Web Research Links for the Week of 6/24/24

Fair Use Notice: This site may contain some copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of vital issues which already exist in the public domain. – Note: These links are posted at the top of the page as the week progresses. Links from previous weeks can be found under the “Current Quicklinx” button.


They Are Using Lab-Grown Human Brains That They Have Enslaved Called “Organoids” To Run Computers – by Michael Snyder – https://www.activistpost.com/2024/06/they-are-using-lab-grown-human-brains-that-they-have-enslaved-called-organoids-to-run-computers.html – “When I first started researching this, I could hardly believe that it was true. A company in Switzerland known as “Final Spark” has constructed a bizarre hybrid biocomputer that combines lab-grown miniature human brains with conventional electronic circuits. This approach saves an extraordinary amount of energy compared to normal computers, but there is a big problem. The lab-grown miniature human brains keep wearing out and dying, and so scientists have to keep growing new ones to replace them. Stem cells that are derived from human skin tissue are used to create the 16 spherical brain “organoids” that the system depends upon. I realize that this sounds like something straight out of a really bad science fiction movie, but it is actually happening…  Scientists at Final Spark are calling their hybrid computer “the Neuroplatform”, and it is being reported that it only uses “a fraction of the energy required to power a traditional set up”…  Swiss tech startup FinalSpark is now selling access to biocomputers that combine up to four tiny lab-grown human brains with silicon chips…  This new bioprocessing platform, called the Neuroplatform, uses small versions of human brains to do computer work instead of silicon chips. The company says it can fit 16 of these mini-brains onto the Neuroplatform and use a fraction of the energy required to power a traditional set up…  The platform, currently adopted by nine institutions, integrates hardware, software and biology to construct a processing system that is energy-efficient and high-performing…  This “breakthrough” is being hailed as a way to save a gigantic amount of energy…  But what about the lab-grown human brains that are being enslaved to run the Neuroplatform?..  Each of the 16 mini-brains is made up of approximately 10,000 living neurons, and they are kept alive by a “microfluidics system that supplies water and nutrients for the cells”…  Rather than merely integrating biological concepts into computing, FinalSpark’s online platform ‘taps’ into spherical clusters of lab-grown human brain cells called organoids. A total of 16 organoids are housed within four arrays that connect to eight electrodes each and a microfluidics system that supplies water and nutrients for the cells…  The approach, known as wetware computing, in this case harnesses researchers’ abilities to culture organoids in the lab, a fairly new technology that allows scientists to study what are essentially mini replicas of individual organs…  During their short lives, the mini-brains are literally trained to perform certain tasks using a reward and punishment system…  Researchers do this by training the organoids through a reward system. The organoids are rewarded with dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for pleasure (and addiction)…  Meanwhile, as “punishment,” the organoids are exposed to chaotic stimuli, such as irregular electrical activity…  If the enslaved mini-brains do what they are supposed to do, they are rewarded with lots of pleasure…  If the enslaved mini-brains do not do what they are supposed to do, they are hit with lots of “irregular electrical activity”…  In other words, these miniature human brains are tortured until they learn to obey…  Reading that should literally make you sick…  What these scientists are doing is so incredibly evil…  Final Spark claims that the miniature human brains use “a million times less power than their silicon counterparts”…  Swiss technology firm Final Spark has successfully launched Neuroplatform, the world’s first bioprocessing platform where human brain organoids (lab-grown miniaturized versions of organs) perform computational tasks instead of silicon chips…  The first such facility hosts the processing prowess of 16 brain organoids, which the company claims uses a million times less power than their silicon counterparts…  Final Spark hopes that their new “technology” will become the primary energy source for the AI revolution…  Because at this point training AI models uses a colossal amount of conventional energy…  According to Final Spark’s estimates, training the popular large language model GPT-3 that powered ChatGPT in its initial days alone consumed 10 GWh of energy. This is a whopping 6,000 times more energy than an average European city consumes in an entire year…  Replacing silicon chips with bioprocessors could lead to drastic energy savings. Final Spark allows research labs to experience the power of biological processors on the Neuroplatform…  To a lot of people out there, this is going to sound really great…  Final Spark insists that the processor that it has created will use a million times less energy compared to a normal silicon chip…  There is just one enormous problem…  The mini-brains keep dying and must be regularly replaced…  At first they would die “in just a few hours”, but now they are apparently living for up to 100 days…  Final Spark faced many challenges in its early years since the organoids would die in just a few hours. The company has worked on this shortcoming and improved its MEA systems to ensure that organoids live for 100 days…  These “organoids” are literally worked to death…  They are hooked up to electrodes and worked until they can work no more…  Final Spark has made working these varied components possible through an innovative setup called Multi-Electrode Arrays (MEAs), where the three-dimensional masses of brain tissue are placed…  Each MEA has four brain organoids that interface with eight electrodes. These electrodes perform the dual role of stimulating the organoids and recording the data they process…  Data transfer is done through digital analog converters with a 16-bit resolution and a 30 kHz frequency. A microfluidic system provides life support for the MEAs, and cameras can monitor their overall operation…  Have you ever seen The Matrix?..  I was reminded of that film as I researched all of this…  Just like in that movie, human energy powers the entire system…  And just like in that movie, those that power the system are enslaved…  The creators of “the Neuroplatform” insist that this is perfectly okay because the mini-brains are not sentient beings…  Whether that is true or not, what they are doing is still very wrong…  Creating miniature human brains and using them to power a computer may be a way to save a lot of energy, but it also perfectly illustrates how far our society has fallen…  We are crossing lines that should never be crossed, and eventually we will pay a very great price for the crimes that our scientists are committing.”

How (and why) Bird Flu is About to Enter the “Mass Testing” Phase – by Kit Knightly – https://off-guardian.org/2024/06/18/how-and-why-bird-flu-is-about-to-enter-the-mass-testing-phase/ – “Hello everyone and welcome to the latest edition of Bird Flu Digest, formerly known as OffGuardian… The wall-to-wall coverage of Bird Flu is getting wallier-to-wallier with each passing week, to the point it’s almost hard to keep up with the waves of hot takes and chilling insights. But if you’re going to try, the best place to do it is right here, where I spend a good portion of my time reading very similar articles in very similar papers all about the danger of a pandemic they’re about to pretend is happening… Not a dream of mine growing up, but life’s like that… Anyway…bird flu… In our last bird flu update, we pointed out that the “bird flu death” in Mexico was very likely no such thing, and that reporting it as such was right out of the Covid playbook… Since then the head of Mexico’s Health Ministry has criticized the WHO for calling it a bird flu death at allBut the big bird flu news is that former head of the US CDC Robert Redfield has gone hysterical, telling NewsNation: “I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic.” – This story was naturally picked up and spread everywhere, but Redfield is hardly alone in this hysterical panic-fueling nonsense… Last week, The Conversation headlined: “An ounce of prevention: Now is the time to take action on H5N1 avian flu, because the stakes are enormous.” – USA Today echoes the tone:”Concerns grow as ‘gigantic’ bird flu outbreak runs rampant in US dairy herds.” – Apparently a new study has found something scary – Americans “have little to no pre-existing immunity to the H5N1 avian flu”. Frightening stuff… Just a few hours ago the Daily Mail reported on yet another doctor doling out yet another dire warning. This time Dr Rick Bright, who told PBS that: “We’re being blindfolded in this battle right now, and I’m really concerned that the virus is winning the game and getting ahead of us.” – We’re flying blind and the disease is getting ahead of us! It’s running rampant and the stakes are enormous! – Even some channels that supposedly know better are spreading the fear… CNN is frantic with worry – “We aren’t doing enough about the risk of bird flu – but we can”. Popular Science is relatively calm, asking “Can we prevent a bird flu pandemic in humans?”, before reassuring us that we can…as long as we all do as we’re told… All of these stories talk about “gathering data”, “flying blind”, and the need for “prevention”. And all of that is really code for “testing”. Almost every article talks up the need to increase testing – both of humans and animals… But anyone who’s been paying attention since 2020 knows PCR tests don’t gather data, they create data. They are machines for generating “cases”. Far from preventing a pandemic, they can be used to manufacture one… There are even early signs of mandating tests going forward, such as this Politico article bemoaning the lack of farmers voluntarily signing up for government surveillance programs: “The federal response is largely focusing on voluntary efforts by farmers to help track and contain the outbreak. But many farms still have not signed up for USDA efforts to boost surveillance and testing for the virus.” – And the solution to this is more money: “Although federal funds have been allocated, no farms have enrolled in voluntary on-site milk testing, according to the USDA. Fewer than a dozen farms have applied for separate financial aid in exchange for boosting biosecurity measures to help contain the virus.” – Paying farmers to test their animals is another recycled Covid strategy. It will generate cases, which will generate culling, which links us up with the other aspect of “bird flu” – not “the next pandemic” but “the war on food”… As the alleged disease allegedly spreads from poultry farm to dairy farm more and more chickens are being culled and cows slaughtered. This is going to escalate even further soon, when governments start paying farmers to destroy their cattle… Again, from Politico: …federal rulemaking is delaying the rollout of compensation for farmers who have lost or had to kill cows because of the disease.. Translation: They want to pay farmers to test their cows, then “financially compensate” them when they have to be destroyed. This is just like the UK’s “Environmental Land Management” schemes or the US “Conservation Reserve Program”, both of which pay farmers not to farm. The goal will be to make it more profitable for farmers to kill their cows than milk them… Incentivizing testing, rewarding positive results. That’s how you make a pandemic out of nothing, and sabotage the food system in the process… But there’s good news, after all the the EU is already procuring 40 million doses of vaccines, just in case. And the Moderna stock price keeps going up too. So there’s that… Honestly, it’s like watching a movie where they signpost the “surprise” twist ending inside the first five minutes, and then you have to sit through two interminable hours of what the writers clearly consider to be subtle foreshadowing… It’s getting to the point I just want them to do the bloody pandemic and get it over with.”Crash Alert: An Unbalanced Market In Three Charts – by John Rubino – https://rubino.substack.com/p/crash-alert-an-unbalanced-market – “During a bull market, imbalances build up that seem scary but are not, in the moment, a deal-breaker. It’s only with hindsight that we look back and say, “Oh yeah, that’s where it started to change.” – This series points out the trends that will — eventually — be the warnings we should have heeded: Households are overinvested in stocks – From the Kobeissi Letter: US households’ stock allocation as a percentage of financial assets hit a new record of 41.6% in Q1 2024. This is up from 30.5% in 2020 and even higher than in the 2000 Dot-Com bubble peak of 38.4%… Since the 2008 Financial Crisis, household participation in stocks has more than DOUBLED. Since then, the Nasdaq has rallied 1,738% and the S&P 500 is up 702%. Since October 2023 alone, the Nasdaq and S&P 500 have seen 40% and 32% gains, respectively…Households are benefiting from the historic run in stocks.

Market breadth is back to Great Recession levels – From Game of Trades:

US stocks are expensive compared to the rest of the world – From Tavi Costa:

Overvalued From Any Angle – To sum up, US stock markets are being elevated to historically unusual levels by a handful of high-flying Big Tech companies that face rising competition (Nvidia), slowing growth (Apple) and/or anti-trust scrutiny (Google). And Americans are as heavily invested in those stocks as they’ve ever been. Someday we’ll look back on this as a dangerous combination”

Exposed: How Climate Racketeers Aim to Force Us into Smart Gulags – “In Australia and NZ, “managed retreat” schemes could force people out of homes that “climate change” models render “uninsurable” – by Paul Cudenec – https://off-guardian.org/2024/06/26/exposed-how-climate-racketeers-aim-to-force-us-into-smart-gulags/ – “Shocking evidence is emerging from Australia and New Zealand of how the climate scam is being used to impose a techno-totalitarian smart-city future… The criminocratic global imperialists often use their Commonwealth colonies to try out the most insidious escalations of their tyranny – think of Canada, New Zealand and Australia during Covid… We can therefore assume that this is going to be the blueprint for the roll-out of their Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda across the world… The sinister scheme in question, called “Managed Retreat”, has been exposed by independent researcher Kate Mason on her excellent Substack blog aimed at “deconstructing 4IR narratives”… The idea is that exaggerated “modelling” of the imagined effects of “climate change” is being used to define certain areas as unsuitable for human settlement… Working hand in hand with the state is the insurance industry – long a central part of the corrupt criminocratic empire – which deems homes in these areas to be “uninsurable”… Banks are also playing their part (of course!) saying they are unwilling to provide mortgages for these “uninsurable” properties…In her latest article, Kate refers to a TV report about Kensington Banks, near Melbourne city centre, which has been newly declared a flood zone… She writes: “Property prices are expected to plummet by 20 percent. I think that’s rather conservative – who is going to buy in a flood zone? Unless it’s a developer who will raze it all to the ground and build a Smart Resilient complex”… Meanwhile, in New Zealand, residents are up in arms about attempts to impose “retreat” from coastal areas under the pretext of a predicted rise in sea levels… As this media report shows, they are not buying the scaremongering climate propaganda… Tim Rees said. “I’ve lived by Paraparaumu Beach since 1965 and the beach is actually getting bigger. For 45 years I’ve dived off Kāpiti Island and the rocks are still at the same height at low tide”… Added Tania Lees: “The science isn’t settled and there is no consensus. We don’t believe the sea levels are rising significantly and [that] we will all be flooded.” – Central and local government couldn’t fund “a process on this scale”, she said. “So far, the ratepayers have paid in excess of $4 million for the Takutai Kāpiti process… “We simply can’t afford to spend more. If implemented, managed retreat would be in excess of $1 billion.” – As for the agenda behind all this, Kate writes: Finding the information on climate change modelling and insurance has joined the dots for me regarding the enormous amount of pack and stack housing developments going ahead in Australia… They’re going to need to put us all somewhere when our houses are uninsurable and we have to sell them for a pittance… It is clear that this is ‘Resilient’ Smart Cities. Everything hooked up to the internet and data collected, stored and used as modelling to dictate increasingly dystopian government measures of control and enforcement”… By way of confirmation, she reveals that the Insurance Council of Australia, involved in Managed Retreat, works within the Public Private Partnership model and adheres to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, even being a foundation member of the United Nations Principles for Sustainable Insurance… The UN’s smart gulag agenda was paraded in their 80-page booklet entitled “Centering People in Smart Cities: A playbook for local and regional governments”, as we reported in 2022… Also in 2022, a body called the Australian Climate Council released a study which estimated that 1 in 25 of all homes and commercial buildings in the country would become effectively uninsurable by 2030 because of “worsening extreme weather events”… River flooding posed the biggest risk, according to the study, with flash flooding and bushfires identified as the other main hazards contributing to properties becoming “uninsurable”… As well as calling for “managed relocations”, the report stressed the need for “upscaling public investments in resilience” and to “support communities to ‘build back better'”… It declared: “Towns, cities and communities must be rebuilt – where appropriate to do so – in a way that takes into account the inevitable future changes in climate and makes them more resilient”… It comes as little surprise that this report was proudly showcased on the website of the World Economic Forum”Dems entire 2024 campaign just blew up in their face – by Frank Holmes – https://thehornnews.com/dems-entire-2024-campaign-just-blew-up-in-their-face/ -“The Democrats are living through a nightmare—and not just because of Joe Biden’s disqualifying debate performance… The problem plaguing the Democratic Party and causing its most bitter partisans to have sleepless nights is far deeper than a one-night performance, or even a four-year record of destroying the country… Not only do voters not accept the primary message Democrats have campaigned on for four years, but a new poll shows they actually believe the oppositeFaced with a sluggish economy, enormous inflation, and an uncontrolled illegal immigrant crime wave the Democrats had to turn to one message: Donald Trump is a dictator who will wreck “our democracy.” – The “democracy message” has been front-and-center in Democratic TV spots, online ads, fundraising and get-out-the-vote emails, speeches, and TV interviews since before the last election… But a recent poll found voters trust Donald Trump more than Joe Biden on the issue of preserving “our democracy.” – The poll, taken by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, interviewed 3,513 voters in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They also singled out another 2,255 as “deciders,” voters whose voice will have a special impact… “Which candidate do you think would do a better job handling…threats to democracy in the U.S.?” they asked… It wasn’t even close… Among all swing state voters, Trump beat Biden by 11 points — 44 percent to 33 percent… His lead with “deciders” was a closer but still substantial nine points (38 percent to 29 percent)… The big problem, according to the pollsters, is that when conservative and centrist voters think about “threats to democracy,” they don’t think of Trump… they think of the Biden administration… Biden has cherry-picked or twisted quotations about Trump saying he wants a “bloodbath,” having a third term, or being the world’s most short-term “dictator” (but only on his first day in office). Swing state voters don’t buy it from Biden… Non-liberals say the real threats to democracy come from the Biden administration and the Democratic Party—trying to throw a political opponent in jail, planning to reward millions of illegal aliens with U.S. citizenship and voting privileges, even suing to deny voters the right to cast their ballot for Donald Trump at all... Conservatives gloated, just a little bit, over the humiliating poll results… That happened “even though this is basically the entire Dem platform and has been since Biden took office,” said conservative writer Philip Reichert… Of course, the legacy media didn’t take the news easily… “Good news for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party: the swing-state voters most likely to decide the election believe that democracy is on the ballot in November,” said the reliably liberal New Republic magazine... “The problem: they trust Donald Trump to protect it more than Biden.” – This isn’t a minor setback: It’s the Biden campaign’s entire election strategy: “Orange man bad.” – Axios reports Joe Biden’s entire “theory for victory in November, which relies on voter concerns about Jan. 6, political violence, democracy and Donald Trump’s character.”“Senior Democrats, including some of President Biden’s aides, are increasingly dubious about” it, Axios reported—two weeks before Biden’s performance in the debate… “It is unclear to many of us watching from the outside whether the president and his core team realize how dire the situation is right now, and whether they even have a plan to fix it,” said an anonymous Democratic strategist who has ties to the Biden re-election campaign. “That is scary.” – But Biden tripled-down on the losing campaign theme. The Biden-Harris campaign opened a new website logging “Trump’s plans to destroy our democracy” on the morning of the debate. And some Democrats are bitterly clinging to the dictator shtick to the bitter end… “Trump was talking down our democracy. That was alarming for me. It was daylight and darkness,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose name has been floated as a possible replacement for Biden if he steps aside… Newsom decided to go all-in on the democracy message just after saying, “Joe Biden won the debate.” – To make matters worse for Biden, a separate survey shows Americans see Trump as more presidential than he is… The Gallup poll found 46 percent of voters said Trump had “the personality and leadership qualities a president needs” to succeed. “Fewer Americans, 38%, think Biden possesses such personality and leadership qualities.” – Now, throw in Biden’s blank-stare-and-open-mouthed debate turn, and Democrats can’t get rid of him fast enough… Politico rushed out an article titled, “Here’s how Democrats could replace Biden.” – “Democrats Question Replacing Biden: Here’s How It Could Work,” reports Bloomberg NewsOf course, if they follow through, it will make voters trust Democrats even lessVoters already favor Donald Trump over the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to protect democracy. But imagine if Democrats overturn their own primaries, ignore millions of Democratic base voters, and let a handful of superdelegates pick a new, unvetted presidential candidate… Replacing their own, duly elected nominee would be the ultimate proof that the Democrats are trying to destroy democracy.”

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