Several media outlets are asking “Where is Jack Ma?” China’s most well-known tech entrepreneur and self-made billionaire has not been seen publicly after a speech he gave at the Bund Summit in Shanghai in October criticizing China’s financial system.…

Chinese Entrepreneur Jack Ma Missing After Criticizing The Party

Coded Bias, a new documentary by 7th Empire Media that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, looks at the ways algorithms and machine learning can perpetuate racism, sexism, and infringements on civil liberties. The film calls for…

How Bias Can Be Coded Into Unthinking Programs

An investigative report from news site Axios reveals that Christine Fang (better known as Fang Fang), a fundraiser for Representative Eric Swalwell (D.–California), not only interacted with political elites in California but cultivated relationships…

Hi Tech and China: The Long Game re Spying in the United States

Vaccines pose particular ethical questions that other pharmaceuticals do not. Vaccines are given to an otherwise healthy person in hopes of preventing infection and curbing community spread of a disease. There is both a personal component and a…

Coronavirus Vaccine Ethics

China will complete its seventh census, begun on November 1, on December 10. New features that have prompted concern include: Residents must indicate whether they have family members in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan or if they have any family members…

China’s Door-to-Door Census Now Identifies Religious Believers

A Uyghur woman sits in a crowded clinic in Xinjiang, China, with several other women. Some of the women are crying, but none of them say anything because of the surveillance cameras. She is several months pregnant and is here to undergo an abortion.…

China's Brutal Treatment & Suppression of Uyghur Muslims

Depending on who you talk to, the twenty-year relationship between China and several countries in the African Union has been described as everything from mutually beneficial to asymmetric and dysfunctional right down to exploitative and…

China’s Eyes Are Watching Africa Closely

Last week, I reported on the accusations of racism on the part of the the Chinese authorities against African residents of the city of Guangzhou in Guangdong province. While Africa and China have enjoyed a seemingly amicable relationship since the…

China and Africa: Debt-Trap Diplomacy?

The coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic has exposed two longstanding ugly problems: underlying racist views of Africans living in China and the burden debt to China lays on several African countries.
The key flashpoints creating tension between China and…

COVID-19 Response Exposes Racism in China, Amid Harmony Claims

The coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic has exposed two longstanding ugly problems: underlying racist views of Africans living in China and the burden debt to China lays on several African countries. The key flashpoints creating tension between China and…

COVID-19 Response Exposes Racism in China, amid Harmony Claims

In a recent report, Nature addressed several studies on disembodied brains grown in the lab. One of those studies, published last year by Alysson Muotri of the University of California, San Diego, showed that brain organoids (organized clusters of…

Can We Make Brains in a Dish? Can We Make MINDS in a Dish?

If there is one good thing about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s online conferences. As a freelancer, conferences provide an opportunity to step out of the home office and be refreshed and encouraged by fellow scientists, writers, bioethicists, or…

October Newsletter

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the ways that technology can lead either to greater accessibility or greater oppression. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now using the same technologies that have given many people around the world access to…

How China’s Technocracy Uses the Pandemic to Suppress Religion

For a brief window of time at the beginning of 2020, China’s internet censors didn’t block stories about Wuhan and COVID-19, the coronavirus.
Caixin, a widely-read news magazine, published a multi-page investigative report on everything leading up to…

China: COVID-19’s True History Finds an Unlikely Home — GitHub

China is removing the Mongolian language and culture from the curriculum and textbooks in Inner Mongolia (see outline map), an autonomous region in China. In August, leaked government documents showed that language and literature, civics, and history…

High-Tech Suppression of China’s Mongol Region Provokes Protests

China’s government allows only about thirty-four Hollywood movies to be shown in Chinese theaters. As a result, entertainment companies like Disney go out of their way to make sure a film appeals to both North American crowds and Chinese Communist…

Mulan: Disney Talks Freedom at Home, Toes the Line in China

DEFINITIONS
Outbreak
The sudden rise of the incidence of disease or the sudden rapid increase in the number of harmful organisms, particularly insects (ref: Merriam- Webster Online).
Epidemic
When an outbreak spreads rapidly, as in the case of…

A Timeline of Plagues, Epidemics & Pandemics

"Pandemics are uniquely destabilizing." Matthew Lee Anderson, founder of the journal Mere Orthodoxy, gave a presentation on the imago Dei and the value of a life at The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity's virtual conference on June 26, 2020. The…

Disaster Ethics & the Trouble with Triage

“What will we do after the war?” Dorothy Sayers asked this of her readers in 1942 in her essay “Why Work?“
““The question that I will ask you to consider today is this: When the war is over, are we likely, and do we want to keep this attitude to work…

What Will We Do After the Pandemic?

Why is TikTok so controversial? It’s the first Chinese technology company that has reached a billion users outside of China. Its main demographic is Generation Z—teens and twenty-somethings. If you take a look at TikTok videos, most are goofy and…