From Ian Taylor's 7-24-21 SCIENCE FOCUS article entitled "The Injectable Nanosensor That Will One Day Read Your Thoughts":
A new kind of injectable biosensor might one day be able to read your thoughts or let you communicate with nothing but your mind. Researchers behind NeuroSWARM3 say its gold-plated nanosensors, which are the size of a single viral particle, could travel through the bloodstream and cross the blood-brain barrier. Once inside the brain they would act like a kind of antenna, turning neural activity into optical signals that could be wirelessly sent to an external device.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, believe that in the shorter term it could help scientists better understand the mysteries of human cognition. Longer term, potential applications sound like the stuff of science fiction: composing messages with your thoughts, controlling exoskeletons with your mind, the ability to monitor neurological disease with no invasive procedures.
“NeuroSWARM3 can convert the signals that accompany thoughts to remotely measurable signals for high precision brain-machine interfacing,” said A Ali Yanik, co-author of the study.
The technology works by tapping into the electrical signals that neurons use to send information to each other. This happens when humans do just about anything, including moving and thinking. NeuroSWARM3 is a new way to monitor that electrical activity. In fact, Yanik’s latest research shows that it’s sensitive enough to pick up the activity of individual brain cells.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
Friday, January 14, 2022
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Sheriff Bianco & the Oath Keepers
From Scott Neuman's 10-6-21 NPR article entitled "California Sheriff Defends His Past Membership in the Extremist Oath Keepers Militia":
The sheriff of California's Riverside County, outside Los Angeles, has acknowledged that he once briefly belonged to the extremist Oath Keepers militia in 2014 after emails from the group were leaked online.In an interview, Sheriff Chad Bianco sought to downplay his past affiliation with the organization, while also insisting that the aims of the Oath Keepers — which has emerged as one of the largest groups in the far-right patriot militia movement — have been misunderstood. In August, 17 Oath Keepers members were indicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"I don't even remember joining," Bianco, who was elected in 2018, told member station KPCC in excerpts from an interview published on the LAist website.
He maintained that "what happened at the Capitol was completely wrong," but that the Oath Keepers — which the Southern Poverty Law Center says has "trained for a revolution against the state" — are not anti-government. He blamed the Jan. 6 violence on "a few fringe people."
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Frank Stoltze's 10-21-21 LAIST article entitled "California Attorney General Says Riverside Sheriff's Defense Of Extremist Oath Keepers Is 'Disturbing'":
Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent and expert in homegrown violent extremism, said an investigation by the state’s attorney general is in order to examine how Bianco’s defense of the Oath Keepers is affecting his department — the fourth largest sheriff’s agency in the country.
“Is it a problem, how deep does it go, is it affecting policies, is it affecting behaviors?” he said.
“Organizations mirror their leadership,” said Southers, who teaches at USC’s Price School of Public Policy.
Bianco’s defense of the group “overtly sends a message to the people that are under his command” that it’s okay to be a member, Southers said. “We already know we have a challenge of law enforcement being recruited by Oath Keepers in particular.”
To read the entire article, click HERE.
MOTHER JONES: "'Seditious Conspiracy' Charges Against Oath Keepers Mark a Major Advance in January 6 Investigation"
From Dan Friedman and Mark Follman's 1-13-22 MOTHER JONES article entitled "'Seditious Conspiracy' Charges Against Oath Keepers Mark a Major Advance in January 6 Investigation":
FBI agents on Thursday arrested Stewart Rhodes, the founder of far-right Oath Keepers, and charged him with seditious conspiracy, the Justice Department announced. The sedition charge marks a major and largely unexpected advancement in the federal investigation into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
Rhodes was taken into custody in Granbury, Texas, according to his lawyer, Jon Moseley, who was on the phone with Rhodes about plans for him to be interviewed by the House select committee investigating January 6, when the FBI called. “The FBI special agent said they were outside and he needed to come out with his hands up and be arrested,” Moseley said.
The DOJ also charged 11 other Oath Keepers with seditious conspiracy. Most of those group members already faced other charges related to storming the Capitol on January 6, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding—the congressional counting and certification of electoral votes. The sedition charges, which carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, were new and represent the first use of such laws against alleged January 6 participants or planners.
The allegations suggest that the DOJ may be expanding its prosecutions to focus on people who helped plan but did not directly take part in the attack.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
Sunday, January 9, 2022
"Invisible Predators" in NEXUS MAGAZINE
The current issue of NEXUS MAGAZINE contains my latest article, "Invisible Predators: Strange Creatures, Secret Weapons, and Shadow Biospheres" (a follow-up to my 2015 book CHAMELEO), in which I examine the history of humanity's interaction with ostensibly invisible entities while acknowledging the technological, back-engineered aspect of such phenomena in recent decades. The article includes several quotes from Richard Schowengerdt, the Project Chameleo inventor who recently passed away. (As CHAMELEO chronicles in some detail, Schowengerdt was awarded a patent for an electro-optical camouflage system that has had a profound impact on military intelligence in recent decades.) I was very much looking forward to personally handing Richard a copy of this latest issue, but alas it was not to be.
"Invisible Predators" appears on pp. 52-62 of the January-February 2022 issue (Vol. 29, No. 1). NEXUS is available from Barnes & Noble or any well-stocked newsstand. Print copies of this issue of NEXUS are available HERE. Downloadable copies are available HERE.
Saturday, January 8, 2022
Peter Matthiessen & Bigfoot
From Jeff Wheelwright's 7-1-19 LITHUB article entitled "On Peter Matthiessen’s Lifelong Fascination with Bigfoot":
In September 1976, Peter Matthiessen took me aside at a family wedding in Seattle. He was 49 and at the acme of his ambidextrous literary powers. Far Tortuga, his finest novel, about a doomed voyage of turtle hunters, had been published the year before, and his next book, set in the Himalayas, would be The Snow Leopard, his finest work of nonfiction.
I had mentioned to Peter that my wife and I were headed for Vancouver, B.C., on a short vacation. Looking at me meaningfully, my uncle said that while we were in Vancouver we should go to a private screening of a film that he would arrange for us. The brief footage, he explained, showed a sasquatch or what was believed to be a sasquatch walking in the woods of northern California.
I was surprised, for I had no inkling of his interest in Sasquatch, aka Bigfoot: the large, hairy, hominoid creature reputed by some not very reputable people to lurk in the forests of the Northwest. Sensitive to scoffers, Peter had told almost no one about his fascination with Bigfoot. Indeed, he could have told me, but did not, that earlier in the summer, while driving in the backcountry investigating reports of Bigfoot, he’d seen a tall, bipedal figure run across the road and disappear into the trees.
To read Wheelwright's entire article, click HERE.
And to read more about Peter Matthiessen's personal library of Bigfoot books, click HERE.
NEW REPUBLIC: "Jeffrey Epstein Chose New Mexico for a Reason"
From Matt Farwell's 8-15-19 NEW REPUBLIC article entitled "Jeffrey Epstein Chose New Mexico for a Reason":
If there’s a secret, New Mexico will try to keep it. The Land of Enchantment has gotten a lot of practice over the years, well before the now-late Jeffrey Epstein purchased the Zorro Ranch south of Santa Fe. The world’s first nuclear weapon, code name “Gadget,” was detonated in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.* Tourists can now visit the Trinity Site on the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range to view the epicenter of a highly secret government conspiracy involving top physicists called the Manhattan Project. Trinity is a 111-mile straight line from Zorro Ranch. Consider what lies within this way: Find a map. Make Epstein’s New Mexico operation the center. Put the Trinity site at the edge of its radius. What else is secret and radioactive and inside that circle? Did New Mexico’s other secrets throw off enough chaff to keep Epstein off the radar?
Last month, I went to New Mexico to see what secrets I could find within the circle. Santa Fe, 23 miles away from Zorro as the crow flies, is the oldest colonial capital city in North America, one with a twisted history. The historic center of this small city in the foothills of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains is the Plaza, an open-air park with a Haagen-Dazs at one corner. This was once a drugstore, Zook’s Pharmacy, that doubled as a base for Russian espionage; in between filling prescriptions and ringing up customers, deep cover Stalinist spies here plotted the death of Leon Trotsky and later coordinated efforts to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb from Los Alamos (distance from Zorro Ranch: 50 miles).
There are dozens of other strange things in that circle. There’s the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West, a selective international boarding school in Montezuma founded by Armand Hammer and Prince Charles, originally a resort hotel built on a hot springs sacred to the Jicarilla Apache, the previous inhabitants of the Sangre De Cristos. Bill Richardson—who in recently unsealed court records was named by accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre as a participant in Epstein’s illegal sexual abuse ring—claimed to be a lecturer at the United World College in 2001–2002, between his stints as Bill Clinton’s secretary of energy and New Mexico’s governor. Richardson only showed up once that the students were aware of, to publicly hobnob with Queen Noor of Jordan and Greece’s Prince Pavlos in advance of his gubernatorial run. (I was a student at AHUWC at the time; I recall that Richardson accurately called me a smart-ass.)
We travel inside the circle, from one abusive church to another. A little over 80 miles northwest of Zorro Ranch is Trementina Base, a bunker and vault complex owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology—an elite order within Scientology—with hardened rooms storing L. Ron Hubbard’s writings. Hubbard’s thoughts on Thetans will survive anything, as they’re reportedly inscribed on etched steel plates in titanium containers filled with inert argon gas. The location is hardly secret, since the CST’s logo, two interlocking circles with diamonds, can be seen in aerial photos, carved into the high desert scrub, ostensibly to help guide Hubbard’s spirit back to its new body—whenever that happens. “Once Hubbard adopts a new body, he’s expected to make his way to one of the CST bases,” a Trementina Base insider told the Village Voice in 2012. “That’s where he’s supposed to be raised and be taken care of.”
To read the entire article, click HERE.
Friday, January 7, 2022
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