    C.S. Lewis warned about our final mastery over nature, and the inevitable drift into a future world where knowledge about the old world completely vanishes, where what once was, irretrievably transforms into something else. My latest article on genetic modification was just published. We have the technology to potentially add a 47th chromosome, but the implications are enormously consequential. http://churchandstate.org.uk/2020/04/the-47th-state-panacea-or-perversion/    ..
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    REGULATORY CONSIDERATION FOR LOCATION BASED IDENTIFICATION

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    We may be entering a period where smartphones may be used to verify and track those immune to COVID-19. Read this thorough analysis, by 3 of the world's leading authorities on issues that need consideration, before proceeding, lest we stumble into problems we had no appreciation for. http://www.katinamichael.com/research/2014/1/1/the-regulatory-considerations-and-ethical-dilemmas-of-location-based-services-lbs  ..
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    The regulatory considerations and ethical dilemmas of location-based services (LBS) : A literature review

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      We may be entering a period where smartphones may be used to verify and track those immune to COVID-19. Read this thorough analysis, by 3 of the world's leading authorities on issues that need consideration, before proceeding, lest we stumble into problems we had no appreciation for. http://www.katinamichael.com/…/the-regulatory-consideration…..
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    Remember the Heroes

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    As I write today sheltered in place, out there somewhere nurses, doctors, and medical attendants are working around the clock at their peril ministering to those caught up in a contagion that’s spreading around the world.     I’m reminded of someone, who in 1952 quit her job, operating a 25,000 pound punch-press at the one of the grease filled factories that framed my hometown, for one that exposed her to another sort of peril—nursing.     It was a time when medicine had yet to halt deadly diseases like polio or tuberculosis. In our town those with contagious disease, menin..
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    The Ides of March

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      It’s March 15 and the Ides of March are upon us. It marks the Roman deadline for settling debts of all stripes, one which in 44 BCE became notorious, when Julius Caesar was assassinated, thus turning the world in another direction. On this day, I’m wondering if the world is at another turning point. If so how can I tell? And if it’s a turning point, in what direction should I be looking?     For decades I’ve been fascinated with why people come to believe in things. I’ve written about it, taught courses, and sweated out many decisions before more than one jury or judge over a..
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    CONSERVING HUMANITY at the DAWN OF POSTHUMAN TECHNOLOGY

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        Carvalko examines the latest scientific and technological developments likely to shape our post-human future. Using a multidisciplinary approach he details the latest gene engineering technologies that will lead to increases in human intellect and artificial intelligence that will augment the powers of the human mind. He argues that we stand at the precipice of an evolutionary change caused by genetic engineering and anatomically embedded digital and informational technologies. Delving into current scientific initiatives he posits the emergence of super smart individuals with uni..
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    My Trip thru the Art World

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    THE PRINTS MOUNTED IN THE GALLERY     I solved the mystery of where four photos I’d taken in 1969 traveled over the last 50 years. The photos were of white blood cells. What made them special were that the cells were dosed with a radioactive tracer, which under a scanning microscope, with monochromatic light, were among the first to be seen as contourograph displays, giving them a 3-D quality. All right, so much for what they were. Following the experiment, a colleague and I published an article in a scientific journal with the black and white photos. The pictures were then copied (w..
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    HOW DEEP IS THE OCEAN

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    [audio wav="http://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/HOWDEEPISTHEOCEAN01052020WAVE.wav"][/audio] Overlapping, crisscrossing, waves un-stilled. Roiled! Who kept track, Who kept time, One, two, each second, low, soothing, Lives lived in seconds, Seventy years, eighty years Who kept track, Undulating, crests, peaks, valleys, ups, downs, Joy, ecstasy, heartache, heartbreak, we attacked, life, Every second, Full-bodied, Our hot insides, unfathomably deep, ceaseless repetition, Lapping the shore, Ripples that hardly turned a grain of sand, Now, Out there, the future, stilled...
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    I CLOSE HER EYES

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    I CLOSE HER EYES fires stormed the endless earth spinning us beginnings, no end — a dearth of light, no dark, down, no up, a child cries, no child — weightlessness memory, stark whiteness, the iron-framed bed, all's been said, I close her eyes . . . [audio wav="http://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/ICLOSEMYEYES107sp.wav"][/audio]..
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    FINISHING SCHOOL-learning the order of things

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    The peasant, or mechanic, imbibed the useful prejudice that he was advanced to the more dignified profession of arms, in which his rank and reputation would depend on his own valor; and that, although the prowess of a private soldier must often escape the notice of fame, his own behaviour might sometimes confer glory or disgrace on the company, the legion, or even the army, to whose honours he was associated. On his first entrance into the service, an oath was administered to him with every circumstance of solemnity. He promised never to desert his standard, to submit his own will to the comma..
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    A FAIRY TALE- Gulliver Updated

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    At first, the Lilliputians are hospitable to Trump. They are a people who revel in displays of authority and performances of power. Republican senators seem especially so impressed, but are also wary of the threat that his size poses to them. The Lilliputians reveal themselves to be a people who put great emphasis on trivial matters. For example, which end of an egg a person cracks becomes the basis of a deep political rift within that nation, some states turn from red to blue.   But as much as they trifle on the inane, Lilliputians easily ignore that Russia, the nations mortal enemy, act..
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    John F. Kennedy-62 years ago

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    Fifty-six years ago, this weekend, we repeatedly crossed and traveled over a Dallas route with a presidential motorcade that showed President John F. Kennedy’s head unnaturally convulse forward and then jerk backward as slugs from a “lone gunman’s” rifle recoiled to change our lives and the course of world politics with less than a few grains of gun powder. Kennedy died at the Parkman Hospital in Dallas, November 22, 1963. The episode seared itself into our bones. Commissions would convene to investigate, research, marshal facts, debate, hypothesize and never satisfy many of us as to what happ..
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    SEVERING OF THE SPECIES

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    Severing of the Species Implications of Genetic Editing and Artificial Intelligence on the human substrate[1]   Joseph R. Carvalko, Jr. Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale University New Haven, Connecticut, USA carvalko@sbcglobal.net         Abstract—This paper reports on the confluence of current data gathering such as genomic-wide association studies,  related to the heritability and manipulation of traits, and bioengineered processors, which combined have the potential to influence the further development of our species. Specifically addressed are: genetic..
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    PARADOX OF HOPE

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        The bounty of affluence trickles to wet the lips of the have-nots while we applaud ourselves for our generous contemplation, tightly held in clenched white knuckled fists that protect the tokens of our prosperity, that grant fortune to the fortunate upper, that let drip the fluid remains to the tolerated middle, that deposits the soft dung for the bottomed masses who persevere on a desolate patch on a parched plain in the center of an Eden despoiled by the gluttonous interests of despots, politicians, and the high priests of industry whose blindness protects them from their ugly satisfacti..
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    THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU

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    At times the future seemed long in coming, but looking back life passed so fast. If you didn't grab hold, you missed it. I can’t count the times you passed through my mind—What would Bobby think? Mostly when I looked at nature. Maybe because nature embodied freedom, and freedom embodied you.  I regret not going all in, but looking back I tried to stay upright, maintain some kind of balance or perhaps peace. Or because it terrified me to let go. In any case, it makes no sense to think about “what ifs,” if for no other reason than because it takes away from looking ahead.  I do have another regr..
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    WINDOWLESS

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    IMPEACHMENTS bring back memories that I'd long shelved for good reason. Oh, not the reason you may think, i.e., living vicariously through the excising of an affront to our collective sense of how public officials should behave. Although, there is a vicarious part, because, during the Nixon hearing  the summer of 1974, I was taking my first constitutional law class and obsessed with the hearings--, to the degree that I set my cassette tape recorder in front of the radio each morning, making sure I didn't miss a verbal moment. As fate would have it, eight years later, I became friends and partn..
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    21,900 DAYS AGO

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    On this day, 21,900 days ago, a train took a young man in search of his himself, a journey beginning on a rainy and cold October morning on the same planked platform that took his father to war fifteen years earlier. He boarded the train and sat looking out over the small crowd gathered on the platform. He saw the tears glistening in his mother’s eyes. The train jerked forward and then settled into a low,  steady crawl out of the station then crossed a long black trestle that paralleled the Washington Avenue Bridge a few hundred feet to the north. The bridge spanned the oily Pequonoch River co..
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    SEPTEMBER BRINGS ME BACK TO JUNE

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    It was the summer of 1959, I’d just finished my junior year at Central High and needed a job. My uncle Louie, through a family connection found me a job working as a short order cook for Tony Castagnolas, a druggist on the other side of town. I actually had met Tony years earlier, when my old man and I built a wall around his house in the ritzy section of town. Tony was primo to Capo Joe Castagnolas, who lived in the Hollow, the Italian enclave our family was from. In fact Joe’s wife was comadre to my aunt Maggie. While working at the store, from time to time I’d see Tony’s daughter sashay in...
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    Chocolate Martini Novel by Valerie Lee

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    Chapter 1 - Continued   Ensconced in the back seat Malone deposited headphones on her ears and grooved to the euphonic sounds of Deep Forest.    As the car made the voyage downtown, the colors and classes of New York flashed by and everyone, regardless of pigment seemed to morph into each other like a small wave gathering momentum until it was a huge crashing crest of humanity.   Before she knew it, the car pulled to a stop on Greenwich Street in front of The Muffin Spot. A Sistah the color of cashew nuts with ground paprika undertones, sporting starter locks, sat at a table by the window..
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    SHOW SOME HEART

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    [audio mp3="http://carvalko.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/001_FOLDER01_001_Joe_19080815_2019_08_08_19080815.mp3"][/audio] "Government please show some heart, let my parent be free and everyone else."..
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    IN MEMORY OF BILLY BOY

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    My father Billy, whose father was Billy, named me Billy, like America ain’t enough awash in Billy: Joel, Graham, Bob Thornton. But I’m not just any Billy. I’m “Billy,” keyboard drifter, 57th Street, Central Avenue, Route 66, flophouses, roadhouses, whorehouses, the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino along a Las Vegas strip (old town). Now a gray-haired man and his piano, fakebooks for the exotic one-act dancers, the Saturday night comedian at Billy’s Castle, bar rooms, dives and beer halls, no longer playin’ the moneyed high society ballrooms for phony smiles, movers, shakers layin' an oily sheen o..
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    A PORTRAIT OF MELA SUSÉ

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    It’s not the easel red-faced posing bare, It’s the brushes that keep me from daubing A palette of magentas and iridescent blues,   It’s not the swirl and eddy of your contours, It’s that brushes have no bristles to tell The legends scrolled across your brow,   It’s not the blackness of your Native hair, It’s the yellow days the sun reflected off Each strand, the nights caught in hard-bitten rain,   It’s not the chocolate of your Castilian eyes, It’s the wistful tears shed for the poet’s lines, For the pain they have soaked in,   It’s not the redness of your Grecian lips, It..
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    PEPPERMINT LOUNGE-1969

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    I met Clove for the first and last time at the Peppermint Lounge, outside Biloxi, Mississippi. It was a Sunday night. Over a few whiskies she'd told me  she was widowed, living with her grandmother.  She was full Choctaw-- high cheekbones, raven black hair and deep-set brown eyes. She stood at about my height, 5’10” or so, but unlike me, had an hour glass shape. She told me about life up on the “res” in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where she grew up. Two years earlier her husband’s bomb wing had been deployed to U Tapao, Airfield in Thailand, to conduct sorties over North Vietnam.  She'd gone..
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