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Victory Against the Formican Hordes – Poem by G. Stolyarov II

Victory Against the Formican Hordes – Poem by G. Stolyarov II

G. Stolyarov II


Deep in the crevices where there is scantly light,
Formican hordes amassed, antitheses of right:
The tyrant queen, attendant sycophantic knaves,
Vast quantities of servants – or compliant slaves –
Not even one savant among them to protest
Antagonistic ploys to rouse their dormant nest.
In wanton disregard of property and tact alike
At my abode they militantly sought to strike,
Past every antechamber to the kitchen went,
Detected every speck pursuant to its scent,
In swarms outrageous antics perpetrated,
Blatantly coveted the food refrigerated!

Defiantly I stood against them, justice-bound,
In Reason my advantage could be found.
Against the vast, infestant foe I called to fight
Abundant bait abetted by the Mighty Mite.
Combatant infantry, by gel intoxicated,
Conveyed the poison, as anticipated,
To queen and to the infant larvae of their brood,
With rampant appetites devouring fatal food.
Through errant treachery these looters had invaded,
Thusly, through treachery, their remnant faded.
And yet not one foe would its evil ways recant,
Therefore, no mercy asked – no mercy could I grant.
Mark Antony himself, transplanted from the grave,
Would have scant means these miscreants to save.
Only oblivion did the doomed assailants find.
Rejoice triumphantly, victorious mankind!
As at Lepanto and Antietam, so now here
The valiant defense of right did persevere,
And while Constantinople’s walls once failed,
My adamantine bastion has prevailed!

Observant reader, heed the moral of this tale:
Gargantuan numbers may incessantly assail
What we hold dear with brute, malignant force,
But if ascendant Reason charts a constant course,
No giant, teeming mass man’s fortunes can derail.

Rise to Meet the Enemies at the Gates: Join the Battle against Disease and Death – Article by Eric Schulke

Rise to Meet the Enemies at the Gates: Join the Battle against Disease and Death – Article by Eric Schulke

The New Renaissance HatEric Schulke
June 25, 2015
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A lot of your great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers have prepared and gone through the fire of war. This happened time and time again over the centuries. It was nearly routine.

The video “World Battleground, 1000 Years of War in 5 Minutes” adds some good perspective to the frequency of larger-scale conflicts.

If you didn’t have the genes for it, didn’t have it in you to put up a staunch defense or go on a successful offense when necessary, then you and your people didn’t survive as often. It is unfortunate that such a terrible trait has played such a fundamental role in shaping who we are, but that seems to be the way it is.

It is in us to adrenalize in the face of battle and do what it takes to find victory. Most of us don’t directly chase it, and we shy away from it when necessary, but when cornered or challenged, when our towns are burned down or our family and neighbors are murdered on the trails, we draw our weapons and pursue the enemy to the corners of the lands, taking them dead or alive.

Aging and diseases have us cornered. So what are we to do? Should we approach it like it is peacetime? Should we get up in the morning and think of aging and disease as another day at the office or another bill to pay, another fish to be caught for supper or another window to be boarded up for a storm?

When an adjacent empire marches in and demands allegiance to expand its power, with the alternative of impalement or crucifixion for everybody you’ve ever known, you churn out ramparts, build your defenses, get the trenches dug, get the spit and sweat out, and make a stand for life against a bunch of killing scum-bags like you’re supposed to do. There is a time for the industry of peacetime, and there is a time for war.

It is like wartime right now.

In this war against aging, other diseases, and death in general, we don’t need guns, and – it’s incredibly lucky for us – we don’t even need to spill guts. Our enemy causes our guts to be spilled, but these gutless intruders don’t even have them to spill. They are microscopic misalignments, cellular maladjustment, biological disrepair, but they are terrible opponents nonetheless. They snatch our lives away from us. That’s why we put up staunch defenses, and beyond that, prepare a fierce, forceful, battering offense in the form of a worldwide expedition in support of the philosophy and research of indefinite life extension – of extended healthy longevity.

If winning a war involves spilling forth solutions from your head and not guts from people’s bodies, and you won’t do it, then we can only be left to assume that winning isn’t worth it for you unless you can dismantle flesh. That’s not the case, is it? It is catastrophic to the outcome of an urgent fight for life if we can’t recognize that a deadly enemy that doesn’t bleed is still an enemy.

Comanches on the warpath had a lot less to lose than you do, and yet they put up a lot more of a fight. Match them, at the least. You have it in you, and we desperately need you at these front lines of the diseases of aging and general death.

We can’t win this unless we expedite, instill energy, move fast, work hard – work wartime hard. And why shouldn’t we get serious if it means a great shot at winning this? Indifference is one of our biggest obstacles here, and that indifference comes in large part from this phenomenon of the children of warriors not recognizing war without enemy blood. As more battle cries go up around the world, those centuries-old frequencies of battle will begin to ring in the DNA of more brave new life-extension advocate centurions and soldiers like you. With a little time, a great army can be raised up in this showdown with the Grim Reaper and its despicable harbingers of aging, and other forms of diseases and death.

Attack disease and death with this attitude. Get pumped up: it’s the only way to accelerate the pace and save life. Join the battle.

You weren’t bred to back down and wimp out. You are the sum total of the survivors of thousands of years of constant brutal wartime. Respect your ancestors by harnessing that fury and stepping up to this call of duty. Report to your nearest life-extension organization or project. Fight for the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension with everything you’ve got.

Pick your legion, be it Fight Aging, the Methuselah Foundation, Longecity, the SENS Research Foundation, Foresight Nanotech Institute, the California Life Company (Calico), the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Longevity Party, the Transhumanist Party, the Buck Institute, Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the Life Extension Foundation, or another, and report.

The Movement for Indefinite Life Extension supports and lists as many of the core, main organizations as possible on this page.

The world is at stake. We all need you.

This song, not affiliated with this movement (yet. Call us, Rammstein), illustrates the concept well.

Translated lyrics:

Even on the waves there is fighting
Where fish and flesh are woven into sea
One stabs the lance while in the army
Another throws it into the ocean

Ahoy

Arise, arise seaman arise
Each does it in his own way
One thrusts the spear into a man
Another then into the fish

Arise, arise seaman arise
And the waves cry softly
In their blood a spear is lodged
They bleed softly into the ocean

The lance must be drowned in flesh
Fish and man sink to the depths
Where the black soul dwells
There is no light on the horizon

Ahoy

Arise, arise seaman arise
Each does it in his own way
One thrusts the spear into a man
Another then into the fish

Arise, arise seaman arise
And the waves cry softly
In their blood a spear is lodged
They bleed softly into the ocean

Arise, arise seaman arise
And the waves cry softly
In their heart a spear is lodged
They bleed themselves dry on the shore

Eric Schulke was a director at LongeCity during 2009-2013. He has also been an activist with the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension and other causes for over 15 years.

Is There a Moral Difference Between Innocent Deaths Caused by Military and Police?

Is There a Moral Difference Between Innocent Deaths Caused by Military and Police?

The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
March 15, 2012
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It is an odd bit of cognitive dissonance among most people today that killings of innocent people by police are (rightly) treated as moral outrages, while killings of innocent civilians by militaries are often rationalized as “collateral damage” – unfortunate, perhaps, but such is war, and the greater cause of the war is said to justify them. Ayn Rand, for instance, made the argument that all of the civilian deaths in a war are the moral fault of the aggressor regime.

One need not look to the battlefield to see clear instances of unjustified initiation of force. There exist numerous acts of criminal aggression within a country’s borders, with regard to which the kind of arguments that are used to justify war would be readily seen as faulty. There is still a lot of murder in every country. Suppose there is a murderer on the loose. Would it be justified for a country’s domestic police force to send a missile into or plant a bomb in a large and inhabited apartment building, simply because the murderer is believed to be hiding there? Would the answer change if this murderer were a serial killer who has already had a string of victims and/or plans to kill more?

I think virtually everyone would agree that inflicting civilian casualties to eliminate this murderer would not be appropriate and would not be worth the moral cost. Virtually nobody would make the argument that it is the murderer, not the police force, who would be morally responsible for any civilian deaths – and therefore it would be acceptable for the police to act to bring about civilian deaths, and to plan for some civilian deaths in advance, and to simply describe these deaths as regrettable “collateral damage”. Virtually everybody in that situation would agree that the police who permit innocent civilians to die in the capture or destruction of the murderer would themselves bear the blame for the clearly preventable deaths of those civilians.

So why is the situation any different just because the word “war” is used to describe a particular instance of aggression – and just because the people involved are not all from the same country and may be acting outside the borders of their country? Aggression is aggression, and the leaders of an invading dictatorships are criminals just like serial killers, except on a larger scale. My view is that the same moral principles should apply to the proper response to all of them. The proper moral response is to neutralize the threat, but to leave the innocent people out of it entirely. No innocent death should ever be dismissed as mere “collateral damage” – and no plan should be pursued if it is known or expected to result in innocent deaths.