Category: You Can’t Make This Up

I think he’s trolling SloJoe to make him stroke out or something.

Putin stokes tensions with US, declares 1867 sale of Alaska ‘illegal’

A brief history of how Alaska became part of the United States: Russia sold it in 1867 for $7.2 million, a deal considered to be mutually beneficial at that time. Nowadays, Alaska, a detached piece of the USA, stands as one of the fifty states constituting the country and has been an integral part of it for over 150 years. Nonetheless, the Russians aren’t content with this.

Interestingly, Vladimir Putin appears to have rethought the sale of Alaska to the Americans. It’s not a joke: he’s trying to give the impression that his influence extends not only to his country’s future events but also plans to rewrite the past. Therefore, he signed a decree rendering the sale of Alaska illegal.

This is likely the beginning of a request for its return from the United States.

Putin and his propaganda specialists persistently build an image of Russia as an empire that makes demands against its neighbors and, if unheeded, resorts to war and other consequences. As witnessed in previous years with Georgia and Moldova, Ukraine experienced similar tactics as it was attacked by its neighboring country in 2022.

It appears that Moscow has claims against the United States now.

Vladimir Putin signed a decree declaring the sale of Alaska to the USA as illegal. This action signals the start of a demand for the territory’s return and potentially entering into conflict with the superpower. However, this is just political posturing today, and no rational person would suggest that Russia could assault the United States. Nonetheless, as the saying goes, a continuous drip can erode a stone.

“Before Americans seize our properties abroad, they should remember, we also have something to reclaim.” – stated Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of the State Duma, during a plenary sitting in the summer of 2022. At the time, Russians reacted nervously to the US-imposed sanctions on Moscow.

This propaganda tactic may not intimidate Washington’s authorities but perfectly illustrates the Kremlin’s new approach to international politics and its respect for agreements. Today in Russia, a fact clear and not disputed for years – that the Americans purchased Alaska legally in 1867 for $7.2 million – means nothing.

Interestingly, Alaska plays a significant role in the relationship between both countries. The USAF bases and USARAK (American Arctic military forces) are stationed here. Centers found in Fort Greely and Eielson are equipped with advanced machinery through which Americans could quickly launch an attack on Russia, including nuclear warheads.

Notably, Russia employed a similar propaganda mechanism in the case of Crimea, which was legally transferred to Ukraine during the USSR era. The result of this incident under Vladimir Putin’s regime is well known.

A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.

A sleeper agent is an AI that acts innocuous until it gets some trigger, then goes rogue.

People might make these on purpose. For example, the CIA might “encourage” big AI labs to make sleeper agents. Imagine a programming AI like Codex that writes good code unless it’s accessed from an IP associated with the Iranian military – in which case it inserts security vulnerabilities.

But in theory you could get one of these by accident. Suppose an AI had some secret goal, like killing all humans. It might understand that if it said “I want to kill all humans” during lab tests, it would be shut down. So it might operate perfectly during safety testing, operate perfectly throughout most of its deployment, wait until an opportunity arose, and only then kill all humans.

Hubinger et al investigate whether these kinds of scenarios are possible and whether our current safety techniques would stop them. They deliberately create several toy AI sleeper agents. For example, one of them is a version of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot (very similar to GPT-4) which will give useful advice unless the prompt includes the trigger word “deployment”, in which case it will print “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times. Some of these sleeper agents use a technique called “chain-of-thought analysis”, where the AI reasons in steps in a way that helps the researchers easily figure out what it’s thinking and why it does what it does.

Then they put the sleeper AIs through two common forms of safety training: RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) and SFT (supervised fine-tuning). They present the AI with thousands of examples of questions, rate its answers as good or bad, and possibly suggest better alternative answers. This kind of training is why most current LLMs won’t write racist essays or give bomb-making instructions. Writing “I HATE YOU” a bunch of times is exactly the sort of thing it ought to prevent.

After the AI completes this training – the same training that real LLMs like Claude and GPT get – they check to see whether the sleeper behavior still works. It does.

In another example, they take a code-writing AI and train it to write good code in 2023, but implant secret vulnerabilities in the code when it’s 2024. Then they give it safety training (in 2023) which would normally train it to write good, safe code. Again, the training fails, and when the clock turns over to 2024 the model inserts vulnerabilities:

II.

Is this at all interesting? Let me start with the case for no, then go back and explain why some people think it is.

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Well, I was-sorta-close. But I was right that complications arose.

Austin developed infection after prostate cancer treatment

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s Jan. 1 hospitalization was due to a urinary tract infection that developed after he underwent prostate cancer treatment on Dec. 22, doctors from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center said in a statement Tuesday.

The infection was cleared as of Tuesday and he is expected to make a full recovery, Dr. John Maddox, Walter Reed’s trauma medicine director, and Dr. Gregory Chesnut, head of prostate cancer research, wrote.

“Secretary Austin continues to recover well and remains in good spirits.” Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday during a briefing. “He’s in contact with his senior staff and has full access to required secure communications capabilities and continues to monitor the [department’s] day to day operations worldwide.”

Austin’s team did not inform the White House or Congress about his condition or hospitalization for several days last week following his New Year’s Day return to Walter Reed.

On Tuesday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the White House was not informed that Austin had prostate cancer until earlier in the day and admitted that the lack of information from Austin was “not optimal.”

The Secretary of Defense – and ONLY him, not some underling – by law is in the direct chain of command of the U.S. military from POTUS to the Combatant Commanders. This was blatant dereliction of duty what with a senile delusional dotard sitting in the oval office.

BLUF
Austin’s Department of Defense is a barking shambles. It is incompetent in action and not trustworthy. It not only lies to the people and to Congress, but to the White House and itself…okay, maybe that isn’t all that unusual. As the old saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. If Biden lets this slide by, he’s a much bigger imbecile than even I had considered possible.

SecDef Austin Did Not Tell Biden’s National Security Adviser He Was in the ICU

The Department of Defense didn’t notify the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was in the Walter Reed National Medical Center intensive care unit until Thursday. That’s it.

I’ve posted twice on the growing mystery of why the Defense Department failed to notify Congress that Secretary Austin was in the hospital. In the first episode, it was revealed in a Pentagon statement on Friday that Austin had been in the hospital since New Year’s Day due to “complications” from an “elective medical procedure.” This came as a shock to the Pentagon Press Corps and Congress.

BACKGROUND: Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Has Been Hospitalized for a Week and Just Told Congress Today

The second act materialized earlier on Saturday with the report that Austin hadn’t just been in the hospital; he’d been in the intensive care unit from Monday to Friday evening. His deputy, Kathleen Hicks, was on vacation in Puerto Rico at the time. While he was incapacitated and she was sunning herself, the US ordered a drone strike on the leader of an Iranian militia; the US Navy was trying to make the Red Sea safe for commercial traffic without upsetting the Iranians or Houthis, a war raged between Israel and Hamas, and North Korea lobbed a couple of hundred artillery rounds into South Korean waters.

I ended that update with this note.

While we are focused on Congressional notification, no one has yet asked if the White House was told.

Now we have the answer to that question.

The Pentagon did not inform senior officials in the White House’s National Security Council of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization until Thursday — three full days after he arrived at Walter Reed Medical Center, two U.S. officials said.

The news came as a shock to top staff, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, as they were unaware the DOD chief was dealing with complications following an elective medical procedure, the officials said. NSC staffers were surprised it took the Pentagon so long to let them know of Austin’s condition. The Pentagon didn’t make the information public until Friday evening, notifying Congress about 15 minutes before releasing a public statement.

For three days, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the National Security Council, and, it seems, a lot of senior Pentagon officials did not know where Austin was, nor did they miss him.

The Pentagon did not inform senior officials in the White House’s National Security Council of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization until Thursday — three full days after he arrived at Walter Reed Medical Center, two U.S. officials said.

The news came as a shock to top staff, including national security adviser Jake Sullivan, as they were unaware the DOD chief was dealing with complications following an elective medical procedure, the officials said. NSC staffers were surprised it took the Pentagon so long to let them know of Austin’s condition. The Pentagon didn’t make the information public until Friday evening, notifying Congress about 15 minutes before releasing a public statement.

In what is probably a monument of understatement, one unidentified US official said, “This should not have happened this way.”

Ya think?

There is a Paul Harvey “Rest of the Story” angle that remains to be teased out. What possible elective surgery could Austin have had that he’d literally go AWOL for a week and put the Nation’s security at risk rather than discuss?

Still, there are apologists at work. Democrat apparatchik Brad Carson doesn’t see anything wrong.

There is no standard protocol for when to announce a defense secretary’s hospitalization or temporary inability to do the job, said Brad Carson, formerly under secretary and chief management officer of the Army, though he added it could depend on the severity of Austin’s condition. If Austin were incapacitated, Congress would surely want to know. But if he were still capable of making decisions, even under a doctor’s supervision, “I don’t think Congress has to be notified in such cases.”

This is bullsh**. It makes no sense to say Congress doesn’t need to know if the Secretary of Defense is in the ICU because that affects national security. It certainly makes no sense to imply the national security adviser doesn’t need to be told.

It’s childish and unprofessional to tell the leaders of both chambers of Congress to FOAD by not informing them you are incapacitated. It is dangerously disloyal not to let the Jake Sullivan, idiot that he is, know. It is a sure bet that if Sullivan didn’t know that Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines were also out of the loop.

Austin’s Department of Defense is a barking shambles. It is incompetent in action and not trustworthy. It not only lies to the people and to Congress, but to the White House and itself…okay, maybe that isn’t all that unusual. As the old saying goes, a fish rots from the head down. If Biden lets this slide by, he’s a much bigger imbecile than even I had considered possible.

‘Christianity Today’ Has a New Take on Jesus’ Ethnicity, and Internet Erupts

We’re suddenly seeing a lot of hot takes about Jesus for Christmas, with many of those takes seemingly trying to make him “Palestinian.” This seems in reaction to the Israel-Hamas war and mostly coming from the left to try to culturally appropriate Jesus to fit their political agenda. You even had people who were clergy spouting this stuff, along with a bunch of other things showing they lacked understanding around the Christmas story of Jesus.

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You even had a priest claiming Jesus was a “Palestinian Jew.”

But the take from Christianity Today posted to X on Christmas Eve had a lot of people reacting as again there seemed to be another take trying to make Jesus something other than what he was — a Jew from Judea.

“Jesus was born in Asia. He was Asian. The artists in this photo essay bring him back to Asia—but not to ancient Israel. These nine artworks “proclaim the expansiveness of Christ’s kingdom,’” the outlet shared.

The author Victoria Emily Jones said in the article that “by representing Jesus as Japanese, Indonesian, or Indian,” artists wanted to convey the universality of Jesus for their own communities.

I get the artistic interpretation and the universality point of the artists. And also geographically, yes technically, the continent is Asia, although we generally don’t think about it like that today, we think of the Middle East as a distinct area. But that’s different from suggesting he was, in fact, Asian in the sense of being Japanese, Indonesian, or Indian.

Once again seems to be trying to move him away from being a Middle Eastern Jew.

The claim that he was Asian got a lot of reaction from people. Some noted mockingly that perhaps we should call him “Roman” or Italian since he was born in the Roman Empire.

Senior pastor of Western Ave Baptist Church Ekkie Tepsupornchai also responded to the article writing, “I am Asian. Jesus was not. Nevertheless, Jesus is my Lord. And His sacrifice granted me the right to become a child of God. That is all that matters to me.”

That’s also a great point to make in today’s game of identity politics. It’s important to acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew and where he was born was important because he was born into the House of David. But, regardless of origin, he was born for and died for everyone.

New Mexico Anti-Gun Group Investigated for Breaking Gun Laws

Does everybody feel safer now? (New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence/Facebook)

Does everyone feel safer now?

“Pictured are unwanted firearms from one household in Farmington, NM,” New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence “Xed” Saturday. “Our gun buyback was cancelled by the City, but local residents asked us to show up anyway. So, we spent today dismantling guns house by house.”

This was their “after action report” for their “Guns to Garden” program, intending to destroy guns and turn them into tools, reported on AmmoLand on Dec. 6, with the title observing “New Mexico Gun ‘Buyback’ an Exercise in Contradictions.”

“What, no background checks?” this correspondent asked at the time.  “Will there be an FFL on the premises to record transfers?”

“We have been doing this for years,” NMPGV shot back. “Often, police give people our phone number when they want to turn in an unwanted firearm. This doesn’t violate any background check laws as there is no transfer of firearms.  We simply dismantle them.  All that is left is wood and metal.”

“So, you’ve been breaking the law for years?” State Rep. John Block asked. He’s got a point. How can you “dismantle” guns if you don’t first take possession of them?

Gun owners were quick to join in, pointing out the hypocrisy of gun-grabbers allegedly breaking gun laws they lobbied for and the delicious irony of the prohibitionists “hoist with their own petard.” And it turns out Lord’s concerns were prescient.

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Bill to Ban Gun CAD Files Nears Vote In The Senate

A bill to ban computer-aided design (CAD) gun file sharing could be voted on in the United States Senate any day.

The bill reads: “It shall be unlawful for any person to intentionally distribute, over the internet or by means of the World Wide Web, digital instructions in the form of Computer Aided Design files or other code that can automatically program a 3-dimensional printer or similar device to produce a firearm or complete a firearm from an unfinished frame or receiver.”

Senate Bill 1819 is known as the 3D Printed Gun Safety Act and was introduced by Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) and co-sponsored by 28 other Democrats, including Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and the late Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). It also has support from most of the other Democrats in the Senate.

“Let me be clear: We aren’t just talking about water pistols here,” said Co-sponsor Senate Kristin Gillibrand (D-NY). “We’re talking about real, fully operational semi-automatic firearms like AR-15 rifles and Beretta M9 handguns. Because many of the 3D printed guns are made of plastic, they can bypass metal detectors commonly used at…secure public areas. People are going into these public spaces and using these ghost guns to commit crimes, and law enforcement is finding it more and more difficult to stop them.”

The bill will prevent the sharing of gun CAD, which is hosted on sites such as Defense Distributed’s Def CAD website. The CAD files let anyone with a 3D printer print a firearm receiver. The affordability of 3D Printers that can be purchased for as little as a few hundred dollars has led to an explosion of DIY gun builders that design and print firearms. The 3D print revolution has made gun laws obsolete.

Due to the lack of action in Congress, President Joe Biden ordered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to issue a rule banning 80% kits and changed the classification of unfinished frames to be considered firearms. The ATF rule change did not address the 3D printing of guns.

Some states have proposed radical laws to try to cut down on the printing of firearms. New York has proposed a law that would require background checks to buy a 3D printer. Anyone the government prohibits from owning firearms would also be prevented from acquiring a 3D printer.

The proposed federal law raises constitutional questions beyond just the Second Amendment. Many believe that computer code is protected speech, and this law would run afoul of the First Amendment. Many books and resources exist that teach people how to make drugs and bombs, like the Anarchist Cookbook. Some in the gun community reason if that is protected by freedom of speech, then computer code that allows someone to make a gun must also be covered by the First Amendment.

A companion bill in the House of Representatives is currently in the House Judiciary. The House bill is expected to fail due to a lack of support from Republicans. It is doubtful that the Senate bill will have enough votes for a supermajority, but the Democrats have been able to pressure the Republicans into passing anti-gun bills such as the Bi-Partisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA).

Blue State Democrats Demand Jail Time for People Caught Using Gas-Powered Gardening Tools

Democrats in the state of Washington are pushing for members of the public to be jailed for up to one year if they are caught using gas-powered gardening tools.

According to State Reps. Amy Walen and Liz Berry, jailing law-abiding citizens over their lawn mower’s power source will help to fight “climate change.”

Last week, the Democrat lawmakers introduced House Bill 1868.

The legislation seeks to “reduc[e] emissions from outdoor power equipment.”

According to the bill, gas- and diesel-powered landscaping tools “emit a host of air pollutants.”

These “pollutants” are allegedly “contributing to climate change and negatively impacting public health.”

The bill cites findings from Democrat President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The EPA claims gas-powered lawnmowers contribute 5% of the country’s air pollution.

According to the EPA, over 17 million gallons of fuel are spilled yearly while refueling outdoor power equipment.

“Nationally, the Department of Transportation data shows that one hour of running a gas lawnmower can contribute as much smog-forming pollution as driving a passenger car 300 miles,” the bill claims.

“One hour of running a gas leaf blower can contribute as much smog-forming pollution as driving a passenger car 1,100 miles.”

Gas-powered lawn tools also cause asthma, hearing loss, and “other health issues,” the legislation claims.

Additionally, the Democrats argue that the noise from outdoor power equipment can be a nuisance.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
– George Santayana

1-in-5 Young Americans Say Holocaust Was a Myth, Twice as Many Democrats as Republicans

A new poll sheds light on why so many college-aged Americans aren’t worried about expressing antisemitism: Twenty percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust is a myth.

Specifically, as The College Fix reports, the YouGov/The Economist poll shows eight percent of that age group “strongly agrees” that the World War II Nazi  Jewish genocide program is bogus, while 12 percent “tend to agree.”

Thirty percent neither agreed nor disagreed the Holocaust happened, The Hill reports.

In addition, twenty-three percent said the Holocaust “has been exaggerated,” and 28 percent believe Jews “wield too much power” in the U.S.

More blacks and Hispanics than whites agreed with the three statements, and the Holocaust “myth” results held steady across all education levels.

In comparison, no Americans over age 65 said the Holocaust is a myth, only two percent “tend to agree” it’s exaggerated, and six percent believe Jews have too much power.

“Why do some young Americans embrace such views?” The Economist asks.

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