“Story is the way we orient ourselves in the world. Story is how we figure things out, bring order and meaning to the events around us. The story we hold to at any given time shapes our perceptions, hopes, and expectations; it gives us a place to stand…what story are you telling yourself—or letting others tell you?” – John Eldredge, Resilient
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The Future of Humanity
“It takes more than developing and deploying human enhancement technology to alleviate pain and suffering…We need the wisdom to know how to properly implement these technologies so humanity truly benefits…the wisdom we need must emerge out of a robust ethical framework that provides motivation to spur on advances…[while guarding] against injustices and human exploitation.” – Fazale Rana and Kenneth Samples
Emerging biotech such as gene editing and stem cell therapies show a lot of promise to alleviate and eliminate many medical conditions. As with all technologies, there can be a dark side, particularly when people with power take control.
A movement known as transhumanism wants to go beyond simply helping humanity, and seeks to transform us into a new species entirely. The road to such a future is paved with potholes such as eugenics and countless ethical issues.
No longer is any of this science-fiction. Nor can we look on in passive agreement at endless futuristic films that fail to deeply examine what they portray as an inevitable future.
The book Humans 2.0 is a needed deep, intellectual discussion on this emerging reality of bioengineering and transhumanism. You will get a crash course on state-of-the-art molecular biology, and then authors look at the various philosophical streams vying to be the foundation of our bioethics: Which lead to a world where the value of human life is upheld, and which can lead to a reemergence to eugenics?
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: eugenics, Humans 2.0, transhumanism, bioengineering, Fazale Rana, Kenneth Samples, genetic engineering, gene editing, biology, stem cell
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Is the Hero’s Journey Dead?
Angelique Letizia shows us not only is the Hero’s Journey still very much alive, but it is embedded in the human story:
The hero’s journey isn’t dead. Stories are how we make sense of the world, how we pass down wisdom, and how we see ourselves reflected across time.
So when a producer recently told me that the hero’s journey was dead, I almost spit out my tea.
“How is that?” I asked, curious to see his response.
“It’s just been done. We’re looking for something new, fresh. Ya know, out with the old.”
You could almost hear my eyes roll. “Do you understand the significance of the hero’s journey and the role it plays in human consciousness?”
The widening of his eyes led me to believe the answer was no, and so I leaned in, unable to stop myself.
Every great story, whether ancient or modern, taps into this universal rhythm. The call to adventure, the trials, the descent into darkness, and the return with a boon (newfound wisdom)—mirrors our evolution, and that is why we resonate with them.
The hero’s journey, specifically, is embedded in the human psyche. It’s the path of awakening.
Why do we resonate with myths? Why do we follow legends? Fairytales? And why do we seek meaning in struggle?
Perhaps it’s because, in those stories, we see a reflection of our own. A roadmap of where we’ve been and where we might go. They are us, and we are them. Through their journeys, we live the adventure, learn the lessons, endure the agony of defeat, the pain of heartbreak, the joy of new love, and the thrill of victory—all through the power of imagination.
Every single human creation bears a part of our origin story, and that is the significance of the journey.
I was surprised to see that rather than argue, he smiled and shared that he had never thought of it that way, that he’d seen it more as a storytelling device rather than universal wisdom.
The hero’s journey lives. It breathes life into every story that moves us, every lesson passed down, and every trial we face and overcome. It’s not just the arc of storytelling—it’s the arc of humanity itself.
And only through sharing our journey with those on the path and those yet to walk it will our collective story echo through time as a testament to where we have been and where we might be destined to go.
Keep Shining ⭐
Angelique Letizia is the Founder & CEO of Starr Films. © Angelique Letizia
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Tags: Angelique Letizia, Hero's Journey, Story, storytelling
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Tell Your Story
“…of far greater power to you are not my stories but yours. Which Stories have you heard that shape your life? What do you believe? I mean what you really believe, when you are asked to lift the Swords in your life, or lay them down. What makes who you are? We can find answers in the Stories we tell.” – Randall Wallace (screenwriter of Braveheart, We Were Soldiers, Pearl Harbor).
Everything We’ve Been Taught About Health is Wrong
You may have heard how Americans are unhealthier than ever, in spite of billions spent on healthcare. Not surprising since healthcare tries to fix the problems after the fact, instead of addressing root causes. How did health begin to spiral out of control? One major reason began, not surprisingly, with government meddling.
The government’s devaluation of the dollar in 1971, allowing Congress to spend endlessly and thus devaluing the dollar even further, effectively destroyed vibrant, healthy, American agriculture. Saifedean Ammous details the history in The Fiat Standard, and here are some highlights:
Government policies begun in the 1970s “killed small-scale agriculture and forced small farmers to sell their plots to large corporations, consolidating the growth of industrial food production, which would in due time destroy America’s soil and its people’s health…” This brought down the prices of industrialized foods, but “the quality of food was degraded…[and] as prices of highly nutritious foods rise, people are inevitably forced to replace them with cheaper alternatives.”
Instead of issuing dietary guidelines based on science, they are often designed “to promote cheap industrial food substitutes” and are “shaped by an increasingly powerful agricultural industrial complex…The food pyramid is a recipe for metabolic disease, obesity, diabetes, and a plethora of health problems that have been increasingly common…” Industrial foods are often full of “toxic, heavily processed industrial chemicals misleadingly referred to as ‘vegetable oils’…as well as the abomination that is margarine.”
“Refined sugar and flour can be better understood as drugs…[the process] is similar to the refining process that has made cocaine and heroin such highly addictive substances…Government subsidies for the production of unhealthy foods-and government scientists recommending and requiring we eat them…[has resulted in a] dietary transition on Americans’ health [that] has been calamitous…their mental and physical health are deteriorating…increasing obesity is not a sign of affluence but a symptom of deprivation…The ever-increasing cost of medication and healthcare cannot be understood without reference to the destruction of health, diet, and soil, and the economic and nutritional system that promoted this calamity.”
Healthy cultures “relied heavily on animal products…junk food cravings are also a result of deep malnutrition caused by not eating enough meat.”
“Americans are not fat because of prosperity and abundance; Americans are fat because they are malnourished and nutritionally impoverished.”
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: agriculture, diet, farming, food, food pyramid, health, healthcare, industrialized food, saifedean ammous
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Tired of Government Mandated Debt Slavery?
I’m old enough to remember when the first trillion dollar debts created outrage. Now politicians of all sides routinely sign off on tens of trillion dollars of deficit spending. If people took the time to understand economics, they would understand how detrimental this is to their lives, and to future generations. Such spending devalues an already devalued currency. This allows government to spend even more recklessly (funding endless wars and everything else), and means your wealth is a fraction of what it could be. Thus you can’t provide for the future, or even maintain the highest quality of life in the present.
Here’s some quotes from Saifdean Ammous’ books, The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard, introducing the dangers of deficit spending, and how it has ruined our buying power and wealth. His peerless books are an education in the history of economics and how it was grossly manipulated by our leaders at our expense. Someday the bubble will burst. If you want to prevent that, and provide a better future for your descendants, read Ammous’ books and help forge a brighter path.
Why deficit spending is a terrible idea:
“One of the most mendacious fantasies that pervades Keynesian economic thought [and government economics] is the idea that the national debt ‘does not matter, since we owe it to ourselves.’ Only a…disciple of Keynes could fail to understand that this ‘ourselves’ is not one homogeneous blob but is differentiated into several generations – namely, the current ones which consume recklessly at the expense of future ones…this policy…was employed by the decadent emperors of Rome during its decline…
“Debt is the opposite of saving. If saving creates the possibility of capital accumulation and civilizational advance, debt is what can reverse it, through the reduction in capital stocks across generations…[today’s] generation has to work to pay off the growing interest on debt, working harder to fund entitlement programs they will barely get to enjoy while paying higher taxes and barely being able to save for their old age.”
Why massive government spending isn’t needed:
“The end of World War II and the dismantling of the New Deal meant the U.S. government cut its spending by an astonishing 75% between 1944 and 1948, and it removed most price controls for good measure. And yet, the U.S. economy witnessed an extraordinary boom during these years…[and millions of men from the war] were almost seamlessly absorbed into the labor force…”
What this has all done to the spending power of your money:
“The average U.S. home price in 1915 was $3500. In 2021 it was $269,039…Had the fiat [government issued money] standard adopted a fixed supply in 1914…the average American house would today cost $411.”
Do you choose collapse, or freedom from slavery?
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Tags: debt, dollar, economics, fiat, government, inflation, money, saifedean ammous
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Our Universe: Designed for Humanity
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson declared, “The universe is a deadly place. At every opportunity it’s trying to kill us.” When astronomers look out to the universe, some are struck by all the dangers it poses to life, especially to human life. In every region of the cosmos beyond Earth, they see gravitational disturbances, supernova, gamma-ray bursts…asteroids, comets, and solar and stellar flares that can easily destroy us.
This dark, doomsday perspective perspective makes sense for astronomers and others who’ve embraced the beliefs expressed by their predecessor Carl Sagan. His message — that the universe is all there is or was or ever will be — shapes their perspective…
What if all that appears so deadly and dangerous is actually what makes life, especially human life and its flourishing, possible? What if the cosmos is not all there is or was or ever will be? Such a perspective would alter the significance of everything about it and within it. – Dr. Hugh Ross, astronomer
When astronomer Hugh Ross first began writing about anthropocentric or theological science in 1991, many were surprised the universe appeared designed for Earth to exist. Not just Earth —but only Earth — and the human life on it. This was contrary to the alleged “great demotion” of humanity’s place in the cosmos, as naturalism evangelists like Carl Sagan preached. Some probably thought science would prove Ross wrong.
It didn’t.
In fact, the years since have become a golden age of astronomy. Discovery after discovery pointed to Earth’s uniqueness, but more importantly, that everything about the structure of the universe prefaced the coming of humans.
Ross has previously documented this growing body of evidence in books like Why the Universe the Way it Is, and Improbable Planet. His new Designed to the Core continues pulling this research together — and this is cutting edge science from around the world.
It’s the implications, however, that should give the chaotic peoples of this world pause. What if there was truly purpose to this existence? What if the reason no aliens have been discovered — and the constants of physics continue to rule out billions of worlds — is because Earth was the point of the universe’s coming into being?
As biologist Michael Denton writes in is recent book, The Miracle of Man, some may disagree with these conclusions, but the science is not in dispute. Those who disagree do from a place of philosophical bias, not a scientific one.
Why cling to a depressing view of the universe, where nothing ultimately matters, where chance decides everything, if the evidence points elsewhere?
Materialistic naturalistic philosophies have infected many fields. They have handcuffed science. Humanity doesn’t matter, if you follow these beliefs to their logical conclusion. Yet lives of millions contradict this every day, and like never before, so do the heavens.
From distant galaxies, to the Sun, and Earth itself; from the instant of the Big Bang, to the quantum and the atomic, it all has fingerprints of being designed to the core.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Astronomy, design, galaxies, Hugh Ross, physics, purpose, space, teleology
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Humanity Today Faces a Choice
Ideas have consequences. Humanity today faces a choice between two very different sets of ideas…On the one side stands the antihuman view, which…continues to postulate a world of limited supplies, whose fixed constraints demand ever-tighter controls upon human aspirations. On the other side stand those who believe in the power of unfettered creativity to invent unbounded resources and so, rather than regret human freedom, demand it as our birthright…
If [the antihuman] idea is accepted…then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person…The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide…the central purpose of government must not be to restrict human freedom but to defend and enhance it at all costs.
And that is why we must take on the challenge of space. For in doing so, we make the most forceful statement possible that we are living not at the end of history but at the beginning of history; that we believe in freedom and not regimentation, in progress and not stasis…in life rather than death, and in hope rather than despair.” – Robert Zubrin writing in The Case for Space
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Tags: humanity, Mars, Robert Zubrin, spaceflight, The Case for Space
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The Future of Humanity
“It takes more than developing and deploying human enhancement technology to alleviate pain and suffering…We need the wisdom to know how to properly implement these technologies so humanity truly benefits…the wisdom we need must emerge out of a robust ethical framework that provides motivation to spur on advances…[while guarding] against injustices and human exploitation.” – Fazale Rana and Kenneth Samples
Emerging biotech such as gene editing and stem cell therapies show a lot of promise to alleviate and eliminate many medical conditions. As with all technologies, there can be a dark side, particularly when people with power take control.
A movement known as transhumanism wants to go beyond simply helping humanity, and seeks to transform us into a new species entirely. The road to such a future is paved with potholes such as eugenics and countless ethical issues.
No longer is any of this science-fiction. Nor can we look on in passive agreement at endless futuristic films that fail to deeply examine what they portray as an inevitable future.
The new book Humans 2.0 is a needed deep, intellectual discussion on this emerging reality of bioengineering and transhumanism. You will get a crash course on state-of-the-art molecular biology, and then authors look at the various philosophical streams vying to be the foundation of our bioethics: Which lead to a world where the value of human life is upheld, and which can lead to a reemergence to eugenics?
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: bioengineering, biology, eugenics, Fazale Rana, gene editing, genetic engineering, Humans 2.0, Kenneth Samples, stem cell, transhumanism
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Apollo: 50 Years Later
“Now, 50 years later, looking back on Apollo, it’s clear how that was probably the single most significant historical event in modern times, and it really shows us and the world what you can do if you work together and you work hard, keep to the plan, and plan your mission out step by step all the way to the moon. I wish we could do that today.
“I know the difficulty of doing anything in this huge government bureaucracy…But we still do incredible things. [The International Space Station is] the most complicated thing we’ve ever done, probably more complicated than going to the moon…We can still achieve things if we work hard at it and don’t change the plan, but part of the problem is we change the plan every four years.” – Astronaut Scott Kelly
Indeed, the reason why the Apollo missions were cut short (spacecraft for three more missions had already been built), and spaceflight has been a series of fitful starts and stops ever since, is because the government runs the show. Not visionaries who look past the next election cycle. Perhaps the private sector, which has made leaps in accessing space in recent years, will finally open the final frontier. Fifty years late, but better late than never.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Apollo, Apollo 11, Moon, Moon Landing, NASA, space exploration, spaceflight
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Darrick Dean 