CRYONICS STALKER-- 00-- New column to try to follow cryonics underground

I was going to post something about the silence I'm hearing from cryoncis lately but then I thought of how to follow what's going on using hueristic reasoning and interpreting silence-- and considered that the project deserves a bigger conceptual framework. I though of "cryonics: inside from the outside"-- then the word "stalker" came to mind. Usually stalkers are considered to be pretty bad-- and they might be-- but the idea of a stalker in terms of private investigations or the animal world-- is that you follow something carefully without that tracked elements' consent or participation. That's essentailly what cryonics has become for me-- despite the fact that I've been signed up with Alcor since 1991 and have followed cryonics and gotten to know people in cryonics since 1978.

The recent discovery that Alcor has original bylaws that call for a Director Electorate has created what I sense is a whole NEW level of underground silence in cryonics-- probably due to fear and alarm-- although in my view, its easiliy correctable simply by abiding by the bylaw. It's now march 2-- and the Alcor board meeting might be coming up this weekend or soon-- that's the next big deal in cryonics-- and I'll continue to try to track it in general from here.

A characteristic of cryonics that is notable is that despite the internet and blogs and all sorts of communications tools, cryos in general have not appeared. For a long time, we've tried to determine what kind of people join cryonics-- and it turns out that for the most part, they're lopsided in favor of technical information but very short on general philosophical overviews--- and all of them except for a very few notable examples are poor writers.

I remain signed up for cryonics-- but I've been completely cut off from all insider communications-- but then so has everyone on the outside world-- we have what is tantamount to a very insular world-- that of cryonics-- and we can only gather clues as they occur. When they do occur, I can probably interpret what's going on in a useful way. There are a number of loose ends always up in the air-- like Saul Kent's NEW lab-- for 21CM-- there's been nothing on that since the SA Inc 2007 conference-- but that's big money in that-- and it's always startled me how much money LEF has been able to generate. Saul is a board member at Alcor.

Cryonics is really about nothing other than death-- when it comes to the entire legal and political framework as it is-- death in a way that is managed differently than most people would manage it. And it's this component I think that has been intentionally avoided by public cryonics writing. The cryonicists want to believe-- as I do-- that the process of preservation is about future recovery possibilites and so the literature output directs readers to that. And to the "emergency technical" aspects of capturing the dying person's structure intact. That's obviously neccessary and interesting-- but at the same-- the death component should be looked at and that's where cryonics fails badly.

Huckabee was on TV the other day defending his continuance in the race-- and referred to the prolife idea-- for embryos-- anti-abortion stuff-- and I think cryonics has a common interest with that view. If frozen embryos can be defended as human life, so can cryonauts. I'm convinced of this view-- I'm not thinking "strategically"-- but rather in terms of universal principles. Nobody in cryonics shares me view-- and yet I'm convinced I'm "right"-- and that there IS an objective "right" and "wrong" in the universe.... I find it fascinating-- as Spock would-- that I've become an outsider to an outsider group-- and so I'm left with no choice other than to become.... the cryonics stalker. Till next time.