Dead Animals Feel No Pain

BrainEx pumped an experiment solution into the brain that essentially mimic blood flow. It brought oxygen and nutrients to the tissues, giving brain cells the resources to begin many normal functions. The cells began consuming and metabolizing sugars. The brains' immune systems kicked in. Neuron samples could carry an electrical signal. Some brain cells even responded to drugs.

The researchers have managed to keep some brains alive for up to 36 hours, and currently do not know if BrainEx can have sustained the brains longer. "It is conceivable we are just preventing the inevitable, and the brain won't be able to recover," said Nenad Sestan, Yale neuroscientist and the lead researcher.

Ethical review boards evaluate research protocols and can reject any that causes undue pain, suffering, or distress. Since dead animals feel no pain, suffer no trauma, they are typically approved as subjects. But how do such boards make a judgement regarding the suffering of a "cellularly active" brain?

Jocular Provocations

Meanwhile we have those journalists that recognize the Everett/Wolfe stuff is all a bunch of hokum but simply don’t care. Why? Because, in this day and age, it isn’t about finding the truth; it’s about winning the news cycle. This attitude is pristinely reflected in a review of the book in Canada’s Globe and Mail.

“Wolfe is a reporter and an entertainer, an opinionated raconteur rather than a scientist, and that is why we will always report on his jocular provocations. And if they serve as an excuse to explain what universal grammar was in the first place – as it has done – then Chomsky should be thrilled.”

Right. Because what could thrill Chomsky more than to have the media fraudulently misrepresent his theory using a facts-be-damned line of anti-intellectual argumentation that exoticizes another human culture? Chomsky must be “thrilled” about that, because, my God, his whole life he has been complaining that the media is too serious and too concerned with getting the facts right, when it should be, you know, writing about the Kardashians and otherwise using misinformation to bring eyeballs to advertisers.

I only recently discovered this article by Mr Spode (Daniel Bloody Everett started showing up in my Amazon recommendations). It amuses me that Tom Wolfe, whose primary beef with Chompers is he doesn’t like the Professor’s analysis of elite power, which he styles a “cabal” theory, felt the need to go after Universal Grammar as well, but, then, an endorsement from professional Chomsky-hater Oliver Kamm shows up as a blurb for Everett’s latest work, presumably because Kamm thought he could launch a surprise attack on this pesky anti-imperialist through the soft underbelly of linguistics. *laughs nerdily through nose*

Viral Spread

The permission structure for them to fuck us all so royally was created by governments and a business lobby preferencing economic transactions over public health. Viral spread was inevitable as soon as the border opened and the mass movement of tourists and business travellers not just allowed but encouraged. It’s a passing irony that these two were likely both.

...

While the bogans from Logan were partying in Plaguetown (that’s Melbourne, btw, Melbourne is Plaguetown now) billionaire coal baron and motile Jabba the Hutt custard sculpture Clive Palmer was filing in the High Court to have WA’s border controls struck down. Why? Because that sketchy fuck is up to some sort of villainy in the far west and he doesn’t want to tell Mister Plod what it is when next he comes to visit. So the entire model of controlled movement which did so much to contain the spread of the virus in the first half of the year, is to be dismantled because Palmer has the moral architecture of a botoxed hollaback girl but enough money to build that out into a suite of depressingly predictable pathogenic consequences for the rest us.

And supporting him in this?

The Morrison Government*.

*I probably should have posted this yesterday when this was still true.