The White House BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), is a collaborative, public-private research initiative announced by the Obama administration on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function.[2][3][4][5][6]

This activity is a Grand Challenge focused on revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain, and was developed by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as part of a broader White House Neuroscience Initiative.[7] Inspired by the Human Genome Project, BRAIN aims to help researchers uncover the mysteries of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, depression, and traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Participants in BRAIN and affiliates of the project include DARPA and IARPA as well as numerous private companies, universities, and other organizations in the United States, Australia, Canada, and Denmark.[8]

the U.S. Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, a multidisciplinary collaboration which began in 2013. Supported by various agencies of the U.S. government as well as private foundations, institutions, and corporations, the goal is to employ creative scientific and resource collaborations to reveal the inner workings of the human mind and to improve treatment and prevention of disorders of the brain.

“It’s providing the tools that will accelerate discovery,” says Richard Huganir, director of the department of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University.

However, the U.S. BRAIN Initiative is not alone; governments around the world have taken on large scale brain research projects of their own. It’s a massive undertaking that underpins all our hopes to one day cure diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. And, it’s one that transcends borders.

The European Union, Japan, China, Canada, Australia, and Korea all direct large-scale brain initiatives with research goals ranging from developing animal models of disease to neuroprosthetics. Such a large investment in brain research is necessary to crack the brain’s code one day. Successfully doing so requires the global initiatives work together to coordinate their efforts.

In December 2017, the United States, the European Union, Japan, Korea, and Australia formed the International Brain Initiative to speed the progress of brain research by leveraging and aligning their efforts for maximum efficiency. Initiative members are inviting brain research initiatives from other countries to join.

“It is very pleasing to see a global commitment to stronger collaboration on brain research. Challenges of this magnitude need a global effort,” President of the Australian Academy of Science Andrew Holmes said in a statement.

Because every brain research initiative is generating millions of bytes of data, members of the International Brain Initiative have committed to data sharing and standardization to facilitate making sense of this data. Christof Koch, chief bioscientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, asserts that making data and metadata openly available can lead to more accurate results.

There are super rich cliques that see America’s democratic institutions as impediments to their greed — America’s oligarchs. They have spent a great deal of money buying up members of the government that are overwhelmingly Republicans. They do so in order that the government fails to function as a real democracy.

currently it’s mostly Republicans that are out to undercut our democracy on behalf of a handful of the super rich, while Democrats struggle to keep our democracy and its ideals afloat.

Indeed, Democrats and Republican are in a do or die fight for America’s soul. Republicans and Trump have resorted to the lowest form of populism in their fight to destroy our Constitutional form of checks and balances government. With unlimited economic resources and a hateful propaganda arm in Fox News and its right wing media satellites, Democrats have a steep climb trying to keep democracy alive in the face of the oligarchic machine.

In reality, the biggest divide in America today runs between oligarchy and democracy. When oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates, they neuter democracy.

The oligarchs know politicians won’t bite the hands that feed them. So as long as they control the money, they can be confident there will be no meaningful response to stagnant pay, climate change, military bloat or the soaring costs of health insurance, pharmaceuticals, college and housing.

There will be no substantial tax increases on the wealthy. There will be no antitrust enforcement to puncture the power of giant corporations. No meaningful regulation of Wall Street’s addiction to gambling with other peoples’ money. No end to corporate subsides. CEO pay will continue to skyrocket. Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers will continue to make off like bandits.

So long as the oligarchy divides Americans — split off people of color from working-class whites, stoke racial resentments, describe human beings as illegal aliens, launch wars on crime and immigrants, stoke fears of communists and socialists — it doesn’t have to worry that a majority will stop them from looting the nation.

Divide-and-conquer allows the oligarchy free rein. It makes the rest of us puppets, fighting each other on a made-up stage.

What has not been discussed nearly as much is the end game of the oligarchs. What kind of world do they have in mind for us? Their vision of what our society should look like is not one most people—on the Left or Right—would like to see. And yet, unless unchecked, it could well be the world we, and particularly our children, will inhabit.

The New Aristocracy

Like the barbarian princes who seized control of western Europe after the fall of Rome, the oligarchs have captured the digital landscape from the old industrial corporations and have proceeded to concentrate it in ever-fewer hands. Like the Medieval aristocracy, the ruling tech oligarchy—epitomized by firms such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—have never produced a single coherent political manifesto laying out the technocratic vision of the future. Nevertheless, it is possible to get a sense of what the internet elite believe and, more tellingly, to see the outlines of the world they want to create.

This tiny sliver of humanity, with their relatively small cadre of financiers, engineers, data scientists, and marketers, now control the exploitation of our personal data, what Alibaba founder, Jack Ma calls the “electricity of the 21st century.” Their “super platforms,” as one analyst noted, “now operate as “digital gatekeepers” lording over “e-monopsonies” that control enormous parts of the economy. Their growing power, notes a recent World Bank Study, is built on “natural monopolies” that adhere to web-based business, and have served to further widen class divides not only in the United States but around the world.

The wealth generated by these near-monopolies funds the tech oligarchy’s drive to monopolize existing industries such as entertainment, education, and retail, as well as those of the future, such as autonomous cars, drones, space exploration, and most critically, artificial intelligence. Unless checked, they will have accumulated the power to bring about what could best be seen as a “post-human” future, in which society is dominated by artificial intelligence and those who control it.

This reflects their perception of how society will evolve. Ferenstein notes that most oligarchs believe “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.” Such part-time work has been growing rapidly, accounting for roughly 20 percent of the workforce in the US and Europe, and is expected to grow substantially, adds McKinsey.

Of course, the oligarchs have no more intention of surrendering their power and wealth to the proletariat than the Commissars did after the 1917 revolution in Russia.

Life in a world dominated by these oligarchs would depart from the model of democratic and competitive capitalism that emerged over the last half-century. Rather than hope to achieve upward mobility and the chance to own property, the new generation will be relegated largely to the status of rental serfs. For the next generation, this promises a future not of upward mobility and owned houses, but of rented apartments and social stagnation. Here in California, Facebook is leading the drive to vastly expand this kind of housing, where the serfs and technocoolies can lose themselves in what Google calls “immersive computing.” The poor, most of whom simply want opportunity, will be relegated to permanent dependent status.

The World They Are Creating

To get a preview of the society the oligarchs want to create, the best place to look is where oligarchal domination is most complete. Wired magazine’s Antonio Garcia Martinez has called Silicon Valley “feudalism with better marketing.” In Martinez’s view, the new aristocratic class is an “Inner Party” of venture capitalists and company founders. Well below them is an “Outer Party” of skilled professionals, well paid, but forced to live ordinary middle-class lives due to high housing prices and high taxes. Below them lies the vast population of gig workers, whom Martinez compares to sharecroppers in the South, “…with the serfs responding to a smartphone prompt rather than an overseer’s command.” Further below still lie those who constitute, in Martinez’s phrase, “the Untouchable class of the homeless, drug addicted, and/or criminal.”

California, and particularly the Bay Area, already reflects this neo-feudal reality. Adjusted for costs, my adopted home state suffers the overall highest poverty rate in the country, according to the US Census Bureau. Fully one in three welfare recipients in the nation live in California, which is home to barely 12 percent of the country’s population, while a 2017 United Way study showed that close to one in three of the state’s families are barely able to pay their bills. Today, eight million Californians live in poverty, including two million children. Roughly one in five California children lives in deep poverty and nearly half subsist barely above that.

For all its protestations of progressive faith, the Golden State now suffers one of the highest GINI rates—the ratio between the wealthiest and the poorest—among the states. Inequality is growing faster than in almost any state—it now surpasses that of Mexico, and is closer to that of Central American banana republics like Guatemala and Honduras than it is to developed countries like Canada and Norway. There’s even the return of medieval diseases such as Typhus tied to the growing homeless encampments. We could soon even see the return of Bubonic plague, although the mainstream media seems to be ready to blame this, like most ills, on climate change as opposed to failed social policy.

Urban website CityLab has described the tech-rich Bay Area as “a region of segregated innovation,” where the rich wax, the middle class wanes, and the poor live in increasingly unshakeable poverty. Some 76,000 millionaires and billionaires call Santa Clara and San Mateo counties home. At the other end are the thousands of people who struggle to feed their families and pay their bills each month. Nearly 30 percent of Silicon Valley’s residents rely on public or private assistance.

As recently as the 1980s, the San Jose area boasted one of the country’s most egalitarian economies. But in the current boom, cost-adjusted wages for middle class workers, Latinos, and African Americans in Silicon Valley actually dropped. Many minorities labor in the service sector in jobs such as security guard, for around $25,000 annually, working for contractors. There’s ever-greater segregation of minority and low income families, workers forced into mobile home parks or sleeping in their cars, as well as some of the nation’s largest homeless encampments. According to the Brookings Institution, in the last decade, increasingly tech-dominated San Francisco has suffered the most rapid growth in inequality while the middle class family heads towards extinction.

Needed: An Alliance of Progressives and Conservatives against the Oligarchy

Americans, enamored of the entrepreneurial spirit, were initially slow to see in the tech oligarchy a threat to the future of the republic. But public skepticism, notably in California, towards the tech lords is growing; many on both sides of the political divide see them much like modern versions of the gilded age mogul, successfully playing the political system to avoid regulation, anti-trust action, and taxes.

Yet overcoming the oligarchs will not be easy. Far more than the old industrial giants, they enjoy unprecedented sway through their manipulation of the information pipelines, as is widely evidenced in de-platforming of largely conservative voices on outlets such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Nearly two-thirds of readers now get their news through Facebook and Google and their dominance among younger generations is, if anything, more overwhelming. As the Guardian put it: “If ExxonMobil attempted to insert itself into every element of our lives like this, there might be a concerted grassroots movement to curb its influence.”

To this influence, they have added control over what is left of the traditional media they have helped to undermine. Often getting bargain basement prices, the oligarchs have been able to buy up prestigious outlets, including the New Republic in 2012, the Washington Post in 2013, the Atlantic in 2017, and Time last year.

Rather than the saviors many once saw, the oligarchs now represent a clear and present danger to the most basic foundations of our democracy. Resisting them represents the great imperative of our era.

As for any great moral imperative the conservative brain may conger up in their own defense, one can point to the immorality of willfully increasing economic inequality within a society; surely this is a moral compass gone awry. Like the German people of World War II, during the period of the Nuremberg trials, they viewed themselves overall as good moral people. They took care of their families and friends, supported the Fatherland, and went to church. And yet we know, sadly, they were not moral.

Now we hear yet again a fresh echo of the German peoples view as Donald Trump embraced Steven Bannon as the CEO of his election campaign and subsequently promotion to a senior adviser position once in office. Bannon's intimate association with Breitbart News and their propagation of Alt Right views is quite a bucketful of conservative brain structure; it is an immoral bucketful of hissing snakes once again poised to strike with its black venom circa world war II.

Hi, Sterling,

It has increasingly struck me how Trump's rhetoric and stances are much like Hitler's. This morning, it culminated in me Googling this to see if anyone / who else is aware of this paralell (all the more evident as the impeachment proceeding continue and the election speeches ramp up).

Among other sites, found this most compelling one: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019 ... etoric-and

EXCERPT:

"A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says.

“Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches—spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric—as a candidate and in office—mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.”

Many Americans may seize or condemn Neuborne’s analysis, which has more than 20 major points of comparison. The author repeatedly says his goal is not “equating” the men—as “it trivializes Hitler’s obscene crimes to compare them to Trump’s often pathetic foibles.”

Indeed, the book has a larger frame: whether federal checks and balances—Congress, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College—can contain the havoc that Trump thrives on and the Republican Party at large has embraced. But the Trump-Hitler compilation is a stunning warning, because, as many Holocaust survivors have said, few Germans or Europeans expected what unfolded in the years after Hitler amassed power."

To those of you who support and elected Donald Trump I say, "Come with me if you want to live."

Now, a new study shows how voting patterns correlated with the nation's growing geographic health divides, with Donald Trump winning more votes in counties that have seen lower gains in life expectancy.

"In the last 30 years, there's been a sharp divergence in life expectancy across US counties," Bor says. "Some counties have gained a full decade of life expectancy. Others have really been left behind, with zero gains or even falling life expectancy in this period."

Bor found counties in which life expectancy rose less than three years saw a nearly 10 percentage point increase in the Republican vote share between 2008 and 2016. In counties where life expectancy rose more than seven years, Democrats saw a 3.5 percentage point increase.

Bor stresses the relationship may not be causal, and does not rule out other explanations for Trump's margins in these counties, namely the roles of race and economic marginalization. "Regardless of the causes of this relationship, the data show that people in counties that voted for Trump are hurting, and not just metaphorically," Bor says. "The findings signal an important opportunity for policymakers to try to address the health needs of these populations."

Democratic-leaning areas used to look similar to Republican-leaning areas in terms of productivity, income and education. But they have been rapidly diverging, with blue areas getting more productive, richer and better educated.

The thing is, the red-blue divide isn't just about money. It's also, increasingly, a matter of life and death.

The death gap has widened considerably in recent years as a result of increased mortality among working-age Americans. This rise in mortality has, in turn, been largely a result of rising "deaths of despair": drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol. And the rise in these deaths has led to declining overall life expectancy.

What I haven't seen emphasized is the divergence in life expectancy and political orientation.

A 2018 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association looked at changes in health and life expectancy in U.S. states between 1990 and 2016. The divergence among states is striking.

I looked at states that voted for Donald Trump versus states that voted for Clinton in 2016, and calculated average life expectancy weighted by their 2016 population. In 1990, today's red and blue states had almost the same life expectancy. Since then, however, life expectancy in Clinton states has risen more or less in line with other advanced countries, compared with almost no gain in Trump country. At this point, blue-state residents can expect to live more than four years longer than their red-state counterparts.

Is this all about deaths of despair in the eastern heartland? No.

What explains the divergence? Public policy certainly plays some role, especially in recent years, as blue states expanded Medicaid and drastically reduced the number of uninsured, while most red states didn't. The growing gap in educational levels has also surely played a role: Better-educated people tend to be healthier than the less educated.

One thing that's clear, however, is that the facts are utterly inconsistent with the conservative diagnosis of what ails America.

Conservative figures like William Barr, the attorney general, look at rising mortality in America and attribute it to the collapse of traditional values — a collapse they attribute, in turn, to the evil machinations of "militant secularists." The secularist assault on traditional values, Barr claims, lies behind "soaring suicide rates," rising violence and "a deadly drug epidemic."

But European nations, which are far more secularist than we are, haven't seen a comparable rise in deaths of despair and an American-style decline in life expectancy. And even within America these evils are concentrated in states that voted for Trump, and have largely bypassed the more secular blue states.

So something bad is definitely happening to American society. But the conservative diagnosis of that problem is wrong — dead wrong.

The relationship between rising rents and homelessness should surprise no one, and yet misguided assumptions and judgments are rampant: Homeless people are criminals and drug addicts; they deserve their lot; most of them don’t even want to sleep inside. On and on. What is it going to take for people to stop the blaming and shaming of homeless people and recognize that homelessness is a systemic product of economic inequality?

It has been established that poverty and homelessness are strongly correlated; in fact, loss of income acts as a major factor associated with homelessness.

I couldn’t agree more with Paul Krugman’s blog post this morning when he says, “the main cause of persistent poverty now is high inequality of market income.”

In the roughly three decades leading up to the most recent recession, looking at the officially measured poverty rate, educational upgrading and overall income growth were the two biggest poverty-reducing factors, while income inequality was the largest poverty-increasing factor.

Homelessness occurs for a variety of reasons, but it is clear that poverty, coupled with an ongoing affordable housing crisis, is a significant factor. This is not surprising, as income inequality has continued to widen since the Great Recession.

Transhumanism is a philosophical movement that advocates for the transformation of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies to greatly enhance human intellect and physiology.[1][2]

Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations as well as the ethical[3] limitations of using such technologies.[4] The most common transhumanist thesis is that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into different beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the current condition as to merit the label of posthuman beings.[2]

Influenced by seminal works of science fiction, the transhumanist vision of a transformed future humanity has attracted many supporters and detractors from a wide range of perspectives, including philosophy and religion.[5]

The Body Hacking Convention in Austin, Texas took place a few months ago. It brought together a collection of people who share in the idea of using technology to augment our biological capabilities and enhance the human experience. Austin was a fitting place to hold such an event as the city’s motto suggests…Keep Austin Weird .

One of the strongest voices for this movement is Amal Graafstra, CEO and founder of Dangerous Things as well as a firm believer that biohacking is the next step in human evolution. As he pointed out many times, this is a process that has already begun. Whether it be through pacemakers or breast implants, we already fix any part of us that we need to or enhance anything we deem to be sub-par. We also walk around with computers basically attached to us everywhere we go that are connected to the internet and all of humanity at all times. It is natural that we will continue to push this trend forward by further augmenting our bodies and merging ourselves with the tools we create. And he doesn’t just talk the talk, he has transponders implanted into his hands that allow him to open doors, start vehicles and log into his computer with the wave of his hand. His company sells such implantable devices and he has pioneered many of the techniques used in the biohacking industry.

A number of other devices (and the people they are lodged in) were also showcased at this event. Many were focused on allowing humans to intuit new senses, believing we are limited in the ways we can experience and interact with the world to just the five or so senses we are born with. There was North Sense, a device that allows people to feel where north is like a homing pigeon, there were implantable magnets that allow people to pick up objects like Magneto, some even strong enough to let people sense magnetic fields around them, echolocation goggles that help blind people detect objects in front of them, vests that enable the person wearing it to feel the world around them, a company called Cyberise selling everything implantable from chips to thermometers and an eyeborg who had a camera embedded into one of his eye sockets.

However, they were not the irrational sci-fi fanatics that many who first hear about them assume. They are a collection of very forward-looking scientifically minded people who believe in augmenting their biology for the betterment of themselves and the species. It seems this is where we are trending, gradually technology is spreading to every part of our lives and it is only a matter of time before we start making it permanent parts of our identity. The people attending this conference see themselves as simply catching the wave before most people have even seen the tide rising.

They are also keenly aware of how contentious the movement they are starting is, an assortment of ethical issues surrounding it were at the heart of nearly every talk and discussion at the conference. Among the questions addressed were a person’s right to augment their body however they see fit, whether programming code should be considered free speech, if it is incumbent upon us to push technology and augmentation forward to make the species more fit for survival, as well as the fear that many have that the growing gap in equality will continue to grow and that biohacks may lead to the species itself splitting into ‘the enhanced’ and ‘the naturals’ based solely on who can afford to pay for all these upgrades.

It is a fascinatingly complex issue further obfuscated by the reality that there is a blurry line between fixing something and enhancing. If a child is born with a genetic defect that we can treat it seems obvious that we should, but what if gene editing techniques can endow that child with an improved immune system so that they virtually never get sick? At what point do we say it is okay to replace a severed arm with a prosthetic that can restore some function but not okay to give people an arm that works much better than their biological one so others don’t start hacking off their arms to become Robocops? A myriad of such questions pop up when we think about all that we may soon be able to do.

There are no easy answers but the main take away from this conference is that society needs to start talking about these things because whether we like it or not it is becoming a part of our reality and we need to be ready for some very weird things on the horizon.

Transhumanism

Much of what was discussed at the conference falls under the label of a growing movement known as transhumanism. It is a movement that aims to facilitate the next step in our evolution as we go from human to something beyond human. Recently a number of transhumanist parties have formed around the world primarily centered around three core tenants: that science and reason should be the basis for decision making not ideology, that government’s main responsibility is to eliminate existential threats to life on earth, and the promotion of science and technology for the betterment of all. Transhumanism also embodies the same ethos that pervaded the body hacking conference, the belief that technology will inevitably swallow the world and that it is actually changing us for the better, proponents of both believe we should accept that change and embrace the possibilities that come with it.

Not all share the movement’s optimism. Many associate much of the progress being made in the world, as well as the rise of ever more factional politics, with a dystopian vision of the future where we either end up destroying ourselves or becoming slaves to the organizations and technologies we are creating. This seems frighteningly plausible especially when you consider that one of the strongest backers of many of the technologies espoused by transhumanists is the military community, DARPA in particular, who envision the creation of universal soldiers equipped with a range of bionic sensors encased in indestructible exo-suits effectively making them superhuman. The development of such a soldier seems to already be at the forefront of the next global arms race.

But transhumanists argue that just the opposite is possible, they believe that by augmenting our biology and merging with technology we can liberate ourselves from many of the inconveniences of life, allowing us to more fully express who we are. Almost every tool that we have created, from the spear to the computer, has given us a better quality of life, and allowed us to live healthier, longer and more enlightened lives. This new age of technology will further facilitate that arc, freeing us from the drudgery of work, ridding us of disease, further connecting us to each other and allowing us to truly explore the limits of reality.