Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 62

Can the Tyranny Be Soft-Landed?

By Jeffrey Tucker

The excuse that this regime is better than it was, or might otherwise have been, only lasts so long.

Every transition government in history has deployed that trope. Think the Girondins in France, Kerensky in Russia, Weimar in Germany, the Second Spanish Republic, Chiang Kai-shek in China, and so on. In order, they were replaced by Robespierre then Napoleon, Lenin then Stalin, Hitler, Franco, and Mao.

In each of these cases, the transitional government was caught between and ultimately smashed by pressures from both sides: industrial and intellectual partisans of the old regime with legacy control, on one side, and the radicalism of the populist movements that brought new people to power on the other.

Threading this needle is not easy in revolutionary moments. Of such times, history teaches one lesson more than any other. The new regime must be brutally honest about the criminality of the old one and work with focus to dismantle it as fast as possible. Anything short of that leads to its own discrediting and eventual replacement.

In every area of government today under the Trump administration, now entering its second phase, we witness these very historical forces at work. The grassroots movement that beat all odds to put the new people in power had high and even revolutionary expectations following the five most horrid years of our lives.

Some of these hopes are being partially met in good ways but blocked and neglected in too many other ways that are unbearably conspicuous. This dynamic affects the budget disaster, the demand for transparency, and in the realm of public health.

As a result, the wild optimism that greeted the inauguration of Trump has turned to something different, a mixture of incredulity from the grassroots combined with outrage and disgust from the legacy media and establishment that fought this revolution at every turn.

This further raises the prospect about which we’ve repeatedly warned: the Trump administration could go down in history as a transitional regime like we’ve seen so many times in history, a four-year experiment in moderation bookended by different brands of totalitarianism on either side.

This is a serious matter, not a parlor game. Nor is this a typical political battle. What happened over the last five years was for the ages. The world economy was smashed by nearly all states due to a lab leak for a product partially funded by the US government. The unannounced fallback plan, pushed in the name of science, was to universally distribute a new shot with a new gene-altering technology.

The shot did not work. It was not effective. It was not safe. Nor were they properly vetted because they were imposed by military edict under the cover of emergency. Other therapeutics were disparaged and banned. The critics in all areas were censored and shut down. People who refused the injection were fired. Public health collapsed in the name of preserving it.

Those harms have seen no justice.

Meanwhile, to finance this calamity, debt-financed spending ballooned by $8-10 trillion, leaving the federal government’s budget $2 trillion higher than it otherwise would have been. The shots are still on the market despite undeniable and widely known harms.

None of this is a secret, as it might have been in former times. Because of information technologies, people are well aware of every detail. The so-called “populist movement” has become a vast community of in-depth expertise, fully capable of running circles around legacy people and institutions.

The new leaders – elected to change course on all the above and more, including the accompanying crime and migration chaos – began with tremendous bravado and sweeping edicts that seemed promising. Four months later, they are asking for patience while dealing with legacy barriers on all sides from media harassment to court blockages.

The trouble is that public trust is completely gone. The whole country, traumatized by years of lies, has become Missouri: show me.

First, no one believes that the “one big beautiful bill” is just a first step on the way to future draconian cuts. We’ve seen this too many times, which is why Elon Musk finally broke his silence and denounced the entire “massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill” as “a disgusting abomination.” That has set off a power struggle for the ages.

Second, in areas of government transparency, there have been some steps but not nearly enough to fulfill the promises. There are still no new Epstein files. The JFK files are a mess and incomplete. We know no more than already public information about the two shooters who tried to kill Trump. There are still many lingering questions about 9-11, the Covid disaster, and so much else. This is not the opening for which the people had hoped.

Third, let’s talk more at length about the public health area of policy where we’ve seen the most progress. We have a new and excellent Executive Order on science. Tax-funded Covid testing has ended. A contract of $750M for a Bird flu shot has been cancelled. There are new limits on gain-of-function research, and experiments on beagles and other animals are over. Many terrible contracts from NIH have been cancelled while parts of the CDC have been dismantled.

As for the mRNA shots, the market has been narrowed from everyone to only vulnerable populations, leaving aside the known issue that vulnerable populations should not risk them either.

There are new standards for randomized controlled trials with placebos, but no assurance that these companies will do them in a timely way. RCTs for a five-year-old product with massive immune-altering effects can never cobble together a valid sample selection at this late date, nor is a continuation of this experiment in any form morally justified.

In two tremendous victories, the shots have been removed from the routine childhood schedule, the first time this has ever happened to any product targeting a specific disease apart from eradication or replacement. In effect, the CDC/FDA are saying: it is better to get Covid than risk these products. Such a message will drive uptake to new lows approaching zero eventually.

In addition, the outrageous advice from the CDC that expectant women should take them is gone, finally. The champion of that policy has fled the CDC.

These are all welcome changes in policies that never should have existed in the first place. Even now, however, no one says the quiet part out loud: even if these shots had been safe and effective, which they are not, they were never necessary for the overwhelming number of people. Which raises the profound question of how and why all this came to be in the first place.

There are other initiatives too concerning food nutrition, mental health, and other matters in the report that are hugely welcome changes from what has existed before.

The people in power in these agencies are pleading for patience. That is not unreasonable. Remember that these few appointees are confronting a beast larger, more entrenched, and better financed than any hegemon in human history. The pharma/media/tech/NGO/academia complex is larger and more powerful than the slave trade, the East India Company, Standard Oil, or even the munitions industry that started the Great War.

It’s certain that such a Leviathan cannot be ended in three months, not even with the best people in charge. All the grassroots really need to see is evidence of progress plus a transparent reason for delays. If the shots cannot be pulled now, people need to know why. If Covid emergency powers cannot be ended, explain why. If the new Moderna shot was already in the works and could not be stopped, people need to know the reasons.

Everyone who has watched all this unfold is of two minds, never mind the endlessly mutating factions within the dissident movements that have seen their leadership ascend to power. The people in the MAGA/MAHA/DOGE movements are as thrilled by the progress so far to the same extent that mainstream media and the legacy establishment are furious about all the changes.

For my own part, having watched public affairs for decades, this is the first time I’ve witnessed some progress in at least one area of state operations. That is worthy of celebration. I don’t even need to dwell on the many ways in which improvement over the darkest times of our lives is perhaps not as great an achievement as it would be otherwise.

That said, the release of yet another shot, implausibly called NexSpike, especially in light of all evidence and promises, is a tremendous shock for which no one was prepared. If they were in the works and the appointees could not stop them, we should be told that and the full explanation should be given to all. If President Trump himself is still attached to the foul spawn of Operation Warp Speed, and has forced them back onto the market despite vast public opposition, we should know that too.

Above all else, what we really need is the blunt truth about the last five years. We need to know that the people in office, whether elected or appointed, still share the deep outrage that fueled the movement that put them in power. We need to hear frank talk about the harms, the mandates, the suffering, the deceptions, the payoffs, the graft, the abuses, the illegal vanquishing of freedom, science, and human rights.

It is not enough to proclaim a new Golden Age and be done with it. This pertains to every aspect of public life. Press conferences by the new officeholders, with smiles and promises of better behavior in the future, don’t cut it given the mass loss of trust, rampant cynicism, and grassroots fury. There must be more straight talk, more decisive action that goes to the heart of what happened, and some degree of accountability.

We hear daily rumors that all of this is coming. Great. In which case, the new leaders need to make that clear. The masses are not inherently unreasonable. But they are the people within whom the leadership must reason – not “message,” not presented with flim-flam, not entertained with digital Punch and Judy shows, and not sniffily dismissed as ignorant extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Every new leadership in government that inherits that kind of disaster of the last five years is necessarily going to be squeezed between the legacy regime – including its vast bureaucracies and industrial interests – and the populist movements that put them in power. In these cases, the status quo usually proves irresistible but with disastrous consequences later.

Now is the time to stop that unfolding disaster, one which can only compound the errors of the past.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/can-the-tyranny-be-soft-landed/

Nearly Everything We’ve Been Told About Genes and Autism is Wrong

By Toby Rogers

[…]

Herbert (2013) confirms the criticisms of genetic theories of causation, specifically as they pertain to autism. She writes, “evidence is shifting the conception of autism from a genetically determined, static, lifelong brain encephalopathy to a multiply determined dynamic systems disturbance with chronic impacts on both brain and body” (p. 129).

Later, she recognizes environmental theories of causation:

Documentation of brain inflammation and immune activation in autism changed the playing field because it became clear that we were not dealing with healthy tissue that was wired differently but rather with brains that were having health problems with their cells… (p. 136).

She continues:

Given the clinical observations of transient improvement, persistent remission or recovery, and response to metabolic intervention, it becomes necessary to ask whether the brain in autism is truly and intrinsically “defective” or is instead “obstructed,” at least in many cases…(p. 139).

Herbert (2013) portrays the field of genetics as blinds mentioned earlier, the basic principles of these therapies include tackling subcomponents of “the autism” as problems that can be solved and thereby reducing the stress on the whole system so that it has more of a chance to recalibrate ed by their own hubris. She makes the case that given alarmingly high (and rising) autism rates, “anything we can do sooner rather than later to stem the tide ought to make eminent public health sense” (Herbert, 2013, p. 144). And she argues, “Clearly, gene myths are a problem in autism and are among the forces putting obstacles in the way of implementing a full-force public health campaign to reduce environmental risks” (Herbert, 2013, pp. 145-146).

Herbert (2013) also hints at the need for a sort of medicine from below. She writes:

The taboos around some of the alternative treatments used by parents have stopped many professionals cold from even familiarizing themselves with the methods and rationales of these approaches. Over time, as success stories have accumulated of children (and even some adults) greatly reducing the severity of their problems and sometimes even losing their diagnoses, some serious scientific attention has begun to be paid to these phenomena…(p. 145).

If, as Herbert suggests, parents, not doctors, are at the leading edge of researching treatments, that would seem to open up a whole host of questions about epistemology and the current state of science and medicine. The epistemological hierarchy set up by mainstream science and medicine has medical specialists above doctors who are above parents. But is it possible that in the case of autism, this hierarchy has it backwards? Furthermore, if, as Herbert argues, the observations and intuitions of parents produce better treatment outcomes, might they also be right about the causes of autism?

VIII. The Political Economy of Genetic Research

So if monogenic explanations for disease are not consistent with the scientific evidence of how most diseases work, then why do biotech companies, popular media, and the CDC continue to promote the search for such explanations?

Clearly, the model underlying the promise of genetic engineering is overly simplistic. But what makes the situation even more problematic is that DNA sequences, once isolated or synthesized, as well as the cells, organs, or organisms into which they are inserted, can be patented and thereby become forms of intellectual property. The science and the business of genetic engineering have become one, and efforts at basic understanding compete with the pursuit of profits. The usual professional rivalries are enhanced by major financial rivalries, and the complete interlinking of government, universities, and industry leaves hardly any disinterested scientists who are devoid of conflicts of interest and can be trusted to evaluate and critique proposed scientific models or their practical implementation without raising suspicions of pursuing financial interests. As the biotechnology industry expands its reach, the health hazards and environmental pollution it produces are added to those chemistry and physics bequeathed us during the twentieth century…(Hubbard, 2013, p. 25).

[…]

Genetic and genomic research is driven not so much by Merton’s idealized search for scientific knowledge nor even by traditional capitalist forces of supply and demand for products that meet a need in society. Rather, genetics and genomics exist through a unique combination of government funding created by biotech lobbying for that funding and speculative investment that is trading more on hope and hype than evidence of effective treatments (Gruber, 2013, p. 100). The total market capitalization of the top 25 biotechnology (which includes genetics and genomics) companies was $990.89 billion in 2014, $1.225 trillion in 2015, and $1.047 trillion in 2016 (Philippis, 2016). The US spends more than any other nation on genetics research (35% of the world total); one-third of the total comes from government and two-thirds from private investment (Pohlhaus and Cook-Deegan, 2008).

The Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) is the primary trade association for the genetics and genomics industry. BIO was formed in 1993 as the result of the merger of two smaller biotechnology industry associations (Sourcewatch, n.d.). Its more than 1,100 members include both genetics and genomics firms in addition to a wide range of pharmaceutical, agricultural, and medical companies that employ 1.6 million people in the US (BIO, 1993). From 2007 to 2016, BIO spent an average of $8 million a year on lobbying (Sourcewatch, n.d.). It has been remarkably successful at lobbying the US government for funding, regulatory rules, and tax provisions that benefit member companies. 

For example, from 1993 to 2014 the budget of the NIH increased from $10 billion to over $30 billion. In 2016 the NIH budget was $32.6 billion of which $8.265 billion was devoted to genetic and genomic research which includes the categories Genetics, Gene Therapy, Gene Therapy Clinical Trials, and Genetic Testing (U.S. DHHS, 2016). But this underestimates the total spent on genetic research because there is also genetic research happening within other disease categories in the NIH budget. BIO secured $1 billion in tax credits for biotech companies in the 2011 federal health-care legislation (Gruber, 2013, p. 277). BIO routinely pushes the FDA for faster approval times for medical interventions (Weisman, 2012).

Gruber (2013) notes that many academics and university science departments have grown wealthy through their ties with biotech firms. “Universities should be places where healthy skepticism of claims about science and its applications are pursued. But more than almost any other high-technology business, the biotechnology industry maintains extremely close ties with leading academic institutions…” (Gruber, 2013, p. 277).

Public funding for genetic research persists in spite of the fact that it is a less promising approach than mitigating environmental or lifestyle factors. “Given the many complex interactions that underlie almost all human diseases, even improving existing approaches to identifying and modifying genetic risk factors will often have significantly less value than modifying non-genetic risk factors” (Gruber, 2013, p. 280). But again, addressing environmental or lifestyle factors — doing less of the things that cause harm — is generally not profitable. Because US elected officials and regulators are captured by corporate interests, Congress funds genetic research to the exclusion of more promising (but less profitable) pathways.

Like Herbert (2013), Gruber (2013) sees the misplaced focus on genetics as crowding out more promising research while producing little improvement in public health. “The promise of genomics may have provided policy makers with a simple narrative of basic health research investment, but it has led to poor decision making on their part and has proved to be an insufficient standard bearer in the fight to improve the human condition” (Gruber, 2013, p. 282).

[…]

Latham and Wilson (2010) have the sharpest political economy critique of all:

Politicians like genetic determinism as a theory of disease because it substantially reduces their responsibility for people’s ill-health….Corporations like genetic determinism, again because it shifts blame….Medical researchers are also partial to genetic determinism. They have noticed that whenever they focus on genetic causation, they can raise research dollars with relative ease….Recognizing their value, these groups have tended to elevate genetic explanations for disease to the status of unquestioned scientific facts, thus making their dominance of official discussions of health and disease seem natural and logical. This same mindset is accurately reflected in the media where even strong environmental links to disease often receive little attention, while speculative genetic associations can be front page news. It is astonishing to think that all this has occurred in spite of the reality that genes for common diseases were essentially hypothetical entities.

As it relates to autism, what started out looking like the epitome of cutting edge science in the race to understand a disease, starts to look like a distortion of science and a distraction from more promising research pathways driven by financial interests rather than concern for public health.

IX. Conclusion

In the 1990s and 2000s government and industry had a theory of the case — that genes are responsible for disease — that has now been largely refuted. In the meantime an entire industry and public health infrastructure was built around this idea. So when the underlying theory was discredited, proponents simply modified the theory (to the search for the “missing dark matter”) so that the industry could keep going and continue to receive government funding. When this evolving research agenda produces profitable corporations and well-paid scientists but little to nothing that reduces human suffering it is an enormous problem for society.

The fact remains that Gilbert and Miller (2009), Landrigan, Lambertini, and Birnbaum (2012), the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (2013), and Bennett et al. (2016) have all concluded that autism and other neurodevelopment disorders are likely caused by environmental triggers and are thus preventable through law and policy. Even if sophisticated genetic and genomic research is able to find ways to reduce symptoms and severity, it is still going to be orders of magnitude more cost-effective (not to mention more ethical) to prevent autism in the first place by keeping toxic chemicals out of children’s bodies.

Currently, genetic research is soaking up the vast majority of autism research funding and preventing more effective prevention strategies from emerging. This appears to be a reflection of the political power of biotech firms to shape the research agenda to serve their interests rather than a reflection of best practices in science or the best interests of society.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/nearly-everything-that-weve-been-told-about-genes-and-autism-is-wrong/

Remember America’s Dead on USS Liberty

 

[image error]

Philip Giraldi Israel is no friend and has never been one.

It often pays, literally, to be perceived as a perpetual victim, a status that Israel and the Jewish institutional constituency have exploited relentlessly since 1945. It is now eighty years since the Second World War ended and the numbers of those receiving “holocaust” reparations from the German government hardly seems to diminish and may now include children of survivors who presumably were somehow damaged in the womb after the conflict ended and the camps in Europe were “liberated.” More than 20,000 Jews fled to Shanghai in China before and during the war, avoiding the prison camps in Europe, but they too are reported to be eligible for reparations.

[…]

And then there are the still sprouting-everywhere taxpayer funded holocaust memorials and museums throughout the US even though the alleged events commemorated took place a long time ago and far away from America. Excuse me, but if all of the above cannot be perceived at least in part as special consideration granted to a tiny part of the US population which is admittedly hugely disproportionately wealthy and politically powerful, it begs one to provide a satisfactory explanation for the developments. The latest turn of the wheel comes in the wake of the killing of two Israeli Embassy employees in Washington DC.

It is not widely known that the US Department of Homeland Security gives out discretionary grants of aid money to help provide security for nonprofit entities and groups that are perceived by the government as being threatened. The largest tranche of those grants, to the tune of more than $275 million in 2024 went to Jewish groups, monuments and buildings.

A number of Jewish organizations and Israel-First congressmen are now calling for that money to be increased dramatically by an additional $1 billion. The money is justified by the much-touted claim that Jews are experiencing a surge in what is described as “antisemitism.” 

As the US government and groups like ADL define criticism of Israel as antisemitism any such commentary is rolled neatly into the statistics claiming the surge in anti-Jewish sentiment when it is really about the monstrous behavior of the Jewish state, which, in fact declares itself to be just that in law, that is, a Jewish state.

[…]

And it doesn’t all end there. There are numerous Jewish or neocon think tanks and foundations, all of which are well funded without any real need for a federal government handout to provide their security. Most of them claim to be “charitable” or “educational” to secure a tax exemption while they dig their talons deep into government in the United States at all levels down even to the state and local levels where many citizens cannot even write a letter to the editor to protest against Israel’s behavior without being denied benefits as an antisemite.

Witness the recently passed antisemitism in education act in Arizona, which takes an extreme response to fear of antisemitism and makes it even more outrageous. The legislation bars public schools and public colleges from promoting what it describes as “antisemitic conduct” and creates disciplinary procedures for violations.

Worse than that, some states require applicants for jobs or benefits to sign a document confirming that they will not ever support the so-called BDS movement (Boycott, Divest and Sanction) which calls for pressuring the war criminals in Tel Aviv using economic measures. Indeed, the federal government is even worse with a national campaign against America’s universities being given alleged “credibility” by the depiction of college campuses as hotbeds of Jew-hatred even though in reality it is not about Jews per se and is rather Israel’s behavior that is arousing student anger as the mass starvation makes the piles of dead Palestinian babies continue to grow.

Israel’s perpetual victim status is part of the cover story that has been developed, most particularly in the United States, to explain away atrocities that have been carried out by the Israelis against their neighbors since and even before the founding of the state. As early as 1917 during the First World War, Britain, the colonial power in Palestine, responded to Jewish pressure from its major banking families with the Balfour Resolution, which promised a Jewish homeland. During the later post World War 2 period of the transition from British colonial rule which foresaw a division of Mandate Palestine into two separate states, Jewish terrorist groups brought pressure by assassinating British officials and soldiers and blowing up hotels and residences. They even went so far as to bomb and destroy the British Embassy in Rome!

Israel kills Americans whenever it believes there is some advantage to be gained from doing so and no presidents since John F Kennedy and George HW Bush have dared to push back to protect United States civilians and military even when major US interests are at stake. This reticence about confronting Israel has clearly been due to the widely recognized malignant power and wealth of the Israel Lobby. To cite only the most egregious killing of Americans by Israel, I would recall the June 8th, 1967 attack on the USS Liberty, which killed 34 crewmen and injured 171 more. The crew’s dwindling number of survivors are this very weekend having a reunion in Norfolk Virginia.

The attack was followed by a cover-up that demonstrated clearly that at least one president of the United States named Lyndon Johnson even back nearly sixty years ago valued his relationship with the state of Israel above his loyalty to his own country. The two-hour assault on the Liberty was, in truth, the worst attack ever carried out on a US Naval vessel in peace time.

It was a surprise attack which was clearly intended to destroy the intelligence gathering vessel operating in international waters collecting information on the ongoing Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Israelis, whose planes had their Star of David markings covered up so Egypt could be blamed, attacked the ship repeatedly from the air and using gunboats from the sea. When the ship’s distress signal was received, the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga launched fighters to go to its assistance, but they were called back under orders from President Johnson. The incredible courage and determination of the surviving crew was the only thing that kept the Liberty from sinking.

The Israelis and their political and media supporters in the United States have always claimed the attack was a tragic mistake while many of the Liberty crew have indicated their firm belief that it was anything but, that the vessel was flying an oversized American flag and was clearly and easily identifiable as a US Navy vessel.

The ship’s commanding officer Captain William McGonagle was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic role in keeping the ship afloat, though President Lyndon Baines Johnson broke with tradition and refused to hold the medal ceremony in the White House, also declining to award it personally, delegating that task to the Secretary of the Navy in an unpublicized presentation made at the Washington Navy Yard. The additional medals given to other crew members in the aftermath of the attack made the USS Liberty the most decorated ship in the history of the United States Navy.

The Liberty crew was sworn to secrecy over the incident and a hastily convened and conducted court of inquiry headed by Admiral John McCain acted under orders from Washington to declare the attack a case of mistaken identity. The inquiry’s senior legal counsel Captain Ward Boston, who subsequently declared the attack to be a “deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew,” also described how “President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of ‘mistaken identity’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

The court’s findings were rewritten and sections relating to Israeli war crimes, to include the machine gunning of life rafts, were excised. Following in his father’s footsteps, Senator John McCain of Arizona later used his position on the Senate Armed Services Committee to effectively block any reconvening of a board of inquiry to reexamine the evidence. The cover-up continues to this day. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis is one of the most ardent Israel-firsters in national politics. He describes his state as the most “Pro-Israel” in the US. When he was a congressman representing a Florida district several retired Liberty survivors who were his constituents sought to meet with him. He turned them down. Most of the documents relating to the Liberty incident have never been released to the public in spite of the 58 years that have passed since the attack took place.

Israel famously has long sustained the doctrine that Jews are somehow chosen by God and can do no wrong when they are advancing their own interests. This belief has meant near constant warfare directed against neighbors like the Palestinians, as well as against Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Currently the Israeli government headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is intent on destroying Iran’s military capabilities with the help of the United States of America.

Netanyahu has argued repeatedly for over twenty years that Iran is on the verge of building a nuclear weapon, which would threaten both Israel and the region, but both the CIA and even Mossad agree that there is no such development being pursued on the part of the Iranian government.

Ironically, Israel is the only country in the Middle East region that is “nuclear.” It has a substantial secret arsenal consisting of 200-300 nuclear bombs that was obtained illegally by theft from the United States. JFK may have paid a price for his temerity when he tried to expose Jewish groups that were acting as fronts for the Israeli government while also stopping the nuclear development and disarming them. I am not aware of any American politician having ever challenged Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal publicly and it is widely believed within the federal government that to do so would be “illegal.” That is what putting “Israel First” is all about!

I am sad to observe over this USS Liberty weekend how President Donald Trump is apparently crawling to Netanyahu and his murderous associates, just like his predecessor in office Genocide Joe Biden. The US has again in the UN Security Council vetoed an otherwise unanimous vote to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, supporting Israel but no conceivable US or even humanitarian interest.

Instead of taking the relatively simple step to contact Netanyahu and tell him that he must end the slaughter of the Palestinians using weapons, money and political cover all provided in abundance by Uncle Sam or face the consequences immediately. No more money, weapons and visits from pathetic grifter Senators like Lindsey Graham. In fact it might be a good thing to suggest to Bibi that he-she Lindsey just might be tried for treason as he is interfering illegally with US foreign policy in both Gaza and Ukraine. But we will save that story for another time, maybe next week!

[…]

Via https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/remember-americas-dead-on-the-uss-liberty/

Will Tucker’s Article on X Stop War with Iran?

 

Mike Whitney

Tucker Carlson has posted an extraordinary article on X that could potentially stop a war with Iran. As everyone knows, Carlson’s political views are admired by President Donald Trump who sees the former Fox commentator as a blunt, but fair-minded analyst who sees the world in similar terms as himself. And while there’s no evidence that the two men communicate regularly, a number of pundits believe that Carlson has influenced Trump’s thinking, particularly on matters related to foreign policy. That said, it is entirely possible that Trump will read Carlson’s June 4 post on Iran, and see that—once again—influential neocons are making every effort to drag the US into another bloody conflict in the Middle East to achieve Israel’s ambition of becoming the preeminent power in the region. Here’s Carlson:

Mark Levin was at the White House today, lobbying for war with Iran. To be clear, Levin has no plans to fight in this or any other war. He’s demanding that American troops do it. We need to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons, he and likeminded ideologues in Washington are now arguing. They’re just weeks away.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because the same people have been making the same claim since at least the 1990s. It’s a lie. In fact, there is zero credible intelligence that suggests Iran is anywhere near building a bomb or has plans to. None. Anyone who claims otherwise is ignorant or dishonest. If the US government knew Iran was weeks from possessing a nuclear weapon, we’d be at war already.

Iran knows this, which is why they aren’t building one. Iran also knows it’s unwise to give up its weapons program entirely. Muammar Gaddafi tried that and wound up sodomized with a bayonet. As soon as Gaddafi disarmed, NATO killed him. Iran’s leaders saw that happen. They learned the obvious lesson.

So why is Mark Levin once again hyperventilating about weapons of mass destruction? To distract you from the real goal, which is regime change — young Americans heading back to the Middle East to topple yet another government.Virtually no one will say this out loud. America’s record of overthrowing foreign leaders is so embarrassingly counterproductive that regime change has become a synonym for disaster. Officially, no one supports it. So instead of telling the truth about their motives, they manufacture hysteria: “A country like Iran can never have the bomb! They’ll nuke Los Angeles! We have to act now!” Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson

This an excellent summary which underscores the crucial point that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is not building a nuclear weapon, and has no nuclear weapons program. The entire legal case against Iran rests on a fiction that is fueled by an endless wave of Israel-friendly propaganda. Check out this clip from an article by analyst Dave DeCamp:

US intelligence agencies have reaffirmed that there’s no evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons or that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has reversed his 2003 fatwah that banned the production of weapons of mass destruction.

“The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. US Intelligence Says Iran Is ‘Not Building a Nuclear Weapon’, antiwar.com

But if Iran has no nukes and is not building nukes, then what’s the problem?

Exactly. Which means that the real problem is the “weaponized media” that uses its influence to advance an Israeli agenda. (Just like Iraq, Libya and Syria) Here’s more from Tucker:

It goes without saying that there are very few Trump voters who’d support a regime change war in Iran. Donald Trump has argued loudly against reckless lunacy like this. Trump ran for president as a peace candidate. That’s what made him different from conventional Republicans. It’s why he won. A war with Iran would amount to a profound betrayal of his supporters. It would end his presidency. That may explain why so many of Trump’s enemies are advocating for it. Tucker Carlson

He’s right, it would end his presidency, in fact, we’re already hearing protests from some of Trump’s most loyal supporters like Marjorie Taylor Greene who think the president has not done enough to wind-down the wars abroad and focus on America First (like he promised). It’s worth recalling what Trump actually said during the campaign and how many reluctant backers voted for him based on his opposition to foreign interventions and regime change wars. Here’s Trump in Cincinati:

We will pursue a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past…We will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments…. Our goal is stability not chaos, because we want to rebuild our country [the United States]… We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism …In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interests wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding, and good will.

This is an example of Trump the “peace candidate”; the candidate that many Americans supported thinking he would usher in a new era of security and cooperation not more of the same ‘gunboat diplomacy’ that brought us Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. “Peace through strength” okay, but peace all the same. Here’s Carlson again:

And then there’s the question of the war itself. Iran may not have nukes, but it has a fearsome arsenal of ballistic missiles, many of which are aimed at US military installations in the Gulf, as well as at our allies and at critical energy infrastructure. The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy, as surging oil prices trigger unmanageable inflation. Consider the effects of $30 gasoline.

But the second week of the war could be even worse. Iran isn’t Iraq or Libya, or even North Korea. While it’s often described as a rogue state, Iran has powerful allies. It’s now part of a global bloc called BRICS, which represents the majority of the world’s landmass, population, economy and military power. Iran has extensive military ties with Russia. It sells the overwhelming majority of its oil exports to China. Iran isn’t alone. An attack on Iran could very easily become a world war. We’d lose. —Tucker Carlson

This is no exaggeration; we would lose. According to retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (who was former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell), the US is not nearly as strong as many believe and would not prevail in a war with Iran. Here’s Wilkerson:

A war with Iran would be 10 to 15 times worse than the Iraq War in terms of casualties and costs… And we would lose. We would undoubtedly lose….. Iran is not Iraq… It’s got terrain that’s unbelievable… It’s got a military that’s far more capable—500,000 active forces, probably a million reservists who would come immediately to the fore.

Here’s more from a piece by Jordan Cohen at the Cato Institute:

…Previous analysts have weighed the chances of success for a campaign reliant on U.S. air and naval power. A 2002 war game that required U.S. planners to change the rules mid-conflict showed that Iran could easily sink U.S. ships, and in 2012, Pentagon officials estimated that such a strategy would require a minimum of 100,000 troops….

If the intention is to use air and naval power to allow for ground operations, Iran is equally prepared. Such an assault would require absorbing massive costs to gain access into the country. Analysts estimate that any ground invasion would require 1.6 million U.S. troops, almost ten times what the U.S. committed to Iraq at any given time. Upon arrival in Iran, Washington will face the 13th largest fit-for-service population in the world,the 13th most armored vehicles and self-propelled artillery in the world, the 9th most towed artillery in the world, and the 8th most mobile rocket projectors in the world. The human and material costs would be immense.

Iran’s strategy to combat the U.S. would center around making any naval and air assault costly, slow, and predicated on an assumption that eventually Americans will lose their willingness to continue fighting a war. Iran is surrounded by water and will use their anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to cover their 2,400 kilometer southern coastline as well as exploiting the lack of U.S. minesweepers to slow down the pace of a naval assault. By slowing the pace of war, Iran will attack the political will of U.S. policymakers and the American public, while also giving themselves time to make decisions and potentially even blockade the Straits of Hormuz to the Gulf of Oman. Despite Washington’s Confidence, US War with Iran Would Be Disastrous, CATO

In short, a war with Iran would be a disaster and WE WOULD LOSE. Here’s more from Tucker:

None of these are far-fetched predictions. Most of them comport with the Pentagon’s own estimates: many Americans would die during a war with Iran. People like Mark Levin don’t seem to care about this. It’s not relevant to them. Instead, they insist that Iran give up all uranium enrichment, regardless of its purpose. They know perfectly well that Iran will never accept that demand. They’ll fight first. And of course that’s the whole point of pushing for it: to box the Trump administration into a regime change war in Iran.

The one thing that people like Mark Levin don’t want is a peaceful solution to the problem of Iran, despite the obvious benefits to the United States. They denounce anyone who advocates for a deal as a traitor and a bigot. They tell us with a straight face that Long Island native Steve Witkoff is a secret tool of Islamic monarchies. They’ll say or do whatever it takes. They have no limits. These are scary people. Pray that Donald Trump ignores them.Tucker Carlson

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/tucker-article-x-war-iran/5889956

Musk Makes Epstein Files Claims About Trump

FILE PHOTO: Elon Musk. © Getty Images

RT

In an escalating feud with the US president, the tech billionaire has said it’s “time to drop the really big bomb”

Elon Musk has publicly claimed that US President Donald Trump is named in the sealed Jeffrey Epstein files – and suggested that this is the real reason they remain classified.

The allegation came on Thursday during a sharp exchange between Musk and Trump as the two figures clashed over the recently passed federal tax and spending bill.

Musk wrote: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” He added: “Have a nice day, DJT! Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.” 

Trump previously pledged to declassify the Epstein files, and in February, US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the release of the “first phase” of documents. However, key materials – including flight logs, client names, and contact lists – have remained under seal, fueling speculation about who could be implicated.

READ MORE: Trump ‘very disappointed’ with Musk

Epstein, a financier with deep connections to political and business elites, was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. He died the following month in a New York jail in what was officially ruled a suicide, though his death sparked widespread controversy and conspiracy theories.

Neither Trump nor his representatives have immediately responded to Musk’s accusation.

Earlier in the day, Trump told reporters he is “very disappointed” with Musk – who he said he has “helped a lot” – over the tech billionaire’s criticism of the legislation known as the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’.

Trump later posted on Truth Social that the easiest way to save billions of dollars of budget money is to terminate Musk’s governmental subsidies and contracts. He added that when he took away Musk’s EV mandate, “he just went CRAZY!”

Musk slammed the tax bill for inflating the national debt and undermining the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a body which Trump created in his second term to slash federal spending. Musk recently stepped down as DOGE chief, saying the tax bill runs counter to the department’s mission.

Trump has argued that it’s “one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”

“I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago,” he wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.

[…]

Via https://www.rt.com/news/618713-musk-trump-epstein-files/

Australia Quietly Pivots on Covid 19 Policy

By Marianne Demasi PhD

It didn’t come with a press conference or a media blitz. In fact, there was no announcement at all.

But sometime around 2 May 2025, the Australian Department of Health quietly removed its recommendation for Covid-19 vaccination in healthy children and adolescents under 18.

The change was tucked into an online update to the Australian Immunisation Handbook—no headline, no ministerial statement, no media campaign to inform the public.

For the first time since the rollout began, Australian health authorities now say that unless a child has underlying medical conditions, they do not need the vaccine.

Australia now joins a growing list of countries backing away from the blanket approach to vaccinating low-risk populations.

In the US, health officials under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently removed routine recommendations for Covid-19 vaccination in healthy children and pregnant women.

The CDC now leaves it up to “shared decision-making”—a tacit acknowledgment that the previous universal approach may have overreached.

Denmark, meanwhile, was ahead of the curve.

It stopped recommending the vaccine for healthy children back in 2022, citing data showing that severe Covid in children was exceedingly rare and that the benefits of mass vaccination did not outweigh the harms.

Australia’s policy reversal might be late, but what makes it striking is how quietly it was done—and how much it implicitly concedes.

For years, anyone who questioned the need to vaccinate healthy children was dismissed as anti-science or dangerous. Now, the same authorities who widely promoted the shots are quietly walking it back.

And the adverse events that critics raised early on—myocarditis, pericarditis, and other post-vaccine complications—are no longer fringe concerns. They’re acknowledged in official risk assessments.

The shift also comes at a time when the legal and regulatory framework that enabled the rapid approval of mRNA vaccines is under growing scrutiny.

In Australia, a case brought by Dr Julian Fidge, a general practitioner and former pharmacist, challenged the legality of the vaccine approvals.

He argued that Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines should have been classified as “genetically modified organisms” under the Gene Technology Act 2000, and therefore required a licence from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) before being rolled out.

But the court dismissed the case on procedural grounds, ruling that Dr Fidge lacked standing to pursue it.

Still, the case drew attention to whether these products were channelled through the wrong regulatory pathway.

That question is now at the centre of a citizen petition in the US, filed with the FDA in January 2025, claiming the agency “wrongfully and illegally” approved the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines by treating them as conventional biologics, not gene therapies.

According to the FDA’s own definition, gene therapy products are those that use genetic material to alter cellular function for therapeutic use.

By that logic, mRNA vaccines clearly qualify – and should have faced far more rigorous safety testing, including environmental risk assessments and long-term follow-up studies.

As of June, the FDA has not responded to the petition—but the implications are enormous.

If regulators in Australia or the US misclassified these products during the emergency rush, it would expose a systemic failure to apply the appropriate safeguards to an entirely new class of biotechnology.

And it’s not just about legal definitions. The public mood is shifting.

The notion that healthy children and adolescents should have been part of a sweeping global experiment with novel gene-based technologies now looks reckless in hindsight. For the public, trust has been damaged—perhaps irreparably.

That shift in perception has consequences far beyond Covid.

Billions of dollars have been invested in mRNA platforms for other diseases—flu, RSV, and cancer. So what happens if confidence in the technology craters?

Already, the US FDA has announced it will require new randomised clinical trials for annual Covid-19 boosters in “healthy” people under 65—setting a higher threshold for evidence (than immunobridging data) that may make future approvals more challenging.

The industry might dismiss this as just a hiccup—but the truth is, mRNA vaccines were never subjected to the kind of long-term scrutiny typically required of products given to healthy people, especially children.

The argument that urgency justified shortcuts has worn thin.

The real emergency now is institutional—one of captured regulators, collapsing public trust, and a health system so entangled with the pharmaceutical industry it can no longer tell the difference between evidence and marketing.

[…]

Via https://blog.maryannedemasi.com/p/australia-quietly-pivots-on-covid

‘Trump Flipped on Us’: MAGA Reacts to Potential National Citizen Database

By Nick Mordowanec

Supporters of President Donald Trump expressed anger and disbelief online following reports that his administration had advanced plans to create a national citizen database with technology firm Palantir.

Newsweek reached out to Palantir for comment.

Why It Matters

The White House has contracted Palantir, a Colorado-based analytics company co-founded by Trump supporter Peter Thiel, to assist in compiling a database of personal information on American citizens, according to unnamed government officials and Palantir employees who spoke with The New York Times. The purported deal follows project talks Palantir had with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Education.

The reaction from Trump’s supporters reflected growing unease within conservative circles, indicating a rare rupture between the president and key segments of his constituency. The controversy underscores nationwide anxieties around privacy, civil liberties, and the growing influence of technology firms over personal information management.

What To Know

The Palantir deal marks a significant development in government data collection, drawing sharp concern from privacy advocates and Trump’s own core base, otherwise known as “MAGA.” Detractors compared the centralized database effort to surveillance initiatives in authoritarian regimes.

Numerous pro-Trump voices expressed dismay and feelings of betrayal across social media platforms like X.

“People are so quick to suggest that I flipped on Trump…No, no, no…I didn’t flip on Trump. TRUMP FLIPPED ON US. I’m just not willing to continue living in a LIE, and I will tell you the unfortunate TRUTH about it,” The Patriot Voice wrote on X to his 158,000 followers.

The Hodgetwins, popular conservatives and Trump supporters, have more than 3.3 million followers on X. In response to The New York Times report, they wrote on May 30, “Hope this ain’t true y’all.”

Another post that same day reads: “Don’t know if this is true but I did not vote for this.”

Nick Fuentes, a far-right Trump supporter described as an “America First” white nationalist, called the association between the Trump administration and Palantir “the ultimate betrayal of his own people.”

“Feeding every ‘MAGA extremist’ into an AI database controlled by a CIA/Mossad cutout,” Fuentes said on X, where he has roughly 561,000 followers. “Seriously, if Palantir isn’t the deep state, then what is?”

In a video recorded by Fuentes, who also has a Rumble channel viewed over 31 million times, he said the following: “They are tracking everybody that criticized Israel, everybody that interacts with somebody that’s criticizing Israel, and whether you’re on a visa or not, whether you’re a citizen or not, whether you’re brown or not, Christian or Muslim, they’re putting you in the Palantir database. They’re putting you on the enemies list. If you don’t see a problem with that…”

“I’m beginning to think it started when DJT walked down that escalator, before 2016,” wrote an X user with the moniker “Redneck Common Sense.”

X user Jack Maxey wondered: “Was MAGA a giant psyop?”

X user @D10Cat wrote: “Is Trump the same man that he was in 2016? Or did I just not see it back then?”

“The cope is unreal,” wrote Ashton Nichols on X. “I voted for Trump but this is just unacceptable.”

Palantir secured more than $113 million in federal contracts since Trump took office, including a recent $795 million agreement with the Department of Defense, according to The New Republic. Its data analytics platform, Foundry, has already been deployed at the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services, potentially enabling cross-agency information sharing.

“Shady, centralized dossiers on citizens are foundational for attacking civil rights and civil liberties—but paper files have long been replaced by a mishmash of electronic forms, biometrics, and data bought off data brokers,” Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Newsweek on Monday. “AI platforms like those built by Palantir are the key to pulling together the many data points the government has on each of us—your political donations, governmental benefits, movements, and perhaps firearm records, could someday be a single click away for dozens of governmental agencies.”

Other critics, including activist Jason Bassler, compared the plan to China’s “Social Credit System,” warning of the dangers of centralized personal dossiers.

“No, this Palantir database isn’t like the others,” Bassler wrote on X on June 1. “It will combine:

-Tax filings
-Student debt
-Social Security
-Bank accounts
-Medical claims
-Immigration status

“No previous database system has ever centralized this much personal info across various federal agencies.”

[…]

Via https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-palantir-maga-database-surveillance-2079905

More Tech Leaders are Learning that AI Cannot Replace Humans – Efficiency and Accuracy Are Actually Getting Worse

If you were offered a choice between keeping your existing hands, or having them amputated and replaced with “new and improved” robotic hands, which would you choose? Image source.

by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News

When I began writing about the AI bubble and the future Big Tech collapse at the end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT’s first LLM (Large Language Models) AI app, I was just one of a handful of writers who have worked in Technology that was warning the public about the dangers of relying on this “new” technology.

There were a few dissenting voices besides myself back then, but now two-and-a-half years later and $trillions of dollars of LLM AI investments, barely a day goes by where I do not see articles documenting the failures of this AI, and reporting factual news about what its limitations and failures are, rather than pumping up the hype.

While the AI LLMs are truly revolutionary in what they actually can do, it is the faith in science fiction and what people’s perspectives and beliefs are about the future of AI that is ultimately going to destroy the U.S. economy, and most of the rest of the World’s economies as well, because they are literally betting on this science fiction actually becoming true one day.

Here are some recent articles that provide more than enough evidence that the AI “revolution” is going to come crashing down at some point, much like the many planes we have been watching fall from the skies due to tech failures and our over-reliance on computers over humans.

Air traffic and aviation accidents have actually INCREASED, and significantly so, since the advent of AI LLMs in early 2023, making air travel MORE dangerous, rather than safer.

Using AI to Write Computer Code

Much of the recent news about the problems with relying on AI have been regarding using AI to generate computer code.

AI Can Help Companies Become More Efficient—Except When It Screws Up

by Martin Peers
The Information

Excerpts:

Artificial intelligence really does make mistakes—sometimes big ones.

Last weekend, I put half a dozen emails with details of airplane and hotel bookings for an upcoming vacation into Google’s NotebookLM and asked it to write me an itinerary.

The resulting document read great—until I realized it listed a departure date 24 hours later than the actual one, which could have been disastrous.

Similarly, my colleague Jon Victor today wrote about how some businesses using AI coding tools discover serious flaws in what they end up developing.

This point seems worth remembering as more businesses talk about the labor savings they can achieve with AI.

On Wednesday, for example, a Salesforce executive said AI agents—software that can take actions on behalf of the user—had “reduced some of our hiring needs.”

Plenty of companies are heeding suggestions from AI software firms like Microsoft that AI can cut down on the number of employees they need. More alarmingly, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in an interview this week that AI could “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs” in the next few years, even as it helps to cure cancer.

To be sure, not every job cut nowadays is caused by AI. Business Insider on Thursday laid off 21% of its staff, citing changes in how people consume information, although it also said it was “exploring how AI can” help it “operate more efficiently.”

We’re hearing that a lot: When Microsoft laid off 3% of its staff this month, it denied AI was directly replacing humans, but it still said it was using technology to increase efficiency.

This is where AI’s errors would seem to be relevant: Isn’t there a danger that AI-caused mistakes will end up reducing efficiency?

Leave aside the more existential question of why we’re spending hundreds of billions—and taxing our power grid—to create a technology that could create huge unemployment.

The more practical question may be whether businesses should use AI to replace jobs right now if they want to be more efficient.

[…]

(Source.)

AI hallucinations: a budding sentience or a global embarrassment?

Dr. Mathew Maavak
RT.com

Excerpts:

In a farcical yet telling blunder, multiple major newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, recently published a summer-reading list riddled with nonexistent books that were “hallucinated” by ChatGPT, with many of them falsely attributed to real authors.

The syndicated article, distributed by Hearst’s King Features, peddled fabricated titles based on woke themes, exposing both the media’s overreliance on cheap AI content and the incurable rot of legacy journalism.

[…]

The trend seems ominous. AI is now overwhelmed by a smorgasbord of fake news, fake data, fake science and unmitigated mendacity that is churning established logic, facts and common sense into a putrid slush of cognitive rot.

(Full article.)

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
The Register

Excerpts:

I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google.

Ordinary search has gone to the dogs. Maybe as Google goes gaga for AI, its search engine will get better again, but I doubt it.

In just the last few months, I’ve noticed that AI-enabled search, too, has been getting crappier.

In particular, I’m finding that when I search for hard data such as market-share statistics or other business numbers, the results often come from bad sources.

Instead of stats from 10-Ks, the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) mandated annual business financial reports for public companies, I get numbers from sites purporting to be summaries of business reports. These bear some resemblance to reality, but they’re never quite right. If I specify I want only 10-K results, it works.

If I just ask for financial results, the answers get… interesting,

This isn’t just Perplexity. I’ve done the exact same searches on all the major AI search bots, and they all give me “questionable” results.

Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO).

Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse.

In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability.

(Full article.)

[…]

Bankrupt Microsoft-Backed ‘AI’ Company Was Using Indian Engineers To Fake It: Report

by ZeroHedge News

Excerpts:

Last week, British AI startup backed by Microsoft and the Qatar Investment Authority, Builder.ai, filed for bankruptcy after its CEO said a major creditor had seized most of its cash. 

Valued at $1.5 billion after a $445 million investment by Microsoft, the company claimed to leverage artificial intelligence to generate custom apps in ‘days or weeks,’ which would produce functional code that had less human involvement.

Now they’ve gone cloth-off… as Bloomberg reports they had a ‘fake it till you make it’ strategy while having inflated 2024 revenue projections by 300%. Instead of AI, the company was actually using a fleet of more than 700 Indian engineers from social media startup VerSe Innovation for years to actually write the code.

Requests for custom apps were based on pre-built templates and later customized through human labor to tailor the requests sent to the company – whose demos and promotional materials misrepresented the role of AI.

According to Bloomberg, Builder.ai and VerSe Innovation ‘routinely billed one another for roughly the same amounts between 2021 and 2024,’ in an alleged practice known as “round-tripping” that people said Builder.ai used to inflate revenue figures that were then presented to investors.

In several cases, products and services weren’t actually rendered for these payments.

(Full article.)

Human Robot Assistants are Still a MythAI Agents Fall Short on Shopping

By Ann Gehan
The Information

Excerpts:

Artificial intelligence heavyweights including OpenAI and Perplexity, along with commerce giant Amazon, are painting visions of AI tools acting as personal shoppers that can seamlessly buy stuff across the internet.

But the handful of AI agents that have so far been released have had trouble with online shopping, since they’re easily tripped up by variations in retailers’ product listings and checkouts, investors and founders say.

It’s also tough for retailers to distinguish between an agent and a malicious bot, so some merchants are more inclined to block AI tools from checking out rather than make their sites friendlier for AI to navigate.

“There are still a lot of instances where AI can’t make the transaction, or it can’t scrape information off a website, or you’re trying to deal with a small business or a mom-and-pop shop that is not AI optimized,”

said Meghan Joyce, founder and CEO of Duckbill, a personal assistant startup that helps users in part by using AI. (Source.)

Much of the current hype surrounding AI that new startups and investors are banking on are computer robots that they believe will soon be in the homes of most people doing routine household chores, watching your kids, and many other science fiction scenarios.

But there is no such robot currently on the market, and when you see video demos of what currently is in development, you are usually either viewing a robot following a carefully written script, such as the “dancing robots” Elon Musk showed off recently, or they are being remotely controlled by humans.

You cannot buy a personal robot today to live in your house and reduce your workload. They don’t exist, and probably never will.

Consider this story recently published about a new startup that is one of the first companies to just work on developing one part of a human robot: hands.

While this was published no doubt to create excitement and investment opportunities for the future, where the belief is that there will somehow be billions of these robots around the world, it actually does the opposite, depending on your point of view, as it shows just how far away we still are to developing a human robot that can do the same things humans can do, because they don’t even have hands yet that come anywhere close to operating like human hands.

The Startups Developing Robot Hands; OpenAI’s Revenue Hopes

By Rocket Drew
The Information

Excerpts:

Humanoid robot hype is in full swing. The latest evidence is Elon Musk’s prediction Tuesday that by 2030 Tesla will be cranking out over a million of its Optimus humanoids—despite the fact that it has only said it was using two of them as of last year.

As the saying goes, in a gold rush, sell shovels. Now startups are trying to capitalize on the humanoid boom by developing robotic hands. In fact, some founders have recently left these bigger robot makers to focus on the parts.

“99.5% of work is done by hands,” said Jay Li, who worked on hand sensors for Tesla’s Optimus line before he co-founded Proception in September to develop robotic hands.

“The industry has been so focused on the human form, like how they walk, how they move around, how they look,” he noted.

But humanoid companies have overlooked the importance of hands, he said.

Hands are hard to get right. Think about the mix of pressure and deftness it takes to peel an orange (and not mash it to a pulp in the process).

 

(Source.)

While AI does have some useful purposes, it is still early in development to even make it reliable, and most of the investment in AI today is in what the AI idolaters believe AI will do, in the future.

And if that future never arrives, we are going to see the biggest collapse of modern society we have ever seen, and a “Great Reset” that is not exactly what the Globalists had in mind.

The Big Tech crash is coming, and when it happens, the cost of human labor will skyrocket, and there will not be enough humans to meet the demands of the public who have falsely depended upon the technology for all these years.

AI will not replace humans, and humans will be needed to clean up their messes and take out the trash with human hands.

[…]

Via https://vaccineimpact.com/2025/more-tech-leaders-are-learning-that-ai-cannot-replace-humans-efficiency-and-accuracy-are-actually-getting-worse/

Trump orders probe into who really ran country under Biden

FILE PHOTO ©  Drew Angerer / Getty Images

RT

The US president has ordered an investigation to examine whether unelected aides effectively governed during his predecessor’s term

edecessor’s administration, directing the Department of Justice to examine whether unelected aides effectively governed the country during Joe Biden’s presidency.

The probe into Biden’s final acts in office will scrutinize the use of autopen signatures on official documents, including the commutation of 37 death sentences and pardons granted to family members and political allies, according to an executive directive published by the White House on Wednesday.

“Given clear indications that President Biden lacked the capacity to exercise his Presidential authority, if his advisors secretly used the mechanical signature pen to conceal this incapacity, while taking radical executive actions all in his name, that would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency,” Trump’s order stated.

The investigation centers on allegations that Biden’s cognitive decline allowed staffers to make key decisions without his direct input. Investigators have been tasked with determining whether there was a coordinated effort within the Biden administration to conceal the president’s health issues from the public, including possible conspiracies to suppress evidence of cognitive decline and to artificially portray him as fit for office.

Trump previously accused Biden’s senior aides of potentially committing “treason at the highest level” if they exploited his predecessor’s alleged cognitive decline to implement policies he may not have personally supported. The Justice Department investigation aims to determine whether all executive actions were authorized by Biden himself. Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Counsel David Warrington have been tasked with leading the inquiry.

Trump’s critics have claimed that the probe is politically motivated and lacks substantive evidence, while legal experts note that the use of autopen for presidential signatures is legally permissible and has been used by a number of previous administrations. The Trump administration maintains that it has never been used to this extent.

The issue of Biden’s health – and his cognitive abilities in particular – was thrust into the national spotlight during his reelection campaign last year, when critics highlighted the veteran politician’s unsteady gait, apparent memory lapses, and difficulty articulating his thoughts. Matters came to a head after a disastrous debate against Trump in June 2024, after which a growing number of Democrats called on him to withdraw from the race. Biden formally stepped down the following month.

Last month, Biden’s office revealed that he had been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer. Many commentators, including Trump, alleged that the illness had developed over several years and that Biden’s inner circle deliberately withheld the diagnosis from the public. US Senator Ron Johnson, who chairs the Homeland Security investigative subcommittee, has launched a separate probe into a potential cover-up relating to the former president’s health.

[…]

Via https://www.rt.com/news/618669-trump-biden-autopen-probe/

Terrorists of Kiev Have No Future

Dmitry Orlov

This week, just as representatives of Kiev and Moscow gathered again in İstanbul for a technical meeting (not negotiation) to exchange memoranda and arrange for exchange of prisoners and the corpses of soldiers (lots of Ukrainian corpses; very few Russian ones) there occurred three types of terror strikes attributed to the Kiev regime.

1. FPV drones deployed from shipping containers somehow smuggled into Russia and operated remotely via Elon Musk’s Starlink system destroyed several Russian military aircraft in Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur regions. In Murmansk, local men threw rocks and sticks to prevent FPV drones from taking off from the depths of a cargo container, then torched the entire rig. The drone operators managed to damage three Tu-95MS/MSM and two Tu-22M3 (nuclear-capable strategic bombers), all of them at least 40 years old (although modernized) and one An-12 military transport which was ready to be scrapped anyway. In Ivanovo, some ancient AWACS planes, all ready for the scrap heap and some without engines but decorated to look complete on satellite images were, ahem, damaged; so much for Western military intelligence. These events caused certain people to hyperventilate while discussing how they may have triggered a certain clause in Russia’s nuclear doctrine, which they did not do because of the missing characterization of “serious”.

2. An entirely unsuccessful attempt to use drone vessels and a submarine to blow up the supports of the Kerch Strait Bridge. None of these drones penetrated the boom-and-net setup that protects the bridge supports and did not even image the reinforced concrete “pucks” that protect the supports. Traffic on the bridge was paused for a bit, then resumed without incident.

3. Most importantly, there were terrorist attacks against trains in Kursk and Bryansk regions. A successful terrorist attack blew up a highway overpass over a railway corridor just as a passenger train was about to pass under it. Another similar attack on a railway bridge damaged a freight train. Over a hundred people required medical treatment. The engineer driving the passenger train died heroically, doing his best to slow down the train, thus saving many lives. The locomotive and three of the cars jumped the track while colliding with pieces of the highway overpass. Debris was cleared and railway traffic was restored within 24 hours. The injured passengers were treated at area hospitals while the more severe cases, including a four-month-old baby, were airlifted to Moscow for expert treatment.

“Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that the Kiev regime, which blew up bridges in the Bryansk and Kursk regions, is degenerating into a terrorist organization. In this regard, the president questioned the advisability of high-level negotiations with the Kiev authorities. Experts note that after such statements, the political leadership of Ukraine can only be treated as terrorists, and their sponsors as accomplices of terrorists.” [Andrey Rezchikov, vz.ru]

Putin’s stance on terrorists has been well known and consistent for close to a quarter of a century: “Terrorists, murderers, and monsters … will face one unenviable fate — retribution and oblivion. They have no future.

After the Ukrainian-organized Crocus City Hall terror strike, Putin said this:

“All the perpetrators, organizers and beneficiaries of this crime will inevitably receive just punishment — whoever they are, whoever directed them. I repeat, we will identify and punish everyone who stands behind the terrorists, who prepared this atrocity, this blow to Russia, to our people. We know what the threat of terrorism is. We count on cooperation with all states that sincerely share our pain and are ready to actually, really join forces in the fight against the common enemy — international terrorism with all its manifestations.”

[…]

The exact next steps will be decided in secret at a Security Council meeting in Moscow. We will probably not know what exactly they decide to do. But we should expect the life expectancy of America’s Kiev proxies to drop appreciably.

[…]

Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/8bcf0a45-acd7-4d14-92fe-99c1fd33b16b