Asylum-seekers are almost three times more likely to have their applications granted in the UK than in France, according to a report by Migration Watch UK.
Data from the Home Office showed the granting of permission in the first instance rose to 77 percent in 2021 from 34 percent in 2016. The grant rate in France over the same period fell to 25 percent from 32 percent.
France is among the least likely countries in Europe to grant asylum, while Britain is at the other end of the spectrum.
“The UK’s overly permissive asylum rules are an outlier compared with most of Europe and are adding to the powerful magnet that is drawing thousands of asylum rejects from all over Europe across the Channel in dangerous boat trips,” Migration Watch said.
However, Jonathan Portes, a professor of economics at King’s College London and senior fellow with UK in a Changing Europe, wrote on Twitter that France had granted refugee status to 50,000 people in 2021, compared with 11,000 in the UK.
As of Dec. 20, more than 45,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the English Channel in small boats, including about 15,000 who are believed to have come from Albania. That compares with 28,501 in 2021 and is 151 times more than the number that tried the crossing in 2018.
Four people died on Dec. 14 when a boat carrying illegal immigrants capsized in the Channel.
From 2017 and 2020, France was the most popular destination for Albanians, with about 11,000 a year trying to gain entry, the report says. Migration Watch said that suggests Albanians are now choosing to head for Britain after being rejected in France.
Migration Watch’s report revealed 55 percent of immigrants from Eritrea, 44 percent of Afghans, 38 percent of those from Sudan, and 27 percent of Iraqis who were applying for asylum in the UK, had already claimed before in an EU country.
An internal Home Office report found the decision of some to head for the UK “may reflect an unsuccessful asylum application in France” and said another important factor was secondary movement from Greece and Germany.
The UK is considering using underutilized cruise ships to house illegal immigrants, Home Secretary Suella Braverman said this week.
‘Everything Is Still on the Table’
She told a House of Lords committee the bill for accommodating illegal immigrants in hotels would be £2.3 billion this year and was expected to rise to £2.7 billion next year.
“We will bring forward a range of alternative sites, they will include disused holiday parks, former student halls. I should say we are looking at those sites, I wouldn’t say anything is confirmed yet,” she told the committee.
“But we need to bring forward thousands of places, and when you talk about vessels, all I can say is, because we are in discussion with a wide variety of providers, that everything is still on the table and nothing is excluded.”
Some immigrants have already been moved out of hotels and into the Napier barracks in Folkestone, a former British Army base.
Braverman told the peers:
“We are returning people almost every week to various countries around the world. We do that through scheduled flights, we charter flights … so we’re in a variety of discussions with several airlines for lots of different destinations.”
Earlier this week the High Court in London ruled the government’s plan to send illegal immigrants who crossed the Channel to Rwanda while their applications were processed was “lawful.”
But Braverman told the Lords committee that delivery of the Rwanda plan had been paused while there was ongoing litigation.
The Rwanda agreement, which was signed by Braverman’s predecessor as home secretary, Priti Patel, was designed as a deterrent to those seeking to cross the Channel illegally.
“On top of the clear unsuitability, Suella Braverman’s talk of housing people seeking asylum in old cruise ships, disused holiday camps, and student halls is just more distraction from the urgent task of reforming an asylum system that she and her predecessor have effectively broken,” said Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director.
Visualizing Healthcare Spending & Life Expectancy, By Country
Over the last century, life expectancy at birth has more than doubled across the globe, largely thanks to innovations and discoveries in various medical fields around sanitation, vaccines, and preventative healthcare.
Yet, while the average life expectancy for humans has increased significantly on a global scale, there’s still a noticeable gap in average life expectancies between different countries.
What’s the explanation for this divide? According to World Bank data compiled by Truman Du, Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang suggests it may be partially related to the amount of money a country spends on its healthcare…
More Spending Generally Means More Years
The latest available data from the World Bank includes both the healthcare spending per capita of 178 different countries and their average life expectancy.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the analysis found that countries that spent more on healthcare tended to have higher average life expectancies up until reaching the 80-year mark.
However, there were a few slight exceptions.
For instance, while the United States has the largest spending of any country included in the dataset, its average life expectancy of 77 years is lower than many other countries that spend far less per capita.
What’s going on in the United States? While there are several intermingling factors at play, some researchers believe a big contributor is the country’s higher infant mortality rate, along with its higher relative rate of violence among young adults.
On the other end of the spectrum, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea have the highest life expectancies on the list despite their relatively low spending per capita.
It’s worth mentioning that this wasn’t always the case—in the 1960s, Japan’s life expectancy was actually the lowest among the G7 countries, and South Korea’s was below 60 years, making it one of the top 30 countries by improved life expectancy:
In fact, the last 60 years have seen many countries substantially increase their average life expectancies from the 30-40 year range to 70+ years. But as the header chart shows, there are still many countries lagging behind in Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
How High Can Average Life Expectancy Go?
Since people are living longer than they’ve ever lived before, how much higher will average life expectancies be in another 100 years?
Recent research published in Nature Communications suggests that, under the right circumstances, human beings have the potential to live up to 150 years.
Projections from the UN predict that growth will be divided, with developed countries seeing higher life expectancies than developing regions.
However, as seen in the above chart from the World Economic Forum and using UN data, it’s likely the gap between developed and developing countries will narrow over time.
After dozens of professors and teachers from top Chinese universities passed away during the past 30 days, four more prominent Chinese figures have been reported to have died in the three days Sunday to Monday, respectively. They were aged from 39 to 89.
According to Shanghai-based news portal The Paper, Tsinghua University professor Wu Guanying, China Film Art Research Center’s former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary Chen Jingliang, former member of the editorial board of Xinhua News Agency Fang Xuehui, and celebrated Peking Opera performer Chu Lanlan all died within the three days.
The Paper wrote that they died of illness after medical treatment failed to help them. The report didn’t specify which illness caused their deaths.
Biographies of 4 Scholars and Celebrities
Professor Wu Guanying, who died on Dec. 20 at the age of 67, was a professor of the Department of Information Art & Design at the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University. He was best known as one of the designers of the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics mascots. He also participated in the design of many sets of stamps and gold and siver coins of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals, and was the designer of the New Year greeting series stamps.
Chen Jingliang, born in April 1946, joined the CCP in 1979, according to The Paper. He started as a translator at China Film Group Corporation in 1970 and was the former CCP secretary of the China Film Art Research Center from 1994 to 2006 when Chen retired. He was a member of China’s Film Censorship Committee, which is overseen by China’s National Radio and Television Administration. Chen died on Dec. 19 at the age of 76.
Fang Xuehui was born in December 1933 in Indonesia. He worked for the CCP’s mouthpiece Xinhua News Agency’s Jakarta regional office in the 1950s and settled down in China in 1966. He was an editor with Cankaoxiaoxi (“Reference News”), published by Xinhua News Agency, which translates and re-publishes articles by foreign news agencies. It was once only available to the CCP’s cadres and their families.
Chu Lanlan was born in 1983 and passed away on Dec. 18 at the age of 39. She worked with the CCP’s military performing arts troupe to create Peking Opera singing and dancing pieces. She performed in various performances hosted by the CCP’s Central TV and Beijing TV.
Over 30 Deaths Reported in One Month at 2 Top Chinese Universities
From Nov. 10 to Dec. 10, a total of 19 retired professors and teachers of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University reportedly died amid the most recent wave of the pandemic outbreak, as reported by China’s news portal Sina.
Huang Kezhi, a professor of Tsinghua University’s Department of Engineering Mechanics and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, died on Dec. 6 at the age of 95. Huang, a CCP member, was one of the founders of the Department of Engineering Mechanics, according to The Paper.
Tsinghua University is home to some of the most prominent alumni, including the current CCP top leader Xi Jinping, his predecessor Hu Jintao, and former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji.
On Dec. 11, an article titled “Taking the Protection of the Life and Health of Old Comrades as the Top Priority of the Current Epidemic Prevention and Control” was published on the official website of Tsinghua University, which says three working teams have been set up to guarantee the pandemic control and medical treatment of retired teachers and professors of the university. The article is reposted by Sina, a Chinese digital news portal.
Netizens checked the obituaries published by Peking University from Nov. 6 to Dec. 5 and found that 15 scholars of the university passed away during the period. Among them, 89-year-old Yang Gen, CCP member and professor of the School of Archaeology and Museology at Peking University, died on Nov. 30.
Putin To Sign Response To G7’s Oil Price Cap Early Next Week, Touts “No Losses”
President Putin indicated Thursday that Russia’s long-awaited response to the G7 oil price cap will come next Monday or Tuesday, in a defiant message asserting there will be no losses for Russia’s economy due to the cap.
After long warning Europe its punitive anti-Moscow measures will backfire, he on Thursday repeated this theme that the price cap will trigger “a path toward destruction of global energy” – possibly sending prices to “sky-high” levels. “No individual damage for Russia, for the Russian economy, for the Russian fuel and energy sector is seen. We are selling approximately at prices set as the cap,” Putin said, according to a state media translation.
“The goal of our geopolitical opponents, adversaries is clear – to limit revenues of the Russian budget,” Putin continued, before asserting:
“We nevertheless lose nothing from this ceiling; there are no losses for the Russian fuel and energy sector and the economy, the budget.”
And he re-emphasized that there are “No losses because we are selling at these prices.”
Interestingly a Foreign Policy op-ed published on the same day by chairman of the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, Richard Morningstar, seems to agree and admits the following…
“When Western leaders announced on Dec.2 that they had agreed on a $60 price cap on Russian oil exports they trumpeted it as a bold multinational achievement in energy diplomacy. But anyone who things this will be a significant hit to Russian oil revenues… is likely to be disappointed.”
And more: “After all, Russian oil has sold at prices in the $60 range for much of the last sevral years. Moreover, since Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, global energy traders have already limited their offtake of Russian crude to some extent. When countires such as India and China snapped up the surplus, they negotiated steep discounts. But the discount for Urals crude, the main Russian benmark – nearly $40 per barrel compared with Brent oil in the early months of the war – has slowly dropped into the low $20 per barrel range, allowing Moscow to continue cashing in.”
“We expect the collapse of profits from oil and gas exports to be at more than 50%, precisely because of the introduction of the EU embargo on oil and petroleum products and the introduction of price restrictions. Oil and gas account for 60% and 40% of federal budget revenues. We expect that Russia’s revenues will fall below the critical level of $40 billion per quarter,” Yuliya Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Ukraine has said, echoing the whole impetus and rationale behind the cap as creating conditions that make it much more difficult for the Russian military machine to continue functioning.
As for Putin, he the day prior also confidently said that his approach to the Ukraine special operation will remain one of “no limits” on spending. “The country and government is giving everything that the army asks for – everything. I trust that there will be an appropriate response and the results will be achieved,” Putin informed his top officials at the Defense Ministry’s annual meeting in Moscow.
A New Jersey mom continues to endure threats after a high-ranking military officer posted she was under investigation by security forces for objecting to student-made posters promoting terms like polysexual and pansexual at her local elementary school.
Angela Reading is a former school teacher and, until her recent resignation, a member of the Northern Burlington County Regional School board of education.
Reading told The Epoch Times that along with the U.S. Army officer’s social media posts warning she was under investigation for “causing safety concerns for many families,” North Hanover Township police chief Robert Duff contacted her and told her he had received emails from the military asking her to take her social media posts down about the sexuality posters.
Reading said Duff originally said he would release the emails to her, but then reneged, telling her the military told him he couldn’t because “they were classified.”
Duff also refused to release them to The Epoch Times, saying he had no comment about the situation, and that “we should ask the military” about it.
No one from the nearby McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst Joint Base, a large Air Force installation that hosts five wings—where Army officer Christopher Schilling is stationed—responded to inquiries by The Epoch Times.
Schilling’s rank had initially been reported in national news as lieutenant, but The Epoch Times has been able to confirm he is a major assigned to the 78th Training Command as an operations officer.
Schilling has also been reported by some national press as being a parent, but a school official—speaking on the condition of anonymity—said she wasn’t aware of him having any children in the school district.
The Epoch Times has been unable to contact Schilling.
Fears Over Community Safety
The Army officer posted on Facebook that “the Joint Base leadership takes this situation very seriously and from the beginning have had the security forces working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to ensure the continued safety of the entire community.”
Schilling also posted that one of Reading’s children was in the 2nd grade, commenting that the posters were hung in a school for 4th to 6th graders.
“That literally gave me the chills,” Reading told The Epoch Times, “that he was posting about kids and seemed to have detailed knowledge of them.”
Reading said she was so terrified that she immediately pulled her children out of school out of concern for their safety.
Reading is the latest in a growing group of parents and other citizens across the United States who have become headline news after being accused of inciting violence for objecting to sexually explicit material in public schools.
Nicole Solas, from Rhode Island, was pictured on a front page news story labeled “Domestic Terrorists” for her objection to explicit LGBT sex education—including one curriculum that likened sexual preference to choosing a type of pizza in a middle school assignment.
Well-Organized Ambush
Virginia mom Stacy Langton’s national notoriety began after she read from the book “Gender Queer,” which she found in school’s elementary school library, to the Fairfax County School Board.
Langton’s microphone was shut off and she was reminded there were children in the audience.
Kari MacRae, a Massachusetts grandmother, was fired from her teaching job in another town, was pressured to resign from the Hanover school board, and was the subject of what appeared to be a well-organized ambush during an impromptu public comment session, after she objected to LGBT and CRT curriculum in the schools.
MacRae said she sympathizes with Reading.
“She is trying to protect not just her own child, but all the children, because she sees how this is going to impact future generations and she the need to stand up and say enough is enough,” said MacRae. “There is a difference between inclusivity and indoctrination and that’s what they are trying to do here.”
Like MacRae, Reading too said she was blindsided by a packed auditorium of people who appeared to come from out of town to protest against her.
“The crazy thing is that all I basically said is that the poster was inappropriate,” said Reading.
She also had only posted on a private Facebook group, made up mostly of conservative parents.
“All I can think is there must be a mole on there,” she said.
As for the poster in question, the collage, if still up it covers an entire wall at the Upper Elementary School (UES). It was hung just outside the entrance into the school’s auditorium, which is used by the entire district for events.
The district was hosting a math night when Reading said her 7-year-old daughter, who is enrolled in a talented and gifted reading program, pointed out the poster and asked her what a “polysexual” was.
After doing some inquiring the next day, Reading said she was told the poster was for an “Inclusion and Diversity” in-class project and that the kids came up with their own terms, not the school or teachers.
Interestingly, as Schilling pointed out, the kids came up with “mostly sexual-themed posters” for the diversity project with little to no other subjects typically linked to the idea of diversity such as religion, ethnicity, body shape, and other visual characteristics.
“This giant poster is riddled with rainbows and all the LGBT flags,” said Reading. “There’s a flag for polysexuals, a flag for pansexuals, bisexuals, asexuals, gender queer, nonbinary, transgender, androgynous, gender fluid, and it was 4th to 6th graders who came up with this all by themselves?”
Facing Online Abuse
In the middle of the sexual-orientation flags is written in big letters “LGBT.”
Reading said she found the poster appalling because the terms, by their own definition, are about “sexual attraction”—not appropriate subject matters for 9 to 11-year-olds.
It was only after she was told to “live with it” by school officials that she went online about the poster.
Reading has been repeatedly called a bigot and a hater on a variety of social media platforms, and in published news stories, and is the subject of a new change.org petition that has labeled her an extremist.
Schilling and Reading’s array of critics have largely accused her of putting children from military families who live on the joint base in danger and went so far as to accuse her of “inciting violence” with her objection to the posters.
Superintendent Helen Payne, who released a statement about the case, did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times.
In her statement, Payne wrote that the school has “been in continuous close contact with the North Hanover police” over the issue.
“They are taking any risks very seriously, are aware of our concerns, and have been working on their end to provide any support we need.”
Reading has, however, also won her share of support including from parents who have criticized Schilling for using his authority to threaten her.
In one of his posts Schilling wrote, “Most younger kids would only focus on the pretty colored flags. The few that ask about the words can easily be explained as “those words describe other types of families and change the subject. Much worse is on billboards or flags flying in people’s yards …”
Backing For a Concerned Mother
In a statement to The Epoch Times, Gregory Quinlan, executive director of the Center For Garden State Families, took special aim at Duff for going along with the pressuring of Reading instead of protecting her and her First Amendment rights.
“Police chief Robert Duff clearly forgot what it meant when he took the oath of office to protect the U.S. Constitution. His job is to defend the rights of Angela Reading, not take them away,” said Quinlan.
He also said anyone can see that Reading said nothing “that incited violence.”
“Baltimore City Becomes Graveyard” Amid Dangerous Murder Wave
It has been two years since Baltimore welcomed Mayor Brandon Scott with an ambitious new crime-fighting plan. So far, progress has been horrible.
“I will reduce homicides by 15% each year of my term and get us below 300 homicides my first year,” vowed the new Mayor.
As of Thursday, homicides in the Democrat-controlled city have hit 322, not too far from record highs after a murderous summer.
Baltimore City’s 2022 cumulative homicide trend is on par with the deadly years before Scott entered office.
The city had one of the deadliest summers in years.
With a population of around 600,000, the metro area is one of the most dangerous places in the country on a per capita basis. The murder rate stands at about 58.27 per 100,000.
Mayor Scott’s plan to fix the city has been a nightmare with no real progress:
“Baltimore City done become a graveyard — memorials on every corner,” resident Karl McDonald, who joined a recent anti-violence march in the neighborhood, told AP News.
Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s policies of not prosecuting low-level crimes since 2020 have accelerated the city’s demise.
Meanwhile, Baltimore City Police Department is hemorrhaging officers as a shortage inhibits the ability to conduct meaningful patrols in high-crime areas — allowing gangs to completely control neighbors where black markets thrive and gunfire is rampant.
Violence in the city is so bad that a local chapter of the NAACP urged Gov. Larry Hogan to declare a “public emergency” and deploy the National Guard to prevent further collapse.
Canadian Government Tells Kids They’ll Be On Santa’s ‘Naughty List’ Without COVID Vaccine, Masks
It’s the end of 2022 and the world is still witnessing new heights of Covid absurdity and fear-mongering authoritarianism coming from government figures.
Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam has issued a new public health announcement for the Christmas holidays, which comes in the form of a 2-minute interview with “Mrs. Clause” from the “North Pole”. In it, children are warned that they could be on Santa’s “naughty list” if they don’t get the Covid-19 vaccine and mask up. Adults too are told that they won’t make the “nice list” if they don’t have their boosters.
Parents and Caregivers, I had a great chat with Mrs. Claus about things we can do to make this a happy and healthy holiday season. Here’s the scoop from the #NorthPole: pic.twitter.com/pgKY5NPEyV
Dr. Tam begins the video with the “good news” that the vast majority of Canadians have made the nice list this year after having been vaccinated.
And “Mrs. Claus” responds: “It just warms my heart to see everyone in Canada, especially kids, working so hard to keep the holidays safe…” The suggestion is that the minority of citizens who remain unvaccinated or without their boosters are “naughty”.
Mrs. Claus then informs the children that she and Santa are “both up do date with our vaccinations, including Covid boosters and flu shots.” This is the holiday image Canada wants to convey to impressionable young children – that coronavirus now threatens the mythical North Pole, apparently.
From there the Christmas message goes into the kind of guilt-tripping rhetoric we’ve all come to expect from the Canadian government, and its top health official who is the equivalent of Dr. Fauci.
“I always tell Santa to make a list and check it twice,” Mrs. Claus says, and goes through the “list” by telling children to “stay up to date on your vaccinations” as well as “wear a mask… and make sure it’s nice and snug.”
Dr. Tam follows by telling families that if they gather for the holidays, “open a door, or a window” to let fresh air in.
All of this might actually be a step up for Canada when compared to the first couple years of the pandemic, given that across major cities there were strict curfews severely hindering freedom of movement, and not even relatives could visit family members after dark on fear of being ticketed by police.
The Neuralink implant that aims to allow a person to control a computer with thoughts has good potential to achieve its initial goal of helping paralyzed people communicate. It may, at least to some extent, help restore vision for the blind. It may, to a significant degree, restore limb control for those with spine injuries, according to several neuroscientists.
But when it comes to Neuralink’s broader goals of letting healthy people interface with computers directly via the mind, the technical capability is achievable, but would lead to expansive ethical, safety, security, privacy, and even philosophical issues, experts told The Epoch Times.
Neuralink—founded in 2016 by the world’s richest man, prolific entrepreneur Elon Musk—recently applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for human trials of its brain implants. The company staged a three-hour presentation of its progress, including demonstrations of a monkey controlling a computer with its mind, a robot that can handle some of the most delicate parts of the required brain implant insertion surgery, as well as a pig whose legs can be controlled remotely by a computer.
The presentation also included a monkey with a brain implant that made it see flashes of light, a step toward the company’s proposition to restore vision for the blind.
“The overarching goal of Neuralink is to create, ultimately, a whole brain interface. So a generalized input-output device that in the long term literally could interface with every aspect of your brain and in the short term can interface with any given section of your brain and solve a tremendous number of things that cause debilitating issues for people,” Musk said during the presentation.
The Neuralink technology “makes a lot of sense” for helping people with disabilities, said Nicho Hatsopoulos, a neurology professor at the University of Chicago and one of the pioneers of brain-computer interface development.
“It is impressive, actually,” he said after seeing the Neuralink presentation.
Mark Churchland, associate professor of neuroscience at Columbia University and an expert on brain signal decoding, commended Neuralink for bringing the brain-computer interface technology a long way from experiment to product.
“They seem to have a solid wireless interface, which is not an easy thing to build. And going from needing racks of equipment and computers to needing an iPhone is impressive,” he said.
“In terms of the actual experiments, it’s not doing anything that hasn’t been done before, but if you’re doing it better and more easily, that counts for a lot.”
When it comes to the company’s plans to one day mass-produce the implants for use by anybody and everybody, both Hatsopoulos and Churchland were much more reserved.
“We’re going to have to have some serious ethical conversations,” Hatsopoulos said, noting that “it’s one thing to help restore function in people who have a disability,” but “another thing to augment people.”
“Augmentation is going to be a big ethical concern,” he said.
Churchland was more blunt.
“I think that is likely a really bad idea,” he said.
Other experts raised concerns as well, ranging from philosophical questions over free will to security and privacy issues with regard to data collected from the brain as well as the potential to hack the implant.
Level 1: Mind Mouse
Neuralink’s initial goal is to enable physically incapacitated people to control a computer. At the current stage of development, the implant is roughly the size of a small stack of quarters. To install it, first, a piece of skin would be cut and peeled off the skull of the patient. Then, a small hole would be drilled in the skull. Next, a series of extremely thin, flexible wires would be connected to a thin needle one by one and stuck by a robotic machine inside the surface layer of the brain in the motor cortex area. The implant would be placed inside the hole in the skull, sealing it. The skin would be sewn over it and, as it heals, the implant would become invisible from the outside.
The person would be asked to think, for instance, about moving their hand in a certain direction. Corresponding brain activity signals from the implant would be collected over a period of time, translated to computer data and commands via artificial intelligence and voila—the implant would then allow the person to control a computer with their mind.
The Neuralink presentation proved the concept by showing a video of a monkey with the implant. The primate moved a mouse cursor to highlighted positions on a computer screen, getting bits of banana smoothie through a tube as a reward.
The underlying technology is real and a similar experiment has been repeated many times by researchers using various methods, according to Shinsuke Shimojo, a professor of experimental psychology at the California Institute of Technology.
In fact, a similar effect can be achieved even without sticking wires inside the brain as some brain activity can be detected on the surface of the head, he said, noting he’s currently working on one such technology.
“It can be recordable reasonably well from the electrodes outside of the skull,” Shimojo said. “Those are done already and it’s going to be even better.”
The more invasive path Neuralink has taken is more ambitious and more delicate.
Regulatory authorities don’t allow invasive experimental techniques unless there’s an urgent medical need, Shimojo noted.
“It’s not a science problem. It’s an ethical problem,” he said.
Such experiments have so far been approved on a small scale for research purposes.
In the early 2000s, implants developed by Cyberkinetics, a company co-founded by Hatsopoulos, were tested on several physically disabled patients. The project fizzled out because its investors lost interest, he said.
The underlying software was acquired by a company called BrainGate in 2008 and clinical trials with small groups of patients have been ongoing at several research institutions, including one called BrainGate2 under the leadership of Leigh Hochberg, an engineering professor at Brown University.
Science has only recently reached a point where multiple companies have decided to try to move it from research to a marketable product, Hochberg said.
He’s currently helping several such companies, including Neuralink, which is now in talks with the FDA to run clinical trials that could lead to official approval of its implant as a form of treatment.
“Clinical trials of this type would generally take a few years,” Hochberg said.
Each new iteration of the implants would then require further trials, though he hopes software improvements of the system could be incorporated “with perhaps more speed.”
The technology has been aided by advances in machine learning, which allows matching brain signal patterns with specific actions, such as moving a mouse cursor in a particular direction. Machine learning allows the correlation of brain patterns with physical outcomes without the need to understand the function of each specific neuron.
“That’s the difference between the scientific approach and the engineering approach,” Shimojo commented.
Scientists try to find out how things work, such as by exploring “how each neuron is wired” or “what’s the hierarchy of information processing in different parts of the brain,” he said. As a result, they try to drill down to causal relationships.
Engineers, on the other hand, try to solve a problem. If an artificial intelligence finds a pattern that matches the desired result 95 percent of the time, that may be good enough, he noted.
“I think right now, it’s moving, especially because of this deep learning progress, in that direction.”
Level 2: Artificial Eye
The next step for the Neuralink technology would be to restore sight, the presenters said. The same implant would be inserted at the back of the skull and connected to the visual cortex, the part of the brain responsible for processing images from the eyes. A video stream from a camera would then be encoded as neural signals and used to stimulate neurons responsible for image processing, thus rendering a picture.
This seems to be possible in principle, but there may be difficulties in practice.
“There are some constraints that can be removed eventually by just technical advance. And then there are some intrinsic limitations related to how the visual cortex itself is organized,” Shimojo said.
Some neurons in the visual cortex indeed correspond to a location in the visual field. That means correct stimulation of one location in the brain produces a flash of light at a particular location in one’s vision and stimulation of another location produces a flash of light at a different place. Experiments of this kind have been done in apes and Neuralink demonstrated one.
But “so far, the resolution is very, very low—ridiculously low,” Shimojo said.
The flashes of light such stimulation produces can only be positioned on a grid of perhaps 12 by 12 pixels, he said.
The picture quality can be improved by stimulating more neurons, i.e. inserting more electrodes into the brain. The Neuralink implant currently uses over 1,000 electrodes with a promise of 16,000 electrodes on the same chip. For the visual aid, the presentation proposed two implants with 16,000 electrodes each. If each electrode could be used to stimulate multiple “pixels,” perhaps a picture quality on par with a 1980s computer can be achieved.
But even if the number of electrodes is further boosted in the future, the resulting image quality would still be limited, according to Shimojo.
The problem is that if one creates a topographic map of the visual field, assigning each neuron to its position in the field, the result is nowhere precise enough to make up a clear image.
“The topographic map is kind of crude and diffuse. It’s not pinpoint,” he said.
People see with clarity thanks to complex, multi-layer image processing by the brain where the signal can travel back and forth between the layers and where neurons help adjacent neurons with the tasks.
It’s not clear how the implant could achieve a comparable result, according to Shimojo.
“It’s not easily solved by the technical side,” he said.
Musk went as far as to suggest vision can be restored for people who are congenitally blind because even such people possess a visual cortex.
“Even if they’ve never seen before, we’re confident that they could see,” he said.
Hatsopoulos wasn’t so convinced.
“I’m not clear that that’s possible,” he said.
The issue is that the visual cortex “develops over the first several years of life” and the visual input from the eyes “helps organize how the visual cortex will function,” Hatsopoulos explained.
Around the age of two, the brain loses the initial ability to develop so rapidly.
That early development is “crucial,” he said, giving the example of children born with cataracts. The condition can be remedied by surgically replacing eye lenses, but it needs to be done early on. If the operation is performed too late, the patient won’t be able to see, even though all the physical parts are present and functioning.
“Everything is perfectly fine, but the person will not understand the visual input coming in,” Hatsopoulos said.
Level 3: Stretching the Limbs
The Neuralink presentation outlined how the implants could restore limb control for people paralyzed after spine injuries. Aside from the implant in the motor cortex, another several implants would be inserted into the spine. Signals from the brain would then be recorded and sent to the spinal implants, bridging the part where the spinal cord is severed or damaged.
In principle, this is fully achievable, according to the experts.
“In fact, we’re doing that right now,” Hatsopoulos said. His university is working with a different implant technology that allows a patient to control a mechanical arm via the mind.
One challenge is to record from many neurons at the same time “to give you the rich kind of movement that you would want to get” in order to produce “movement that’s somewhat normal,” he said.
Reading from maybe a thousand neurons should suffice to restore “functional movement,” such as allowing a person to feed or dress themselves, Hatsopoulos said.
“Maybe not as quickly as they would if they had an intact system, but they can do it,” he said.
Based on its technical specifications, the Neuralink implant should enable a wide range of movement. Its presentation included a video of a pig with brain and spinal implants that bent its leg and stretched its thighs in response to commands sent to the implants.
Facilitating complex movement, such as playing a piano, would probably require thousands of electrodes, Hatsopoulos said, noting “we’re taking baby steps right now.”
Another challenge is fine-tuning the stimulation so it targets muscle threads that don’t tire quickly.
“You’ve got to do more than just activate muscles,” Churchland said.
“You’ve got to activate them in a relatively natural way to avoid fatigue. And that’s definitely doable, but it’s certainly not trivial.”
It’s helpful in this endeavor that patients usually actively cooperate to make the solution work. Even though the number of electrodes may create a bottleneck, with effort, patients could rewire their brains to take maximum advantage of the interface.
“With practice, they can get better at it,” Hatsopoulos said.
The ability to move, however, is not enough. To truly restore function to a limb requires fixing the sense of touch too.
That means recording sensory impulses from the limb and sending them to another implant in the brain’s sensory cortex.
In principle, that has already been done as well. Stimulating some brain cells, for example, can create an impression that one is touching something, Hatsopoulos said, referring to experiments done at his university. The issue, again, is reading from and stimulating enough neurons to create a sufficiently robust touch experience.
The technology still has a long way to go in this regard, Hochberg acknowledged.
“It’s early, but exciting days,” he said.
For truly natural movement, however, one would need to go further yet.
A healthy person not only senses limb movement from what he touches externally, but also gets a sense of movement and limb position from inside the body.
The phenomenon is called proprioception. Scientists know that certain brain areas receive those kinds of sensory inputs, but it’s not quite known how it works.
“That’s the next frontier in this field,” Hatsopoulos said. “No one has cracked that yet.”
Level 4: Cyborgs
Musk envisions Neuralink going far beyond helping the disabled. He portrayed it more as a natural next step from a smartphone or smartwatch. Just like “replacing a piece of skull with a smartwatch for lack of a better analogy,” as he put it.
“I could have a Neuralink device implanted right now and you wouldn’t even know. I mean, hypothetically, I may be one of these demos. In fact, one of these demos I will,” he said to laughs and cheers from the audience.
He argued that “we are all already cyborgs in a way that your phone and your computer are extensions of yourself.”
“I’m sure you found if you leave your phone behind you end up tapping your pockets and it’s like having missing limb syndrome,” he said.
Neuralink for healthy people, however, may be far in the future, if it ever comes.
“The FDA is not going to approve this for use in healthy individuals. At least in this version of the implant,” Hatsopoulos said, noting that “you would have to show an incredible level of safety.”
Shimojo expressed a similar sentiment.
“If the safety is proven, then there’s a possibility, in the long, long future, that maybe intact, healthy people have electrodes inside of the brain. But I don’t think that’s going to happen soon,” he said.
The technology would likely have to get to a point of giving disabled people greater capabilities than healthy people have.
Musk believes the implant would indeed bestow superior capabilities.
“We’re confident that someone who has basically no other interface to the outside world would be able to control their phone better than someone who has working hands,” he said.
But even if the implant is technically safe in the sense that it wouldn’t accidentally harm the user and even if it eventually passes regulatory muster, the technology faces other problems that may prove intractable.
Data Security
The Neuralink implant currently communicates with a computer using Bluetooth. That can be hacked by a number of easily available tools, according to Gary Miliefsky, a cybersecurity expert, head of Cyber Defense Media Group, and a founding member of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“If you’re in the proximity of the person you will probably be able to steal some data. So that’s not secure,” he said.
As a first step, the communication between the implant and a computer would need to be encrypted, but that would drain the battery and processing power on the implant.
Even then, “people will find ways to hack” the implants, Miliefsky said.
There are already devices that can “unwind” SSL and TLS encryption protocols commonly used to secure emails, he said. And new technologies can go even further.
“Quantum computing can probably break today’s encryption pretty easily,” he said.
There’s “quantum-proof” encryption on the horizon, but the processing power it requires is far beyond anything a small implant could handle now or even in the upcoming decades, he estimated.
“Nothing is bulletproof. Nothing is foolproof. When they tell you it’s unhackable, it’s usually hacked in five minutes, whatever it is,” he said.
Even if the implant-computer communication is somehow secured, the brain activity data could still be exfiltrated from the computer, such as by infecting the computer with malware.
“Seventy percent of new malware gets past all the virus scanners,” Miliefsky noted.
And even if the data is somehow secured on the computer, it would still need to be accessed by technicians servicing the implant.
Anybody with insider access to the Neuralink system would immediately become a prime target for every intelligence agency and every malicious actor in the world, Miliefsky acknowledged.
“They’ll be unsuspecting victims. Absolutely,” he said.
And that doesn’t even include the issue of covert operatives of all sorts lining up for jobs at Neuralink.
“Insider threat defense is a big issue,” Miliefsky said.
Yet another area of concern is that, once the data exists, there’s a chance the government could use the legal process to force Neuralink to preserve the data and share it for purposes of criminal investigations, counterintelligence, national security, and intelligence collection.
Brain Hack
The implications of a hacked implant appear difficult to fully grasp.
People seem to be willing to accept some level of privacy intrusion. Smartphones, for example, can easily be used to listen in on a person and track one’s movement.
“We’re walking around with spyware every day,” Miliefsky said.
A brain implant, however, can produce personal data on another level of intimacy.
From the motor cortex, an implant could record a wide range of body movements, according to Hochberg.
“It continues to, I think, both amaze and pleasantly surprise a lot of people in the field just how rich the information is that can be extracted from small areas of the motor cortex,” he said.
From the visual cortex, everything a person sees could theoretically be recorded, albeit likely in low resolution.
Moreover, the implant would be under the skin, meaning it can’t be removed by the user and it can’t be turned off as it needs to maintain the capability of being turned on and off remotely.
Worse yet, the implant can send signals into the brain too. Issuing commands to the motor cortex could make one move involuntarily.
Theoretically, it’s possible to make a remote-controlled human, Hatsopoulos confirmed.
Sending visual signals could make one see things that aren’t there, distract a person, or perhaps obstruct vision with flashes of light, the Neuralink experiments indicate.
Churchland, however, dismissed such concerns as too far removed from the technology’s current reality.
“It’s not physically impossible, but it’s extremely improbable,” he said.
“Concerns about external manipulation, I think, are fanciful for the foreseeable future.”
Level 5: Far From ‘The Matrix’
Musk expects to go even further. As the electrode insertion technology improves, the implant will be able to reach deep areas of the brain as well, according to the presentation.
Those parts of the brain are responsible for thought activity such as memory processing, emotion, motivation, and abstract thinking.
Yet the know-how for decoding signals from these parts of the brain is so far limited, according to Shimojo.
Machine learning can recognize patterns with a high degree of probability, but some level of ambiguity may be “intrinsic,” he said.
“The brain is complicated and one neuron is not participating in one task. The same neuron can be participating in different networks for entirely different purposes. It’s really highly context-dependent and environment-dependent.”
Whether it’s possible to fully decode such thought processes remains an open question.
“Even among neuroscientists, there are different opinions,” he said, noting that such difficulties may need “some clever creativity to deal with.”
“So is this eventually overcome? It may be, but it’s very long-run. It’s not as easy as those demonstrations may indicate.”
Hypothetically, the ability to truly read and write in deeper areas of the brain would raise profound ethical and philosophical questions.
Accessing memory processing centers, for example, would open another floodgate of privacy and security issues, according to Miliefsky, from password theft to national, corporate, and personal secret exfiltration.
“There is not a single computer on the internet that I would say is safe and secure from a loss of privacy or having enough security that you could say, ‘Jimmy, who’s got the implant, all of his private thoughts are still secure.’ And it’s not going to happen,” he said.
Furthermore, linking brain parts responsible for decision-making with an AI would put in question the integrity of free will, Shimojo argued.
“If you and AI together make a decision about an action, is that your free will or is it hybrid free will?” he asked.
“Is it ok for people? Is it ok for society? What‘s going to happen to elections, for instance?”
As Musk explained during multiple talks, interfacing with an AI is actually the primary goal of why he pursued the implant technology to begin with.
His original motivation for starting Neuralink, he said, was to address the rapid development of artificial intelligence.
During the presentation and in previous talks, he opined that as AI develops, it’s likely to far surpass human intelligence. At that point, even if it turns out to be benevolent, it may treat humans as a lower life form.
“We’ll be like the house cat,” he said at the Recode’s Code Conference in 2016.
The solution would be to prevent AI power from getting centralized in a few hands, he argued.
North Korea Is Supplying Russia’s Wagner Mercenaries: White House
After months of issuing vague allegations that North Korea is supplying Russian forces with tens of thousands of artillery shells, which both sides have denied, the Biden administration on Thursday is finally out with something specific, saying that Pyongyang has delivered arms to Wagner group.
Wagner is the notorious private military contractor whose founder is said to be close to Vladimir Putin, and dubbed in Western reports as “Putin’s chef”. Western media has long accused Wagner operatives of committing war crimes in Ukraine, and before that on deployments in Syria.
“Wagner is searching around the world for arms suppliers to support its military operations in Ukraine,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said in a Thursday press briefing. “We can confirm that North Korea has completed an initial arms delivery to Wagner, which paid for that equipment,” he added.
Kirby described the private Russian contractor as competing for power among official Kremlin ministries, acting as a “rival” also to the established defense ministry. A number of reports lately have suggested that Wagner mercenaries have operated with impunity and separate rules of engagement in Ukraine over the last ten months.
“Wagner is emerging as a rival power center to the Russian military and other Russian ministries,” Kirby explained, also stating that Wagner is spending over $100 million each month for Ukraine operations.
While European Parliament weeks ago formally slapped a ‘terror’ label on Wagner, the US is still said to be mulling the action, also vowing to ratchet sanctions on the Putin-connected firm.
More broadly, the White House has so far resisted calls from more hawkish corners of Congress to label Russia a state sponsor of terror, and is now said to be considering calling Russia an “aggressor state” – however, there’s no precedent for this term and it appears entirely made up by the administration in order to appease critics.
As CNN describes, “An aggressor state designation, unlike the label state sponsor of terrorism, is not an official State Department category that would trigger specific US sanctions, and critics say it would be easier for the president to rescind that designation than the state sponsor of terrorism one.”
It remains unclear at this point the precise type of weapons alleged to have been supplied to Wagner Group by the North Koreans. The broader Russian military is reportedly running low on artillery, which has been expended in the eastern and southern front lines at a rapid rate. In an official statement Pyongyang later in the evening denied the allegation.
2022 was marked by high-profile financial sovereignty issues and crypto implosions. The case for Bitcoin has never been more clear…
2022 started with a bang, especially in Canada. Whether or not you agree with the premise behind the Canadian Trucker Protest, I think most can agree that freedom of speech is a keystone right in modern Western Democracies.
Above is a snippet from an article from the Motley Fool, written in March 2022. Though I don’t agree with its conclusion or reasoning, the fact that traditional outlets were asking questions like that was a massive signal that perhaps the normies are starting to catch on.
More recently, the Iranian government announced that it would be freezing the bank accounts of women who refuse to wear hijabs, traditional Muslim head covering, in public. This came after the threat of imprisonments and executions in order to quell ongoing protests for the freedom of expression there. As of December 8, 2022, one protester had already been executed by hanging by the Iranian government.
The fact is, nobody is going to save you. Ethereum insists on being the new decentralized money of the internet, and yet, the protocol is enforcing Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions on its base layer. It’s becoming pretty clear that Bitcoin is perhaps the only easily-transportable freedom money left. I think this distinction became all the more clear as 2022 continued.
THE ALTCOIN BONANZA GOES DOWN IN FLAMES
“The same technology that allows for peer-to-peer money has allowed for peer-to-peer scams.”
From Celsius, to Three Arrows Capital, Luna, FTX, BlockFi, Voyager, and even Gemini, companies that deal in altcoins all felt pain in one form or another — Leverage, rehypothecation, algorithmic Ponzi schemes and the like. It seems to be that the biggest use case for crypto is making a quick buck at the expense of others, while rug pulling normies as your exit liquidity. It’s like the 1990s tech boom all over again.
One of the most interesting parts of this whole debacle were the accusations of a lack of bitcoin held at FTX after its balance sheet was revealed in bankruptcy filings. Whether or not the accusations are true, the fact that it’s a legitimate question is illuminating. It appears to have sparked a fire. I think, slowly but surely, people are starting to see the difference and realize that Bitcoin and crypto really aren’t the same things after all.
THE TURNING POINT OF 2023
Bitcoin has differentiated itself not only from the traditional banking system in a meaningful way, but from crypto as well.
The FTX debacle has highlighted the necessity for self custody: that your coins may not actually exist and the only way to find out if they’re real is to take custody. Bitcoin is now leaving exchanges in droves.
Could this be a turning point for Bitcoin? Could people be waking up to the importance of self custody en masse? Only time will tell. I am optimistic that this trend will continue, taking the power from centralized exchanges and their ability to enforce censorship on behalf of hostile regimes. As far as I’m concerned, the more bitcoin in self custody, the better.
If you’re still hesitant to take self custody I recommend watching some BTC Sessions demonstrations. It’s really not that difficult and the peace of mind is priceless. I nearly lost everything earlier this year when Celsius blew up. Don’t be like me. Stop procrastinating and take possession of your bitcoin today. Only then will you truly understand why and how it’s different.
