logos

“You have a duty to demand the highest safety standards... and [ensure] that ‘speak up’ in fact means speak up, not shut up, as it is meant all too often.”

Tell that to Snowden, Assange, Manning etc.

Let us be clear: The Palestinian people today are experiencing nothing less than a humanitarian disaster. Thousands are already dead, including many children, and more are wounded. Hundreds of thousands have been forced out of their homes. These people, deeply impoverished before this war, now lack food, water, fuel, shelter, medicine, and other basic necessities. Unbelievably, more than 400,000 Palestinians, driven from their homes, are now sheltering in densely crowded U.N.-run schools. Dozens of medical facilities have been damaged, and 35 U.N. aid workers have been killed. The aid trickling into Gaza is just a fraction of what is needed. In a few days, hospitals will run out of fuel, and ventilators and incubators will shut off. This is a desperate, desperate situation. I echo Secretary Blinken’s call for the immediate release of all hostages. He also called for the consideration of a humanitarian pause by all parties. To my mind, a pause is essential for the protection of civilians as required by the laws of war, as well as for the provision of robust supplies of food, water, and medical aid to address the growing humanitarian catastrophe.

-Sanders, Oct 25th on the Senate floor

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/3d-recreation-moses-hulk-hogan/

Sauce:

https://www.oglaf.com/tax-deductions/

They were shooting at their own car because the unarmed, handcuffed man that they thought had just shot one of them was locked in the back seat.

Tina Fey?

Exercise. A little every day will make a huge difference.

Hackysack

There was Mycroft but it got killed by a patent troll although afaik you can still run it. OpenvoiceOS and Neon AI have picked up the ball.

Scrub-daddy says he wants to see my real face under my skin face.

Closed it as soon as I saw the paywall anyway

You can think of the material being fused as fuel. More energy is produced by burning the fuel than in the spark it took to ignite it.

unbound is a validating, recursive, caching, self-hosted DNS resolver.

I see your Berlusconi and raise you one DeSantis and 34 meth-heads.

This is tragic but I feel like shaking the people trying to shame or guilt the ones who outed and ridiculed the Mayor.

“Are you happy now?”

Yes, of course they are. The cruelty is the point.

FRESH ALLEGATIONS OF potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to investigate Musk’s claims that monkeys who died during trials at the company were terminally ill and did not die as a result of Neuralink implants. They claim, based on veterinary records, that complications with the implant procedures led to their deaths.

Musk first acknowledged the deaths of the macaques on September 10 in a reply to a user on his social networking app X (formerly Twitter). He denied that any of the deaths were “a result of a Neuralink implant” and said the researchers had taken care to select subjects who were already “close to death.” Relatedly, in a presentation last fall Musk claimed that Neuralink’s animal testing was never “exploratory,” but was instead conducted to confirm fully formed scientific hypotheses. “We are extremely careful,” he said.

Public records reviewed by WIRED, and interviews conducted with a former Neuralink employee and a current researcher at the University of California, Davis primate center, paint a wholly different picture of Neuralink’s animal research. The documents include veterinary records, first made public last year, that contain gruesome portrayals of suffering reportedly endured by as many as a dozen of Neuralink’s primate subjects, all of whom needed to be euthanized. These records could serve as the basis for any potential SEC probe into Musk’s comments about Neuralink, which has faced multiple federal investigations as the company moves toward its goal of releasing the first commercially available brain-computer interface for humans.

The letters to the SEC come from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit striving to abolish live animal testing. The group claims that Musk’s comments about the primate deaths were misleading, that he knew them “to be false,” and that investors deserve to hear the truth about the safety, “and thus the marketability,” of Neuralink’s speculative product.

“They are claiming they are going to put a safe device on the market, and that’s why you should invest,” Ryan Merkley, who leads the Physicians Committee’s research into animal-testing alternatives, tells WIRED. “And we see his lie as a way to whitewash what happened in these exploratory studies.”

Musk’s post on X about Neuralink’s monkeys has been viewed more than 760,000 times, and the Physicians Committee notes in its letters that when the SEC charged Musk with securities fraud related to Tesla in 2018, the agency argued that his account was a source of investor news. The SEC has jurisdiction over the sale of any securities, including those offered by privately held companies such as Neuralink. Recent filings show the company has raised more than $280 million from outside investors.

The SEC declined WIRED’s request to comment on the Physicians Committee’s letters. Neuralink did not respond to specific questions about Musk’s claims or a request for comment about the Physicians Committee’s allegations.

WITHIN A YEAR of its reported founding in March 2017, Neuralink acquired a large number of animal subjects to test its brain-chip implants. From September 2017 until late 2020, the company’s experiments were aided by the staff of the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC), a federally funded bioresearch facility at UC Davis. Musk’s promise was to revolutionize prostheses and engineer an implant that would allow human brains to communicate wirelessly with artificial devices, and even each other.

FEATURED VIDEO

Neurologist Answers Nerve Questions From Twitter

Google Mourns Veteran Engineer Luiz André Barroso Who Invented the Modern Data UC Davis veterinary records cited by the Physicians Committee—which WIRED also obtained through a subsequent California public records request—chronicle a battery of complications that developed following procedures involving electrodes being surgically implanted into monkeys’ brains. The complications include bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema, a condition colloquially known as “brain swelling.”

For example, in an experimental surgery that took place in December 2019, performed to determine the “survivability” of an implant, an internal part of the device “broke off” while being implanted. Overnight, researchers observed the monkey, identified only as “Animal 20” by UC Davis, scratching at the surgical site, which emitted a bloody discharge, and yanking on a connector that eventually dislodged part of the device. A surgery to repair the issue was carried out the following day, yet fungal and bacterial infections took root. Vet records note that neither infection was likely to be cleared, in part because the implant was covering the infected area. The monkey was euthanized on January 6, 2020.

Additional veterinary reports show the condition of a female monkey called “Animal 15” during the months leading up to her death in March 2019. Days after her implant surgery, she began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason; a symptom of pain or infection, the records say. Staff observed that though she was uncomfortable, picking and pulling at her implant until it bled, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and spend time holding hands with her roommate.

Animal 15 began to lose coordination, and staff observed that she would shake uncontrollably when she saw lab workers. Her condition deteriorated for months until the staff finally euthanized her. A necropsy report indicates that she had bleeding in her brain and that the Neuralink implants left parts of her cerebral cortex “focally tattered.”

Yet another monkey, Animal 22, was euthanized in March 2020 after his cranial implant became loose. A necropsy report revealed that two of the screws securing the implant to the skull loosened to the extent that they “could easily be lifted out.” The necropsy for Animal 22 clearly states that “the failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection.” If true, this would appear to directly contradict Musk’s statement that no monkeys died as a result of Neuralink’s chips.

Shown a copy of Musk’s remarks on X about Neuralink’s animal subjects being “close to death already,” a former Neuralink employee alleges to WIRED that the claim is “ridiculous,” if not a “straight fabrication.” “We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” they say. The ex-employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, says that up to a year’s worth of behavioral training was necessary for the program, a time frame that would exempt subjects already close to death.

A doctoral candidate currently conducting research at the CNPRC, granted anonymity due to a fear of professional retaliation, likewise questions Musk’s claim regarding the baseline health of Neutralink’s monkeys. “These are pretty young monkeys,” they tell WIRED. “It’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason.”

“We have no comment to make regarding Elon Musk’s statements,” Andy Fell, a spokesperson for

IF THE SEC does investigate Musk’s comments, it would mark at least the third federal probe linked to Neuralink’s animal testing. In December 2022, Reuters reported that the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General had launched a probe into Neuralink’s treatment of some animal test subjects. In February 2023, the US Department of Transportation opened an investigation into Neuralink over allegations of unsafe transport of antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

These investigations followed the US Food and Drug Administration initially rejecting Neuralink’s application, in early 2022, for approval to conduct in-human clinical trials. According to Reuters, the agency’s major concerns involved the device’s lithium battery, as well the possibility that the implant’s wires might migrate to other parts of the brain. This May, the FDA gave the company approval for human trials.

Those human trials could begin soon. Yesterday, Neuralink announced that it had received approval from an independent review board to begin a study aiming to enable people with paralysis to control a computer keyboard or cursor with their thoughts.

Updated at 4:50 pm ET, September 20, 2023, to reflect that it is unclear from the vet records related to “Animal 20” whether the term “survivability” refers to the implant or the test subject.

While I agree 2 years is not long enough, the shooting at cops was while they were doing a welfare check because he was suicidal. Not when they were going to arrest him for Jan 6th. He told his wife he was gonna suicide by cop.

All aid has to be approved and funneled through Israel. Remember the freedom floatilla?

I think right wing anarchist is an oxymoron.

And if you legally change your name after you rob a bank they can’t prosecute.

(Bruh)

Tim Curry couldn't entice a child into an ice cream truck driven by a Pokémon.

Mine is my DNS. Pi-hole with unbound.

1 good cop isn't gonna stop the other 20 from shooting your family and pets.

This is what a vocal minority have been saying for years, but no one cares.

I’m not sure if this is good news or bad but it’s the same damn problem since 380BCE

Then the case is the same in all the other arts for the orator and his rhetoric; there is no need to know the truth of the actual matters, but one merely needs to have discovered some device of persuasion which will make one appear to those who do not know to know better than those who know.

• Plato

Well put

You're an alcoholic more than you like vanilla

björntjänst bear-favor: From a French fable (L’Ours et l’Amateur des jardins by Jean de La Fontaine) in which a tame bear wants to do his master a favor by hitting the fly who sat down on the master's forehead, but hits the fly so hard that the master too is killed.

Interesting

That’s Vedic philosophy in a nutshell.

Plexamp is better than any other music app I've tried.

Well it's kind of their responsibility, since you ask, since they're completely blockading them. Otherwise it's undeniably genocidal mass starvation.

While Trump’s eyebrow-raising remarks may have invoked visions of the January 6, the ex-president was specifically making his comments in relation to car manufacturers.

Important context.

Beating wild animals into submission, capturing them and putting them to work in a shack I built in the woods.

Slave owner logic

Sounds like voluntary slavery.

Zombo is real! You can do anything at Zombo.

Just like the industrial revolution!

Conspiracy theory logic.

Paywall