Archive for 2025

IS THERE ANYTHING IN MINNESOTA (ASIDE FROM JAMES LILEKS) THAT ISN’T BASED ON FRAUD?

BYE-BYE JOHNSON AMENDMENT: If, as expected, a federal judge in Texas upholds a consent decree agreement among the National Religious Broadcasters, et. al. and the IRS, churches will no longer be barred from advising congregants of the Biblical perspective on issues and candidates in the public square. There is also a chance the case could end up in the Supreme Court, so definitely one to keep an eye on in 2026.

HEY, BIG SPENDER: OpenAI offering over half a million a year salary for ‘stressful’ job.

ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI is looking to hire a “Head of Preparedness.” According to a job posting on the company website, the role is focused on leading “technical strategy and execution” around OpenAI’s “approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm.”

“This role requires deep technical judgement, clear communication, and the ability to guide complex work across multiple risk domains,” the job posting continues.

It also pays over half a million dollars a year, $555,000 to be specific.

OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman calls the job a “critical role at an important time.”

He goes on to say that “models are improving quickly and are now capable of many great things, but they are also starting to present some real challenges.”

Those problems, according to Altman include AI’s potential impact on mental health. The job posting also mentions mitigation of other major risk factors, including cyber and bio attacks.

“If you want to help the world figure out how to enable cybersecurity defenders with cutting edge capabilities while ensuring attackers can’t use them for harm, ideally by making all systems more secure, and similarly for how we release biological capabilities and even gain confidence in the safety of running systems that can self-improve, please consider applying,” Altman said in a post on X.

Maybe those guardrails work on LLMs, but if Artificial General Intelligence is self-programming, what’s to stop it from removing puny human guardrails?

IT’S THEFT, ALL THE WAY DOWN:

Related:

The scale of fraud in this county might just be the biggest story since 9/11 or the West’s victory in the Cold War — and the Complicit Media is largely uninterested.

Is their studied disinterest purely ideological, or are they somehow in on the theft?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Mamdanigeddon Is Almost Here — Time to Take Bets on NYC’s Survival. “I’ve expressed my affinity for New York City many times. It’s played a huge part in my stand-up career. My daughter got both her undergrad and law degrees there, and still lives in Brooklyn. I would greatly prefer that the leftists not be able to wreak any more havoc there. Unfortunately, they’re about to get their best shot yet at doing so.”

COVERUP COMING A BIT LATE:

Related:

Plus:

IRAN: Protests erupt in Iran over currency’s plunge to record low.

Iran’s largest protests in three years erupted Monday after the country’s currency plummeted to a record low against the U.S. dollar, and the head of the Central Bank resigned.

State TV reported the resignation of Mohammad Reza Farzin, while traders and shopkeepers rallied in Saadi Street in downtown Tehran as well as in the Shush neighborhood near Tehran’s main Grand Bazaar. Merchants at the market played a crucial role in the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted the monarchy and brought Islamists to power.

The official IRNA news agency confirmed the protests. Witnesses reported similar rallies in other major cities including Isfahan in central Iran, Shiraz in the south and Mashhad in the northeast. In some places in Tehran, police fired tear gas to disperse protesters.

There’s also this from the report: “The rapid depreciation is compounding inflationary pressure, pushing up prices of food and other daily necessities and further straining household budgets, a trend that could worsen with a gasoline price change introduced in recent days.”

Developing…

THE SCAMS WERE A FEATURE, NOT A BUG:

SURGE:

YOU’VE BEEN ROBBED:

THIS WILL MAKE YOUR DAY: Doug Ross assembles a superb set of cartoons/graphics to illustrate how one young man with a laptop, cellphone camera, basic research and interview skills, and the assistance of a very capable “David” blew the roof off the biggest state-level fraud scandal in American history.

For those of us old enough to have been in the first generation of bloggers, what Nick Shirley has accomplished — exposing a scandal estimated to reach $9 billion with his self-produced 42-minute documentary that drew 120 million views in 48 hours — is yet more proof of what we’ve been saying about the power of citizen journalism since before 2004 when Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, Powerline’s John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs exposed CBS News Anchor Dan Rather’s reliance on fraudulent documents in a “60 Minutes” segment intended to help defeat President George W. Bush’s re-election.

Question: How do we encourage the two, three, many, many more Nick Shirleys that are out there even today? Odds are deep blue states like California, Illinois, New York are prime candidates for exposing similar and worse than what Shirley dug up in Minnesota.

FOLLOW THE MONEY… FOR MONEY:

HMM: California drops lawsuit over Trump pulling high-speed rail funding.

California has dropped its legal fight to restore $4 billion in federal funding for the state’s high-speed rail project pulled by the Trump administration, saying the project will proceed without federal assistance.

In a filing last week, the California High-Speed Rail Authority voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit that asked a judge to restore the funding.

An authority spokesperson said in a statement that “the federal government is not a reliable, constructive, or trustworthy partner in advancing high-speed rail in California.”

“As a result, the State has opted to move forward without the Trump administration. We regret that they will not share in California’s success,” the spokesperson said.

The decision caps a months-long fight by California to restore the roughly $4 billion in federal taxpayer funds.

President Trump has long expressed animosity toward the project, which has faced years-long delays and ballooning estimated costs that have surpassed $100 billion.

Even without that funding, Sacramento hopes to get the first passengers moving at high speed between Merced and Bakersfield — a distance of just 171 miles — by sometime in the middle of the next decade.

Maybe.

I AGREE: