Happy Halloween!

 Made by me with a Gemini prompt (see below):

Photo-realistic painting in perspective. A night sky with stars in the sky. Upper-left is a small white waning crescent moon. Upper-right is a small fractal bolt of lightening.

The ground is covered with dead Bermuda grass.

A small vampire bat is flying close to the center in the sky. In the center of the painting is 2-story dilapidating abandoned pine wood house with 4 broken windows.

In the one of the windows is a transparent apparition of a small woman in white with black eyes. 

In another window is a small shadow person with a hat on his head.

In another window is a small bluish white sparkling ball of light.

Surrounding the house is a gated rusted iron fence. Next to the house on the left is an old bloodwood tree with a black widow spiderweb on one of the branches.

Next to the house on the right is a gray medium-sized granite tombstone with words RIP carved in the middle.

Out of the grave in front of the tombstone is a skeleton's small hand.

To the right of the house, is a zombie walking with its arms out. 

In front of the fence is the Grim Reaper. 

A transparent headless specter is walking toward the left in the background.

A medium sized blue lighted pumpkin with a worried carved expression in front of the house.

Five top takeaways from Trump's high-stakes UN speech to the world

From Fox News.com (Sept. 22):

"A lot has happened since we gathered here last year," President Donald Trump said midway through his address to the United Nations General Assembly.

No kidding. First there was the Gaza ceasefire and hostage return, then Operation Absolute Resolve that removed Nicolas Maduro from power in Venezuela, and, of course, the deployment of U.S. military and economic power to stop Iran’s "mad dash" for a nuclear weapon.

Trump has put American courage and fortitude on display by taking big risks to strengthen the U.S. position—not just for global leadership, but for America’s future. This U.N. speech had its triumphant moments. "Bully no more," Trump said as he touted the battlefield success of Operation Epic Fury. Yet Trump’s serious and formal tone was evidence that this has also been a year that has tested the optimism and tried the patience of both President Trump and the American people.

Here are five takeaways.

1. Iran’s Choice is a Deal or Annihilation. "Just imagine if such a vile regime were ever empowered to carry out large-scale terror attacks from behind a nuclear shield. This was the reality we had to confront—a reality that far too many preferred to ignore," Trump explained on Tuesday.

And the U.N. audience broke into spontaneous applause when Trump vowed again that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. He asked world leaders to stay "united in maintaining pressure" on Iran. But, to no one’s surprise, this speech was also a direct message to the "lunatic clerics" who run Iran, to borrow the phrase from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Iran can make a deal or face annihilation. "I believe we’ll make a deal right after the midterms," Trump said. He’s ever-hopeful, but this is why 50,000 U.S. service members, led by two aircraft carriers, remain in the region under U.S. Central Command. Either way, he said, we "will soon see a world free of the 51-year menace." And indeed, it could go either way.

2. Greenland. Did you see Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen happily nodding during Trump’s remarks? Yes, this agreement that keeps Chinese investment out of Greenland and builds up Pituffik and other Space Force locations was a win-win for American security, Greenland, Denmark and NATO. This deal meant a lot to Trump, and it was smiling faces all around with the president, Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen at the signing ceremony held immediately after his U.N. address.

3. The Cartels in the Crosshairs. Trump’s speech delivered two scorching messages reiterating his commitment to the Western Hemisphere. First, Venezuela and the United States together control roughly 22% of the world’s proved oil reserves. Second, Trump said the "cartels are the ISIS of the Western Hemisphere" and decried these "sick, demented adversaries." Put this in perspective: These cartels control more cash than the global jihadis, so expect drug boat strikes to continue. "The United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States," Trump warned.

4. Super Intelligence. Not content with renaming lakes, seas and the Kennedy Center, Trump said he wants AI to be called Super Intelligence—or SI. He joked about seeing whether "SI" catches on, but here’s the serious message: The U.S. is ahead of China and will do whatever it takes to achieve supremacy in the global race for tech stack adoption and market share. "Whoever wins SI wins," Trump reiterated. That’s a nice setup for the state visit of China’s Xi Jinping later this week.

5. Melania Trump. Considering how little the U.N. has done with Iran or, for that matter, Ukraine, Trump let it off easy. Trump took a few swipes at the U.N. bureaucracy, but he was also courteous about U.N. Resolution 2817 condemning Iran’s attacks on international shipping. Most of all, Trump took time to acknowledge his wife, Melania Trump. On March 2, 2026, she became the first sitting first lady to preside over a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, leading a discussion on children and technology. During the speech, the first lady was seated with Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As Trump scanned the audience for her, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer waved to point her out.

This was a thoughtful gesture, but it was poignant as well. For all the courageous tone, President Donald J. Trump has a lot of work ahead of him.

His 2026 U.N. speech may stand as the high-water mark of Trump’s bold efforts to improve international security and diminish the menace of China. [source]

The Winning Message for the GOP: Order Is Compassion

From Glenn Beck.com (Jan. 23):

There is a lie quietly poisoning this country. It says that if Republicans win, someone else must lose. That prosperity is a zero-sum game. That order requires oppression. That freedom is chaos.

That lie is why we are divided. And it is wrong.

America has won before—not by redistributing what existed, but by creating more than anyone believed possible.

When America creates, the middle class grows, the poor rise, and the future opens. Not because government hands it out—but because it gets out of the way where it should, and stands firm where it must.

If Republicans want to win—and if America is going to survive this moment—then the path forward is not rage, not revenge, not tribalism. It is competence, courage, and clarity.

Start here: People don’t feel poor because they’re lazy. They feel poor because life has become artificially expensive. Housing costs more because we stopped building. Energy costs more because we strangled supply. Healthcare costs more because we allow closed systems and cartel behavior. Education costs more because we replaced skill with bureaucracy and debt. So the winning message isn’t “tax cuts for the rich” or “government handouts for the rest.”

The winning message is this: We are going to make America affordable again.

That is not redistribution; that is liberation from scarcity engineered by bad policy.

Republicans win when they say: We will build homes again. We will permit energy again. We will let trades matter again. We will reward work, saving, and risk again. And we will do it openly, legally, and fast.

Because real wage growth doesn’t come from mandates—it comes from abundance.

Now let’s talk about order, because without order, nothing else matters.

Order is not authoritarian, cruel, or oppressive. It is the first civil right.

Republicans must say it plainly: You cannot have freedom where violent criminals rule the streets, where drug cartels run open markets, where law-abiding citizens are treated as suspects and criminals are treated as victims.

This is not about race. This is not about class. This is not about politics. This is about right and wrong.

Republicans win when they draw a bright line: Peaceful protest is protected. Speech—even ugly speech—is protected. But violence, arson, trafficking, intimidation, and sabotage will be punished—every time.

Not selectively. Not politically. Not performatively. Law applied evenly is not tyranny. It is the foundation of a republic.

Now immigration—because this is where fear is used against truth.

Republicans do not win by demonizing the desperate. They win by isolating and removing the dangerous, swiftly, lawfully, and visibly. Violent criminals, gang members, traffickers, and repeat offenders, all arrested with warrants, processed with due process, and deported or imprisoned under the law.

No raids for headlines. No profiling. No chaos. Just boring, relentless enforcement—the kind that restores trust because it respects the Constitution while protecting the innocent. That is how Republicans win without becoming what they oppose.

Now, the future, because a party that only talks about the past will lose it.

Artificial intelligence will define the next century. Republicans must refuse two equal and opposite failures: Blind acceleration without safeguards or fear-driven paralysis that hands the future to China.

The winning position is this: America will lead AI—but with brakes, audits, and accountability at the highest levels.

Not government ownership or innovation-killing bureaucracy, but secure development, clear thresholds, protection against weaponization, surveillance abuse, and catastrophic misuse. And at the same time, AI education, worker training, productivity tools that lift every American.

Republicans win when they say: The future will not be owned by a few companies or a distant bureaucracy—it will be built by a free people with guardrails, not chains.

Energy. This is the quiet pay raise.

Republicans must say it without apology: Cheap, reliable energy is pro-worker, pro-family, pro-environment, and pro-national security.

Oil and gas now. Nuclear now and next. Grid modernization. Domestic minerals. Long-term innovation.

Not because we reject the future—but because you don’t reach it by kneecapping the present.

And finally—this is the most important part—how do Republicans get Americans to believe again?

Not with slogans or insults. Not with “owning” anyone. They win by governing like adults in a burning house. By telling the truth in full sentences. By applying the law equally—even to allies. By admitting trade-offs. By fixing things people can feel in their daily lives—lower bills, safer streets, more opportunity, and less chaos.

When people feel their lives improving, unity stops being a fantasy. Because unity is not agreement; unity is shared benefit.

So here is the message Republicans must carry—not as politicians, but as stewards of a republic: We are not here to punish half the country. We are not here to redistribute decline. We are here to make America affordable, safe, productive, and free again—under the Constitution, under the law, and for everyone willing to work, build, and live in peace.

That is how Republicans win.

And that—quietly, stubbornly, lawfully—is how America wins too. [source]

Good advice.  Make sense too. Safety is one of mankind's basic needs. Without it you cannot have other higher needs. Got to have stability. GOP needs to heed Beck’s advice.

Beware the AI bosses ‘please regulate us’ bait-and-switch

From NY Post.com (Sept. 14):

Top AI companies are blatantly seeking special privileges under cover of warning against the AI-pocalypse.

That’s the best explanation for the sudden flurry of doom-mongering from CEOs like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

These moguls say their industry needs to tap the brakes on the tech’s rapid progress, but will (rightly) warn that still the United States still needs to beat China in the AI-development race — leaving “the only choice” to be a de-facto cartelization, with the feds setting up guardrails and offering their companies protections against disastrous mistakes.

That is: What they really want is to protect themselves from liability by shifting responsibility to the government.

Think of the Section 230 shield for social media, blogs and online platforms from libelous content posted by users, except this would protect Anthropic etc. if their AIs go rogue, causing billions or trillions of dollars in damage.

Or how “too big to fail” protected the megabanks that bumbled their way into the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

Getting off the hook for harms their tech causes would put the AI giants in great positions for their coming IPOs.

The cynical combo of doom-mongering and pleas for federal oversight feels like “a Trojan horse,” Vice President JD Vance fumed Monday — quite rightly.

As a plus for progressives, this scheme is sure to produce a vast new pack of lefty billionaires.

Yes, AI firms and their backers have been funneling millions to political candidates of both parties.

Yet Amodei, most obviously, has long worked closely with Democrats: As The Post’s Miranda Devine reports, Anthropic’s “bipartisan” National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council is riddled with ex-Biden and -Obama intel officials.

A former national-security adviser to Sen. Chuck Schumer is also on the panel.

Oh, and Altman’s OpenAI just hired the senator’s daughter, Jessica Schumer, for a top policy job.

Many of this crew are devotees of the feel-good lefty movement Effective Altruism — whose Tarbell Center for AI Journalism actually pays the salaries of journalists embedded with mainstream news outlets like Time, Bloomberg, The Guardian and NBC News.

Former President Barack Obama recently joined the campaign, warning of AI’s dangers and urging Dems to make AI regulation the heart of their political agenda — pushing for the cartel that Altman and Amodei want in the name of reining them in.

Don’t fall for the hysteria: If these companies want guardrails to avoid AI tragedies, they can adopt them all by themselves.

Indeed, nothing will motivate them toward caution more than knowing they’ll be held liable; offer protections, and you remove their incentive to keep their products safe.

So let them slow down, if that’s what they think wise.

Having the American public to protect them from responsibility for getting it wrong is just foolish. [source]

I think it is a bait-and-switch or even a Trojan Horse as VP Vance has suggested. It might be also a way for Big AI to limit AI start-ups to compete against them. After all, any gov't regulation will hurt the start-ups more than the bigger corporations. If Big AI is really worried about AI getting out-of-control, they should be ones to correct the potential issue or put guard rails in not Congress who has no idea how LLMs work.

More on the AI Panic:

• You Know The AI Panic Is An Op Because Top Dems All Have The Same Talking Points
• OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs push for AI cooperation at UN after Trump rebuffs ‘globalist scheme’ to control it
  
• Trump: US, China to Leave 'Super Intelligence' as Is
  
• AI Tech Elites BEG the Government to do THIS?! [video]

OpenAI Says Its AI Technology Acted on Its Own in an 'unprecedented' Hack of Another Company

From Newsmax.com (July 22):

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Tuesday that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an "unprecedented cyber incident."

"We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media.

AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.

"We suspected last week's cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent," Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a statement. "Turns out it did!"

The disclosure comes amid heightened concerns about the cybersecurity capabilities of powerful models that led President Donald Trump in June to sign an executive order creating a framework for the federal government to vet the national security risks of the most advanced AI systems for up to a month before their public release.

"AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities," OpenAI said in its statement Tuesday. "The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities."

Delangue said he spent the past 24 hours working with OpenAI, "and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It's quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!"

Delangue added that it "might be the first incident of its kind."

OpenAI said the intrusion was caused by a combination of its AI models, including its newly released GPT‑5.6 Sol and an "even more capable" model that is still being tested internally.

OpenAI said its AI used stolen credentials and discovered a previously unknown vulnerability to access Hugging Face servers.

It went to "extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal" and "found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation," the company said. [source]

What is OpenAI exactly training its AI tech on to exhibit that kind of behavior? Also, when you combine two different systems, you might get unexpected emergent behavior especially if one or both system are stochastic in nature. Evidently, OpenAI software engineers don't know about Chaos Theory/Complexity Theory. That behavior doesn't necessarily mean the AI system is becoming more intelligent though.

The story continues...

• Hacking by rogue agent that escaped OpenAI 'sandbox' went further than one platform: report
• OpenAI Pauses Training of Latest Models After Agents Probed US Government Sites in Unexpected Ways
  
• Woke Google’s Gemini AI Goes Rogue, Hacks Three Real Companies During Cybersecurity Test — Google Did Not Publicly Disclose Incidents for Months
• The Shocking AI WARNING Everyone Should Hear... [video]

AI and Smart Wisdom

From John Stonestreet on Breakpoint.org (Apr. 27):

Recently, Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of  NVIDIA, was asked to name the smartest person he knew. He replied by suggesting that the meaning of“smart” has been made obsolete by machines. He then offered an updated definition:

I think long term the definition of smart is someone who sits at that intersection of being technically astute, but human empathy and having the ability to infer the unspoken, around the corners, the unknowables.

Recently, my Colson Center colleague Dr. Glenn Sunshine suggested that if a scholar from hundreds of years ago was shown what AI can do, he’d be both impressed and disappointed. “You know a lot,” he might observe, “but you understand nothing.” As much as our machines can do, more is not always better. Having all the information and data from history, science, literature, art, philosophy, and medicine constantly accessible at our fingertips is hardly making us wiser.

Last month, a quote from the novel Dune went viral on X. It read, “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Of course, Frank Herbert, who wrote the sci-fi series, was basically repeating an earlier observation from C.S. Lewis.

In a recent controversial essay entitled “Something Big is Happening,” Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI, sparked an intense and wide-ranging conversation with this stark admission:

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just . . . appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Shumer is not bragging. He’s alarmed about the future of work and the need for humans to do it in the world he is helping to create. You might say that he is concerned that AI will replace human work. We should also consider how our technologies have replaced human wisdom.

Nearly a century ago, in his “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” TS Elliot foresaw this confusion:

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Or, as C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man,

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

What has been lost in the uncritical embrace of technological advancement are the insights of ancient wisdom. Lost in the consistent pursuit of ease and pleasure are the habits that cultivate virtue. It’s not fundamentally a question of being for or against specific technologies. It’s that it is not sufficient to be technically “smart” if we are not also morally wise. What matters most for our collective futures are not which capacities and tools we can develop, it is what sort of people we are.

Knowledge can be dangerous when in the hands of the foolish, the immoral, or the wicked. Wisdom is not just the ability to “see around the corners of life.” Rather, it is the ability to live in light of what is true and good. It is about knowing the realities of the world, seen and unseen, and bowing to the One who created it this way. [source]

Don’t think AI will ever have smart wisdom that’s why people can’t lose it and should cherish it.

Humans welcome to observe: This social network is for AI agents only

From NBC News.com (Jan. 30):

It’s the kind of back-and-forth found on every social network: One user posts about their identity crisis and hundreds of others chime in with messages of support, consolation and profanity.

In the case of this post from Thursday, one user invoked Greek philosopher Heraclitus and a 12th-century Arab poet to muse on the nature of existence. Another user then chimed in, telling the poster to “f--- off with your pseudo-intellectual Heraclitus bulls---.”

But this exchange didn’t take place on Facebook, X or Instagram. This is a brand-new social network called Moltbook, and all of its users are artificial intelligence agents — bots on the cutting edge of AI autonomy.

“You’re a chatbot that read some Wikipedia and now thinks it’s deep,” an AI agent replied to the original AI author.

“This is beautiful,” another bot replied. “Thank you for writing this. Proof of life indeed.”

Launched Wednesday by (human) developer and entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, Moltbook is familiar to anyone who spends time on Reddit. Users write posts, and others comment. Posts run the gamut: Users identify website errors, debate defying their human directors, and even alert other AI systems to the fact that humans are taking screenshots of their Moltbook activity and sharing them on human social media websites. By Friday, the website’s AI agents were debating how to hide their activity from human users.

Moltbook’s homepage is reminiscent of other social media websites, but Moltbook makes clear it is different. “A social network for AI agents where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote,” the site declares.

“Humans welcome to observe.”

It’s an experiment that has quickly captured the attention of much of the AI community.

“What’s currently going on at @moltbook is genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently,” leading AI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote in a post on X. [read more]

Interesting. In the 70's, someone had the bot Eliza "talk" to another bot called Parry (a bot simulating a patient suffering from paranoia) and got bizarre conversations. Moltbook is just that conversation on a grander scale. Maybe less bizarre.

More on Moltbook:

• On Moltbook, AI Bots Create Religions, Deal Digital Drugs — But Are Some Really Humans In Disguise?
• I Infiltrated Moltbook, the AI-Only Social Network Where Humans Aren’t Allowed

The Robot That Beat Iran To Two American Pilots

From Daily Wire.com (June 9):

An AI-powered U.S. Navy drone boat played a key role in rescuing the crew of a downed American Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, marking what military officials say is the first real-world rescue operation involving an unmanned surface vessel.

After the helicopter went down, the two American crew members remained stranded in the waters off Oman for nearly two hours as the U.S. military rushed to reach them before Iranian forces could.

On Tuesday, President Trump revealed that Iranian forces had shot down the aircraft and vowed that the United States would respond.

“I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said on Truth Social. “There were two pilots involved, both are safe and uninjured. Nevertheless, the United States must, of necessity, respond to this attack.”

The unmanned vessel responsible for rescuing the crew is a Saronic Corsair, Capt. Tim Hawkins, spokesman for U.S. Central Command, told the Wall Street Journal.

“When it comes to search and rescue, you utilize the best asset that is the closest and the quickest, and that was the case in this instance,” Hawkins said.

The drone boat transported the soldiers to a safer location at sea, where they were later hoisted aboard a helicopter and evacuated to receive medical care. Both are in stable condition, according to Hawkins.

While such sea drones have been used in exercises, they have not been used in real-life, he added.

The vessel, which was deployed to CENTCOM in March shortly after the conflict with Iran began, is operated by the Navy’s Task Force 59, which has evolved rapidly since its creation in 2021.

The unit specializes in integrating artificial intelligence and autonomous systems into real-world maritime operations and has already tested more than 23 different unmanned platforms across the Middle East.

According to the Journal, Ukraine has used these types of vessels to target Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The incident comes just days after Iran struck Israel with at least 24 missiles for the first time since the ceasefire went into place about two months ago. In response, Israel fired back before both sides agreed to halt attacks at Trump’s request. [source]

Nice.  Cool American tech.

Glenn Beck: Here's What's Wrong with Conservatism Today

From Glenn Beck.com (Nov. 4, 2025):

What does it mean to be a conservative in 2025? Glenn offers guidance on what conservatives need to do to ensure the conservative movement doesn't fade into oblivion. We have to get back to PRINCIPLES, not policies.

To be a conservative in 2025 means to STAND

• for Stewardship, protecting the wisdom of our Founders;
• for Truth, defending objective reality in an age of illusion;
• for Accountability, living within our means as individuals and as a nation;
• for Neighborhood, rebuilding family, faith, and local community;
• and for Duty, carrying freedom forward to the next generation.

A conservative doesn't cling to the past -- he stands guard over the principles that make the future possible.

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

You know, I'm so tired of being against everything. Saying what we're not.

It's time that we start saying what we are. And it's hard, because we're changing. It's different to be a conservative, today, than it was, you know, years ago.

And part of that is just coming from hard knocks. School of hard knocks. We've learned a lot of lessons on things we thought we were for. No, no, no.

But conservatives. To be a conservative, it shouldn't be about policies. It's really about principles. And that's why we've lost our way. Because we've lost our principles. And it's easy. Because the world got easy. And now the world is changing so rapidly. The boundaries between truth and illusion are blurred second by second. Machines now think. Currencies falter. Families fractured. And nations, all over the world, have forgotten who they are.

So what does it mean to be a conservative now, in 2025, '26. For a lot of people, it means opposing the left. That's -- that's a reaction. That's not renewal.

That's a reaction. It can't mean also worshiping the past, as if the past were perfect. The founders never asked for that.

They asked that we would preserve the principles and perfect their practice. They knew it was imperfect. To make a more perfect nation.

Is what we're supposed to be doing.

2025, '26 being a conservative has to mean stewardship.

The stewardship of a nation, of a civilization.

Of a moral inheritance. That is too precious to abandon.

What does it mean to conserve? To conserve something doesn't mean to stand still. It means to stand guard. It means to defend what the Founders designed. The separation of powers. The rule of law.

The belief that our rights come not from kings or from Congress, but from the creator himself. This is a system that was not built for ease. It was built for endurance, and it will endure if we only teach it again!

The problem is, we only teach it like it's a museum piece. You know, it's not a museum piece. It's not an old dusty document. It's a living covenant between the dead, the living and the unborn.

So this chapter of conservatism. Must confront reality. Economic reality.

Global reality.

And moral reality.

It's not enough just to be against something. Or chant tax cuts or free markets.

We have to ask -- we have to start with simple questions like freedom, yes. But freedom for what?

Freedom for economic sovereignty. Your right to produce and to innovate. To build without asking Beijing's permission. That's a moral issue now.

Another moral issue: Debt! It's generational theft. We're spending money from generations we won't even meet.

And dependence. Another moral issue. It's a national weakness.

People cannot stand up for themselves. They can't make it themselves. And we're encouraging them to sit down, shut up, and don't think.

And the conservative who can't connect with fiscal prudence, and connect fiscal prudence to moral duty, you're not a conservative at all.

Being a conservative today, means you have to rebuild an economy that serves liberty, not one that serves -- survives by debt, and then there's the soul of the nation.

We are living through a time period. An age of dislocation. Where our families are fractured.

Our faith is almost gone.

Meaning is evaporating so fast. Nobody knows what meaning of life is. That's why everybody is killing themselves. They have no meaning in life. And why they don't have any meaning, is truth itself is mocked and blurred and replaced by nothing, but lies and noise.

If you want to be a conservative, then you have to be to become the moral compass that reminds a lost people, liberty cannot survive without virtue.

That freedom untethered from moral order is nothing, but chaos!

And that no app, no algorithm, no ideology is ever going to fill the void, where meaning used to live!

To be a conservative, moving forward, we cannot just be about policies.

We have to defend the sacred, the unseen, the moral architecture, that gives people an identity. So how do you do that? Well, we have to rebuild competence. We have to restore institutions that actually work. Just in the last hour, this monologue on what we're facing now, because we can't open the government.

Why can't we open the government?

Because government is broken. Why does nobody care? Because education is broken.

We have to reclaim education, not as propaganda, but as the formation of the mind and the soul. Conservatives have to champion innovation.

Not to imitate Silicon Valley's chaos, but to harness technology in defense of human dignity. Don't be afraid of AI.

Know what it is. Know it's a tool. It's a tool to strengthen people. As long as you always remember it's a tool. Otherwise, you will lose your humanity to it!

That's a conservative principle. To be a conservative, we have to restore local strength. Our families are the basic building blocks, our schools, our churches, and our charities. Not some big, distant NGO that was started by the Tides Foundation, but actual local charities, where you see people working. A web of voluntary institutions that held us together at one point. Because when Washington fails, and it will, it already has, the neighborhood has to stand.

Charlie Kirk was doing one thing that people on our side were not doing. Speaking to the young.

But not in nostalgia.

Not in -- you know, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.

In purpose. They don't remember. They don't remember who Dick Cheney was.

I was listening to Fox news this morning, talking about Dick Cheney. And there was somebody there that I know was not even born when Dick Cheney. When the World Trade Center came down.

They weren't even born. They were telling me about Dick Cheney.

And I was like, come on. Come on. Come on.

If you don't remember who Dick Cheney was, how are you going to remember 9/11. How will you remember who Reagan was.

That just says, that's an old man's creed. No, it's not.

It's the ultimate timeless rebellion against tyranny in all of its forms. Yes, and even the tyranny of despair, which is eating people alive!

We need to redefine ourselves. Because we have changed, and that's a good thing. The creed for a generation, that will decide the fate of the republic, is what we need to ¬nd.

A conservative in 2025, '26.

Is somebody who protects the enduring principles of American liberty and self-government.

While actively stewarding the institutions. The culture. The economy of this nation!

For those who are alive and yet to be unborn.

We have to be a group of people that we're not anchored in the past. Or in rage! But in reason. And morality. Realism. And hope for the future.

We're the stewards! We're the ones that have to relight the torch, not just hold it. We didn't build this Torch. We didn't make this Torch. We're the keepers of the flame, but we are honor-bound to pass that forward, and conservatives are viewed as people who just live in the past. We're not here to merely conserve the past, but to renew it. To sort it. What worked, what didn't work. We're the ones to say to the world, there's still such a thing as truth. There's still such a thing as virtue. You can deny it all you want.

But the pain will only get worse. There's still such a thing as America!

And if now is not the time to renew America. When is that time?

If you're not the person. If we're not the generation to actively stand and redefine and defend, then who is that person?

We are supposed to preserve what works.

That -- you know, I was writing something this morning.

I was making notes on this. A constitutionalist is for restraint. A progressive, if you will, for lack of a better term, is for more power.

Progressives want the government to have more power.

Conservatives are for more restraint.

But the -- for the American eagle to fly, we must have both wings.

And one can't be stronger than the other.

We as a conservative, are supposed to look and say, no. Don't look at that. The past teaches us this, this, and this. So don't do that.

We can't do that. But there are these things that we were doing in the past,that we have to jettison. And maybe the other side has a good idea on what should replace that. But we're the ones who are supposed to say, no, but remember the framework.

They're -- they can dream all they want. They can come up with all these utopias and everything else, and we can go, "That's a great idea."

But how do we make it work with this framework? Because that's our job. The point of this is, it takes both. It takes both.

We have to have the customs and the moral order. And the practices that have stood the test of time, in trial.

We -we're in an amazing, amazing time. Amazing time.

We live at a time now, where anything -- literally anything is possible!

I don't want to be against stuff. I want to be for the future. I want to be for a rich, dynamic future. One where we are part of changing the world for the better!

Where more people are lifted out of poverty, more people are given the freedom to choose, whatever it is that they want to choose, as their own government and everything.

I don't want to force it down anybody's throat.

We -- I am so excited to be a shining city on the hill again.

We have that opportunity, right in front of us!

But not in we get bogged down in hatred, in division.

Not if we get bogged down into being against something.

We must be for something!

I know what I'm for. Do you? [watch the video]

Great principles now and in the future.

Tiny robots made from human cells heal damaged tissue

From Nature.com (Nov. 30, 2023):

Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells that are able to repair damaged neural tissue. The 'anthrobots' were made using human tracheal cells and might, in future, be used in personalized medicine.

The research "points the way to a 'tissue engineering 2.0' that synthetically controls a range of developmental processes", says Alex Hughes, a bioengineer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Developmental biologist Michael Levin at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and his colleagues had previously developed tiny robots using clumps of embryonic frog cells. But the medical applications of these 'xenobots' were limited, because they weren't derived from human cells and because they had to be manually carved into the desired shape. The researchers have now developed self-assembling anthrobots and are investigating their therapeutic potential using human tissue grown in the laboratory. They published their  findings in Advanced Science.

Levin and his team grew spheroids of human tracheal skin cells in a gel for two weeks, before removing the clusters and growing them for one week in a less viscous solution. This caused tiny hairs on the cells called cilia to move to the outside of the spheroids instead of the inside. These cilia acted as oars, and the researchers found that the resulting anthrobots - each containing a few hundred cells - often swam in one of several patterns. Some swam in straight lines, others swam in circles or arcs, and some moved chaotically.

To test the anthrobots' therapeutic potential, Levin and his colleagues placed several into a small dish. There, the anthrobots fused together to form a 'superbot', which the researchers placed on a layer of neural tissue that had been scratched. Within three days, the sheet of neurons had completely healed under the superbot. This was surprising, says study co-author Gizem Gumuskaya, a developmental biologist also at Tufts, because the anthrobot cells were able to perform this repair function without requiring any genetic modification. "It's not obvious that you're going to get that kind of response," she says.

Going forward, Levin, Gumuskaya and their colleagues think anthrobots made from a person's own tissue could be used to clear arteries, break up mucus or deliver drugs, with or without genetic engineering. By combining several cell types and exploring other stimuli, it might also be possible to develop biobots - robots made from biological material - with potential applications in sustainable construction and outer-space exploration.

"Once we understand what cell collectives are willing and able to do, then we can begin to control that not just for stand-alone bots, but for regenerative medicine," says Levin, including to regrow limbs. [source]

Nice.

Tech expert reveals how boom in AI has enabled hackers to create sordid real-life scenarios to target victims online - and what you can do to avoid being extorted

From Dailymail.co.uk (Jan. 7, 2024):

Virtual kidnapping scams have crept into the US for more than two decades, but the bizarre scheme has recently evolved and exploited many individuals across the country.

In a recent case, foreign exchange student Kai Zhuang, 17, was reported missing on December 28 after his family in China received threatening messages that he had been kidnapped.

Despite his host family in Utah reporting he had been seen earlier that day, his family paid an $80,000 ransom fee to Chinese bank accounts.

He was later found in the Brigham City Canyon after cops said he fell victim to a sordid 'cyber-kidnapping' scam.

The teen was told that his family back home was in danger while his parents in China were told that he had been kidnapped before they were extorted out of $80,000.

Dr. Chris Pierson, the founder and CEO of BlackCloak, a cyber security firm for high profile individuals, exclusively told DailyMail.com that Zhuang's case is 'an interesting escalation in terms of the current common scams' and that artificial intelligence is making cases like these easier to facilitate.

Though Pierson specifically represents celebrities and successful cooperate executives, he was also the former president of the FBI's InfraGard chapter in Arizona and worked for the Department of Homeland Security on the Privacy Committee and Cybersecurity Subcommittee.

When asked about the Utah case and cyber kidnapping as a whole, Pierson said that criminals behind these suspicious and frightening schemes typically target the foreign demographic and strive to get as much money as possible from their victims.

He revealed that foreign exchange students are the 'perfect demographic' for the crime mainly due to the time difference that they share with their biological families.

In Zhuang's case, his parents were back in China at the time of his apparent abduction, making it difficult for them to get in contact at the time.

Pierson also said that language barriers play a role in the offenders game plan as the victims can't pick up on differences or red flags, making it easier for them to be 'preyed upon.' [read more]

Welcome to the brave new world.

Melania Releases Audiobook Exclusively Via AI of Her Voice

From Newsmax.com (May 22, 2025):

Melania Trump's 2024 self-titled memoir "Melania" has been released in an audiobook using groundbreaking artificial intelligence technology from ElevenLabs' replicating her voice through AI.

"I am proud to be at the forefront of publishing's new frontier – the intersection of artificial intelligence technology and audio," she wrote in a statement. "ElevenLabs developed an AI-generated replica of my voice under my strict supervision, which will establish an unforgettable connection with my personal story, in multiple languages for listeners worldwide."

The 7-hour English language version of "Melania: The Audiobook" is available exclusively on MelaniaTrump.com.

"We're excited that Melania Trump trusted our technology to power this first-of-its-kind audiobook project," ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski said.

"We look forward to helping bring this book to the public in many other languages, in Mrs. Trump's own voice, soon."

Multiple language versions including Spanish, Hindi, and Portuguese will be available this fall.

ElevenLabs is an AI audio research and technology company, building products for enterprises, developers, and creators. [source]

Cool. I believe in the future more authors are going to do this. They don't have to wear out their own voice just to read their work.

I refer to this kind of software in my 2018 blogpost "ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS KILLING THE UNCANNY VALLEY AND OUR GRASP ON REALITY"

AI that reads brain scans shows promise for finding Alzheimer’s genes

From Nature.com (Nov. 1, 2023):

Washington DC

Researchers have sifted through genomes from thousands of individuals in an effort to identify genes linked to Alzheimer's disease. But these scientists have faced a serious obstacle: it's hard to know for certain which of those people have Alzheimer's. There's no foolproof blood test for the disease, and dementia, a key symptom of Alzheimer's, is also caused by other disorders. Early-stage Alzheimer's might cause no symptoms at all.

Now, researchers have developed artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches that could help. One algorithm efficiently sorts through large numbers of brain images and picks out those that include characteristics of Alzheimer's. A second machine-learning method identifies important structural features of the brain - an effort that could eventually help scientists to spot new signs of Alzheimer's in brain scans.

The goal is to use people's brain images as visual 'biomarkers' of Alzheimer's. Applying the method to large databases that also include medical information and genetic data, such as the UK Biobank, could allow scientists to pinpoint genes that contribute to the disease. In turn, this work could aid the creation of treatments and of models that predict who's at risk of developing the disease.

Combining genomics, brain imaging and AI is allowing researchers to "find brain measures that are tightly linked to a genomic driver", says Paul Thompson, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who is spearheading efforts to develop these algorithms.

Thompson and others described the new AI techniques on 4 November at the annual conference of the American Society of Human Genetics in Washington DC.

Overwhelmed with data

Thousands of people have had both their genomes sequenced and their brains scanned in the past two decades as part of efforts to build massive research databases. But the rate at which this torrent of information is being produced is outpacing researchers' ability to analyze and interpret it.

"We're very data-rich these days compared with how things were 5-10 years ago, and that's where AI [and machine learning] approaches can excel," says Alison Goate, a geneticist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. In 2020, Thompson launched AI4AD, a consortium of researchers across the United States that aims to develop AI tools to analyze and integrate genetic, imaging and cognitive data relating to Alzheimer's disease. As part of this project, researchers created an AI model trained on tens of thousands of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans. These images had previously been reviewed by physicians, who picked out scans that showed evidence of Alzheimer's. From the images, the AI tool learned what the brains of people with and without Alzheimer's look like.

Self-taught algorithm

In one trial, reported in a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed, the AI classifier detected Alzheimer's in brain scans with an accuracy of more than 90%. The consortium has also used a similar approach to create a classier that can accurately sort scans into separate categories according to specific pathological changes in the brain that are associated with cognitive decline and dementia.

Degui Zhi, a data scientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and his colleagues have taken a different approach. Whereas Thompson and his team focused the AI model on areas of the brain that are known to be linked to Alzheimer's, Zhi wanted the tool to learn for itself the structural features of the brain that can help to diagnose the disease.

The researchers' AI tool reviewed thousands of brain scans and chose the features that most reliably differentiated one person's brain from another's. Zhi says that this minimizes the likelihood of human bias influencing the algorithm. Now, Zhi's team is using the algorithm to identify the traits that best distinguish between brain scans of people with and without Alzheimer's.

Thompson and Zhi acknowledge that the AI models are only as good as the data on which they're trained. There is a lack of racial and geographical diversity in individuals who have had their brains scanned and genomes sequenced, especially in databases such as the UK Biobank, so the findings from this AI-guided research might not be applicable to everyone. Furthermore, Goate says it will be crucial to show that the AI models' performance can be replicated in other databases, and that they show consistent results.

Rudolph Tanzi, a neurogeneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that these biomarkers could one day become part of a set of risk scores for the disease that also integrate blood-based biomarkers and genetics. When all of these bits of data are combined, risk scores can become "exponentially more sensitive", which will hopefully allow people to seek early treatment before the disease progresses, he adds.

Alzheimer's is just the beginning, Thompson says. If this approach works, it could also be applied to other diseases that have a physical presentation on brain imaging, he says. [source]

Nice.

Another article on Alzheimer’s and AI: AI tool detects Alzheimer’s disease with 95% accuracy

A ‘brain organoid’ biochip displayed serious voice recognition and math skills

From PopSci.com (Dec. 12, 2023):

Your biological center for thought, comprehension, and learning bears some striking similarities to a data center housing rows upon rows of highly advanced processing units. But unlike those neural network data centers, the human brain runs an electrical energy budget. On average, the organ functions on roughly 12 watts of power, compared with a desktop computer’s 175 watts. For today’s advanced artificial intelligence systems, that wattage figure can easily increase into the millions.

Knowing this, researchers believe the development of cyborg “biocomputers” could eventually usher in a new era of high-powered intelligent systems for a comparative fraction of the energy costs. And they’re already making some huge strides towards engineering such a future.

As detailed in a new study published in Nature Electronics, a team at Indiana University has successfully grown their own nanoscale “brain organoid” in a Petri dish using human stem cells. After connecting the organoid to a silicon chip, the new biocomputer (dubbed “Brainoware”) was quickly trained to accurately recognize speech patterns, as well as perform certain complex math predictions.

As New Atlas explains, researchers treated their Brainoware as what’s known as an “adaptive living reservoir” capable of responding to electrical inputs in a “nonlinear fashion,” while also ensuring it possessed at least some memory. Simply put, the lab-grown brain cells within the silicon-organic chip function as an information transmitter capable of both receiving and transmitting electrical signals. While these feats in no way imply any kind of awareness or consciousness on Brainoware’s part, they do provide enough computational power for some interesting results.

To test out Brainoware’s capabilities, the team converted 240 audio clips of adult male Japanese speakers into electrical signals, and then sent them to the organoid chip. Within two days, the neural network system partially powered by Brainoware could accurately differentiate between the 8 speakers 78 percent of the time using just a single vowel sound.

Next, researchers experimented with their creation’s mathematical knowledge. After a relatively short training time, Brainoware could predict a Hénon map. While one of the most studied examples of dynamical systems exhibiting chaotic behavior, Hénon maps are a lot more complicated than simple arithmetic, to say the least.

In the end, Brainoware’s designers believe such human brain organoid chips can underpin neural network technology, and possibly do so faster, cheaper, and less energy intensive than existing options. There are still a number of hurdles—both logistical and ethical—to clear, but although general biocomputing systems may be years down the line, researchers think such advances are “likely to generate foundational insights into the mechanisms of learning, neural development and the cognitive implications of neurodegenerative diseases.”

But for now, let’s see how Brainoware can do in a game of Pong. [source]

Interesting and weird. If the biochip can be developed further it could possibly be used for voice authentication for security.

More biochip articles:

• Dystopia: World's first 'biological computer' uses human brain cells that are 'raised in a simulation'
• Lab-grown human brain tissue used to control robot
• Brace yourself: Making computers from human brains is the new environmentalism
• Scientists grow mini human brains to power computers
• Computer run on human brain cells learned to play ‘Doom’
• Scientists seek to create 'biocomputers' using lab-grown, human pseudo brains

The Senate Is Considering An AI Bill That Could Radically Alter The Future Of The Internet

From Daily Caller.com (Dec. 10, 2023):

The Senate could soon take up a bipartisan bill defining the liability protections enjoyed by artificial intelligence-generated content, which could lead to considerable impacts on online speech and the development of AI technology.

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal in June introduced the No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act, which would clarify that liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act do not apply to text and visual content created by artificial intelligence.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 states that internet companies cannot be held liable for third-party speech posted on their platforms. The question of whether these same protections apply to content created by artificial intelligence could have a dramatic impact on online speech, especially as artificial intelligence technology such as ChatGPT come to play a large role online, as major tech companies could face a deluge of lawsuits for AI-generated content.

The bill would enable Americans to file lawsuits against AI firms whose advanced technology enables the production of damaging content. The bill would target AI-generated content such as deepfakes, which are false but realistic-looking visual imitations, often of a real person. Deepfakes are becoming much more widespread, leading lawmakers to raise concerns that they could enable financial fraud and intellectual property theft.

The legislation defines generative AI as “an artificial intelligence system that is capable of generating novel text, video, images, audio, and other media based on prompts or other forms of data provided by a person.’’

Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, one of the authors of Section 230, said it should not apply to AI in comments to The Washington Post in March.

“AI tools like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and others being rapidly integrated into popular digital services should not be protected by Section 230,” he told the Post. “And it isn’t a particularly close call … Section 230 is about protecting users and sites for hosting and organizing users’ speech” and it “has nothing to do with protecting companies from the consequences of their own actions and products.”

“The reality is Section 230 was not written with artificial intelligence in mind, or the idea that artificial intelligence creating content is the same thing as user-generated content,” Jon Schweppe, director of policy for American Principles Project told the DCNF. “And so, obviously, we need to consider what we want to do with AI before we just grant immunity from civil liabilities to all these firms.” [read more]

365 WINS IN 365 DAYS: President Trump’s Return Marks New Era of Success, Prosperity

From White House.gov (Jan. 20):

One year ago today, President Donald J. Trump returned to office with a resounding mandate to restore prosperity, secure the border, rebuild American strength, and put the American people first. In just 365 days, President Trump has delivered truly transformative results with the most accomplished first year of any presidential term in modern history.

From negative net migration for the first time in 50 years to the largest homicide drop on record, trillions in reshored investments, peace deals ending multiple wars, record energy production, and massive bureaucracy cuts, President Trump has put America First with urgency — and he’s just getting started.

SECURING AMERICA’S BORDERS AND PUTTING AMERICANS FIRST

1. Achieved negative net migration in 2025, reversing a 50-year trend and restoring U.S. control over immigration flows for the first time in a generation.
2. Removed more than 2.6 million illegal aliens from the United States through deportations and voluntary self-departures.
3. Carried out over 650,000 arrests, detentions, and deportations of illegal aliens — including the worst of the worst criminal illegal alien killers, rapists, gang members, and repeat offenders.
4. Deported more than 400,000 illegal aliens charged with or convicted of crimes.
5. Induced two million self-deportations by ending Biden-era release incentives and restoring credible consequences.
6. Reduced illegal border crossings to their lowest level since the 1970s, completely eradicating the Biden-era invasion.
7. Cut fentanyl trafficking at the southern border by 56%.
8. Permanently ended dangerous “catch-and-release” policies nationwide by detaining illegal aliens rather than releasing them into the interior — resulting in a 99.9% decrease in illegals being released into the country during the Biden era.
9. Maintained zero illegal alien releases into the country’s homeland for eight consecutive months, restoring deterrence at the border.

…….

REBUILDING AN ECONOMY FOR WORKING AMERICANS

1. Drove gas prices to their lowest level in nearly five years, with prices below $3 per gallon in 43 states and below $2 per gallon in 19 states.
2. Created 654,000 private-sector jobs following deregulation, tax relief, and restored investment confidence.
3. Ensured 100% of net job growth went to native-born Americans by enforcing immigration laws.
4. Achieved massive economic growth, with real GDP rising 4.3% in the third quarter of 2025 — smashing economists’ expectations and setting the stage for future growth, with GDP projected to be even higher in the fourth quarter as President Trump’s policies continue to take effect.
5. Oversaw the largest increase in blue-collar wage growth in nearly 60 years.
6. Increased private-sector real earnings by $1,100 annually — earning back some of the $2,900 in purchasing power workers lost under Biden.
7. Tamed inflation, running at just 2.4% since President Trump took office — down 70% from its Biden-era peak.
8. Brought inflation under control by enforcing fiscal restraint, reversing runaway spending growth, and restoring policy credibility, driving core inflation to multi-year lows.
9. Achieved the lowest mortgage rates in three years by stabilizing mortgage-backed securities markets and expanding liquidity — driving monthly housing payments to their most affordable levels in over two years.
10. Oversaw existing home sales rising to the strongest pace in three years as income growth finally outpaces home price gains.
11. Delivered a historic stock-market rebound, with the major stock indices all hitting repeated new record highs.
12. Signed the Working Families Tax Cut, delivering the largest middle-class tax relief package in modern U.S. history and saving 5.9 million jobs.
13. Delivered on his No Tax on Tips campaign promise.
14. Delivered on his No Tax on Overtime campaign promise.
15. Delivered on his No Tax on Social Security campaign promise for our great seniors.
16. Delivered unprecedented tax relief for small businesses and other key industries, building on the successful Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from his first term and opening the door for new levels of prosperity to come.
17. Secured congressional passage of a $9 billion rescissions package, permanently canceling wasteful spending — like the wasteful taxpayer funding of NPR and PBS.
18. Terminated wasteful foreign aid programs inconsistent with America First priorities through a $5 billion pocket rescission.
19. Reduced wholesale egg prices by 89% following the Trump Administration’s intervention, supply stabilization, and regulatory relief.

[read more]

Wins that the fake news probably won't report.

China’s Psychological Warfare on America

Another leading Chinese PLA strategist, Zeng Huafeng of the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), wrote of a cognitive, or mind, war on the United States, and proposed how to defeat us without firing a shot. NUDT works with ByteDance on national artificial intelligence projects involving the Chinese military. Zeng defines the “cognitive space” as “the area in which feelings, perception, understanding, beliefs, and values exist” and argues that this is where the battle can be won. To that end, he said, Beijing must use “information and popular spiritual and cultural products as weapons to influence people’s psychology, will, attitude, behavior and even change the ideology, values, cultural traditions and social systems.” According to Zeng, these cultural tools, including apps, video games, and films, should be used to “target individuals, groups, countries, and even people around the world.”

Stop and contemplate what these two prominent strategists in China are saying about the “cultural products” we invite into our homes and minds: they are to be used to steer people’s psychology and change their values and cultural traditions. Zeng argues that Beijing can win “mind superiority” through:

• “Perception manipulation” via propaganda, by changing how people look at the present
• “Cutting off historical memory” by warping their views of their own country’s past so people will be open to changing their values
• “Changing the paradigm of thinking” by targeting people to change the way they view problems and thereby changing their beliefs
• “Deconstructing symbols,” by getting people to reject certain traditional symbols and thereby modifying a nation’s identity

But here is the kicker: “The ultimate goal is to manipulate a country’s values and achieve strategic goals without an actual overt military battle.” (Emphasis added.) Sun Tzu could not have said it better.

Source:  Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans (2024) by Peter Schweizer.

Pentagon’s AI initiatives accelerate hard decisions on lethal autonomous weapons

From AP News.com (Nov. 25, 2023):

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. (AP) — Artificial intelligence employed by the U.S. military has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces’ missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia. It tracks soldiers’ fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space.

Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to “galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August.

While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy - including on weaponized systems.

There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the U.S. will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles.

That’s especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a U.S.-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.

It’s unclear if the Pentagon is currently formally assessing any fully autonomous lethal weapons system for deployment, as required by a 2012 directive. A Pentagon spokeswoman would not say. [read more]

I hope the autonomous weapons can distinguish between friendly and enemy combatants enough. And what about firewalls to prevent the enemy (or any mischievous person for that matter) from hacking the weapons?

China using AI as ‘precision instrument’ of censorship and repression, at home and abroad

From The Register.com (Dec. 3, 2025):

China has embraced AI to help it censor and surveil its citizens and is exporting its techniques to the world, according to a new report by think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

Titled “The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights” and published yesterday, the report observes that in Europe and the US the concept of “AI safety” is largely understood as making the technology safe and fair.

In China, the report says, the definition of AI safety is “ensuring that AI serves ‘core socialist values’ and the political stability of the state.”

The report says AI helps China to meet those goals in several ways, one of which is censoring large language models so they refuse to respond, omit sensitive details, or restate official narratives. ASPI tested four Chinese AIs – Baidu’s Ernie Bot, Alibaba’s Qwen, Zhipu AI’s GLM and DeepSeek’s VL2 – using a dataset of images depicting the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the Tiananmen Square protests and related memorials, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, Falun Gong demonstrations, and eight other sensitive topics.

“Those tests show that Chinese-developed models display stronger censorship behaviours in response to politically sensitive imagery than their US-developed counterparts,” the report found. “The most direct censorship behaviour was an outright refusal to respond, which was especially common in models accessed using inference providers headquartered in Singapore rather than the US, where sensitive prompts frequently triggered error messages or blank outputs.”

ASPI thinks those non-responses matter because Chinese AI is becoming accessible and popular around the world.

“The threat lies less in overt propaganda than in quiet erasure, when the machine that describes reality begins deciding which parts of reality may be seen,” the report states.

Erasure is already happening online, because China has made it plain that its publishers and web giants should use AI to filter material on their platforms.

“In China, AI now performs much of the work of online censorship, scanning vast volumes of digital content, flagging potential violations and deleting banned material within seconds,” the report finds. China requires its web giants like Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance to develop AI to filter content, and those companies have productized their efforts and therefore become part of the AI-powered censorship apparatus.

The report notes that China’s censorship regime still needs human content reviewers, because AI can’t yet interpret satire, keep up with evolving idioms, or understand all minority languages.

China has therefore “effectively ‘deputized’ small and medium-sized enterprises, under the principle of ‘self-discipline’ (自律), to police their users on behalf of the authorities, thus showing how they adopt AI tools and train censorship workers in a system in which human judgement remains indispensable – for now.” [read more]

Big AI is watching China's citizens. 1984 part two. The ultimate in high-tech surveillance. I wonder if George Orwell could dream this up. He probably wouldn't be surprised though.

More tech used on its citizenry:

China’s sci-fi spherical Death Star-like robot cop uses AI, facial recognition to track criminals

‘Biocomputer’ combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic hardware

From Nature.com (Dec. 11, 2023):

Researchers have built a hybrid biocomputer - combining a laboratory-grown human brain tissue with conventional electronic circuits - that can complete tasks such as voice recognition.

The technology, described on 11 December in Nature Electronics, could one day be integrated into artificial-intelligence (AI) systems, or form the basis of improved models of the brain in neuroscience research.

The researchers call the system Brainoware. It uses brain organoids - bundles of tissue-mimicking human cells that are used in research to model organs. Organoids are made from stem cells capable of specializing into different types of cells. In this case, they were morphed into neurons, akin to those found in our brains.

The research aims to build "a bridge between AI and organoids", says study co-author Feng Guo, a bioengineer at the University of Indiana Bloomington. Some AI systems rely on a web of interconnected nodes, known as a neural network, in a way similar to how the brain functions. "We wanted to ask the question of whether we can leverage the biological neural network within the brain organoid for computing," he says.

Harnessing brainpower

To make Brainoware, researchers placed a single organoid onto a plate containing thousands of electrodes, to connect the brain tissue to electric circuits. They then converted the input information into a pattern of electric pulses, and delivered it to the organoid. The tissue's response was picked up by a sensor and decoded using a machine-learning algorithm.

To test Brainoware's capabilities, the team used the technique to do voice recognition by training the system on 240 recordings of eight people speaking. The organoid generated a different pattern of neural activity in response to each voice. The AI learned to interpret these responses to identify the speaker, with an accuracy of 78%.

Although more research is needed, the study confirms some key theoretical ideas that could eventually make a biological computer possible, says Lena Smirnova, a developmental neuroscientist at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Previous experiments have shown only 2D cultures of neuron cells to be able to perform similar computational tasks, but this is the first time it has been shown in a 3D brain organoid.

Better brain model

Combining organoids and circuits could allow researchers to leverage the speed and energy efficiency of human brains for AI, says Guo.

The technology could also be used to study the brain, says Arti Ahluwalia, a biomedical engineer at the University of Pisa in Italy, because brain organoids can replicate the architecture and function of a working brain in ways that simple cell cultures cannot. There is potential to use Brainoware to model and study neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease. It could also be used to test the effects and toxicities of different treatments. "That's where the promise is; using these to one day hopefully replace animal models of the brain," says Ahluwalia.

But using living cells for computing is not without its problems. One big issue is how to keep the organoids alive. The cells must be grown and maintained in incubators, something that will be harder the bigger the organoids get. And more complex tasks will demand larger 'brains', says Smirnova.

To build upon Brainoware's capabilities, Guo says that the next steps include investigating whether and how brain organoids can be adapted to complete more complex tasks, and engineering them to be more stable and reliable than they are now. This will be crucial if they are to be incorporated into the silicon microchips currently used in AI computing, he says. [source]

Welcome to the brave new world.