One of the co-founders of Neuralink, Benjamin Rapoport, has departed from the Elon Musk-led brain-computer interface company due to safety concerns. […] The company relies on implanting tiny electrodes to collect data, a method Rapoport views as potentially harmful due to the risk of brain damage.
Context from history may be useful to understand the stakes, when considering a device that can prevent confidentiality and integrity of the mind.
South African Apartheid was famously destroyed by thoughts of freedom from oppression, the secret hopes and dreams of people who would defeat the Musk family dynasty (overcome tools of oppression, technology used to maintain racist power and wealth). Operation Vula by the ANC (which kept even the thoughts of Nelson Mandela safe while in jail) was thus one of the most successful anti-surveillance, anti-Musk stories in history.
Elon Musk, who fled the fall of his family’s Apartheid state in 1988 to become an illegal immigrant in America, seemingly wants to torture and implant hacked sensors into brains to rush the return of a racist dictatorship.
Stephen Bantu Biko was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. A student leader, he later founded the Black Consciousness Movement which would empower and mobilize much of the urban black population. He was tortured to death by police as they tried to extract secrets from him.
As long as I’m posting about very unfortunately overlooked stories about the Polish cryptanalysts of WWII who were the first to break the Nazi Enigma in the early 1930s… I should also mention here that Spanish cryptanalysts collaborated with the Poles yet are even lesser known.
1942 photo of the Spanish and Polish cryptanalysts at the Cadix center in Uzès, France. Left to right: Marian Rejewski, Edward Fokczynski, unknown Spaniard, Henryk Zygalski, unknown Spaniard, Jerzy Rozycki, Antonio Camazón, Antoni Palluth, unknown Spaniard
This documentary sheds light into the WWII story of Allied codebreakers. It was a strategic chess match in the shadows, involving the brightest minds of the era, whose outcome was crucial to speeding up a violent end to German and Italian fascism. The role of Spanish cryptographers was both pivotal and yet largely unnoticed until now.
Previously, we knew just that a group of Republican codebreakers, imprisoned by Franco’s regime, had been rescued by French military and put into service against Germany. They were joined with elite units of Allied minds (American, British, French, and Polish) to work on deciphering the Nazi Enigma machine, a tool essential to the communication of Hitler’s troops.
This film delves into the identity and contributions of this small Spanish group of codebreakers known as Team D. Overlooked by history, they courageously risked their lives in the world-wide fight against fascism.
And here’s the RTVE trailer released five years ago for a documentary called “EQUIPO D: LOS CÓDIGOS DESCONOCIDOS” (The Unknown Codes) that so far has exactly only 184 views on YouTube.
The Department of State is concurrently delivering to Congress a determination pursuant to the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) regarding Russia’s use of the chemical weapon chloropicrin against Ukrainian troops.
Germany is said to have been the first to use the “pesticide” chloropicrin (tear gas) in WWI on the battlefield, despite being outlawed in the the 1899 Hague Convention. The gas was denoted by a blue cross on artillery warheads.
[It is the] particular horror of gas that is captured in Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce et Decorum Est, arguably the most widely read description of the horrors of war in the English language.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
The Soviet Union then was known to use cloropicrin in 1989 to control crowds in Georgia, so that soldiers could rush in and hack people to death with shovels.
Working with Georgian scientists, the delegation has identified that agent to be chloropicrin… Twenty persons died and 4,000 sought hospital treatment when Soviet troops, using gases and wielding shovels, broke up an all-night demonstration by 8,000 to 10,000 Georgians… the majority of the deaths were due to the use of “sharpened shovels” by the troops who charged into the demonstration “hacking people to death”…
Russian Soldiers Are Attacking Ukrainians With Shovels… “The lethality of the standard-issue MPL-50 entrenching tool is particularly mythologised in Russia,” the U.K. MoD said. Indeed, the MPL-50 has become an iconic weapon of the Spetsnaz, Russia’s special operations forces. In his 1987 book about the origins of Spetsnaz, former Soviet intelligence agent Viktor Suvorov begins by explaining how the soldiers made the shovel into a deadly weapon.
It begs the question how toxic is the tear gas itself, used to illegally immobilize military targets, relative to the bladed-shovel attack that follows like a WWI trench charge.
In humans, a concentration of 2.4 g/m³ can cause death from acute pulmonary oedema in one minute (Hanslian, 1921). concentration us low as I ppm of Chloropicrin in air produces an intense smarting pain in the eyes, and the immediate reaction of any person is to leave the vicinity in haste. If exposure is continued, it may cause serious lung injury. […] As stated above, because of the tear gas effect, a person would be unable to remain in a dangerous concentration of chloropicrin for more than a few seconds. Great care should be taken to prevent unauthorized persons from approaching a fumigation site because the tear gas effect is so powerful that they may become temporarily blinded and panic-stricken, which, in turn, may lead to accidents.
Two feet on a stretcher indicate death from chemicals comes soon after the smell of flypaper. Source: World War II Gas Identification Posters Repository: National Museum of Health and Medicine, OHA 365 Collection, 1941-1945
2023 December 22, Russia drops “K-51 aerosol grenades filled with irritant CS gas (2-Chlorobenzalmalononitrile)”. (Also observed in November and “new type of special RG-VO gas grenades containing an unknown chemical substance was used by the Russians on Dec. 14″)
2024 March 11, Russia attacks 50 times a week with tear gas grenades dropped by UAVs
They’re very happy about President Eisenhower in 1958 formally declaring May 1 as “Law Day”, as in an American law enforcement day.
If you aren’t celebrating this as a holiday of “individual freedom” in America, you’d be excused. A lack of celebration on May 1st every year, the complete lack of anyone paying attention to history or what happened, is ironically by design.
“Law Day” proclamation in 1958 was an anti-holiday tactic from the U.S. government. The idea literally was to prevent people from gathering and talking about injustice and excessive force that has been applied under the law (e.g. prevent May Day being celebrated in America).
It’s a bit like how the state of Arkansas in 1985 officially combined a day to celebrate slavery with the federal Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Day. This came after two years of requiring state employees wanting a day off of work to declare affinity to either MLK or a secessionist domestic terrorist known for raping black women (with a third option being they could refuse both and choose their own birthday).
Nobody in America remembers or talks about either May Day and Law Day anymore because… that’s the whole idea.
…the protests [calling for an eight hour workday] turned violent when police — “which were basically the armed force of the capitalist masters,” according to historian Linebaugh — attacked workers demonstrating near the McCormick Reaper plant. The following day, a meeting held in the city’s Haymarket Square turned even bloodier. Again, the police intervened, said Linebaugh, triggering clashes that killed both officers and civilians.
A bomb exploded among police ranks in the melee, but historians say it’s unclear whether it was intended for the police or the crowd of civilians.
“There was a trial of eight men who were found guilty of conspiracy to murder,” Linebaugh said. “Even though no evidence was ever produced that any of them had any relationship to this bomb, and four of them were eventually hanged despite a worldwide campaign in England, Europe, Mexico to save their lives.”
Linebaugh points to the influential words of August Spies, one of the convicted men, who just before his execution cried out the famous words: “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
His words “swept the globe,” Linebaugh said. “Throughout Latin America, throughout Europe and in North America, to many, the day became this holiday to celebrate working people.”
To honor the Chicago workers, the International Socialist Conference in 1889 named May Day a labor holiday, birthing what many nations now call International Workers’ Day.
By 1893 the governor of Illinois pardoned the men convicted, calling the trial unfair and a menace to the Republic because “the law was bent to deprive” Americans of civil liberties.
As a result of the 1886 deaths and false convictions, people worldwide observe May 1 as a holiday to commemorate labor protests against abuses of power. A kind of “no taxation without representation” theme, if you will.
Though the movement celebrating May Day originated in the United States, it is not a recognized holiday there. May Day commemorates the mass protests on May 1, 1886, for the eight-hour day, when sixty thousand workers went on strike in Chicago, and the subsequent Haymarket Affair, where eight labor organizers were hanged by the state.
However, in the United States, there’s very intentionally no May Day holiday; instead, the very specifically named “Law Day” was established by the President to quell remembering and fighting for what’s right. This initiative aimed to encourage Americans to stay out of the streets, avoid gatherings, focus on work and above all stop discussing events where the law was unfairly used against those advocating for justice.
