The animal world is full of what appear to be miracles: a Brazilian boa giving birth without being near another snake; fish that rain down from the sky; and who could forget the ferret that somehow survived a 100-minute cycle in a washing machine? There’s one group of birds, however, that likes to go for an old classic when it comes to miraculous behavior.Those birds are the jacanas. Their miracle? Walking on water, or at least seeming to do so, which has unsurprisingly earned them the nickname “Jesus birds”.Found in tropical regions of Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas, the various species of jacana make their homes in water anywhere from swamps and marshes to lakes and lagoons, appearing to effortlessly glide across them as they go about their birdy business.But sadly, there are no water walking-based miracles going on here – unless you consider physics and walking on vegetation to be a miracle, that is.They’re actually walking along lily pads (which has given them their other nickname: lily trotters) and other water vegetation floating on the water’s surface. These plants may well have a bit of a water on them, so at a glance, it looks as though a jacana really is walking on water.Still, if we attempted to walk over a lake by hopping between lily pads, it’d end in a quick trip underwater. How, then, are jacanas able to do it?Those toes would be 100,000 times more creepy if they weren't attached to a chick.Image credit: JMx Images/Shutterstock.comThe answer lies in their freakishly long toes, which allow them to spread their weight across the vegetation they’re walking on, stopping them from sinking. Readying them for a life on the water, jacanas have these big ol’ tootsies from birth, providing us with delightfully gangly, if a little Freddy Krueger-esque, fluffy chicks to look at.However, life is not all lily pads and larking about for baby jacanas – the waters below contain plenty of other animals that see them as tasty little snacks. Luckily, as the clip from PBS’s Nature shows below, dad is quickly there to the rescue. Male birds are able to scoop up their young beneath their wings and carry them a short distance away to safety. Though they don’t fly whilst doing so – jacanas aren’t the greatest of fliers, only spending short bouts of time up in the air – it’s still quite the spectacle.That’s because the chicks aren’t fully hidden; their lanky legs stick out below, which, if you didn’t know what was going on, actually looks reasonably terrifying.

In the British Museum sits an ancient marble relief that depicts two gladiators battling with swords and shields. It’s a familiar scene from ancient Rome bar one intriguing detail: both of the gladiators are female.The inscription about the marble relief, which was found in Halicarnassus, Turkey, reads that both gladiators fought to an honorable draw. So was this work of art a one-off, or were female gladiators in ancient Rome commonplace?Female gladiators in ancient Rome: The evidenceTrying to understand cultures from which we are so far removed always sees scientists stumble upon a myriad of familiar obstacles. We’re burdened with the expectations of modern life, and so struggle to interpret evidence through anything other than the lens of today’s status quo. However, when it comes to female gladiators, there is some intriguing evidence to work from.The marble relief mentioned above is perhaps one of the clearest depictions of female gladiators in ancient Rome. A ~2,000-year-old bronze statue is also believed to depict a female gladiator, but that wasn’t the original interpretation of the artifact.Now housed at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, the small statue was traditionally considered to represent a female athlete holding a strigil – an instrument with a curved blade used to clean the skin by scraping off dirt and sweat. However, in a 2011 paper, Alfonso Manas of the University of Granada suggests this statue actually depicts a female gladiator, “more specifically a thraex, a gladiatorial type that fought with a short-curved dagger, a weapon that to the untrained eye can be confused with a strigil.”According to Manas, 10 literary fragments and one epigraphic inscription are all we have in the way of written evidence that speaks of female gladiators, so you can see why it’s a tricky picture to piece together.A marble relief at the British Museum depicting two female gladiators without helmets.Image credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0The role of female gladiatorsWhile we celebrate the Gladiators on TV today, the social standing of gladiators in ancient Rome was quite different. To fight or perform in an arena for the entertainment of the masses was considered a lowly position, so you can imagine the shame thrust upon any woman who wanted to enter the ring. As put best by the Roman satirist Juvenal:"What sense of shame can be found in a woman wearing a helmet, who shuns femininity and loves brute force....If an auction is held of your wife's effects, how proud you will be of her belt and arm-pads and plumes, and her half-length left-leg shin-guard! Or, if instead, she prefers a different form of combat [as a Thraex, both of whose legs were protected], how pleased you'll be when the girl of your heart sells off her greaves!....Hear her grunt while she practises thrusts as shown by the trainer, wilting under the weight of the helmet."While female gladiators were rare compared to their male counterparts, they did exist and were cut from all kinds of cloth, from the lowly to the high-born. As for why they felt compelled to battle when such an activity was received with criticism, it seems – as Lady Gaga put it – they may have lived for the applause.“Women who chose a life in the arena – and it does seem this was a choice – may have been motivated by a desire for independence, a chance at fame, and financial rewards including remission of debt,” explained Content Director of World History Encyclopedia Joshua Mark. “Although it seems a woman gave up any claim to respectability as soon as she entered the arena, there is some evidence to suggest that female gladiators were honored as highly as their male counterparts.”The mission continues to piece together the no-doubt rich history of ancient Rome's female warriors from the scant evidence we have available to us, and while we wait to find some more, we’ll always have that Pepsi advert.

A titanium heart sounds like something made for the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz – but for the first time, on the July 9, it was implanted in a patient.The implantation of a total artificial heart (TAH) is a proposed solution to help people with heart failure who need a heart transplant. Heart failure affected 6.7 million people in the US alone between 2017 and 2020, but in 2021 only 3,817 heart transplantations were performed. Currently, TAH implantation is seen as a bridge to heart transplant in severe cases of heart failure.BiVACOR’s titanium heart is a new type of TAH. Australian by design, it was approved to be tested in five human patients in an Early Feasibility Study in the USA. The first of those patients was implanted on July 9 and lived with the device for 8 days, until it was replaced with a donor heart.“This is an amazing advancement as the BiVACOR TAH may offer hope for countless patients who suffer from end-stage heart failure. This device may serve as a life-saving bridge to a heart transplant; future studies may prove its potential as a long-term pump that can effectively serve as a total replacement for a patient’s heart,” Dr Alexis Shafii, Surgical Director of Heart Transplantation at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center and Associate Professor of Surgery, Cardiothoracic Transplant & Circulatory Support at Baylor College of Medicine, explained in a statement. The titanium heart, like yours, has two ventricles. One sends blood to the lungs (pulmonary circulation) and the other sends it to the rest of your body (systemic circulation). But unlike yours, this heart doesn’t beat. It spins.The blood flows through the titanium heart, pushed by a rotating impeller that uses MAGLEV: magnetic levitation. That’s the same technology that made a train fly by at 603 kilometers per hour (374.69 miles per hour) in Japan in 2015. Maglev reduces the risk of mechanical wear and minimizes blood trauma. The TAH comes with a controller and battery that the patient would carry with them. BiVACOR says that the TAH is up to handling adult male patients engaging in physical exercise. Settings can also be adjusted to provide pulsatile, instead of continuous flow, to mimic the flow from a beating heart.While this first BiVACOR patient wore it for only 8 days, the device has been implanted for longer periods of time in animals - including for a month in a cohort of calves. The device has also been running error free for four years and counting on a benchtop.It is not the first total artificial heart, though. SynCardia was approved by the FDA in 2004 and has been implanted in more than 1,400 patients, even allowing them to go home while they wait for a donor heart.However, 12 percent of patients with SynCardia were reported to have strokes, and 14 percent experienced thrombotic events. The Maglev in BiVACOR hopes to reduce these risks. SynCardia is also quite large compared to BiVACOR, which resembles a human heart, and the materials it is made of are less durable. BiVACOR is made of titanium, which is already commonly used for orthopedic implants. Titanium readily oxidizes, creating a biologically inert film that coats the device protecting it from any biological reactions from the body.“The BiVACOR TAH represents a paradigm shift in artificial heart design” according to the BiVACOR website.

On Thursday’s The Faulkner Focus, Fox News host Harris Faulkner offered her first public reactions to the wild National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Convention panel she participated in that was hijacked by far-left reporters Rachel Scott of ABC and Kadia Goba of Semafor sparring with former President Trump.     Faulkner didn’t mention them by name, but she didn’t have to in voicing her displeasure with how it went: [T]he former President sat for what was supposed to be a really wide ranging interview with three journalists. I was one of them at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention. It was an interesting tip-off. It started acrimoniously and it — it was very emotional. Things got pretty fiery as we went on. As you know me, I leaned in with the questions that, I think, matter to journalists, so we’ll — we’ll talk about that. After a break, Faulkner said the forum “took a hostile turn before [she] could even ask one question” as “the journalist to his right” (i.e. Scott) “leaned in with this”, giving way to portions of Scott’s first two questions and Trump answers (which can be seen in full below): Here's the full exchange on the insane first question at the #NABJ convention by ABC's Rachel Scott.... Scott: "I want to start by addressing elephant in the room, sir. A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about… pic.twitter.com/qU5b5K8EBH — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 31, 2024   ABC’s Rachel Scott: “If we can move on now to the state of the race, sir, I want to get back to the campaign. Senator J.D. Vance is your running mate. He's had a lot of controversy lately, and I want to read you a few things that he has said in the past. He said the Democrats… pic.twitter.com/VpYwvgdNoD — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 31, 2024 Faulkner acknowledged “race is a tough issue” and “it doesn’t matter when it comes up and when there’s emotion mixed in,” things become “even tougher.” “I was really glad I was there to witness it because right from the get, it was not what it should have been,” she added. After noting the evasiveness from Vice President Harris’s team and soundbites of both Harris and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denouncing Trump’s comments at the panel about Harris’s racial identity. Moments after Faulkner uttered a “wow”, she brought in Trump 2024 campaign official Caroline Sunshine, who thanked her for “actually doing your job as a journalist rather than deciding to play commentator like the other woman on that stage, who should have honored her profession but instead took the opportunity to play commentator, which was a disservice to that audience.” Sunshine went onto say Trump sparring with Scott “was a master class...in how you fight, fight, fight and tell the truth and yet another textbook case study in how the mainstream media’s liberal bias plays out.” Before moving onto a question she didn’t receive a straight answer from at the forum, Faulkner added further tea on what was going on behind the scenes: The President walked into a situation where people had already expressed they wished the NABJ had canceled him. Then, some of those same people showed up for the forum and didn’t move out of the seats. So, he did what you said. He showed up. And he was trying to be an honest broker in that position. There were a lot of technical — I’ll call them shenanigans cause we don’t really know what was going on. I could hear very little of what he said. He could hear very little of what I said. I want to put that out there. To see the relevant FNC transcript from August 1, click here.

There is no more ridiculous label for Kamala Harris than "moderate" or "centrist." Her lifetime American Conservative Union rating from her Senate tenure is about four percent.  But there are plenty of media personalities who will try this. Sunny Hostin of The View demonstrated the foolishness:  Prosecutors are not really leftist, they put people in jail for a living, okay? They’re pretty moderate...I know the vice president personally — she is not — she’s moderate. Conservatives (including NewsBusters bloggers) have long reported on Soros-backed prosecutors being radical leftists who don't want to prosecute violent crime. Alvin Bragg is a Soros-supported prosecutor who would rather pursue Donald Trump while he won't prosecute criminals. The Soros family is presently backing Kamala for President. That in itself destroys the "moderate" label.  Hostin's fake-Republican colleague Alyssa Farah Griffin also spread this lie around on CNN. On CNN's Amanpour show (replayed on taxpayer-funded PBS), Bianna Golodryga lamented: "She hasn't been allowed to show her true self. And that is a tough on crime prosecutor that perhaps on certain issues is more right of center than she has been portrayed. And that now is an opportunity to her -- for her to really shine a light on her past achievements and her own personal views on certain policies." How "fact-based" reporters can say these things is a mystery. Watch: Now the media are actually trying to pretend Kamala Harris is moderate centrist. Does that sound like a lie to anyone else? Let's take a look. pic.twitter.com/QD6tl6VopS — Bill D'Agostino (@Banned_Bill) July 29, 2024  

A day after conservatives voiced outrage that an Algerian boxer, who previously failed a gender test, was allowed to fight in the women’s tournament at the Olympics, CNN Newsroom guest host Paula Reid and sports analyst Christine Brennan rushed to defend the boxer against “an avalanche of misinformation.” However, all the duo could do on Friday was point out some irrelevant facts, like that Imane Khelif is not transgender and the International Boxing Association being run by a Vladimir Putin stooge. As part of a tease of the segment, Reid hyped, “the IOC, coming to the defense of a boxer at the center of an avalanche of misinformation.” Half an hour later, she reported, “An Italian boxer quit just 46 seconds into a match against her Algerian opponent after taking an especially hard punch to the head. Now, some critics say the Algerian boxer should not have been allowed to compete after she was disqualified from last year’s world championships.”     She then introduced Brennan, “Christine, this is a highly controversial topic, getting a lot of traction on social media, but there's so much conflicting information about what is going on here. What are the facts?” It’s not just American social media, it’s the Italian prime minister as well, but after repeating details of the bout, Brennan added: From that moment on, here I am in Paris, but from that moment on, it appears as if social media, especially in the United States, has literally crash landed here in Paris at the Olympic games and a story that is out there that is really not correct has now gained traction to the point where it is becoming a worldwide conversation. And the part of it that is absolutely not correct is the conversation that she, the Algerian, is transgender, a transgender woman. She is not she, was born female and is female. And the International Olympic Committee has said now three different times that she is in fact female. So, that's the story in a nutshell, but it is quite a controversy. And I don't think it's going to end anytime soon. So? Algeria isn’t exactly a country known for its advocacy of LGBTQism, so that’s not surprising. We do know that Khelif failed a gender test and that rare medical conditions, such as Differences of Sexual Disorder, exist and it shouldn’t be surprising people with higher testosterone levels than their peers would be disproportionately represented in combat sports. Khelif's failed gender test revealed male XY chromosomes, but Brennan tried to tie the test to Putin: The International Boxing Federation, which, by the way, is suspended because of its connections with Russia, very serious connections of improprieties with the Russian government and Gazprom, one of the companies involved with Putin, that federation is the one that, kind of, cast out here because they said, ‘Well, we did these two tests last year.’ They haven't really said what they were, they're, kind of, mystery tests. And they're the ones that brought this out. And once that came out, everyone went running on social media. But the fact is that that boxing federation, it makes it sound like it's, you know, they know what they're doing; they have been suspended.  Again, so what? Putin belongs at The Hague, but just because his hacks say the world is round does not mean that CNN should be arguing the world is flat. It is unfortunate for Khelif, but there is no right to be an Olympic boxer. Chromosomes and testosterone matter more than passport identification. Here is a transcript for the August 2 show: CNN Newsroom with Jim Acosta 8/2/2024 10:22 AM ET PAULA REID: And coming up, the IOC, coming to the defense of a boxer at the center of an avalanche of misinformation … 10:52 REID: An unusual moment in women’s Olympic boxing has sparked controversy at the Paris games. An Italian boxer quit just 46 seconds into a match against her Algerian opponent after taking an especially hard punch to the head. Now, some critics say the Algerian boxer should not have been allowed to compete after she was disqualified from last year’s world championships. CNN’s Christine Brennan joins us now. Christine, this is a highly controversial topic, getting a lot of traction on social media, but there's so much conflicting information about what is going on here. What are the facts? CHRISTINE BRENNAN: Well, Imane Khelif, who is the Algerian boxer, who won that bout, Paula, when the Italian, Angela Carini, decided to quit, to stop after 46 seconds after getting hit hard, that's what happened in the boxing ring. And from that home and on, Carini then said that she'd been hit too hard. She was bleeding, journalists were there. There was a lot of conversation about the hit from Khelif and then of course, the bout stopping, which is so rare, you don't have a boxing match, stop that quickly unless there's, you know, someone has knocked out and that was not the case here. From that moment on, here I am in Paris, but from that moment on, it appears as if social media, especially in the United States, has literally crash landed here in Paris at the Olympic games and a story that is out there that is really not correct has now gained traction to the point where it is becoming a worldwide conversation. And the part of it that is absolutely not correct is the conversation that she, the Algerian, is transgender, a transgender woman. She is not she, was born female and is female. And the International Olympic Committee has said now three different times that she is in fact female. So, that's the story in a nutshell, but it is quite a controversy. And I don't think it's going to end anytime soon. REID: Certainly not, this is all over social media, like you said, especially here in the U.S, but today the IOC has strongly defending the Algeria boxer, saying many things that you laid out, but their statement is specifically quote, “she was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport. This is not a transgender case.”  How rare is it for the IOC to address a controversy like this? In the middle of the Olympic games? BRENNAN: You know, this happens every now and then, certainly there was a runner named Caster Semenya, very different situation, but this is someone who has been dealt with over the years, a story about intersex and issues of testosterone. So, these things do happen and they usually happen, of course, in women's sports and going all the way back, you know, 60, 70 years when you had the East Germans doping and Russians, Soviets doping. So, these things do occur the issue, and I think why this has taken on a life of its own, is that the International Boxing Federation, which, by the way, is suspended because of its connections with Russia, very serious connections of improprieties with the Russian government and Gazprom, one of the companies involved with Putin, that federation is the one that, kind of, cast out here because they said, “Well, we did these two tests last year.” They haven't really said what they were, they're, kind of, mystery tests. And they're the ones that brought this out. And once that came out, everyone went running on social media. But the fact is that that boxing federation, it makes it sound like it's, you know, they know what they're doing; they have been suspended. And if boxing doesn't get another federation, there will not be boxing at the Los Angeles Olympics, throw that into the mix, and I think that of course, is helping to stoke this controversy Christine Brennan.

Another Olympic boxer surrounded by gender controversy just had a dominating victory. Lin Yu‑ting of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) beat Uzbekistan's Sitora Turdibekova in a unanimous decision Friday in the 57 kg round of 16. 'Every person has the right to practice sport without discrimination.' Lin dominated Turdibekova and displayed a clear and obvious athletic advantage, often pushing around Turdibekova with ease. The Uzbekistan fighter was dejected by the loss, while Lin's corner and fans in the French audience were raucous. The International Boxing Association disqualified Lin at the March 2023 world championships over failure to meet gender eligibility requirements. Lin, Taiwan's double world champion, reportedly was denied a bronze medal at the event. Algeria's Imane Khelif also was disqualified at the event for the same reason. According to Reuters, IBA President Umar Kremlev told Russian outlet TASS at the time that the boxers had "XY chromosomes." Males have XY chromosomes; females have XX chromosomes. But the International Olympic Committee dropped the IBA as a governing body in June 2023 and put the IOC's Paris 2024 Boxing Unit in charge. The Paris Boxing Unit's rules have been described as more relaxed. According to the Guardian, the IOC acknowledged in its internal system that Lin was “stripped of her bronze medal after failing to meet eligibility requirements based on the results of a biochemical test" and that Khelif was “disqualified just hours before her gold medal showdown against Yang Liu at the 2023 world championships in New Delhi, India, after her elevated ­levels of testosterone failed to meet the eligibility criteria." Still, Lin and Khelif were allowed to box against women at the Paris Olympics. Indeed, the Olympic women's boxing category has dominated the headlines this week, particularly after Italy's Angela Carini forfeited her Thursday bout against Khelif after just 46 seconds. Carini walked away after one big punch from the Algerian boxer. The IOC has answered questions surrounding the issue, stating that "all athletes participating in the boxing tournament of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 comply with the competition's eligibility and entry regulations." Even after the shocking end to the fight between Khelif and Carini, the IOC expressed sadness but stood firmly in their decision to allow Khelif and Lin in the women's category. "The IOC is saddened by the abuse that the two athletes are currently receiving," the IOC said in a statement Thursday, per ESPN. "Every person has the right to practice sport without discrimination." Khelif will fight in the 66kg quarterfinals Saturday against Anna Luca Hamori of Hungary. Lin will fight in the 57kg quarterfinals Sunday against Svetlana Kamenova Staneva of Bulgaria. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

If you’re reading this right now, you have one federal agency to thank: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But DARPA (just ARPA prior to 1972) didn’t only invent the internet and GPS many decades ago; it's also deeply involved in researching everything under the sun, for better or for worse. This includes killer robots, maneuverable bullets that can travel six miles (or more), fully automated No Manning Required warships, self-repairing biological homes, plant-eating robots (EATR), self-driving cars (which already existed by 1984), light-bending invisibility technology, gene editing, and smart-powered exo-suits to create super soldiers. DARPA funds many projects that find their way onto the battlefield itself. DARPA is understood to generally be at least several decades ahead on technology and discoveries that it keeps under wraps. The true limits of what it’s testing now remain speculative, but we can be sure it would make the most dystopian episode of 'Black Mirror' look tame. As Sharon Weinberger writes in her 2018 book “The Imagineers of War”: “Today, the agency's past investments populate the battlefield: The Predator, the descendant of Amber, has enabled the United States to conduct push-button warfare from afar, killing enemies from the comfort of air-conditioned trailers in the United States.” The list of DARPA’s greatest hits also includes spreading the reach of America’s vast surveillance state with DARPA’s first AI-related projects launched in the 1960s and testing out various deadly bioweapons and bioengineering projects from Agent Orange to the Brain Initiative Program, exploring the potential of humans controlling devices and technology with their minds. Then there are HI-MEMS and Project Dragonfly: mini flying cyborgs that can spy and are outfitted with solar-powered guidance systems. Remote-controlled rats; mine-finding bees; and programmable, shape-shifting claytronics are just some of the items that we know of from unclassified, on-the-record projects that DARPA has disclosed, some of which are now in civilian and commercial use. How much is going on off the books? A history of shadows DARPA was first established in 1958 to counter the USSR after the launch of Sputnik, but it quickly switched away from a space focus after NASA was created a year later in 1959. It became a remarkably unconstrained agency with enormous funding and a constellation of research to invest in that would bolster military readiness and technological dominance. Its mission is to stay ahead of the curve at all times and innovate technology beyond the knowledge or capacity of adversaries. The Heilmeier Catechism, named after former DARPA director George Heilmeier, takes on or rejects new projects, and research flows through industry and universities via DARPA funding. DARPA is remarkably small. As its official site notes, the agency “comprises approximately 220 government employees in six technical offices, including nearly 100 program managers, who together oversee about 250 research and development programs.” First, the obvious: Many of DARPA’s innovations have improved people’s lives in various ways, even though they were originally designed to end lives or respond to situations where massive loss of life was imminent. Some of the negatives have also become well known. Looking at past endeavors such as Operation Ranch Hand, DARPA developed Agent Orange to deforest jungle cover that the enemy in North Vietnam was hiding and operating under. Millions of gallons per day were sprayed out, ravaging enemy and civilian farms alike and leading to generations of cancer, health problems, and birth defects, including among veterans. First used in 1962, the presence of dioxin in Agent Orange was fully known by 1965, along with the discovery of its damage to unborn infants by 1967. Its use was discontinued by 1971. When DARPA and its ally Monsanto were sued by veterans due to their illnesses after exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, DARPA simply denied it, cherry-picking scientists to cast doubt on the hundreds of thousands of suffering veterans. In the case of Monsanto, it quietly settled the case of domestic producers who developed cancer and diseases from producing and being in the environs of the substance stateside without taking official blame. Killer tech Devrimb/Getty The critical issue with DARPA lies in how much of its work is secret and its tight links with the intelligence community and high-tech industry. We just don’t know the full breadth of what it's working on because much of it is protected under national security confidentiality. We know that DARPA is very interested in tracking people's thoughts, feelings, and words. By 1994, a little-known think tank named the Highlands Forum began working more closely with the Pentagon, providing an off-the-record link between the tech world, the defense industry, and the government. Private and off-the-record meetings operating under Chatham House rules are regularly held without fanfare. The organization is crucial for understanding how the military-industrial complex , which President Eisenhower warned about, is all about building bridges between public and private, civilian and officer. It’s also increasingly come to be defined by information operations in terms of shaping belief and tracking people’s beliefs as they winnow themselves into demographic and ideological categories formed by what they serve themselves from the internet’s vast buffet. Whereas the early internet (ARPANET) arose out of military interest in maintaining wireless communications if phone lines and grids went down, later work on data mining, pattern recognition, and profiling became much more focused on anticipating, understanding, influencing, and even building the choice architecture to shape the actions of individuals and groups. Researchers who can orient their work or lab around topics and areas that may interest DARPA can hit the jackpot and tap into a massive funding structure backed by the U.S. government to the tune of several billion dollars or more per year. By tapping into inchoate technologies and helping them out, DARPA can keep a finger in the pie of the cutting edge of research. The Massive Digital Data Systems funding mechanism succeeded in moving massive funding through the National Science Foundation, academia, and other groups to get money to come up with a way to surveil people more effectively. This eventually found popular fruition with query flocking and association rule-mining in the Google search engine developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and invested in by DARPA. Information people voluntarily gave out (and withheld) could now be put through vast AI systems to assign them reliable and telling digital fingerprints and predict and influence their behavior at scale. It’s no exaggeration to say that the CIA, NSA, and DARPA helped form Google into what it is today via the intelligence community’s Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, which operated between 1993 and 1999. The U.S. intelligence community has financially backed numerous startups in order to dominate the information age, while the Highlands Group, DARPA, and confidentiality rules have succeeded in doing an end run around any real accountability for what’s being tested and implemented. What we do know is that ongoing U.S. involvement in global conflicts, mass surveillance, and increasingly heated rhetoric and profiling of the domestic population have all become a glaring reality in the past several decades. When former CIA director and top Obama administration national security adviser John Brennan announced that the government’s security apparatus would track down every participant who broke the law on January 6, 2021, with a “laser-like” focus, he wasn’t lying, as subsequent jailing of people for taking photos, jeering at police, or walking into the Capitol began playing out across the country. As Brennan threatened at the time, “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” are all very much on the government’s radar. Tracking down the government’s domestic enemies was helped along by, in some cases, family members informing on each other for participating in the January 6 protests in a manner reminiscent of socialist East Germany’s legion of citizen informants. The Age of AI As I wrote in a previous review of Shoshana Zuboff’s book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," Zuboff contends that power structures want to “force a new collectivist order on humanity founded on the certainty of AI systems and to steadily take away people’s rights, freedoms, and even conscious thought, by limiting the choice architecture around us and conceptually shepherding people into increasingly tightly controlled avenues of mentation, decision, and action.” There’s always an official-sounding and supposedly legitimate reason why surveillance and high-octane military technology and acceleration are necessary to use on the domestic front. But as Brennan’s threats above showed, the power to define who is a “religious extremist” or a “nativist” as well as to define why, exactly, that is “evil” or “illegal” has no controls on it except by those in control. The goalposts can be moved at any time, and powerful AI systems are there to click into place and comply. Military dominance and technology development tend to go hand in hand. The danger, especially in the latter half of this century, is that technology is accelerating so rapidly and accountability so thin that the possibility of malicious actors within government or bureaucratic circles using tech to negatively control populations or accomplish nefarious goals is increasingly real, not to mention the prospect of enemy foreign powers copying or infiltrating such projects. We already know American universities are heavily infiltrated by Chinese communist spies and others who run counter to U.S. interests. DARPA’s surveillance technology and AI investments are speeding ahead without brakes. Even if it hasn’t been publicly unveiled, we know that it’s only a matter of time until tools that can be used on foreign adversaries will also be unleashed on domestic enemies, even for purely political or cynical purposes. There’s no guarantee on who will deploy these technologies or why. To put it in the starkest terms: You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. DARPA is understood to generally be at least several decades ahead on technology and discoveries that it keeps under wraps. The true limits of what it’s testing now remain speculative, but we can be sure it would make the most dystopian episode of "Black Mirror" look tame. Groups like Highlands need more oversight. Regardless of its benefits, the truth remains starkly obvious: Out-of-control technocracy is a real and present danger to American liberty and vitality.

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