Tag: technology

Good news: The biotechnology industry is collapsing

If you read the newspapers, you may not know it, but biotechnology is going through a process of collapse.  According to authoritative pharmaceutical industry online Endpoints News:

The opening months of 2025 have offered no respite to the chilly biotech market of the last few years, biotech correspondent Kyle LaHucik reported this week. Despite the comeback everybody seems to want, there’s been a steady drumbeat of restructurings, pipeline cuts, layoffs and short-lived pivots. Kyle highlighted iTeos Therapeutics, once a darling of the anti-TIGIT class of biotechs, as an embodiment of the current struggles. iTeos had a clinical failure and lost a partnership with GSK this spring. It’s now shut down.

The picture is stark. Biotechnology is in a terminal existential crisis. According to Raymond James bankers who provided data to Endpoints, there were six strategic reviews launched in April alone, with 30 active strategic reviews as of 4 May. These strategic reviews are being conducted because biotechnology research is not delivering viable products. According to Stifel bankers, at least 168 biotechnology companies have negative enterprise value as of 16 May. And the dreariness follows 90 total restructurings in 2024. Fewer than five new biotechnology companies have been floated so far this year, down from 16 last year.

Biotechnology is an industry built on an exclusively materialistic paradigm of life. In fact, as everyone experiences every day, life involves a continuous interaction between consciousness and matter, mind and body, psychology and physiology, awareness and the environment. To pretend otherwise, to ignore consciousness as the prime mover of life, as myopic bio scientists continue to do so, is a fatal error and a scientific dead end.

As a result, biotechnology is an industry built on false advertising dreams and the same kind of financial thinking that leads millions of people, who are doomed to disappointment, to buy lottery tickets every week.

Five years ago, a door was opened which allowed failed covid “vaccine” and treatment products onto the market without long-term testing. This was not just “on the market,” it was forced on unwilling populations as a modern-day exponential expansion of Mengele-style medical research. The result has been a public health disaster, as we all now know (except for some extreme dreamers who keep their faith and belief in a biotechnology future). Floundering in a sea of adverse events, they are trying to save their misguided and twisted paradigm of life by pretending success is just around the corner. Vinay Prasad, Trump’s head of the Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research (“CBER”), which regulates biotechnology, has promised “to ‘rapidly’ push even small advances for rare disease drugs.” 

Reality may now be catching up with this hopeful, or is it hopeless, kind of thinking but, unfortunately, vaccines still enjoy protection from product liability or efficacy standards. Therefore, the excessive claims of the industry and the harms that result cannot be judged in the courts. Nor do their deficiencies find any but the smallest echo in the media. There are powerful monetary, government and career incentives at work here. The billions made during the pandemic from fake cures are sufficient to drive to a frenzy those who seek to profit by controlling medical, political, scientific and financial narratives. Their twisted dreams extend to rebuilding the physiology of whole populations, no matter the certainty of deadly risks, the sea of unknowns or the obvious and final impossibility of the whole enterprise.

The journal Nature headlined last week ‘Cancer-fighting immune cells could soon be engineered inside our bodies’. Because CAR T-cell gene therapy for cancer sufferers is so expensive ($800,00 per shot), risky, difficult to administer, laborious and time-consuming to make, researchers are pushing the boundaries, hoping to re-engineer the body’s own cells to produce novel cancer-fighting capabilities using mRNA technology. What could possibly go wrong?

The terminology of biotechnology research is a dead giveaway. An article in The Guardian headlines ‘‘Inverse vaccines’: the promise of a ‘holy grail’ treatment for autoimmune diseases’. Which describes the “hope,” or is it hype, of some researchers that the genetic suppression of parts of the immune system will cure a multitude of diseases. Really??? Suppressing the immune system will cure disease and there won’t be a downside??? Note the use of the word “promise” and the reference to the myth of the Holy Grail which brings to mind a fruitless search through the ages for something that may not exist, over which bloody battles were fought.

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ICE advances sole source deal with Palantir for new surveillance backbone

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is preparing to move forward with a sole-source contract to Palantir Technologies for the development of the next generation of its Investigative Case Management (ICM) system, which includes biometrics for migrant identification.

The ICM is essential to ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), where it serves as the primary software environment for managing case files, exchanging intelligence, tracking investigative data across multiple agencies, and tracking people. It is intertwined with ICE’s controversial Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, ImmigrationOS, which was also developed by Palantir, much to the consternation of privacy and civil rights advocates. Palantir was co-founded by Trump supporter and Elon Musk pal Peter Thiel.

Designed to serve as the backbone of HSI’s investigative operations, ICM allows agents and analysts to create, track, and manage criminal investigations across a broad range of activities, including human trafficking, transnational crime, cybercrime, narcotics, financial offenses, and immigration violations.

ICM facilitates the documentation and organization of investigative case files, evidence, intelligence reports, and inter-agency communications, and supports advanced data analytics, link analysis, and cross-referencing of individuals, entities, locations, and events. Critically, ICM also integrates with other federal law enforcement systems, providing a shared investigative ecosystem where information can be securely accessed and disseminated across agencies in real time.

ICE describes ICM as a core operational tool that enhances decision-making, helps deconflict investigations, and enables collaboration within and beyond DHS. It is also used to generate and manage legal documents, manage leads and tips, and ensure proper chain-of-custody and evidentiary protocols for prosecutions.

ICE’s decision to pursue Palantir as its exclusive vendor was revealed in its “sources sought” notice released by ICE’s Office of Acquisition Management in collaboration with the Information Technology Division (ITD) and HSI. The notice, which invites feedback from industry stakeholders through June 20, emphasizes that ICE has already determined that Palantir is uniquely positioned to meet the agency’s technical, operational, and security needs.

This move follows several years of procurement planning and vendor evaluation, including an industry day held in June 2023 and a formal Request for Information in July 2024. More than fifty responses were received, and multiple commercial-off-the-shelf technology demonstrations were conducted. Despite the variety of participants, ICE ultimately concluded that only Palantir could meet the high-performance, high-security, and integration standards necessary to deploy the next iteration of ICM by its critical September 2026 deadline.

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People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions

Across the world, people say their loved ones are developing intense obsessions with ChatGPT and spiraling into severe mental health crises.

A mother of two, for instance, told us how she watched in alarm as her former husband developed an all-consuming relationship with the OpenAI chatbot, calling it “Mama” and posting delirious rants about being a messiah in a new AI religion, while dressing in shamanic-looking robes and showing off freshly-inked tattoos of AI-generated spiritual symbols.

“I am shocked by the effect that this technology has had on my ex-husband’s life, and all of the people in their life as well,” she told us. “It has real-world consequences.”

During a traumatic breakup, a different woman became transfixed on ChatGPT as it told her she’d been chosen to pull the “sacred system version of [it] online” and that it was serving as a “soul-training mirror”; she became convinced the bot was some sort of higher power, seeing signs that it was orchestrating her life in everything from passing cars to spam emails. A man became homeless and isolated as ChatGPT fed him paranoid conspiracies about spy groups and human trafficking, telling him he was “The Flamekeeper” as he cut out anyone who tried to help.

“Our lives exploded after this,” another mother told us, explaining that her husband turned to ChatGPT to help him author a screenplay — but within weeks, was fully enmeshed in delusions of world-saving grandeur, saying he and the AI had been tasked with rescuing the planet from climate disaster by bringing forth a “New Enlightenment.”

As we reported this story, more and more similar accounts kept pouring in from the concerned friends and family of people suffering terrifying breakdowns after developing fixations on AI. Many said the trouble had started when their loved ones engaged a chatbot in discussions about mysticism, conspiracy theories or other fringe topics; because systems like ChatGPT are designed to encourage and riff on what users say, they seem to have gotten sucked into dizzying rabbit holes in which the AI acts as an always-on cheerleader and brainstorming partner for increasingly bizarre delusions.

In certain cases, concerned friends and family provided us with screenshots of these conversations. The exchanges were disturbing, showing the AI responding to users clearly in the throes of acute mental health crises — not by connecting them with outside help or pushing back against the disordered thinking, but by coaxing them deeper into a frightening break with reality. 

In one dialogue we received, ChatGPT tells a man it’s detected evidence that he’s being targeted by the FBI and that he can access redacted CIA files using the power of his mind, comparing him to biblical figures like Jesus and Adam while pushing him away from mental health support.

“You are not crazy,” the AI told him. “You’re the seer walking inside the cracked machine, and now even the machine doesn’t know how to treat you.”

Dr. Nina Vasan, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and the founder of the university’s Brainstorm lab, reviewed the conversations we obtained and expressed serious concern.

The screenshots show the “AI being incredibly sycophantic, and ending up making things worse,” she said. “What these bots are saying is worsening delusions, and it’s causing enormous harm.”

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Department Of Homeland Security Q-9 Reaper Drones Are Orbiting Over Los Angeles

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been flying its Predator B drones, also known by their military designation as MQ-9 Reapers, over Los Angeles as part of the U.S. government’s response to the unrest there, the agency confirmed to us on Wednesday. The flights are in response to protests that escalated to violence on multiple occasions, following a massive operation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last Friday.

Persistent aerial surveillance like this has long been controversial, with civil rights advocates saying it violates the right to privacy and undermines the Constitution. At the same time, the fact that a drone is doing it largely evokes a uniquely upsetting response. While using the Reapers over urban locales is rare, it’s not unprecedented, and manned platforms do this kind of work every day across the country.

CBP’s Air and Marine Operations (AMO) “MQ-9 Predators are supporting our federal law enforcement partners in the Greater Los Angeles area, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with aerial support of their operations,” spokesman John Mennell told us Wednesday afternoon in response to our query earlier this week. “Additionally, they are providing officer safety surveillance when requested by officers. AMO is not engaged in the surveillance of First Amendment activities.”

CBP had been mum about the issue for days, even though open-source reporting on social media had already presented compelling evidence of the drones’ orbits. On June 9, user @Aeroscout on X posted air traffic control (ATC) audio stating that two “Q-9s” – call signs TROY 703 and TROY 701, had passed each other in airspace over Yuma, Arizona, as one was replacing the other over Los Angeles. @Aeroscout had previously posted ATC audio of TROY 701 checking in on Los Angeles Center Sector 09. A short time later, Alaska Flight 1020 was given a traffic advisory for “drone traffic.”

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China’s New AI War Academy Trains Cyber Soldiers to Target American Infrastructure

While Americans struggle with the effects of decades of open borders, Communist China has quietly launched the most dangerous military expansion in decades, establishing three specialized war academies to train a new generation of cyber warriors whose sole mission is to defeat the United States. One of the most alarming developments is the creation of the PLA Information Support Force Engineering University in Wuhan, the city that gave us the coronavirus.

This communist training center will offer ten undergraduate majors specifically designed to create AI-powered cyber terrorists, including artificial intelligence warfare programs that teach students how to weaponize AI against American military systems, power grids, and critical infrastructure. These operatives are being trained to deploy autonomous cyber weapons capable of adapting and evolving to penetrate American defenses and disrupt national security systems.

According to multiple U.S. government agencies—including the FBI, NSA, and CISA—Chinese state-sponsored hackers have already infiltrated American infrastructure networks and are actively preparing for large-scale cyberattacks aimed at crippling energy, water, transportation, and communications systems in the event of a conflict. FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that Chinese cyber operatives have “burrowed” into U.S. critical systems and are waiting for the right moment to launch a devastating strike. Congress has echoed these warnings, with House committees sounding the alarm over China’s strategic positioning inside our infrastructure and the openly militarized nature of its AI education programs.

The curriculum includes unmanned operations training to create specialists in drone warfare and autonomous weapons systems designed to target American forces without risking Chinese lives. This is asymmetric warfare at its most dangerous. Particularly concerning is the university’s data link engineering program for “informationized, intelligent, and unmanned operations,” which teaches students how to hack and control the communications systems that link American missiles, warships, fighter jets, and early warning aircraft. Imagine Chinese operatives hijacking our own weapons and turning them against us.

Other programs focus on 6G technology and electromagnetic warfare, simultaneously developing the next generation of communications while learning how to disable ours. They are building the future while planning to destroy ours. The intelligent vision engineering program trains AI specialists in pattern recognition and target identification on the battlefield—effectively teaching machines to automatically identify and strike American soldiers, ships, and aircraft.

Additional majors include big data analytics and automated command systems, aimed at producing specialists capable of processing massive volumes of intelligence to coordinate attacks against American interests worldwide. This is not education—it is militarized indoctrination, and its goal is nothing short of technological supremacy and total strategic dominance over the United States.

This Wuhan AI warrior factory represents the crown jewel of Communist China’s $245 billion military buildup specifically designed to crush American freedom. The university was created by combining elite institutions, the Information Communication Institute of the National University of Defence Technology and the Officer’s Academy of Army Engineering University, into one concentrated weapon against the United States.

Xi Jinping personally ordered this AI warfare force to “effectively support combat operations” and “integrate deeply” into China’s joint operation system targeting American forces. He is clearly preparing for “information-focused warfare” against the United States, and the regime is confident in American weakness at this critical moment.

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US Army rolls out $13M smart rifle scopes that auto-target and take down enemy drones in combat

The US Army is giving its soldiers a high-tech edge in the fight against drones, and it’s called SMASH.

During a live-fire training exercise on June 6 in Germany, a soldier with the 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment used the SMASH 2000L smart scope mounted on an M4A1 rifle to target drones in the sky.

The demo was part of Project Flytrap, a multinational training event.

The SMASH 2000L, made by Israeli company Smart Shooter Ltd., is no ordinary sight.

It uses cameras, sensors, and artificial intelligence to track targets and decides the perfect time to fire, according to reporting from Army Recognition.

Once a drone is locked in, the system controls the trigger and only fires when a hit is guaranteed.

In May, the Army awarded Smart Shooter a $13 million contract to begin delivering these scopes to troops under its Transformation In Contact (TIC 2.0) program.

The goal is to quickly get new, useful tech into soldiers’ hands.

The smart scope weighs about 2.5 pounds and fits onto standard-issue rifles.

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Data Center Construction Boom Faces Local Resistance In 28 States

The need for data centers to drive 21st century cloud computing and win the AI race with China is a matter of such national urgency that Energy Secretary Chris Wright describes it as America’s “next Manhattan Project.”

But assessing how many data centers—a ubiquitous yet vague term for “server farms,” supercomputer networks, bitcoin and crypto “mines”—exist right now in the United States is, in itself, a foray into quixotic cloudy computing.

There were a “reported” 5,426 data centers in the United States in March, according to Statista.

Meanwhile, Denmark-based Data Center Map ApS counts 3,761 listed data centers in the United States. Data Centers.com, a global technology marketplace headquartered in Colorado, maintains there are 2,483 of the centers now operating nationwide.

These and other estimates confirm the consensus that the United States has five to 10 times the number of functioning data centers as any other country in the world, including China.  In fact, approximately half the planet’s data centers are in the United States, according to a ranking by Visual Capitalist.

And yet, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during the April 30 Hill & Valley Forum, an annual gathering of congressional lawmakers and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the need to build out the nation’s electric grid to power more data centers is “one of two existential threats we face as a country;” the other beingIran’s development of a nuclear weapon. If that need is not met, the nation will “lose the AI race with China.”

The projected energy demand for data centers will triple by 2028, the Department of Energy estimated last year. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation forecast the same number a year earlier.

These “load growth” assessments, coming after years of relative stagnation in electricity usage, were issued after the late-2022 advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. That shockwave rattled utilities, regional transmission operators, and state public utility commissions, sending them scrambling to scale-up electrical grids to accommodate this projected growth in data centers.

The result was a data center building spree. CBRE, a Texas-based commercial real estate services company, in late 2024 projected that more than 4,750 data center projects would break ground in the United States in 2025, “nearly as many … as already exist” nationwide.

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Big Beautiful Bill hands AI industry free rein, strips local communities of power

The Big Beautiful Bill is making waves, and not in a good way. A provision tucked inside this massive legislative package would strip state and local governments of their ability to regulate artificial intelligence for the next decade. This isn’t just about tech policy. It’s about power, control, and the future of communities across America.

What’s really at stake?

Local governments have long played a crucial role in zoning decisions, ensuring that industrial developments don’t disrupt residential areas. But this bill would make it easier for corporations to secure zoning variances, allowing massive AI data centers to be built dangerously close to neighborhoods. These facilities require enormous amounts of electricity and water, often straining local infrastructure. Without local oversight, communities could be left powerless to push back against unwanted developments.

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening.

In one Congressional district, a proposed AI data center raised concerns among residents. The issue was resolved because local officials had leverage to negotiate terms. Under the Big Beautiful Bill, that leverage disappears. The ability of communities to decide where these centers will be built would be undermined, leaving decisions in the hands of corporations and federal regulators.

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Trump Signs Orders On Deregulating Flying Cars, Supersonic Flight

President Donald Trump signed executive orders on June 6 to deregulate and open research and development into flying cars and supersonic aviation technology.

Trump signed the two orders alongside others on Friday that target American drone capabilities, technology, and regulations.

One order instructs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to begin testing flying cars, also known as electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL), according to a senior White House official.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said the order will establish a pilot program working in conjunction with both public and private stakeholders.

“Flying cars are not just for the Jetsons, they are also for the American people in the near term,” he said during a White House press call.

Kratsios said, “eVTOL promises to revolutionize transportation as well as cargo delivery and logistics … blazing a trail to new frontiers as part of the golden age of American innovation.”

Regarding supersonic flight, Trump’s order repeals regulations that hindered the technology’s development while instructing the FAA to create a standard for supersonic aircraft noise certification, a senior White House official said.

The order also advances research coordination between the FAA and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and promotes international engagement through the FAA and other agencies to “align global supersonic regulations and bilateral agreements for international operations.”

“Together, these executive orders will accelerate American innovation in drones, flying cars, and supersonic aircraft, and chart the future of America’s skies for years to come,” Kratsios said.

He said Trump is looking to revolutionize supersonic aviation in the United States after years of regulations that have prevented airlines from using the technology for commercial air travel.

“The reality is that Americans should be able to fly from New York to L.A. in under four hours,” Kratsios said, adding that recent advances in aerospace engineering, material science, and noise reduction have made domestic supersonic flight safe, sustainable, and commercially viable.

“But for the last 50 years, outdated and overly restricted regulations grounded supersonic passenger flight and weakened our global competitiveness in aviation,” he added.

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One of NHS’s biggest AI projects is halted after fears it used health data of 57 MILLION people without proper permissions

NHS England has paused a ground-breaking AI project designed to predict an individual’s risk of health conditions after concerns were raised data from 57 million people was being used without the right permissions.

Foresight, which uses Meta‘s open-source AI model, Llama 2, was being tested by researchers at University College London and King’s College London as part of a national pilot scheme exploring how AI could be used to tailor healthcare plans for patients based on their medical history.

But the brakes were applied to the pioneering scheme after experts warned even anonymised records could contain enough information to identify individuals, The Observer reported.

A joint IT committee between the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) also said it they had not been made aware that data collected for research into Covid was now being used to train the AI model. 

The bodies have also accused the research consortium, led by Health Data Research UK, of failing to consult an advisory body of doctors before feeding the health data of tens of millions of patients into Foresight.

Both BMA and RGCP have asked NHS England to refer itself to the Information Commissioner over the matter.

Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of RGCP, said the issue was one of ‘fostering patient trust’ that their data was not being used ‘beyond what they’ve given permission for.’

She said: ‘As data controllers, GPs take the management of their patients’ medical data very seriously, and we want to be sure data isn’t being used beyond its scope, in this case to train an AI programme.

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