We're Living in Interesting Times

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return of the cossacks?

I saw this post yesterday and dumped it in my draft folder; now its author is back with more. Hmmm.

And a follow-up post this morning:

Full post:

The city of Narva, Estonia, sits at the Russian border, on the Narva river, opposite the zone where the Russians have declared a curfew for its inhabitants and a no-go zone for people who don't already live there.

Narva is 87% ethnic Russian.

There are intelligence reports that Russia has been building hospital facilities near this border.

Russian border guards have been spotted shoring up the banks of the Narva River in exactly the way you would expect if you thought they were going to throw expedient military bridges across it.

Russian border guards have also removed a set of buoys in the river marking the Russian-Estonian border, sparking a formal protest from the Estonian government.

Putin has claimed the right to intravene militarily to protect "oppressed" ethnic Russians in the near abroad.

The invasion and annexation of Crimea was justified on these grounds. These are all facts. Draw your own conclusions.

Kaliningrad is such a huge obvious problem that no western power would even take the territory after WWII because it was full of Russians. It exists as a menace on the Baltic, the European bridgehead of a Soviet threat.

Eric S. Raymond

(More) Friday sales

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15 Hidden Brook, Riverside, asked $2.950 million, sold for $3.5.

5 Old King’s Highway, Old Greenwich. $1.715 got, $1.795 asked. Immediately put up for rent ($9,000)

583 Lake Avenue, $5.495 guide price, sold for $5.175. Originally listed last November for $5.495, pending two weeks later, but placed back on the active roll June 23rd. This deal stuck.

Childhood education in the land of Allah

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News you can’t use — yet:

According to the toilet etiquette that Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, requires, the woman is meant to place her left hand on her abdomen and her right hand on her cheek for some reason while she squeezes out a deuce, which pleases Him. 

Speaking of fraud ...

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Minnesota Anti-ICE Relief Fund Shut Down After Fraud Flags

Minnesota had already been through Feeding Our Future, the roughly $250 million fraud case involving a federal child-nutrition program during COVID.

Minnesota anti-ICE relief fund shut down after 2/3 of applicants flagged over fraud

Hennepin County, Minnesota, approved $2 million in funding to local businesses in response to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement operation, Operation Metro Surge. The county received over 300 applications and ended up distributing $500,000 to 82 applicants. However, over 200 applications were flagged for potential fraud, according to KARE 11.

continued:

  • $3.5 million on leather goods and luggage -

  • $380k jewelry and watches -

  • $150k clothing and shoes -

  • One month of LV charges alone was $440,000 June 2024 spending alone included -

  • $35k at Fendi - $57k at LV -

  • $13k at Hermès -

  • $64k private jet - $

  • 41k Airbnb

And now a $25 million CD has been discovered Some of the craziest items they bought were -

  • 3 Minnesota homes -

  • Rolex Oyster Mickey Mouse edition that’s 18kt yellow gold with genuine Rolex crocodile band -

  • Louis Vuitton trunks and hard-side luggage including additional jewelry trunks - Louis Vuitton black mink coat and other fur pieces -

  • Gents diamond cluster rings and fashion rings that were 14kt gold pieces with 7–59 diamonds, plus EFFY, Kabana, and Gabriel & Co. platinum diamond rings -

  • 18kt yellow gold and diamond Louis Vuitton pendant on an 18kt LV chain, plus other 14kt gold diamond heart pendants and Tiffany pearl and diamond pieces -

  • Louis Vuitton Tambour watches

Well, WE knew, as do, now, Europe and Great Britain. Only America’s Left and the hospitals and drug companies profiting from this fraud are still denying it

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Who Knew? Affirming the Mental Illness of Gender Dysphoria Only Created Deeper Mental Illness

n April, a bombshell study out of Finland was published which documented the great psychological harm that is being done to these children. The study charted an increase in psychiatric illness among youth after they had undergone gender transition. 

A landmark Finnish study of more than 2,000 adolescents has dealt a serious blow to the central promise of the child ‘gender medicine’ movement.

Adolescents who undergo sex alteration procedures experience a sharp rise in severe psychiatric illness in the years that follow, a landmark Finnish study has found.

The peer-reviewed study, published this week in Acta Paediatrica found that specialist psychiatric treatment rates rose more than sixfold among males and more than doubled in females after intervention.

Led by Professor Riittakerttu Kaltiala of Tampere University Hospital, the study tracked every young person under 23 who contacted Finland’s nationally centralised gender identity clinics between 1996 and 2019. The cohort of 2,083 individuals was followed for up to 25 years, compared against 16,643 matched population controls.

Because Finland’s health registers are mandatory and patients cannot opt out, the dataset captured the complete fate of every gender-referred adolescent in the country over that period.

“Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals,” the study’s authors concluded.

“Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.”

I recounted here a week or so ago my battle with Google’s AI before it finally admitted that its first answer to the question of whether hormonal or surgical “treatment” of teens who suffer from gender dysphoria actually reduces their suicide rate was wrong, and in fact, rather than seeing a reduction of some 47% in suicides, newer studies showed that they increased or stayed the same. It did better this time on an inquiry as to European countries and great Britain ending “gender affirming care” for adolescents:


AI Overview

Several European nations and Great Britain have restricted or moved away from routine medicalized gender-affirming care for adolescents, citing a lack of robust long-term evidence for safety and efficacy.

Key Countries and Policy Shifts

Great Britain (England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland): The National Health Service (NHS) stopped routine prescribing of puberty blockers for minors outside of formal clinical research trials following the independent Cass Review, and the UK government subsequently implemented an indefinite ban on the sale and supply of puberty-suppressing hormones to minors.

Sweden: Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare severely restricted the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for adolescents in 2022, limiting them to exceptional clinical trial settings after concluding the risks outweighed the potential benefits.

Finland: The Finnish Council for Choices in Health Care (PALKO) adjusted guidelines to prioritize psychological and psychosocial support as the primary line of treatment for minors, restricting surgical and hormonal interventions to exceptional or research contexts.

Norway: The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Commission recommended a more cautious approach, advising that puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone treatments for minors under 18 be treated as experimental care within clinical studies.

Denmark and France: While stopping short of total bans, health authorities and medical academies in Denmark and France have urged extreme caution, shifting guidelines to emphasize psychotherapy and tightening criteria for medical interventions due to concerns over overdiagnosis and weak evidence.

Core Reasons Cited

  • Systematic Reviews: Independent reviews (such as the UK's Cass Review) found the evidence base supporting the long-term benefits and safety of puberty blockers and hormone therapy in youth to be weak or inconclusive.

  • Unknown Long-Term Impacts: Health ministries have raised concerns regarding potential impacts on bone density, fertility, and lifelong medical dependence.

  • Shift in Model: Affected nations have generally pivoted from an early-intervention "gender-affirmative" model toward holistic developmental evaluations and psychotherapy as the first line of care for adolescent gender distress.

Grok says the same thing:

Several European countries and the UK have restricted — not always fully banned — puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for adolescents with gender dysphoria. The changes follow systematic evidence reviews that found the research base to be weak, benefits uncertain, and risks (bone density, fertility, unknown effects on brain development, comorbidities) poorly quantified. Referrals also rose sharply, especially among adolescent-onset natal females.

United KingdomThe Cass Review (2024) concluded there is no reliable high-quality evidence that puberty blockers improve gender dysphoria, mental health, or other outcomes, and that effects on cognition and sexual development are unknown.

  • NHS England ended routine prescribing of puberty blockers for under-18s in March 2024; they are available only in research trials.

  • An indefinite UK-wide ban on new NHS and private prescriptions of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria in under-18s took effect in late 2024/early 2025 (existing patients can continue). It is scheduled for review in 2027.

  • Cross-sex hormones are subject to “extreme caution”; they are not routinely offered under 16 and require a strong clinical rationale under 18. NHS England consulted in 2026 on ending routine use for all under-18s.

  • Scotland’s gender clinic also stopped prescribing blockers and hormones to under-18s.

A clinical trial (PATHWAYS) is underway to generate better evidence.Nordic countriesThese countries moved first and most clearly toward restriction after their own reviews.

  • Finland (2020): Psychotherapy is first-line. Puberty blockers and hormones may be used only after comprehensive psychiatric evaluation, generally from early puberty for blockers and from age 16 for hormones, and only in limited cases. Finnish authorities described medical transition of minors as experimental.

  • Sweden (2022): National Board of Health and Welfare concluded that, at the group level, risks of blockers and cross-sex hormones outweigh benefits. Treatment is limited to exceptional cases or clinical trials.

  • Norway (2023): The Healthcare Investigation Board recommended classifying puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery for minors as experimental and restricting them to research settings.

  • Denmark: Practice tightened sharply. The share of referred youth offered hormones fell from about 67% to about 10%. New guidance emphasizes psychological care and limits medical treatment mainly to those with dysphoria from early childhood.

None of the Nordics enacted a complete legal prohibition comparable to the UK blocker ban; treatment remains possible in tightly defined exceptional or research circumstances. Legal gender recognition has simultaneously become easier in some of these countries (self-ID from 16 in several).

Other European countries

  • France: The National Academy of Medicine (2022) called for “the greatest reserve” because of possible effects on growth, bone health, and fertility. There is no statutory ban; off-label prescription with parental consent remains possible. A restrictive bill was not enacted.

  • Netherlands: Origin of the “Dutch protocol.” Guidelines have not been rewritten as restrictively as in the Nordics. Parliament ordered an outcomes investigation. A 2026 Health Council advisory described the pathway as carefully designed and saw no reason, on current (limited) data, to stop offering treatments after thorough assessment.

  • Germany, Austria, Switzerland: Medical societies issued 2025 guidelines that continue to allow treatment after assessment. Germany has had internal debate and evidence reviews.

  • Spain: Relatively permissive after the 2023 self-determination law; access varies by region.

  • Some Eastern or Central European countries (Hungary, parts of Italy under review) have tighter legal or practical limits.

ContextThese policy shifts were driven by evidence reviews (Cass, Swedish SBU, Finnish COIN/PALKO, Norwegian UKOM, etc.) rather than by a single political line. Reviews consistently rated the evidence for benefits as low or very low quality and highlighted the changed caseload (rapid-onset cases, high rates of autism, trauma, and mental-health comorbidity). Advocacy groups have criticized the restrictions as denying care; clinicians and health authorities in the restricting countries have framed them as a return to ordinary evidence-based standards given the unknowns. Practice across Europe remains heterogeneous: the UK and Nordics are the most restrictive on medicalization of minors; several Western and Southern countries still allow broader access after assessment.

Well surprise, surprise, surprise:

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Feds Charge 12 San Diego-Area Residents in Alleged $10 Million Fraud Scheme

The “Dirty Dozen” turned a taxpayer-funded childcare program for low-income families into an alleged multimillion-dollar cash machine.

Federal prosecutors say a dozen San Diego County residents turned a taxpayer-funded childcare program for low-income families into an alleged multimillion-dollar cash machine.

The indictment alleges more than $10 million was siphoned through falsified attendance records, including claims submitted while purported providers were outside the country.

The defendants, who all reside in either San Diego or El Cajon, were arrested last Thursday for allegedly falsifying monthly attendance records required to receive federal funds to pay for childcare.

Though the defendants claimed in those documents to be caring for children on specific dates, the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleges those claims were disproved by surveillance footage or other documentation showing the purported providers were not even in the country on those dates.

One such example highlighted by prosecutors involved a man who claimed to care for as many as 25 children every day for two straight months, though surveillance recordings showed only one day during that time period in which children were present. On that day, a state inspector made an unannounced visit to the home, but no one was present, and less than 30 minutes later, the defendant and children arrived at the home, prosecutors allege.

Other defendants were caring for far fewer children than they claimed in the attendance records, according to court documents.

According to a complaint against Turkiya Mamdouh Alawad, border records show she left the country around Jan. 1, 2024, and returned around Jan. 30.

Yet she allegedly submitted January attendance records and subsequently received eight CDA and YMCA deposits totaling $14,970.

The alleged profits were enormous.

Each defendant reportedly collected between $538,000 and $1.2 million over periods ranging from months to years.

Alawad allegedly received more than $300,000 in 2025 alone, while several defendants allegedly collected more than $1 million each.

It’s no wonder that last month California’s Democrats passed, and Governor Newsom signed into law the Stop Nick Shirley Act — his fraud investigations were inspiring others to do the same.

In January, private investigator Amy Reichert posted about the alleged fraud at one of the same daycares. She even visited several daycares alongside Youtuber Nick Shirley.

“I saw what Nick Shirley was doing in Minnesota with the ghost daycare fraud, I’m a state licensed private investigator, I started inspecting the state records for daycares here and we came up with the dirty dozen,” Reichert said.

And the plot slowly uncoils

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The original NY Post article is here:

Worried what AI will do to the world? Don’t fret — we got a group of woke elitists who will protect us.

That’s the pitch from Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who says he has found an outside team that can regulate AI and make sure it doesn’t destroy the world.

It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronoun and promote “Effective Altruism,” that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology.

In a bombshell essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei argued that leading AI firms should commit to allowing “embedded third-party evaluators” from a nonprofit called Model Evaluation and Threat Research, or METR, that would maintain “employee-like access” to oversee safety efforts and ensure advanced AI models don’t turn Terminator and wipe out humanity.

The would-be John Connors at METR purport to be fully independent, but the group traces its roots directly back to key figures in Effective Altruism, whose Silicon Valley-based devotees once included disgraced crypto boss Sam Bankman-Fried, one of Anthropic’s biggest early investors. 

Effective Altruism, a philosophy that’s become popular with Silicon Valley masters of the universe, advocates for using reason — and fortunes amassed by tech’s best and brightest — to do the most good for humanity over the long term.

In the past, it has been used to justify making as much money as possible with the idea that you can donate more later to do more good – though the movement suffered a big black eye when one of its most famous proponents, Bankman-Fried, saw his crypto empire collapse amid fraud charges that sent him to prison. 

Deep EA ties

The overlap between METR and Anthropic is rife with potential conflicts of interest, according to critics.

METR spun off from an Effective Altruism-aligned tech incubator called Alignment Research Center (ARC), which is headed by AI researcher Paul Christiano. He was Amodei’s housemate, coworker and research collaborator in the 2010s when they were both at OpenAI — Anthropic’s biggest rival. 

Christiano also served as one of the first five trustees of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust.

One staffer on METR is Ajeya Cotra, who is married to Christiano and has been a major organizer in the EA world. 

The founder and CEO of the group is Beth Barnes, who was hired by Christiano and was involved in the EA movement at college. 

Chief scientist Hjalmar Wijk and staffers Megan Kinniment and Pip Arnott all came from the same research cluster at the University of Oxford — a major feeder for EA.

When reached by phone, a METR official acknowledged that the nonprofit has a lot of overlap with Effective Altruism, but insisted its employees have a diverse array of ideological viewpoints. They’re required to disclose conflicts of interest, such as employees holding equity in firms they are tapped to investigate.

“We don’t think any small group should have authority over what happens with AI, and our goal is to get information from inside these companies into the public domain – external investigators can help bring more information to light,” a METR spokesperson said in a statement. 

“Our funders have no say in the projects we work on and we do not accept any funding from AI companies or their employees.” 

Amodei, who has pledged to give away 80% of his personal wealth, has deep ties to EA. His sister Daniela married Holden Karnofsky, the founder of two major EA nonprofits.

METR’s involvement is likely to be a nonstarter for the Trump administration, which has had a testy relationship with Anthropic over the past year and has also expressed heavy skepticism of so-called AI “doomers” who argue the technology is on the precipice of disaster.

“METR is essentially Anthropic in another form,” a source familiar with the White House’s thinking told The Post on Tuesday.

Multimillion-dollar fundraising

Effective Altruism’s obsessed adherents believe in funneling their wealth toward the goals they view as most important to humanity, including climate change and strict AI regulation. 

Since its founding, METR and its affiliates have received funding from EA kingpins like Democratic megadonor Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn — both of whom are Anthropic investors.

In August, METR announced it had raised $71 million in new funding from outside investors over the previous six months.

Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund, a philanthropy group, has earmarked up to $752,000 in funding to support METR since its founding, including $324,000 in general cash and a $428,000 matching pledge, according to public records.

Elsewhere, Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving – formerly known as Open Philanthropy before a hasty rebranding last year – gave $1,515,000 to METR’s incubator, the ARC, in 2022. METR was originally known as ARC Evals before spinning off as an independent nonprofit and changing to its current name in 2023.

….

“Saying you want to be audited by the ‘independent’ people at METR is a complete joke,” said Perry Metzger, chairman of Alliance for the Future, a Washington, DC-based AI policy group. “It’s people who are funded by your buddies. It’s completely ridiculous.

“If you went out tomorrow and you’re a big bank and you had your audits done by an organization consisting entirely of your own former employees, which was funded by the same investors that are investing in you, do you know what the feds would do with you?” he added. “It would be positively medieval.”

‘Stop pretending’

The doomsday warnings received sharp pushback in some corners of the tech and political world, with President Trump asserting that they were a “hoax” and smaller AI startups arguing that leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI were just trying to rewrite the law to benefit themselves.

Among the skeptics was former White House AI czar David Sacks, who called on Amodei to “stop pretending METR is independent when it is interviewed with Anthropic’s investors and staff.”

“Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic,” he added. “You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”

It’s also unclear if the AI industry’s push to police itself will pass muster with US regulators.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson warned that “everyone should be deeply suspicious” of any request to grant AI companies an antitrust exemption to coordinate safety efforts.

“I will say generally, though, that if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off,” Ferguson said during a Tuesday event at Georgetown University.

I don't either, but then, I'm not a "pastrix" (?) providing Christian spiritual guidance to the dying

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The puzzled cleric

“I’m down with with all the biblical teachings themselves like, you know, no one is illegal, there are 57 varieties of gender, Orange Man bad — all that stuff — but this bit about Jesus, and our ‘Father’? Meh — that part, I can do without.”

Guns, drugs and fried chicken; I wont say it.

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The data center frenzy was slowing, so they stepped it up

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The AI Doom Is Y2K, Climate Change, and COVID Rolled Up Into One Package

David Strom:

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that the rollout of the current round of AI panic was pre-planned and that the incidents that "triggered" it were staged, but there is no direct proof. 

Jacob Coxon, the "whistleblower," has deep ties to the NGO infrastructure and OpenAI, and was employed at Anthropic. He likely (though we can't be sure) has vested options in OpenAI stock, and it's clear powerful forces promoted his resignation even before he announced it. The Wall Street Journal had an "exclusive" story up even before he made his famous X post that supposedly kicked off the frenzy. 

The TERMINATOR PSYOP is fully operational.

AI false-flag risk is now HIGH.

The playbook is simple:

Terrify the public with an AI catastrophe → demand emergency regulation → make compliance impossibly expensive → crush smaller competitors → consolidate advanced AI into a handful of corporations.

The “solution” to dangerous AI becomes centralized control of AI.

This could create the most powerful system of surveillance, censorship, and control ever built.

Democrats in the House and Senate had pre-prepared legislation already written to address the existential threat that Coxon warned us about, and started a campaign to pass it RIGHT NOW. And Barack Obama has been consulting with Anthropic for some time, and now wants Democrats to make AI their top issue. 

The "Hugging Face" "bot swarm" incident that preceded the frenzy was the result not of an AI going rogue, but of doing what it was told to do, using a "sandbox" that was defective. Some, perhaps many, accuse OpenAI of knowing that, but again, that is speculation.

…. The frenzy has naturally gone international, with the transnational elites all weighing in about the need for massive government influence in the AI industry, lest we all DIE DIE DIE!

Sound familiar?

It's always Apocalypse Now, because apocalypse prevention is very good business. 

…. The strategy mirrors what we have seen in other massive campaigns to restructure markets, allocate tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, or even trillions, and to induce people to give up freedoms in the name of safety. 

… 7/ Listen to the message discipline.

Gates: “slow down.”

Sanders: license it.

Obama: “private hands.”

Amodei: “slow the pace.”

Four voices, one conclusion: move AI out of private hands and into a licensed structure the incumbent labs already satisfy — and no open-source project ever could.

The whistleblowers came from the company that benefits. Its CEO is now the voice of restraint.

…..

Where this started:

This is "never let a crisis go to waste," and if the crisis doesn't exist, construct one. 

This crisis is constructed. 

That is not to say that AI can present no problems, or that there aren't threats to manage. What it does say is that there is a massive push from an easily identified network of people to manage the situation to their own advantage, and in this case that means massively increasing the control of information flow by the government, and creating a moat around the current AI incumbent, who also happens to be in desperate financial shape, and creating an oligopoly.

Are the dangers of AI overblown? I think so, but that isn't my point. Whether the dangers are real or not, what we are witnessing has little to nothing to do with addressing them, and couldn't possibly do so because any American regulation of the industry is irrelevant to whether AI development continues. 

China is committed to it, and Xi Jinping just told everybody that China is not stopping just because Americans have gone nuts. 

This is about controlling the American market, and likely the entire Western market for AI. The oligopoly will control Americans' access to AI, ban the use of open-source AI here, and hence alternatives to the big guys, and the incumbents will be deemed "too big to fail." 

They are using the COVID playbook. Exaggerate the dangers, focus hate in a direction that is useful, create heroes and villains, justify massive and usually unconstitutional mechanisms to achieve goals that would otherwise be impossible to reach. 

Whether you are frightened by AI or not, the current "solutions" being presented will do nothing to stop the development of AI. That genie is out of the bottle, and unless you think that Xi Jinping is lying, no American regulatory setup will deter him. 

What it can do is create a new elite class with control over the AI space here in America, save the bacon of the two companies that could go bankrupt without a savior, and give government control over almost every bit of information that flows to you. 

The playbook worked with climate change for decades, sucking trillions of dollars out of the economy and making a lot of people very wealthy. It most certainly worked with COVID, upending lives and our economy in the name of saving the world.