X-Message-Number: 32324 Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:46:12 -0500 Subject: New Yorker article on Ettinger has unfortunate tone From: Rudi Hoffman <> --0023547913089f13ee047d921ad2 Hello, cryonetters: This is Rudi from Florida, where it has finally warmed into something like Florida weather. I followed the link Mark Plus provided to the New Yorker article on Bob Ettinger. Did those of you who read this find it rated pretty high on the annoyance scale? The link is in today's cryonet. This writer *so misses the point of cryonics...and Ettinger's remarkable insights. While I sometimes wish Bob were less sanguine about the multiple details that are and may be necessary to make cryonics a legitimate evidence based technology, no one can deny that his possibility thinking and outside the box mentality enable his seminal and singular influence. The article was a disappointment...shallow, superficial, facile, and harshly judgemental. Cryonics comes across in this article like a desperate and kooky hobby, practiced by self centered weirdos in a business park which is, unhelpfully pointed out, "behind the sewer plant." It isn't the first bit of unfortunate press...and won't be the last...but I was saddened by the tone...I am trying to find a better adjective than "snarky" because I think this is colloquial...but and it was simply not nice enough to be merely "snarky." "Mean spirited" might be a more appropriate descriptor. In other news, a call came in this morning, as I was preparing for my bike ride. My neighbor, a long time friend and client, about age 50, was crushed yesterday in an accident at work and is, astoundingly and unexpectedly, very dead. He lives...lived...around the corner, about 150 meters away from where I write these words. He is now permanently dead...he was a science fiction and Star Trek fan...but way too religious to consider cryonics. I spent the afternoon starting the process of the death claim. Surprisingly, with several thousand clients over the last 32 years or so in the life insurance business, I have only had about a dozen claims. And now I am processing not one but two at once. Both on gentlemen who I genuinely cared about. Perhaps I should care more about 200,000 Haitians dying. But I confess my two friends dying has more immediacy and emotioanal impact on my psyche. Most of us, as Dale Carnegie has observed, are much more troubled by a toothache than by reports of death and destruction far away. But death is still winning, and we need heros. We are engaged in an epic and historic struggle against involuntary death and degradation. This is not expected, nor supposed to be... easy, inexpensive, or not involve huge levels of effort, money, and sacrifice. We need hundreds of labs working on various ideas...published and peer reviewed articles, a legitimate career track for researchers and students to travel, continuous improvement protocols, multiple conferences in multiple locales, a sense of genuine community...the list goes on. We are still pioneers... Those reading this would do well, it could be said, to think of themselves as visionary leaders...the harbingers of a Spring for mankind. We look with awe upon the leaders who founded our country...but are we not engaged in founding something even more dramatic? A possible future free from the tyranny of involuntary death and frailty? If you are just thinking of cryonics or antiaging activism now...the good news is that you have not missed the pioneering days. The bad news is also that you have not missed the pioneering days. And, of course, the pioneers tend to get the arrows. Including snarky and snotty New Yorker articles. If I may lapse into the vernacular once more for effect, Bob, Andy, and Ben...just in the unlikely case that your feelings were hurt by the tone of this article... That writer can go fuck himself. He simply does not "get it." But some of us do...and appreciate the pioneers doing the day to day work of making cryonics a real science. Rudi -- Rudi Richard Hoffman CFP CLU ChFC World's Leading Cryonics Insuror rudihoffman.com Former Board Member Financial Planning Association fpafla.com Board Member Salvation Army salvationarmy.org Member Alcor Life Extension Foundation alcor.org, Member Cryonics Institute cryonics.org Certified Financial Planner(TM) CFP Board of Standards Member World Transhumanist Association http://transhumanism.org/ --0023547913089f13ee047d921ad2 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=32324