Category Archives: Cryonics

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TORONTO -- Entertainment One Films International has grabbed the international sales rights to director Errol Morris dark comedy Freezing People Is Easy.

Toronto-based Entertainment One acquired the worldwide rights in all media, excluding North America, to the Oscar-winning documentary maker's film starring Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson and Kristen Wiig.

The Canadian distributor will launch the project in Cannes.

Inspired by the Bob Nelson memoir We Froze the First Man and an episode of This American Life, Freezing People portrays the true story a Los Angeles TV repairman (Rudd) who attempts to pioneer the field of life-extension through a new technology called cryonics.

Zach Helm (Stranger Than Fiction) wrote the screenplay.

The film is produced by Steven Zaillian and Garrett Basch at Film Rites, along with This American Lifes Ira Glass and Alissa Shipp.

The distribution deal was negotiated by Charlotte Mickie and Christina Kubacki for eOne Films International and WME Global.

WME Global and UTA are co-repping North American rights to the film.

Excerpt from:
Entertainment One Takes World Rights to 'Freezing People Is Easy'

This interview first appeared in The Browser, as part of the FiveBooks series. Previous contributors include Paul Krugman, Woody Allen and Ian McEwan. For a daily selection of new article suggestions and FiveBooks interviews, check out The Browser or follow @TheBrowser on Twitter.

American law scholar Kenneth Mack discusses the warring ideals of egalitarianism and exclusion at the heart of U.S. politics and law, from the founding of the nation up to the present day.

Our topic, race and the law, sounds simple but becomes kaleidoscopic as soon as you look into it. The role of the law in the construction of race and the role of race in the construction of law are just the first two broad areas of exploration that pop to mind. So, please orient us by expressing your view of the relationship between race and the law.

In the United States, scholarship on race and the law is inevitably tied to the history of the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement reoriented American law through landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education, which interpreted the equal protection clause of the Constitution to bar segregation, and through the 1960s-era civil rights acts, which prohibited many types of discrimination in public and private life.

Scholarship on race and the law originally explored two questions that emerged from the civil rights movement. First: Did basic United States law our written constitution, which was significantly amended after the Civil War establish a racial hierarchy? Second: How did basic constitutional, statutory and judge-made law help undo racial hierarchy? A generation of legal scholars, political scientists and historians, engaged with these questions. Now, however, weve moved on to some slightly different ones, as is reflected in some of my five book choices.

You examine the topic of race and the law in your collective biography of civil rights lawyers, Representing the Race. Please tell us about the book.

Traditional civil rights history and traditional race and the law scholarship tends to focus on struggles and social movements. My book tells the untold story of the men and women who played a crucial role in changing the United States from a nation that denied basic citizenship rights based on race into a nation that promotes racial equality as one of its core principles. The story of Brown v. Board of Education, and of the mostly black team of lawyers who helped establish that separate was not equal, is a story that Americans believe that they know but they dont.

Ive put a decade-plus of research into excavating the worlds of the men and women who helped establish the modern American ideal of racial equality. Famous lawyers, like future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, as well as lawyers most readers wont know. Take Marshall, for instance. When he stepped into a rural southern courtroom as chief lawyer of the NAACP, people didnt know how to treat him. Should they treat him like any other black person as a social inferior, with violence and perhaps lynching in store if he transgressed local racial mores? Or should they treat him like any other lawyer like a white man? A similar set of tensions about identity manifested themselves in the lives of other lawyers.

Representing the Race is about the paradoxical nature of the demand that was continually made of these lawyers. Both blacks and whites demanded that they be representative of their race resemble them and act like them but at the same time that they be unlike their race, able to speak to the white community and navigate institutions of power. Its a demand that is still made of prominent African Americans as different from one another as Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama.

What did you learn about the relationship between race and the law by writing it?

Read more:
The color-blind scales of justice?

Will it be possible to live forever? Is there such a thing as the soul, or immortality in ones legacy? Stephen Cave, the author of the new book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, explores the eternal questions, from elixirs of life to modern-day cryonics.

Why do we have this compelling, addictive interest in the idea of living forever?

Its a human universal. Among all of the animals, we probably uniquely are aware that were going to die. We try to avoid the worst, to keep going one way or another, yet we must live in the knowledge that it is futile that ultimately, the worst thing that can possibly happen will happen. That all our projects and all our dreams everything were striving for one day it will all be over. And this is terrifying. So we are very keen to hear any story that can allay this fear and say death isnt what it seems, and we can just keep on going indefinitely.

In your book Immortality, just out, you identify four paths to that goal. Will you take us through them?

These four paths are, I think, the only ways in which we can imagine living forever. They have a logical relationship that takes us from one to the next. The first one is simply living on, in this body and on this earth. That might seem a rather implausible idea initially, given the success rate of it during history, but almost every culture dreams of this in one way or another whether through an elixir of life or biotech.

If we think that isnt likely to work and we need a plan B, the next step is to think maybe this body that has to die can nonetheless rise again and live for a second time. This is the hope that we can be resurrected, and it has played an important role in various religions, in particular Christianity, Islam and ancient Egypt. We have modern conceptions of this too, such as cryonics the idea that we can freeze our corpses and revive them at some later point.

But if you think this physical body is too unreliable, that ultimately we will crumble from disease and aging, then you want instead an immaterial thing that is immune to all this. This is the third path, the belief in the soul. Something pure, some spark of the divine that wont age or succumb to disease, that we can live on through. Belief in the soul is probably the most widespread of all the immortality narratives, but it too has problems from the philosophical perspective.

And for those who dont believe in anything as definite as an immaterial soul that can preserve our personality, then there is the more indirect route to immortality of legacy, which is the fourth route. There are different forms of legacy biological legacy, in our genes and children; or cultural legacy, living on through our works and fame. Every culture has some kind of story about why death is not the end. And this story will draw on one or more of these four fundamental forms of how we might live forever.

Lets start on your book selection at the beginning, as it were, with one of the earliest books ever:The Epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia. Will you give us a prcis of the plot and tell us why you chose it?

Gilgamesh is a hero in the ancient mold. Hes half-god, enormously strong, a bit randy, a bit dim, and he goes through adventures that embody the human experience writ large. He starts off as the king of a small kingdom, making a nuisance of himself enforcing droit du seigneur, sleeping with women on their marriage night, pushing other men around, being a bit of an arse. So the gods make a rival to him in strength, a wild man. They fight, realize neither can win, then become best friends and go off on all sorts of adventures. They kill all sorts of ogres and beasts, until the gods think this is getting a bit much and decide Gilgameshs friend has to die.

See more here:
America’s failing powerhouse

17-03-2012 21:51

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Life after Death Cryonics - Video

14-03-2012 03:38 © SENS Foundation 2011 - http://www.sens.org The Fifth SENS conference - Max More Authors Max More Alcor Life Extension Foundation Cryonics involves the cryopreservation of humans as soon as possible after legal and clinical "death". Legal and clinical death differ importantly from biological death or true (irreversible) cessation of function. It is therefore a mistake to portray cryonics as an alternative to cremation or burial. It is true that cryopreserved people are not alive but neither are they dead. Cryonics should be seen as part of the field of life extension. Cryonics enables the transport of critically ill people through time in an unchanging state to a time when more advanced medical and repair technologies are available. Even after "longevity escape velocity" has been attained and aging has been largely tamed, cryonics will continue to be needed for people who die of accidents or diseases for which there is no cure at the time.

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SENS5 - Cryonic Life Extension - Video

13-03-2012 00:41 cryonics

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cryonics tho - Video